The casual flick of Nasira's finger felt like it plunged a fist into Rasim's belly. This was the plan, this was his plan, but his breath left him and the rope he'd held slipped through suddenly numb fingers. They weren't friends, he and the captain, but he'd thought her hatred of him had faded. He had never imagined she might jump at the chance to have him killed. For a sick instant he cast his mind backward, wondering if Nasira had, after all, had something to do with him being thrown off the Waifia as it sailed north.
It didn't matter now, not really. Rasim's shoulders were jostled as two of Amdria's men came on board and cut his ropes, then pulled his arms behind him and chained his wrists together. Sesin cried a protest, but Rasim, still stunned, didn't even try to fight. He had nothing to fight with, anyway: he was small for his age and his magic was stunted by the mindkiller. All he could do was stare at Nasira, waiting for some sign that this was a terrible joke.
No such sign came. When he couldn't command his legs to walk well, Amdria's men dragged him past the captain, who watched with her nasty, cutting smile still in place. Only Nasira's cackling whisper followed him as he was hauled off the ship. "Remember, slave. No seawitchery."
A wild hope blossomed in Rasim's chest. He shot one look back over his shoulder, taking in Nasira's smirk and the hopeless gaze of the rest of the crew. Only Sesin had any other expression, a fierce triumphant joy that she quelled almost before Rasim was certain he'd seen it flash over her face. He let his own gaze drop again and allowed himself to be hauled away without protest. Excitement strong enough to be sickness pierced his gut, and he couldn't stop the shiver that wracked his body.
One of his captors snorted and said something clearly mocking, even if Rasim couldn't understand the actual words. He didn't care: they could assume his trembling was fear all they wanted.
Nasira had forbidden him the use of seawitchery. Specifically seawitchery.
He had no idea if she knew whether he could command stonewitchery, and for a horrible moment thought perhaps he should have told her as they hatched their plot. He still believed King Taishm should be told first, so he could decide if Rasim's talents were a threat, but...well, Nasira had been so careful to make sure he heard her order. Their secret, their plot, might not be discovered, if he utilized his other magic. He might be able to use stonemastery under the very noses of his captors, because they wouldn't be looking for it.
But it was too soon to try. He needed to be out anyone else's range of command, because he couldn't risk being seen working magic at all. Which meant he needed—terribly, frighteningly—to be in the Arena. He kept his head down, thinking ferociously, and barely protested when he was thrown into a shallow cart. His guards spoke to the driver, a man whose thin face looked as though it had never seen a smile, and Rasim was chained into the cart's belly. One of the guards prodded him until he knelt up, able to see—and be seen—over the cart's low sides. He was bumped and thudded over the Moranese streets to shouts of interest and curiosity, though if any of the callers asked questions, the driver didn't respond. A woman pitched an apple core at Rasim when he met her eyes, and after that he kept his gaze on the cart floor.
There would be some way, inside the Arena, to free himself. There had to be. He would have the use of stonewitchery and his own wits, and that would be enough. Rasim told himself that as his knees began to ache from kneeling on the cart's wooden belly, and as his shoulders began to hurt with the weight of chains. It wouldn't be for long, and then he would find the Ilyaran slaves, free them too, and perhaps together find some way to break the back of Moranese slavery. Conviction burned in his chest, filling him with confidence and the fever of wanting to act.
A shadow fell over him. Rasim looked up, and his conviction faded into awe.
An impossibly tall wall rose up above him. It was not stone, as it would have been in Ilyara. Rasim thought it was mostly mud, maybe with sticks woven within it as support, but it was hard mud, almost stone, and it was taller than any building in Ilyara. Its thick sides bulged outward as they passed through a door so deep and broad it was more of a tunnel. Wondering how he'd missed the vast wall in his inspection of the city, Rasim glanced backward and saw they'd been traveling down a shallow hill for some time, so the enormous structure stood in a dip in the valley floor.
The cart rattled through into a sand-floored arena more than a hundred feet across and at least twice that deep. Its back wall was a natural amphitheater in the valley hills. The Moranese had simply completed it as a gigantic oval to build their circus pit. There were hollows in both the valley wall—caves, Rasim thought—and in the man-made walls. All of them were fronted with heavy iron gates through which there could be no escape.
He had never even imagined a structure like the arena. Faced with it, his plans to free himself seemed naive. The driver, unimpressed by the view, seized his chains and dragged him from the cart. He hit the sandy dirt hard on his knees before scrambling to his feet and following in the driver's wake. The driver threw Rasim in front of another keeper, whose gaze was disdainful as he looked on the Ilyaran. The two Moranese spoke for a moment, their language swift and unintelligible to Rasim's ears. When they were finished, the other keeper took Rasim's chains. This time he was faster and kept his feet as he was hauled across the sands and finally thrust into one of the iron-barred cages. The door banged shut behind him, and Rasim fell against one of the stick-and-mud walls, gasping at the suddenness of his imprisonment.
"Well, well. Fresh meat for the ring," said a woman in a familiar tongue, from the back of the cage. A Northerner emerged from the darkness, and Rasim took an instinctive step back. She was as tall and nearly as broad across the shoulder as the Northern guard Gontor, the biggest man Rasim had ever seen. Her skin, where it wasn't marked and notched with scars, was as browned by the sun as any Northerner could get, and her hair, which she wore in a braid as tight as any Seamaster's braid, was white from the sun. Looking him up and down, she added, "Ilyaran. You won't have understood a word of that. Just as well."
"I speak your language," Rasim said in a voice gone hoarse. He had met many politically and magically powerful people, but this woman looked like she could break him in half without trying.
The woman's eyebrows, which were so white they stood out against her tanned face, quirked upward. "Where did you learn my language, Ilyaran?"
"Mostly in Hongrunn. Where did you learn mine?"
"My partner in the pits taught me, until the day I had to kill him to stay alive. My advice? Don't get too attached to anyone." The giant woman stalked to the back of the cage.
Rasim sank to the floor by the barred entrance, staring at thick cage walls. They looked like dried mud, not stone, and he didn't know if he could work with it. Even natural-born Stonemasters had trouble working with earth, and found metal, like the bars across the cage's entrance, nearly impossible to shape.
The danger he was in hit him suddenly, sharply, and made a pit of fear in his gut. He should have been much more frightened before this, having been captive twice already, but he'd had such confidence in his dual magics that he'd forgotten to be afraid. He lowered his head against his knees, shivering and trying to imagine how he could survive this mess.
"No spark in you," the Northerner said from the darkness. "Like this one. You'll never last."
Rasim turned to see her gesture at another boy, perhaps a few years older than Rasim, who sat huddled at the back of the cage. He was both small and quiet, and his coloring, even in the faded light, was extraordinarily beautiful. His hair and eyes were black, and his golden-toned skin had a translucent quality that gave it an unearthly depth. His cheeks glowed with red warmth, as if he was lit from within, and he looked, all in all, like he had already given up his grip on this world. Siliaria would welcome him, Rasim thought, and then, as the boy shifted, saw that he was draped with a horse's pelt. Only the Shenryalan clans wore those. Siliaria wouldn't come for this boy, then. His gods would be led by the Horse King, whom the Shenryalans said ran across the sky each night and lit the stars with each fall of his hooves.
"I'm Rasim," he said to the Shenryalan boy, and while the boy didn't answer, the Northerner did. "He doesn't talk. Can't or won't, I don't know, but he doesn't. Won't fight, either. He sits against the wall of the arena, and nobody dares come close to him."
"Why is that?" Rasim looked at the woman, who shrugged.
"One part the way he looks, all gold and ghostly, I reckon, and he's only little when he stands." She was silent a moment. "And maybe one part that there's a Northern giant with a blade between him and them."
"He's your new partner?"
"Aye, he's my partner now."
"So you'll turn on him, when it's your life or his?"
The big woman shrugged again. "Maybe. Or maybe I'll win the hearts of the crowd by defending him, and we'll both go free."
Rasim straightened, his spine scraping away from the rough walls. "What?"
"It's the sweet they dangle for us, to keep us fighting. Once in a while, a crowd favorite is granted their freedom. Almost nobody lives long enough to become a favorite, though, never mind fight their way free."
"Have you? You've been here long enough to betray at least one partner."
The woman gave him a hard look. "They know me."
"But do they love you?"
Her jaw tightened and Rasim turned a faint smirk toward the sands outside. "Not since you betrayed him, right? And that's the real reason you're hoping you don't have to kill the Shenryalan. They'll never forgive you for killing a boy and you'll never be free. How'd you end up here?"
"You've got a lot of questions, Ilyaran."
"Rasim. My name is Rasim."
"I don't care."
Rasim, under his breath and in his own language, muttered, "No wonder they don't love you," and aloud in her tongue said, "Maybe if we work together we can all go free."
"Escape, you mean? No one escapes. There are two exits at ground level, Ilyaran, and only one is used by the living. That's the one you came in through." The Northerner came forward again, dangling her fingers through the bars to gesture around the arena. "Everybody who's not noble—merchants, commoners and slaves alike—all enter through those gates. The animals are brought in the same way, but on different days."
"Animals?"
"Big cats. Wild dogs. Birds taller than a man that kick like mules. There are half a dozen or more cages just for the animals, like kept with like to keep down on the killing. Slaves come straight to these pits, eight or ten of them. At Festival, there are thirty or forty in each cage like this one."
Rasim looked around the confines of their cell in shock. "They'd have to be stacked."
"Aye. They allow betting on who or how many will still be alive every morning. You're lucky. The cages are as empty as I've ever seen them, right now."
"Lucky? Doesn't it make us more likely to die out there?"
"Better there, for the crowds, than in here over a scrap of earth to sleep on."
"You have a strange idea of luck."
"My luck has kept me alive this long," the Northerner said. "Don't scoff at it."
"I still think our chances are better if we make a team." Rasim left the cage doors to examine the walls. They weren't mud after all, or if they were, it was the hardest mud he'd ever seen. He knocked on a section, then nursed his knuckles. Water could wear it down eventually, but it was almost stone. He might be able to work it. "What is this stuff?"
"Sticks bound together and slathered with some kind of hardening mixture. You can chip your way through it, but not fast enough to escape, if that's what you're thinking. They're always reapplying it. The cells get new coats about once a year."
Rasim looked over his shoulder at her. "How long have you been here?"
The Northerner shifted one big shoulder. "Long enough. Look to the sky, Ilyaran. The sun's coming up high. Rest while it's hot. There will be fights tonight."