such vicious brutes. Presumably by himself, bare-handed, with his eyes shut and while hopping on one foot.
Coming closer, she eyed his prizes: three vicious bruisers. One was slick with slime, dripping from its jaws and the ripples in its thick, scarred skin. Another was a two-legged beast that wore skin covered in spikes from its neck down to a deadly-looking tail that terminated in a ball of flesh with spikes as long as Tamra’s arm. The third was a massive lion. It was sheathed in black scales instead of tawny fur, its mane looked as if it were made from black metal, and its tail was split into three muscular whips.
“Which one’s your strongest?” she asked.
He pointed to the third, the metallic-black lion. “Killed a man.”
“While you were hunting him?” So, not by himself. And probably not while hopping on one foot either.
“Yesterday, at the market.”
She didn’t want a known killer. Once they had a taste for human death, more often than not it became their sole obsession. You couldn’t race a beast that cared only about death. The desire to cause death was too closely linked to the desire to feel it. Dismissing the black lion, Tamra moved on to the spiked kehok. “Has this one been tested with a saddle?”
“No.”
Not exactly practical for racing. She wasn’t certain how a saddle would fit between the spikes. The hunter had clearly caught this one just for the fun of it.
As she stepped forward for a closer look at its back full of spikes, the two-legged kehok swung its macelike tail at the cage bars. CRACK. It hit hard, but the bars held. Expecting it, Tamra didn’t flinch.
Behind her, she heard the gasps of other shoppers.
She ignored them and moved on to the kehok that oozed with its own goo. She wasn’t bothered by the thick layer of slime, though she thought it would take a special kind of rider to sit in that filth every day for hours at a time. It wouldn’t matter, though, if the beast could win. You can get used to anything if it’ll bring you what you want.
She suppressed a grin, imagining what the augurs would say about that sentiment. You were supposed to always seek to better yourself, but they probably never thought that meant subjecting yourself to daily goo.
Walking around the cage, Tamra examined each of its limbs. “Uneven legs,” she noted. One hind leg had bunches of muscles, while the other seemed to be shriveled.
The seller grunted. She couldn’t tell if that was agreement or an objection, or if he was just grunting at the heat or the stench or a hundred other things.
“This one didn’t outrun you,” she guessed.
“Caught up to it quickly. Problem was caging it. See the ooze? Burns to the touch.”
“You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”
He shrugged. “All of them are trouble. Be slaughtering them after the auction. Hunt them down again in their new bodies. Might fetch better prices next time around. Plus it’s how I test myself against them. I win if I re-catch them.”
“You know odds are they won’t remember you, right?” Except in rare cases, you couldn’t remember your past lives. Restoring your memory of your past life usually required extensive exposure to your old home and family. Most never got that chance. It was a circle: you couldn’t remember who you’d been, so you didn’t return to where you’d remember, so you couldn’t remember . . . and so on. This was part of why the augurs were so necessary—they could read both your past and future for you, and tell you whether you were on the right route or not. In the case of kehoks, who’d forfeited all rights to improving their fate, that amnesia was most likely a blessing.
Another shrug. “I remember. And the augurs back me up, when the market recordkeepers use them to do their tallies. Caught that one”—he nodded to the spiked kehok—“fifteen times.”
She didn’t want a kehok who could be caught so easily. Or one that would burn its rider. Reluctantly, she returned to the first kehok, the black-scaled lion. “And this one?”
“Augur hasn’t been by to read it yet. Most of them have been reassigned to help the guards keep things calm, you know? Can’t afford to have the market shut down. But I don’t need any augur to tell me about this monster. First time catching it. It’s got so I can tell—this is this one’s first spin as a kehok. Might be