This Pit was not big, only about thirty strides across. The crowd were all richly dressed, watched over by bodyguards. They were not the normal sort of mob you saw at a public arena. A lot of money had changed hands to purchase entrance tonight. All eyes looked at him for a moment. The faces held the curiously slack look of people not yet quite sated with blood lust. He spat on the sand and shook his fist at them. They laughed, amused by his defiance.

The two fighter entrances were open to the north and south. The Gate of Victory in the East and the Gate of the Dead through which the loser would be dragged westwards were still locked.

Horns sounded and the drums beat louder followed by a moment of dramatic silence. A massive figure stood silhouetted in the entranceway across from them.

Ulrik licked his lips. Perhaps he had only a few more minutes to live. He paused to consider for a moment. He had not had the best of lives, but it was the only one he was ever going to get. And there had been good times too- the feel of an airship deck beneath his feet and the sun setting over the wastelands. Anna’s arms around him in the heat of the night. The sight of his first born son cradled in her arms. The evenings he had spent with his children under the glow of the Arch, watching the airships come and go across the ancient ruins of his home port of Hydra. At least soon he might join his family in death.

He pushed such thoughts from his mind, knowing that they were a weakness he could not afford if he were going to come through the next few minutes alive. All of that was gone so far into the past that it might as well have never happened. Now his only reality was this Pit and his only task to live through the next five minutes.

The Master of Ceremonies waited, a great toad of a man. His robes were thick and red as blood. Mystical rings covered his pale chubby fingers. His eyes were those of an ancient lizard, cold and inhuman. The shimmer of a discrete protective enchantment hovered around him.

He spoke, the balloon-like sacs on his throat expanding and contracting as his fleshcraft augmented voice boomed through the building, telling the crowd about Ulrik, his piracy and the names of the famous gladiators he had killed. He commended Ulrik’s soul to the spirits of the Pit according to the old religious rites and then began to speak of Lem.

It had the sound of an ancient epic, a tale of unbroken victories over mighty foes and unstoppable monsters, of courage overcoming all enemies. Ulrik realised that in this tale, he was cast as the monster and Lem was the one who was going to vanquish him. The crowd roared their approval. They always had more sympathy with a proven winner.