Battleslave Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ensaak

  About the Author

  Other works by the author

  For the people who said my writing didn’t suck.

  Chapter One

  Talitha should feel something—anger, grief, fear—but she didn’t.

  Two weeks ago, she had been heir to the greatest city in the Sandsea. Today, she stumbled into a strange city with her hands tied.

  Prothero—her new owner—rode in the litter, whipping absently at flies with a swatter of black hair. He’d paid for her with iron coins from a money changer not far inside the city.

  The northmen rode away with Shaza as soon as they had their coin. Her enemy turned ally had barely been able to speak with thirst and exhaustion. Talitha didn’t want to think on what they had planned for him. He had taken the sister of their leader captive after she’d attacked them and they’d killed all her soldiers. The northerner woman, Breida, now seemed to command their band. Her vengeance would be brutal and harsh. She’d sold Talitha as a battleslave, but had wanted to keep Shaza. No doubt in repayment for him keeping her as a prisoner these past days.

  Battleslave—the word echoed through Talitha’s head.

  Her cousin Esreth was dead. Her grandfather the ensaak was dead. Ilios had been taken. Naram had declared himself ensaak. She didn’t know where Kasrei and Gilsazi were or even if they were still alive. She had now way of knowing if Naram had spared her loyalists when he took the city—and there were many.

  Talitha had lost everything she had ever cared for.

  Prothero’s small procession came to a grinding halt before the gates. There were chips and scars in the stone along the upper arch, marking where warlord after warlord had hung his colors, then had them ripped off when the next warlord came. This city had been conquered and reconquered—Talitha could only hope it was more stable now.

  Beyond the gate were rows of flat stone buildings. The usual noise and stench of life wafted out. A chicken squawked and an old sirrush missing the scales along its spine plodded after a child in rags.

  Just past the poor boy and the decrepit animal, a broad warrior with golden nose rings haggled with a street vendor over the price of something in a clay jar. She said something and he replied. Her voice raised and whatever he said must not have been satisfactory. In an instant, she had a sword out and jabbed for the skinny man’s gut.

  Lucky for him, she missed, but he jumped back with a loud cry. The next instant, the warrior crumpled with a black-fletched arrow sticking out between her shoulder blades.

  Talitha squinted, following the direction of the arrow’s path to the tops of a nearby flat roof. An archer in light armor, the shooter apparent, nocked another arrow and carried on. He or she meandered the tops of the roofs, wrapped in scarves and a helmet visor to shield against the sun.

  Not lawless town—Talitha noted. Just savage.

  A guard in tarnished bronze armor stepped before their small procession, pounding a spear in threat. “Who goes—?”

  “Out of the way, you white-bellied toad!” Prothero roared, his husky voice like the bark of an old dune wolf. “I could buy your whole family off Mieden, feed you to my fang serpents for a show, and still make a profit!”

  The guard muttered something and dipped his head, the visor of his helmet shading his face a moment. “Forgive me.”

  “Move!” Prothero waved his fly swatter impatiently. “Go!”

  The eunuch holding the rope to Talitha’s wrists jerked her onward. Prothero’s litter trundled past the shot, still moving and groaning.

  The broad woman spat blood and wheezed, wriggling on the ground. The vendor let off a jeer in a language Talitha didn’t know and produced a knife from behind his cart of goods.

  Talitha didn’t have to watch to know what would happen.

  Ropes strung between the houses, flapping with rugs, prayer kerchiefs, and ratted laundry. It was all the things one expected to see in a city, but there was a different shrine on every corner—shrines to Anakti, Ja’al, Enki, Nigna, and every other deity. No one patron god of the city here.

  The city had the sense of being on edge. It brought to mind a bunch of wild animals stuffed together in one place.

  Houses were barred and ringed by sturdy fences. Even the upper windows were latticed to shield those from prying gazes. This reminded her of the bandit city where she had found Ashek—a place where appetites were indulged until they had to be beaten back with fists and steel.

  That made Talitha think of the orderliness of Ilios and that brought with it…nothing. She could still feel nothing.

  Talitha tripped on a loose cobblestone and hit the ground. Her elbows cracked on the paving, impact shooting through her bones. She strangled a cry, blinking back tears, and stumbled to her feet. Only then did she realize it wasn’t a cobblestone, it was a femur. Looking up, she realized it wasn’t just rugs and laundry hanging between the houses.

  A dried corpse of unknowable identity swayed in the hot breeze.

  “A disobedient slave, no doubt!” cried Eulad, her owner’s son who had already established himself as her tormentor. He was a man little in stature—which he couldn’t help—with a small character to match—which he could have helped. “You had best learn to submit, wench!”

  Talitha spat and didn’t look up.

  “Did you just—?”

  “I told you not to harass the battleslaves,” Prothero snapped. “Stop, or I’ll give you to the Bonerender and see how he likes your pasty hide.”

  Eulad made a strangled sound. “Father—”

  “If Juba decides she’s unfit for the arena, we can talk. From what she did to your ear, I doubt it.”

  Eulad’s ear still bled where Talitha had ripped out his pearl earring. She should have felt some amount of satisfaction, but there was nothing.

  Their small procession came to a stop before wrought iron gates—grand, by the standards of the city. As they drew closer, Talitha tilted her head to the side. A sound carried on the breeze, a distant roar she couldn’t quite place.

  One of the eunuchs shouted something unintelligible at the gates and they swung open with the jangling of locks. Talitha had no choice but to follow the litter inside.

  Her gaze snapped straight to the fountain shaded beneath a terrace at the edge of the courtyard. Her cracked lips and parched throat ached at the sight.

  If Prothero had a fountain, he must be far richer than Talitha had first thought.

  “I have an hour before I must return to the palace. Bring me the reports from last week,” Prothero commanded, stepping off the edge of his litter. “Take the new slave to Juba. I want her patched and ready for the fight in three days.”

  Three days? Talitha could barely stand.

  One of the eunuchs took the end of her rope and gave a hard yank. Talitha crashed to her knees on the crooked cobbles, but refused to make a sound.

  The eunuch chuckled, then dragged her up by the back of her tunic.

  Talitha meant to glare at him, but all that she could manage was a hollow, empty stare. She half walked and was half dragged along behind the eunuch, his broad, naked back rippling in front of her. He must have been a grown man by the time he was cut. There were not many eunuchs in Ilios, but they never grew this tall or strong.

  The eunuch led her toward another wrought iron gate, stretched across
a narrow set of stairs. He unlatched the gate and jerked Talitha down the steps.

  If he hadn’t been holding her by the back of her neck, she would have fallen face first. Her feet ached and throbbed, pain radiating up from her soles to her scalp. One of her sandal straps had broke and the bottom flapped awkwardly against her foot.

  The stairway ended abruptly, opening up into a subterranean barracks—or prison. There were bunks and privies and what appeared to be a kitchen, but a solid wall of bars separated the living quarters from everything else.

  Here, the roar was louder—a cheer. It broke, rose, and fell. Talitha didn’t want to consider the cause of it. That kind of cheering was never innocent.

  On the other side of the bars, a group of half-dressed people with wooden swords were thunking each other, going through the paces in an open air courtyard. There must have been at least a hundred of them. They sparred in pairs and in larger groups, with nets and wooden spears, with shields and whips.

  Battleslaves.

  Talitha had never seen so many of them in one place. Where was she? This place must be far larger than a mere fringe town.

  Guards in plate armor with bronze weapons watched over the slaves’ practice. The guards all stood at the ready, but, from the way they all slouched in boredom, they were not often needed.

  Talitha’s guard pounded his fist on the bars, catching the attention of the nearest watchman.

  “What?” snapped the guard, a young woman with a whorling tattoo over the left side of her face. A milky white film coated that eye, yet she flicked her gaze over Talitha and the eunuch, sharp as a hawk. “Another one?”

  The eunuch grunted.

  “For Juba?”

  The eunuch grunted again.

  “Alright, then. Barros, watch the gate.” Turning back to the eunuch, the half blind guard asked, “Has she given any trouble?”

  The eunuch made a grumbling, wheezing sound. It took Talitha a moment to realize it was a chuckle.

  “A troublemaker, eh?”

  Talitha stared emptily into the slave’s quarters. Would she die here? Which was better—an anonymous death as a deserter turned slave or public beheading the deposed heir of a once-great dynasty?

  Did she wanted to die as nothing or a failure?

  The grated door rattled open and the half-blind guard took her bonds from the eunuch. “Don’t make trouble and there won’t be trouble. Got that?”

  Talitha didn’t move.

  “Good.” Without warning, the guard kicked her ankle the same moment the guard yanked on her ropes.

  Talitha crashed to the ground, elbows striking the dirt-covered stone. She grunted, keeping her head down to hide how much that had hurt. Everything was sore and there was no promise it would get better.

  Laughter erupted from the guards and the eunuch made a chortling sound that must have been laughter. He was a mute—he must have had his tongue cut off along with his manhood.

  “Lazy one, aye?” the half-blind guard snapped, yanking on the rope again.

  Talitha’s elbows jerked out from under her and she narrowly missed splitting her lip open.

  “Get up!”

  A sandal slammed into Talitha’s lower back and she couldn’t breathe. Her pelvis ground into the stone and her lungs couldn’t expand.

  “I said, get up!”

  The foot on her back stomped harder.

  Talitha cried out, but she was too tired to fight. She should have. She should have dragged herself together. Her grandfather had always taught her to struggle no matter what to earn favor. Favor—with Anakti.

  Talitha’s lip curled at the thought of the goddess. Anakti was a myth that had killed thousands. She’d never served Anakti, but she had allowed the goddess to be served. It was her own fault if the Lonely God chose to judge her now.

  A hand seized her hair, snapping her head back so far she was sure her neck would crack. The edge of a face came into her view, a man’s face with breath that stank of toothrot.

  “What’s this?” The guard grabbed the back of her tunic. “Looks quality to me. A rich little thing once, weren’t you?”

  Talitha had been abandoned. After everything, enough people had turned on her and followed that Lakeshan weakling. Over her lifetime, she’d taken insults, even beatings, kept her head down, bowed and scraped to the right people, and respected a goddess she didn’t believe in, and for—?

  The fowl-breathed guard ripped the back of Talitha’s collar, making to tear off her tunic. “Won’t be needing this anymore!”

  Talitha snapped one knee under her and flipped the guard off sideways. Her heel cracked into his jaw. She dove for him with a yell, wrapping her calf across his neck and pinning him down.

  The half-blind guard shouted and yanked her back, but Talitha was on her the next moment. Talitha rolled halfway off the first guard, twisting one foot under her. She sprang up and charged.

  The half-blind guard already had a knife out and thrust for her torso. Talitha swung her arms and the rope caught the knife. The blade skittered out of the guard’s hand the instant Talitha body slammed her to the ground.

  With a shriek, Talitha beat her bound fists into the other woman’s good eye. She smashed as hard as she could, straddling the guard.

  The world blurred, blood spattered. For one moment, Talitha saw Esreth’s head under her fists, bloody and gaping at the sky. “Everything I did, I did so you could live!”

  A pole smacked into the back of her head and Talitha flew off the guard. The world blurred around her and she blacked out for a moment.

  Before she regained her senses, meaty hands had a hold of her arms and somewhere in the distance out of sight, a crowd cheered.

  Chapter Two

  “I’m already short ten fighters this week.”

  Talitha squinted up at the speaker, a weathered man even darker and older than Prothero, yet standing as straight as a spear.

  Her wrists had been untied, but the narrow barred cage was locked. Rotting hay padded the floor along with a film of dried piss and shit.

  Talitha surveyed the man and said nothing. They scrutinized one another, him taking in her battered, torn, bloody shape and her wondering if the straight seams on his tunic had been imported or sewn here.

  “Attacking guards…what a waste.” The dark stranger jerked his head to the rows of battleslaves lining up to have their bowls filled in the soup line.

  From where she had been incarcerated, Talitha could see the practice yards and the kitchens and the barracks for the other slaves. Perhaps that was the point—offenders got a full view of what they could have if they had just behaved.

  “A good fighter, I’ll give her that.” Talitha blinked at the voice to her right. It was the half-blind guard, rubbing oil on the cuts Talitha had pounded into her face. “I hear Prothero paid a high price for this one.”

  The dark man spat. “He was swindled. We have to kill her.”

  How odd. She was sentenced to death for attacking a guard, but not her owner’s son. The heir apparent must not be liked by his father at all.

  Talitha leaned against the back of her cramped cell and closed her eyes. It was just large enough for her to sit upright, but not large enough to lie down—unless she fancied the fetal position. A wooden slat had been run through the middle of the cell to make it even smaller.

  Oddly, the thought of her impending death didn’t give her any feeling. If anything, it was encouraging. Maybe Anakti was real after all and in the afterlife she could punch the goddess in the face.

  Even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. There was only one god and if her circumstances were any indication, He was angry with her.

  “Pity. At least we still get a show.” Without warning, the guard grabbed a cord from the ceiling and pulled.

  The floor broke away.

  Talitha tumbled through the trap door into sand. The late afternoon sun blazed in her eyes and the roar of a crowd made her headache sharper.

  The iron
stench of blood filled her nostrils as a scream split the air. Instinctive fear spiked through her blood.

  She was in round arena, perhaps seventy paces across. Grated doors lined one end and more than twenty rows of seats rose in every direction. Free-standing stone pillars poked up from the center, giving perfect spots to ambush and hide. There were boxes with shade canopies over collared slaves waving fans for gaudy women. All around the arena, a motley throng pressed in tight, cheering as a snarling, snapping sound roared from the center.

  A dappled brown hulk tore at a bloody corpse. A single untouched hand was the only way Talitha knew the corpse had been a human and massive teeth scarfed that down next. Hip bones and ribs jutted sharp under the creature’s sagging skin, balding in patches. It tore into the body ravenously, bones, hair, organs, and all. Long tusks jutted from bloody jowls.

  A brusii.

  Even starved and abused as the animal was, it was twice the height of a sirrush with claws as big as Talitha’s forearm.

  Talitha pushed her hands under her, easing herself upright. The crowd had spotted her arrive in the arena and the fresh cheers had begun.

  It was a show, a spectacle. It struck her that the sound of their cheers were not so different from the cheers she had heard a thousand times riding through the streets of Ilios. Was that all she was, then? A show for one mob’s amusement or another?

  The brusii’s head snapped up. Scarred, empty holes watched above its nose. The creature had been blinded and it was a long time ago, from the look of it. The animal sniffed at the air experimentally. It snorted.

  Talitha’s heart raced.

  Long, gangly forearms clawed forward, the creature’s much shorter hind legs padding behind. It snorted, sniffing again.

  Talitha blinked at the animal. It would tear her apart, stripping her bones while she was alive. Death in general had its appeal, but that method of death not so much.

  A slingshot appeared from the stands overhead and a stone clipped the brusii in the face. Talitha swore. They were goading it.

  The brusii charged with a bellow. It’s mouth opened, rushing despite being blind. Though the thing must know there were walls, it was either too hungry or too crazed to care about crashing. How long had they starved it?