Kzine Issue 20

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  I rolled under another wild blow. When I came up behind Th’Linea, I kicked her in the small of her back and sent her sprawling to the ground. I turned to Bastion.

  “How about it, my orally challenged friend? Care for a spot of practice?”

  Bastion gestured across the arena to where Necrophelia and her squad of shambling corpses were observing us with interest. Gladiators mostly kept to themselves while training. If you damaged another slave, your master was fined, and what he lost he took out of your winnings. It was hard to buy your freedom if your winnings went into your master’s pocket for recompense, and so gladiators were mostly civil with one another. Mostly.

  * * *

  “I’m bored!” I called out into the uncomfortable silence.

  I was sprawled on my back in the middle of our cell, and if it was possible to die of boredom, then I was sure to expire within the hour. Th’Linea just continued glaring daggers at me. Asuka had been sold during the day, and without the comfort that the shape changer offered her, she was less amenable to my charm than usual.

  “Please don’t leave me alone with my thoughts. They’re rather unpleasant, and I prefer a chaperone. Bastion, my friend, tell me a story.”

  He continued running his fingers over his collar in silence.

  “Fine then, ask me something.”

  “I will think of a question,” he promised.

  After five more minutes of silence, I cracked.

  “I have a son, you know? Not that I was much of a father.” I swallowed the lump that was forming in my throat. “I was many things: a guard, a bard, a tailor, an occasional nurse. Anything I ever needed to know, I found a way to learn. It never brought in much money, but enough to buy some rope with which to hang myself. I was a gambler, you see. Hence the name, and by the time my son was a few years old, I was already swimming in debt, and the only piece of driftwood I could clutch to was the illustrious position I still occupy ten years later.”

  I waited several long seconds. No one else filled the silence, so I continued.

  “My son would be fifteen now, an-”

  “Why do you fight without your chimaera?” Bastion asked.

  I craned my neck backwards to follow the inverted exchange.

  “It’s none of your business,” Th’Linea snapped.

  She was looking at Bastion like a feral animal, her brows furrowed with rage and frustration. She was particularly touchy about the subject of her imprisoned beast.

  Bastion turned to me. “Why does the Ashlyn fight without her chimaera?”

  I grinned; the tale was a good one. A few months back Th’Linea and her chimaera had attacked Bruno’s caravan. Bruno lost his guard but managed to subdue the beast. When he went for the killing blow, though, Th’Linea had thrown herself to the ground hard enough crack her teeth together and begged for the chimaera’s life. She had called it her soul. She sold herself into slavery with the understanding that if she could fight well enough, she could win both her and her soul’s freedom.

  My traitorous tongue started to flap, and I threatened to bite it off.

  “I know the tale, my friend, but it is not mine to share. As slaves, the only thing we truly own are our memories, and while I give mine freely, I’ll not steal another’s for a brief respite from boredom.”

  Th’Linea stared at me. Her mouth seemed to be considering a smile, and I imagined that I could see within her cold blue eyes the beginnings of a spark of respect. Then she grinned, and the barbarian facade fell away to reveal a beautiful woman.

  “Well answered. Perhaps there is hope of training you to be a proper man yet,” she finally said.

  I deflated.

  * * *

  The next day during training, Bastion had taken his customary post against the wall when Necrophelia cornered him with her two ghouls. I followed their exchange with one eye while keeping the other on Th’Linea’s wild swings.

  “If all you do is watch the others fight, maybe you should leave the arena to those willing to draw blood,” Necrophelia said. She spoke with a lisp from a particularly nasty face fracture she had received from Golax last year.

  Bastian didn’t waste time with words; his talents didn’t lie in articulation. Instead, he inspected her like a professional hunter inspects a beast. Observing him, I got the feeling that he didn’t spit without first evaluating the angle and wind speed.

  I sheathed my daggers and held up my hand to pause my fight with Th’Linea.

  “How dare you!” Th’Linea said.

  I motioned towards the trio surrounding our teammate and pressed my finger to my lips, hoping she would use her head for once.

  Ophelia, known in the Arena as Necrophelia, wasn’t much of a fighter, but then again, malificiae had other tricks. My hand to the gods, I had seen her screw her head back on once after someone had cut it off. What really made her dangerous, though, was that she knew the rules of the game inside out. Odds were that she was planning something. The two large ghouls that stood by her side reinforced those odds.

  Necrophelia spat, striking Bastion on the cheek. I tensed, but he surprised me by calmly wiping the spittle away. I snuck up behind her before she could test the limits of his steel composure any further.

  “Sorry, corpse lover, this one still has a pulse,” I said, startling her. “But wait around until after Bloodbath is finished and I’m sure that you can find some fresh corpses to cool in your bed.”

  I looked past her and caught Bastion’s eye.

  “Don’t let those muscles fool you, either. A gigantic brain lies behind that horn of his, and he’s already planned how to kill you. He’s just waiting for you to make the first move so that our master doesn’t have to pay the damaged goods price.” I was trying to scare her off, but my words were also for Bastion. If he didn’t already know the stakes of the game, he did now.

  “Money is money, Gambler, no matter how it is gained. Can’t blame me for trying,” Necrophelia said.

  She limped away, and her ghouls followed. I was starting to think that we had beaten the odds when she shouldered into Th’Linea. She didn’t try too hard to make it look like an accident, but she didn’t need to. Th’Linea would have been ready to fight if it was an accident and Necrophelia had apologised profusely.

  Th’Linea lunged, but the ghouls were in her way. She batted the first aside with her staff and then stabbed her weapon at the second like a spear. The blunt end punctured through the walking cadaver’s chest with the sound of dry twigs snapping. She tried ripping her staff free, but it was trapped inside the ghoul’s ribs, and she was soon trapped inside of its arms.

  Bastion strode forward, but I slapped my hand to his chest and shook my head. He looked from me to the fight and then retook his place against the wall. Say what you want about big guys being all brawn and no brain, Bastion was no fool.

  My eyes jumped from the fight to the bleachers above, waiting for a sign from Bruno. The boss man was talking to Urook, the owner of The Corpse Squad, probably trying to talk his way out of paying the damaged goods fine.

  Th’Linea howled, and my hands tightened on the hilts of my daggers. Urook was a gambler. Hell, everyone at The Blood Bath was a gambler in one way or another. It shouldn’t have been taking so long for Bruno to wet Urook’s appetite. If he didn’t hurry, he was going to lose a third of our team.

  Urook slapped Bruno on the back, and I unsheathed my daggers. Bruno grinned, and I took a step towards the fight. The slavers shook hands.

  “Give us a show!”

  The echo of Bruno’s voice was still reverberating off of the arena walls when I slammed my daggers into the elbow joints of the ghoul clinging to Th’Linea. The corpse’s arms snapped off, and she was free.

  “Keep your head, Princess. If one of us goes down, we all go down.”

  “I require advice from no man!”

  She shoved passed me, and I stumbled, kicking up clouds of dust as I danced to regain my balance. She grabbed the ghoul with the good arms by its sh
oulders and hefted it over her head. It hit the wall a second later and was reduced to a pile of shattered bones. The pieces started to fit back together almost immediately, like some repulsive jigsaw puzzle.

  The other ghoul lunged towards me with both of its broken arms outstretched like bone daggers. Not too keen on the idea of being stabbed by them, I leapt aside, directly into Th’Linea.

  “Stupid man!”

  She thrust me aside again, and my world spun as I fell into an awkward dance just to keep my feet. The ghoul came at me, but my limbs were already in motion, and I couldn’t stop them. At this point, I expected many things. I expected first hand to experience what it felt like to be stabbed with a dead man’s bone. I expected once-human teeth to tear out my throat. In short, I expected to die. What I did not expect, though, was for Th’Linea to step between the ghoul and me without even a wooden weapon with which to protect herself. Even more unexpected was when the ghoul collapsed into dust before reaching us.

  I looked from Th’Linea to Bastion, and he had in his hands the hissing head of Necrophelia. In front of him, her body was lashing out blindly with its dagger. I got to my feet.

  “Throw it here,” I said.

  Bastion lobbed Necrophelia’s decapitated head my way and the last thing to go through her mind before Lady Death finally took her, was my foot.

  Bruno’s laughter thundered in the bleachers above. A sack changed hands, and once again, wealthy men were made wealthier for a slave’s death. After our impromptu match, Bruno led us to Stabbie’s Armoury. I had been to the store more times than I could count, but the weapons and armours that lined the walls were never the same, and a never-ending source of entertainment.

  “Alright, Blood Horn, take your pick. Weapon. Not armour, mind you. It would cost me all my winnings just to armour up the top half of your body,” Bruno said.

  “Knowing your luck, he would just go out and acquire a leg wound,” I said.

  There was a moment of silence before Bruno burst into laughter. I joined in, always thankful for an audience.

  Ignoring us both, Bastion browsed the walls, lifting weapons and testing their weight one after another. He stopped when he came to a large white battleaxe. The head was double sided; one side a blade and its brother a pike. The entire weapon had to be over three metres tall, and looked to have been carved from some giant bone. A foreign script of flowing letters covered the shaft’s base.

  “This is mine,” Bastion said, holding the great axe in one hand like a hatchet.

  “It was yours,” Bruno corrected. “But like yourself, it became mine when I put a collar around your throat, and so I sold it as was my right. But if it is the weapon you would fight best with, I will buy it back.”

  “He’s generous like that,” I said. This time, no one laughed.

  Bastion stroked a small nick where a portion of the script along the shaft had been gouged out.

  “I want it.”

  “Good choice, Blood Horn. That thing can block, stab or decapitate. A perfect weapon for any occasion, much like yourself.”

  “I will take this,” Th’Linea said, holding up a spear. The shaft was solid steel, honed to a point at both ends.

  “You hold that thing like it’s made of wood,” Bruno said.

  Th’Linea grinned. The poor girl thought that he was complimenting her strength.

  “But that steel is worth more than you are. Put it back.”

  Th’Linea released the spear, and it clattered to the ground. She glared at Bruno with the feral look that had earned her the nickname, Wild Woman of the Mountains.

  “I do not understand why you insult me. I battle with a wooden pole while you arm your men,” she spat the gender qualifier like an insult.

  Bruno crossed the room in slow, confident strides to stand in front of Th’Linea. He met her passionate anger with cool logic.

  “You are given wood because unless you learn to control your temper, the steel that goes into your weapon would never see any use.”

  Th’Linea opened her mouth but Bruno flicked her collar, and the chime of the metal stopped her short.

  “And do remember, Priestess. It was a man who captured you, a man who owns your soul, and a man whose orders you obey.”

  Th’Linea tried to turn away to hide her shame, but Bruno grasped her chin and forced her to meet his eyes.

  “Say the words.”

  They stared at each other, hot anger meeting cold patience until she finally muttered: “Yes, Master.”

  * * *

  Plateau Arena was always populated by slavers and their guards, with the occasional collared slave standing at attention, but once Bloodbath began, the stands were a hive of activity.

  The prelims were a quick succession of scuffles and the days passed one by one without entertainment. Lady Death was present at the dance, observing me from across the room, but she always took the hand of another man. It wasn’t until the day of the semi-finals when entertainment finally appeared.

  The announcer, a lanky woman, dressed in motley with bells garnishing her hat, stood beside Nassa, The King of Games. He whispered something to her, and she flipped from his private booth down the ten metre drop to arena grounds. She then cartwheeled to the centre without ever losing her hat. The crowd watched her, enthralled, and even I clapped.

  “Released from the left, Bruno’s freedom fighters!” The announcer’s voice vibrated the air.

  “Released from the right, The Three Deadly Sins!”

  She raised her arms to the sky until she had the attention of the crowd.

  “Without further ado, let us bathe in the Bloodbath!”

  She fled the grounds as the iron grills slid up, allowing us into the arena and we each broke away from our groups to choose our own prey.

  Th’Linea faced down a man who resembled a descending mountain of fat. The act of drawing breath was exertion enough to bathe his body in sour perspiration that smelt like rotting cabbage, and I did not envy Th’Linea her choice.

  Bastion stood facing another draquinus. A thinner, shorter draquinus who was not quite a boy, but not yet a man either. Unlike Bastion, whose massive horn protruded from a bed of closely cropped, silver hair, the youth’s smaller horn was partially submerged by a flowing lake of silver that waterfalled over his shoulders.

  “Vasheda,” Bastion exclaimed.

  “Vasheda,” the youth repeated.

  I, of course, chose the biggest of the lot. A giant of size with Bastion, carrying a hammer the length of his own body.

  “Little bugs get crushed in arena,” the giant said as he lumbered toward me. In no immediate danger of the walking cliché reaching me before nightfall, I ignored him and juggled my daggers. When he finally came within striking distance, he swung his hammer in a predictable wide ark. I ducked under the blow, rolled between his legs, and made him into a woman, all in one smooth motion.

  “Don’t you hate it when a bug bites somewhere sensitive?” I called over my shoulder as I strolled away.

  He roared wordlessly in reply. With one hand pressed to his crotch, he lumbered after me, painting the earth brown in his wake. He wouldn’t have been able to keep up with me on his best day, but short a limb as he was, he couldn’t even keep pace with my casual stroll as I crossed the arena to observe Bastion’s fight.

  The young draquinus flowed like a dancer, each sword strike blending into the next while Bastion parried with the shaft of his battleaxe, neither giving nor taking ground.

  My pursuer crawled to within a metre of me, so I circled around him and crossed the arena again to watch Th’Linea’s fight. Her wooden staff slapped harmlessly against the mountain of fat, and I slapped my forehead. Ever the fool, she made the same mistakes over and over for pride’s sake.

  The mountain of fat swung his monstrous mace. It was a slow blow that Th’Linea could have easily dodged but chose to meet. Her staff snapped in half, but she didn’t miss a beat in her assault. She stabbed both broken ends into the mountain’s side
s and seized his weapon. She tried to rip it from his grasps, and like wine overflowing from a cup, true laughter spilt from my lips when he toppled forward, and Th’Linea was crushed by an avalanche of fat.

  “Need a hand, Princess?” I asked.

  Th’Linea grunted as she hefted a roll of blubber away from her face. She had to spit out a mouthful of flesh to answer.

  “If you offer a hand, I will break it off at the wrist.”

  “As you like, Princess. Just let me know when you’re ready to ask for help.”

  Still laughing, I ascended the mountain of fat. My dying foe would bleed out before he could reach me up there, and I would have a throne from which to better observe the fight between the two draquini. Double up, double win.

  The youth still danced and jabbed with his sword, but his blows were no longer the strikes of lightning that they had been earlier. Trickles of blood ran down Bastion’s arms where he had failed to block, but the cuts could have been butterfly kisses for the attention he gave them.

  When the youth began to gasp for breath, and a shine of sweat painted his skin wet, Bastion struck. With no time to dodge, the youth tried to block the blow with his sword, but the thin steel gave way to Bastion’s mad strength.

  The youth fell to his knees with his hands pressed to his wounded stomach. He raised his head, and his violet eyes met Bastion’s.

  “Vasheda.” The youth pushed the word through gritted teeth.

  Bastion knelt by the dying draquinus and placed a hand on either side of the youth’s shoulders.

  “Vasheda,” Bastion replied, and thrust his horn through the youth’s chest.

  The crowd continued their perpetual roar, unable to fully appreciate such a spectacle. I, for the first time that I could remember, was speechless.

  “That was beautiful. You should have seen it, Princess,” I said once my awe had dissipated.

  When Th’Linea didn’t answer, I looked over the twin hills of fat that were my throne’s shoulders. Th’Linea’s tanned face was a shade of purple beneath the blood.

  “Shit!”

  I rolled down the mountainside and gripped Th’Linea under her arms. I yanked her, but she was trapped.