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First I should tell you a bit about how the arena looked on the inside, for it was no less a marvel than its bony outside. It was a great round place, with seating going up on almost every side. Most spectators sat on bare stone, but there were karks around ready to rent them a cushion for a few coppers. I say “them,” because, being the royal fool, I was sitting with the king and his family under great orange shade-cloths, on proper chairs with tables before us. From where we sat, we faced east and the faraway Thralls. The royal boxes were about midway up—not close enough to risk injury from a thrown weapon, but close enough to see the look on a geezer’s face when he got something lopped off, stabbed, or broken. But one feature of the Bone Palace that bears mention was a pair of giant hands in white stone by the one part of the stadium that was open. This was the view east. These hands were open, palms east, the way your own hands would look if you held them up making a triangle of the two thumbs and pointer fingers. I didn’t realize the significance of their placement until evening came on, I just thought they were very well made.

We hadn’t been sat long before the feasting started, slaves wheeling out carts filled with platters of this and that and something else besides. You wouldn’t have known there was anyone hungry in the world to see the volume of food consumed before the Lunar Games of Erydon.

The king alone put down a two-pound slab of ox, two roasted herons, and a grilled tentacle as thick as my arm. This is without mentioning the melon, root vegetables, sausages, some sort of hot grain, and a fearsome quantity of wine. How did he manage it? How did any of them? Well, this is once when I’ll tell you that you don’t want to know. It involves a thing called a sauce-cart, which is wheeled around to the tables of the well-off so they can cast forth their accounts. It’s the most disgusting fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Ach, I’m not saying I never got pissed and harfed up my stew. But I never put a stew in me meaning to harf it. Let alone tentacles and wading birds and some kind of great fat ant with honey in its gut, the size of a frog, too; and frogs too, but white, and alive, still kicking all the way down. And just when you thought they’d split themselves in half, here came the creaky-wheeled sauce-cart pushed by a slave whose job I’ll never covet if I go to the salt mines; and hurk-a-lurk and umph-a-glumph, out it all came again in a winey, purply wash, not half so pretty as it went in, and that wasn’t pretty at all. And the beards on them, too. Auff. You can imagine. How are you supposed to take someone like that seriously? I never thought of their language the same way again after I heard them at it. Even their big wicked goddie sounds like a blarghing. “Who do you worship at home?” “Oh, we’re all servants of THUMOOOOOOS.” Balls, my eyes are tearing up just thinking about it. If I didn’t fully hate these nine-foot cunts for being slavers, I hated them for what they did to supper.

By the time we got to people killing each other, it was a fucking relief.

“You look green, Kitchy-witch,” Her Highness said a couple of hours later.

This was after I watched the true giant fight the bull elephant and get his ribs broken up like sticks while the thing rolled him up against the wall. This was after the third time I’d seen them rake the black sand to get spills and chopped-off bits clear.

“Tender little Kitch is an animal lover, like us,” said the king, still with the wee white leg of a frog in his beard. He was kingly drunk and weepy, and not too proud to speak Arvisk to me. “Kitch saw the way that bastardly thing hit the tusker’s leg with the club, saw it limp away to an uncertain fate after it fought so nobly.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Poor old tusker.”

“Poor old tusker, indeed,” the king agreed and gave my shoulder a squeeze that I wouldn’t have thought friendly from a human, shaking me once so the bells on my hat shook, too. This made him laugh once through his tears.

“Well, if we’re all talking slave-talk,” Queen Neffa now said, “I should tell you for the third time that you’re drinking too much and if you keep at it, you’ll fall asleep before moonrise.”

He waved her away, then looked in his cup as though he hoped it would tell him he hadn’t had too much after all. Then he seemed to sense his false bangs were askew, which they were, and motioned his steward to come and arrange him. The steward did as much, and also plucked away the frog’s leg with such discretion I thought he’d do all right as a pickpocket.

“Anyway,” the king said, “do you remember that expensive fighter-girl I bought with you?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, trying to sound like my heart hadn’t leapt up my throat.

He looked down his nose at a leaflet, saying, “She’s up next, I think.”

28Gods with Monsters’ Hearts

As the sun began to set in the west, the shadow of Thumos’s Throne falling over the capital, the final game began. It was to be a mass combat, with three teams; one belonging to the king, one belonging to the Praxeter, and one belonging to the juggers, as the merchants were known, for all that they traded jugs of wine and oil and honey. I saw Galva immediately, wearing the orange sash of the king—they’d let her keep her shield and armor. Not only was she the only dam on the king’s team; she was the only kynd. Each team had three fighters: one kynd, one half-giant, one true giant. Galva was five and a half feet tall, and I didn’t like her odds with two nine-footers and two twelve-footers out to kill her. Not to mention the kynd fighters.

They stood at three opposite points on the black sand of the arena.

A marshal was talking in Erydon.

He motioned to the king, who stood, all eyes fixed on him.

The king pointed to the east, and I could now see the full moon rising. From our privileged position in the arena, the pinkish orb was just entering the triangle formed by the great stone hands. Everyone now turned toward the east and made that triangle with their own hands, putting the moon in the middle of it. The mob of twenty thousand or more made a sort of growl that grew into a cheer, at the loudest part of which they all threw their arms skyward and stood.

And the fight in the arena was on.

It was a brutal, bloody business, and I won’t give it to you punch by chop. I will just say that the true giants came out trying to kill each other’s kynd, but the juggers’ giant fell instead. Their halfie and kynd now fell under the axes of the bigguns for the king and Praxeter, who had made a sort of truce to finish one team out. It was Galva who took the fight to the Praxeter’s giant, a female with a shorn head and faded blue tattoos of what looked like stars all over her. Like the others, she was only armored to the top of her girdle, breasts bare, and Galva got her deep under one mammet and through the ribs. In the heart, I think. Only she didn’t die right away. She just sort of walked away, holding her hand under her breast.

The king’s giant, halfie, and Galva now did for the halfie and kynd of the Praxeter, and it went as you’d imagine. But my attention was only half on the fight. I was watching the Praxeter’s giantess, bleeding hard from Galva’s cut, who looked like nothing so much as a lost child. She looked up in the stands to see if anyone would help her. After a moment of only getting jeers and laughter, she dropped to her knees, and then fell over, a great amount of blood washing out from the wound her hand had been covering.

“OOOOOH, KITCH, your friend is GOOD!” Renata said, squealing with excitement as she always did when people or animals were getting hurt. She wasn’t alone—the whole of the Bone Palace was screaming with bloodlust. The half-giants were some of the cruelest karks you’ll ever meet. Not as vicious as goblins perhaps, but it’s a close business. At least the goblins look like monsters. These of Erydon were beauteous but fell, like gods with monsters’ hearts.

But though the light was starting to fail, the long day wasn’t over yet.

Now everyone turned west, where the dark mountain known as Thumos’s Throne stood against the redness of the sky where the sun had just set.

“This is my favorite part,” Renata whispered.

The Praxeter walked to the center of the arena.

He congratulated the victors.

The spectators applauded them.