INTERLUDE 8E: THE SHOW

“Patience. Do you comprehend what it takes, to know the future’s design, to watch it unfurl like a sail to catch the breeze? Hasty is the hand that snatches at the rope before the wind is ready. I will not see the sail torn free. I will guide this boat. And I will see it safely to shore.”

– from ‘The Notes of Timesnatcher’, recovered after the Fall

Before a bout began, each gladiator entering the arena would first be checked for pre-applied enhancements. Dispels were used to counter any such effects, and even the mere presence of magical augmentation was frowned upon, taken as an attempt at cheating – it was often a factor in deciding to ban a contender outright. Only after they’d gone through the cleansing ritual would the correct spells be placed upon the gladiator, depending on the fighter’s position in the games. The earliest bouts of the afternoon, conducted when the sun was at its hottest, would usually offer no such quirks other than a divination screen – but when the day began to fade, the slaves would be put back in their chains and the veterans would be unleashed, with increasing amounts of magical aids. Twelve-foot titans would clash, swords longer than most men were tall, the clamour of the encounter deafening. Men and women with whips and spears of living fire would meet in ferocious combat, seeming to dance a lethal dance upon the sands, as the crowds chanted and roared. Healing-spells and workings that increased endurance, durability; these were always given to the last warriors of the day, the most skilled, those whose match the crowd would want to last more than five minutes.

Abathorn feared that his wouldn’t be a very long combat. He and Ovax had been chosen for the final game. And Ovax was going to lose in less than sixty seconds, Abathorn worried, unless he did his best to drag it out. Despite the augmentations making it difficult to be permanently harmed, his opponent was overly-concerned with his appearance. Abathorn always tied back his glinting, rust-red hair in order to better display the lines of his wounds, criss-crossing his proud, narrow face, but Ovax was handsome, a tall, buff, blond spectacle of a human. A few lost body parts, a few ugly scars, and the coward would be raising his cupped hand palm-up, the sign of submission to the director of the games to halt the match and declare the victor. Arch-druidry would regrow the severed limbs, as good as new, but, whether by incompetence or deliberate policy, they’d always leave scars behind. Gladiators were supposed to be scarred, tough-looking… Ovax was relatively new to the games, but was doubtless an experienced warrior, with serpentine reflexes and the frame of a demi-god. Yet it was a matter of attitude – the human was no true gladiator. He would be better suited to the morning games, performing for the children with the actors.

No. Ovax was no Abathorn.

Abathorn built his legend upon the skulls of his foes. Fourteen times, the elf’s opponents had perished under his axe-blade and the heel of his iron-shod boot. Fourteen times – an unprecedented tally in living memory. It wasn’t that the Thorn, as his fans called him, was particularly brutal. It was just a matter of technique. It was his job, to win fights, and to make it look good while he did it. It wasn’t his job to worry in the moment of action about whether or not the druids would be able to fix the injuries he inflicted on his opponents. That could come after.

I will cut his face, Abathorn decided. A slash across the mouth, opening both his pouting lips, and he will raise submission. Another enemy defeated for the Thorn.

The elf stood in the privacy of the dusty corridor, looking out through the wooden slats at the women currently fighting on the sands.

The tattoo-covered knife-wielder in leather and her heavily-armoured opponent were crowd-pleasers, agile and deadly in their own way, equipped with both the tools and the finesse to draw whoops and hollers from the assembled thousands – but they weren’t capable of the same feats as the men under equal enhancement. Abathorn was lithe, his elven anatomy streamlined like an eagle’s; he was no muscle-bound lead-brain, but when the druidic strength was in his veins he was more powerful than any orc, his narrow limbs becoming tight knots of steel; and Ovax would be stronger still.

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Strength is for amateurs, for pleasing the ladies, he thought with a wry smile on his face. The killer-instinct – that is what separates the wheat from the berry from the bramble.

As he watched on through the slats, the tattooed knife-fighter slipped through her opponent’s defences, darting in to slice at throat and face. He could see that this was a feint – the chain hauberk and lowered visor made the success of such blows improbable, if not impossible. But the armoured gladiator’s instincts misled her, forcing her to twist away, an automatic reaction that betrayed her –

Exposing the unarmoured armpit, baring the entry-point for a weapon that could seek the lungs, even the heart…

The tattooed woman sank her longer blade, the serrated dirk, deep inside the armoured one’s chest cavity. She danced back out of range as her opponent growled in pain and dropped to one knee, red wine fountaining from beneath her arm.

The moment the loser released her hold on her mace, dropping it to the sand in order to grab at the dagger’s handle and yank it loose against all wise advice – in that moment the knife-fighter danced back in.

The shorter blade drove in at the loser’s face, angled to slip beneath the visor –

Ah. Not the loser.

Abathorn raised an eyebrow as a mail-gauntleted fist gripped the tattooed woman’s wrist – she tried to switch knife-hands but the motion was too clumsy, too desperate –

The metal visor went crunching into tattoo-girl’s face as she received the super-strength head-butt full on, destroying her nose, sending at least two or three teeth flying, glinting like chips of mica in the dying sunlight. The thunder of the blow resounded across the filled stands; the short knife was dropped to the sand.

Another headbutt and its wielder joined it, the leather-clad woman now motionless on the ground.

The armoured gladiator threw off her helm and raised both fists to the sky in victory, roaring like a lion, the blood pouring from her armpit slowed now to a trickle. Healers rushed forth from their gate onto the sands as the crowd’s jubilation was made manifest, a drumming of feet against boards unlike any other, a great uproar of voices lifted in acclaim and unrest – unrest, from those whose bets had turned against them, those who’d gambled on the lightly-armed gladiator and lost.

Abathorn smiled thinly. He liked the upset. The shock, the surprise. The arena wasn’t just blood and sand and screams. It was intrigue. It was a contest, not just of skill and sinew but sweat. Resolve wasn’t something that could just be taught. The willingness to enter the fray was only half of it. You had to be willing to kill. Willing to die. Willing to do anything to win. And even then you would lose, lose, lose. The other guy wanted it more. The other guy was a gladiator.

Abathorn, undefeated in seven years, knew well the burning need, the desire that was as a chariot, horses crazed with fury, running amok over every inch of his thoughts, untrammelled, trampling all in its path until his mind was a clear pane reflecting only blood. He was the chariot, he was the madness in the horse’s eye. Death was his gift. He would offer it to all who opposed him.

He didn’t wear much by way of armour; in that he and Ovax were alike. But where Ovax exposed his body out of vanity – going almost topless with just a single shoulder-guard, his helmet, bracers, belt, loincloth and boots – Abathorn did so out of practicality. The elf wore clothes, like any rational creature ought. His kind, like the dwarves, suffered less than humans when subjected to extremes of temperature, but wizardry was employed to keep the arena of Firenight Square climate-controlled. As such he just wore a long-sleeved black tunic, black hose and boots. Rain falling on the grounds was evaporated fifty feet up, and illusory illumination was used when, like now, the sky was anything less than epic. Abathorn and Ovax’s contest, being the last of the day, would be bathed in bloody dusk-light. Already, now that they were approaching the final matches, the false sky was subtly changing.

He wondered whether Ovax was at his gate, whether he was waiting, watching the sky deepen towards red… No. He would be signing bits of paper, talking it up with the crowd from his booth.

Cretin.

Abathorn had no doubt about it – Ovax was the more-popular fighter, despite his status as a relative newcomer. He was up-and-coming, his name on the lips of the noble and merchant alike. Abathorn was old news, a reliable dog past its prime. Or would’ve been, by now, had he been human. But Abathorn wasn’t even a hundred yet, and for his kind that made him a positive youngster. He had decades of combat left in him, he was certain – unless someone gave him an irreparable injury, or decapitated him, like he’d done to a fellow elf back in ninety-five…

Extended supernatural lifespans meant little when you were down one head.

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