Chapter 65: The Colosseum of Human Toys
The second floor disappeared in front of me.
I never even had time to look at it. I’d seen a vault, a distance, four silhouettes, and her, and that was everything I’d bothered to register, so when the grey light went out I lost nothing else. The vault went. The floor went. The four of them went. She went last, or maybe that’s only the order my eyes let go in, and my hand was still out in the place where her shoulder had been a fraction of a second earlier.
Alice.
No.
No, no, no.
I closed my hand on nothing and kept going forward on a dead leg, in the dark, toward somebody who wasn’t in front of me anymore.
Come back. Come back here right now. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to show me that and leave, you don’t get to make me drag myself up all those steps and leave, you don’t get to smile like that and leave.
I need to know. I need to know, I need to know, I need to know—
I screamed her name. I don’t know whether the sound came out anywhere, I don’t know whether there was still a place left for it to come out into, but I screamed it, and I screamed it again, and I hit the dark with the fist I had left, and the dark gave nothing back.
Then I landed.
It wasn’t a clean landing. The ground arrived all at once under my knees, metal, and my left leg did nothing to soften it, and I went down forward into bars that returned the impact through my teeth. Everything began swaying gently underneath me. I heard a chain creak above my head, very high up, very slow.
I raised my eyes.
I was in a cage.
A cage about the size of a small room, hanging in the air, black iron, with a floor of welded bars I could see straight down through. It hung from a chain that climbed up into the dark to a stone arch, and the arch was part of a ring of arches, and the ring of arches went the whole way around. Far below me there was pale sand, an oval surface, raked flat and empty. Around that sand the tiers rose, row after row after row, until they lost themselves in the black.
A colosseum.
It was night, a black night, no moon, with a sky that didn’t have a single star in it. Braziers burned along the top of the tiers at even distances and lit nothing beyond their own stone. There was nobody in the stands. Tens of thousands of empty seats with that orange light coming up at them from underneath, and the sand below, waiting.
And cages. Everywhere.
They hung all the way around the ring, at different heights, some nearer the sand, others almost up against the arches. There were a great many. In each one, somebody. I saw men sitting against the bars with their arms over their knees. I saw bodies lying down that didn’t move at all. I saw faces turned toward me without any particular curiosity, with that way of looking that people have when they’ve already watched a lot of new arrivals come in. Humans. Others who weren’t, with short horns, grey skin, long ears. All of them thin. All of them marked. Not one had a weapon, not one had a coat, most had nothing but trousers and filth.
I pulled myself up against the bars and I searched.
Gabriel would have been obvious immediately, he wouldn’t even fit inside one of these cages. Alice’s white hair would have shown from the far side of this place by the light of a single brazier. Leon, Evelyn, Yanshu, any of them, any silhouette I knew.
I went the whole way around, cage after cage, twice, gripping the iron and turning on my good leg.
Nobody.
All right. All right. The quest. There’s always a quest.
There’s always the blue window that turns up to tell you where you are and what’s expected of you and how long you’ve got, it always comes, it came in the clearing, it came in front of the tower, it comes.
I waited.
Nothing came.
No window. No sound. No blue frame at the corner of my vision, no line of text, no warning, nothing. Only the creak of the chain above my head and the wind moving through the bars.
I gripped my skull between both hands and stayed like that for a while, folded over at the bottom of that cage, with the image of her turning her head toward me and smiling.
Where have you sent me, Alice?
And it was while I was trying to straighten up that I noticed.
My body understood before I did, and it understood by reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Worldflow.
I called it up. Nothing changed. The colosseum stayed a colosseum, the sand stayed sand, the air stayed air, and there was no current, no weave, none of those colors that run through the world and that I’ve been seeing for so long I’d forgotten they could go out.
I went down inside myself, to the exact place where my mana sits.
There was no place.
Not an empty reserve, not a bottom being scraped, not exhaustion. Something else. The place itself was gone, and where it had been there was a wall, a flat cold surface that my will went and struck and came back off with nothing.
I stood up. I put my hand out in front of me, palm open, and I said the words.
"Infinite Arsenal."
Nothing.
I said them again, louder, sounding out every syllable.
"Infinite Arsenal!"
Nothing. Not a blade. Not a glimmer. Not that prickling in the forearm that I know without having to think about it. My hand stayed a hand held open inside a cage hanging above the sand, and I looked at it while I closed it again slowly, one finger at a time.
That was when the laugh started on my right.
"Ahaha... look at the new one trying to do magic!"
A man, in the next cage over, bare-chested, dirty beard, leaning against his bars with both arms through them. Another one picked it up further along. Then another. Then the whole row, then the ring, a tired laugh bouncing from cage to cage all the way around the colosseum while every one of them watched me do it.
After everything I’d just come through, that was what finished me.
"WHAT’S SO FUNNY, YOU BASTARDS!"
The laughing stopped dead.
Not gradually. All at once, everywhere, in every cage at the same time. The color went out of their faces one after another, and not a single one of them was looking at me anymore. They were all looking behind me.
I turned around.
He was standing on the other side of my bars, on a narrow stone walkway I hadn’t even noticed, and he was so far above me that he had to bend his neck to keep me in view. A demon. Skin a dark grey, almost black at the joints, stretched over shoulders too wide for the walkway. Two wings spread out behind him, tall, membraned, which he didn’t bother to fold and which touched the chains on either side. Short thick horns going backward. And around all of it a black aura that didn’t move and didn’t smoke, that simply clung to him and made the brazier light weaker everywhere it passed.
He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look curious. He wore a complete and perfectly calm anger on his face, and it was plainly the state he lived in.
"You’re the dog that barks at night?"
His voice came down on me and I felt the iron shake under my feet.
Part of me knew exactly what needed saying.
I had just climbed a hundred steps dragging a dead leg to ask five questions of somebody who had wiped me out of the world before the first one.
"And what about it, you son of a bitch?"
No sound.
None. Not a laugh, not a murmur, not a foot shifting on a floor of bars. Hundreds of men locked up for God knows how long, men who’d been laughing at a stranger together a moment earlier, and not one of them piled on, not one of them enjoyed himself at my expense, not one of them made a sound.
That was everything I needed to know about him.
Ah. Here we go, I suppose.
The demon put a hand on the door of my cage and opened it.
He didn’t use a weapon. He didn’t even use his wings. He came in, took me by the ankle of my dead leg, and pulled me out through the opening, and my head counted every bar of that floor on the way. Then he jumped.
The drop emptied my lungs before the impact did. The sand arrived, hard, packed down, and I bounced off it, and he still hadn’t let go of my ankle. He dragged me the whole length of the arena at a walk, in no hurry at all, while I scraped along on my back and tried to grab hold of something, his hand, my own foot, anything.
Then he started.
He picked me up by the collar and his fist went into my ribs, the ones that were already broken, and I heard the sound before I felt anything. He let go, I fell, he picked me up. The fist came back. He let go, I fell, he picked me up. He worked my back, my stomach, my face. He was not in a hurry and he was not putting any effort into it. At one point he crouched down, took my left leg, the one that hadn’t felt anything since the staircase, and brought his heel down on it, once, twice, three times, watching my eyes to see what it would do.
It did nothing at all, and that seemed to disappoint him, so he went back up to the ribs.
I spat blood onto the sand. I screamed. Yes, I screamed, and I don’t care, I screamed my throat raw in an empty colosseum in front of hundreds of silent men watching from their cages, and at no point did that thing speed up or slow down.
Then it stopped.
He picked me up by the back of the collar, went back up, put me in my cage and closed the door.
I stayed where he’d left me, on my side, half dead, my whole body bleeding out of places I could no longer identify. A thread of blood ran out of my mouth onto the iron. My eyes wouldn’t focus.
"You’ll fight tomorrow," he said as he walked away. "I hope you’ll be in good shape."
And he laughed. The whole way, until the sound of his steps was gone.
"Kooff... koff..."
I coughed, and what came out wasn’t air, and I held my ribs with the arm that still answered.
It was the man next door who spoke. The same one who’d laughed at me first. There was nothing left of the mockery in his voice.
"Kid... you shouldn’t have. The first rule here is that you don’t challenge the jailers, not if you want to avoid dying sooner."
I didn’t answer.
That son of a bitch could have told me before. He watched me dig the hole, he laughed along with the rest of them, and he waits until I’m on the floor to explain the rule.
He must have read something on my face, because he went on.
"If you want to survive here, you have to accept the situation. You’re not a human anymore. You’re not anything anymore. We’re toys for demons, we’re here to entertain them, that’s all we are. You see the chains on your ankles?"
My eyes went down to them.
I hadn’t noticed them. Two rings of dull metal, one at each ankle, with no visible lock, and lines cut into them that gave off no light at all.
"That’s aldranite. Demon work, runes mixed into magical ore. It cuts the prisoner’s link to the System. And to mana."
Ah. So that was it.
"That’s why," he breathed. "We’re no match for them."
Around us, in the other cages, several of them nodded without saying anything.
"Get some rest, kid. Either way, tomorrow, if you want to live through it, you’ll have your work cut out."
And that was how I fell asleep. In pain, in a place whose name I didn’t know, without a single answer, without Alice, and stripped of everything.