Chapter 2
Two weeks is long enough.
Long enough to learn the rhythms. The bells that mark the shifts, the feeding times that come at irregular intervals because the guards can't be bothered with consistency, the fight schedules that follow a pattern only if you watch closely enough to catch it.
Zazyrus watches. He has nothing else to do in this cage except watch and catalog and remember, and he is very, very good at remembering.
The first bell rings at dawn. Shift change.
The night guards are lazier than the day guards but more predictable.
They patrol in pairs, always the same route, always the same pace, and they talk too loudly about things that don't matter.
The day guards are more varied. Some are cruel for sport, the ones who rattle cage bars with their cudgels and spit at the fighters through the gaps.
Some are simply doing a job that happens to be distasteful, and those ones keep their heads down and their eyes forward and don't linger.
Zazyrus catalogs all of them. Faces. Names, when he can catch them. Habits. Weaknesses. Which ones favor their left side. Which ones drink on shift. Which ones carry keys and which ones don't.
He doesn't speak. He has nothing to say to any of them.
The cage they've put him in is the largest in the deep kennels, which tells him they know what he is and what he's capable of and have made the minimal accommodations necessary to keep him contained.
The chains are heavy, blackened iron bolted to the back wall, long enough that he can reach the center of the cage but not the door.
The manacles bite into his wrists and the skin beneath them is raw and weeping and infected, probably, though he can't see well enough in the dim light to be sure. It doesn't matter. He's had worse.
He's had worse than all of this. The cage and the chains and the cold stone and the stinking straw and the food they shove through the slot in the bars, half-rotten, barely enough.
He's had worse owners. Worse fights. Worse nights in worse dark, and the fact that this is not the worst doesn't make it bearable, but it makes it survivable, and Zazyrus has built his entire existence around the distinction between those two things.
He doesn't know how old he is. He stopped counting a long time ago, when counting started to feel pointless.
Old enough to have scars layered over scars.
Old enough that the markings on his body, the ones he was born with, the dark patterns that trace his skin from his throat to his ankles, have stretched and shifted with growth and damage until some of them are barely recognizable.
Old enough to have been sold four times and escaped twice and caught both times and punished in ways that taught him escaping wasn't worth the aftermath.
He is done learning that lesson.
The rage is constant. It sits in his chest, hot and compressed, and it has been there so long that he can't remember what existed in that space before.
Maybe nothing. Maybe he was born with it, born angry, born with his fists clenched and his teeth bared and his first sound a snarl instead of a cry.
It doesn't matter. The rage is useful. The rage is the only thing they haven't managed to take from him, and he guards it the way other creatures guard hope or faith or love.
It is his. It burns. It keeps him alive.
***
He hates every filthy human he sees.
This is not an exaggeration and it is not a mood.
It is a settled, considered position arrived at through years of evidence.
Humans bought him. Humans chained him. Humans put him in rings and watched him bleed for their entertainment and then fed him scraps and called it generosity.
Humans looked at his horns and his claws and the markings on his skin and decided he was less than them, decided he was property, decided his pain was a spectacle and his body was a commodity and his rage was something to be provoked and then punished when it turned on them.
He killed the first handler in this pit on the second day.
The man had a stick with a sharpened end and he used it to prod Zazyrus through the bars, jabbing at his ribs, his thighs, the base of his horns, laughing when Zazyrus flinched.
When the cage opened for feeding, Zazyrus grabbed the stick, broke it, and drove the splintered end through the man's shoulder.
He would have aimed for the throat but the angle was wrong and the chains pulled him short.
The second handler died three days later. That one had been trying to muzzle him. Zazyrus broke the muzzle and then broke the man's neck and felt nothing about it except a brief, sharp satisfaction that faded before the body hit the ground.
They beat him for both. He took the beating in silence and cataloged the faces of every man who participated and added them to the list he keeps in his head, the long list, the one that grows every day and will keep growing until he finds a way to start crossing names off.
He killed three guards during his first week.
One who got too close. Two who thought numbers would protect them when they entered his cage to change the straw.
The numbers did not protect them. Zazyrus is faster than he looks and his claws are sharp and the space between "too close" and "close enough" is measured in the length of his arm plus the length of his chains, and most humans are not smart enough to do that math before it's too late.
After that, they stopped sending people into his cage.
Good.
***
The fight comes on a day indistinguishable from every other day, announced by the rattle of chains and the arrival of four guards with polearms who keep their distance and unlock his restraints from the far wall using a system of pulleys that Zazyrus has already studied and memorized.
They march him through the tunnels. The sound builds as they ascend: the dull roar of a crowd, muffled by stone, growing louder with each turn until it becomes a physical thing, a vibration in his chest, a pressure against his eardrums. He knows this sound.
He has heard it in every pit, every arena, every ring they've dragged him to since he was old enough to fight.
It is the sound of humans who have paid to watch him suffer, and he hates it with every part of himself.
The gate opens and the sand stretches out before him, bright after the darkness of the kennels, and the noise hits him full force.
Thousands of them. Packed into stone seats that rise in tiers above the arena floor, screaming, stamping, waving tokens and betting slips.
The air stinks of sweat and spilled wine and roasted meat and underneath it all the old, rust-brown smell of blood soaked into sand that never fully dries.
His opponent is already in the ring. Big, armored in natural plating, four arms, a heavy jaw built for crushing. Zazyrus doesn't know its name and doesn't care. It is between him and the gate. That's all that matters.
He lets the rage carry him.
Because rage is the only thing they haven't taken.
Not his dignity, which they stripped years ago.
Not his freedom, which was never his to begin with.
Not his name, which they mangle or ignore.
The rage is his. The rage fills his arms and his legs and his lungs and turns his vision sharp and narrow and cold, and when the bell sounds and his opponent charges, Zazyrus doesn't think. He moves.
The crowd screams. The sand churns beneath his feet.
He takes a hit to his ribs that cracks something, takes another across his shoulder that opens the skin in a long, burning line, and he doesn't slow down.
He gets inside the creature's guard and his claws find the gaps in the plating and he tears until the creature stops moving.
It's over in minutes.
He stands in the center of the arena with blood on his hands and blood in his mouth and the crowd roaring his number because they don't know his name and wouldn't use it if they did, and the rage doesn't fade.
It never fades. It just settles, banking down to embers, waiting for the next time it's needed.
The guards come with their polearms. He lets them shackle him because fighting now would be pointless.
He's bleeding from his ribs, his shoulder, a gash across his forehead, and the adrenaline is receding and the pain is filling in the spaces it leaves behind.
They drag him back through the tunnels, down the stairs, into the deep kennels, into his cage. The chains go back on. The door locks.
He lowers himself to the floor. The stone is cold against his bare back and the blood is warm and the contrast makes him shiver.
He closes his eyes and breathes through the pain, cataloging it the way he catalogs everything: ribs, cracked, left side.
Shoulder, deep laceration, needs closing.
Forehead, split, superficial. Assorted cuts, abrasions, nothing critical.
He'll survive. He always survives. That's the problem with being valuable: they keep you alive whether you want it or not.
***
He hears the guards before he sees them. Two sets of boots in the corridor, heavy, and between them a third set of footsteps, lighter, quicker, the stride of someone being hurried along.
Voices. A guard, gruff: "Just patch him up and get out. Don't take all night."
And another voice, quieter, steady: "I'll take as long as it takes. You can wait outside."
The guard laughs. "Your funeral, Lamb."
The cage door opens. The guards don't enter. They shove someone through and the door clangs shut and the lock turns and the footsteps retreat and Zazyrus opens his eyes.