It was all about blood in Samarla. The stadium crowd roared in Ashua’s ears. Sammies and Daks surged to their feet from tiered benches. Somewhere down on the court, an Urchin had been intercepted by an opposing Juggernaut. Ashua hadn’t seen the ensuing tackle – the crowd got in her way – but by the excited comments of her neighbours, the Urchin had very likely been killed, or at least crippled for life. Blood. They lived and died by it. The blood of their athletes, drooling out onto dusty a’shi-shi courts. Blood torn from the flayed backs of the Murthians that had built this enormous hexagonal stadium. Blood curling lazily into the barrel of a syringe, just before the plunger was pressed. Blood was who they were. The average Samarlan could trace their family back twenty generations or more. The custodians in the Black Archives kept records that went back much further than that. The Sammies had the finest chemists and doctors in the world, and they knew techniques that could identify a person’s lineage with extraordinary accuracy.
