The existence of the fighting pits may be technically against the law, but in Roma Sargassa, Cato Palmar is the law. Subtlety isn’t exactly in his nature, except where the illusion of deference to the Imperium and Ovidii princeps are concerned. Selah arrives back at Belamar just as he’s preparing to climb into his coach, an ostentatiously ornate thing crested with the Palmar familia sigil and flanked by two sentries on either side.
Arran isn’t here yet. He was supposed to meet her at the gate, after she stopped home to wash up and change into clothes free of sweat and bloodstains and riot debris. He didn’t, and it’s done nothing for Selah’s rattled nerves.
“You didn’t bring your girl with you,” Cato Palmar remarks.
Selah shakes her head. “My mother has too many eyes and ears at Breakwater. I’m still learning which ones I can trust.”
The truth is, with Arran and Theo around to back her up this time, Selah did what she’s been unable to do since they were ten and eleven years old, and successfully argued Tair down. She didn’t want her to come at all, but Tair had pointed out that the Iveroa Stone was in her possession, after all, and Selah was forced to give in. She’s coming with Theo through one of the back ways they seem to inexplicably know about, along with the rest of the crowd.
“Yet you trust him?”
His eyes rake over to where Arran has just run into view around the corner of the winding drive, and she sees her brother stop short, tense beneath the scrutiny. Relief washes over her at the sight of him, even as Selah wants to rip Palmar’s eyes out.
Instead, she makes herself smile, and lets him help her up into the waiting coach, and hopes he can’t hear her heart pounding in her throat. She doesn’t let herself look at her brother, who’s left to lift himself up next to the driver.
“Arran knows it’s in his best interest to stay on my good side,” she says, feeling disgusting.
When the coach pulls to a stop twenty minutes later, Selah blinks, and for a moment thinks there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. She had been expecting to end up back in Paleaside or the Third Ward, dark alleys and shady warehouses. Instead, they’re somewhere in the Financial District, stopped right outside what looks like a perfectly respectable brownstone home.
By now, she thinks she should stop being so surprised.
A serva—just a teenager, just a boy—lets them in, and Selah has the distinct impression she’s stepped into some sort of patrician social club. Lacquered wood, easy conversation, the smell of cigar smoke. Men, mostly, but a few women here and there that nod their welcome to Palmar and raise their surprised brows at her, and the serva boy shows them through the crowded foyer hallway down to the wine cellar.
Underground, indeed. Arran bumps slightly against her, and Selah has to stop herself from glancing back to make sure he’s all right as the kid slides open the door to what looks like some sort of subterranean cellar. Their party steps inside.
Down here, the world is quiet, and Selah feels her heart drop into her stomach as she realizes exactly where she is. It’s not a cellar.
The ancient catacombs that run beneath Luxana’s busy streets are wide and sloping things of smooth and maintained concra, lit every now and again by the odd mourner’s candle flickering its last—little pools of weak firelight piercing the heavy dark. A final resting place for the dead. Selah was here not so many days ago, a few miles north beneath the Imperial Archives where they lay Alexander Kleios to rest beside his parents in the familia crypt. She had said nothing then, at the mourner’s vigil that night after the viewing. Mima’s hand held tightly in her own, Arran’s presence heavy behind and somewhere to her left, and she watched the last of her father’s pale skin melt from his face, his salt-streak auburn hair curl and burn away to dust.
That will be her someday. Sacrificed to the flames lest her death-toxins poison and choke All-Mater Terra’s sacred soil. Nothing but an effigy left, a poor shadow of the person who once ran barefoot along the Sargassan shore. That will be all of them, erased into stone and ash. Selah shivers, and tries not to think of the souls too poor and immaterial to receive a likeness, whose faded memories watch her now from row upon row of dusty burial plates set along the catacomb walls, made anonymous by long years of wear and obscurity.
This is a sacred place, now defiled.
“Will all of those people be coming to the games?” she asks Palmar. “Back at the house?”
“Some may, some may not. Some prefer to look the other way. The Leontine Club isn’t the only entrance to the pits. Just the most exclusive.”
The closest, too, it turns out. It doesn’t take long for them to arrive, the muffled echoes of shouts and jeering curling their way into her ears long before one of the Consul’s four flanking sentries raps on the hard, curved door—and it’s not concra, but neither is it any other stone or metal Selah has ever seen—and she steps into chaos.
It’s an arena.
A pit.
You could fit the whole of Breakwater House down here.
Paraffin lamps illuminate a cavernous room the size of several warehouses, yawning wide and high even as it seems to be carved out from the earth itself. Risers loom in a huge circle around the center, and from the top of the high stone stairs where she entered, Selah can see that the fighting ring within sinks into the not-concra floor, too deep for even a full-grown man to climb out. On the far left end of the enormous space, a row of latticed cells, secured and locked, that somehow seems to go on forever. And everywhere she looks, people. Salt-worn plebs with weathered faces shouting over each other to place their last-minute bets. Well-dressed women greeting each other with a kiss to each cheek. Laughing, waiting for hops at the bar, arguing over their favorites to win. Just . . . people. Regular people, out for a good time. Selah feels sick.
Don’t they realize what’s happening here?
She doesn’t let it show, though, as a hatchet-faced man in gray materializes out of the crowd, and Palmar says, “There you are. Selah, this is Wieler, our chief handler. Wieler, the Lady Historian.” Wieler inclines his head, an awkward bow. “He’ll take the boy down to the staging area, get him armed up and such.”
“Armed?” she asks quickly. “He fights bare-knuckle.”
“Oh, I only mean in the general sense of preparation.”
“Good,” Selah says, and, aware of the relief in her voice, makes herself add, “I’d hate to lose an investment so quickly.”
“Naturally.” The Consul inclines his head, his white teeth glistening in an all-too-pleasant smile. “The opening matches are just a warm-up to the real blood sport. We’ll want to see what he’s capable of before entering him into anything truly lethal.”
Palmar’s assurances don’t go very far to sway her unease. She watches as the man Wieler fingers the heavy baton in his belt and at long last lets herself turn to look back at her brother.
He’s gone. Well, no, he’s still there, but Selah’s never seen him like this. How he holds himself away from her, a quiet shadow of himself. If she looks hard enough, she can see him glance at her for just a fraction of a second, something hard and urgent in his gaze that she doesn’t understand. But then the green eyes they share flick back to train themselves steady somewhere just over her left shoulder.
“Ma’am,” he says, and his voice sounds flat, it sounds dead, and they’re back at the cobblestone banks of the Third Ward canal but this time there’s no wink, no smirk, nothing Arran. He still won’t meet her eyes.
Just an act. It’s just an act.
Be careful, she thinks, desperate, willing him to somehow hear. And then he’s gone, for real this time. Disappeared with Wieler into the press of people.
“Come,” says the Consul, his sentries parting a way for them through the crowd. “I’ll show you to my private pavilion. There are some friends I’d like to introduce you to.”