Nothing quite compared to a projectile wake-up call. The cell’s door pulled open with a screech, dragging Rook into consciousness, and just as he tumbled from bed a metal rock hit him in the head. The force was enough to knock him to the ground. His ears rang from the blow. Eyes forced shut. When his mind gathered he looked, finally, and found the missile; it was cold against his fingers, and he pulled it against his chest—

It was a bronze helmet.

The sunburnt porter stood in the doorway, a dagger in his hand. He said something in Daromese and gestured at the helmet.

“Guess you’re up,” Jason said through the cell’s bars.

The scale-faced arena master stepped forward.

“Blessings of the tide, Master Rook. I pray you slept well?”

“Very well,” Rook said. He took a moment to brush the hair from his eyes. “No natural light down here. Soundest rest since I arrived in Sam’al. Have you reconsidered?”

“The stands are full of admirers; you would not wish to disappoint.”

“Then you’re as cold-blooded as Hasdrubal.”

The arena master’s face contorted into a smile. “Your cellmate spoke. He does have a foul habit to run his tongue.”

“Disappointed?”

“Your face when you saw the Champion of Sam’al would have been one for the crowds to remember.”

Rook had himself been smiling, but here he sighed. “But you’ll keep your word? I go free if I win?”

“Of course. The people would not suffer their new champion to live in a cage.”

“Three to a team, that was the original deal.”

“Plan, a plan—not deal,” the arena master said. “And you have disrupted the plans so interestingly already.”

Rook put the helmet on. Briefly he considered doing something daring—if they skewered him now they lost their show, and wouldn’t they be sorry then?—but he decided it was best to play along. During his conversation last night he’d had one idea that might do something to increase his odds of survival, and now he decided to put it into action.

“I want Jason to fight beside me,” he said.

“What!?” Jason said. He jumped immediately to his feet, clawing at the bars of the cell.

The arena master hadn’t expected this. His eyebrows knitted around the scales across his forehead. “Jason is no gladiator.”

“Account it an execution. If he lives then the gods saw it thusly fit,” Rook said.

“That’s insane! I’m not fighting in the arena!” Jason said.

“He was very expensive,” the arena master said. “When he is put to death, I desire it to be painful as possible.”

“Your crowds came to see blood, didn’t they? How will they feel when only one man walks onto the sand? They see Hasdrubal’s one-sided slaughter every week; that’s no festival for the New Year. Lend me him as my second. In return, if I win, he goes free with me.”

“Don’t listen to him! This cell is way worse than death, trust me!"

The arena master stroked his forehead with a thumb. Then he shrugged. “You are a cogent lawyer for such a violent man, Master Rook. Perhaps you might be my new scribe?” He laughed. “These terms are acceptable.” He said something to the porter, and once done, proceeded out of the dungeon. “May the fortune of Ba’al Lotan be with you in battle.”

A moment of silence followed. “Ba’al Lotan?” Rook said.

“God of snakes,” Jason said. “They worship him here.”

“Oh,” Rook said.

Jason’s cell door screeched open. A different slave, one Rook didn’t recognize, stepped forward to retrieve him. “Hey—you can’t make me fight,” he said, “don’t touch me—hey!”

The slave presented a dagger. That changed Jason’s demeanor quickly.

“Ok. I’m coming. Ok.”

They were thrown together into a preparation room, the arena’s wings, shepherded into place by slaves and mercenaries with spears and daggers. There clothes awaited them: two blue cloaks were brought forth, as well as arrays of weapons and armor. A bow with arrows, a spear, a sword, a dagger—anything they wanted was theirs. Jason perused everything but settled on nothing. He still fumed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Courage and handsomeness?” Rook said.

“You just got me killed.”

Rook hadn’t expected this response. It had him baffled. “You would have died in that cell.”

“Look: I get it. You’re doing yourself a favor. You want someone else to distract the snake while you slice it up. Me personally, I don’t like being viperbait. I don’t even know how to fight—I’ve never been in a fight! Not that I’ve won, anyway.”

Rook took a spear and handed it to him. He put an arm around his shoulder. He smelled very bad. “You’ve traded certain death within the next week for a chance at going free within the next hour. When we win, you’ll learn to appreciate your friend Rook looking out for you.”

“Death is still certain, it’s always a question of when it’s going to come. And that’s about probabilities. I’ll take five days in a cell over fifteen seconds in a meatgrinder.”

“I think you mean ten tides. Then it’s good you’re a slave who doesn’t make his own decisions,” Rook said. “Take the spear. Don’t touch the sharp end.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

Rook put on what little armor fit him—a bronze pauldron, certain to do no good against a giant snake—and took the sword. The spear was a better weapon in this fight, but it would be far easier for Jason to use. He contemplated taking the bow, but he wasn’t much of an archer. He decided to try anyway. He hung the quiver around his waist and held the bow in one hand, the sword in the other; he would toss it in the sand once the gate opened.

The guards watched them closely. These were well-armored. The arena master paid for good security; fighting through them would be suicidal.

The sunburnt porter stepped forward. He led them toward the gate onto the pit. The brightness of the never-waning Daromese sun blinded Rook as he drew near. The sand was like a mirror through the portcullis.

He could hear the crowd.

Jason stepped backward. He was routing already. “This is insane.”

Rook caught him by the back with the flat edge of his sword. “What did you do when you were captured?”

“What?”

“What did you do?”

“I thrashed like a piglet in the water after falling overboard from a sinking ship.”

“So you fought back.”

“Yeah, I would have drowned if I hadn’t.”

“If you don’t fight now, we’re both going to drown,” Rook said.

“If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t even be in the water this time! I don’t even know you!”

Rook pushed toward the gate with his sword, ever so gently. “If you hadn’t gotten on that boat, you wouldn’t have had to make like pork and swim, either. But you didn’t drown to damn yourself. You dealt with the problem you had to deal with and swam.”

“So?”

“So. Swim.” Another tap.

Jason was a poltroon, but once the desperate situation was framed in new terms he saw the need for courage. Rook turned his attention thereafter toward the pit.

The battle with Hasdrubal was not the day’s sole fight. A parade of goblins—the arena master must have had a magician in his employ—did battle with more mercenaries. This time they scored a single kill, much to the crowd’s delight, and routed the two remaining mercenaries. Their focus then shifted toward the audience; three of the misshapen creatures formed a humanoid ladder, jumping, snapping, and reaching at a woman holding a small child.

A volley of arrows came down from overhead, somewhere obscured to Rook by the angle of the stands. The remaining four goblins were killed almost instantly, and for good measure the archers targeted the two broken mercenaries, too, until not a soul was left alive on the sand.

If the spectators were bothered by the scene, they didn’t show it. The stands were packed beyond packed and delighted beyond delighted.

“Does it make it easier or harder to know they’ve all come to see you die?” Jason said.

“Easier,” Rook replied without delay. “Then we’ll all be pleasantly surprised when we win.”

A few young slaves cleared the corpses away. The arena master took to his stand and gave a speech. Some more festivities followed, including a dance performed by six naked women. Jason and Rook both watched with attention rapt—until one of the women turned, and they saw that from her back extended the thin, long tail of a gecko.

“I bet it comes off when you tug on it,” Jason said.

They still stared, but with awe more than lust. “I’d prefer it that way,” Rook said.

“I’d still fuck her.”

“You’ve been in a cage too long.”

“Look at her, you’re telling me a tail would stop you?”

A horn blew. The women were escorted from the pit. Rook gave her one last glance, but before he could answer, the sunburnt porter grunted. He shouted something else in their direction, then began to turn a winch.

The portcullis raised.

They both stared out at the sand. The blood from the earlier fights had been baked into dust, but it was still unmistakable. The dance had taken place atop red pools.

Two of the armored mercenaries, with spears, stepped forward from behind. Encouragement for Rook and Jason to proceed outside.

So they did.

Rook tossed the sword onto the sand and nocked an arrow. The draw weight on the bow was pitiful, maybe 40 pounds, but that was for the best. He wouldn’t have been accurate with anything heavier. Once satisfied with the state of his armaments he looked up and surveyed the audience.

Hundreds of indistinguishable faces. Maybe thousands. Maybe a million, he could have believed it—any number seemed reasonable. He was confident about the forthcoming fight, after all he’d never lost a fight to the death before, but like any reasonable man had his reservations, his anxieties and nerves—but bearing witness to so many spectators changed everything. He felt a thunderous shock to his morale. He’d barely looked at the crowds, barely taken note of them beyond their cheering, during yesterday’s fight: there had been no time, it started the second he stepped forward. But there was no sign of Hasdrubal now; now they were alone, together, in the ring, on the sand, in the pit, and for a brief moment the thought seriously crossed Rook’s mind that he had to win, because if he didn’t he would look like an idiot in front of ten million bloodthirsty viewers.

But no. That wasn’t it. He didn’t care about them. He had to win to prove Jason wrong, and to let him go free. He had to win to see Pyraz again. And above all, he had to live for Aletheia. That was what really stood at stake.

A few fights at the arena seemed like good, daring fun compared to adventuring. Maybe it was, compared to whatever mess they would have entangled themselves in if he hadn’t come here. But in that moment, as he spun in circles about the ring, he regretted coming here more than could be expressed in words. It was a sinking, despairing feeling.

The arena master gave another speech. Rook watched for a few moments, mouth hung open, before he realized and turned to Jason.

“What’s the word?”

Jason’s face was pallid as storm-bleached marble. He waited until the oration came to a pause. “Introducing the Albino Crow and his bodyguard. You remember him, his…victories, his brave victories—or, valiant, something like that. Come from Katharos to challenge Hasdrubal to the death. They…”

He trailed off. There was more, clearly, but his courage waned, and he fell silent. Whether or not it was due to the arena master’s next words Rook never found out, because presently a roar, a mantra from the crowd, began: and even a Kathar could understand the one word they chanted.

Hasdrubal.

One of the far gates opened. There were several; this was smaller, with a lower arch that suggested access to the dungeons below. Rook didn’t know if he could hear the rolling of its gears or if it was only in his imagination, but it deafened him regardless. All the world faded except the dark recess in the arena’s walls.

The gate crashed as it reached its zenith. Rook and Jason lurched backward.

It came.

Hasdrubal was a cobra. A black hood checkered with white diamonds extended from its eyes down its body. From the stands it had seemed like a huge snake, but nothing more; up close it was a dragon. As it slithered the ridge of its skull extended eight feet in the air. The back of its tail seemed ten miles in the distance, still concealed by the darkness of the dungeon from which it emerged.

And it moved slowly. Not like the trial-by-snake Rook saw the other day, but with lethargy, gazing upon the two men before it like a fat man at a banquet gazes upon distant cakes. Once it had slithered suitably into the sun it stopped and coiled about itself, raising its head—but it didn’t yet strike.

Jason lowered the spear in its direction. It hissed. Rook raised his bow to take a shot. The string pulled back easily enough; he let his fingers slip around the fletching of the arrow and it flung forward in an arc, flying toward the serpent—and then clattering against the wall behind.

That was a waste of time. He threw the bow on the ground and picked up the sword. Hasdrubal lowered its head in his direction and again hissed but did nothing more, not once he had dodged back.

“Flank about its back,” Rook said, gesturing. Hasdrubal’s eyes were on him.

Jason obeyed. The spear shook in his hand. Once he was in place Rook took a step forward, earning another hiss, testing the creature’s aggression—

Jason saw an opening, for just then he lunged recklessly with the spear at the snake’s tail. Hasdrubal had been poised and it moved faster than anything so huge possibly should have, like light itself; the spear’s tip found some purchase in the snake’s side, but not much, and Jason was forced to the ground to dodge a strike from the snake’s fangs. He rolled over himself on the sand, then scrambled up onto his feet—

Rook jumped to action. With Hasdrubal’s back turned he placed the blade of his sword evenly against its abdomen and prepared a severing, cleaving strike, edge alignment just right, and he brought it forth with all his strength—

The edge nicked at scales tough as chainmail. His arms recoiled backward.

Hasdrubal turned back to Rook. It bit in his direction, but he thrust the sword up at its mouth, nicking its forked tongue, and it became more cautious. Another bite; he dodged to the right; another, to the left; Jason had dropped his spear, but now he grabbed it again and stuck it into the snake’s exposed belly—to no effect, the blade was deflected entirely, but it gave Rook the distraction he needed to drive a thrust of his own through the right side of Hasdrubal’s hood from behind.

The blade went clean through. Hasdrubal pulled itself upright at the sudden pain, forcing Rook to choose between travelling with it into the air or losing his weapon.

He went into the air. Ten feet. Eleven. The serpent extended itself higher and higher, lifting its head toward the stands. Rook clutched his sword and serpent’s hood for his life, and when he looked around himself he saw the spectators at eye-level—

Hasdrubal jerked its head suddenly, down and to the right. Rook was thrown from his perch—with the sword in his hand. He flew like a javelin toward one of the ring’s walls. He hit it hard, then toppled to the ground head-first. His helmet absorbed part of the impact, but more than just the wind was knocked from him as he squirmed to his senses. His breath caught as he moved—a terrible pain in his chest.

He lifted himself up an inch to see what was happening. Hasdrubal bled from its hood and held its head unevenly, tilted to the uninjured side. It attacked Jason in a ruthless assault—yet its only weapon, its head, was its most vulnerable point, and it was smart enough to evade the tip of the spear.

Rook tried to stand. His helmet fell off. He managed to make it to his feet, then toppled down again; more than his breath was his head, which was awash with vertigo, like the whole ring around him was teetering on a saw.

A flash. A spot of darkness, like a shadow falling across the arena, crossed his vision. Then nothing except the blurry colors of Jason and the serpent in the distance. Until…

Something tugged at his arm.

“Get up!” It was Aletheia. “Get up now!”

She was neither heavy nor strong, but with her help he lifted up to his feet. She grabbed his sword off the ground and handed it back to him.

Another figure dropped from the stands with the billow of a cloak. “Aletheia!” she scolded. It was Astera.

“Don’t argue, fight!” Aletheia said. She turned over her shoulder toward the serpent. Her eyes spotted the bow on the ground. “Give me your arrows!”

Rook was not in a mental state to respond, so she took matters into her own hands, unstrapping his belt and hooking it over her shoulder like a baldric.

Hasdrubal was coiled; it struck at Jason and caught his spear in its mouth. With a single bite the wooden heft was splintered into a thousand pieces. It used its weight to hit Jason in the side with its head, knocking him over like a battering ram.

Astera drew her Dwarven longsword. She sprinted at amazing speed to the serpent’s tail. With the deftness that a mortal climbs a flight of stairs she jumped onto its back and scaled its neck, to its head. Here Rook finally found the wherewithal to rejoin the fray. He found the back of its tail and tried again to hack it off, this time splicing between the scales and damaging the flesh beneath; but it slapped back at him in response, cracking like a whip against his leg, and he fell again to the ground.

Astera balanced herself like a monk on a tightrope and raised the sword over her head. She drove it into Hasdrubal’s skull.

It was like killing an elephant with a needle. The serpent shook its head like a dog climbing from a river and even an elf’s careful balance was disrupted. The sword was lost, stuck in its skull, and Astera fell to the ground. She was dazed for a moment, and a moment was all Hasdrubal needed; it opened its jaws wide and bit down hard around her torso.

Astera went limp.

The serpent turned. Jason squirmed; Rook climbed back up to his feet; and Astera in the distance, cowering in the corner—

Hasdrubal came for Rook. It tripped him again with its tail, then lowered its fangs in his direction.

He saw Aletheia in his final moments. She was crouched in the place where he dropped the bow. In her hand was an arrow; she held it in her left hand by the shaft, and her right hand covered its head like a fire being sheltered from the wind.

More than like. He saw fire flashing between her fingers. She was focused intently on her hand—channeling magic, it had to be. When her hand withdrew a moment later the arrow’s head burned like molten lava held in place, veiny and black and writhing where once there had been bronze.

She lifted up the bow, nocked the arrow, drew it back, and shot it into Hasdrubal’s mouth.

Rook turned onto his back just as it hit its target, more or less dead on, but then it didn’t matter: a fireball engulfed the ring. A blue blast of blinding energy, yet it caused no sound except the momentary whooshing of flame. Hasdrubal’s head exploded outward, disintegrating, and blood showered the arena and its stands. The serpent’s severed neck stayed upright before collapsing down, but not before the downpour stopped.

Astera’s sword landed point-first in the dirt by Rook’s head.

Jason and Aletheia rushed to Astera’s side. Rook tried to rush himself, but there was too much snake in the way; he contented himself to watch from some distance off, leaning on the cool carcass as a sofa.

“Who the hell are you?” Jason said.

“Gladiators,” Aletheia said, then she turned her attention to Astera. She was alive, but the wounds from the snake’s fangs were terrible, like twin blows from lances—but much, much worse, for they were far wider. She shook Astera. “Astera! Stay awake!”

Astera exhaled. Then she inhaled, and just like before, just like in the bugbears’ lair, the wounds closed themselves. She sealed them shut with a channeling of energy from her hand—or something to that effect, Rook neither understood the specifics nor cared to pay close attention in the moment—and then was good as healed. She smiled and rose back to her feet.

“What did you just do?” Jason sputtered. “The venom—it kills in—what did you just…you’re an elf!”

“A sacrifice of Essence. A fragment of immortality in exchange for closed wounds,” Astera said.

He stumbled backward, and just then was when he noticed the audience. They had been cheering. They had been uproarious in excitement. They were clapping and yelling like children playing with puppies. Even at the addition of new challengers were they thrilled. But that was only when Rook and Jason were losing.

Now they were silent.

Rook remembered the archers. He grabbed Astera’s sword and climbed atop Hasdrubal’s carcass, like a pedestal for an oration. He was certain he had a concussion: he nearly fell from lack of balance. But he managed to steady himself, and he shouted to the stands,

“Hasdrubal lies dead at my feet. Witness the new champions of Sam’al!”

A man in the stands shouted something. Silence. Then another man said the same words, then another, until soon everyone chanted one thing and one thing only.

“What do they say?” Rook said to Jason.

Jason spun and sputtered. “They say—death to the profaners of Ba’al Lotan.”

“We killed their snake,” Aletheia said.

The chanting grew only louder. Now Rook saw the marksmen on the awning with their bows, waiting, all of them, for the signal to rain arrows down upon the party. What an end that would be.

The arena master stepped forth. At his gesture the crowd fell silent once again; there was a man they respected.

“You have broken the deal, Master Rook.” His voice boomed.

“It was a plan, not a deal,” Rook shouted back. "Plans change."

A moment passed before the reply came. “Cheating in the arena is punished by death.”

“The audience came forth to help us. No rule was broken on our part,” Rook said. “Would you kill your new champions?”

“You are not the champions. Nor are you the champion. The only champion among you is the one who slew Hasdrubal, which your girl did on her own.”

“I’m not a champion,” Aletheia said quickly.

“She,” the arena master continued, “is the only who would be spared. The crowds demand your blood. But…”

Here he delivered the rest of his speech in Daromese. Jason translated.

“…upon the final battle of the Tournament of the New Year, the bloodshed in the arena must cease for fourteen tides. The teachings of Ba’al Lotan are clear. The slayers of Hasdrubal must not be killed. They have proved themselves valiant gladiators and slain the Champion of Sam’al. They have earned our respect and admiration, if not our love. Thus I ask you harm them not as we let them go, and ensure no harm befalls them until the fifteenth tide from…today, the word means ‘today.’ Uh—"

“He’s letting us go?” Rook said.

“Ask him about our reward!” Jason said.

Rook did not ask him about their reward. Instead he bowed gratefully. The arena master bowed back.

“My slaves will escort you to the village, Master Rook. If you wish to fight again some day you are welcome to be received—but the crowds may not be so happy to see you, and I may not be so magnanimous in my judgement.”

“We shan’t be back soon,” Rook called.

The armored spearmen came forth. And, as promised, they led them back to town.