death bug in his britches, says the two of them are gonna fight it out this hour.”
“Five fights between the two of them already?” Adamat snorted. “It’ll be piss poor, they’ll barely be able to stand.”
“Aye, that’s what the tables are saying, and there’s not much wagers yet. Everybody that’s betting has put it on Formichael.”
“SouSmith hits hard.”
Jeram gave him a sly glance. “If he can land a punch. Formichael’s better rested, younger, and half SouSmith’s weight.”
“Bah,” Adamat said, “you young ones always think the old have nothing left in them.”
Jeram chuckled. “Right, then, what’ll it be, governor?” He removed a folded paper from his back pocket, covered in smudges and long-erased lines. He set it against the doorframe and poised a piece of charcoal over it.
“What are the odds?”
Jeram scratched his cheek, leaving a bit of charcoal there. “I’ll give you nine to one.”
Adamat raised his eyebrows. “Give me twenty-five on SouSmith.”
“Risky,” Jeram grunted. “Figures.” He scratched down the numbers and folded the piece of paper, then jammed it back in his pocket. Adamat knew the paper was just for show. Jeram had a memory almost as good as Adamat’s, and without a Knack—he never forgot a face, never forgot a number, and had not once delivered wrongly on a bet, though many times was accused of such. That didn’t happen often nowadays, not since the Proprietor took over this boxing ring. He didn’t take kindly to anyone accusing his bookies.
Inside, the only light came from rectangular slat windows high up under the eaves. Adamat pushed past a series of curtains that muffled sound and hid the inside from prying eyes. The whole building was one big room, long since gutted, with a few stalls and cordoned-off rooms to give the fighters some privacy to recover from fights. In the middle was the building’s namesake: the Arena, a round pit twelve paces across, four paces below floor level.
A latticework of haphazard seating surrounded the pit, going back to either side of the building and nearly to the roof. Adamat ducked beneath the rear seating, crossed to the other side, and elbowed his way in among the men crowding the edge of the pit. The stands were full, men shoulder to shoulder in all the seats, enough for a few hundred gentlemen with their canes and hats, street workers with frayed jackets, and even a pair of city police officers, their black capes and top hats hard to miss among the crowd.
A fight had finished perhaps ten minutes ago, and the Arena workers were throwing down sawdust to soak up the blood, readying for the next one. A quiet murmur filled the room as men talked among themselves, resting their voices to cheer the violence ahead. Adamat breathed in sweat and grime and the smell of anger. He let his breath out slowly, shuddering. Bareknuckle boxing was a barbaric, feral sport. He grinned to himself. How fun. He took another breath, catching a whiff of pig. Not long ago the Arena had been a sty, and before that? A series of shops, maybe, back when High Talian was supposed to be the newest, richest, most fashionable part of the city.
A pair of shirtless men left the fighters’ stalls at the end of the room. They entered the Arena side by side and without ceremony. The workers cleared out, and the fighters faced each other. The man on the left was smaller, leaner, his muscles corded and defined like a warhorse. His curly brown hair bobbed into his face now and then, and he blew it away each time. Formichael. The Proprietor’s favorite fighter—or he had been when Adamat had last come by the fights. He was a warehouse worker, young and handsome, and it was whispered the Proprietor was grooming him to be something more than a simple thug.
The man on the right looked twice Formichael’s size. His hair had a touch of gray at the sides, his face bore a poorly shaved beard. His eyes were piggish, set deep in his face, and they examined Formichael with the singular intensity of a killer. His arms looked big enough to win a wrestling match with a mountain bear. Pits marred his knuckles where they’d broken—and been broken by—men’s jaws, and his face was covered in the puckered scars of bad stitching jobs. He flashed a set of broken teeth at Formichael.
Despite SouSmith’s advantage in size and experience, he was obviously tired. His chin sagged from a long day of hard-won