“Then we’ll figure that out once we get down here.” I tried to sound more confident than I was. “We’ve got four days to prepare. If you’ve got any bright ideas, come and talk to me, because Waterday morning, we’re earning the rent.”
Nine
When you ask a gaggle of would-be mages if they’ve got any bright ideas to solve a problem, be forewarned, you are about to receive a deluge of the dumbest concepts imaginable. Those inclined toward wizardry as a profession are not, as a rule, stupid, but rather they’re so smart that their intellect becomes uncoupled from the pesky facts of reality.
I don’t know how many times that day I had to tell someone, no, we can’t afford that sort of enchantment, or no, we have insufficient element to accomplish that, or no, none of us know a spell that can pick the whole island up and fly it to shore… And each time when I was done, the look of defeat on their once hopeful face made me feel like I’d just shot their pet unicorn.
Rufus Rudnik, self-proclaimedwar mage, may have been dumber than a bag of rocks, but he’d at least come up with a respectable suggestion. We needed money for supplies. Some of our students thought they were capable of earning money as gladiators, but had never worked up the courage to risk it. Let’s go fight and hopefully get paid. Which was what brought a group of us to the market side of the Under Slump that night.
This was Skerret family territory, and after my unfortunate encounters with my rat bastard countrymen, I wouldn’t go tothis side of the Under Slump without a bunch of friends. The Skerret family had gotten banished from Fogo for being crooks, and now they were one of the many smaller gangs infesting the Slumps who paid taxes to Carcalla. Hopefully, the Skerrets had gotten word that us Outcasts had come to terms with the Latrocinium, so in the off chance I did run into one of them, they’d overlook their resentment against me long enough to not do anything foolishly violent enough to anger our local crime boss.
But you know what they say about us hotlanders!
I kept my scarf over my face and my hood over my head as we walked, in the hopes of not being recognized. And if I was picked out of the crowd by a wrathful member of the Skerret gang, I had Krachma, Rade, Rufus, Danny, Bognar, and Sifuso with me. The Skerrets had quite a few men, but my group consisted of seven gladiators—well, three with a few fights under our belts and four rookies, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.
There were several fighting arenas around the Slumps. The Livnight mage fights were held just off the ramp down from the grand market. That put us only a few blocks from the notorious Crumpled House, home of the Skerret gang, but as Rufus had so helpfully pointed out, if we were going adventuring, we needed to buy more element, and fast. Other than robbery—and I put my foot down against that sort of behavior—there was no faster way to make some coin in the Slumps than fighting in the arena. So, as it stood, us three with a bit of experience, and the new guys who’d been eager to try their hand at mage fighting, found ourselves at this particular arena.
We had to use up our own magic in the arena, but even if you lost, you got five percent off the house. Even losers usually broke even on the element use, unless of course you wasted too much magic, or put on a bad show that the crowd didn’t bet much. But if you won, it was twenty percent. The better the match, the morepeople would bet, which equaled more coins in your pocket at the end of the night. Slump fight crowds were pretty bloodthirsty and even upper-class citizens from the finer districts would come down here to watch us low-ranking fighters injure each other. Our magic wasn’t nearly as potent or refined down here, but everyone loved to watch a good vicious beating.
The biggest danger in a mage fight—especially in these shoddy conditions—was that if the protective charm the goblins issued you fizzled and failed to stop a blow, you’d get crippled or die. But that didn’t happentoooften. Deaths were bad for business, as it scared off competitors. From what I’d learned about Carcalla’s nature, he didn’t tolerate failure. If a goblin enchanter screwed up too many times, he’d end up in the canal chained to the corpse of the last gladiator he’d let down, along with some concrete to make sure neither of them would float.
Because the Great Machine had been aligned with the Elemental Plane of Life all day, the air actually smelled nice, as opposed to the usual stink of garbage and piss common to this trash-strewn section of the Under Slump.
“What is that lovely fragrance?” Rade asked.
“That there’s the scent of wildflowers upon the wind,” Rufus said. “I’m from the Realm of Life, so I know it well. Today, the gate’s pointed at our sister city, Hutan upon the Gunang. It’s a thousand miles south of my home, but it’s a place that’s ever green.”
“Mine is ever on fire,” I said.
“My homeland is also always green. Same as lacertian skin,” Sifuso hissed. “Better to hide in ambush waiting to strike.”
“Acheron is cloaked in an endless fog,” Rade said, not to be outdone. “And teeming with the restless dead.”
“Krachma had only dirt.”
Young Danny shrugged. “I was born like twelve blocks that way. I’m not exotic like you guys.”
“Core City, me self.” Big Bognar pointed up toward the Slump. “You can probably see me mum’s basement from here.”
Rufus couldn’t let us get the wrong impression that he’d led a sheltered life. “Don’t let the name of my realm fool you. Our element makes things grow, fast and concentrated, so the place is teeming with life, but for one thing to live, something else must die to feed it. It’s a savage, wild land, with deadly predators lurking behind every tree, and Bergwald’s got a great many trees!”
I caught sight of a few ruffians watching us at the mouth of the next alley. “We’ve got no trees in the Under Slump, but we’ve still got predators a plenty.”
They were clearly searching for a victim to shank and roll, but when they saw the size of our group, and that one was a rock-scarred lob and the other a tall lizard beast, they took their hunt in the opposite direction.
It annoyed me that bandits could be so brazen here, but the Slumps were a lawless place. We’d surely have more students if we weren’t in such a bad part of town. The watch wouldn’t ever come down these ramps because, officially, this neighborhood didn’t exist anymore, so it was all poor folks with nowhere else to go, getting picked on by violent scum.
“It shouldn’t be like this. Someday, when the Outcast Academy has grown strong, we’re going to clean this place up.”
“That’s what I like about you, Mr. Carnavon, sir. You dream big,” Danny said.
We reached the arena. I’d not fought at this particular venue yet, but Krachma and Rade both had. Every mage fighting arena was set up a bit differently. This one was a big pit that had once been a quarry. There were a bunch of stone blocks haphazardly scattered around the bottom to provide cover and give some variety to the terrain. The contestants had to climb the scaffolding along the sides to get up and down. A rambunctiouscrowd stood around the top, cheering for their favorite or booing their enemy, as goblins moved between them taking bets.
The line for aspiring fighters was short tonight, so the goblins were excited to see so many of us show up at once. From their reaction, Carcalla hadn’t preemptively cut us off from fighting. I knew if I hadn’t agreed to his demand for adventurers, the bouncers would be tossing us out of here.
The goblin bookie waddled over to examine us. Like most goblins, he was short and hideous, with huge ears, and limbs that should be too long and spindly to support his ponderous gut.
“Ah, I know this ponderous lob. Krachma the Killer, a fan favorite. What’re you now, six-and-one?”
