Chapter One
In a stone-walled underground cell with a small, barred window and a strong wooden door locked from the outside, a woman stood in front of a mirror of polished bronze and donned her weapons with meticulous care. She was tall and possessed the strong musculature of an active athlete generously padded with a thick layer of fat, most of it distributed on her ample breasts, stomach, backside and thighs, forming a voluptuous figure of eight. Her dark hair was cut a handbreadth under her shoulders and woven into a tight French braid. Her caramel skin boasted several scars, mementos of wounds made by swords, trigons and spears, all of them sustained within the past year, month and seventeen days, except the one on her right thigh. That one was from a bullet that grazed her in a drug bust in her rookie year at the Houston PD.
She wore armor made of layered brown leather. Many fighters preferred metal, but she found it too clunky. Leather was lighter, more flexible. It breathed, and was just as effective as steel, provided it was properly made. And hers was. No fighter ever stepped out onto the sands of the Pit of Wallaria unless they were of sound mind and body and properly equipped both offensively and defensively. Hers was a composite consisting of a scale cuirass with faulds made of wide leather strips, pauldrons on her shoulders, greaves on her legs, and vambraces with hand and elbow guards, the underside of each hiding a retractable dagger. Whereas the majority of other fighters used knives and daggers as secondary weapons, she used nothing but them, which is why she had a pair strapped to her forearms and her thighs, and over a dozen throwing knives stashed away in the secret folds of her armor.
Outside, she could hear the masses chanting.
“Hele! Hele! Hele!”
An understanding of the Common Tongue of Elamaren was one of the first skills she acquired since her abduction, but the name she had been given was a word of her mistress’ native tongue.
Hele.
Behemoth.
Pain shot through her, and she closed her eyes tight, counting backward from ten before she opened them again, looking at herself, at this person she had become to survive. She felt her heart clench.
“I am Teresa Luz Echeverría, of Houston, Texas, USA,” she said, in English, hard determination in her clear, deep voice as she willed herself to remember the one truth no one could take from her. She touched the bullet scar, the sole anchor to her old life. “I am twenty-seven, a human woman of the planet Earth. I am a soldier. I am a policewoman. I’ve survived foster care, high school, a tour in Afghanistan and six months of hazing my first year on the Force, and I’ll be damned if I won’t survive this, too. This wretched hive will burn to the ground one day... but I’ll still be standing.” Eyes firmly on the mirror, she repeated her mantra, in Spanish this time, and then again, in Pashto and Dari each.
They could take her from her home.
They could enslave her.
They could beat her, starve her, give her a derogatory name.
They could force her to fight others for their entertainment, and then slap a pleasure-collar on her and sell her to the highest bidder.
But they could not take who and what she was. Never.
“Listen how they call for you,” a smooth, lilting voice called out from the hallway, and Teresa mentally reminded herself that killing the woman the voice belonged to would be counterproductive to her goals. After unlocking and removing the beam that both closed and fortified the door to her cell, the door opened and two... well... let’s be generous and call them men, walked in. They were twins, and by far the largest of all the different sentient beings Teresa had become acquainted with since her abduction. They were at least a foot and a half taller than her and built of nothing but solid muscle. Their skin was a sooty dark gray covered in thin, coarse hair, and their enormous heads, which had large jowls and mean teeth that seemed to always be bared in a snarl, grew directly from their shoulders.
The Garn could be called many things, but easy on the eyes wasn’t one of them.
They positioned themselves on each side of the door, both dressed in chainmail and leather and armed to the teeth, watching her as if they couldn’t wait to be given the order to rip her apart.
But the woman who entered after them would never give that order, at least not while she could still make money out of Teresa.
She was the most beautiful creature ever created, a resplendent sample of the Skatian race. Tall, taller than Teresa, and built to willowy perfection, her features were exquisitely delicate, and her silvery hair, straight as an arrow, cascaded down her back all the way to her hips, always behaving perfectly, as if she were an anime goddess. Her skin was a powdery, pale beige hue that marked her as a member of the noble caste, flawless, and perfumed with a fresh, flowery scent Therese would’ve loved if she did not associate it with her current fate. The woman wore, as always, a long, flowing gown of gossamer silk in pale, pastel colors, strategically layered to tantalize the observer’s imagination yet reveal nothing, and no jewelry save for the long, layered necklace of painstakingly thin chains that cascaded from the graceful column of her neck to the tips of her demure bosom.
Her name was Esplyn of House Rida, and Teresa hated her with all the passion of the undying fire of a thousand suns.
“My Hele,” the woman cooed, as she observed her property. Teresa did not correct her. It was not worth the pain and humiliation of the punishment she would have to endure for it once the fight was over.
She’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“You must be very careful to put on a good show today,” her mistress instructed her, in the tone one would usually use on a mentally underdeveloped child, and petted Teresa’s cheek. “We have special guests in the audience today – a diplomatic envoy from Kinai – and we want them to have fun.” Her face scrunched in disgust. “Filthy barbarians,” she sneered but reverted quickly to her usual graceful serenity in a second. “But, alas, we must play nice with them,” she sighed, the sound of a long-suffering person resigned to their fate.
Personally, it made Teresa want to punch her (more so than usually, that is). There were many people in Wallaria who deserved to feel sorry for themselves, but not this woman. As a scion of a noble family and the favorite lover of the High General, Lady Esplyn had lived a life of splendor and privilege since the day she was born, and probably would until the day she died. Even this – buying, training, and working slaves for Pit fights – was nothing but a hobby to her, a game to pass the time and indulge her sadistic urges.
But Teresa knew better than to say or do anything that would give her mistress any reason to be displeased with her, so she just stood there and waited to see if this conversation had a point.
And, when Lady Esplyn snatched Teresa’s chin in her spindly fingers and pulled her head up to face her, she knew she was about to find out.
“You must win today,” she ordered, in that cruel tone of voice Teresa knew to dread, “That bitch Sangra paid off the Pit Master to pair you with that Firuzian bitch-boy of hers, and I want to see you annihilate him. Do you understand?” Teresa nodded. She understood, perhaps better than her mistress thought. No matter how hard their masters tried to isolate and desensitize their fighters to prevent them from forming bonds amongst themselves or organizing a rebellion (as had been the case a few times in the past), they still found a way to communicate amongst themselves.
More to the point, though, her training had conditioned her to be observant, vigilant and always aware of her surroundings, and she gathered information in her head like an ant gathers food for the winter.
She knew, then, that the reason Lady Esplyn was on edge today was because her main rival in the High General’s bed, Lady Sangra of House Chenei, had issued what was tantamount to a public challenge by influencing the Pit Master to pair up the fighters to her liking. In itself, this was not strange, but when it happened without the mutual agreement of the fighters’ masters... oh, yes. Lady Sangra could not have made her motives any clearer if she had hired all the criers in Wallaria to shout it from the rooftops.
Teresa also knew the reputation of the man she was about to take on, and that only added to the pressure she suddenly found put upon her.
The Firuzian, whom Teresa had never heard referred to by his name, was as famous for his fighting prowess as he was for his beauty and extravagant style, and a recent addition to the Pit roster. He was an Adonis among bog monsters when compared to all the other male fighters she knew, with his powerful, perfectly chiseled musculature set upon a tall, wide frame. Teresa found the combination of his athletic, humanoid features and the defining traits of his race – completely smooth, hairless skin the color of oiled bronze, sharply angled cheekbones and slanted, almond-shaped eyes with irises of sparkling gold, roughly three times as large as that of an average human – extremely attractive. And she was not the only one, for it was said that his mistress charged obscene amounts of money to those who wished to indulge in that impeccable body, and there were rumors he spent every night he was not rented out in Lady Sangra’s bed.
There was no doubt that the Firuzian was an expert killing machine as well as a skilled showman. Teresa honestly wasn’t sure she would come out of this fight alive, let alone win – especially not in the spectacular fashion her mistress had demanded.
“Win, my Hele,” Esplyn hissed in her face, “Or I shall grant a week’s worth of playtime with you to the twins.” Teresa gulped, terrified and disgusted at the memory of the last time the mistress had put the pleasure-collar on her and let her attack dogs have her way with her, and nodded again. “Excellent,” Esplyn smiled, all gentleness and sweetness again, and began to walk out.
“Oh,” she said, pausing, and glanced at Teresa over her shoulder, “And do try to cut up his face.” With that, Esplyn left the cell, and her goons with her, but the door did not close. Instead, four guards entered, wearing armor in red and tan, the colors worn by all those who worked in the Pit.
The time had come.
They would escort her to the Pit, where she would fight for her life yet again.
May God grant her mercy in this merciless place.