Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  Stone examined them until the spotlight winked out—so these were two of the Talented’s leaders, architects of this insane system. Chanandra, a small, slim woman, had dark hair pulled back from a sly, narrow-eyed face, and an equally sly smile. Her expression was one of anticipation. Olystriar had broad shoulders, dark brown skin, and bright blond hair. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts. Stone memorized both faces, in case he should ever encounter them again.

  Not bloody likely. I’ll be dead before the night’s over.

  “And…begin!” the announcer called.

  In the dirt circle, Geral and Holan didn’t move. They eyed each other warily, as if each one expected the other to make the first move, but neither did.

  The crowd booed.

  “Now, now,” the announcer said. “You know the rules. Whoever wins at the end of the evening gets his freedom. But if you refuse to fight—”

  Suddenly, both fighters went rigid. Holan jerked and shuddered, while Geral clawed at his throat. Stone gripped the bars tighter, heart pounding.

  Whatever had taken hold of them vanished as abruptly as it had come, and both men dropped to their knees in the dirt, gasping.

  “That will be your last warning,” the announcer said. “Put on a good show, or you’ll be slaughtered like the pigs you are!”

  That, apparently, was enough for Holan. With a roar of rage, he leaped up and flung himself forward toward Geral, arms outstretched. The crowd cheered once again.

  Geral didn’t get out of the way in time. He barely managed to throw himself sideways and avoid the worst of Holan’s attack, but the other man was larger and taller. Both of them crashed into the wall and went down, each trying to get a good shot at the other.

  Stone glanced up in time to see Geral’s “sponsor,” Donastian, stand up and lean a little over the partition. He fixed his gaze on Geral and made a gesture.

  Suddenly, Geral found new motivation. He yelled something unintelligible, flung Holan off him, and threw himself on top of the other man, flailing his fists and raining blows down on his opponent’s face. Holan fought back, kneeing Geral in the gut to knock him off, then leaping at him to renew his own attack. All around, the crowd continued to cheer.

  “That’s the way to do it!” the announcer called. “Looks like Donastian is using a little inducement to light a fire under Geral. What do you all say—shall we liven things up?”

  The cheers grew to roars of approval.

  From somewhere high above the arena, two small objects dropped down and landed in the center of the dirt ring, several feet apart. From Stone’s vantage point it was hard to tell what they were, but it soon became obvious: both Geral and Holan hurried forward to snatch them up, and they glinted in the overhead light: crude, long-bladed daggers.

  The two men began circling each other with wary caution again. Both were puffing with exertion and drenched in sweat. Blood poured from Holan’s nose and ran down his face, and Geral was clearly favoring his right leg.

  Suddenly, Holan spun toward the stands. With a shout of rage, he flung his knife directly at Elithria.

  It bounced off an unseen shield and dropped back to the dirt.

  The crowd erupted in laughter.

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” the announcer crowed. “How many times have we seen them try that? It never gets old, does it?”

  “Fight, you cowardly pig!” yelled a man from the stands, as Holan’s knife levitated back to him.

  The two combatants stumbled toward each other again, and Stone noticed with horror that they didn’t seem to be moving entirely under their own power. Something was nudging them into action—more magic, no doubt. He wondered if anyone in the audience was allowed to affect the fighters, or only their “sponsors.”

  As the crowd continued to laugh and jeer, Holan and Geral seemed to give up their resolve not to fight. They circled, slicing at each other with the knives, their faces set in growing anger. Each time one of them drew blood—first Holan on Geral’s arm, then Geral across Holan’s broad chest—the crowd’s cheers rose until they echoed off the arena’s unseen ceiling. Blood pattered to the dirt floor; whenever one of the fighters was knocked down or fell to his knees, the mixture of blood and dirt coated his body with a grimy film.

  Stone didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to watch one of these men kill the other one. But he couldn’t look away. This was destined to be his fate sometime tonight, so if he were to have any chance of surviving it, he’d need all the data he could gather.

  When the end came, it came fast—and not even deliberately. Geral and Holan were circling each other again, their knives held out in front of them, their gazes locked on each other, looking for an opening to slash. Suddenly Geral, now caked with bloody mud, dashed forward, ducked under Holan’s longer reach, and flailed his blade madly toward the taller man’s stomach.

  Holan jumped back, barely avoiding the attack, but in the process, he tripped. In a wild attempt to catch himself before he fell over and put himself at Geral’s mercy, he pitched forward. His knife swung wildly.

  Geral screamed, a loud shriek that was almost instantly cut off. His hands flew to his neck.

  The crowd exploded in cheers, many of them craning forward for a better look.

  Stone, gripping his bars, stared at the scene in horror. Somehow, without meaning to do it, Holan’s strike had slashed across the side of Geral’s neck. He must have hit the man’s jugular vein, because bright red blood bubbled and spurted from beneath the terrified man’s hands. Geral scrabbled at the wound, trying to stanch it, to hold the blood in, but it was already too late. He went white and collapsed to the dirt. He twitched twice, and then his hands fell away and he lay still. A red puddle appeared beneath his neck and grew rapidly larger, soaking into the dry dirt.

  Amid the deafening applause, laughs, and jeers from the crowd, Holan appeared to be in shock. His eyes were so wide Stone could see the whites all around them, and he stared down at Geral’s body with a kind of disassociated disbelief. His hold on the knife began to loosen.

  Then, suddenly, it tightened again. Tears streaming down his face, he yelled something Stone’s magical translator couldn’t handle, and then plunged the blade into his own chest. A moment later he, too, had fallen to the dirt next to his dead opponent.

  If Stone had thought this crowd possessed even a shred of humanity, enough to be shocked by what had just occurred, he was mistaken. If anything, the cheers grew louder.

  “Well!” called the announcer in glee. “Seems we’ve got a double casualty this time! Too bad, Elithria—your man’s the winner, but I don’t think he’s going to last long enough to manage his next fight!”

  The spotlight fell on Elithria, who smiled ruefully and shrugged. “Such is the way,” she said, her voice amplifying as well. “Perhaps I’ll have better luck next time!”

  “There’s the right attitude!” the announcer crowed, chuckling. “All right—just a brief break while we take out the trash, and we’ll get to our next match. You’re going to like this one, I promise!”

  Stone slumped, gripping the bars in impotent rage. In desperation, he checked once again to see if his own—or Harrison’s—magic had returned. If it had, he planned to cause as much mayhem as he could manage, starting with that contemptible announcer and working his way as far as he could get through the Council members, the two “sponsors,” and the crowd members before they took him down. He knew he wouldn’t get far, but if he could manage to take out even one of these sadistic bastards, it would be worth it.

  But his magic hadn’t returned. Of course it hadn’t. It wasn’t going to, and soon he’d be out there in the dirt and the blood and the muck, trying to stay alive without killing some other poor sod as unfortunate as he was.

  He didn’t like his odds.

  He watched as two more fights passed, his despair growing with each. The second consisted of a pair of women—Petra wasn’t one of them—clad in the gray shorts and matching gray tank tops. Once ag
ain they clearly didn’t want to fight each other, and once again the crowd used magic to “encourage” them. This time they didn’t get daggers, but long, thin-bladed swords. The fight lasted longer than Geral and Holan’s had, but ended when one of the women, spurred to near-madness by her sponsor’s incessant poking, drove her blade through her opponent’s eye. The victor was herded back to her cage amid loud cheers; before she made it, she dropped to her knees and vomited on the ground. The crowd laughed, and someone magically tossed her back into the cage. It slammed shut behind her.

  The third fight was different. Two men again, one with a purple stripe on his shorts, the other with white. Both looked in better shape than Geral and Holan had, their muscles rippling.

  “This should be entertaining,” the announcer called. “Their sponsors, Millia and Vestereth—who, as most of you know, have been bonded to each other for years—have been experimenting with some alchemical mixtures that should ensure these two fighters will put on a good show for us. Elar, in the purple, is a murderer. Utha, in white, was caught committing atrocities on at least three children. Let’s watch them, friends!”

  Stone had no idea what was in the “alchemical mixtures”—or, for that matter, if the loathsome announcer was telling the truth about Elar’s and Utha’s crimes—but the instant they were ordered to, both men roared and lunged at each other. They fought like mad things, punching, kicking, grappling—even biting bloody chunks from each other’s skin. Once, when they turned for a second in Stone’s direction, he got a look at their eyes and flinched back. Both men had the crazed, unhinged expressions demonstrating that they had little control over their actions.

  The crowd was eating it up, cheering and pounding their mugs on the arms of their chairs. This time, the fighters weren’t given weapons—they obviously could do a fine job of killing each other with their bare hands, feet, and teeth. Stone, from his cage, felt ill watching them. These men weren’t even human anymore—and it wasn’t their fault. When the spotlights briefly picked out their sponsors in the audience, a man and a woman sitting next to each other, their faces showed excited anticipation and, to Stone’s disgust, sharp curiosity. This was an experiment for them, to see how their concoctions would perform under real-world conditions. He mentally added them to his target list should his magic suddenly return.

  The fight lasted nearly twenty minutes before one of the men got a good hold on the other’s neck—Stone couldn’t even tell which was which anymore, since both were crusted head to toe in the bloody mud—and snapped it with a crack that echoed so loudly above the cheers that he was sure it must be magically amplified.

  “What a fight!” the announcer yelled. “Oh, my, that was amazing! Let’s give some applause to Millia and Vestereth, for making such a show possible! Perhaps some of you might speak to them about getting hold of their latest brew—this one’s a winner, don’t you agree?”

  The crowd enthusiastically agreed.

  Meanwhile, the winner of the bout—Stone still couldn’t identify him—appeared not to be coming down from his chemically-induced rage. In fact, he seemed to be in the grip of some kind of fit. He roared, charged around the dirt arena, and tore at his own skin with his hands almost as if he were overheated. His wild gaze darted around the crowd, and then he dived toward his dead opponent and began clawing at the man.

  “Oh, dear,” the announcer said, not sounding the least bit distressed. “Seems our friends haven’t quite worked all the bugs out of their elixir yet. Might want to wait a bit with those orders! Meanwhile, let’s get these two out so we can prepare for our final first-round fight of the evening!”

  Instantly, magical grips took hold of both the live man and the dead one, separating them and shoving them through two different openings—the live one into his cage, and the dead one out through a door that only appeared at the end of each bout.

  Stone was so caught up in his disgust in the whole proceeding that it took him a moment to process the announcer’s words.

  Final first-round fight of the evening.

  That’s me, then. No more time.

  In a few minutes, he’d have no choice but to try to kill, or at least incapacitate, an unknown opponent. Would he face another one punched up on Millia and Vestereth’s vile alchemical brew? Or worse, would they force him to drink it?

  It didn’t matter, though—brew or no brew, he knew how it would end. He was no fighter. Unless they put him up against someone as unskilled at it as he was, it was only a matter of time.

  “All right!” The announcer was speaking again. “All right, friends, are you ready for our last fresh pair of the night? The winner of this match will go on to face Elar, since I’m afraid Holan has succumbed to his self-inflicted injuries.” Once again, he didn’t sound the least bit sad or regretful about this.

  “For this last match,” he continued, “we have a special combatant, and he’ll go against someone I’m sure will be a crowd favorite. First, let me introduce you to Karol. He’s only been a guest of our system for a few weeks—a fine worker, slower of wit than even the typical Dim, but big and ready to prove himself!”

  A cage on the other side of the dirt circle opened, and a man entered, looking around nervously. He was about Stone’s height but had at least fifty pounds on him, with broad shoulders and powerful legs. He wore shorts with an orange stripe, and his expression seemed almost bewildered, like he didn’t know where he was. Blinking against the bright lights, he swiped a hand across his face and stood waiting in the center. The crowd jeered and laughed; somebody tossed a hunk of bread at him, and it bounced off his chest. He looked down at it, then back up.

  “His opponent,” the announcer called, “is also a newcomer—both to our system and, to hear him tell it, to our very way of life here in Temolan. He claims to be from somewhere far away, and doesn’t know our customs. I guess this is where he learns, right? Say hello to Stone.”

  Stone’s cage bars shot upward, forcing him to let go. The crowd cheered, and he could see the anticipation on their faces. They’d been waiting for him—the upstart newcomer who’d been asking too many questions.

  When he didn’t move out of the cage, something shoved him in the back, hard. He stumbled out, caught himself before he went face-first into the bloody dirt, and stopped, regarding Karol from several feet away. He shivered; the air was cold out here, colder than it had been inside the cages. The damp soil squelched under his bare feet.

  “Look at him,” the announcer said. “Quite a specimen, wouldn’t you say? You wouldn’t think a skinny wretch like him would have a chance against the likes of Karol, but—” he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial murmur that still came through clearly to the room “—there are rumors that he thinks he’s one of us! Look at that tattoo on his chest—it looks magical, does it not? And I’m told he even had the nerve to use a name that would mark him as one of the Talented.”

  The crowd erupted in laughter, boos, and jeers.

  “Watch carefully—perhaps we’ll see some magic tonight, friends! Perhaps this newcomer will surprise us all!”

  “Karol will rip his guts out!” cried a man from the stands. Another hunk of bread, along with some kind of wadded-up food wrapper, sailed down and hit Stone.

  “Start the fight! We want blood!” shouted another.

  The announcer laughed. “I see you’re popular tonight, Stone—or whatever your name is. Show us some of that magic, won’t you? Begin!”

  Heart pounding hard, Stone didn’t move. He kept his gaze fixed on Karol, watching as the other man took a tentative step in his direction. He knew his only hope, if his opponent was indeed slow-witted, was to anticipate his attacks and avoid them, then do something to incapacitate him—kick out one of his knees, perhaps. He wasn’t strong, but he was fast. If he could make it so Karol couldn’t catch him, maybe they’d call the fight a draw. He doubted it—the crowd was already calling for blood and wouldn’t be satisfied with less—but if he could do something decisive while he was st
ill fresh, he might get out of this alive.

  Karol, however, had no such plans. As the spectators continued to yell mocking encouragement to both him and Stone (“Kill the skinny pig!” and “Show us some magic!” being the most common respective cries), his brows knit and his face set in a frown of angry resolve. With a shout, he spread his arms wide and leaped at Stone.

  Stone dived out of the way, landing hard and rolling up. Bloody hell, he’s fast! He stood, panting, feeling but not daring to look down at the grit and blood now coating his body.

  “Hit him!” a male voice shouted. “Fight, you coward!”

  Karol went after him again, and this time he managed to duck sideways, lashing out with a kick toward his opponent’s knee. It didn’t connect solidly, but the man’s pained oof! told him he hadn’t missed. He backed away in triumph.

  “Use some magic!” the same male voice called, laughing.

  Stone flashed him a quick glare, then focused back on Karol. He wondered if the organizers of this fiasco would give them weapons, or be satisfied with Karol ripping him apart with his bare hands, as Elar had done in the previous bout. Even if I win this one, I’ll still have to face him, he reminded himself.

  “Stop runnin’ away!” Karol yelled, and made another lunge at Stone. “I’ll kill ya fast!” He didn’t look bewildered anymore—he looked determined, like a bull who’d finally figured out that the only way out of the ring was to trample the bullfighter.

  Stone was pleased to see his opponent was limping a little, at least. He waited until the last moment, then made another dive to the side—but this time Karol was ready for him. Instead of plowing through as he’d done before, he mirrored Stone’s movement and threw himself in the same direction, his heavy, muscular arms wrapping around Stone’s upper body and driving him with a crash into the wooden wall.

  The crowd went wild. “That’s it!” a man shouted.

  “Kill him!” a woman added.

  “Show us some magic, pig!” another man yelled.

  Stone barely avoided hitting his head on the wall, but the rest of him wasn’t so lucky. He jerked and writhed, trying to wrest himself from Karol’s grasp, but he didn’t have the strength to do it. Instead, he brought his foot up and tried to kick his opponent again. Unfortunately for him, the way Karol was holding him meant he couldn’t see where he was aiming this time, so the blow went wide and only glanced off the other man’s tree-trunk leg.