by Dante King
“I’ll see you all soon,” I said over my shoulder to Hana, Renji, and Tamsin.
“Yes, you shall see Dragonmancer Noctis when he stands toe-to-toe with Shaykh Antizah’s champion,” Commander Sabika said. “Although he may very well have more on his mind than waving to his wives, hm?”
I was led from the palace under guard. Was it a ceremonial guard? The casual passerby or civilian might have thought so, but it didn’t feel like it to me. I felt more like the condemned being walked to the gallows. Hell, that was a bit of a pessimistic mentality to take, perhaps, but there were two crucial differences between me and your average condemned guy.
The first was that I was a fucking dragonmancer.
The second was that I was the only male mancer born in centuries. I had the combined power of six dragons at my fingertips.
The power of a catmancer and a dragonmancer might have been comparable—it probably was, but I was ignorant on that point. Shaykh Antizah might have thought he knew the level of the power that I wielded. He might have thought that Zala, one of his other catmancer harem members, or whoever this champion was he had lined up, would be able to best me.
I was about to show him, and every other person watching this bout, that he was dead wrong on that score.
Shaykh Antizah, and Akrit in general, with all its money and the influence that came with it, may have been far more aware of life outside of its borders than the Mystocean Empire was. The Shaykh had not shown a jot of surprise when three dragonmancers and a bearmancer had been escorted through his front door, which made me suspect that he had spies in our lands. It was not really surprising; a ruler with a bottomless wallet could probably get information from anywhere. He might have seen a dragonmancer fight before.
But he had not seen the likes of me.
I felt a twinge at the sudden idea of having to fight Zala to the death. She seemed like a good woman, and she had, however obliquely, tried to warn me that the coming contest was not going to be fair—whatever that might mean.
At the end of the day, unfortunately, if the only way I could complete my mission was by going through Zala…
I pushed that distasteful thought aside. There was no point worrying about shit that might not come to fruition. Instead, I opted to soak in as much of my environment as I could as I was walked briskly through the streets of Akrit’s capital.
We passed into the midst of a market, which Commander Sabika grudgingly informed me was the biggest market in Akrit and stretched from where we had just entered all the way to the gladiator’s entrance of the arena where I would be fighting.
“I’m glad I got to see the place on market day,” I enthused, looking around me and opening my nose to the lavish extravaganza of beguiling smells.
The commander gave me one of those funny looks of hers that made me think that I was pulling her leg again. “It is always market day in Akrit,” she told me. “If there was no market, it would be like cutting off the blood to the heart of the city.”
“The blood being gold,” I said.
“Of course,” Commander Sabika said.
Money. Money made the world go round. It seemed that saying was just as true here in Akrit as it was back in Los Angeles.
I stared around me. I could see stalls stretching in all directions. Stalls so close together that their roofs touched and formed little tunnels that were shaded from the unforgiving sun.
There were traders of all races and species selling mounds of spices taller than me out of booths that ranged from the luxurious to the filthy. The purveyors were doling out portions of bright silver, blue, pink, orange, and turquoise powder with scoops and scales to legions of their customers, who were clamoring and yelling and shoving one another so that they might be served first. Even as small fights and arguments broke out in front of their stalls, the vendors would declaim how they were in possession of the cheapest fluxroot, the most fresh and fragrant bunches of dune creeper, the highest quality pygmy powder anywhere in Akrit.
Two old, wrinkled female leopardkin showed a crowd sheets of self-cleaning silk. A half-orc tried to snare foot traffic by letting his adorable tame gremlin jump onto people’s shoulders, then tow them by the ear back to his stall, which was crammed with cages of all different colored imps.
Steam and smoke rose from hosts of stalls and carts; portable restaurants offering everything from broiled sandslug to stewed sphinx tongues, skewers of unidentifiable vegetables to curried redcap testicle soup.
Damn me, I had seen a few sights that would strain the belief of even the most open-minded, LSD-loving hippy, but I had never been in a more dynamic, electrifying, vibrant, and coruscating metropolis in all my life. Not even Eureka on its best day could top this place. It was like the human spirit—not to mention the spirit almost every other magical humanoid I might have tried (and failed) to put a name to—had been distilled down here, so that it was at its rawest and most potent form.
It was life condensed.
A warm wind blew the scent of roasting and grilling meats, herbs and spices uncounted, candied nuts and dried flowers, battered fish, and pungent selkie coffee all around me and my armed escort in galvanizing gusts. The noise, shouted arguments, laments at being ripped off, and confusion pummeled at my ears.
However, as incredible as all these sights, scents, and sounds were, I was intent on keeping my head on a swivel. I didn’t want to be caught out by anything. This was not a goddamn vacation after all. If there was anyone watching me among this tumult of shopping and bartering, with assassination or anything else in their heart, then I couldn’t afford to miss them.
“Fear not, Mike,” Noctis said in my head. “I and the younger ones do not sense any malevolence toward you.”
“Yeah, all is clear, Dad,” Cyan chipped in.
“Not a peep of trouble,” Garth agreed, though he sounded a little disappointed.
We wove through the tightly packed throngs of shoppers, ducking through a man-made tunnel that ran on for about a hundred yards and exclusively sold elixirs and potions promising a variety of different results.
“We are here,” Commander Stick-up-the-Ass said abruptly.
Looking around, I saw that we had reached a huge wooden door, scarred and marked and studded with iron rivets. This door was set into a sandstone wall that towered upward, so high that I had to crane my neck all the way back to see the numerous silken pennants waving from its top. Commander Sabika had not been kidding—the market really did run right up to the walls of the arena.
Now that I was paying attention, I became aware of a colossal constant roar, like the droning of an incomparably massive hive of bees, or God revving his Harley-Davidson.
“We’re here?” I asked.
Commander Sabika inclined her head and smiled an even less friendly smile than she had previously.
“Yes,” she said, “this is the end of the road.”
She called out a curt order. At once, the heavy doors swung ponderously open, and I was led inside and into the heart of the arena.
Chapter 9
There was a disappointing lack of show business and general theatrics, I found, to the whole gladiator gig.
I was ushered down a stone flagged hall that was cavernous, dimly lit, and shook with the thumping footfalls of the thousands of spectators above. I passed numerous locked doors; all big and sturdy, bound with iron and guarded by men with scimitars. From behind some of these doors, I heard the wailing of prisoners or slaves. From others came the harsh laughter of jesting warriors, and from others still I heard the heavy breathing and scraping footsteps of creatures that sounded much, much bigger than I was.
It was all quite dark, though not dank or gloomy. It was efficiently clean and didn’t smell. Thanks to the combined sensory faculties of half a dozen dragons, I was aware of every upcoming passage and every incoming person long before my guide, the good Commander Sabika was.
The Commander walked ahead of me in silence, telling me nothing, until we reached
a passage with a gradient that led upward. At the end of the sloping corridor, I could see the illuminated cracks of yet another great set of doors.
“On you go, Dragonmancer Noctis,” Commander Sabika said.
If there is one thing that can be guaranteed to put fire in my belly, it is the moronic chuckling of cruel men who think that they are sending some poor schmuck to his doom. As it happened, this very sound was what caressed my ear canals, coming from some of the commander’s men who had been following us—no doubt to make sure that I didn’t try and make a dash for it.
I looked up the slope that surely led to the arena floor. Then I looked back at Commander Sabika.
“What? No kiss for good luck, Commander?” I asked with a sweet smile.
The chuckling died in the throats of the soldiers.
Commander Sabika motioned to the ramp leading upward. Her face just then reminded me of an ass that had just been smacked.
“Go,” she said. “May the Shaykh have mercy on you.”
“Oh, so it’s like that,” I said back. “I thought I was fighting the Shaykh’s champion?”
The look on Commander Sabika’s face as she walked away, back into the bowels of the arena, told me exactly what she had meant with that parting remark.
I ascended the ramp. The doors were opened by unseen hands, and I stepped out into the light and the noise.
The bellowing, ceaseless roar of the congregated spectators lining the benches that stretched from just above the floor of the arena all the way to the back of the vast structure was deafening.
“They remind me of pack animals, of dogs, baying for blood, Father,” Pan said to me, awe coloring his voice even in my head.
“Yeah, they do a bit, don’t they?” I said. “I think you might be quite surprised at just how mindlessly bloodthirsty us humanoids can be if given the chance.”
“Won’t they get a little annoyed when you wipe the floor with their champion, Dad?” Brenna asked.
I grinned. Her voice in my head was almost stereotypical sixteen-year-old girl. I shouldn’t have been surprised really—as part of the bond, I took on a fraction of my dragon’s physical abilities. On their side, they inherited some of my vocabulary and mannerisms.
“Well, I wasn’t planning on getting myself killed today, kids,” I said. “Life lesson for you here: sometimes you can’t make everybody happy.”
“And sometimes,” Garth added hesitantly, “you have to burn someone to a crisp and eat them to make yourself happy?”
The sentence ended in a question, as if the Pearl Dragon was hoping for some sort of reassurance.
“I’m not sure if that’s quite the same sentiment I was going for, Garth,” I said, “but good effort.”
Wayne gave a telepathic snigger.
While I acclimatized to the greeting I had been given by about fifty thousand cheering Akritites and made sure that my eardrums had not actually ruptured, I looked around. The arena was essentially a large circle of sand. Across from me was an enormous set of doors that mirrored the ones that I had just walked through. I supposed that, once my reception had simmered down a little, those doors would be thrown open to much fanfare and Shaykh Antizah’s hero would come strutting out, slicker than owl shit, like someone who thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.
I looked along the lower rows of seats, the seating that would afford the best view of the action, and quickly found where the Shaykh was sitting.
He was surrounded by flunkies as well as a bunch of spruced up men and women. I assumed they were the visiting officials from the other principalities under his dominion that he hoped to entertain with this friendly bit of bloodsport. The dignitaries looked to be liberally bejeweled and oiled up—I could practically smell the perfume radiating from them.
Tamsin, Hana, and Renji were also seated right next to Shaykh Antizah. I was happy to see that they didn’t look too tense. They, unlike our new pal Shaykh Antizah, knew exactly what I was capable of. I figured they were more interested about the sort of performance I would put in, rather than worried about the result. They were also, probably, just as interested at what sort of champion Shaykh Antizah would put forward against a mancer.
We didn’t have to wait long.
The great arena doors at the opposite side of the arena creaked ponderously open, maneuvered by two soldiers per side, pulling them on great chains. When they were fully open, all that was revealed was an empty, yawning tunnel mouth.
An enclosure. That’s an enclosure, I realized.
The assembled masses bellowed and cheered like a sporting crowd expecting the emergence of their home team.
But nothing appeared out of the blackness.
A catmancer leaped down from somewhere in the stands when there was no movement, and the cries of the fanatical watchers had risen an octave or two. With a flourish of her hand, she sent a quartet of the scintillating green birds flapping off into the blackness. I couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the crowd, but I saw four firecracker explosions go off in the dark and could imagine that they had been accompanied by a few loud reports.
“What kind of fucking champion needs to be goaded out to fight with fireworks?” I mused to myself.
With a sleepy roar, Shaykh Antizah’s chosen gladiator lumbered jerkily out into the light.
The spectators went ballistic.
I pulled a face. It was a knee-jerk reaction. The thing, whatever the fuck it was, was ugly as hell.
Shaykh Antizah’s champion was hunkered down like a bad dream at the opposite side of the arena to me. I had been expecting some massive mountain of a man or woman, built along the lines of the WWE’s Kane.
But I was way off with that assumption.
The only thing that the Shaykh’s champion had in common with Kane—or any wrestler for that matter—was that it was vaguely humanoid in shape. That’s where the similarities to anything that might have been considered a fair competitor ended.
The thing, the creature, was massive, lumpy, and yellow as sulfur. It must have been all of thirty feet tall and weighed as much as a full garbage truck. Its back was covered in thick, bristling spines like a giant echidna. It was wearing roughly made armor, a backplate and breastplate, of beaten bronze and steel, through the back of which its thick quills stuck.
It was the thing’s head, though, that really captured my eye and held my attention. It was an amalgamation of chimp and bat, with a smattering of cuttlefish around the enormous protuberant eyes. It had large, twitching ears, a squashed nose with enormous nostrils, the aforementioned bulbous eyes, and a mouth full of teeth like shards of broken gray glass.
“So, you’ve got a face for radio,” I said to myself. “That might frighten some, but not me, buddy. The real question is: can you fight?”
The crowd was roaring so loudly that I could barely make out my words over the screaming din.
Judging by the limbs on the champion, not to mention the fact that it was Shaykh Antizah’s champion, I supposed that it probably could fight. Its arms were long and orangutan-like, strung with uneven globs of muscle under the skin. They ended in clever-looking six-fingered hands tipped with vicious claws. On closer inspection, the fingers actually appeared to morph seamlessly into sharp points, rather than have separate nails as such. Its legs were thickly muscled and, judging by the way that it was crouching, looked like they were built for pouncing.
Incentivized by another burst of magical firecrackers, the reluctant-looking monster was turned toward me. Its giant eyes, with their strange horizontal pupils, fastened on me. The bulbous nose twitched and the snotty nostrils dilated as the monster sucked in air, sifting it. Drool hung in thick ropes from its slavering, many-toothed lower jaw, which was hanging down like that of some slack-jawed yokel whose mother also happens to be his sister.
I looked down at the sand that covered the arena floor. Handy for soaking up blood, sand. The grains that had made their way onto the toes of my boots were dancing, reverberating in the
clamor the fans were making.
I looked up to my right. I could see my three companions peering down at me. They were sitting in what I guessed would have been the VIP section had I been about to fight a monster in the Red Rocks Amphitheatre or something.
Shaykh Antizah was sitting next to them. He was surrounded by attendants, brown-nosers, and suck-ups. Behind him, as always apparently, was the lithe figure of Zala, his catmancer bodyguard and concubine. There were also more athletic, scantily robed women scattered throughout the Shaykh’s select seating area. I thought that they were probably more members of his catmancer harem.
There was something about the superior way in which Shaykh Antizah treated the smoking hot Akritites that rankled me. I had never viewed my relationship with Hana, Elenari, Saya, Renji, Penelope, and Tamsin as being part of such a dynamic.
Shaykh Antizah though… Now, that slippery motherfucker looked very much like a spoiled brat who had collected a bunch of sexy, magically endowed women just because he could. Because it added to his own self-image.
As I alternated my gaze between the monster and the Shaykh Antizah, there was a blaring of trumpets.
The horns echoed around the packed arena and had the effect of a wet blanket over a fryer fire. The crowd simmered down, the dull roar of the spectators becoming more a rumble akin to distant thunder.
Shaykh Antizah got slowly and regally to his feet. Fair dues to the man, he sure as hell knew how to look like the ruler of a city. He was decked out in the sort of finery that any royal would have been stoked to have hanging in their wardrobe.
“My loyal subjects,” Shaykh Antizah said graciously, beaming around at his massive audience. “I thank you for joining me today to enjoy the spectacle that I have kindly deigned to furnish you with. A special acknowledgment must also be made to the governors who have graced me with their presence today.” He indicated the collection of fancy pants peacocks that were lounging around him. “Let us hope that they witness a spectacle worthy of their time and mine.”
