For his first weeks in Karanopolis, Blade lived well. In the House of the Servants of the Arena on the outskirts of the city, he and the other prisoners destined to become gladiators lived like princes-or, more accurately, like cattle being fattened for the slaughter. They had good and abundant food, a bottle of the finest wine each day, daily baths, exercises, massages with perfumed oils by trained slave girls, and once a week a night with one of those slave girls.

Blade found it hard to enjoy himself with the girls. They were scrubbed clean, perfumed, and wore gilded bells and bracelets and the filmiest of silks. But the expression in their eyes was the same as that of the slave women in Scador.

Otherwise the month Blade spent in the House was almost idyllic. He felt the flesh returning to his bones until he was up to his fighting weight again. His massive muscles regained all their strength, his reflexes regained their lightning speed, he became once more an almost frighteningly skilled fighting machine. He did frighten some of the guards. They took to giving him his orders from twenty feet away, with one hand clamped hard on the hilts of their swords. That made Blade laugh out loud, and that laughter in turn made him even more formidable in their eyes. But the men chosen for the service of the High Arena were expected to have their pride, so there was no punishment. A warrior, even a slave warrior, could not be broken into a cringing creature like one of the slave girls.

But there would be no such protection for Tera. She was in the hands of a man who might take personal pleasure in literally beating her into submission. The thought of that happening to Tera was never entirely out of Blade's mind. Even when he was impressing guards by snatching thrown spears out of the air or fending off two swordsmen at once with only a small round shield and a stick, he could not forget Tera.

He knew very well where all this luxurious living and training would take him in the end. From the sunbathing deck on the roof of the House he could look across the fruit orchards and country villas to the looming mass of the High Arena. Inside that hill-sized pile of black and white checkered stone he would sooner or later fight and probably sooner or later die, for the amusement of as many as two hundred thousand people.

What he didn't know was how being a piece in Pardes' game would affect his path from the House to the Arena. He was sure it would. The eunuch wouldn't let even the smallest of his pieces go astray until it had done its job. But it would be a waste of time to try finding answers when he didn't even know half the questions.

Blade left the House of the Servants of the Arena after six weeks. As fighters were trained and fattened up, they were bought by wealthy individuals or syndicates. Some of these bought gladiators simply for the pleasure of seeing them go out and fight and die. Others bought them and sent them out because putting a good team of gladiators into the Arena amused the people of Karanopolis.

That way could lie power-power over the swarming mob of the great city. In their hundreds of thousands the mob could swamp any army, sweep away any enemy, topple noblemen, princes, and even Emperors. It had happened before. To be able to make it happen again, at their command, was the dream of every ambitious man high enough in Karan to have any dreams at all. If they could not do that, they could at least try for the more modest goal of keeping their enemies from hurling the mob against them.

Blade didn't exactly get all this laid out for him on a gilded scroll. But he kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut, and built up the picture out of the odd piece dropped here and there by guards or loose-tongued visitors. After six weeks in the House, he had few doubts left about what kind of game Pardes was playing.

Blade was not bought out of the House by Pardes himself. That would have been unsubtle and foolish. The huge eunuch would never be foolish-at least not more than once. He probably would never be unsubtle, either, even when he could afford it. Among the rulers of Karan, intrigue was not just a technique. It was an addiction.

The man who came to buy Blade was named Figurades, a wealthy merchant nearly as big as the eunuch. But most of his bulk was fat, and the fat was swathed in embroidered silks and soft kidskin, not in wool and leather and metal. His sausage-thick fingers practically dripped rings, and his heavy-fowled face did drip sweat.

Blade doubted if all that sweat was caused by the heat. It was the height of summer and the sun poured down into the Auction Yard behind the House. But beside the merchant stood Pardes' henchman, the scar-faced soldier. He wore a long knife in his jeweled belt and his small eyes moved from Blade to the merchant and back again. He watched Figurades particularly closely as the man counted out one thousand two hundred stamped gold coins as Blade's purchase price.

Left to himself a merchant like Figurades would never have paid half that sum for even the most formidable gladiator-slave. But he wasn't being left to himself. Blade suspected that half of those coins came from Pardes' own purse. The eunuch had moved his new piece one square forward.

No doubt the next move would be to the High Arena itself, for Blade's first combat.

Blade's first fight in the Arena came two weeks after Figurades bought him. It was not much of a test. Against Blade none of the three opponents lasted more than ten minutes. Two of them had no more chance than a twelve-year-old boy. The third was either more skilled or more desperate, but even he lasted ten minutes only because Blade realized that he shouldn't kill too quickly. The crowd in the seats of the Arena had the same fondness for seeing slow, painful deaths as the Karani soldiers did. Blade couldn't bring himself to slice the man apart piece by piece, but he did manage to play with him long enough to have the crowd howling in bloodthirsty delight. Then the man launched a wild charge at Blade. A moment later he was flat on the sand at Blade's feet, blood pouring from his mouth and from the spear wound in his chest.

Blade learned a good deal from that first fight. He learned even more from watching the rest of the day's fighting. By nightfall, it was obvious that only fights involving the less skilled gladiators were usually pushed to the end. The magnates of the Empire of Karan were more than happy to gratify the mob's lust for blood. But as a rule, they were unwilling to dip too deeply into their pockets to do so. A first-class gladiator ran from four hundred gold pieces on up. But the poor wretches who died by the half-dozen cost their masters no more than fifty or a hundred apiece.

Yet there was a catch in that pattern, a catch that Blade kept in mind on the way back to Figurades' slave quarters that night. What happened when really good fighters faced each other, each owned by a master with a well-filled purse? Even against a half-trained fighter, bad luck or an accident could still kill an expert. Against an equal, the risk was even greater.

Then suppose betting was heavy, so that one side might gain a tempting prize by a kill? Or suppose someone wanted to put on a particularly spectacular show of skill with weapons? Blade wondered how long it would be before he got caught in a situation like that.

He saw experts pitted against each other the very next week, in fact. Iscaros sent seven of his most formidable gladiators into the Arena. Five of them walked out of it, leaving behind two dead comrades and no less than seventeen dead opponents and a wildly cheering crowd.

That day Iscaros was accompanied by a woman who made Blade start the first time he saw her. For a moment he thought he was looking at Tera, flaunted on the arm of her master. Then he looked more closely and saw that this woman, though much like Tera, was a good head taller and stood and gestured like one born to command. The simple robe that flowed down from her slim shoulders glittered with a wealth of tiny jewels that not even the arrogant Iscaros would have lavished on a slave woman.