“Until I tell you otherwise, follow only,” the master commanded him. “Do not try to use your Gift. You don’t know the spells to make the cuts straight and smooth along the entire face of the stone. I will teach them to you one day, but it’s too complex now.” They walked to the first stone. Yadeen drew his hand over the surface, bringing it away covered with marble dust. He rubbed his palms together and raised them to his face, smelling them. Arram, hesitant, did the same. The dust had its own dry scent, pleasing to his sensitive nostrils. It lingered as he sat cross-legged next to Yadeen.
“Relax and wait,” Yadeen told him. “Meditate. I will come to you when I need you.” He closed his eyes and was gone, his power flowing into the stone. Arram watched with his Gift as the master’s green-and-brown streaked fire rolled into the stone and spread, forming a thin sheet inside the marble face.
As Yadeen moved on and on, Arram withdrew. He knew he’d be seeing enough of the stone’s insides in time. Instead he let his Gift spread over the sands, cringing from the touch of old blood and bits of bone. But there were also faded pieces of flowers and ribbons that the arena keepers hadn’t cleaned up, bird droppings—he didn’t want to think about why birds might come to the arena grounds—and bits of fur. He roamed up to the seats, wondering why people came to such a sad place. Among the rows he found reasons: greed, lust, fury, excitement, all the feelings of people who forgot everything but the combats, including their struggling daily lives.
Yadeen was calling. Relieved, Arram let himself fly back to the master. He was no sooner returned to his body than he felt the gentle tug on his power. He let it mingle with Yadeen’s, until they formed a cord between them that was one magic. Then they returned to the marble. The stone traveled inner paths that showed as white-hot fire crystals. Turning, they fit themselves into walls that lined up as the magic demanded, perfectly.
Then Yadeen drew Arram out, away from the stone. In the sudden cold outside the marble, he released his student.
Arram cried out and covered his ears from an assault of noise: voices, things banging, the crunch of footwear on sand, wind in the tunnel, and…the mumble of elephants? He forced his eyes open against the torchlight. At the front of the tunnel, elephants peered in curiously. The closest one had its trunk extended. Many-petaled flowers were painted on its forehead. A very large black man, as dark as Yadeen, with scars and a shaved head, petted the elephant as he cooed to it. Arram squinted, blinking rapidly to rid himself of the water spilling from his eyes.
“Mu-Musenda?” he croaked.
Yadeen was getting up. Arram remembered his duty to his teacher and struggled to stand until Yadeen gripped his wrist and lifted him to his feet. “You know Musenda?” he asked as he waited for Arram to get his balance.
The gladiator advanced, frowning. “You look familiar…,” he said, puzzled. “We’ve met, haven’t we?”
As if impatient with the slowness of human introductions, the orchid-blossomed elephant thrust her way into the tunnel, wrapped her trunk around Arram, and lifted him up so she could peruse him, first with one eye, then the other. He laughed and leaned against her forehead. “Ua, I hoped I would see you!” he cried. “How are you, you gorgeous thing?” He looked down at the staring workers and told Yadeen, “Musenda and Ua saved my life when I was younger!”
“Now I remember!” Musenda boomed. “The boy who fell into the arena! You’ve grown so much I didn’t know you! What brings you here?”
He and Yadeen talked briefly while Arram plucked straw from Ua’s stiff forehead hair and whispered how beautiful she was. Finally Najau shouted, “This is sweet as spring flowers, but we have work, all of us! Get down here, boy!”
Arram coaxed Ua to release him; the elephant reluctantly obeyed. “We’re here to cart the marble slabs to the stand,” Musenda explained. Four more heavy-muscled gladiators of mixed color and nationality came forward with large flatbeds of wood attached to wheels. As Arram watched—Yadeen waved him away from this part of the task—Yadeen produced his Gift in waves. It wrapped around the first slab they had finished and lifted it as smoothly into the air as if it were a feather. Arram was shocked to see the flat edges and sharp corners on the slab, as well as the brightly polished front and rear faces. He barely remembered anything that might have been working the marble in that shape.
“We did all that?” he asked Yadeen when the master had settled the piece onto the wagon. Musenda was leading Ua and another elephant to the front, where workers fashioned their harnesses to the flatbed. Someone cried out, the elephants groaned, and the wagon began to move forward.
“We did all that,” Yadeen said, his eyes on the marble. “We drew it in to be flat and smoothed it sharp, all from the inside. It’s tricky work—you did better than I thought. You’ll have to tell me how you met Musenda and Ua, but later. We must do three more, and then there’s putting the slabs in place.”
“I thought we had to do…six,” Arram said, his voice faltering. Two more perfect slabs lay where the first boulder of marble had been. Yadeen was already using his Gift to raise one of them onto the newest wagon.
“It’s easy to get caught up,” Yadeen said. “And one plane inside the stone—one area we smooth out—looks much the same as the next after a while. We made three slabs from the first stone.”
When the last of the finished slabs from the first block were gone, they moved to the next stone. They got only two finished pieces from it. Yadeen decided they could do two more out of the next, using all the boulders in the tunnel.
“There’s a relief!” Musenda commented. He had just come in for the slabs from the second boulder. “Otherwise we’d have had to cart them away after all the trouble it took to bring them in. It makes a fellow cross.”
Arram frowned. “It’s not right, you having to fight and push boulders around, too.”
Musenda touched a forefinger to his mouth. “We’re at the emperor’s service,” he told Arram. “Us second-and third-rankers do whatever is required when we aren’t fighting. It builds us up.” Lowering his voice, he said, “And the master of gladiators reaps a pretty thaki or three from jobs outside the games.”
“That’s wrong!” Arram protested angrily.
“That’s the world,” Musenda replied.
“Learn it now or learn it later,” Yadeen murmured. “But a wise man does learn it.”
Musenda saluted Yadeen and went to see the finished pieces taken to the stand. Arram and Yadeen made themselves comfortable beside the last piece of unfinished stone and went to work, Yadeen leading Arram inside the many lines and tracks of stone. Twice he had to call Arram’s attention back to work: Arram hadn’t realized he was drifting away. When he finally returned to himself in the tunnel, it took him several tries to get to his feet. His head was spinning. When he did stand, he was greeted by a foggy shape in a gaudy orange overgarment, topped in black.