The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,111

“Kill him!” and within seconds it had become a chant.

Lothar may not have been a weakling, but he didn’t want to die, either. He scrabbled toward his sword, kicking with his good leg and pulling himself along with his arms. Jedra reluctantly hit him again in the shoulder, crippling him further.

Tears were streaming from Jedra’s eyes now. “I can’t do this!” he cried, backing away.

The crowd began to boo, and pieces of rotted fruit and even hunks of spoiled meat began pelting the sand around them. Kayan looked up just in time to dodge a melon, then she snatched the club from Jedra’s hand, stepped up to Lothar, and swung it at his head. The crack of club on bone echoed all the way across the arena, and Lothar jerked once, then lay still.

Jedra turned away and threw up. In the sudden silence that greeted his ungladiatorlike action, Kayan whispered, “Bow to the king, damn it!”

Thankful that he’d at least managed to turn away from the king to throw up, Jedra managed to stand and turn around, then bow. He looked at the fallen dwarf, then at Kayan.

“How could you do that?” he asked, suddenly disgusted at the sight of her.

“Don’t get all haughty on me,” she said, then she lowered her voice and whispered, “I hit him just hard enough to knock him out, and I amplified the noise so it sounded like I’d killed him.”

“Oh!” Suddenly mollified, he retrieved his club from her, and they began to walk back toward the slave pens at the base of the ziggurat, relieved to think that they had survived their first battle without having to kill anyone. The cleanup team—two slaves, one with a shovel—passed them on their way out to retrieve the body.

“Sorry about the mess,” Jedra said, embarrassed now at having lost his breakfast in front of thousands of people.

“‘Appens all the time, chum,” the slave with the shovel said. “Excitement, y’know.”

Jedra and Kayan walked on to the arena entrance, where Sahalik congratulated them and pounded them on their backs. Some of the other gladiators crowded around to offer congratulations or advice of their own, but suddenly the noise stopped and everyone looked back out into the arena, where one of the slaves in the cleanup crew held back the dwarf’s head while the other slit his throat from ear to ear with a short dagger.

“Hah,” Sahalik grunted. “The coward must’ve been faking it. Don’t worry, it won’t affect your standing.”

As if to belie his words, Jedra’s wounded leg buckled beneath him, and he fell to his knees. “Whoa,” Sahalik said, grabbing his shoulder in one powerful hand and raising him back up. “You must’ve lost more blood than I thought. Healer! Get a healer over here.”

Jedra hardly heard him. He barely felt it when two of the arena’s psionicists took him aside and stopped his wounds from bleeding, or even when they dulled his pain. His mind was a million miles away, in an imaginary world where people didn’t fight for amusement and didn’t kill each other for sport.

* * *

The gladiators’ quarters felt empty that night. Shani was off with Sahalik, celebrating her victory against an elf woman from another noble’s house, but the bunk between hers and Jedra’s was also empty. The middle-aged man had lost his match. He had never been a friend; they had spoken maybe a dozen words to each other the whole time they’d been housed together, but now his absence left an emptiness. Maybe it was because Jedra knew that somewhere else, in some other gladiator’s house, someone was celebrating this man’s death.

Kayan was quiet, too. Jedra had tried to talk with her, but she had greeted his overtures with monosyllables until it was clear she just wanted to be left alone. Jedra didn’t blame her; his squeamishness had forced her hand, made her try a desperate gamble to save them while keeping her own conscience free of guilt, but it had backfired on her.

The psionicists guarding them were playing dice again, relying on their sense of danger to alert them to any escape attempt. Jedra considered mindlinking with Kayan and trying to surprise them, but she and he were both exhausted; they wouldn’t get anything but punishment for their effort. No, they would have to bide their time. An opportunity would come. It had to.

* * *

Sahalik was all smiles in the morning. His former animosity toward his newest gladiators seemed completely forgotten. “People are calling you the squabblers, or