The Empire's Ruin, page 83
Ruc winced. The transition was too abrupt. A moment before she’d been laughing and joking. Now she was bending over, her face twisted with a grimace that looked obviously forced, her voice unnaturally loud.
Goatface, however, didn’t spare her a glance. He was busy studying Bien.
“You will want to approach this contest with some … tact,” he suggested.
“You mean stay out of the way so I don’t get killed.” Her voice sounded already dead.
He spread his hands in a loose apology. “Your skills have waxed more rapidly than the moon.…”
“But I’m still terrible.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Talal said. “You’re going to have a weapon. Hopefully the spear. You might not be a born warrior, but you can put the point through someone’s throat easily enough. They’ll have to respect that. One of them will have to square off against you.”
Bien was worrying the inside of her cheek. “Which one?”
Ruc gazed out across the sand, tried to take the measure of the other three. He’d seen them all in the yard, of course, although he’d never had the chance to study them closely. The woman—Sang the Ox—was aptly named. She was huge, a hand taller than Ruc himself, with shoulders like her namesake and a broad, flat, angry face. He’d watched her smash through stacks of clay tiles with her bare hands, but she moved slowly, awkwardly.
“If you’re facing the Ox…” he began.
“I know,” Bien growled. “Keep my distance.”
“Good advice for all of you,” Goatface observed. “People become … unpredictable when fighting for their lives. Cowards are filled with desperate bravery. The weak find reservoirs of unexpected strength.…”
“The fisher’s not weak,” Talal said.
Ruc shifted his gaze to Nung. The man was smaller than Sang the Ox—everyone was smaller than Sang the Ox—wiry rather than brutish. He had, however, the sinew of someone who’d spent most of his days rowing a boat and tossing nets.
Only the last of the Worthy appeared at all uncertain. Yon To was barely more than a kid, eighteen or nineteen, his face a riot of pimples. He didn’t look like the type to have volunteered his life to the worship of his gods, but Dombâng was a strange place. It wouldn’t be the first time a skinny kid had dreamed of glory. He would have signed up when the high holy days were still a year off. He would have imagined the fame, the cheers, the adoration of the crowd, would have convinced himself that a year was enough time to grow into the role.… Judging from his expression, he regretted his decision.
“I’ll take the boy,” Bien said. The words were firm, even bold, but it was easy to note what she didn’t say: I’ll fight the boy or I’ll kill the boy.
“You take the boy,” Monster replied. “I’m going to be taking a shit. Fucking sweet-reed last night was crawling with weevils. Stupid,” she said, gesturing to Goatface’s folded parasol, “a little privacy would be nice.”
Goatface glanced over at her, frowning. Ruc’s stomach clenched. If the trainer suspected …
But evidently he did not suspect.
“It is not the sweet-reed,” he replied. “It is your nerves. It is not uncommon for the Arena to have this effect.”
“My nerves are just fucking fine, thank you very much,” Monster snapped.
Goatface shrugged, then vaulted over the low wall of the box. Again, Ruc was surprised by the man’s agility—his body had all the shape of an ill-stuffed sack, but his movements reminded Ruc of a delta cat. He waited for Talal, Ruc, and Bien to join him on the sand, then smiled.
“In a fight like this, you have no greater friends than your own patience and the haste of your foes.”
He patted Talal genially on the shoulder, as though the soldier were a small puppy, then headed off toward his perch at the eastern side of the pit.
The two groups of Worthy met in the center of the open space, on opposite sides of the weapons table.
Sang the Ox ran her eyes over them, spat into the sand, shook her head. She kept clenching and unclenching her massive fists, as though her hands itched to hold a weapon. The fisher kept his eyes on the sand. The kid—Yon To—stared at them, but he looked dazed, as though he’d just awoken, as though he didn’t quite believe that he was there.
The crier lifted the bronze dagger, held it up for the crowd to see, then laid it flat on the table once more and spun it. For a few heartbeats it turned into a flashing disk of sunlight, then slowed, slowed, and came to rest pointing to the east, to the space between Ruc and Bien.
“The first choice of weapon,” the crier said, nodding to them, “is yours.”
It was a stroke of good luck, and Bien wasted no time stepping forward to claim the spear.
The fisher grunted, but his face betrayed nothing.
Ruc expected the Ox to claim the dagger and shield. Bigger, stronger warriors could use the heavy bronze disk for both defense and attack. To his surprise, she picked the ring dogs. The bronze hooks looked slender, almost delicate in her broad hands. She swept them, one after the other, in vicious, whistling arcs, then bared her brown teeth in something that might have been a smile.
That left the sickles, the net, the grapple and line, and the shield and dagger. Ruc was tempted by the sickles. He wasn’t strong enough to toss the shield around as readily as he’d have liked, and the sickles offered better reach and more speed. But the shield could prove useful, even crucial, especially if the kid was more dangerous than he seemed. Ruc could use the shield to cover both himself and Bien while she thrusted from behind or overhead with the spear. He stepped forward, lifted the bronze circle from the table, took up the dagger.
Nung took the net. That was a dangerous development. Most of the Worthy couldn’t do much with the knotted rope, but Nung handled it like what he was—a fisher who’d spend a lifetime plying the delta.
Ruc was tempted to ask him why he’d given it up to come here. Boredom? A lust for blood? Some inchoate hunger for power? Whatever the case, the time for asking questions was long past.
The kid claimed the sickles, staring tat them as though he’d never seen then before.
Talal shrugged, took the grapple and line from the table, and the choosing was done.
Half a dozen slaves scuttled in from the pit’s perimeter, lifted the heavy table, and carried it off toward the open gate. Bien looked after them longingly, as though tempted to follow. Ruc risked a glance over his shoulder toward Goatface’s box. Mouse leaned against the back wall, arms folded across his chest. Stupid chatted with him as he held the parasol obscuring Monster and the wooden bucket. The two men looked surprisingly casual—like old friends chatting at a market. Almost too casual, Ruc thought, given the fight that was about to unfold. He wondered if Monster was through the wall yet. It felt like she had to be, but time was difficult to judge out on the sand. He might have been standing there for half the morning or only a handful of heartbeats.
“To your sides,” announced the crier, pointing to opposite walls of the Arena.
“So?” Bien said as they retreated across the open space.
“I can kill them all,” Talal said, voice matter-of-fact. “But it’ll be over too fast.”
Ruc blinked. “You sound pretty confident.”
The Kettral just nodded.
Bien was staring at him, her face twisted between amazement and horror.
“You say it so casually. Kill them all.”
Talal shook his head. “It’s never casual, killing a person.”
“Casual or not,” Ruc said, “you can’t do it. Not right away. Like you said—Monster needs time. Which means we need to stall.”
“I can keep Sang and the kid away from me,” Bien said. “Goatface taught me that much. I’m worried about the net, though.”
“The net’s a problem,” Talal agreed.
“We have the right weapons to draw this out,” Ruc said. “Your grapple can hold them at a distance. So can Bien’s spear. I’ll cover with the shield if the kid throws one of those sickles. We just keep retreating until we see Monster again.”
“Won’t be popular with the crowd,” the soldier pointed out.
“Fuck the crowd,” Bien growled. There was fear in her voice, but anger too, in equal measure.
And that exhausted all the time they had for strategy. Up on the ship’s deck, a bare-chested man was hammering out a heartbeat on a huge bronze disk. Ruc glanced up to see Goatface on his raised platform. The trainer waved merrily.
The first fight of the third day of the culling had begun.
The Ox stepped forward, still spinning the ring dogs, the fisher and the boy at her shoulders. They moved well together, staying close enough that it would be tough to force a wedge between them, but not so close that they couldn’t use their weapons.
It was only when Ruc felt Bien’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back, that he realized he’d stepped forward to meet the attack.
“What about stalling?” she hissed.
He nodded, forced himself to retreat a step, then another. It felt strange. Everything about his bright, wordless childhood had trained him to hunt, not to run. Kem Anh would have snapped at him, swatted him into the water for giving ground before such a shabby collection of mortals, but Kem Anh only ever wanted one thing—the bright, hot blood. Even if she’d had words, the notions of delay or escape would never have occurred to her.
Even as Ruc stepped back, Talal shifted forward. Unlike Stupid, he didn’t whirl the grapple in a circle around his head. Instead, as the other three closed, he hurled it, glittering, toward the ankles of the Ox. Toward, Ruc realized, but not exactly at. The woman shifted to the side, but the movement wasn’t necessary. The grapple thudded into the sand to her right. Talal yanked it back. If he’d landed it a little closer, the hooked bronze would have taken the woman in the back of the leg, tripping her, maybe ripping through the muscle or tendon. As it was, it missed her entirely, whistling back through the empty air.
Talal cursed.
Ruc risked a glance over at him.
The soldier looked worried—furrowed brow, nasty grimace—but when Ruc shifted his perspective to look beneath the skin, to read the language of the body’s heat, he found Talal’s heart beating slowly, steadily. He might as well not have been fighting at all. He reeled in the grapple, reclaimed it, and took another step back.
The failed attack had the necessary effect. The other three slowed, alert to this new danger. The Ox dropped one of her ring dogs into a kind of low guard, ready to block the grapple when Talal threw it again. Nung moved forward in a wary crouch. The kid followed half a step behind, the sickles held up before him as though they weren’t weapons, but some kind of talisman that could ward off danger, even death.
Sang took a cautious step forward. Ruc and the others fell back.
The fight had opened in the middle of a wide, expectant hush, but it didn’t take long for the taunts to come. People didn’t flock to the Arena for a patient dance of pace and retreat. They came, as Talal had said earlier, because they wanted to see something die. None of the Worthy were obliging. Sang, for all her spitting and scowling, was proving more cautious than Ruc expected, and she seemed to be setting the pace for the others.
Curses fell like rain. Ruc backed up and backed up, one cautious step and then another, until he’d made a half circuit of the pit. He could see Goatface’s box now without turning his head. Mouse and Stupid were still there, which was good. Monster was still missing, which wasn’t. According to Bien, the storeroom beyond the wall had a single door, and that door would open barely a handsbreadth—just enough to show a few links of the chain and padlock holding it shut. Monster boasted that there was no lock she couldn’t pick with the right tools and a little bit of time, but Monster was always boasting. If she failed to open the lock, or worse yet, opened it but decided to escape on her own …
The attack came faster than Ruc would have guessed.
One moment the other three was moving forward at the same steady, grudging pace, the next the kid screamed, darted up, hurled one of those glittering sickles.
Ruc moved without thinking, lunging between Bien and the deadly bronze, stretching out with his shield.… The great roar of the crowd struck at the same moment as the sickle, the one pounding down from above, the other skittering off the shield’s rim to drop into the sand.
Blocking the attack had forced Ruc to bring his left arm, his shield arm, all the way across his body, which meant that he landed sprawled on the ground with his back half turned to the attackers. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Talal throw the grapple, an underhand snap almost too fast to follow. At the same moment, Nung the Fisher attacked. He might have been twice as old as Ruc, but he moved easily, fluidly. That was what a life balancing on the rails of a swallowtail would get you. Balance was balance—in the boat or the pit; speed was speed, spearing fish or men. The net dropped over Ruc’s head, then tightened around his neck and shoulder as Nung yanked back on the cinch cord.
His shield hopelessly fouled, Ruc gave himself over to instinct. Instead of trying to pull back against the netting—a move that would only leave him snared and immobile—he surged forward, felt the rope go slack, saw the bronze hook of a ring dog shred the air, managed to slip just inside the swing. The Ox’s forearm caught him across the head. The blow almost knocked him down, but it was better than a length of bronze to the skull. The woman swore, tried to shove him back, but Ruc pivoted against her body—she might as well have been a pillar for all the ground she gave—leaning against her as he rolled around to her side, ensnaring her in the net.
With a quick, vicious thrust, he drove the dagger up into her ribs. The shock of the blow stiffened her. She dropped one of the ring dogs. He ground the blade deeper, grimly willing her to collapse. She did not. Instead, with a roar that threatened to dislodge the knife from inside her, she seized the net, twisted it, began to haul.
It was a desperate gambit. In the madness of the moment, she couldn’t have known that the cinch line had snagged Ruc around the throat, couldn’t have known that he didn’t have an arm up blocking it, couldn’t have known that by dragging on the rope she was choking him. The Vuo Ton had an expression, though—Bad luck kills quicker than poison.
He could feel her straining against the cord, the rough fibers cutting into his neck. His vision dimmed, as though a bank of clouds had slid across the sun. Strength fled his legs. Was that roaring in his ears, or silence? He tore free the dagger—the motion felt slow, as though they were both underwater—then plunged it into her again. Bronze grated on bone; hot blood soaked his hand, his arm, everything. The woman groaned, faltered. The rope around his neck slipped a fraction. Ruc dragged the dagger out, then stabbed her again, then again, searching for a lung, a heart, anything, really, that would make her drop.
At last she shuddered, lost her grasp on the rope, stumbled forward, dragging him with her, and collapsed. Blood flooded his brain once more. The world brightened to sun and screaming. Ruc rolled, pulled the blade free of the body, hacked at the rope still wrapped around him.
A few paces away, the fisher was on his knees, clutching at his neck. He seemed unbloodied, but his face was turning from brown to a sick purple. A crushed throat? Talal rolled to his feet a pace beyond the man. Whatever happened, Nung was finished, gasping out the last of his life into the sand.
Two down …
The rope parted beneath the knife, and Ruc yanked himself free, stumbled up to a knee, searched desperately for Bien, found her five paces off, her spear held before her as the kid with his sickle closed in. She lunged—the same lunge Goatface had made them practice ten thousand times. Yon To made an awkward parry. There was an opening, but Bien didn’t press home the attack. The boy, Ruc realized, was sobbing. He couldn’t hear the sound over the clamor of the mob, but he could see the kid’s shoulders shaking, the bronze of the sickle flashing as his hands trembled.
It was over. The boy knew it was over. The only question was how it would finish.
Ruc had just regained his feet when the kid gave a horrible, desperate cry, and lunged at Bien.
As it turned out, Goatface was right. In a real fight, a life-and-death fight, sometimes all you needed were the basics. Yon To came on, and Bien extended her spear, an action so simple, so plain, so utterly unadorned that it was almost boring. The boy ran right onto it. She held him there a moment, her brown eyes wide. The sickle dropped. Yon To peered tearfully at the shaft buried in his gut, reached down to touch it.
“No,” the boy said, sobs twisting his face.
Bien tossed aside the shaft of the spear as though she’d found herself holding a snake, then dropped to her knees. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m sorry. Oh sweet Eira, I’m sorry.”
“No,” the kid said again. “Please…”
Whatever he was about to ask for, he didn’t get it. Talal, who’d picked up the other sickle on his way across the sand, slid behind him and slit his throat.
It was the kind thing, the merciful thing, the necessary thing, the thing they had trained to do. For a moment, though, all Ruc could see was an Annurian soldier killing a boy who couldn’t fight back.
The crowd was frothing.
Bien, on her knees, stared at the body.
“What did we do?” she groaned. “What did we do?”
“We did what we had to,” Ruc said.
He had no idea if that was true.
He tried to help her up, but she refused to rise. Her gaze was fixed on Yon To. He looked even younger, dead. Even thinner. What the fuck had he been thinking, joining the Worthy?
A few paces away, the Ox was still struggling to breathe. She had a hand pressed to her side. Blood dribbled from her lips.
Ruc walked over, knelt at her side.
“Done,” she managed, turning her head to face him. Her face was ugly, but her eyes were beautiful, brown flecked with green, like the delta at dawn. “Done.”
He nodded, wiped her sweaty hair back from her forehead, opened her throat with the knife.
She offered up a great sigh, half breath, half blood, before her beautiful eyes went glassy.
