Talbot Mundy 
Told in the East [EPUB ebook] 

Guards, go out! – he ordered. Twelve men went out one by one from the house he had left. They seemed to feel more warm than Brown did, because they fell into the sword of Brown. In this nameless sanatorium there was no flag, and no flag was there, so the sword, without her nail, performed duties, pointing down to the ground as the totem pole of the empire. Brown was stuck there, like the Boanerges sandals, and there he stayed from the sunrise to the sunset, so that he would be replaced by whoever dared to do it, at his peril.