Chapter 5
The summons comes at the late bell.
Not a knock this time. A guard, one of the newer ones whose name Lethe hasn't bothered to learn, standing in his doorway with his eyes fixed somewhere above Lethe's head because he can't quite look at him and say the words at the same time.
"Demos wants you."
Three words. That's all it takes. Three words and Lethe's body goes through the sequence it has memorized over six years: the cold drop in his stomach, the tightening of his throat, the brief and useless spike of adrenaline that has nowhere to go because there is nowhere to go.
No running. No hiding. No locked door between him and the man who owns him.
He sets down the bandage he was rolling. "Now?"
"Now."
Lethe stands. Smooths his shirt. Runs his thumb along the strap of his satchel where it hangs on the hook by his door, a gesture that is habit and not comfort because comfort doesn't exist in this sequence.
He follows the guard down the corridor and up the stairs and through the passage that leads to the pit lord's chambers, and his footsteps are even and his face is blank and inside his head he is already leaving.
He goes to the place he built years ago, the quiet room behind his eyes where none of this reaches.
It has no walls and no ceiling and no door.
It is simply absence. A space where he is not his body, where the things done to his body happen at a distance, muffled and removed, as though observed through thick glass.
He has perfected this over time. He can maintain it through almost anything.
Almost.
Demos's chambers are large by the standards of the pits, furnished with things stolen or extorted from merchants above: a heavy oak desk, a rug, a bed with actual linens.
The man himself is behind the desk when Lethe enters, pouring wine from a bottle that costs more than the food budget for the kennels.
He's thick through the middle, heavy-jawed, with small eyes that appraise everything in terms of what it can do for him or what it's worth.
He looks at Lethe the way he looks at the fighters: calculating the value, assessing the condition, checking for damage.
"There he is," Demos says. "My little lamb."
Lethe stands in the doorway and waits. There is no correct response to this.
Any words he offers will be wrong, either too much or too little, and Demos will use them as an excuse for whatever he was going to do anyway.
So Lethe waits, and Demos drinks, and the room is warm and close and smells of wine and sweat and the particular cologne that Demos wears that Lethe will smell in his nightmares until he dies.
"Come here."
Lethe goes.
There are things that happen in the quiet room behind his eyes and there are things that happen to his body, and the distance between the two is the only thing that keeps Lethe functional.
The distance is a skill. A survival mechanism.
A thing he taught himself at sixteen when the alternative was to feel everything and break, and Lethe decided, in a moment of clarity that he still draws from, that he would not break.
Not for this. Not for a man who looked at a child and saw something to use.
Demos is not gentle. He has never been gentle. Gentleness is not a quality he possesses or values or understands, and the sounds he makes and the words he says are things that Lethe files in the room behind his eyes and locks away and does not revisit.
When it's over, Demos pours more wine and tells Lethe to clean himself up. His tone is conversational. Satisfied. The tone of a man who has taken what he wanted and is pleased with the transaction.
Lethe gathers himself. He pulls his clothes back into place with hands that move on autopilot, muscle memory, the practiced efficiency of someone who has dressed himself after this enough times that his fingers know the sequence without input from his brain.
He walks to the door. His gait is wrong.
His body is informing him of damage in the dull, insistent language of pain, and he catalogs it the way he catalogs everything: bruising, deep, left hip.
Abrasion, inner thigh. Contusion, throat, bilateral. His wrists ache where they were held.
He makes it to the corridor before the shaking starts.
He doesn't stop walking. Shaking is manageable.
Shaking is just the body processing what the mind refused to hold.
He walks with his arms tight against his sides and his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed on the middle distance and he takes the long way back to his room, the route that avoids the main corridors, the one he knows by heart.
He passes no one. The late bell rang an hour ago. The pits are quiet.
His room. His door. His basin.
The water is cold. He strips his shirt and his pants and he stands in the chill air and he washes.
He uses the rough soap that Maren gave him, the one that smells of herbs and nothing at all like cologne, and he scrubs.
His arms. His chest. His throat, where the bruises are already darkening into shapes he'll have to cover tomorrow.
His thighs. His hips. Every place that was touched, he scrubs, and the soap stings on the raw places and he scrubs harder.
He scrubs until his skin is pink and burning and then he scrubs more, because the feeling of being clean is not the same as being clean and he can't reach the second one no matter how hard he tries.
The first time Demos summoned him, he scrubbed until he bled.
He's more careful now. More practiced. He knows the line between raw and damaged and he walks it with the precision of someone who can't afford to hurt himself badly enough to affect his work.
He stops. Grips the edge of the basin. Water drips from his elbows onto the stone floor.
His reflection stares up at him from the basin, fractured by the ripples. A thin face. Blue eyes too large for it. Brown hair plastered to his forehead. The bruises on his throat, purple already, spreading.
He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth.
He puts on a clean shirt. Buttons it to the throat. Lies down.
The ceiling is the same. The bells are the same. Nothing has changed. Lethe closes his eyes and lets the quiet room behind his eyes dissolve, slowly, carefully, because coming back is always harder than leaving and he has to do it in stages or the feelings hit all at once and he can't function.
He comes back. It hurts. He breathes through it.
Tomorrow there are creatures who need tending. Tomorrow his hands will need to be steady. Tomorrow he will walk into cages and talk about kittens and poultices and the weather above ground, and no one will know, and that is how it works. That is how it has always worked.
He sleeps. Eventually.
***
The next day is hard.
He moves through his rounds on autopilot, his body performing the tasks his hands know while the rest of him operates at a distance.
He's quieter than usual. The creatures notice, some of them, tilting their heads when he enters without his habitual stream of narration.
He stitches wounds and changes bandages and checks healing and his voice, when he uses it, is thinner than normal.
Functional. The warmth is there but buried deep, muffled by the layers he's wrapped around himself to get through the day.
Maren takes one look at him when he comes for breakfast and sets a bowl in front of him without a word.
No commentary about his weight. No banter.
She puts her hand on the back of his head for a moment, brief and firm, and then goes back to her work.
Lethe eats. The food tastes like nothing.
Soot climbs into his lap and he holds her against his chest and feels the vibration of her purring against his sternum and it helps, a little, the way small warm things help.
He saves Zazyrus for last.
He always does the deep cages at the end of his rounds, because the walk down gives him time to prepare and the walk back gives him time to decompress, but today there's another reason.
Today he's not sure he can maintain the voice.
The steadiness. The careful, narrated calm that he wraps around himself when he enters Zazyrus's cage.
Today the calm feels thin and the voice feels fragile and the bruises on his throat ache when he swallows.
He descends the stairs. The temperature drops. The lanterns flicker.
He unlocks the cage. Steps inside. Sets down his satchel.
Zazyrus is in his usual position, sitting against the back wall with his wrists resting on his drawn-up knees, and his dark eyes find Lethe the moment the door opens.
Lethe feels the weight of that gaze settle on him and he can't meet it, not today, so he focuses on his supplies and begins laying them out with hands that are steady because he won't allow them to be anything else.
"Morning," he says, and his voice is wrong. He can hear it. Thinner. Tighter. The word comes out clipped and small and he clears his throat and tries again. "I need to check your stitches. The ones on your ribs first."
He doesn't narrate. He doesn't talk about Soot or the weather or the poultice he's been experimenting with. He works in silence, which is not something he does, which is not something he has ever done in this cage, and the absence of his voice is loud.
Zazyrus is watching him. Lethe can feel it. The gaze is heavier today, more focused, tracking Lethe's movements with an attention that has shifted from its usual predatory patience into something sharper. Something assessing.
Lethe keeps his head down. He unwraps the bandage on Zazyrus's ribs, checks the stitches, applies fresh salve.
Moves to the shoulder. His movements are efficient and entirely without the tenderness that usually characterizes his work.
He's being clinical. He's being careful.
He is not going to fall apart in this cage.