She would have to avoid contact next time. Pass without a word. It could be done, of course. She was quite confident Bodok would pick up on her body language. He certainly paid attention to her in that respect, as he’d made abundantly clear so recently. Maureen held back a little smile forming at the thought of it.
“It won’t happen again, I promise,” she said, her face neutral.
“I know it won’t. That is no longer your task. You have shown yourself untrustworthy, and your workload will reflect that. Now, go to the kitchen and relay my directions, then clean yourself up. You are to serve us at this week’s tournament.”
“Tournament?”
“You will see.”
Several hours later in a ringside luxury box in the city’s arena, Maureen and one other servant she had not met before stood at attention on either side of the Tormiks, ensuring their glasses were full and their plates piled high.
The experience would have been fine if not for what was happening on the arena floor in front of them.
How these two could eat when men and women were beating each other to a pulp was beyond her. Blood flowed and unconscious fighters were dragged away to the cheers of the ravenous crowd.
It was so cruel. So primitive, especially for such an advanced people. This wasn’t just some tournament, as she had assumed, given their seemingly evolved society. This was like the old Roman gladiator matches she’d read about in history books, and just as violent.
The early matches were just a warmup for the crowd, she quickly learned. Brutal, yes, but featuring lesser combatants who fought to submission rather than to the death. The Tormiks didn’t seem terribly interested in these lesser matches, so they arrived at the event well after it had begun.
The tournament was a regular thing, it seemed, and one the public loved. As a result, the magistrate made sure a steady stream of fighters were available to feed that hunger, even if that meant conscripts from prisons or even other settlements on the planet.
Typically, however, the combatants were willingly participating, earning good money with every bout they fought. They were still prisoners, but money meant a higher quality of life as they could buy themselves slightly better food, or even an occasional carnal visit.
With their frequency, most of the tournaments featured lower-ranked fighters, all of them vying to rise in the ranks to challenge the champions. This allowed the masses a steady stream of entertainment leading up to the bigger event. The motivation was clear.
Beat a champion and you could earn enough to buy your freedom. But the champions had it good, and though they had earned their freedom, they chose to remain in their deadly profession of choice, training hard to ensure the lesser challengers they faced had little hope of dethroning them. It was a good gig, and one with the odds tilted heavily in their favor.
The Tormiks’ interest grew as the matches became deadly, the two of them reveling in the bloody spectacle playing out so close by. Maureen felt ill from it all. The carnage, the bloodshed, the death. By the time the champions fighting the last matches had brutally slain their challengers, she was pale and sick to her stomach.
Somehow, she kept it together, cleaning up the Tormiks’ box, packaging the remaining food and drink, and following them back to the residence. Once she had dropped the basket in the kitchen and made it back to her quarters, however, Maureen vomited until her stomach cramped.
“What the hell have I gotten into?” she lamented, rinsing her mouth in the sink.
The day had gone from amazing to horrifying in a flash, and she had no idea what to do next. For the moment, there seemed to be just one option. Sleep and pray for a better day.
As her head sank into her pillow, she couldn’t help but wonder what other surprises her new life would hold in store for her. One thing was for certain. She would find out soon enough.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
While Vice Quaestor Tormik was not present most of the day, his staff was constantly busy running tasks for him, keeping his home office in a state of perpetual readiness for his return.
Likewise, Mistress Tormik’s servants were hard at work keeping the household maintained to precisely her exacting standards. It was exhausting work, but unlike the others, for Maureen it did not end there.
She was also sent on countless outings, errands her defacto employer had her running from morning until night. She noticed that her destinations were farther from the ones she had previously been assigned than she had realized at first. And the more she traveled through the outer neighborhoods of the city, the more alien races she encountered firsthand.
It made it even more clear that there were far more than Mondarians in this place. She’d known that intellectually, of course, and she’s seen the others in passing during her whirlwind arrival. But seeing it all up close and personal with her own eyes, taking in the different races of aliens and all of their wildly varying morphologies, the societal structure of the Mondarian enclave became clear.
Mondarians ran things. Period. Other races might live there, but there was no mistaking who was in charge. She hadn’t been there long enough to suss out what sort of racism was at play, but from what she could tell the races with less humanoid physiques tended to be looked down upon despite their numbers constituting a majority.
It was a funny thing, that, because it was several of those same species who had been the ones who treated her with the most kindness as she ran her mistress’s errands. The people she had spoken with had all seemed quite pleasant, as well as interested in this unusual female of a race they had never encountered before. Ahuman, whatever that was.
Maureen also learned that what Bodok had first noted about the planet was correct. This was a transit hub for many different races. Some were loners, keeping to themselves in their own outposts. Others were rather gregarious, seeking out trade with anyone they could. Still others were combative and confrontational—though those had learned early on they should know better than to attack their co-inhabitants if they wanted to avoid incurring the wrath of pretty muchallthe other races on the planet.
And then there were the power hungry. The Mondarians fell into that category, building a city designed to draw in others from all across the realm, each paying taxes and trade fees, propping up the Mondarian magistrate while they solidified their people’s claim on their tiny sliver of this world.
All in all, her brief talks with the other aliens in the city were delightful bits of respite, and she would have enjoyed getting to know them better if she could, to hear the stories about their homeworlds and how they came to be on this planet.
But the opportunity would definitely not arise. Not now. Mistress Tormik was running her ragged, her tasks taking her to complete opposite ends of the city with so little time to spare she was often forced to run so as not to be late. And to be late was to draw even more ire.
