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Observer without punishment.
    His hand on the knob, Cazzel hesitated. His
opponent rolled back on his hips, face red with anger and
humiliation, moving awkwardly. Where his legs should have been,
there were only stumps. The man's deficit had been hidden by
blankets before, but now that his hasty attack had exposed flesh,
his deformity was unmasked for all to see.
    Cazzel dropped his walking stick and bent to
study the man. The flesh where his legs ended was covered with
horrid scars. Clearly this was not a defect of birth. The man's
legs had been removed. Recently.
    “What happened to your legs?” he asked.
    “Leave my village,” the man hissed. “Or I
will say you hit me.”
    Cazzel reached for his walking stick, pulled
off its cap, and pressed the sharpened point to the cripple's chin.
“Answer my question or I will do a lot worse than hitting you.”
    “Go ahead. Kill me. You will be doing me a
favor.”
    Cazzel tilted his head to the side. “Then I
won't kill you. I will do something you want less. The loss of your
legs bothers you. If you don't give me the answers I want, then I
will break more parts of your body.” He poked at the closer of the
man's hands. “I will smash the bones at the back of your hand so
you can never use your fingers again. If that doesn't motivate you,
then I will knock out your teeth so that you can't chew food
properly or sound out all your words. I could take your eyes and
leave you in eternal darkness, or scar your face so that your
family feels horror every time they look on you.”
    He smiled at the man. “I want simple answers.
And you want me to go away. To be fair, I will answer your question
first. You asked what manner of wanderer I am. The answer is a very
dangerous one. I am willing to do more violence than anyone you
have ever met. And I don't care if people hate me. I don't even
care if they try to kill me.
    “Your turn now. What happened to your
legs?”
    The man met Cazzel's gaze with fire in his
eyes. “They were crushed between the stones of the old well.”
    “The old well? Did it collapse with you
inside it?”
    “It collapsed when we pulled free one of the
blocks lining the shaft. We needed the stones to hold up the walls
of the new well.”
    Cazzel nodded, filling in the blanks in his
mind. “Your old well went dry. Because the soil around here is
sandy, you need stone to keep the new well from collapsing. But
there isn't a lot of suitable stone to be found, so you scavenged
from the old well. Somebody – probably you – pulled a stone free in
the wrong order and caused an accident. Is all of that right?”
    “Yes, stranger,” the man spat. “All of that
is right.”
    “The pain was terrible?”
    “Yes.”
    “When your people pulled you free, your legs
were useless?”
    “Yes.”
    “They knew you would die from the wounds
inside, so they cut off your legs and stopped the bleeding with
fire?”
    The man shook his head. “No. My people wept
and held me and said their goodbyes. I was ready for death. But
then the strangers came. The White Man said he could save me, and
my mother begged for his help.
    The cripple spat on the ground again. “The
strangers took my legs and said I was healed. The life they gave me
is worse than death. I was a hard worker. My village respected me.
Women looked at me. Now every eye that turns my way shows
pity.”
    “What were the names of these strangers?”
    “The White Man gave the name Tyro, but his
woman called him Hess. The woman was Mara.”
    Cazzel smiled. Mara was the name of a village
ten days' travel south. Not a proper woman's name at all, just a
convenient moniker for an Observer. “Her real name was Elza.” He
spoke before he thought through the words. Real name. The
concept seemed odd to him. Names were for the pathetic creatures
they observed. Names were things he used and discarded without a
second thought.
    But the Observers he followed had names. Hess
and Elza. Labels of convenience, maybe. Maybe