Reign of Shadows - Deborah Chester [103]
But by day, even if his footwork improved, his ability to work with the fake weapons did not. It was as though some strange force blocked the messages from his brain to his arm. By concentrating extremely hard, he could finally get his wrist and arm into the correct rhythm and perform the drills correctly, but as soon as his opponent shifted or attacked, Caelan muffed the whole thing and ended up with the blunt end of his opponent’s practice weapon rammed painfully against his breastbone or pressing hard against his neck.
“By the gods, I’d like to cut off your bloody head,” swore Nux when their practice bout ended in the usual way. He held Caelan pinned for longer than was allowed, glaring into Caelan’s eyes.
“I will cut it off tomorrow,” he said. A brawny Serian with a flat broken nose and no front teeth, he was a veteran of the arena and had been here for two years, the longest of anyone.
He fought in a weird style unlike any of the others, and his taunts were the worst. Somehow he always seemed to know what his opponent secretly feared the most, and he preyed on that, laughing as he attacked. He had never been deemed good enough to make it to the private arenas, despite the fact that he’d survived four seasons in the last two years.
A season lasted three months, with three months’ rest while new fighters were trained. That meant each year was supposed to have two seasons. However, when the common arena was at rest, many of the private arenas were in season. That meant any citizen of Imperia, providing he had the means and the access, could attend a gladiatorial contest any given day of the year.
It was a bloody madness, a public obsession at its worst here in the capital city. It used up men voraciously, with the dead piling up in a carnage nearly equal to that of a battlefield. While the war with Madrun continued, there were plenty of prisoners of war to be hauled in to supplement the ranks of fighters.
Many people in Imperia disapproved of the practice, and that disapproval was said to be slowly gaining popularity. Critics who dared speak out claimed the arena games were an outdated piece of savagery. The empire had grown and matured beyond such barbarism, and the arena should be left behind in the dim past of a less civilized era, where it belonged.
Of course to criticize the games was to criticize the emperor, who had organized them long, long ago in his first incarnation. It was even whispered that those who wanted the games banned and the arenas closed wanted the emperor to die that the world might go on into a modern age.
There were many discoveries, many practices of new knowledge supposedly banned by imperial decree. As the centuries had passed, the emperor seemed to want to cling to the old ways more and more. He resisted modern progress in every way possible. That’s why the army was still organized into fighting legions, still armed with old-fashioned shortswords for the infantry, still encumbered with ancient rituals while the officers rebelliously wore modern armor plate and carried more efficient weapons.
Now and then people were heard to say, “When Tirhin is emperor, things will change.”
But they did not say such things often or very loudly, without first looking over their shoulders. It was still considered treason to utter such a statement. And officially Tirhin had not been named as successor.
The prince himself was apparently