“And that?” He pointed to the bread. “Is that the same piece I left sitting there?”
Fesh nodded, then jumped down to get the plate.
“Let me see.” Pushing himself up woke a dull pain in his broken arm, but nothing more grievous than that. He poked at the crust. It was stale but still gave.
“Three months, eh?” he asked, dubious.
Fesh nodded again and clicked his teeth. He made the sign for “sorry” and hurried out the door on three legs, taking the impossible plate away.
Chapter 26
Over a morning meal of lumpy gruel and cold bacon, Sherakai tried to imagine his tutor as one of the vaunted heroes. “Did you get that scar here?” he asked of the mark on Hamrin’s face. A few days of rest at the Gates had been followed by three weeks of rigorous training. It was every bit as demanding as his lessons in the bloody arena. Bairith had observed intently, seeking for gods-only-knew-what in his star pupil. When he’d found it, he’d packed Sherakai off to the Twixt again.
Hamrin glanced up from his bowl. “I did.”
“Were you a hero?”
He laughed. “Not even close. Twelfth deck.”
“How did you get out?”
“I’m still in, aren’t I.” It wasn’t a question.
“Fighting?” It surprised him.
“No. Training.”
He had learned more from Iniki, who had pushed him until he couldn’t stand anymore. Iniki had taught him how to use weapons, how to increase his endurance, how to become stronger. Hamrin did… what? Sherakai stirred his gray soup. “Why?”
“Because I’m good at it.”
A spoonful of gruel kept him from needing to respond, at least for a moment.
“Ye disagree?”
He shrugged and ate another bite.
“If ye’ve got something to say, then speak yair piece.”
He swallowed the food. “No, sir.”
“Ye think I’m not up to the likes of Iniki dan Sorehi.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Hamrin waved his spoon in Sherakai’s direction. “Master Iniki did a fine job with ye. So fine that he taught ye how to kill him—and ye only a whelp.” He ignored the furrowing of the youth’s brow. “Don’t ye think I know ye could kill me if ye set yair mind to it? Ye’ve got what it takes, ye just refuse to use it.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I watched him work with ye.” He held the spoon out like a weapon. “Ye learn fast. Crazy fast.”
Someone sat down beside him. No, not someone, but a presence. A sideways glance revealed no one at all, but a chill touched the right side of his body, and he could smell sweat as if a fighter had just come from practice. There was also a sense of curiosity and challenge, as if this thing might at any moment make some scathing, pointed remark. Waited, in fact, for the opportunity. For Hamrin.
Sherakai chewed on the inside of his cheek. All the strange scents and sounds that didn’t belong to anything, the fleeting movements caught out of the corner of his eye, the feeling of not being alone suddenly made sense. Horrible sense. But he hadn’t called any spirits.
Deliberately, he ignored all the implications that hurtled at him like a flood. ‘Crazy’ seemed all too appropriate a word. He worried about his sanity and needed time to think about this new development. “If that’s so,” he asked, “why’d he have me do the same things over and over as if I were too stupid to grasp the easiest concepts?”
“To make them a habit, Sherakai. Because of him, ye can parry and thrust without even thinking. Now ye can focus on the little details of the action instead of just keeping yairself from getting an eye put out or a hand lopped off. Now ye can twist and drop without losing yair balance or yair momentum.”
“Then what are you teaching me?”
“I’m doing the polishing,” he admitted, “though I’d like to believe ye’ve learned a thing or two from me. I’ve got that much pride. Iniki trained ye to aim a blade at yair opponent’s face; I’m giving ye the discipline to target an eye. And just like him, I’ll have ye practice the same skill over again until whatever weapon yair holding is part of ye. Ye won’t have to think—ye’ll do what ye need to because ye’ve done it a thousand times before. And if ye hadn’t gone and taken out Iniki’s throat, he’d be doing this job instead of me.”
Hamrin wasn’t given to long speeches, yet he delivered this one with more passion than Sherakai had ever seen from him. Anger crisped the edges of his words.
“Are you teaching me how to kill you?” he challenged.
“I want ye to know how to kill anybody that gets in yair way.”
“Bairith?”
“I suppose he’s a body, but yair a cub to his lion. He’ll chew ye up, bones and all.”
His devouring had already begun. Sherakai turned away, the brief flicker of hope extinguished as quickly as it had flared. Of all the players filling the room—thirty or more and their trainers besides—not a one looked familiar. Hamrin had brought him to sixth deck a month after he’d broken his arm. How long was that to Rinlag Kirith or the pretty deer girl? Were they dead? And the one called Fin-something, too?
He shouldn’t forget their names, but the nightmares swallowed them up in screams and gore, leaving only their faces. His hand shook, rattling his spoon against the side of the bowl. “What if I can’t be this killer you want me to be? What if my mind comes apart like that boy on the fourth deck?” He, too, inhabited Sherakai’s dreams, running himself onto a dulled wooden lance time and again. Sometimes Sherakai was the poor fool. He’d wake gagging on dream blood only to hear other fighters cursing him and telling him to let them sleep.
“Can ye afford that?”
Did Bairith need him aware and self-directed to make use of him? Did the loss of one’s mind mean the loss of one’s gifts? The idea of the jansu manipulating his body, his hands, and his talents horrified him. Insane or not, those things were his. Without his mind to govern them, he’d simply be turning them—and whatever terrible keys he held—over to a monster.
He thrust his jaw out. “The jansu wants me to become an arena hero?” The impossible path from feckless boy to war master became more credible every day.
Hamrin nodded, a suspicious frown tugging at his brows.
“And to do that I have to kill. How many?” At least those that fought in the arena could fight. They had a chance. The nameless servants with which Bairith threatened him had none.
“That’s up to the governors.”
“How many, Hamrin?” he demanded, lacing his Voice with such venom that his tutor flinched. It only showed in his eyes, but it was enough. It frightened the man.
“I don’t know. The higher the deck, the more tangled the scoring. They like a good show. If ye kill too quickly, ye have to stack up the number of bodies to keep the game balanced.”
Nothing about this world or the peoples that inhabited it, or visited it as Bairith did, made any sense to him. Its existence precluded humanity.
“You are just as sick as they are.” Getting to his feet, he picked up his meal and walked away.
Chapter 27
He made a name for himself in the following months, though how the rumors spread to the decks above him Sherakai had no idea. It might have been the servants. Or maybe the trainers liked to get together for drinks and brag about the prowess of their students. No doubt their opinions played a hand in the betting.
To his relief, he was not required to take part in the performances that occasionally interrupted the fight rounds. The mock wars, rousing speeches, and light displays belonged to the realm of actors. It was another incomprehensible facet of the Twixt.
When Fesh and Teth buckled him into his armor, he made it a wall between himself and whatever happened on the sands. Once in the arena, he counted out the steps that would bring him into Bairith’s view, knelt, and lifted his head to see and acknowledge his master. It was required, and not worth whatever hurt the jansu might cause if he disobeyed. When Bairith dismissed him wi
th an elegant flick of his fingertips, he donned his helm and got to work.
In his first fight after returning to Old Twisty, Sherakai made two kills. He remained on the sixth deck until the next round. Between bouts, he practiced harder than he ever had willingly done. He paid close attention to Hamrin’s instructions and worked to absorb and expand on them. Fighters advancing from the lower decks filled the holes left by previous matches. Each brought different styles for him to practice against. Another two kills carried him to the seventh deck, where he steeled himself to be faster and more aggressive.
Five more died, and he advanced again.
He didn’t play the governors’ stupid, bloody games any more than necessary. The lower decks participated strictly in group fights. The more opponents a single combatant eliminated, the more rapidly he or she moved up another level. The fewer he killed per game, the longer he’d remain in place and the more he’d have to slaughter to move on. He could never tell if he killed too fast to please the governors; he could see no logic to their methods.
The day Sherakai reached the eighth deck Hamrin Demirruk waited for him in the corridor leading away from the sands. Arms folded, he looked Sherakai up and down, a peculiar attentiveness in his dark eyes. Finally, he nodded and stepped aside to let Sherakai pass, and the beasts took him to the baths. The trainer, for the first time, did not go with them.
And, for the first time, the remaining deckers left the space at the head of the bath trough to Sherakai. Their attempt to show him respect only isolated him.
In the cages at night, he sat against the back wall, as far out of the miserable light as possible. There, no one would see him weep for the lives he had taken. He prayed for forgiveness. He prayed for deliverance. And the next day he got up and did it all again.
As he progressed up the decks, the size of the groups in each match gradually decreased. On the ninth deck, he stood with six others against an identical group. His teammates put him front and center, arranging themselves to either side like a pair of knots.
He did not want to be there, to be a leader. These had been pulled from the other blocks; he didn’t know them, nor how they fought.
“Spread out,” he told them.
“We stand by you,” one declared.
“If you don’t want to give yourselves room to use your weapons, then give it to me.”
Reluctantly, the knots loosened. The aro informed him they didn’t care about winning, they only wanted to survive.
A magic user on the other team had different plans. He—no, she—hung back, letting her teammates form a shield in front of her.
Waiting for the signal to attack, Sherakai switched the blades in his hands, taking his knife in his right and the sword in his left. Singled out as he was, he would be her first target. Already, he could sense her gathering the flickering energy.
When the whistle came, he dropped to one knee. A fist of air punched the space his head had occupied. His eyes closed against flying, stinging sand. He focused the aro and threw his knife into the center of the energy that was the mage. A high-pitched scream sliced through the air. He pivoted and swung his sword at an attack on his right, met solid resistance, and shoved it away. Then he was on his feet again. The fight was short and heated. Only one of his teammates died, but the female mage remained alive. His blade had clipped the edge of her armor, glanced off, and punctured her neck. It wasn’t a clean shot, but the crowd didn’t mind. They hooted and screeched like hungry apes, demanding the kill. Ignoring them, she struggled to pull the weapon free or, failing that, to defend herself with magic.
“He’s yours,” announced a man on Sherakai’s right. Violently curly red hair covered his head, face, and neck, clashing with the crimson blood on his breastplate. Yellow eyes bore an expression as ravenous as the shouts of the spectators.
“It’s a she.”
The redhead gave him a brief sideways glance. “I don’t care, kill it.”
He had yet to hear a rule against deliberately killing one’s teammate during a match. Across the sand, he met Bairith’s keen gaze. The pressure through the link urged him to finish the job, but there was a flavor of curiosity there, too. The mage could sense Sherakai’s anger and disgust, and he could tell who provoked it. What will you do about it, little dragon?
None of the others moved to claim the kill for themselves. Sherakai walked to the woman’s side. Her eyes widened. Unintelligible words tumbled past blood-stained lips as she gasped and choked. Setting his sword in the sand well out of her reach, he knelt and pulled off his helm and put it down, too. Then he loosed the strap of her steel cap, gently removed it, and smoothed the hair away from her face. His other hand closed around hers on the hilt of his knife.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “That was a clumsy throw. You were not meant to suffer so. Shh, shh…”
Life ebbed out of her at an alarming rate. Her pain and fear battered at him like frantic wings. The governors did not see fit to heal the fallen, and she would not survive a trip into the bowels of the arena. He’d seen his share of wounded fighters quickly become dead.
“Listen,” he ordered, stroking her panic away as best he could, capturing her attention with his Voice. “You are free now from the sorrow and pain of this place. When you get to the other side, try to find my brothers. Tell them—tell them I miss them.” His voice caught. “And if you see Captain Nayuri, tell him I’m sorry, I should have listened better.”
The woman’s eyes did not leave his.
“Are you ready?”
She licked her bloody lips and searched Sherakai’s eyes. Then she gave the faintest nod and loosed her hold on the knife.
He would like to have closed his eyes, but it seemed disrespectful. A firm push finished the job. He stayed with her until she lost consciousness, then a little longer until her heart stopped beating and the awful sound of her struggle ceased. Light left her. If no one else saw it, he did. He cared.
“I’d have just taken her head off,” the redhead volunteered. “Easier, and she deserved it.”
“Shut up,” someone else said.
He released her gently. Gathering his helmet and his sword, Sherakai stood. The redhead stood in his path, taller, belligerent, and as ugly as a person could be. Sherakai studied those yellow eyes, considering one, then the other. Without a word, he moved around him.
The redhead caught his arm. “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sherakai stopped.
“You got something you want to say, Weeper? You going to cry for her tonight, all by yourself in your little cage?”
He regarded the hand on his arm, then the redhead’s face.
“Leave him,” one of the others said.
“Or what?” Red sneered, challenging. Stupid.
The noise from the stands fell away, the onlookers on the edges of their seats in anticipation. The exchange of coin accompanied new bets.
“Or he kill you.”
“I count three easy ways he could do it from where he’s standing,” another fighter suggested. The lilt in his voice was familiar.
“Fin?”
“Finhaam. Get it right, will you?” The speaker yanked his helm off and gave Sherakai a sharp-toothed grin. “My eyeballs near fell out of my sockets when you bared your head and I saw it was you. You have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to catch up with me?”
Seeing the tension fizzle, the crowd renewed its incessant roar. With typical belligerence, they lobbed anything from coins to vegetables to rotten rodents at the players. The cleaners took that as their cue and hurried onto the sands.
“Look at me!” The redhead yanked Sherakai close. “We’re not finished,” he spat.
Sherakai drew back—and slammed his forehead into Red’s nose. The man wavered for a moment, then stretched his length out on the ground.
“Can he be transferred to this block?” Sherakai asked Hamrin a short while later. Water dripped and sloshed as Fesh and Teth scrubbed away the filth o
f the arena. They would take off an entire layer of skin with their enthusiasm for the job.
“Maybe. For a price.”
“How much?” It would be good to sit and talk to Finhaam again. And blue-haired Rinlag Kirath, too. Did he still live?
“More than ye can afford.”
“Maybe. Will you ask?”
Hamrin pursed his lips, screwing his scarred face into a crooked mask. “No. These people are not yair friends, boy. Not now, not ever.”
He hated being called boy. He hated the suggestion of slavery it implied. “Because something bad happened to you once?”
“Because only a few survive this place. Yair so-called friend will die, and chances are it will be by yair hand. Is that what ye want?”
He had no trouble at all imagining such a scene. It made his stomach twist. “No.”
“If yair nightmares make ye cry now, see how things go when ye run yair pal through. Have ye forgotten Deishi? Was once not enough for you?”
“I said no,” Sherakai growled. “I heard you.”
“Good.”
Fesh tsk-tsked softly. Teth followed with a bucket of clean water dumped over his charge’s head. The shock cooled Sherakai’s anger.
He drew a hand down his dripping face. “What happens if I kill a fighter on my own team during a match?” he asked, changing the subject.
“If it’s that donkey that was braying at ye, ye’ll have my complete support.”
“What of the governors?”
“Hard to say.” It always was. “Yair halfway. If they pass ye to the tenth deck, the rules change.”
“Wonderful.” He stepped out of the water and yanked the bath sheet out of Teth’s hands to scrub himself dry. “Does that mean I’ll get sent ahead, back, or barreled?”
Hamrin straightened. “Ye’ve heard of that?”
“I’m not deaf. Up here on the edge of halfway,” he pointed out in a mocking tone, “more rules have been broken and more fighters are around to tell the tales.”
Neither the governors nor the spectators wanted to waste a first-rate fighter. If death didn’t mean money, it meant loss. Stuffing a fighter into a barrel—often with the company of vermin—and nailing it closed punished a person without killing them. When they were released, they went back into the arena. It was fine if he died then, entertaining the masses.
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