Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones Read online

  There was a scream below, and the three girls in the box looked down. The goblin had managed to slash one woman’s left arm, leaving a deep wound running nearly the length of her upper arm. The woman grimly held onto her spear with both hands even though the blood was running down her forearm and dripping onto the sand, but her next pathetic attempt at thrusting the spear at the goblin revealed that she’d been badly hurt.

  “She poisoned her husband,” Tertius said unexpectedly.

  “What?”

  “That woman.” He pointed down at the woman who’d just been wounded. “She’s a Lucanian who poisoned her husband. The other one is an adulteress who went to a witch to kill her unborn child after she fell pregnant. I don’t know where she’s from, but she looks Epran. They’re not warriors or slaves. They’re damnatii.”

  “Really?” Falconilla was staring at her brother in amazement. “How do you know that?”

  “I sent Marsupor to talk with one of the trainers at the stable. It’s rather stupid to wager on combats if you know nothing of the combatants involved, don’t you think?” He picked up a wooden tablet from his lap and waved it dismissively. “The libellis bills this travesty before us as a battle to the death between two Cynothii warrior women and a goblin blademaster of the savage western tribes. But I very much doubt either of those women has ever held a spear or even been north of Amorr. So I bet on the goblin.”

  “Do you always do that? Have your slave ask around the stables?” Severa attempted to sound curious rather than terrified.

  “I wish I dared.” Tertius sighed ruefully. “No, only when there is cause to think something’s amiss. Such as, for example, the idea that there are any Cynothii captives of either sex to be had. If you recall, the Cynothii defeated Legio XIV a few months ago, so I imagine it is rather more likely there are Amorrans fighting for the amusement of the crowds in Cynothicum than any of their warrior women are fighting here for us.”

  “To say nothing of the fact that their women are no more inclined to take to the battlefield than our own,” added their father, shaking his smoothly shaven head in disapproval. “They may be rebels and provincials, but they’re hardly barbarians.”

  An air of anticipation swept over the crowd, and her father returned his attention to the sands. The two women appeared to have finally understood the need to coordinate their attacks. The taller woman, the adulteress, took a more aggressive stance and was calling out instructions to the wounded poisoner as she circled to her right and attempted to drive the goblin toward the spear of the other woman with a series of quick, conservative jabs.

  The goblin also seemed to realize its danger, and it glanced back and forth between the two women, as if trying to decide which one it should attack first.

  It decided quickly and bared its stained, triangular teeth. It leaped toward the wounded woman and with its free hand slapped away her feeble attempt to thrust her spear at its face.

  She screamed and stumbled backward, dropping the spear and covering her face with her hands.

  The crowd roared, and the goblin pounced. But it reached for the spear instead of stabbing the defenseless woman. It was seemingly unaware of the second woman rushing toward it from behind, her pretty face a mask of desperate determination.

  Severa heard Tertius groan. Even she could see there was no way the goblin could pick up the spear and turn around before the charging woman plunged her spear into it. But it didn’t try. Whether it heard the sound of footsteps on the sand or its move toward the spear was never more than a feint, no one would ever know. Regardless, the goblin stopped, twisted its upper body, and hurled the dagger right into the woman’s face with all of the force in its long, wiry arm.

  A gasp filled the arena. The shock of being struck by the knife sent the woman staggering off-balance to her right, and she dropped her own spear and instinctively raised her hands to her face. The goblin’s dagger fell harmlessly to the ground beside her.

  The crowd roared, a wordless cry of fear and anticipation, until it realized that the woman had been struck by only the hard wooden handle and not the blade.

  But even if the blow wasn’t serious, it gave the goblin enough time to pick up the first spear, raise it overhead, and plunge it once, twice, three times into the chest, throat, and abdomen of the disarmed and screaming murderess. The woman’s screams subsided into the chokes and coughs of the mortally wounded, and the goblin pulled the spear from her body and turned to stalk the remaining woman.

  Her right cheek was red from where the handle had hit her, but she was otherwise unharmed. She bent to retrieve her spear. But the other woman’s fall had clearly sapped her courage, and her steps became tentative, and she was forced onto the defensive.

  With every thrust and jab of the goblin’s bloody spear, the woman’s determination gradually transformed into wide-eyed terror. She was soon reduced to little more than parrying its attacks. It wasn’t long before droplets of the other woman’s blood from the spear’s head sprinkled her face like freckles.

  “I’d rather be executed,” Severa heard Caera say in a low voice.

  “What’s that?”

  “Look at that poor woman. It’s awful. If I ever did anything deserving of a death sentence, I’d rather they simply strangled me or threw me from the Rock than go through that kind of hell. I don’t care what she did—look at her. No one should ever be that terrified!”

  As if to emphasize her words, the goblin let out a ghastly, inhuman shriek, and the woman lost control of her bladder. The goblin sprang upon her, first beating her spear aside with its own and then releasing it in order to grasp her throat with both its dextrous, long-fingered hands. It squeezed with all of its wiry strength, snarling and snapping at her purpling face as if it was some sort of giant, green hairless cat.

  The woman, unable to pull its hands from her throat, gave up and cast desperately about for the knife, which was near her right side. Her fingers scrabbled blindly over the sand. At last she came across it.

  But it was already too late. Before her fingers could curl around the handle, they suddenly straightened and went rigid, and she began to convulse in her dying straits. Finally, her hands relaxed, lifeless, as her spirit left her abused body behind, off to face its own judgment.

  Tertius rose to his feet and raised a fist in triumph, but the crowd’s reaction to the goblin’s victory was less enthusiastic. Perhaps many of them had bet heavily upon the women. Perhaps they simply found the sight of two human women slain by a goblin displeasing. By whatever cause, its mood abruptly became ugly.

  The crowd jeered as a pair of men wearing the colors of the Green stable, armed with clubs and whips, walked out to escort the victor back into the bowels of the arena. The goblin was no sooner divested of its crude weaponry than six slaves ran out—two pairs to drag the dead women’s bodies from the floor of the arena, and the remaining pair to follow them with rakes and eliminate the furrows in the sand left by the bodies.

  The musicians struck up a jaunty tune, and a shaven dwarf walked out and began juggling small skulls to pass the time until the next match.

  Caera looked at Severa with tears in her eyes. “It’s so cruel. How can you stand it?”

  “Everyone dies sooner or later.” Falconilla was in high spirits. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed. She, at least, was thoroughly enjoying herself. “What difference does it make if a woman gets strangled in the prison cells or in the arena? It’s the same either way.”

  Severa stared at a bloody patch of sand. “I wonder what happened to the witch.”

  “What witch?” Falconilla asked.

  “The one the adulteress went to to get rid of her baby. What happened to her?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Who cares? Bring her here and we’ll find out what happens to her.”

  Severa looked away. As was often the case on her visits to the games, she found herself more interested in the varied reactions of the people around her to the violence than in the violence its
elf. The combat was exciting, to be sure, and it stirred her blood. But there was also an element of pagan, even ritual, brutality to the spectacle that she found unsettling. It felt almost as if they had witnessed a human sacrifice, although one to the greedy hunger of the crowd instead of a god. She did not find it hard to understand why more gentle souls, like Caera, had no taste for it.

  “Do you want to leave?” she asked her friend. “I want to see Clusius fight, but then after that I’ll take you home. We don’t need to stay all day if you don’t want to.”

  Caera pursed her lips, then nodded. “When does Clusius fight?”

  “Tertius, who is Clusius fighting today, and when will it come?”

  Her brother consulted the libellus. “The dimachaerus Silicus Clusius of the Blues is scheduled for the fourth bout. He’s facing Caladas the Thraex, of the Reds. It should be a decent match. They’re both unbeaten. Clusius has seven wins and two draws, and Caladas has nine wins and three draws. Two blades are flashy, and Clusius certainly knows how to use them, but I like Caladas here.” The look he gave Severa’s friend was not without compassion. “Caera, there’s only one more match involving a damnatius today, and it’s after the Clusius match, so it’s quite possible you needn’t fear seeing anyone else killed before you go.”

  Caera smiled. “What odds will you give me on Clusius, Tertius?”

  “What is your fascination with him, little sister? I thought it was Caladas who all the young widows are panting for.”

  “I’m not a widow, am I? Anyhow, it’s none of your business. What odds will you give?”

  Tertius frowned and looked up at the makeshift shade that protected them from the cloudless blue sky. “Two to one, so long as you keep it under a thousand sesterces.”

  As if she had a thousand sesterces, Severa thought, annoyed. Of the four of them old enough to count, Tertius was the only one who ever had any money of his own. “Fifty, but you have to give me three to one.” She didn’t actually have the money, but she knew her mother would give it to her in the unlikely event that she lost.

  “Fifty at three to one it is.” Tertius took up the bronze stylus attached to the libellus and made a note in the wax covering it. “Falconilla, Caera, you are both witnesses.”

  None of them was particularly interested in the next bout, which was a venatio featuring five wolves being set against a bear. The venator in charge of the bout had the devil’s own time getting the wolves to pay more attention to the bear than to his own assistants, and not until the bear had raked its claws across the face of one curious wolf did they show any interest in it. The crowd was openly hissing its contempt by the time the small pack managed to bring the half-starved bear down. The venator himself finally had to put the wounded beast out of its misery, as well as one of the wolves with a broken shoulder.

  The next event went over rather better, as it was a comedic hunt in which a dwarf and a goblin, both dressed in orc-style armor, were mounted on large pigs, given lances, and set to hunting hundreds of rabbits that were carried into the arena in ten large cages then released on the sands.

  “Ser Borgulus the Bunnyslayer versus Ser Snotshafter Rabbitsbane,” read Tertius, smiling and shaking his head. “‘The winning knight shall be he who spears the most rabbits in the time of one glass. He and his stablemates shall dine on rabbit stew tonight. The loser shall face a savage warboar in a subsequent match.’ I suppose that should suffice to give the buggers incentive.”

  Laughter echoed off the stone seats of the arena. The crowd, so recently displeased, appeared to have forgiven the master of games for the previous debacle. Especially since the pigs, lashed by the venator’s assistants, squealed and dashed madly into the mass of rabbits. The rodents scattered in what looked, from Severa’s perspective, like a furry explosion, dashing in literally every direction.

  The goblin, which she presumed was the one designated Rabbitsbane, appeared to have a more instinctive grasp of riding, as it was leaning to its right and attempting to spear the rabbits as it rode through the scurrying mass of them. It actually managed to impale one on its first pass, although the pig it rode was even more successful, as the mottled brute left three trampled behind it in its porcine wake.

  “Ten on the goblin, ten on the goblin!” cried Falconilla, leaping out of her chair.

  “Done!” called Regulus over his shoulder.

  On the other side of their father, Tertius was shaking his head and laughing, though he didn’t seem taken by the absurd spectacle before them so much as by the excitement of the others.

  Ser Borgulus the Bunnyslayer, meanwhile, was having trouble merely staying upright on the back of his black mount, despite the ropes that bound him to the rude saddle. The dwarf fought to keep his balance, nearly dropping his lance, and failed to make even one attempt to spear a rabbit on his pig’s first wild charge, although one was crushed to red ruin underneath the cloven hooves of the beast. However, as the pig calmed down from its whip-inspired frenzy, the dwarf managed to get it under control and begin attempting to live up to his false name.

  While the goblin was riding its pig as if it were a real war boar and attacking the rabbits one at a time in succession like a lancer, the dwarf simply aimed his mount directly at the largest gatherings of the little creatures and tried to trample them. He even reversed his grip on the spear and held it just above the spearhead, using the long shaft as a club that sent rabbits flying as he rode past. Soon he had equaled, then surpassed, the goblin’s total. The crowd shouted out the current count each time another rabbit fell to one of the hunters or its mount.

  “No! No! No!” shouted Falconilla, stricken at the sight of the dwarf’s unexpected rabbit-killing prowess. The anguish in her voice made even Caera laugh out loud, as everyone in the Severan box, as well as the rest of the arena, had risen to their feet and were chanting the body count with every rabbit speared, swatted, or trampled. “It doesn’t count! It doesn’t count! Look, that one got up and ran away after he whacked it!”

  The goblin, seeing the dwarf’s tactic was more effective, tried to imitate it, but soon discovered that its long, slender arms were not as strong as the dwarf’s much thicker limbs, and were therefore too weak to deliver a sufficiently deadly blow with the butt end of the lance. Even when it managed to strike a rabbit cleanly, the force only sent the animal tumbling across the sand before it regained its feet and hopped away unharmed. After a few such failed attempts, the Rabbitsbane switched back to using its lance properly, but now it had no hope of regaining its earlier lead.

  The dwarf had now truly mastered his weapon, and in addition to swinging at the rabbits, he was also crushing them with savage, downward thrusts, as if angrily sounding the depth of a river. By the time the master of games held up his hand and caused the trumpeters to blow the call for the hunt’s end, the count was thirty-five to eighteen in favor of Ser Borgulus, who in the eyes of the crowd had truly merited the name of Bunnyslayer.

  The dwarf cast his lance aside and slumped in his ersatz saddle as the crowd rejoiced in his triumph. The goblin looked for a moment as if it was going to charge the venator’s assistants as they approached it, whips in hand. But when one of them aimed a large crossbow at its chest, the greenskin relented and followed the dwarf’s example. But as the dwarf exited through the gate that led to the Green stables staging area, he raised one meaty fist in triumphant salute to the crowd, which went wild in response.

  “Borgulus, Borgulus, ave Borgulus,” thundered the chant, punctuated with rollicking laughter. The master of games took a theatrical bow as a small army of slaves ran out, some of them with leashed dogs, to collect the dead rabbits and chase the living ones back into cages that were being wheeled back out upon the arena floor.

  Falconilla, her face a portrait in bitterness, folded her arms and complained that she’d seen at least three rabbits that shouldn’t have counted for the dwarf’s total, until Tertius pointed out that even without the three, she would still owe him the ten sesterces. Unsurp
risingly, it turned out that Falconilla didn’t have so much as a single coin of any type on her person, so it was agreed that the debt would be collected later. Severa had absolutely no doubt that her friend would manage to forget about it unless Tertius elected to press her on it.

  Finally, when the slaves finished their work and the sands were once more free of debris, the moment for which she’d been waiting arrived. The summa rudis entered, flanked by his two assistants, after which the master of the games announced the two combatants. The crowd replied with thunderous cheers.

  Severa held her breath as Silicus Clusius stalked out into the center of the arena like a young lion, bearing his daggers as if he were a demigod and they were lightning bolts. His smooth, muscular arms were unscarred, testifying to his courage as well as his skill. And when he turned to salute the crowd in the direction she was sitting, her heart skipped a beat. For there, wrapped around his upraised right wrist, was the strip of red she had been hoping to see, the strip of red silk that she’d torn from one of her gowns three nights ago and sent him as a token of her love.

  Severa stared at the beautiful gladiator in silence as the crowd roared its affection for him. They loved him even though they knew nothing of him. How little they knew his heart! She, and she alone, knew of the sweet lover inside the fearless killer. She alone had read the gentle poetry in which he spilled out the unspoken longings of his secret heart to her. She sighed, her eyes drinking in the perfection of his warrior’s body, her hands itching to caress the powerful expanse of his chest.

  She could have stared at him forever, but the strange sensation that someone was watching her gradually worked its way into her consciousness. Then she started. Someone was staring at her, it was her father. His dark, penetrating eyes seemed to bore their way inside her, making her feel as if he could read the treacherous intentions that the sight of that silk token had now burned into her soul. She felt like the mouse ensorcelled by the cobra, and she waited for the fatal strike, for the deadly words that would expose her in front of everyone.