He felt it racing through the floor of the stone chamber, the beating of a thousand feet pounding on the stadium seats just outside the door. For a few moments, Dovik thought he might be imagining the noise, imagining the pounding beat that shook up his leg from the stone, imagining the cheer and roar of people above him. The tonic he took to help focus his mind had certain side effects like that after all, it wasn’t called Berserker’s Fire for nothing.

  But he was supposed to be better than that. Such things weren’t supposed to affect him. He gripped his left hand in his right. Why couldn’t he stop it from shaking?

  The piercing ring of metal cut through the chaotic thumping, and the stone chamber he sat in shook under titanic force. Beyond, the stamping turned to a triumphant cry that was echoed by a hundred throats. That, he knew, he wasn’t imagining. With a long inhale, Dovik pushed all the noise aside. His hand stopped shaking.

  “Are they ready?” Treston Mox asked from the corner of the room.

  The stone chamber Dovik sat in was bare, a square room with a door to enter and a ramp leading up toward a stone gate. The only decoration was an iron bench running down the center, one that had gone to rust long ago. At least, Dovik hoped the blotchy red stains were rust.

  When Dovik looked up, he found the half-elven man bent forward, his long blonde hair tied into an intricate knot that sat on top of his head. The man who had greeted him in a dark alleyway just a few hours before stood transformed, wearing the flowing robes of a criminal emperor and more facial cosmetics than any courtesan. Dovik didn’t sense any real threat from the man. No doubt the strange enchantment strapped tight to his chest was a weapon of some kind, and the two men he had follow him around at all times were dangerous in their own right, but the man’s true danger was foreign to Dovik’s world. That didn’t stop him from looking strange in an unsettling way, no doubt what he was going for, and to a city like this, that would usually be enough.

  Treston Mox bent forward, looking down at a dwarven man who was inspecting one of Dovik’s swords with a scrutinizing eye while one of his assistants held the blades on a piece of cloth. “We are on a bit of a schedule here,” Mox said.

  “These are brilliant blades, sir,” the dwarven man said, nodding toward Dovik. “Very keen.” Dovik ignored the man, and soon the dwarf was looking back at Treston. “I’ve worked some spellcraft to dull their cutting force. I could only dull it, you see. They are simply that powerful.”

  “As long as no one’s limbs are flying away, then we are in business,” Mox said, clapping his hands. He stood, adjusting the way his robes hung over his chest before turning to Dovik. “Ready for your part, my friend.”

  “Absolutely!” Dovik said with enough forced cheer to make the two men looking at him frown.

  His grin fell away as he stood and stalked toward the dwarven man and his assistant. The assistant took a step away from him while the wizard lingered, looking up at Dovik without a hint of fear on his face. The woman holding the swords sighed audibly when Dovik reached down and took up his weapons.

  “Why not just put me against this man?” Dovik asked, sliding one of the swords into the sheath on his hip. The other weapon, conjured by his ring, had no place to be safely tucked away, and so he held it resting on his shoulder. “I might come off otherwise, but I do not enjoy mixing work and pleasure. When I go to the theater, I prefer being the one in the booth.”

  “I do as well,” Treston Mox said, pointing vaguely toward the ceiling. “Which is exactly where I will be watching your bouts from. You are a prodigy magician and the scion of a great house, are you not? Warming up with a few fights before the real one shouldn’t be difficult.”

  “It isn’t a matter of difficulty,” Dovik said, forcing himself not to growl the words. “You want me to kneecap a man, to beat him down so badly that he will wake from nightmares screaming about it. Well, put me against him. No need for the rest of this farce.”

  “Ah, young man, the farce is the reason people come,” Mox said. The man cupped an ear, emphasizing the slowly waning cheers that echoed down through the stone. “You are not a prize fighter in this arena. To build toward a match between you and Senya would take weeks, a dozen or more fixed fights against lesser opponents, and the man himself agreeing to create some kind of rivalry story between you and him. You described this arena as theater, but I doubt you knew how close you were to the truth of it.”

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  “And this man only fights your professional fight actors?” Dovik asked. “Sounds boring.”

  Treston Mox rolled his eyes and huffed. “No, boring is when two master swordsmen clash blades in a single blow and both roll away mortally wounded. What we do here is exciting, especially on nights like tonight. After all, this is the week leading up to Talos Moon.”

  It was Dovik’s turn to roll his eyes and huff. “You Faethians are always celebrating one holiday or another.”

  “Quite right. Talos Moon is all about reaching toward the stars, which is why, for this week, we have opened up “The Run” to amateur outsiders. A bit of new blood in the pit gets people excited every now and again, though most just have their face beaten in by Reaz.”

  “That’s the 10th?” Dovik asked. “This man I have to fight now?”

  “Precisely right. I knew you were clever,” Mox said.

  Dovik shook his head. “Crazy. I do this run, fighting the ten top fighters of this arena of yours, in order, and that is the only way to get to the man you really want me to put the hurt on. Because he won’t fight amateurs?"

  “He is a bit of a prima donna that way,” Mox said. “You don’t necessarily have to fight them in order, but that is how it usually plays out. Senya holds the 6th highest ranking in our little acting troupe, so you will have to go through Reaz, Hart, Taz’Colinar, and Mace first. But, as I said, it should be no problem for someone like you.” Treston clapped Dovik on the shoulder, smiling broadly. “Do that for me, and I’ll give you your winnings back.”

  “And fifty thousand more,” Dovik said.

  “Yes, exactly. Your winnings and fifty thousand suns. You have my word on it.”

  There came two pounding beats on the door at the end of the ramp, signaling that they were ready for him to appear. Dovik sighed and started trudging toward the ramp. This entire thing felt wrong to him, but then again, he had killed monsters with less provocation or information before. This wasn’t even killing.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered to himself. All he had to do was fight and defeat five men. From what Mox told him before, only the two holding the first and second position in the arena’s ranking were rank-three magicians, and only five were even essentia magicians at all. If these people were used to fixed fights, he shouldn’t have too much difficulty.

  Above, the ebb and flow of the cheers filtering down from the arena floor moved like a wave that Mallis had long learned. At other times, he could read the movements of the cheering crowds like a musician reads the sound of music. He felt the building tension as surely as if he was watching the matches themselves, and he could even predict the exact moments that tension would come crashing down. For the last few weeks, however, Mallis couldn’t hear the music.

  Beneath the arena, he had a room all to himself, one he had long ago decorated and furnished so lavishly that it could have been mistaken for a high-rise out in the city. The pink carpet felt cold beneath his blue toes. In fact, everything in the room, from the peat vanity sitting against the wall, the glowing lights of enchanted incandescence, to even the plate of half-eaten dinner sitting on the shelf in his armoire felt cold. That could have been due to the quarter-inch thick ice covering almost every surface, but it more likely stemmed from the overwhelming rage beating against his mind like a cheap drum.

  More than a dozen bottles of discarded liquor lay shattered on the ground around his feet, and for the first time since his brother’s death a few weeks before, Mallis felt the cold clarity he was so used to.

  The beating of the crowd from above started a new tune. Galla was out there now, her muted voice filtering down through the stone, announcing the arrival of a new challenger. Mallis heard it distantly. All his focus was in his eyes, staring down at the sheets of paper in his hand. He stared at images rendered so life-like that he found it hard to dismiss them, created through some work of magic or machine that he didn’t know. The images alone, delivered to him in a simple envelope slipped under his door by an unknown hand, wouldn’t have been enough to push him from his drunken haze, but the note that accompanied them, that did the trick.

  The papers began to fray, shattering in his grasp as their fibers froze solid in his hands. The rage was more potent now than anything he had ever felt. Even sex could hardly compare to the incredible focus and purpose that came from it. Bits of paper fell through his fingers, mostly unrecognizable, but a few images stayed together. In one, a brown-haired human man and a scarlet-haired human woman laughed together at a cafe. In another, the pair watched a parade. In the last, the woman stood outside of a ruined apartment complex, her hand outstretched to snatch a ring out of the air as it soared toward her.

  Mallis listened to the cheering above, and he prepared himself to kill.

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