Jane Carver of Waar (30 page)

T
hat night all us winners got a special dinner, with Texas-size slabs of meat, rich side dishes, wine and tasty treats, and then for our bonus, our “reward,” we each got to pick a whore and take her to a private room in the trainer’s house. Well, all of us except me.

I got the dinner all right, though I didn’t enjoy it much. The rest of the table kept giving me the fish eye all the way through, all except for Lhan, but somehow we found it hard to make conversation. But after dessert, when all the rest of the winners went off with their chosen hos, I wasn’t given the option. I didn’t speak up either. Somehow this didn’t feel like the time to find out how easygoing this society was about “alternative lifestyles.”

What I hoped would happen was that Lhan would think of it and ask me, but he didn’t even pick a whore. Maybe he was used to a better class of pro back in high society Ormolu. I didn’t get to ask him. When lights-out came, me, Lhan and the losers were all locked back in our separate bunkhouses just like every other night.

It was pretty empty in the Ho House. Most of the girls were working. Three girls who hadn’t been picked were chatting in their cots. Yaj, who was still a little black and blue from Hesh’s love taps, had the night off too. She stared at me like she always did.

Not exactly congenial company. I wasn’t in the mood to make new friends anyway. I was feeling miserable and wiped out from too much fighting and food and the tension of fucking up, so I just turned over and went to sleep.

***

I jerked awake with somebody’s hand on my cheek.

“Who...?”

Yaj was sitting on the edge of my cot, petting my face like a cat does in the morning when it wants you to wake up. It was after lights-out. The other whores were asleep.

I knocked her hand away, nervous. I remembered her hair-stay shiv in my back.

“Whaddaya want?”

She stood up, never taking her eyes off me, and shrugged out of her shift, revealing her tiny, bruised body. “Reward.”

Man, I almost cried. It was the first word I’d ever heard her say, to anybody. I didn’t know what to say. “I thought... I thought...”

She sat down again and put her hand on my lips, then reached her scrawny arms around the barrel of my ribs and hugged me tight, burying her head between my breasts.

Now I did cry. I got tears all over her hair. I wrapped my arms around her and crushed her to me, but not too hard. I had to be delicate with Waarians, especially little ones like this.

After a bit she craned her head like a cat stretching, her lips seeking mine. I pulled her up, feeling her wiry curves slide across my body, a heat starting to build up between my legs, and—

A noise. The door. We both froze, like teenagers caught necking in the den. I looked around. A pale slant of moonlight picked out a piece of floor, the corner of a cot. Dim silhouettes crowded quietly through the door. Men with clubs and sharpened stakes. No question who they were here for. They were squinting around, trying to get their eyes used to the dark. I only had a second.

I lifted Yaj to the floor. “Hide in a corner.”

They heard me and turned. I shoved Yaj away.

They came at me like dogs after a bear, swarming around the cots and knocking them aside, swinging their makeshift weapons. Were they nuts? Didn’t they know what I could do by now? Then I saw a pattern twisting at me in the darkness. A net! The one weapon Zhen didn’t lock up at the end of practice.

It dropped over me like a heavy coat. I fell back, half on, half off my cot, as six guys held down the edges of it with all their weight. I thrashed. I just got tangled. I couldn’t get enough leverage to throw them off.

A seventh one jumped on my chest. It was Shir. He hissed in my face, raising a brass serving spoon that had been honed into a razor sharp spade. “Demon bitch! You will shame no more men in the arena!”

As he slashed down, something blurred behind him and suddenly he was screaming and trying to pull something off his neck.

Yaj! She stabbed at Shir’s head and shoulders with her hair-stay. Before he could get her off, the other three whores were tearing at his guys, breaking their concentration and their grip on the net.

It was all I needed. I got an arm free, caught a guy by the belt and slammed him into two other guys. They fell, turning a cot into kindling. I sat up, but not fast enough. Shir stabbed back over his shoulder with his spoon blade and Yaj fell back, shrieking.

I clobbered Shir on the ear, then shoved him off and staggered up. The net was still tangled around my right arm and leg with two more dragging on it, trying to pull me back down.

The last guy jumped at my back, but I spotted him and jabbed back with an elbow. I heard a crunch. He dropped.

I stepped toward Shir, but the three guys I’d thrown were up again and stabbing sticks at me, and the guys holding the net gave up and joined them. I don’t remember what I did next—I had my mad-on, and my brain was as red and hot as a branding iron—but when it was over two of them were across the room, standing on their necks, another was ass-deep in the wall, his head and shoulders hanging out in the cool night air, and two more were draped over the crossbeams above me like wet bed sheets.

I didn’t notice. I was looking down at little Yaj, sprawled like a broken doll on the plank floor, a river of red pouring from a divot in her neck as big as an orange slice. My heart froze up like a lump of cold lead pressing down on the rest of me.

Something chunked into my back. No pain. I turned calmly. Shir was raising his ridiculous, murdering spoon for another chop.

I broke his neck.

The screaming of the women finally brought the guards. They found me kneeling in the blood on the floor, holding Yaj’s little body in my arms. I was rocking back and forth and crying like a baby.

***

I woke up woozy the next morning to Zhen slapping my face. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t move my hands. I was in the infirmary, strapped to a cot.

Zhen stopped slapping. “Good. The brothers wish to see you.” He turned to a pair of guards. “Let her up.”

The infirmary was in the basement of the trainers’ house. I vaguely remembered being brought down the night before. The saw-bones had given me a slug of booze that smelled like rubbing alcohol, and then went to town on my back with a needle and thread. Luckily I’d stopped Shir’s spoon with a rib, so it hadn’t done any internal damage. Not that I felt real lucky after thirty stitches.

The guards undid my straps and hauled me upright, as gentle as roustabouts. My head felt like somebody had tossed it in the spin cycle. Zhen led the way out of the room.

Two dizzy flights up they plopped me down on a backless chair in the brothers’ office. This was the ritziest room in the school—heavy wood furniture, blue walls, sunlight streaming in through stone lattice-work high up near the ceiling, and bronze sculptures of famous gladiators all over the place.

The whole scene reminded me of a parole review. The brothers sat behind a long table, staring at me. Even though they had plenty of room to stretch out, they stayed hip to hip, heads together and whispering. They looked like Heckle and Jeckle with Rain Man’s disease.

Sketh blinked at Zhen. “The damages, Fightmaster Zhen?”

“Yes, damages?” Skir echoed him.

Zhen clicked his heels together. “Sirs, Shir is dead. Broken neck. The others have only minor wounds. Nydin is worst off with a broken nose. All can work.”

“And the circumstances?”

“Yes, tell us the circumstances.”

Zhen looked at a spot on the wall over the brothers’ heads and recited like a flat-foot on the witness stand. “Sirs, Shir and his companions paid off the bunkhouse guard, broke into the comfort house and attacked Jae-En with makeshift weapons. With the help of the comfort women, Jae-En defended herself and inflicted the aforementioned injuries.”

The brothers did their whispering act again. Finally Sketh looked up at me. He reminded me of the principal at my second reform school, a long, thin Ichabod Crane motherfucker who always peered over his glasses at me like I’d let down the whole human race by smoking behind the gym.

Even without glasses Sketh looked like he was peering over his glasses. “It is against the laws of this school for any gladiator to strike another gladiator without permission.”

Skir piped up. “Even in self-defense.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, wouldn’t want any violence around here.”

Zhen backhanded me. I was still too swacked from the doc’s Mickey Finn to even flinch.

Sketh continued like nothing had happened. “The punishment for striking a gladiator without permission is sixty lashes. The punishment for killing a gladiator is death.”

Skir chimed in again. “Yes, death.”

I sighed. “Better and better.”

Another smack from Zhen.

“However,” Sketh put the tips of his fingers together and looked at me again. He really was just like that idiot principal. “We are aware that you are in many ways the injured party in all of this...”

Skir picked it up like they’d rehearsed it. “Even though your provocation of Shir
was
severe. Your actions against him were a deliberate insult.”

Back to Sketh. “Regardless, in light of the complexities of the case, we have determined that there is only one way to be fair to all parties.” He paused for dramatic effect. Lost on me. I could barely keep my head up.

Skir delivered the punchline. “Trial by combat. In the arena. You versus the surviving members of the attack.”

That got through the fog. It even made Zhen cough. I did a little addition. “Me against... two, three, six guys? You call that fair?”

Zhen put a warning hand on my back. Sketh and Skir were babbling.

“Such insolence! Certainly is it fair.”

“Eminently fair.”

“There is no other way.”

“None.”

The interview was over. Zhen muttered to me as he led me out of the office. “Not the only way. Only the most profitable.”

I nodded. Ask Don King. A grudge match always means big box office.

***

I didn’t much care what they did with me. I was still pretty broken up over Yaj. It’s not like she was my type, hell I probably wasn’t hers, but she’d been so brave, and so loyal—protecting me, protecting the other girls. And she’d been the first person on this shit-ass planet that wanted to hold me, even out of pity. Oh sure, Wen-Jhai had come on to me on the pirate ship, but that had been about her, not about me. Yaj had hugged me. She’d wanted to give
me
pleasure. And I didn’t just miss her because I’d been so horny lately. I missed her because I missed her, dammit! What I hadn’t let myself admit—because I’m big, tough Jane, who never lets anything get to her—was how fucking lonely I was.

Ugly as I am, I’ve had plenty partners back on Earth, and believe it or not, more than sex, I missed human contact. Holding someone, having someone’s arms around you on the back of your bike, curling up together on the couch watching a Vikings game. Yaj’s little hug had made me miss that stuff so much it felt like my heart had grown spikes and was stabbing into the rest of me.

Poor little Yaj. In her weird way I think maybe she’d liked me. She saw me lying by myself when all the other fighters were getting their “rewards” and felt sorry enough for the big pink freak to give herself to me. That knocked the wind out of me. Think about giving yourself to a space alien because you thought it was lonely. And if that wasn’t brave enough, the stupid little bitch went and died for me! All she had to do was hide in the corner and nothing would have happened to her! I couldn’t think about it without choking up again, and I spent my nights replaying the scene in my head, thinking of all the ways I could have saved her if I’d really tried.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DEATH MATCH!

T
hey still let me train and eat with the other fighters leading up to the big show, but to keep me safe at night they put me in a room in the trainers’ house. I appreciated the gesture, but now that me and the Ho House girls were finally on good terms it was a little frustrating. Broke up as I was over Yaj I wouldn’t have said no to a little comforting. But not a chance.

When Lhan heard the deal with the death match he was pig-biting mad. “But this is not just, Mistress Jae-En. Six against one? They only find a new way to murder you.”

We were practicing together in the yard. Nobody else would work with me, either because they hated me too much, or they were afraid of pissing off the gang of six. “Hey, I beat ’em once.”

“But not in the arena. Not all armed with their favored weapons and on their guard. And did you not have help before? Were you not saved by...”

“Don’t twist the knife, Lhan.”

“My apologies, Mistress, that was cruel, but I make my point. Even gifted as you are, six are too many, and these are better fighters than Shir. You are in need of help.”

“Try telling the bosses that.”

He lowered his sword, a funny look in his eye. “Indeed. I believe I shall.”

He strode off. I followed, nervous. I didn’t like that look. “Lhan, wait. What are you gonna do?”

He didn’t answer, just bee-lined for Zhen, who was chewing out a couple fighters, as usual, and stopped in front of him. Zhen cocked an eyebrow. “Something troubling you, Fancy?”

Lhan bowed. “Sir, I wish to be Mistress Jae-En’s partner in her upcoming bout.”

The fucking idiot. “Lhan! What the fuck! Don’t do that! There’s no reason—”

Zhen cut me off. “Sorry, Fancy. You’re too good an investment to risk in a suicide scrap like that.”

“But is not Mistress Jae-En an even better investment? Want you such a prospect to die against such unfair odds?”

“What I want matters not. Your masters feel Mistress Jae-En is more trouble than she’s worth. She has divided the stable, made trouble with the whores, and killed a gladiator with many good years left in him. If Jae-En wins, she removes the men who hate her most and things may settle down. If she loses, the source of the trouble is gone.”