Interlude

The Contenders

Kalon winced as the rock hit him in the chest a few inches left of his scar. He’d managed to dodge the other four in the air, but that wasn’t good enough. He needed to dodge them all and manage to return at least one accurate attack. So far it had been impossible to do both while using the strange weapon Harrk had equipped him with but he was getting closer and closer.

The training regime devised for him and Tota by the houseguards was a brutally challenging affair, far more so than the BloodRock slaves were normally put through. It did however lack the savage cruelty that was normally present when they trained as Harrk and company couldn’t risk hurting the boys before the tournament.

This resulted in a situation where Kalon was allowed to actually fail and try things again. He thrived in it, improving by leaps and bounds every single day. He was even beginning to give North problems in their morning sessions.

This particular exercise intended to simulate fighting the flame witch, or ones similar to it, took up a significant portion of his evening training which made Kalon even more grateful for the session with his boyfriend and the Hyena-kid. Yes, he needed to be prepared for the Itti’atti girl, but unless he drew her in the first round Kalon would need to be ready to fight a host of opponent types before he battled her.

Once more recoiling his weapon he glanced up at Harrk and the four other guards armed with slings standing loosely around the main hall of the BloodRock manse.

How close he had come to completing the exercise made him excited, this event; the Storm Herald Invitational was his chance to prove himself to the rest of the boys in the compound. Being friends with Morean had plenty of advantages but he cast a long shadow. That had been the point of challenging North in the first place. It hadn’t worked, everyone knew his mother was one of the houselord’s favorite slaves and they thought he was just hiding behind his stone-blessed friend until he got saved from the adult pits by being sent to the kitchens with his mum.

Kalon wasn’t hiding behind anyone. Not his friends, not his mother, not old man BloodRock and he was going to prove it.

“Are you guys ready to start again or what?”

Corlin grinned, brushing a strand of his bright green hair back behind the pair of wavy bone horns sticking out of his head. He had easily won again, despite their best efforts none of the Tariff youth-pitters had quite managed to adapt to fighting against Corlin’s sky-blessed abilities and they had been sparring him for weeks.

The pitters he and his partner Ariun the hog-cursed would be fighting in the upcoming tournament would have no such practice time. They would need to figure out how to counter his powers during the tournament. Something no one had ever managed to do in a doubles match before. Corlin had lost a couple of singles fights here and there in his sixteen years but when he had someone backing him up his abilities made him practically invincible.

He had proven it beyond any reasonable doubt too. Three years ago House Tariff had sent him and Ariun out into the grasslands to dominate the various centaur own pits along with a couple other regional tournaments and events. The pair of them had little issue tearing their way through the horse-men or the inbred caravan folk who lived out there winning every last double’s event the grasslands had to offer. Now utterly covered in glory and minor accolades Corlin was back in the city, back training in the oddly dry and well-lit training pits underneath the House Tariff compound, back in civilization with all its comforts and debaucheries.

Corlin and Ariun might be slaves but the house of the lawkeepers was more than generous with pitters who won. The pair had been plied with whores, drink, and drugs for each of the regional events they had won. All of these things were of a much higher quality in Far Mantys and Corlin wasn’t about to give them up so he could spend every night sleeping in tents beside the road again. If that meant killing half the youth pitters in this Storm Herald event, well that was a problem for the other teams.

Velorn moved through a series of practiced movements, scimitar in his right hand a ball of fire generated by his own body in the left. The drill was one of his own design that he had slowly changed and improved over the decade he had been a pit-slave.

Of course, slave was a relative term. Velorn had happily agreed to be sold to House Saffron when he was seven.

Here he woke up when he felt like, he ate better than lords in lesser cities and had all the companionship both platonic and otherwise he could ever want. All it cost him was a few hours a day of training, and once or twice a month he had to go incinerate some kid.

He still remembered his life before, and while he hadn’t had an enchanted stone inside him tracking his movements that life had been the one of true slavery. Velorn had been forced to wake with the sun and work his fingers to the bone on the square block of infertile dust his parents insisted was a farm.

He occasionally missed his family, but he never missed that life. Having only ever lost to that little rat bitch Resh, Velorn was near the top of the Saffron youth pitters. Technically he was considered the fifth best among them, but the fire-blessed boy disputed that raking. He was definitely top three, and absolutely number one when it came to looks.

Three obsidian horns, blonde hair that burst into flame when he activated his abilities, and of course eyes that always flickered with trapped fire. With his fine cheekbones and inflated sense of charm, Velorn considered being talked back to his apartment a danger for any woman who set foot in the massive compound.

That apartment was a big part of why he wanted to win this quaint little BlackMist event, a win there would likely put him into the number four spot which came with a bigger apartment, one on the top floor of this particular slave block. He needed a bigger apartment, the rug he had been gifted last month didn’t quite fit his main room, and the edges were forced to curl up at the walls, a sight that annoyed the flame-blessed boy to no end.

So he had thrown himself into training for the Storm Herald Invitational.

Legs, legs, parry, flame spray, thrust into an overhead chop, refill the fire, thrust thrust, throw the flame ball, retreat pivot, more fire, parry parry.

He didn’t know or care who his partner would be. With how hard he had been preparing, and with no Rush competing, that new apartment was his for the taking regardless of who they put him with or against.

Xael made a few minor adjustments to how his shirt sat as he inspected himself in the mirror. The garment was one of his favourites and he had gone to great lengths to keep it safe on the journey to Far Mantys. In theory that effort paid off tonight at this party House BlackMist was throwing. These sorts of events were the real reason he was here….okay that was a lie he admitted to himself.

Xael loved to fight, loved to compete, loved to win. So while technically they had chosen this city as the site of his banishment as a part of Ilexa’s plan. He had pushed for the great slave city when they discussed it since it gave him a chance to compete against some of the best arena fighters in the world.

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A lot of them were actually kind of terrible compared to the knights of his homeland. The good ones though, wow! They lived and breathed combat, their skills and abilities made Xael’s blood sing and his hands tingle and that was just the ones he had seen so far. This tournament would pit him against all manner of new foes and he couldn’t wait.

Deciding to undo the top two buttons of his shirt to give himself a more casual appearance. The GodsRinger reminded himself tonight wasn’t about that, tonight was about building a foundation for their plan. It was about making the world a better place for people like his new lover Kalon, and as many other slaves as they could manage.

Fortunately, as the eldest son of a noble house, he had been trained in social navigation almost as hard as he had been trained in warfare.

“Charming, not obnoxious,” Xael said to himself with an admonishing point to the mirror.

Now he just had to go make sure North hadn’t run off again, and that he had actually managed to wash off that horrible fertilizer smell the Hyena-boy had somehow picked up in the brief time he was missing.

If the two of them could win this tournament he and eventually Illexa would get the chance to go to a lot more events like this one. Then their plan could truly get going.

Embella sat on the wall of House highSail’s practice pit idly dangling her legs over the fifteen-foot drop. Below her, the slaves of house HighSail had broken off into pairs and groups for sparring. She wasn’t allowed to join them anymore. That was fine ‘sparring’ with these fighters was a waste of her time anyway. She had tried to tell the HighSails that when they first brought her to this city of stinking barbarians. Of course, the Far Mantyan traders had ignored her protests, insisting they knew how to make her even more dangerous.

Humans thinking they could teach an Itti’atti anything would be a truly hilarious joke if the punchline wasn’t her enslavement by these inferior beings.

The Itti’atti were conquerors on a hereditary level, that was the simple violent truth of the matter. Embella's most ancient ancestor the goddess Ignisia had made them that way to appease the bloodthirsty demands of her husband Magyar for whom every being on the world of flames was a mere servant.

Even the so-called ‘blessed’ were lesser creatures, half-breeds without even enough control to manipulate elements outside of their own bodies. Also, their horns struck Embella as a little profane. Among true beings of the elemental worlds horns were rare, usually only possessed by ancient beings of great power. Some strange side effect of breeding with a human meant that every single offspring produced and even some of the descendants would have them.

‘Breeding with a human.’ The idea made her feel queasy, what would possess someone to do that with a human? Water could quite literally pour out of them from every opening and even their skin, disgusting. She had no idea how anyone went through having that pushed up against them without retching, let alone enjoy the process.

After she had killed her tenth ‘opponent’ the owners finally agreed to see sense and stopped forcing her to spar with the other slaves. Now stuck watching the others, Embella had to admit to herself that she was bored out of her mind.

So she sat and watched her partner Klash batter the three boys assigned to fight him. That drew a small smile from the Itti’atti girl, she had chosen well with him and victory in this ‘minor’ event coming up was all but assured. It was with her alone anyway, but Embella wasn’t taking any chances.

When she had first been brought here by the servants of the HighSail houselord the dark-skinned man had been smart enough to make a deal with her. It was hard to keep one of her kind a slave, even if they put a Forspoken stone in her she could cause a monstrous amount of damage to the house’s compound at any moment. Especially this house with its many, many wooden ships.

Not wanting to die, even in a blaze of destruction Embella had come to a simple agreement. Win eight ‘Major’ tournaments and they would let her go. It didn’t sound too hard but every daughter of Ignisia was taught to control themselves and whenever possible their surroundings at every turn.

That is where Klash had come in, refusing to risk teaming up with a lesser warrior she had turned down every candidate to be her doubles partner the HighSail’s had provided. She honestly wasn’t trying to be difficult, she simply wasn’t willing to leave things like this to chance. Embella needed to win this tournament as quickly as possible so she could garner more interest and make her way to the ‘majors’ she needed in order to get free.

Eventually, the Houselord’s middle son Daring HighSail had brought her a pitter worth actually fighting alongside. A huge ‘Cursed’ the house had previously sent out to compete somewhere called the Graceless Isles where he had apparently gone undefeated and won every tournament they held. Embella could believe it, the boy was monstrously strong and durable. A bi-producer of being a fusion of human and what she was reasonably sure was an elephant.

The true surprise wasn’t his physical power but that he was fairly skilled too, not quite up to Itti’atti standard of course but greater than any of the other boys in the compound or that she had fought during her time in Far Mantys.

Below her, the sparring finished so Embella cleared her face of expression and dropped down to the practice pit. She landed lightly on the sand and moved to rejoin the other slaves. There was some value in the exercises that the Far Mantian pitters did and it was a lot better than sitting around doing nothing.