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And will you start with children next?Serovek kept the question behind his teeth saying instead “I beg Your Majesty to allow me into the forum to participate in this fight.” His leg muscles were practically twitching with the urge to break for the exit and race for the down stairwell. He watched as Anhuset made a second attempt at finding a chink in the scarpatine's armor for her spearhead. She and the creature circled each other, lunging and feinting at intervals.
He forgot Rodan altogether when the insect surged forward so fast, it almost landed atop Anhuset. It missed her by a hair thanks to her reflexes and the fact she was close enough to the weapons rack to shove it in front of the scarpatine. Its pincers caught and broke the rack apart, dropping polearms and swords into the sand like the inedible bits and pieces of consumed prey. Anhuset bent to fling a shower of sand over it, confusing its sense of movement long enough for her to put distance between them. The crowd roared its approval, chanting her name.
“How much does this woman mean to you?”
Rodan's question worked to pull Serovek's horrified attention off the fight and onto him. He didn't immediately answer. Such a question was a trap on numerous levels, an invitation to step into a pit full of spikes. Considering the circumstances, he had no choice but to answer and do it quickly. “I would take her place in an instant. Still shackled. Without armor or shield. Without a second thought. I never wanted a champion. You chose her. Not me.”
Fevered with the same bloodlust as the crowd he sought to entertain, Rodan motioned for one of the guards forward. “Unshackle his legs but not his wrists.” He pointed to the archers in the room. “Shoot him if he does anything more than stand there.”
Serovek's heart thundered in his ears, but he stood still as a pillar while they removed the shackles from his ankles, switching his attention back and forth between Anhuset fighting for her life in the forum and Rodan staring at him with the cold malice of a serpent.
“Never let it be said I don't cater to my margraves,” he said. “I won't take you at your word, Serovek. You'll have to prove it. Anhuset came to me asking to be made your champion. I agreed. She stays in there until the fight is over. If she loses, I'll let the scarpatine feast on her corpse. You however… I'll give you the chance to make good on your boast. You can join her in the arena, help your champion win the day, but you'll do just as you described. You'll go in there without armor, without shield, and still shackled.”
“Then I beg you allow me to go now, Your Majesty,” Serovek replied, sickened by the idea of Anhuset being fed to the abomination she now fought. “Every moment I'm here, I'm not helping her.”
It was the perfect scenario for Rodan. The chances of Anhuset emerging from this fight were slim, Serovek's practically non-existent. The Beladine would have their bloodsport and the heroic margrave would die fighting in the forum helping his champion defend his innocence instead of under an executioner's ax blade at the king's orders. A potential usurper removed as a threat, a king unblemished for ordering the death of a hero. The king barely got out a nod of permission before Serovek was striding for the door, his escort of guards struggling to keep up with him as he raced for the stairwell.
The crowd's cheers reached deafening volumes when he jogged into the forum. He didn't dare call out to Anhuset, whose full concentration was centered on the scarpatine at the far end. He scrambled to find a suitable weapon for himself among wreckage of the weapons rack. There was no shield. Anhuset held the only one provided. Blades and polearms lay scattered in the sand. A sword would be useless against a creature with a carapace that worked like plate armor and was impervious to a sword's slash. He could take out its legs, but he'd have to come in close to do so. No shield meant no protection from that barbed tail which would impale him in an instant. His hand closed around his prize—a crow's beak with its hook on one side, ax blade on the other and spike crowning the top. A two-handed weapon with the long reach to keep him out of the way while he chopped away at the insect's legs. The limited reach caused by his shackles wouldn't stop him from effectively wielding such a weapon against the scarpatine.
He sprinted to where Anhuset and the scarpatine faced off, neither one getting the advantage over the other, though Serovek saw signs of Anhuset tiring. Her adversary remained just as quick, just as agile, and just as intent on making a meal of its annoyingly nimble prey. This close to the thing, his skin crawled at the sight of segmented legs, multiple eyes and bizarre jaws that extended and retracted over and over behind the protective wall of pincers. The spiky hairs covering its legs quivered at his approach, and the scarpatine spun to face this new threat, pincers clicking and snapping a warning.
Anhuset shouted at him over the boom of the audience's cheers. “No armor, no shield, and still in shackles.” She nodded to the crow's beak. “That will help if you can stay out of the way. I'll try to keep it trained on me while you hack away at it.”
She didn't question his presence or admonish him for it. She'd sized up his weaknesses and the challenges they presented and offered a solution for how to minimize both. She might strip off a piece of his hide later if they managed to survive this melée, but for now it was about the fight and only about the fight. It was one of many things about her that enthralled him.
The audience in the stands yelled his name and hers now, baying for blood, whether it was the scarpatine's or theirs. Anhuset balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to dart away the moment the insect lunged at her. “The plan is to stay alive,” she yelled. “But if you have a strategy, I'm listening.”
Serovek's only strategy until now was to convince the king to even let him on the forum grounds. He dodged the vicious tail, easing toward the creature's right side while Anhuset jabbed at its face behind the equally lethal pincers. They were effective shields, batting away the spearhead with ease, almost knocking it out of her hand.
A grim thought occurred to him as he watched Anhuset counter her opponent's moves—a memory of the sly triumph on Rodan's face when he gave permission for Serovek to enter the arena. Serovek didn't dwell on it. Couldn't dwell on it as he threw himself to the side when the tail swung toward him in a sweeping arc of venom droplets. A hot burn sizzled in spots down his arm and he glanced down to see scorch marks in his sleeve where the venom had struck the fabric. Somehow, they'd have to immobilize that tail or he'd never get to the legs.
“Are you burned?” Anhuset flung herself back from the swipe of a pincer, knocking it aside with her shield for good measure. “Take the shield!”
Were he not shackled, he'd accept her offer. She was better protected than he in her armor while he wasn't protected at all. But the chains limiting the reach of his arms made the shield more of a hindrance than a help, and he needed both hands to wield the crow's beak with any efficiency. “Keep it.” He saw an opening on the scarpatine's left flank and took it, darting in to hack at one of its legs. He only managed to cut off the tip of one before the creature swung so fast, its movement lifted Serovek's hair away from his face.
The edge of its outside claw caught Anhuset on the side, hurling her off her feet to slam into Serovek. He hit the ground in a cloud of blinding sand and an explosive exhalation that emptied his lungs of air. He heaved a gasping Anhuset off him, caught the edge of her dropped shield and raised it just in time to block a strike from the powerful tail. The barb slammed into the shield and through it, driving it toward Serovek's chest. Splinters of pain shot through his bones as he strained to hold the shield away from his body and watched a drop of venom pearl at the barb's tip, hanging there like a deadly raindrop.
He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye before another jarring shock juddered up his arms. He was slung to the side, the venom drop splattering in different directions. “Fuck!” he shouted as a sizzling heat blistered its way down his side. The world somersaulted in his vision as the scarpatine's tail, still stuck to the shield whipped one way, then the other. Serovek let go of the shield, waiting to drop and roll away as fast as he could.
Instead, his shackles clacked as they slid down the scarpatine's tail, taking him down as well. When he'd raised the shield to block the creature's strike, the chain connecting his wrists had looped over the tail, trapping him as surely as the shield still trapped the barb. The edge caught him hard in the shoulder twice and almost in the head once as the tail flailed and whipped, trying to arch over the insect's back so the pincers could grab what the tail had caught.
For all its size, the scarpatine wasn't strong enough to fling its heavy prey over its back. Serovek twisted the chain even tighter on the tail and dropped to his haunches, bent his knees and dug his heels hard in the dirt beneath the flyaway sand. “I have the tail down!” he shouted to Anhuset, who battled the pincers with the crow's beak he'd dropped. More venom splattered in a wide arc. “Climb it! Climb it!”
He didn't know if she heard him. The crowd's screaming nearly deafened him to everything except the skittering noise of numerous legs scrabbling through sand, the hard clicking of pincers, and the grating sound of insectile double jaws sliding across each other.
The muscles in his back, thighs, shoulders, and arms cramped as the scarpatine dragged him across the ground and tried to raise its tail. Its back was a landscape of square plates as hard as any armor he'd ever worn, protecting the creature's vulnerable insides. Beyond the view of Anhuset dodging the pincers, he saw the people standing in their seats, faces almost bestial in their zeal for the fighting. Anhuset suddenly swung out of sight only to reappear with a leap and stand on the insect's back.
She slid to one side, nearly losing her balance when the scarpatine arched, its body rippling under her feet in a roll of smooth armored plates. The movement threatened to wrench Serovek's shoulders out of their sockets and pull him to his feet. Anhuset widened her stance and held her balance. In one hand she gripped the crow's beak, in the other the leaf-blade spear. “Hold that tail,” she barked at him.”
“Not going anywhere,” he shouted back.
Her trust in his abilities humbled him, for she turned her back on the barb still impaling the shield. She almost lost her balance a second time avoiding the upward swing of the pincers as the scarpatine tried to reach its unwelcome rider while protecting its head. Serovek imagined her furious expression as she belted out expletives that made even his ears turn hot with a blush. Using the hook side of the crow's beak, she wedged the steel into the sliver of space between plates and jerked upward, exposing a patch of soft insides. She raised the arm holding the spear, slamming it down and at an angle, driving the spearhead past the steel and up the spear haft. Black liquid spurted out of the wound in a smoking, viscous sludge, the smell so foul, it made his eyes water. No savory scarpatine pie ever smelled this bad.
Anhuset leaped off the scarpatine's back but not before the sludge splashed across her greaves and the top of her boots. The scarpatine's legs collapsed, its body dropping flat and the heavy tail falling hard enough to knock Serovek onto his back under its weight. It no longer so much as twitched. The champion had won, and judging by the crowd's ecstatic cheering, all knew it.
She suddenly loomed over him, without the spear but still holding the crow's beak. “How did you manage to get yourself in such a bind?” Sand dusted her perspiring face, and she squinted hard in the unforgiving daylight.
“I seem to enjoy embracing things that can easily kill me,” he said and grinned. The urge to laugh soon followed, no doubt fueled by the miraculous fact they were both still alive to jest with each other.
