CHAPTER THIRTEEN LYRA
“Do you know anything about pit fights taking place somewhere in the city?” I ask Marcus, almost as soon as I enter the rooms in the palace he uses as offices.
He looks up from a stack of paperwork, eyes widening slightly as he sees me.
“Lyra, are you all right? You look as though you’ve been in a fight.”
“I was,” I say. “Three men tried to attack me in the slums.”
“Did they hurt you?” Marcus says, rising and hurrying over to me, sounding horrified. “I can send for a healer. I-”
“I’m fine,” I assure him, grateful for the concern. He still puts his hands on my shoulders, looking me over carefully, as if determined to catalogue every bruise and scrape he can see. “I managed to question one of them. He didn’t know who sent him.”
Marcus sighs. “That’s all too common. Violent men have nothing better to do in the city than hire themselves out to the highest bidder.”
“But he was hired at some kind of ‘pit fight’, by someone who thought I was a danger to them,” I say.
“So of course you want to go out and look for one,” Marcus replies.
“And I thought that, as someone with an interest in fighters and the games, you might know where I could find one,” I say.
Marcus hesitates, but then nods. “I do,” he admits. “Give me a minute to change out of my toga and into some more normal clothes.”
“You don’t have to come with me,” I say.
“Of course I do,” he replies. “If you’re going somewhere like that, then you need me by your side. Besides, if someone tried to hurt you, then I want to help you to catch them.”
He hurries deeper into his rooms, and I resist the urge to watch as he changes into clothes more suited to going to look for a fight.
He comes out wearing a grey tunic, belted at the waist, with a short sword at his hip.
He has a cloak, the cowl of which he pulls up over his features.
I do the same with my own cloak and we head out, Marcus leading the way into the city.
We aren’t heading for the poorest parts of Aetheria, which catches me by surprise, but instead to a district given over to entertainments for the nobles and the wealthier merchants.
It’s a place of discrete dining establishments and theaters, performances by the most notable musicians and delicate philosophical debates.
And, apparently, pit fights.
Marcus pauses to have a whispered conversation with a young man loitering by the side of the street.
I wouldn’t have picked him out as anything special, but Marcus seems to recognize something about him, and slips him a couple of coins.
He taps a piece of graffiti behind the young man’s head, a stylized rendition of the arena.
“The bathhouse behind the temple,” the young man says. “You’d better hurry, though, because the fights have already started.”
“There are fights in a bathhouse?” I ask Marcus, as we hurry away.
“In all kinds of places. They spring up and then disappear again, since they aren’t strictly legal. The more violent they are, the harder they are to locate. To find them, you have to know the right people, or spot the right signs.”
“Like the graffiti,” I guess.
"Exactly." Marcus sighs. "One of the reasons I want to work to reopen the Colosseum is because closing it hasn't stopped the fighting.
It's just driven it underground. People are still hurting one another for the entertainment of the masses, but they aren't protected by healers, aren't trained by experts. "
“And the city doesn’t get to tax the revenue from them?” I guess.
“And that,” Marcus admits. “You must admit, the city needs the money to help its citizens at this point.”
I’m not sure what to think as he leads me behind the great temple of Aetheria, built in white marble and decorated with stones that pulse with magic. We head around to a building that’s built like a much smaller mirror to it, with elegant marble columns and statues of nymphs carved in front of it.
We head inside, and Marcus pauses to pay a couple of heavyset guards on the door.
I guess they aren't usual for a bathhouse, suggesting that we're in the right place for the fights.
As we go inside, I can hear the all-too-familiar sound of a crowd baying for blood, roaring every time a blow is struck or a fighter narrowly avoids disaster.
It's a sound that carries far too many memories with it, of standing over the bodies of fallen foes, of wounds and pain and suffering.
“Are you all right, Lyra?” Marcus asks me.
“I’m fine,” I say.
He touches my face gently, turning me so I must look him in the eye. “You don’t have to pretend with me.”
I sigh. “It’s just bringing back bad memories, but I need to do this.”
“Well, I’ll be here if you need me,” Marcus says.
I’m grateful for his presence, even if I originally intended to come here alone.
It’s not just that he clearly knows his way around the fights better than I do; it’s that there’s something comforting about him being there, something about him that makes me just want to be around him.
Of course, in other ways, that’s an uncomfortable feeling, because I can’t deny that he’s an attractive man, and I’m not sure if I want to do anything about that.
Alaric made it clear that he wasn’t coming with me. Does that mean we’re done? After all the arguments between us in the past year, a part of me feels relief at that thought, but another part doesn’t know what to think.
Marcus and I go deeper into the bathhouse, following the sounds of violence.
There’s a crowd standing around a pool that has somehow been emptied for the occasion, serving as a pit in which people can fight.
I see a woman being carried out, bloodied and unconscious, while another leaps up out of the pit, into the arms of a man who might be a trainer, a lover, or both.
People are rushing to the spots where a couple of bookmakers stand, taking bets.
“How much money do you think passes through here?” Marcus asks me.
I frown. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“I have,” he says. “And it’s enough that the taxes could pay for rebuilding work in the slums, or enough extra guards that people wouldn’t need to buy their own protection from gangs.”
Those both sound like good things, but I’m not sure if this is the moment to try to sell me on his idea of a reformed games.
“How do we find the people who sent killers after me?” I ask.
“I’ll ask around,” Marcus says. He puts an arm around me briefly. “But it might be better if I do it alone. If anyone is linked to an attempt to attack you, they’ll hardly talk with you right there in front of them.”
“And they’ll talk to you?” I counter.
“I can be persuasive.” I can’t deny that. “Will you be safe if I leave you here briefly?”
“I’m not some delicate, fainting noblewoman,” I point out.
“I would never suggest that you were. But this is still a dangerous place, and you don’t know the way things work here.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assure him. “I’ll watch the fights and look for signs of anything suspicious.”
Marcus nods, still looking worried for me, but he’s right: I can’t go with him for this part. He can find out more without me than with me. So I let him go and push my way through the crowd as two more fighters make their way to the empty space of one of the baths.
“Fighting for your pleasure, we have Teak!” an announcer calls out, and a man who looks like he’s been hewn out of the wood of his name jumps down into the makeshift fighting pit.
He’s stripped to the waist, with corded muscles, and even as I watch, his skin ripples, seeming to cover over with bark.
Apparently, his magical talent is for shifting his flesh to wood.
“And facing him, Kai!”
The young man who jumps down into the pit is slightly built compared to his opponent, leanly muscled and probably fast, but it doesn’t look like a fair fight. The two of them start to circle one another.
The younger man, Kai, hits and moves, and I see the flicker of magic covering his hands as they slam into Teak, hard enough to send splinters of wood flying.
He jabs and moves, ducking under the slow swing of a return punch that’s probably hard enough to take his head from his shoulders.
Kai kicks Teak’s knee, dodges aside from another punch, then hits him again.
I'm impressed by his speed and by his surprising toughness. Even when Teak hits him, he seems to shift his magic just in time to block the worst of the blow. Kai spins away, slamming another kick into Teak's midsection, and keeps moving.
“Kai, Kai, Kai!”
He seems to have the crowd on his side, combining his skills with the charisma to pull in attention. He reminds me of some of the more popular gladiators from the Colosseum, maybe even Alaric.
I can recognize the appeal of the spectacle, the way the fight is getting the blood of the crowd flowing.
Even I can feel the excitement of it as Kai dodges and strikes, avoiding the worst of his opponent’s blows even as he counterattacks.
I find myself willing him to succeed, hoping he’ll be able to bring an end to the fight soon.
He dodges another punch, slamming a combination into Teak's head, finishing with a blow that seems to blur the air around it with the magic he uses. The other fighter topples, blood spraying as his nose breaks, unconsciousness claiming him.
"Kai! Kai! Kai!" the crowd continues to chant, as Kai raises his hands in victory.
He jumps from the fighting pit, and people crowd towards him.
The movement of the crowd carries me into his path, like a leaf on the wind, and suddenly, I find myself face to face with him.
It doesn't matter that I have the hood of my cloak up, because head on, he can still see my face.
He stands there staring at me, as if he can't quite believe what he's seeing.
“You’re Lyra,” he says.
I start to shake my head, but his hand flashes out, faster than even I can block, pulling back the hood of my cloak.
"Lyra Thornwind. I saw you fight so many times when I was a servant in the Colosseum. Did you come to see me fight?"
I shake my head. “I came because someone here sent people to try to hurt me.”
Kai looks shocked by that, but quickly keeps going. “I’m going to fight in the colosseum one day, the way you did.”
He sounds so young, so na?ve.
“It’s not even guaranteed that the fights will start again,” I say.
"Of course they will," Kai replies. "The Senate can't deny that it's what the people want. We'll fight wherever we have to. Why not have the fights in the arena?"
"Because it's dangerous," I counter. "You said you were a servant in the Colosseum. You must have seen what it was like, seen the death, the violence, the way people were forced to risk their lives and serve the whims of the nobles."
“What I saw was the glory,” Kai says. “And these fights would be different. I’m not being forced to do anything. I want to fight.”
I can see I'm not going to persuade him. This is a young man who clearly likes fighting and who can't see the dangers. Whatever respect he has for me isn't enough to make him listen when I tell him how dangerous the Colosseum can be.
Suddenly, I don't want to be here anymore. Especially not when the crowd is starting to gather around me, moving closer in an echo of the way people wanted to be near me and touch me during the processions to the Colosseum.
Marcus is there then, putting a protective arm around me and pulling the hood of my cloak back up. When people get too close, a crackle of lightning flickers out from him, keeping them back.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you back to the palace and your rooms. I’ll tell you what little I’ve found, but we can’t stay here.”