Moro's Price Read online

  Because he was rapidly falling into a grim mood, Val played a bit more of his assigned part. “I’m still deciding. Who names an arena ‘the Golden Cage,’ anyway?”

  “Truth in advertising. It’s a steel cage, it’s plated in gold, and it locks. Two men inside fight for blood, money, and sex. What could be simpler?”

  Unknown to Mateo, Val already knew very well the dynamics of the Golden Cage, the oldest and most infamous of the city’s ten such arenas. Though he’d never met any of the celebrated gladiators, Val’s private holo collection was stocked with pass-coded recordings of at least thirty fights…and their intoxicating aftermaths.

  “Live a little, beautiful,” said Mateo, bending as close as he dared to Val’s unshielded face. “It would do you good, some distance from all your computers and nanobots.”

  Val hitched away a few more inches. “Says the liberal arts major.”

  “Extremely liberal, judging by the company I keep.” Mateo lifted his beer in a mock salute. “I’ve seen a certain look in your eyes sometimes. It’s why I think you’d enjoy the arena.”

  Val looked down to keep Mateo from seeing it again. The polished steel bar reflected slow tides of cobalt, pale rose, and yellow-green light. “You know the scandal if I’m found in such a place,” Val muttered at his wavering image.

  “Scandal? You? Not an answer,” Mateo said. “You could wear another mask to attend. Plenty do.”

  “Mati!”

  Mateo only whacked Val in the shoulder again. “Suit yourself. Be here when it’s over? I’ll tell you stories!” Mateo called back as he left the bar.

  Val watched his friend vanish into the mixed crowd of thrill seekers at the gates of Vaclav 17’s towering casino.

  Old Earth historical costumes were the party trend now: people in ancient Terran Sung and Eura-Renaissance outfits brushed shoulders with others dressed as Romans in white togas or Amerinds in beaded leathers.

  Val’s own clothing was merely contemporary, a subdued gray raw-silk coat over amber tunic and trousers. His black ankle boots and complicated black toolbelt were unglamorous but useful.

  He considered following, paying for a seat safely far from Mateo, and watching anyway.

  It would be a rare opportunity. Brutal battles and brutal sex were both anathema to Val’s people. Not forbidden but regarded with squeamish distaste. He hated his darker urges even more for rising to torment him on a hostile planet so far from home. Worse, some of his self-indulgent fantasies had starred many of the arena fighters, about whom Valier knew far more than Mateo guessed.

  Take the Leopard, for example. Before a mysterious illness sidelined the man last year, Jason Kee-DaSilva had nearly been lust incarnate inside the arena. Val’s second-favorite daydream was of that straight back, the man’s muscles bunching and knotting under his legendary leopard-spot tattoos. A spectacular fighter, DaSilva was known to battle, claim, or yield with the same laughing, manic abandon. Mateo swore the man was ready to rejoin the championships this year. The chance to see the Leopard fight in person was almost too much for Val to deny.

  Only one other gladiator surpassed the Leopard in Val’s violent dreams.

  DaSilva’s rival was known only as “the Diamond,” for his beauty and lethal edge. No one had ever seen him without a veil or the mocking face-paint of his stage persona.

  From the fight last year, Val remembered how the black, gemlike eyes gleamed behind the painted mask. The Diamond’s long blue-black hair had been pulled back in a severe club, freed only in rare defeats or advertising appearances. Val could imagine every inch of the pale, hard-muscled, almost hairless body, elegant as a prince out of a legend. He dreamed of a mouth made to snarl in defiance or moan in submission.

  A secret part of Val wanted his lovers bloody, sobbing, and overcome. That part looked at Michol Kott’s Diamond and howled mine.

  Last year, the Leopard had won a stunning, nearly bloodless match against the mysterious, alluring, and always reluctant bondslave gladiator. All the holos lingered over the startled look on the Diamond’s painted face, as the Leopard bowed courteously, whispered something unheard in the audience’s roar, and offered his hand to his prize.

  Money or flesh. The Diamond always took his opponent’s credits when he won. In defeat, he fought until beaten down and forced, one way or another. But that night, the Leopard had asked, not taken, and whisked him away to privacy. And because the Leopard had just earned his own freeborn status in the arena, no one could deny him.

  Val thought of the pale Diamond and the honey-skinned Leopard twined together in secluded passion.

  A hot trickle of need made Val’s groin tighten. If he saw the Leopard fight tonight, Val knew he’d come in his pants. Not just embarrassing, but insanely dangerous. He’d risk catching his clothing on fire or being arrested for endangering the humans around him.

  He had a little dignity to maintain.

  Enough. Time to escape from Vaclav 17. Mateo could find his own damned way home.

  “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?” asked a rich, warm voice directly into his mind.

  Val slouched. Damned symbiont. Cama could be as fussy as a third mother.

  “I heard that.”

  Mateo wasn’t to blame for Val’s faults. Not even for encouraging them. This moth could say no and mean it.

  “Let me guess, Cama. You meant me to come here and test myself. To be a good boy and not go to the match,” he grumbled silently back at her.

  “We could still have an interesting evening alone in a hotel. The Leopard is lovely.”

  “You don’t even have a body, you shouldn’t care.”

  “Mmmm. I’m riding yours, and you seem to care very much.”

  Val sighed and detached a secure com-scroll from his belt. Unclipping the rigid sides, he unrolled the flexible dark plastic until it became a flat keyboard and monitor screen. His mail system flashed several urgent messages from the Camalian Embassy. Val ignored them.

  He sent a time-delayed message to Mateo’s own com, along with enough credits to get the idiot back in time for classes on Monday. Not in style, but at least Val hadn’t abandoned him in south Saba. Then Val frowned, thinking back on some of their more expensive escapades, and tripled the amount.

  “I’m proud of you,” said Cama.

  “Be proud when I figure out how to expense that as an embassy cost.” Val reached for the vivid orange gloves and fabric half mask hidden in his coat pocket. He shouldn’t be in public without his lower face and hands covered at all times.

  But Mateo had convinced him otherwise earlier in the cab: “Will anyone die if you sneeze on them? No? Probably not? Then hide this crap. It doesn’t match your outfit, anyway. Why’d you think I wanted an automated cab? Nobody’s gonna care if you’re Camalian because they won’t know!”

  Donning protective gear now might lead to a diplomatic incident, or worse. He hadn’t been thrown out of a bar or been arrested in months. No wonder Mateo was trying to cheer him up.

  “I’m rather fond of your bar fights. They’re epic.” How a mostly incorporeal colonial symbiont got that tone of “smug” in her mindvoice, Val never knew.

  Besides, Val knew Cama enjoyed the new anonymity as much as he did. People didn’t depart when he walked into a room, refuse to sit near him, or give him angry looks. Now, the glances he got were friendly and admiring. He spent enough energy at physical training to keep his compact body trim. Nature and genetic engineering had given him a handsome rounded face, rich gold-brown skin, pale golden eyes, and a mane of pale yellow hair almost as curly as his mother Lia’s. Back on Camonde, his family’s looks were a promise and a warning: Here is an Antonin Royal. Run if you can. Linger if you dare!

  In Val’s case the warning was even stronger.

  He couldn’t be trusted around civilized people.

  He’d left Camonde without seeing even a holo of any of his Potential mates, the six or seven young women who might be his proper genetic and mental match. Who wo
uld risk a Potential around an unstable little monster? Poor woman would be doomed the moment Val heard her voice and smelled her scent!

  Sure, it was fun teasing his mother about her own reckless and unsuitable courtships of Aunt Alys and Val’s father, Maitland. The Camalian empress had never used mindforce against any lover, accidentally or not.

  “That’s not what happened,” said Cama. “And nothing actually did happen.”

  Three

  BOTH FIGHTERS HAD been quickly outfitted in Kott’s favorite gear for the Diamond: tall boots, elbow-length gloves studded with three-inch blackened steel spikes, and nothing else but their kilts.

  Once upon a time the two legends had been evenly matched, bronze and white, fighting to a standstill. Now the spectators watched a ludicrous parody of that earlier fight, as DaSilva and the Diamond chased each other inside the lacy golden dome.

  Just outside the cage, in his customary chair, Kott aimed scornful commentary to a hovering camera drone:

  “Are we fighting or dancing?”

  “Have some pride, Leopard. You’d think you were the slave here.”

  “Since fucking’s off the menu, that leaves blood. So when can we see some?”

  “You call him ‘Starlight’ one more time, Leopard, I’ll skin the tattoos off your back myself!”

  Of course, that was the moment DaSilva darted under the Diamond’s spinning kick and crowded chest-to-chest with the other fighter. DaSilva was a scant inch taller. “Starlight, wait! You don’t have to fight me!”

  “St-st-stop, J-Jace,” the slave warned.

  “Oh, we’re both up to pet names, now? Diamond, you at least should know better. This boy is like all the rest of them. They get a taste and they want more. They get more and they get stupid for it.”

  The Diamond half turned and slammed into the Leopard with just his bare shoulder.

  DaSilva reeled back, narrowly avoiding the next punch that would have lacerated his throat, if the Diamond hadn’t pulled back by a wide three inches. Still, the skin contact left its toll.

  “You won’t hurt me,” DaSilva exulted. “I knew it!” He stood slack-armed and panting, his face sallow and his eyes dilated almost black. “Starlight, kneel. Cede the fight. Come away with me again!”

  The Diamond growled and glanced toward the nearest of the cameras.

  DaSilva stepped forward, moving his sweat-drenched arms as if to embrace him. “I don’t care anymore what they all think! I don’t care what you did to earn your sentence! You’re mine. I have to keep you with me and safe. Cedar-Saba laws say I can petition to transfer even a Black-Band bond criminal to another master. Let me take care of you!”

  “Leopard, son, you can’t even take care of yourself,” said Kott.

  The Diamond shook his head and ducked away from DaSilva’s arms.

  “I’m not like the others. I’d never hurt you!”

  Kott’s ugly laugh was so loud it distorted for a moment in the drone feed. “Oh, you are a fool, Leopard. He likes being hurt. Don’t you, my Diamond? You sing for it.”

  The Diamond sent his master another look of instantly shown, instantly veiled hate.

  Kott crossed his big arms over his chest and leaned back in his seat. “You sing…but the poor Leopard here never got that far with you, did he? Bet he couldn’t make you come at all, for all his romance.”

  Most of the audience laughed.

  “Starlight,” DaSilva pleaded and in pure madness, knelt in front of the Diamond.

  On the holo screen keeping a tally, each fighter’s match-price suddenly enlarged on the Leopard’s and the Diamond’s battle statistics.

  The sound techs cut all music and extraneous sound, focusing their drone sensors so tightly the whole arena heard the rasping, wet sound of DaSilva’s labored breaths. Somewhere far up in the cheaper seats, someone shrieked, “Jace, Mara damn you, no!”

  Kott said, “This isn’t funny anymore. Diamond, kill.”

  The Diamond canted his body slightly off-balance, poised on his left boot-tip spike. The holo screens lingered over the image of his taut opaline flesh. He kicked out three times with his free leg. Three awful snap-cracks broke the arena’s vast silence, as he carefully and precisely broke Jason Kee-DaSilva’s right arm, left arm, and right thigh.

  The Leopard folded sideways and fell over. Even as the Diamond turned to face his now-standing master, DaSilva tried to crawl after the other fighter.

  “I said kill,” Kott repeated as he strode forward. At his impatient wave, the fifteen-meter-wide filigree steel Cage lifted on its gold-washed chains, high enough for the nearest audience rings to see more clearly.

  The three referees in bright red stood up from their own bench. “Bondmaster Kott, this match is over. The Leopard is down.”

  On the prize screen, DaSilva’s sixty-thousand-credit match-price disappeared, adding to the Diamond’s tally. Judging by the jeers and shouts from the crowd, a few too many people had gambled in the Leopard’s favor and lost as badly.

  Another screen showed the Shemua representative, his face impassive as stone.

  “I don’t give a wet crap about DaSilva anymore,” Kott said. “I care why my best investment has suddenly lost his mind over a sick, broken freeman not even worth betting on. Diamond, do you love this idiot?”

  “N-n-no,” the Diamond said and knelt with his wrists held up in the trained obedience of an arena slave.

  “Then why defy me?”

  The Diamond jerked his sharp chin sideways. “S-s someone d-does.”

  A lanky young man in a flapping, oversized blue coat skidded down the last of the stairs toward the arena, his wrist-com aimed toward the referees. “You’ve got to let me through, I’m approved kin! Mateo DaSilva. One of his freeborn cousins. We may be poor, but we’re still an original Cedar Buyout Family!”

  “Confirmed,” said one referee, after checking him against the wearable computers wrapped around her left forearm. “We’ve seen you at his earlier matches, Sero DaSilva. You’ve been helping his rehab? He obviously needs more medical attention than he claimed on his entry forms.”

  The Leopard groaned on the floor and went still.

  “Jace!” yelped the young man, crouching to check the Leopard’s pulse. He got a good sniff of the fighter’s scent and looked ready to cry until he took three deep breaths. “He’s breathing but shocky. I need to get him to the nearest hospital. Where are his attendants? His dressers and medics?”

  One of the male referees shrugged. “He posted a waiver fee, saying he wouldn’t need them. He paid for only one attendant, up through his first matches of the day.”

  “Huh,” said Kott. “Likely, he couldn’t afford them after leaving Shemua last year.”

  “Lend me your crew, Sero Kott,” said the younger DaSilva. “You liked Jace earlier, when he was mopping the arena with your trainees!”

  “I would have liked him more if he’d agreed to work for me…and earned his place. I can’t use washed-up fighters, and I won’t lend them valuable personnel,” said Kott. “Ask Shemua if they’ll take him back.”

  “Never,” snapped the younger DaSilva.

  The Diamond cleared his throat. “I p-pay. M-mmy er-er-earnings.”

  “Some of your freedom fund? For him?” Kott jeered. “When you save every credit the law allows? Why waste anything on him?”

  The Diamond gave his master a slow, filthy grin, took a deep breath, and said clearly, “He did. M-ma-make m-me c-come.”

  Kott backhanded the Diamond hard enough to make him spit up blood and then grabbed the back of his black collar. A looped handle there avoided the flanking spikes; when Kott yanked it back again, the Diamond’s whole body arched in response.

  He gave a broken moan of pure lust.

  Kott looked around, making certain the camera drones followed everything, before saying, “Anyone can make you come if they hurt you enough. It’s why you were born to be a fighting-whore.” He looked back at the two DaSilvas. “I forbid the Diamond from
paying one credit to the Leopard. DaSilva can find his own charity, starting with his family! If the boy can pay for him, then I’ll help. Say, eight thousand hard-credits?”

  The new drama had the next matches delayed, their fighters milling at the outer door. The audience fairly buzzed. Some enterprising arena programmer had put up a quick odds calculation of the Leopard’s fate.

  Kott pointed up at it. “No other volunteers? No fools wanting to waste their money on an addict?”

  “If he’s an addict, you helped by aiming that freak at him, first,” Mateo DaSilva hissed, glaring back at the Diamond. The fighter was still shuddering, oblivious from forced pleasure. “Eight thousand, Kott? For some fast-heal tech and good medics you already have on standby?”

  “Now it’s ten thousand. Broken bones are nothing. I can smell the dregs of jinvar stimulant in his sweat, from here. He needs a long stay in a quiet place. My ten thousand is only to patch him up enough to send him out the casino door. You got ten thousand lying around from your family, boy?”

  “No,” said Mateo DaSilva, not even bothering to make eye contact with the audience. The betting was running against him, anyway.

  Mateo’s wrist-com chimed a jaunty tune. He looked down. His brown eyes widened, matching his sudden grin. “Honored referees, you heard Sero Michol Kott vouch that he’d offer his crew to help my cousin Jason Kee-DaSilva today, for ten thousand credits?”

  “Heard and witnessed,” they said in unison, just as Kott said, “Fuck me sideways, who sent that?”

  “My very own poison angel,” said Mateo DaSilva reverently. “Kott, take your Mara-damned money and help me get Jason out of here. I never want to see him near your mutant again!”

  “Oh, I don’t want that, either,” said Kott, waving his team of highly trained medics over. “As a matter of fact, I need to recalibrate my mutant.” He nodded to the referees. “The audience has been bored long enough. For the proper filing fees, I’ll declare an open challenge for the rest of the night. My Diamond against any man who dares fight him! Who’s first?”