In her ballad House in Flames, Tanis Two-fingers suggests that several members of the City Watch, initially dispatched to quell the barroom battle, acquitted themselves with such prowess and ferocity that they were recruited by a booker and went on to become the band known by the admittedly uninspired name The City Watch. Fire and Feathers, written by the renowned poet Jamidor, provides a detailed account of the pillow fight that raged between the fifth and sixth floors of the illfated inn sometime after midnight.
Is it true that Matrick Skulldrummer, the renegade king of Agria, was responsible for the fire? The song Drinking and Dragons proposes that after consuming a quantity of liquor sufficient to render a small giant impotent, he vomited onto a candle and set an entire table ablaze. Others maintain that Arcandius Moog was at fault. The wizard and celebrated alchemist allegedly summoned an elemental ifrit to resolve an argument about whether demons are hatched or naturally born—a futile gesture, since everyone knows they are hatched.
Regardless of its origin, the resulting fire brought about the end of an era. The Riot House was never rebuilt, and among its ashes there remains but a single testament to its decades of debauched existence: a small, innocuous tombstone to mark the grave of what (remarkably) was the night’s single unfortunate casualty, a man known simply as Pete.
The inscription reads as follows: WHEN WE SEEK TO RULE ONLY OURSELVES, WE ARE EACH OF US KINGS.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Maxithon
In retrospect, getting blind drunk the night before fighting for his life in the arena had been a terrible idea. Clay’s stomach gurgled like a cauldron left to boil. His head was pounding, and the not-so-distant thunder of thirty thousand people screaming beyond the shadowed corridor in which they stood wasn’t helping. Nor was the fact that the Maxithon, despite being fastened by four mighty chains against the river’s current, was floating. The effect was subtle, but unnerving, like standing in the hold of some colossal ship.
Clay decided to add vomit everywhere to the long list of things he’d rather not do today, right beneath get killed.
He could hear Dinantra addressing the crowd. Her voice, altered by magic to carry across the arena, was promising a show unlike any they had seen before. The gorgon hadn’t yet revealed what Clay and his bandmates would be fighting, only that it had been brought “with considerable danger and great expense” from the “darkest depths of the Heartwyld,” which could have meant pretty much anything.
“Maybe it’ll be an owlbear,” said Moog excitedly. The wizard seemed unfazed by the exploits of the previous night. “Can you imagine if it was? Be a shame to have to kill it, though. Terrible shame.”
Clay didn’t bother asserting that owlbears didn’t exist. They’d been through it before, many times. The wizard had once offered “proof” that such creatures were real by showing them a crude drawing in an old book of what looked to everyone but Moog like a bear with comically large eyes.
The gorgon had fallen silent. There was a brief fanfare, followed by a resounding cheer, and from that noise emerged a single word booming over and over again, ceaseless as the ocean surf, echoing like a deep drumbeat down the long stone corridor, so loud it shook the dust from the ceiling and set the ground trembling beneath their feet.
Saga, Saga, Saga.
Clay caught Moog and Matrick sharing an eager grin. These two idiots are actually enjoying this, he thought, while trying to suppress his own … well, he certainly wouldn’t have called it excitement, since excitement implied an optimism he didn’t particularly feel about what awaited them in the arena, but there was, admittedly, something undeniably thrilling about hearing their name on the lips of so many thousands of people.
Ganelon cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck from side to side.
Gabriel sat ahead of them in the tunnel, slouched against the wall with his head between his knees. When the crowd began chanting he stiffened, and his head rose like an animal catching wind of its prey. After a moment he stood, his shadow slender against the bright tunnel mouth.
“It’s time,” he said, and then, “Are we ready for this?”
“Ready,” Matrick confirmed.
“Yessir,” said Moog cheerily.
Ganelon grunted, “Sure.”
Clay sighed and shrugged. “Guess so.”
Gabe nodded, turned, and led the four of them up the gently sloping corridor. Clay listened in a hangover-induced daze as the crowd’s incessant chant grew louder, as the tunnel mouth grew wider, brighter.
And then Gabriel stepped into the sun’s partitioning light and the chant dissolved into a wordless, furious roar.
Like each of them, Saga’s frontman had been suitably equipped for the occasion. The armour provided for him was lacquered white and gold, impressive looking but too ornate for Clay’s taste. The sword he carried was a poor imitation of Vellichor, huge and heavy, hideously grey. Gabe’s hair had been washed and brushed out by one of the gorgon’s slaves, so that except for the slump of his shoulders and the haunted look in his eyes he somewhat resembled the “Golden Gabe” this crowd was expecting to see.
Moog went out after him. The wizard had been given proper robes to replace his soiled one-piece pyjamas. He bore nothing but the bag slung over his shoulder, and he waved with both hands at the circling thousands.
Matrick was next. The king wore a black leather vest studded with iron rivets, which he couldn’t quite fasten over the bulge of his stomach. The jewel-encrusted hilts of Roxy and Grace gleamed at his waist, and as he stepped into the arena some of the more patriotic Agrians in the stands began singing his name as well.
Clay grimaced. If Lilith doesn’t know yet that Matrick is alive, he thought, then she will very soon.
Ganelon walked out ahead of Clay. Dinantra had given the southerner back his axe, which she’d purchased from the Quarry along with Ganelon himself and had kept in her personal treasury these past nine years. Clay couldn’t help but stare at it as he followed along: twinned black blades swept like a wyvern’s wings down either side of the haft. Each wicked edge was traced by a filigree of druic script that pulsed blue-white only when the weapon was hefted by the warrior himself. Whenever he did so, the axe itself began whispering quietly, urgently, in a language even Moog didn’t recognize. If used by anyone else, the weapon was as deadly as any other razor-sharp length of metal, but in Ganelon’s hands it was a thing of awesome lethality. It was called Syrinx, and asking the stoic southerner how he came to possess such an artifact was as likely to garner an answer as asking a goat for directions to the nearest library.
Clay went out last, raising an arm and squinting against the sun’s punishing glare. He’d chosen a jerkin of boiled leather from the arena’s armoury that fit him surprisingly well. He had Blackheart strapped to his right arm, and he’d found a reasonably sharp sword that looked as though it might not snap the first time he hit something with it, so that was promising.
The five of them stalked to the wide-open centre of the Maxithon and stood there as wave after wave of deafening adulation washed over them.
This, Clay thought to himself, is why the bands of today don’t bother touring. This is the reason they avoid the Heartwyld. Why risk being ambushed by monsters when you can pick and choose which to fight? Why put yourself in danger of getting lost, or contracting the rot, when you can simply visit your local arena?
He turned a slow circle where he stood, eyes climbing ring after ring of seething multitudes. Uncountable screaming faces. Innumerable waving hands. Why kill in obscurity when you could do so here, and bask in the glory granted by thirty thousand adoring witnesses?
Dinantra was watching from the patron’s box on the lowest tier, which was backed by a tiled wall and shaded by a roof of fluttering silk awnings. The Duke of Endland sat in silence among her gaggle of courtiers, arms crossed and ears flattened against the autumnal sweep of his slicked-back hair. His eyes were fixed firmly on Gabriel, who in turn was staring across the sand-strewn expanse at the huge wrought-iron gate that stood opposite the corridor they’d emerged from a few minutes earlier.