Chapter one
Chapter 1
The blood never fully washes out of the sawdust.
Lethe knows this the way he knows most things about the pits: through repetition, through observation, through the slow accumulation of details that no one else bothers to catalog. The sawdust in the kennels is replaced every three days. By the second day it darkens to rust. By the third it stinks of copper and piss and the particular sourness of creatures kept in spaces too small for their bodies. He spreads the fresh stuff himself when the handlers bother to bring it down, raking it even across the stone floors with a broom that's missing half its bristles, and for a few hours the air smells almost clean.
Almost. Nothing down here is ever fully clean.
He starts his rounds at dawn, though dawn is a guess. No sunlight reaches the kennels. He marks time by the bells that ring from somewhere above, muffled and distant, signaling shift changes for the guards. The first bell means the night watch is ending. The second means the crowds will start gathering in the coliseum within the hour. Between the two, Lethe has thekennels mostly to himself, and he moves through them with the efficiency of long practice.
His satchel is leather, cracked and soft from years of use, and it holds everything he needs. Needles and catgut thread. A tin of salve he mixes himself from rendered fat and calendula and a few drops of clove oil for numbing. Clean linen strips for bandages, thoughcleanis relative. A bone-handled knife for cutting thread and lancing abscesses and, once, defending himself against a fighter who woke mid-stitch and swung blind. He keeps the knife sharp. He keeps everything organized. It is the one small territory he controls in a place where control is a luxury no one offers him.
The first cage holds a creature called Gnarl by the guards, though Lethe doubts that's the name he was born with. He's canine in shape, massive through the shoulders, with a jaw that could snap a man's femur and eyes that track movement with unsettling intelligence. His left foreleg took a bad hit in yesterday's bout and he's been favoring it since, curled in the far corner of his cage with his lips peeled back over teeth the length of Lethe's fingers.
Lethe crouches by the bars. "Morning, love. Let me see that leg."
Gnarl growls. Low, sustained, a sound that vibrates in Lethe's sternum.
"I know," Lethe says. He keeps his voice even, unhurried. "I know it hurts. I'll be quick." He unlocks the cage with the key that hangs from a cord around his neck and steps inside. He makes himself small, shoulders soft, movements telegraphed. He sets his satchel down and opens it slowly, letting Gnarl see every item he removes. "Salve first. Then I'll wrap it. You won't even feel the wrapping, I promise."
He's lying. Gnarl will absolutely feel the wrapping. But the steady rhythm of his voice matters more than the words, andby the time Lethe's fingers find the swollen joint of the foreleg, Gnarl's growl has subsided to a low, unhappy rumble.
Lethe works. He cleans the wound where the skin split over the joint, daubs salve into it with gentle fingers, wraps it in linen tight enough to support but not so tight it cuts circulation. Gnarl flinches once, hard, and Lethe stills until the tension bleeds out of the creature's body before he continues. His hands are steady. They are always steady, here. Whatever else falls apart, his hands remain sure.
"Good boy," he murmurs when he ties off the bandage. "You did so well. Rest today. I'll bring you something from the kitchens."
Gnarl's eyes close. His breathing evens. Lethe gathers his supplies, backs out of the cage, and locks it behind him.
***
Six more cages. Three need wound care. One needs a dislocated digit reset, which Lethe manages with a sharp, practiced twist that makes the creature scream and then go limp with relief. One needs nothing at all, already healing, and watches Lethe with calm, amber eyes while he checks the stitches from two days ago and pronounces them holding.
The last cage holds a fighter who died in the night.
Lethe stands at the bars and looks at the body. It's a reptilian creature, scaled and heavy, who took a blow to the skull three days ago that Lethe suspected had cracked something beneath the bone. He'd told the handlers. He'd written it down and left the note on the ledger where the pit lord reviews the roster each morning. The creature needed rest. A week, maybe two, off the roster.
It fought yesterday. It won. And now it's dead, because a cracked skull doesn't care about winning.
Lethe breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth. He notes the time by the bells. He notes the cage number. He will record this in the ledger and it will matter to no one. The creature's body will be hauled out and dumped, and the cage will be cleaned and filled with someone new, and the sawdust will darken to rust again by the second day.
He closes his eyes. Opens them. Moves on.
This is the rhythm. Tend, record, move on. Don't grieve. Grief is a luxury that gets people killed down here because it makes them slow, makes them hesitate, makes them flinch at the wrong moment. Lethe learned that early. He learned a lot of things early.
***
The afternoon rounds are harder. The arena has been running bouts since the second bell and the wounded come back in waves, hauled through the tunnels by handlers who drop them in their cages and leave without checking whether they're breathing. Lethe moves faster now, triaging by severity, his satchel refilled and his hands already stained.
He is stitching a gash on a fighter's flank when Harsk, one of the day guards, saunters past and kicks the downed creature square in its side.
The fighter lurches. Lethe's needle slips. A thin line of blood wells where it shouldn't.
"Careful, Lamb," Harsk says, grinning. "That one bites."
Lamb.Everyone calls him Lamb. He doesn't remember who started it. One of the guards, probably, and it spread the way nicknames do in closed, cruel places: because it was easy andbecause it fit. He's quiet. Soft-spoken. Gentle with the creatures in ways that make the guards laugh. And lamb is what you are before you're mutton. It's a name that carries its own prophecy: that the pits will devour him, that it's only a matter of time before the system chews through the last of his softness. Before Demos breaks him for good.
Lethe has been hearing it for six years. He is still here. He is still soft. He is still undevoured. None of them seem to notice the significance of that.
