Miro Ontiveros stands across the arena, jaw set, and suddenly the concept of winning doesn’t just seem impossible—it isn’t an option at all. Arran doesn’t want to fight him. He needs him alive, and preferably not too pissed at him, if it turns out Selah and Tair aren’t able to find Diana down below. That said, he isn’t particularly thrilled about the idea of letting Miro kill him, either.
“Still planning on busting me out?” Miro murmurs beneath the din, grim, passing Arran as he paces the circular ring.
“Haven’t really had a chance to think about it.”
“Well, you’d better make up your mind, because I don’t plan on dying here.”
“I had a feeling.” He breathes in through his nose, hard, and tries to push out the roar of the crowd. He really doesn’t like how close Miro’s getting with that sword. “Give me a second to think, yeah?”
He scans the faces jeering down from the stands above, and he can’t find Theo in the crowd. Up in the raised pavilion, some feet above the rest, Cato Palmar has two ring-encrusted hands gripped tight to the railing’s edge, a deeply unpleasant expression of utter triumph spread across his face. Something tight and horribly familiar begins to clench in his chest, and through it, somehow, somehow Arran manages to breathe.
Hello again, he thinks, and the spinning ball of panicked chaos in his chest stays where he can hold it. Here to keep me alive?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the booming voice of an emcee rings out from above his head, and oh shit, this is really happening, and Arran still hasn’t worked out what to do. He can’t kill Miro, but he can’t let Miro kill him, and Theo’s nowhere to be seen, and Selah is the only one in his corner with the power to end this, but Selah isn’t here. He’s well and truly on his own. “Now the sport you’ve been waiting for!”
Their circular pacing around the pit crosses paths once more, and out of the corner of his mouth Arran asks, “What happens if I refuse to fight?”
“I’ll probably stab you.”
“Okay, don’t love that. New question. What happens if we refuse to fight?”
Miro shakes his head. “Bad idea. They’ll throw a mountain lion in with us or something.”
Right, okay, not doing that either.
But before he has the chance to come up with anything else, the resounding boom of an enormous horn sounds out across the cavernous pits, the clamor of the crowd swells to a breaking point, and they’re out of time.
“You know how to use that thing?” Miro asks, beneath the dull roar.
“The basics, yeah.”
“Good,” he says, and brings his short, curved sword down.
It happens so fast Arran nearly forgets to react. He swings his own blade up to meet Miro in a parry, and the elated shouts of the mob rise as the match begins in earnest.
Fuck. Fuck. This is happening too fast. He wants to stop, wants to shout, “What are you doing?” but there’s no point, not when he already knows the answer. Miro’s just trying to stay alive. He brings his sword down again, and again, and again, and Arran has no choice but to parry, then bring his shield across, then parry again—all the while able to think of nothing but the next move, the next step to survival.
It goes this way for a while, with Miro on the offensive and Arran doing the very best he can not to find himself spit on the pointy end of his opponent’s notably sharpened blade. Arran may have some cursory legionary training, and the experience of bare-knuckle street brawls, but Miro is a professional athlete. What’s more, he’s been trained to use the weapon in his hand. He isn’t fumbling to catch up, to get accustomed to it the way Arran is. There’s strength in each blow, but precision, too, and that’s what turns out to be all the more deadly. With each strike, it’s all Arran can do to raise his shield in time, and in the correct angle to make sure that the force of the sword ricochets back off the way it came.
Yet, for all that skill, it doesn’t take long for Arran to realize that Miro is holding back.
Screw it. Throwing caution to the wind, he takes advantage of a momentary gap to press his advantage. Their swords meet high above their heads, and under the screams and jeers, he grits out, “Hoping they’ll just tire out and get bored?”
Miro pushes him back, feints to the left, and then meets him again in another pass.
“Got any better ideas?”
Despite himself, Arran feels a rush in his chest. Miro isn’t trying to kill him at all. Not yet, anyway, and he can work with that. This crowd wants blood, but they also want a show, and if it means stalling, then he can give them that. He might not know the rules of combat as well as Miro, but he knows how to fight dirty. No one asked him if he wanted to be here—that means he gets to play by his own rules. Miro shifts to retreat into a short guard, and in the split second between sliding his boots along the rough-stained concra and assuming the intended position, Arran kicks him hard in the groin. Miro stumbles back, swearing.
There was a plan here, and it was a good one, but it becomes moot fairly quickly as the surprised shouts of the onlookers veer into something altogether different. This may not be the Third Ward, but it’s eerily reminiscent of a time—only scant days ago—that a distinct shift had ripped through the cobblestone banks and Arran, in the midst of heady action, had caught on a half-second later than everyone else.
Cries of bloodlust turning into confused yells. Thrilled jeers giving way to screams of real panic. And in the split second between Arran yanking the sword away from Miro and throwing it to the side, a screeching woman falls into the pit.
Arran looks up.
Up above, the crowd has descended into bedlam. Men, women, and thremed shoving at each other with alarmed shouts, desperately pushing at each other to get around the rim of the sunken pit, toward the exits. Almost like they’re trying to get away from something. Whatever’s happening to cause the mass panic, however, is too far from away Arran’s view to make out. All he can see from down here is the chaos, and another man falling down into the pit, and no one seems to be paying much attention to the two of them at all anymore.
The moment’s now.
“Miro!” he shouts urgently above the clamor. “Shield!”
It’s a desperate act, but he has to try. Miro braces himself and kneels, shield raised, and Arran drops his own shield and spear to the ground. With a running start, he propels himself off the offered shield and leaps, willing himself to make it.
With only one hand free, the other still clenched tight around the pommel of his sword, he just barely catches the pit’s crumbling upper rim. Pulling together his last reserves, he swings his other arm up and heaves himself out. He pulls himself to standing, and only just avoids being trampled by the hysterical mob.
All around him are screaming, stampeding spectators, and he’s nearly knocked back down into the sunken pit when he crouches to throw a hand back down and pull Miro out after him. When he stands back up, it isn’t just the mob pushing and shouting to reach the exits. At their backs, there’s a new mass of people pouring in from the crevice of a corridor set into the back wall, and they are definitely not paying customers.
They look like the stuff of nightmares. Emaciated and deformed, burnt and bruised and bald and amputated, they hardly look human. Rags hanging from ribcages and cheekbones poking through ashy and sallow skin, and all the more frightening for the fact that they are, for the most part, absolutely incandescently wild with rage.
Over the top of the swarming mass’s heads, Arran catches sight of Wieler scrambling out from the looming horde’s direct path. He adjusts his grip on the blade in his hand, hot fury in his chest, but it’s too late. Theo—there—appears through a split-second gap in the melee, seizes the hatchet-faced handler by the arm, and shoves one of their blades right through his chest. Smooth and clean as butter, if not for the burst of crimson blood. He doesn’t have time to dwell on the satisfaction on Theo’s face, however, because some yards behind them is Tair, raising some sort of shining metal pipe and smashing it down on the thick chain links keeping the fighters’ cells locked tight. The chain-link snaps apart, and the fervent throng of servae pit fighters spills out to join the fray, itching for blood.
Cold thrill shooting through his heart, Arran turns away. Selah. If Tair’s back, then that means she has to be somewhere, too. He has to find her.
He pushes through the frenzy, throwing elbows where he has to, bringing down the blunt end of his pommel only once on some man who decides to put up a fight, but for the main part the crowd has the good sense to steer clear of him. Another glimpse of Theo, dodging a blow from one of the ghoulish mob this time, and—Miro, was that Miro? Hand in hand with an older woman who looks so much like him, who has to be—Then the flash of a blackbag uniform, maybe, but he doesn’t care, he has to find his sister, and for all the injured and dead falling to the ground, still the crowd doesn’t seem to be thinning out, and people run this way and that, shoving each other in a bid to make it to one of the exits, and there—
Selah is putting up a good fight, he’ll give her that, thrashing and digging her nails into the arms and chest and face of Cato Palmar’s sentry. But the Consul’s man has her firmly around the waist, and is dragging her toward the exit, and to anyone else it might look like the Consul protecting her escape, but Arran knows better because Palmar wants her and he wants the Stone and she’s too far away, he won’t make it to her in time, the press and rush of the mob is too thick, and they’re almost out a back exit door.
Then the sentry drops, and Tair is standing there, breathing heavy, hands clasped around the metal pole she just used to bash the man across the head.
Arran presses the last length to reach them, where Tair is now standing between Palmar and Selah, weapon raised, blood shining from a cut along her bicep. Palmar’s lip curls, and if he intended to say something, to call for new sentries, to whatever, it doesn’t matter. Arran arrives just as he takes a breath, wrests a dangerously gleaming blade from a passing thremid’s grip, and runs it straight through the Consul’s throat.
And, just for that brief moment, time seems to stop.
Because all Arran can think is, Good.
Cato Palmar is dead. He’s dead, and he didn’t deserve the dignity of last words. Last breath. A poignant moment of clarity where he knew it was all being taken away and why. He deserved a careless end, the way he used others carelessly in life.
“Tair,” he yells over the crowd. “Did you find Diana?”
“Saw her and Miro go out the back way.”
“Good. Get Selah out of here.”
Tair doesn’t need to be told twice. She grabs Selah by the hand and drags her away, and Arran turns back into the melee. He isn’t going anywhere without Theo.