Read The Singular Six (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 27
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The Marauders led Adam and Dagmar through another maze of corridors. This time, however, there were more signs of life along the way—smells of cooking, sticky patches on the floor, the odors of sweat and dirty clothes and moldering food. The Marauders weren’t very good at housekeeping.
After five minutes of walking, they heard the murmur of many voices ahead. The sound had an echoing quality, as if the people making it were in a very large space. The arena, Adam presumed.
The sound grew louder and louder, and then someone up ahead opened a door, and the sound ballooned into a roar. It was the roar of an impatient crowd that wants to be entertained, preferably at the expense of someone’s life.
After a few more paces, Adam sensed the walls of the corridor fall away on either side and felt the floor change from smooth tile to something uneven and somewhat granular. Probably dirt.
When the crowd saw Adam and Dagmar, they hooted and hollered and hurled taunts and insults. The Marauders’ voices came from every side, and from much higher up than the height of an average man, suggesting they were in tiers of seats like those at the theater.
“Stop,” said the Annihilator after they had gone about seventy paces into the room.
They stopped. The Annihilator removed their leashes and collars and then whisked off their blindfolds.
They were in a hangar that the Marauders had converted into a sort of stadium with a dirt floor and wooden bleachers around the periphery. There were dark patches in the dirt, some of them relatively fresh, and Adam detected the faint stink of blood. Several doors led off the hangar, including the door in the west wall they had entered through and wide double doors in both the north and south walls. Metal catwalks crisscrossed the room twenty-five feet up.
In the bleachers sat more Marauders than anyone had thought existed. There had to be close to a hundred of them. Adam saw a few he recognized—Droke, Johnny Circumcision, Big Red—but most were new to him. They were of many races and body types, and their outfits included nearly every fashion Adam was familiar with, and many he wasn’t. Most were human, but there were also two dwarves (not counting Tork), four other diminutive humanoids that he later learned were gnomes, a cat-man, a lizard-man, an amphibious creature, and several whose body-types defied easy classification.
All these men and monsters were screaming at Adam and Dagmar. Many pumped weapons or fists above their heads in time to the screams, which slowly evolved into a chant: “Kill ‘em all! Kill ‘em all! Kill ‘em all!”
Adam recalled Dagmar telling him that Skippy and Oscar had taken off in pursuit of Maggie last night. He scanned the crowd, dreading to see them, but they weren’t there.
“Where are Skippy and Oscar?” he asked, hoping the Annihilator’s response would give him a clue to Maggie’s fate.
“Shut up,” the Annihilator snapped. He jabbed an armored finger at Adam’s chest. “I’ll tell you one thing: If your fucking girlfriend did anything to them, when we find her we’ll do things to her you can’t even imagine.”
Tork chuckled at that. His teeth, Adam noted, were dark, rotten stumps.
“I’m off to find Twitchy,” the Annihilator told Tork and Artemis. “Make sure these two don’t go anywhere.”
He headed off through the double doors in the south wall.
“Why do you do these things?” Adam asked Artemis. “Why do you commit acts that are clearly evil?”
Artemis snorted. “There ain’t no evil. Not in this world. There’s only survival, and the strongest and toughest are the ones who survive.”
“How is murdering us in this arena conducive to your survival?”
Artemis just stared at him for a moment, and though Adam couldn’t see Artemis’s expression behind the tight mesh of the fencing mask, he felt a surge of hope that perhaps his words had gotten through to the Marauder, had sparked some long-dimmed light of reason and fellowship within him.
But then Artemis shook his head and said, “What’s ‘conducive’ mean?”