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Gladiatorial combat has been a central pillar of many civilisations’ entertainment—the method by which their minds are diverted from the issues that truly impact their lives. The balance between emotional and physical suffering in such contests swings with the prevailing societal winds.

Big Brother: Season 8—A Companion Guide , by David Macaw

Arpix

Blue Tower Square boasted five paved acres starting to bake beneath an increasingly hot sun. Bleachers offered seating along three of the four sides, tiered eight rows high, the timbers so fresh as to still be bleeding sap around the bolt heads securing one piece to the next.

A crowd of thousands had largely assembled itself and proved every bit as ready for entertainment as the smaller one that had gathered to watch Arpix hang the day before in a different square further down the slope. Hawkers moved up and down, calling out their wares to the packed stands. Beer, salted bread, sausages, flags, even highly inaccurate models of skeer fashioned from clay or wood.

Along the most distant side of the square, black cloths, large as sails, obscured what might be half a dozen large crates—the breeze exposed a glint of bars. The most important-looking members of the audience sat directly opposite these cages, high up, a splash of colour amid the more drably garbed populace. A line of orderlies to either side ensured that money didn’t have to rub elbows with aspiration. Arpix considered the possibility that the potentate himself might be sitting amidst the nobility and persons of influence arrayed between those two lines. He concluded that it was unlikely such a man would leave himself so exposed.

Front and centre below the dignitaries stood a double line of armoured soldiers, each with a gloved hand on the barrel of a long gun that rested with its stock on the ground. And in front of the troopers, standing a little way out on the square itself, six or seven individuals, no one of them like the other. Arpix wasn’t sure if he should call them soldiers or mercenaries, champions perhaps. All of them appeared well equipped in both the weapons and armour departments. All of them looked very intimidating. He counted four canith and three humans, carrying a variety of guns, some longer than a man, some short but with a barrel almost as wide as a cannon’s, others with multiple barrels.

“Surely this is madness?” Arpix gazed at the stands where families watched on with eager faces, some unpacking food as they waited for the theatre to start. “These people are in danger!”

“If they’ve got skeer under those covers, then yes they are,” Clovis agreed.

Arpix had meant from stray bullets, but Clovis was right too. He saw now that the heavy palisade of timber behind the covered cages must be to stop the insectoids escaping in that direction, and also to prevent the challengers’ shots from peppering the buildings behind. That still meant that any free skeer could charge off over the stands, cutting a swathe of carnage through the seated audience before dropping off the back.

“This way!” A uniformed man approached Clovis, Arpix, and the stragglers still arriving behind them. “Get to your seats. They’re nearly ready!”

Clovis ignored the orderly and set off along the inside perimeter in the opposite direction, towards the group with the weapons. One, the tallest canith Arpix had ever seen, dressed in a blue velvet waistcoat, and with a mane teased into a mass of curls, all set with gold rings like a storybook pirate, turned to watch her approach. Beside him a woman half his height and almost spherical, but muscly with it, said something that made him laugh. The woman shook her head and returned her attention to a blunderbuss taller than she was.

“Wait! Stop!” The orderly took the words from Arpix’s mouth.

“Where’s she going?” A woman in the same uniform joined the man in pursuit of Clovis.

“She’s heading for the contestants!” The man gave chase.

Arpix bit back on his own objections and followed too.

Clovis shook off two attempts to intercept her and earned a few cheers along with scattered jeers from the crowd. Several more of the contestants turned her way as she drew closer.

“Who the hell are you?” The hulking canith with the cannon scowled at Clovis.

“She brought a sword.” One of the two men smirked before looking back down the large sighting tube of the long, gleaming gun he had pointed downrange, supported on a slender tripod. “How quaint.”

“I didn’t know this was a free-for-all,” the other man growled. Where his companion was tall, bald, and of middling years, this one was hairy, athletic, and sported a sizeable number and variety of handguns holstered about his person.

Arpix wasn’t sure how the scene would end, but he fully expected it to start with Clovis breaking someone’s face.

“Madam!” An orderly caught up with Clovis, another took hold of Arpix’s arm. “You have to return to the stands.”

A couple of soldiers moved forward to impose the peace.

“I know how to fight skeer,” Clovis said, not backing down. “You should let me show you how it’s done.”

“An Iccrah without a rifle. How droll.” The “pirate” peered down at her, then drew two heavy, double-barrelled guns, each nearly two feet long, from his silk waistband. “Sit yourself down, lass, and let the Kraffians show you how we do it.”

Two soldiers converged on Clovis, each reaching for an arm. Arpix winced, anticipating the violence which neither man, confident in their uniform, seemed to know was coming their way.

“Find her a seat!” the pirate boomed. “Don’t arrest the wench. Let’s just get on with this, shall we?”

Whether through expediency or an unconscious instinct for self-preservation, the soldiers followed the pirate’s command, and Clovis allowed herself to be turned towards the stands behind the combatants. Some lordling a couple of rows back waved wearily for space to be made for her.

Arpix, by contrast, was manhandled back to where they’d entered and given a shove towards the public seating. He found a place, and sat down, feeling the splinters through his newly acquired trousers. His hunger had returned after a night’s sleep but somehow the pervasive aroma of the many foodstuffs on offer left him feeling slightly ill. He knew what was in those cages, and whatever happened once they were opened would not be pretty.

A hush fell as an announcer in colourful silks strode out. Arpix couldn’t hear what he was shouting—it seemed to be primarily for the benefit of the aristocracy—but after a short while the herald retreated and two of the three human champions stepped forward, the tall bald man with the very long gun, and the hairy, younger one with all his handguns.

At the far side of the square, wranglers drew back the black cloth from one cage, and the audience gasped at the large white creature revealed within. The men retreated behind their barrier and pulled on ropes to raise the bars at the front.

The skeer emerged awkwardly and scanned the arena with multiple eye-pits. The midnight-blue trim on its armour plates drank in the sunlight. Arpix could see that one of its legs had been shattered, ichor spattering the broken chitin exoskeleton. As it made ungainly progress across the flagstones, Arpix realised that something was wrong with all of its legs. He sucked his breath in in distaste. Each limb had been foreshortened, the sharp points cut back by a foot or more, so that it walked on weeping stumps.

The first shot cracked out, striking the skeer in the middle of its eye clusters. Pieces of chitin flew out and the skeer’s whole body flinched. The boom of the gun and sizeable cloud of smoke focused the skeer on the direction of the attack.

“How is it not dead?” a woman beside Arpix complained.

Arpix couldn’t answer that one.

The skeer began an excruciating, broken advance towards the shooter. The bald man started to reload as the other, with his great dark mop of hair, strolled out to meet the creature, a gun in either hand.

The second man began firing with a quarter of the square’s width still between him and the skeer. He shot rapidly with both weapons, smoke billowing in puffs, pieces spraying from the skeer where the bullets hit. The creature lurched on drunkenly, a shrill wail pulsing from it. Behind it, the half-dozen covered crates began to vibrate, one jolting left, another actually lifting from the ground before crashing down.

With a hundred yards to go, the man discarded both handguns and pulled two more from his harness. With fifty yards to go, he began to fire again, aiming for the skeer’s head. It seemed clear to Arpix that whilst some of the bullets were turned by the thick chitin armour, many were not, and white ichor leaked from the holes they made, blackish-grey where a shot found an eye.

“Lie down!” a man shouted behind Arpix.

“Why won’t it die?” A child’s voice.

Scattered shouts of outrage mixed with fear went up along the bleachers. And still the maimed skeer staggered towards its small tormentor.

With ten yards between them the gunman exhausted his ammunition and reached for what might be his final weapon. The skeer dwarfed him, drawing back the arm with the lance-like end to it.

BOOM. The long gun spoke again, and this time the pieces flew from the back of the skeer’s head. With a shudder it slumped to ruin, its arm reaching for the man before it, and dropping to within a yard of his boot toes.

A shocked silence held long enough for the echo of the final gun to die away, only to be broken by the erupting cheers of the crowd. The people around Arpix surged to their feet and he stood too.

The man with the handguns turned and began to walk away, pausing to pick up discarded weapons. Arpix didn’t fully trust the skeer not to launch itself after him in a broken scramble. But the insectoids were just very hard to kill, not supernatural, and it lay where it had fallen, still twitching.

A new hush spread as the one Arpix had mentally dubbed “the pirate” stepped forward with an appropriate degree of swagger. People began returning their backsides to the benches.

“This’ll be good,” the old woman to Arpix’s left confided to a similarly antique friend.

The day dimmed slightly. High cloud in front of the sun, most likely.

At the far end, another black cloth whipped away from another cage.

The bars lifted and a second hobbled skeer skittered out, losing its footing on the flagstones. The mutilation of its “feet” was the only obvious measure taken with this one.

The pirate strode out to meet his opponent, heavy guns in hand. Something swift and glittering flicked by, momentarily eclipsing the pirate’s flamboyance. In the wake of this interruption the canith stumbled, fell to his knees firing both guns at the ground, and toppled forward.

“Where’s his head?” the old woman’s friend asked.

Blood sheeted in front of the fallen pirate, and Arpix found the same question on his own lips. Where was his head?

More guns boomed. People started to scream. And the missing head bounced on the flagstones. Arpix saw the flier then. Lighter than the skeer soldier, or even the long-legged runners, the flier was all limbs and sharp edges, white and hard to see against the sky save for the iridescent shimmer of its wings. More swooped in, a dozen perhaps. Plumes of smoke rose in front of the privileged seating as a score of the potentate’s troopers opened up, loosing bullets skywards.

The fliers dived in, spiralling as they came, hitting from multiple angles. One ploughed a furrow along the full length of the soldiers’ rank, razored limbs shearing through flesh, leaving a wash of crimson ruin in its path as it took to the heights again.

The mercenaries—or whatever they were—in front of Clovis threw a thunderous barrage into the air and several fliers came tumbling down with shredded wings or shattered limbs. Moments later, the glittering cloud descended. More shots rattled out. Arpix saw a young woman in the stands lose half the back of her head as a stray bullet emerged from her long hair.

Screams and yells from the mercenaries were lost in the general uproar of the crowd. Something about the situation, the fact that it was still an arena, and they were still an audience, had kept the great majority of people where they were. Some sensible few were escaping from the rear of the stands, dropping down and making a run for the edges of the square. But most either sat or stood where they were, shouting their anger, or screaming it behind the shake of a fist, as if some invisible barrier protected them from the skeer’s invasion.

The lone skeer soldier turned in place as if seeking some foe worthy of it.

As one the fliers lifted. A handful remained broken and twitching amongst the broken and twitching bodies of the humans and canith that had been chosen to show their superiority. An almost silence reigned beneath the fluttering buzz of skeer wings as the five remaining fliers gained height in a knot, each weaving around the others. Arpix had seen skeer intelligence at work before. They had brought cratalacs to defeat the forbidding that protected the Arthran Plateau. They had dropped rocks to pierce the barrier that held them at bay. But this, this was a different order. This was warfare of the mind. The people of New Kraff craned their necks and watched the blood drip like rain. In moments the skeer would break formation and everyone would run. Arpix imagined that more would die beneath the feet of their fellow citizens than to the skeer’s predations. But either way, it would be slaughter.

Clovis’s emergence onto the square went almost unnoticed. It wasn’t until she was well clear and raised her white sword, with the transfixed head of a skeer flier impaled upon it, that the eyes of the crowd found her. The skeer soldier saw her too and started its hobbled advance.

Clovis had scooped up one of the fallen pirate’s short guns, and demonstrated that he hadn’t fully shot his load by firing it at the aerial display above her. The weapon’s boom, and the peppering of small projectiles, focused all insectoid attention on her, along with that of the crowd. The challenge had to be met, and as if animated by a single mind, all five fliers ceased the vibration of their wings, falling towards Clovis in a tumbling confusion.

Arpix had seen this before, when Clovis had arrived at the plateau with Evar and Kerrol. Even so, both his heart and his breath seemed to stop. When she had danced amid the thrusting cloud of needled limbs that first time, Arpix hadn’t even known her name. He had stood, amazed at her skill, but hadn’t properly valued what could so easily be lost at the slightest misstep.

The fliers reached her before the soldier did. Clovis moved with the blinding speed of her kind, scything the white sword through limbs that would have entangled any lesser blade. She let her foes crowd each other, and used their flight against them, carving ruinous wounds every time an opening presented itself. Two of the skeer hit the ground as if they’d made no attempt to check their speed at the last moment. Another lost two legs, then two more. A fourth fell into unequal halves. And as the fifth flier lunged for the skies, Clovis acknowledged the soldier’s arrival by climbing the thing.

She bounced from one leg to another and onto its back. Before the soldier could twist to lunge at her, Clovis had executed a huge leap, her lead foot powering off the soldier’s shoulder. Against all possibility, she caught one of the escaping flier’s trailing limbs, clamped a hand around the end of the leg, and forced the skeer to drag her into the sky with it.

She stabbed up into its thorax then dropped. Arpix’s gasp became one with the thousands watching. Clovis had released her grip too high: the fall yawning beneath her was more than from the roof of a three-storey building, onto hard stone.

Clovis slammed into the ground, landing on her feet, then hands, then knees. Her side hit the slabs next as she rolled to absorb the impact. She lay motionless for a beat. Two beats. The crowd held its tongue. Already the soldier had turned to face her. Now it started to close the five yards between them.

As one, the whole audience flinched when the forgotten flier hammered down in an ungainly tangle of limbs, almost hitting Clovis. The impact cracked the skeer or the paving slabs, or both.

“No!” Arpix’s shout joined hundreds of others protesting the unfairness as the soldier skeer loomed over Clovis’s prone form. It raised its blade-arm like a chef preparing to chop vegetables for the pot, and the cries from the stands turned to screams.

Clovis rose an instant before the soldier could take its swing, pushing her sword ahead of her, driving the length of it up through the skeer’s head. When she stood, she brought the crowd’s roar up with her, victory and relief mixing in the many-throated cry.

She hadn’t finished, though. Not trusting in a sword through the head to finish her opponent, she lunged and twisted, using the entire weight of her body to enlarge the wound then bring the blade out through the skeer’s face, trailing white ichor.

The soldier collapsed behind her as she walked away.