Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel (24 page)

The stadium filled with polite applause.
Stepping into the sandy open arena, cold sweat beaded on her
forehead as she slid the short sword from its sheath. My god, she
thought as her mind flitted back to her civilized life in the
bunker, never in million years did I imagine ending up here.

“That’s the Galatian?” a man yelled out from
the crowd. “She’s just a Commoner, scared out of her mind. What is
this theater company trying to pull?”

The crowd started to grumble.

“Sit down, good sir,” Mr. Bayloo stood in his
sectioned-off portion of the bleachers reserved for himself and his
entourage, still wrapped in his blanket. “Wait until you see what
she’s got.”

The man sat down, protesting to his friends
about being duped, while Mr. Bayloo signaled for Seleth to cut the
speech short and bring out the competition. The doors at the
opposite side of the arena swung open.

Even as a shadow, Josie instantly recognized
the tuft of hair wrapped around the bone.

“Oh, no,” she said, taking a step back. It
was Big Clo, with a steel club in one hand and a spear in the
other.

As trained to do, the two women met in the
middle of the arena to do the customary fist tap.

“Big Clo,” Josie said tearfully. “What do we
do now?”

“Fight,” Clo said in her simple way.

“No,” Josie said. “Let’s put down our weapons
and refuse.”

“No fight, no stogie. Me fight.”

“Let the battle begin!” Seleth shouted. The
crowd clapped, while Josie backed away, shaking her head.

“I can’t do this, Clo. Not to you.”

Clo moved forward like a freight train,
swinging her club. Josie ducked and felt the power in that swing
eddy the flyaway hairs on the top of her head. A smattering of
applause went through the crowd.

As much as Josie didn’t want to fight, she
wanted even less to die. Damn Big Clo’s stogie addiction. Until
now, she hadn’t realized how deep it went.

Josie’s resolve to die for the sake of her
convictions was beginning to unravel. Opening the Excito within, in
her mind’s eye she saw an endless ocean beneath a tangerine sky. An
island covered with lush green foliage, rising up and up,
disappeared into the golden clouds. White birds flittered all
around. Josie could smell the clean salt spray mixed with a sweet
perfume unlike anything on Earth. The vaporous ocean breeze filled
her up. Invigorated, teeming with energy and power, she saw a flash
of white and the vision was gone. She was no longer straddling two
worlds, but firmly standing in only one, but the Excito still
reached into that other realm, sending her vital energy.

Big Clo was too dumb to be culpable for her
actions. Determined to disarm her, rather than kill her, Josie
tried to reason with her one more time.

“Don’t do this, Clo. We’re friends.”

“Love stogies.”

“Today, if you win, what will you get? Ten
smokes maybe? Haven’t I given you at least twenty stogies? Do the
math. You’ll get more stogies if I live.”

“Hate math.” Clo replied and threw a spear
straight at her head.

Josie snatched the spear out of the air. The
crowd jumped to its feet with a roar of approval, but nobody was
more surprised than Josie by her impossibly fast reflexes. Thank
god for the charisma. She took the spear and broke its shaft over
her knee.

“I will not fight you, Clo.”

“Stogies,” Clo said, coming at her with the
club again. The Gargo swung straight down, intending to crush
Josie’s head, but she rolled out of the way. Clo was strong, but
her brain didn’t work very fast. The club smacked the ground so
hard it bounced back up to hit her own face.

“Ow.” Her thumbtack eyes instantly drooped.
Clo fell backward unconscious, hitting the ground like a tree
trunk.

“Timber!” some smartass shouted from the
crowd.

The crowd laughed so hard that Josie couldn’t
hear herself think; people were slapping their knees, doubling over
and falling in between the bleachers holding their stomachs. Josie
knelt next to Big Clo in concern. Dark red blood was flowing out of
her gaping mouth, bulbous nose and Dumbo ears. She leaned in next
to Big Clo’s mouth to listen. Yes, she was still breathing.

Glancing up at Mr. Bayloo in his lofty perch,
he made the motion of breaking his pretend stick. Angry that he had
caused this senseless suffering, no way would she comply. Standing
again, she cupped a hand to her mouth and shouted up to him.

“Take your imaginary stick and shove it down
your throat, Mr. Bayloo!”

She flung her sword across the arena at the
painted billboard of Mr. Bayloo. It lodged symbolically right in
the center of his laughing mouth. The crowd was on their feet,
cheering.

The real Mr. Bayloo stood up, blanket falling
around his feet, face beet red and mouth in a tight angry line. His
goons marched through the sand to grab her. The crowd busted out
with more applause, and riotous laughter.

“Punish the Bitch, punish the Bitch, punish
the Bitch,” the spectators chanted.

The trainers were getting closer. Josie
didn’t try to run. It’d be futile anyway. They took her by both
arms and led her off the field through the waiting area. This must
be what it felt like to walk to the gallows. The grim-faced actors
stepped out of the way as the trainers led her past the cells down
another corridor into a large windowless room with walls hewn from
dirt and rocks. A couple of torches burned on the wall. Wooden
tables of varying height and shapes, some covered in spikes, others
affixed with ropes, pulleys and leather straps, filled the room. A
shelf holding caged snakes, rodents, and various insects sat in the
corner of the room.

A grayish mole of a humanoid, with a pink
nose and white whiskers, wearing a monocle over one pink eye, stood
behind a wheeled aluminum cart filled with rusting metal
instruments—scalpels, scissors, forceps, needles, metal halos and
more.

Josie tried to pull away from the trainers,
but their grasp remained firm. This isn’t the time to panic, she
told herself in the face of pending torture. Concentrate, open the
doors to the mystical ocean, and you will find a way out of this
jam. But a moment later, a commotion at the door broke her
concentration.

Mr. Bayloo, dressed in yellow tights, purple
pantaloons, and a maroon jacket, elbowed his way into the room. His
face remained red. Curses were coming out of his mouth so fast,
they seemed to be strangling him.

“Strap her in.”

Josie flung open the internal doorway to her
charisma, but was only partially immersed in its power when the
trainers tightened their grips. She knocked a Commoner over and
smashed a Bulwark’s nose, but there were simply too many people to
fight. Before she knew it, they had carried her over to one of the
tables and were strapping her down.

“By the gods, bitch,” one of them said as he
struggled to get her last limb into the strap. “How can someone so
little small be so much strong?”

Her chest was heaving in a mixture of
frustration, fear and anger, as it took three of them to finally
secure her right arm, leaving her unable to move anything but her
head. Calm down and try to open the mystical doorway again. The
room fell quiet as Mr. Bayloo came to stand over her, leaning
threateningly close to her face.

“When I break the stick, you follow
through.”

“I will not!”

“Oh, yes, you will.”

“I’d rather die than fill your pockets with
the blood of innocent people.”

“Start with her little toe, Mrs. Snippy,” Mr.
Bayloo said to the mole-like humanoid standing behind the cart.
Mrs. Snippy held up a pair of scissors, while the others stood back
a little ways. She felt one of the scissor’s cold metal blades
glide between her fourth and fifth toe.

“Please, no, don’t,” Josie pleaded.

“Then go back in and finish off your
opponent.”

“I can’t,” Josie shook her head vigorously,
“Clo’s thoughts are those of a child. How can you live with
yourself forcing someone like that to fight?”

Bayloo nodded at Snippy, who in turn, pressed
the scissors together.

Incredible pain lightning through her
foot.

A woman screamed.

Oh, god. Josie realized the screams were her
own.

Her entire foot seemed to throb like a heart
held in boiling oil, while the mole woman brought up the severed
toe to Josie’s face so she could see it better.

“Goodbye, cute little toesie,” Snippy said
with a giggle, before tossing it to a cage of rats in the corner.
The rodents fought over the toe nugget, rapidly devouring it.
“Don’t worry, my little pets, there’s plenty for everyone. One
down, nine to go, how delightful!”

“Are you ready to follow my directions?” Mr.
Bayloo asked. Not wanting him to see her cry, she turned her face
away from him as a single tear slid down her cheek, dropping to the
dusty floor. “Do a finger this time,” Mr. Bayloo suggested. “Make
her look normal.”

“I’m more authentically Galatian with five on
each hand and that will bring you more customers—” Josie
desperately tried to appeal to his love of money. “If I only have
four fingers, people will accuse you of tricking them with a mere
Commoner—right?”

“That’s true,” Mr. Bayloo said, scratching
his chin. “But it’s difficult to tell the difference between four
fingers and five from up in the stands. And as long as one hand
still has five…so go ahead, Mrs. Snippy, do a pinky.”

“No, no, no...”

The mole-woman wiped the blood off the
scissors with a greasy rag and arranged the blades around Josie’s
left pinky.

Mrs. Snippy slammed the scissors closed.
There was no pain at all. At least not for five seconds. Then it
hit Josie like a grenade, exploding up her arm. She screamed so
loud that some of the goons flinched and held their ears. Her pinky
didn’t come all the way off, so Mrs. Snippy wiggled it back and
forth trying to break it off the last splinters of bone.

Agony.

“Hold on a moment,” Mr. Bayloo said.

Mrs. Snippy let go, while Josie’s finger was
left dangling by a splinter of bone and a few tendons.

“Now will you go out and finish what you
started, Bitch of Galatia?”

“My name is Josephine Albright,” she hissed,
glaring her defiance.

“Why not take the hand this time?” Mrs.
Snippy suggested as she ran her hairy gray fingers along the
Seeker’s chain. “Then you can take her lovely pendant.”

Mr. Bayloo struck the mole woman’s hand with
his decorative cane. Mrs. Snippy let out a shrill cry and pulled
her hand away.

“No one touches my merchandise without
permission.”

Mrs. Snippy’s head tilted back, chin
quivering, as if she were having a major orgasm.

“Oh, Mr. Bayloo, that hurt so
wonderfully.”

“The girl belongs to me, which means the
pendant is already mine. The longer she remains alive, that’s just
butter and syrup on the flap jacks. For now, she remains in one
piece.”

“But I thought you wanted me to slice her
up?”

“Only the non-vital pieces,” Mr. Bayloo said
with a chuckle. “A toe, a finger, an ear...losing a few of them
won’t diminish her fighting skills, so snip away.”

“May the Angel of Galatia smite you,” Josie
panted hatefully through her pain, glaring at everyone in the room.
“You and your whole damn theater company!”

“I’ll burn that sass out of you yet,
Galatian. Mrs. Snippy, get the hot iron.”

(Larsen Drey Steelsun)

The show had started over an hour ago. When
it was halfway through, the trainers escorted Lars to one of the
staging areas for his debut fight. As they led him through the
stone hallways his mind whirled a mile a minute. How had Josie
done? Was she hurt? Would his opponent be a person, a beast or
both? Would he lose a limb? Would he live to see another day?

When he arrived in the staging area, Crash
was standing there surrounded by small humanoids with light brown
skin, pointed ears and large brown eyes—wood elves. Too small and
weak to be effective fighters—they took care of many of the menial
jobs around the theater company. Currently, they were polishing
Crash’s chest armor to a black shine. Other fighters were there,
some in deep meditation, others huddled together in conversations.
The actors and trainers instantly quieted at Lars’s arrival.

“What?” Lars couldn’t help but ask.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump. He
turned to see a blue-green face slashed with old battle scars
grinning at him—Slaughterhouse.

“Mr. Bayloo has a special surprise for you in
the armor room, Dread of the West,” he said.

“Dread of the West?”

“That’s your new stage name, Galatian,”
Slaughterhouse informed.

“No fair!” one of the other actors protested.
“I had to win ten fights in a row before I got real armor.”

Lars knew that his skills had impressed
everyone, but he didn’t expect this little honor so soon. He
chastised himself for caring, for getting wrapped up in theater
life, but a sprout of pride shot up when the other slaves regarded
him with jealous eyes.

This was a cell block he hadn’t seen before.
The room was dank and dim like the rest of them. Other than dirty
straw on the floor, it was completely empty. No armor in sight.
Some of the other trainers entered the room and when they circled
around, danger bells began to ring.

“Wh-what’s going on?”

Slaughterhouse sucker punched him in the
stomach.

Lars doubled over with a grunt.

“What I did I do?” he said, holding his
stomach, trying to catch his breath.

“You were born,” Slaughterhouse replied and
turned to the other trainers in the room. “Now let’s show this
dirty Galatian a good time.”