At the same time as Kalen had gone back to his cell to finally fill his stomach, two guards of the arena worked underground. They chatted idly with each other as they rolled a cart through the narrow passageways.
With all of the new slaves in the arena having their first match that day, as one could expect there were a great number of dead.
The cart that was trailing behind the two men was just one of many that were currently being moved through the various underground sections. As the arena housed a considerable number of beasts, it was necessary to cart off the fallen as soon as possible if they were to serve as proper feed.
The beasts wouldn’t eat anything that was too old or had gone bad.
“This is the one?”
“Yeah, saber’s cage. Hasn’t been fresh fed in over a week.”
The other guard smiled as he took out a key to a heavy door they had stopped near. With a turn, he unlocked it and swung the door open, revealing a semi-lit room that had one wall made of a thick steel mesh, and had a rectangular hole at the center of the room.
“Alright, we’ll start unloading the bodies now.”
Both guards nodded at each other before they started to take corpses off of the cart, drag them into the room, and slide them into the hole. The doorframe was too small to allow the cart inside, but the room was small enough that the bodies didn’t need to be dragged very far.
The two guards continued their work in silence for another couple of minutes, occasionally breaking out in sweat or grunts as they hoisted heavier corpses into the hole.
“Whew! Finally, that’s done.”
One of the men cracked his back as the other wiped the sweat off of his brow.
“Definitely the worst part of the job, but at least they finally built these chutes.”
“Aye, you were here when the cages used to be above-ground, weren’t you?”
The man nodded to his coworker.
His complaints had come from a position of seniority, as unlike the other man, he had been working at the arena as a guard before they had constructed the underground pens for the beasts.
Back then, the staff had been forced to feed the beasts at a closer proximity. There had been a lot of fatalities because of it, so much so that the arena managers had nearly considered hiring a new team of slaves to work as handlers.
But there were other problems with that idea, so they had built these underground cages.
Both men looked past the steel mesh wall down into the pen, there they could see where the bodies had been carried to. Like a slide, the hole that they had been hoisting the bodies into glided its contents down through a chute and deposited them near the saber tooth tiger that laid below them.
As the bodies landed in a pile below the men, the tiger finally looked up from where it had been resting, it got off its paws and stretched, before lazily moving over to the pile of fresh meat and giving a sniff.
“It’s a pretty intelligent beast, huh? No wonder the arena’s got its hands on it. I mean, like how does it even know how to do that? I’ve never seen a cat do that in the city…”
“You’re going to compare a city cat with the monster down there? Last I checked, a tabby can’t thread your spine out from your ass.”
The other guard just shook his head, continuing to look out the steel meshed wall with fascination.
Acting nearly human-like, the tiger was taking in the scent of each body individually, sorting them out with its paw. For what reason, the guard had no idea, but the event was still interesting to watch.
And just as well, as they still had a few minutes still before they would have to return. Because of how many matches had happened at once, a large number of guards were doing the same thing as them right now, so the work would largely be done in a little bit. Upon their return they would just resume their usual shift.
Both guards continued to look at the tiger, watching its unusually intelligent movements, until something strange happened.
“Hey, does it not want that one or something?”
“...I can’t tell, it looks like it noticed something though?”
The men leaned in as they watched the tiger recoil after sniffing one of the bodies. Was a body down there toxic? That shouldn’t have been the case, considering they were all from the same day.
“I don’t think it's going to eat that one, something must be wrong with it.”
“Hmm, I agree. Let’s pull it up.”
One of the guards went to a closet on the side of the room and pulled out a bundle of rope with a hook attached to the end. He quickly threaded it down the room’s center chute, where the other man saw it come out by the pile of bodies.
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“Alright…no, a little to the left…okay try turning it…there! You got it.”
The two guards pulled on the rope after catching the body. With great effort, they dragged it back up the chute and threw it onto the ground.
Sweating yet again, one of them went over to the body to see what the matter was.
“What the hell?!”
Both guards stepped back as they saw the corpse's face. No wonder the saber tooth had stepped back from this one, it looked as if it had been rotting for weeks!
The men bore disgusted looks as they realized the state of the body, but quickly became confused. How had they not noticed the body’s condition when dumping it into the hole?
“Wait…it doesn’t smell, does it?”
The other guard took his hand away from his nose.
“Yeah, you’re right?”
The guard frowned, kneeling down next to the dead man, he wondered what was happening.
The skin around the face and neck looked weathered and gray. As if that part of the man exclusively had been aged for countless years when the rest looked untouched. The guards examined the rest of the body and could find no other oddities, they began to feel nervous.
“Which one was this, again?”
The other guard walked around the body, scratching his chin.
“Ehh, I think he was one of the seniors in chaff, already had an arena name if I remember correctly. Dark…no, Iron Goliath, if I remember correctly? Beaten by one of the newbies today, I suppose.”
The other man nodded, marking that information on a piece of parchment.
“Do you think that it’s some kind of disease?”
They were both at a loss.
“I don’t know, but I’m not the one to make that call. I’ll send a missive for the Eques.”
…
High above the arena’s passages where the two guards were currently panicking, a man was sitting in an office surrounded by various trinkets and some papers.
Most of the baubles in the room were foreign commodities, gifts given to him by frequent or wealthy arena patrons. Yet even more of the stuff in the room were things that he had bought himself, serving as reminders of the high station he had climbed to after leaving the service of the Empire.
He was in the middle of reading a stack of documents related to the recent purchase of the new group of slaves when he heard a knock on his door.
“Hm? What is that sound?”
Marke looked up from the desk.
BANG BANG
He sighed.
“Come in!”
BANG BANG BANG
“COME IN!”
The door blasted open as his attendant practically fell into the office.
“What is it?”
Marke looked upon the skinny man with a stern expression.
“Eques, the guards from the Althan Saber cage are reporting some kind of malignancy with one of the bodies. The beast was refusing to eat it, and they were stuck between poison or sickness as a cause. Though our healers are sure that it’s a new strain of disease!”
The man’s words rolled out with fervor, as if he was trying to force the words from his mouth as quickly as possible.
At the end he looked up, waiting in silence as a myriad of thoughts passed through his boss’s head.
Marke was taken aback. A new disease? In his arena?
He scoffed before the attendant. Marke’s immediate thought was to dismiss such a thing as impossible, though not entirely for no reason, as he had gone to great lengths to prevent such occurrences.
“You think that just below us in the beast cages right now, a new disease is spreading?”
The man nodded to Marke.
“If such a thing could happen so easily, then what do I pay the purification mages for? An outbreak is the last thing that we need at this moment, and the very idea of one was supposed to be rendered impossible by the checks I have put in place!”
Marke tapped the surface of his desk, grinding his teeth in frustration. He really didn’t need this, not right now. He was in the midst of planning something that would require his absence from the arena for a couple of months, and an outbreak occurring here would delay that tremendously.
Possibly by a couple of years, were the wrong people to take notice.
“There will be no plague here, no. I am not my predecessors…”
Marke whispered, now talking more to himself than the servant across from him.
“S-should I inform the church, my lord Eques?”
Marke raised his hand, silencing the frail man while taking a moment to think. He nodded.
“Ultimately, yes, we must. There is no hiding something like this from them, especially not if it turns out to be true, though I will still have to verify that with the healers. All the same, we can control the severity of this by minding our next actions. It is entirely up to us which church we contact, as our only obligation is to inform one of them.”
Marke tapped the papers before him, scanning his desk for an ink quill and blank parchment.
“Take a note to our messengers, tell them to inform the church of Typhos, and send for the most discreet inspector they can. It would be preferable if they were a priest-in-training, even. As someone like that shouldn’t feel anxious to stay here for very long.”
Marke finished writing the note in satisfaction, before handing it to his servant.
Amongst the seven churches of the Vermillion faith, the church of Typhos, the goddess of water, was the one Marke had the most rapport with. By contacting them, in exchange for some past favors, he could likely ask for an inexperienced priest to come and perform the official inspection that was required whenever a plague was suspected to have bloomed.
With that, his plans for his future trip away would be the least impacted.
Marke gave one last instruction before the skinny man left his office.
“Before you leave, tell Atem to burn the body thoroughly. Even if the church is coming to inspect, it’s best to reduce these things to ash before they can spread. I’m sure they will understand”
With that, Marke grinned.
Getting back to what he was doing, he pulled out a piece of paper, not parchment, containing the summarized reports of multiple mercenary companies who had come into contact with ‘knights’ of the Empire.
“Now…who is this group of knights?”