As he stepped out of the shadows, sunlight greeted him in a flash, blinding him. Blinking—waiting for his eyes to adjust—he tried to orient himself. The Khan’s box, supposing it even existed, should be up there somewhere to his right, above the thick swath of red fabric that hung down to the sandy floor of the arena.
Haakon’s view, from the western entrance, was obscured by ranks of spectators. Not Onghwe’s Mongols—a snooty lot who didn’t like to mix with inferiors—but a rabble of Saracens, Slavs, Germans, and Franks. All of them had betrayed their races to curry favor with the rulers of the world—or, depending on how you looked at it, made necessary deals to prevent their people from being destroyed.
In spite of these obstructions, he could see the bulbous shape of a pavilion draped with heavy fabric, shielding not only the Khan from view, but also protecting the pale necks of the Khan’s concubines from the browning radiance of the sun. Satisfied that he knew where the Khan would be, he looked to his left, scanning the recently raked sand. The circle was large, maybe as much as twenty faemr from where he stood to the opposite gate, more than enough space for two men to fight.
Haakon’s brain quailed at the idea that this arena would host more than a pair of combatants. Surely they wouldn’t send more than one against him at a time, not even for the perverse pleasure of the dissolute Khan…
Focus. Taran, again. Fight as you were trained. The rest does not matter.
Haakon scanned the circle again. He was the only fighter in the arena. He glanced over his shoulder at the Mongols behind him. Why had they blocked him? Why was he alone? Were they going to loose animals on him? Why…
Center, he chided himself. Your mind will betray your hands. Stop thinking.
Haakon adjusted his grip on his Great Sword of War and decided he would walk cautiously to the center of the arena. He kept his eyes on the dark opening of the eastern portal—the place where his opponent would emerge—and let the rest of his body relax.
The spectators became a blur of color and motion. Their raucous noise became nothing more than a rhythmic pulse, like the sound of the waves against the rocky foundation of Tyrshammar’s citadel. His heart slowed too, seeking to be in concert with those waves, and his breathing followed.
Zzzu! Zzzu! Zzzu!
He listened more closely. The crowd was shouting a single word in unison. Blurred together, their cries washed across the arena in a buzzing sweep:
“Zug! Zug! Zug!”
The spectators roared now, a thrashing storm of sound. Haakon slowly realized they were calling out a name, working themselves into a howling, ravenous mob. They craved blood, demanded death, and worst of all, they wanted Zug!
Haakon felt like puking.
In the darkness of the eastern gate something moved—a shadow of black and red with broad, square shoulders and a large white mouth. Slowly, emerging into the bright sunlight with all the panache of a royal concubine making an entrance into a court somehow filled with rude bumpkins, the outlandish figure emerged into the open.
They were making that familiar noise—that buzzing sound as if a hundred bees were trapped inside his skull. His mouth was filled with the taste of metal and his jaw ached. He had vomited once already—a bilious stream of acidic arkhi that had spattered his suneate—and his stomach was so knotted he couldn’t puke again.
His suneate, strips of armor bound in parallel and tied to his legs, had been spattered many times over the last few years—mostly with blood. More recently, throwing up before the fight had become a common occurrence. It had become part of the ritual of preparation. Just before he put on the mask, his stomach would rebel. The one part of him that had any feeling left, only his stomach could still muster any outrage at what he had become. The rest was numb, too pickled by the arkhi to care.
He was dead. A ghost, held in this world by the iron of his cage, by the blood debt he had incurred. They summoned him, screaming and shouting the name he had given them—the name he had earned. Their cries—that insistent buzzing of honeybees—woke him from his stupor; he would animate the bag of flesh, would wrap it in the carapace of his shame, and would send it stumbling toward the light.
Only then would he be given the skull-maker.
The noise would stop when he collected a head. The skull-maker, so bright in the light, would go round and round until it wasn’t bright anymore. They would scream and shout for a while after he was done, but the pain in his head would start to lessen. They would let him go back into the darkness; they would let him crawl away, sloughing off his mask and his shell as he went. Until there was nothing left of the monster. Until there was only the dead man who would plunge into the bottomless pit offered by the arkhi. The ghost who would return to the void of senselessness.
He tottered, bumping into the wall of the tunnel. The skull-maker scraped along the ceiling, whining that it was cutting wood instead of bone. It was thirsty too.