“Die!”

  When Dovik woke, he did so with a jolt. The first sound he registered was the whine of leather straining, the first sensation a constricting hand around his throat. He needed to move. Those eyes, they were looking at him. He had too…

  The light was wrong. Such a minor thing to fixate upon, but the change in light lanced right through his panic. The white tile ceiling was far closer than the top of the arena had been. The whining of the leather continued until a metallic snap wrenched through the still air, and the painful sensation of twisted metal scraping against his arm seated him fully in reality.

  Dovik flared his soul presence, and the wave of cerulean washed through the room he was in. His magic stopped at the walls, running into a barrier that it couldn't penetrate, leaving it to fill the small chamber like water in a tank. He became aware of several things simultaneously. The tough linen shirt he wore beneath his combat equipment barely clung to him as several stabs nearly rendered it into rags. He lay on a comfortable bed topped with sheets decorated with flying horses. Both of his arms had been affixed to steel rails bolted to the bedframe by leather cuffs. Only one of the restraints remained, holding his left arm still. Finally, he became aware that he was not alone in the room.

  Standing near the door, a man he had never seen before held some kind of enchanted weapon pointed toward him. The man's hands were shaking as he tried to hold his weapon on target. There was sweat on his face.

  With a groan, Dovik fell back against the pillow. “I lost…again.” The shame he felt in that moment was almost too much to bear. The fight came back to him, dodging in and out of range of the frenzied man's attacks while his swords were blunted by magic. That man didn't seem to have suffered from the same problem. It wasn’t fair, but there it was. That didn't change things.

  At the memory of pain, he looked back down at himself. A few streaks of crimson had dried on his chest, the only reminders of the near-lethal wounding he had suffered. Say whatever you wanted about these people, but they did good healing work. Hells, the chronic pain he had been putting up with for the last few months was more muted as well. Speaking of these people…

  “Hey,” he said, addressing the man standing at the door. The man there had just been in the middle of holstering his weapon, but at Dovik’s voice, he halted. “Who are you?”

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  “I’m just a hired hand, sir,” the man said, still stuck between putting his weapon away or bringing it back up.

  “Alright, Mr. Hand, why am I restrained?” Dovik put a little tension into the leather cuff binding his wrist, causing it to whine.

  That decided it for the man at the door, and he brought his weapon to bear once more. “You are not to leave, sir.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Those were Mr. Mox's orders. Worry not, if that woman holds up her side of the bargain, you will be out of here shortly. Take some time to recover from your wounds. I saw you when they brought you in. A pretty nasty thing.”

  Dovik ignored the second half of what the man said. The Woman. He didn't need even two guesses to settle on who that would be. “I can't even keep my friends out of my shit,” he scoffed. What kind of a loser was he? “It would seem that my equipment was taken from me,” Dovik said, addressing the man at the door. “Would you mind returning that to me?”

  “All of your effects will be returned to you when you leave,” the man said, though it didn't appear that he believed those words.

  “Is that right?” Dovik looked down at his hand, where his ring always sat. Having that taken from him, that hurt. “I had a ring, it is precious to me. Do you know what an artifact is?”

  “An ancient object,” the man said, shrugging.

  “It can mean that too, but magicians refer to artifacts as items they have bound to their souls before they take in their first essentia. It is very rude to take a magician's artifact, but they don't stay stolen for long. You see, magicians can sense where their artifacts are. It has something to do with the soul. I, for example, can feel my ring three stories below us and a few rooms over. What do you think the odds are that all of my equipment is in the same place?”

  The man at the door registered the implication in Dovik's words just a second too late. “Don't--”

  Dovik didn't hear what else the man had to say as he vanished from the bed. He reappeared in a hallway two floors below the room he had been in. Treston Mox warded his detainment room against soul presences, but he failed to ward it against spatial magic. Likely, the man thought Dovik could only teleport inside of his own soul presence.

  There wasn't time to contemplate much as he stood in the empty hallway. A mere ten seconds after appearing there, all the lights in the hallway flashed red, and the sound of a screeching alarm began to fill the air. Focusing on where he felt his ring pulling him toward, he prepared his next jump.

  “I'm coming, Charlene.”

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