Had this happened with the other contestants? I didn’t think so. This was special to us, because we were the last match of the day, the star attraction. We knelt, neither of us wanting to be whipped with limber sticks, or worse, shocked by the auras of our captors.
Elden Flight Killer looked like a man at death’s door—one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Uncle Bob would have said. That was my first thought. The second, close on its heels, was that he wasn’t a man at all. He might have been once, but no more. His skin was the color of an unripe Anjou pear. His eyes—blue, huge, wet, each as big as one of my palms—bulged from wrinkled, sagging sockets. His lips were red, somehow feminine, and so loose they sagged. A crown sat askew, with a horrid jauntiness, on his thin white hair. His purple robe, shot with fine windings of gold, was like a gigantic caftan that covered him all the way down from his bloated neck. And yes, it was moving. Like he was holding a pet underneath, Jaya had said. Except it was rising up and subsiding in several different places at once.
To my left, on the track, stood Red Molly in a short leather skirt like a kilt. Her thighs were muscular and enormous. Her long knife hung in a scabbard on her right hip. Her orange hair stood up in short spikes, a kind of punk-rock do. Wide suspenders held up her skirt and covered part of her otherwise naked breasts. She saw me looking at her and puckered her lips in a kiss.
Flight Killer spoke in a clotted voice that sounded nothing like the insectile buzz of the night soldiers. It was as if he were speaking through a throat filled with some viscous liquid. No, none of the others had been subjected to anything like this; they would have said. The horror of that inhuman voice was indelible.
“Who is King of the Gray World, formerly Empis?”
Those in the box and the rest of the spectators responded smartly, shouting it out. “Elden!”
Flight Killer was looking down at us with those huge egglike eyes. Limber sticks came down on my neck and Cla’s. “Say it,” Kellin buzzed.
“Elden,” we said.
“Who brought down both the monarchs of earth and the monarchs of the air?”
“Elden!” Petra shouted it with the rest, and louder. Her hand was caressing one of Elden’s hanging green jowls. The purple robe rose and fell, rose and fell, in half a dozen different places.
“Elden,” Cla and I said, not wanting to be swatted again.
“Let the match begin!”
This was a call that seemed to require no response except applause and a few cheers.
Kellin was between the two of us, just far enough away to keep his aura from touching us. “Stand and face the field,” he said.
We did so. I could see Cla from the corner of my eye, on my right; he turned his head to take a quick glance at me, then faced forward. Seventy or so yards dead ahead were the weapons of combat. There was something surreal about their careful spacing, like prizes to be won in some homicidal game show.
I could see at once that someone （maybe Flight Killer himself, but my money was on the Lord High） had tilted the game in Cla’s favor, if not outright rigged it. The wicker basket of stabbing spears, obviously the weapons of choice, was on the right, which was Cla’s side. Twenty yards to the left was the table with the spike-studded leather gloves. Twenty yards further to the left, more or less facing me, was a basket of fighting sticks, useful to clobber with, not so useful when it came to killing. No one told us what came next; no one had to. We were going to sprint to the weapons, and if I wanted a stabber instead of a glove or a bando stick, I’d have to get ahead of Cla, then cross in front of him.
You’re faster than you think, Leah had told me, only that had been in a dream and this was real life.
You might ask yourself if I was terrified. I was, but I was also drawing from that dark well I’d discovered as a child, when my father seemed bent on honoring the memory of his wife, my mother, by crashing and burning and leaving us homeless. I had hated him for awhile and hated myself for hating. Bad behavior had resulted. Now I had other things to hate, and no reason to feel bad about it. So yes, I was terrified. But part of me was also eager.
Part of me wanted this.
Flight Killer called out in his bubbling, inhuman voice—something else to hate: “NOW!”
7
We ran. Cla had moved with blinding speed when he attacked Eye, but that had been a quick burst in an enclosed space. It was seventy yards to the weapons. There was a lot of weight for him to carry, over three hundred pounds, and I thought that sprinting full out, I could draw even with him halfway to the spread-out fighting gear. Dream Leah had been right—I was faster than I thought. But I’d still have to cut in front of him, and when I did, I’d be squarely in his slightly reduced field of vision. More dangerous still, my back would be to him.