There were more drums now, a whole battery of them, pounding, hurting his head, killing his stomach.
The chant had been picked up by others he couldn't see, getting louder.
Worked every time, thought Carmine, the chant. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Solomon, didn't even mention his name, but as they turned, the words ran one into the other and produced a new word people thought they recognized and chimed in with. The onlookers got swept up in the moment and began to repeat it.
The barons were now spinning so fast the colours had leached out into a thick dirty white cloud, while the reflections had blended into one another forming a thick crimson band around the middle of the circle.
The chant was growing ever louder and the pain in his stomach was intensifying, like he had a boxer in there, flailing away. He wanted to cry out, but he couldn't move his mouth.
And then Solomon appeared. He rose up slowly from out of the ground, a swirling red and orange light shining beneath him, like flames. He was dressed as the barons were, except all in white, right down to the make-up on his face.
Solomon crossed his arms over his abdomen and drew two long swords from under his coat. The blades caught the light and threw it into Jean's eyes, sharp and white and hot.
Solomon began whirling and twirling the blades through the air, slicing through the purple darkness.
Jean followed their deadly progress, feeling like someone getting sucked towards a spinning fan, dragged towards his death, their pull obliterating his resistance.
His terror had flatlined into panicked resignation. He hoped for the best he could. That he'd go out quick and clean. No pain.
But something else was happening to him too. Inside. The pains in his stomach were gone. He couldn't feel a thing.
And then he was drawn back to the man who'd come to kill him. He'd crossed the blades into an X and was drawing nearer. The light from the cross filled his eyes, warming them with its heat, blotting out his vision, until finally it was all he could see-pure white light.
His hearing faded. He could hear absolutely nothing.
He couldn't speak. He couldn't taste. He couldn't smell. He couldn't touch. He couldn't see.
He wasn't sure he was still breathing.
Was this it? Was this death?
Although it was difficult for him to move, chant and pay attention to what was going on, Carmine caught a glimpse of Solomon rising out of the ground and heard the excited gasps and screams of the simple-minded idiots watching from the balcony. They didn't realize this was an act, exactly like the circus or a pantomime.
He saw flashes of Solomon doing his dance, twirling his two lethal razor-sharp blades through the air like propellers, slicing, coming closer and closer to Jean Assad, as he sat there facing death without being able to so much as blink or scream.
The drums rose and rose to a booming crescendo of roaring cannon strapped to the back of a herd of stampeding bulls, before suddenly and quite abruptly dying back down to the same single, solitary heavy beat that had started the ceremony. The barons slowed their movements down one beat at a time, until, by the tenth, they were walking in step with the drummer.
At the twelfth beat Solomon swiftly raised and back-handed his swords across the middle of Assad's exposed throat, leaving a thin, dark, almost black line. By the fourteenth beat blood had geysered out of the veins and arteries, heavy jets and fine fountains, coating Solomon's painted face and white clothes.
Solomon then covered himself and the body with his cloak. Both were lowered down into the ground, prompting more screaming and shouting from the balcony.
Then the lights went out and the abattoir was plunged into darkness.