The Gladiator, Chapter 4
#4 of The Gladiator
Who chants? Tribals. Who works? Laborers. Who writes? The rich. Who lives? None of them.
Yerom Loxyd
A thin fog of malaise had descended over the feeding grounds sometime after the training center's construction. It was as if the courtyard rested upon a dragon burial ground, or some other tomb, and the misery of ancient days was straining upward to grasp at the heels of surface dwellers. The sun shone a bit darker into the circle and dust churned amid the carts and butcher stands in a smoky haze. People dulled under the grey sun. Their eyelids lowered, either from fatigue or inherited sorrow.
No anger between the slaves and slavemasters, just a collective unease. Rolas suspected that any similar location would have this effect, on both dragons and humans. After all, how much wrong can one place tolerate? Hours, days in the company of bondage and even the most bigoted slaver feels something sacred start to slip away from his person, though the source of this feeling he will never identify. Conformists note only the screams of all they wish but do not want to say, under pain of death, and attribute it to a general feeling of wrongness.
The courtyard was silent but for sounds of chewing, or money changing hands, or the lively footsteps of a new arrival who would promptly notice that this was a place of death.
"I will feed you like a pet, like a dog," the courtyard told Rolas, "because that's what you are."
He felt like shit.
He looked around and thought, welcome to Faligar.
"Hey Kayo," Das'li said, as the pair approached his stand, "I see you've brought a friend."
"Yeah, meet Rolashestul."
Das'li worked in the barracks as a butcher and meat salesman. He spent a lot of time in the courtyard, selling, and a lot of time in the bar, drinking, and struck Kayo as someone who should not use the word friend.
He resembled a walking corpse, she thought, with his sunken face and disheveled, grassy hair. It was tough to tell where his black eyes ended and his face began.
"Nice to meet you," the dragon said. He wondered if the feeding grounds had turned Das'li into such a disgusting sight, or if ghouls like him flocked to this sort of home naturally.
"Ah. He speaks, too. So what'll it be?"
Kayo bought some meat for Rolas and the usual stick of jerky for herself. The dragon opted to eat one chunk there and save the rest for home, or whatever he could call the girl's apartment.
They ate. Kayo found the jerky tough and unappetizing, and the grimace on Rolas' muzzle suggested that his meal tasted much the same. It must have been the courtyard, she figured, as no matter how low-grade a person Das'li managed to become his goods had never followed suit.
So they sat in silence and dined on ash. The few other trainers and dragons in the courtyard all choked down the same cuts of meat, each with hollow stares and clouded eyes.
The pair walked back to Darion's office and told him the good news. They had toured the gladiatorial facility, Kayo talking and Rolas nodding his head with a sage-like calm. There was nothing pretty about the place for a dragon, so she took his composure to mean approval.
"I don't love the place," she told him, "but they're all the same, trust me. It's a dirty business."
"I figured. So what now?"
"We relax for awhile. If Darion sees that you're actually open to competing, he can't touch us, and then we can slack off a bit - sound good?"
He agreed. But good? No such thing.
The next day heat swept over the city walls. A deadly heat - people stepped out into it and stood paralyzed on the sand like buildings. Then they retreated to the shade.
Faligar shut down as it always did during a heatwave. No one worked and no one went outside, and all day the clay walls of their houses baked around the vacant streets.
Kayo lifted her head from the bedmat and squinted. A giant fireball sun loomed in the window. "It's noon," she said. "My turn."
Rolas rose before her and padded to the door, his claws clicking on the uneven floor.
"Wait - "
"No, I'll get it. The heat doesn't bother me as much."
She lifted an arm in brief protest and collapsed back down onto the mat. The dragon looked over his shoulder and studied her with one eye. A tanned heap of flesh sprawled out on the bedmat, the covers pushed aside, a black shroud of hair swept over her face.
Rolas snaked down the stairwell and into the lobby. The front doors were shut along with the windows and sunlight crept into the room through thin cracks in the wood. Haggard forms lay slouched in the normally unoccupied chairs lining the front wall. Dust swirled in the dim light above the blue floor tiles.
"Back are you?" Qurial said to the dragon. He sat behind the front counter with his elbows resting on the stone. The records room behind him was dark and clammy and shelves of yellowed paper were stacked in the doorway.
Rolas approached the counter and sat on his haunches so that he could peek over the counter ledge.
Qurial chuckled. "She making you fetch it now? Bet this heat's got her buried. Girl's not from here you know." He walked around the counter and set a pail of water down on the floor. "Here," he said, and looped back around to his seat behind the counter.
"Where's she from?"
"South, somewhere. Ask her yourself. But they don't have heat waves like this down south. Desert's purer down there."
"Purer?"
He tapped his fingers on the counter. "Heat like this ain't the sun's doing. There's heated dust out there, clouds of the stuff. It'll choke a man in his sleep, I've seen it happen. The desert gets angry sometimes, you see? The sand, the rocks, they hate us - " He pointed to the dragon. " - they hate you, too. Don't forget that.
"We're never safe. The desert gave us this little space of time to live in and it can take it away. It's only a matter of time."
"Really now," the dragon said.
"Look, I'm from Marinia. That means my family had to wade through two deserts to get here. Two deserts, okay? I've seen some shit. Not all stories are stories, whether you like it or not."
Rolas was reluctant to upset his new landlord after only two days, so he hid his amusement and listened. "So why does the desert hate us?"
Qurial donned a bitter smile. "It's the wastes. The ruins." He leaned closer to the dragon. "Necromancers. Sorcerers. Depraved assholes spinning up shit they shouldn't, you understand? We fucked things up and this is our punishment. Nothing but bad magic, this heat. Bad magic."
"I see," Rolas said.
Qurial chuckled at this. "You don't. But you will."
"Yeah, maybe." The dragon gripped the metal handle in his teeth and trotted back upstairs with the pail swinging under his jaws.
He set the pail down beside Kayo and she rolled to her side at the sound of sloshing water. "Thanks," she said.
She poured water into two wooden cups and left the rest of the pail to Rolas. He plunged his snout into it and drank. Then they sat and waited. The next pail would come in three hours.
"Kayo."
"Yeah?"
"Are there any sorcerers in Faligar?"
"You mean seers? Or - "
"No, the real deal. Magicians. Hoods. Back in Cozal it was all I ever heard about. They say you have mages working in the cities, running military production, purifying water. That sort of thing."
She looked to him, his draconic eyes a strange comfort in the fading heat. "Yeah, but farther south, nowhere near here."
"That where you're from?"
"Yeah. How'd you guess?"
"You look a little different. Also, Qurial told me."
"Oh. Yeah, we were migrants. People down south don't fear magic like we do up here - what about in Cozalbaria? Same horror stories?"
"More or less," Rolas said. "We tend to say that magic is best left to Marinians and Marinians are best left to the wastes."
"You buy that?"
"No."
"Okay."
"Ever been to Marinia?"
"No, but my father used to tell me about it. He said it's beautiful."
He snorted. "I suppose that's one view. How's the south?"
"Cooler. More trees. Far enough south you'll find mountains, but I've never seen them."
"Is it anything like the coast?"
"Sort of. Different culture, different climate."
"And none of my kind."
Kayo paused at this. "I wouldn't be so sure."
"What do you mean?"
"Far, very far away from here. Places you can't even imagine. Hell, places I can't even imagine. Green everywhere, streams you can drink from. My father told me dragons live there, up in the mountains."
"So why did you migrate?"
"I don't know. Sickness. Money."
"Why don't you go back?"
"Money."
Rolas looked out the window. Clear, black sky. Candles burning on the rooftops. "I've heard great things about the east. No war. No slavery. Dragons and humans living in peace." He looked back at Kayo, tracing the curves of her smaller body with his eyes. Her tan skin glistened with sweat. "Probably just stories, though."
Kayo was dimly aware of the dragon's gaze. "I doubt we'd survive the trip," she said.
"And we can't go west."
"No, we can't. Nothing but ash."
"Well. We're just flat fucked then, aren't we?"
He seemed to smile. She smiled too.
"Yeah. I guess we are."