Instinct jerks him sideways instead of forward into his bow; years on slick decks save him where temple training cannot. His weight shifts as if a swell has rolled under the boards, knees loose, spine bent but never where Deko expects. The bronze head kisses air instead of artery, but the wind of it burns his skin, hot and personal, like a whispered threat from a god that has learned his name.
He smells the spear’s passage. Oiled wood, metal warmed by torchfire, a thread of incense from the altar it rested against. His cheek stings. Something warm slides down toward his jaw. Not blood. Just the skin’s protest, a red line that will rise later like a thin reef.
The crowd does not see any of that. They see a late bow turned into a clumsy dodge. A sailor flinching where a temple son strikes with scripture-sure precision. Their roar folds around the missed kill like surf over rocks, making the almost-death seem smaller than the spectacle.
Makeno’s body wants to complete the bow, to finish what he started before he was nearly opened from ear to throat. Old habits insist. Never turn your back on a shrine. Never break a greeting once begun. But the arena is not a river shrine, and the stone under his bare soles is not a familiar deck. It hums.
The channels at the edge of his vision shiver. The trickle that lined them when he first stepped out now runs thicker, restless, bumping against the carved banks as if something beneath is breathing through it. The arena-spirits liked that first taste of danger. The water heard the spear.
He forces his head to stay up instead of bowed, cowries swaying at his temples with the after-swing of his aborted obeisance. His right hand, which had been moving toward his heart in respect, drops toward the short spear they lent him. A ceremonial thing compared to Deko’s war-stained weapon, but it has weight. Balance. A center he can hold.
He tastes copper anyway, ghost of a cut that never landed, and with it the remembered choke of brine from the night the ship went under. That storm’s roar tries to rise over the crowd’s. He shoves it down, locks it behind his teeth. Out here, drowned voices are a liability. Deko is already calling them sacrilege.
Cowries ping and clatter in widening arcs across the damp stone, each impact a tiny, hollow knock against the arena’s hungry hush. For a ragged instant even the drums seem to dip, letting the sound of his scattered shells carry. Makeno’s stomach knots as the line of them breaks. Those were knotted for safe passage and remembered names, strung by his mother’s careful fingers, consecrated in river mist and kitchen smoke. Now they skitter away from him in bright, betraying flashes, spilled out as offerings for someone else’s story.
A white one spins to a stop near Deko’s heel. Another vanishes into a floor-channel, snapped up by the thin, rising current. The water takes it like a tithe. The hair at Makeno’s nape prickles; somewhere, in some bound well, an ancestor coughs in irritation or warning and then goes silent again.
Those shells should have been overhead on a mast-line, whispering luck to passing gulls. Instead, they mark where his head almost parted from his neck, mapping his near-death in little crescent moons of bone.
He sinks lower, knees soft, hips loose, spine angled as if to meet a rogue swell head-on. Weight flows from heel to toe, then settles on the balls of his feet, ready to slide, ready to pivot. The borrowed spear’s shaft is strange in his palm (too smooth, too even) but he treats it like a boarding hook anyway, fingers wrapping until knuckles pale against dark skin, finding callused purchase where there is none.
Sound piles on him. The arena’s roar climbs the stone tiers, a living surf that crashes against his ribs. Drums hammer underneath, heavy as hull-strikes in a storm, punching his heart into a harsher cadence, trying to drag his breath, his timing, his very muscles into the spectacle’s chosen rhythm.
Deko is already turning back in, recovery so clean it erases the miss. The spear draws a tight crescent through torch-hazed air and settles, leveled at Makeno’s chest, like it never wandered. No hitch in his stance. No shame. Gold-dusted scars along his arms and shaved scalp flare brighter, drinking in the crowd’s roar like priest-lights fed fresh oil.
Makeno gives ground in short, skimming steps, testing each placement like a sailor gauging treacherous shallows with bare toes instead of a sounding pole. Stone should answer with honest hardness. Instead it flexes under his soles, a slow, unsettling breathe-in, breathe-out. One breath the rock is steady; the next it sighs and slides aside, channels darkening as more river-water seeps up to greet, not merely meet, his retreat.
The cold hits like a live thing.
One blink the stone is there, a sure edge under his heel; the next it sighs out from under him, hard lip turning to nothing, to plunge. His foot drops through where rock should be. Water takes him mid-calf with a slap and a sucking pull, not a neat channel-trickle but a sudden open throat in the floor.
River-cold. Not basin water, not the warmed trickles of courtyard fountains. This is deep-current chill, the kind that eats heat out of bone. It shoots up his leg and bites, a shock so clean it blanks his breath. Leather soaks in an instant. Skin goes from hot-slick with sweat to numb. Cramp spasms up his calf, clawing.
He jerks, instinctive. A sailor snapping back from a snake in the bilge. Hip twists, balance pitches. The borrowed spear lurches in his grip, point skidding along the air, no target. His free foot scrabbles for purchase on stone that suddenly feels too smooth, too oiled.
The arena water answers his panic.
It moves wrong. Not down-slope, not toward some sensible drain. It curls back toward him, a tight little whirl grinding around his buried ankle. The pull is sideways, then inward, a twist instead of a flow. Like fingers. Like a spiteful hand closing.
He yanks again, harder, teeth baring. The current only tightens, cinching around leather, around bone. Tendons in his ankle shriek. Something in the joint pops. The water climbs his shin a finger’s width, clinging, as if delighted to have found purchase on him at last.
Pain flares, sharp enough to cut through drum-thunder and crowd-roar. His knee buckles. He drops into a half-lunge he did not choose, spear haft swinging wide, shieldless side yawning open.
And Deko is coming.
Cold knifes straight through wet leather and calloused skin, no mercy in it, only claim. It seizes the muscle in his calf, locks it, turns tendon to dragged rope. His toes cramp so hard they feel like they might snap off inside the boot. Breath jumps out of him in a grunt he does not mean to give the crowd.
He wrenches back, hauling at his own leg like a net snagged on reef.
The water will not let go.
It does not sheer away, does not break into honest splash the way river shallows do when you kick free of mud. It thickens. Turns heavy and close. The current draws in on itself and then around him, winding tight. The pull runs sideways before it bites inward, a spiraling drag that ignores gravity, slope, sense. Leather creaks under the pressure. Bone sings.
It feels like fingers, many and jointless. Like a grip that knows exactly how much to hurt without yet breaking. An unseen hand, delighted, wrapping his ankle in a wet, twisting noose.
Air turns thin. He drags it in anyway, a sharp, tearing gulp that scrapes his throat raw. His whole weight pitches forward over the trapped leg, body tipping like a skiff taking a bad wave on the beam. Instinct sends his hands out, fingers flaring wide, reaching for a rail, a mast, any solid thing that should be there to catch a falling sailor.
There is nothing. Only open air, hot with breath and incense and the crowd’s rapture.
The arena’s roar buckles. Sound folds in on itself. Drums and chanting and stamped feet smear into a single low rush, like surf heard from underwater. His pulse hammers louder than the noise outside, a panicked drum trapped inside his skull.
Deko does not rush him. He eats the distance in steady, hunting strides, each footfall sure on stone that betrays Makeno. Shield rides high, iron curve guarding heart and throat, barely shifting. The spear is the only thing that moves. A thin, gleaming line that tracks Makeno’s stagger and tilt, adjusting by breaths, by heartbeats, never losing him.
He feels the point find him, a cold coin of future hurt resting just shy of skin. The space between iron and pulse shrinks to a breath he cannot quite draw. Every swallowed story of trial-bouts and blood-oaths slams through him at once. His tongue curls around forbidden river names. Ancestors crowd the edge of silence, listening to see which he will choose.
Blue fire in the hanging gourds gutters and flares with each phrase, shadows of drowned sailors and leaning masts flickering across the painted storm on the ceiling as the crowd’s roar breaks into a ragged hush.
The light stutters like a failing beacon at sea. Each flare carves new ghosts into the smoke. Men with ropes around their necks. Women clutching swollen bundles that might be children or might be coils of serpents. Masts listing at impossible angles, sails torn into mouths. All of it painted on stone high above him, but moving now, shivering with the gourds’ breath.
Makeno’s eyes drag upward despite himself.
Storm-ships wheel in the ceiling mural, hulls cracked open like split fruit, their insides full of cold blue fire. What the painters left still, the arena-spirits set drifting. A prow turns toward him. For a heartbeat it is the shape of his last vessel. The notch in the rail. The missing patch of paint where his mother once carved a prayer and he later scraped it away in anger.
The gourd above that section flares hard.
Blue pours over the scene, erasing color, leaving only bone-white waves and black hull. The shadow of a single man clinging to a spar lengthens across the storm-cloud arch. Thin. Rope-belted. Hair whipping in dreadlocked strands.
The shape is wrong in places. The ancestors never show you clean truth. But the line of the back is too familiar. The way the figure twists, half reaching for a hand that isn’t there.
His gut lurches as if the whole arena has dropped.
Water in the floor channels responds, shivering, dark skins of current lifting against carved stone. It laps at his trapped ankle, sudden-cold, river-slick. Not high. Just enough to remind. Just enough to say: We remember where you almost drowned.
The hush breathes.
Crowd-voices that were a single wave of sound break into eddies of whisper. His name, twisted by different tongues. Sailor. Storm-called. Oath-breaker. Survivor. Words slide over him, none of them catching, all of them cutting.
The blue fire pulses again, slower now. Matching his heartbeat.
Every thud sends a ripple through the painted clouds, through the shadows of drowned sailors. They turn their faces, empty hollows of light and void, to look down into the pit. To look at him. To look at the man with the spear lining up his fall.
The air tastes of wet stone and old smoke and something else he has only ever known out beyond sight of land. The metal tang that rides under storm-wind when spirits lean close to listen.
His cowries knock together against his chest with each shuddering breath, whispering dry clicks that almost form patterns. Almost.
He swallows, and the whole ceiling seems to bend lower, pressing its shipwrecked sky toward the arena floor, as if the painted sea means to meet the real one rising in the channels at his feet.
The choir-voices come in tiers, some high and sharp as gull-cries, some low and grinding like oars in sand, the rest a braided middle that wraps Deko’s pronouncement in ritual weight. They answer his declaration in call-and-response patterns Makeno half-remembers from river shrines, only here the rhythm is harder, iron-edged. Each repeated phrase is a hammer-blow shaping the charge into something the gods can taste.
“Unlicensed callings.” The upper voices snap it three, four times, turning the words into a net.
“Open water.” The bass line rolls under, as if the very sea is a witness against him.
“Unwitnessed bargains.” The middle register rises and falls, picking out a drum pattern that crawls under his skin, too close to the storm-beat that lives in his nightmares.
“A storm not written.” A hiss of sibilants, a scratch of quills on parchment that never touched that night.
“In our ledgers.” A closing stamp, final as a judgment stone.
As the litany builds, the masked statues around the arena seem to lean forward. Their carved mouths do not move, yet the architecture throws the blended sound sideways, backwards, makes it bounce and return until there is no direction to it, only pressure. Every surface in the arena speaks his supposed crimes back at him.
The weight of formal words, academy tongue and temple cadence, tries to press his story flat, to make the wreck and the drowning fit their lines.
The words hit like blows.
Each phrase lands in his chest, then drives down through bone into stone. With every clause the channels answer, twitching against his pinned ankle, the slick touch of river climbing, cold as unripe metal. A finger’s width. Then another. The rise is not rushed; it is measured, deliberate, like a clerk adding lines to a tally. Accusation becomes weight. Weight becomes water.
It curls over his bare skin, tasting him. Not yet to the calf, but past the bone-knob, past the scar where rope once burned him on a different deck. The current knows that mark. It licks along it like a tongue over an old, half-healed wound, and the level jumps as the crowd inhales, as if their belief feeds the tide.
The carved faces are a riot of grins and sharp beaks, eyes inlaid with dark stone that drinks the blue fire and spits it back as cold gleam. Their laughter is fixed, but the sound that rides their lips is Deko’s, multiplied, warped, flung down in spears of echo that nail his name into bone, into wet stone, into listening spirits.
Above the churning shine of the channels the crowd smears into one vast rim of wanting. Students in cheap charms, guards in scuffed cuirasses, gold-threaded priests with their ledgers of sins. All pitched forward, all bright-eyed, all waiting to see him cracked open. “Storm.” “Unwitnessed.” Each echo slams back down, layering over his skin like fresh shackles of sound.
The old words boil up in his mouth anyway, brackish and hot; he feels the shape of a river-curse press against his teeth, a promise to turn Deko’s blood to silt, his lungs to eel nests, before he clamps his jaw shut so hard his molars ache.
The curse claws along his gums, looking for any crack it can seep through. Syllables his mother slapped out of him as a boy rattle the hinge of his jaw. Names his uncles only ever said waist-deep in night rivers crowd behind his tongue, hungry, tasting the arena’s damp like it is home.
He has spat those words into storms before. Into the backs of fleeing ships. Into the white grin of a breaking bar. Each time the river stirred. Each time something old and watching gave a slow, dangerous laugh.
Here, the laugh would not be the river’s alone.
He can feel other listeners. Thin, bright presences coiled along the channel edges, sharp as fishbone, slick as oil on floodwater. Not river mothers. Not the soft murmur of his own drowned kin. Trickster things, knitted from oath-smoke and drumbeat, wearing river like a mask.
If he lets the curse out, they will wear that too.
His jaw throbs. Pain is good. Pain is a rope. He holds to it. Grinds the words down, grits them into a bitter paste he swallows back. The taste is like licking rust off an anchor chain. His throat convulses. His eyes sting.
He will not give them a gutter curse. Not in his mother’s river-tongue. Not here, under painted storms that are not his storms, before priests who would write his anger down as proof.
He forces himself to breathe around the molten knot in his chest. In through his nose, out past clenched teeth. Slow. Measured. Counting like he counts waves between swells on blue water. Fourth breath, the pressure behind his eyes eases a hair. Sixth, his fingers stop twitching toward the spear he does not have.
On the eighth, he remembers the wells.
Remembers the stillness there. The way the academy’s ancestors only answer when addressed in liturgical cadence. The way his own drowned never quite push through, caught in some binding he does not yet understand. If he howls now in the tongue of the Bight, they will hear him (oh yes) but through thick stone and priest-sigils. Twisted. Interpreted. Trapped.
He is already on trial for what he spoke unwitnessed. To add a true curse, in front of all these eyes, would be to hand them the noose and loop it neat around his own neck.
So he swallows river and bile alike. Lets the heat sit low in him, heavy as stormcloud waiting past the horizon. He can carry it. Sailors carry worse. Secrets of reefs. Lines of song never sung ashore. The names of those the sea kept.
Let Deko spit doctrine and polished venom. Let the crowd bay. Let the trickster gods press their laughing faces close.
He will choose his tide.
Salt-sour shame burns his tongue. He tastes river rot and iron, the memory of men crying in black water while he clung to wreckage and begged names that never answered. To spit now, to bellow from the gut like some quay-side brawler swinging a bottle and a broken oar, would be to become exactly what they bought tickets to see. Wild tide. Bad-luck wanderer. Storm-dog who bites any hand that tries to leash him.
It would feed the drums. Feed the ledgers of sin tucked under priestly arms. Feed Deko’s god.
He forces his shoulders loose an inch at a time. The instinct is to hunch, to brace like a man about to take a wave to the chest. He refuses it. Lets his spine stack straight, boat-mast instead of battered hull. Breath in. Hold. Breath out. Slow. No river-hiss. Only the academy’s measured cadence, the kind he has heard in courts and classrooms.
He tells his body this is only another shifting deck. Another treacherous swell. Not sacred stone trying to climb his leg and close over his bones like a swallowed anchor.
Slowly, so the watching masks and living faces can read every motion, he drags his hands up from where they’ve knotted into the rough of his belt. No weapon there. No charm he dares touch. Just callused fingers slick with cold sweat. He peels them open, one at a time, until both palms face out, fingers spread wide in the academy’s stiff, formal sign of open testimony. River-scarred hands posed like a scribe’s clean ones. The roar around him shivers, then dips, noise collapsing inward to a hungry murmur. Drumbeats stagger. A few priests lean forward, scenting advantage; students crane, necklaces of cheap ward-beads clicking. Makeno squares himself toward Deko and the altar-stone, as if bracing to meet a wave.
When he lets the words out, he drapes his rough harbor voice in the rounded vowels and measured pauses of Odu Ile-Imo’s liturgical tongue, slow as a poured libation, loud enough to reach the highest tiers: “If the ancestors spared me, they will speak. If your god is just, he will listen.” Each syllable lands like a ritual stone in deep water. The formal cadence hangs in the smoky air like a thrown spear (shaft straight, point true) leaving no easy path for laughter without scraping doctrine raw, without admitting that what they call law might fear what he has just named.
Cold sweat worms down his spine beneath the salt-stiff tunic as the stone lip of the channel cinches around his trapped ankle, hard as a tightening jaw. The water there begins to gnash and worry at his skin, not yet enough to crush bone, only to bruise and bruise again, a pulsed reminder that the arena, and what listens through its throat of channels, has heard his dare and is tasting him in reply.
The cowries at his throat and wrist prickle, shells ticking faintly against one another as if worried between invisible fingers; power stirs inside them like half-dreaming fish beneath a still surface. Each click is a tiny knock on a long-closed door. The hairs on his arms lift. Salt and river-mud memory rise in his nose, sharp under the arena’s incense and blood-iron reek.
He doesn’t move his hands. Doesn’t dare touch the beads, not with a dozen shrine-keepers’ eyes and Deko’s stone-hard stare on him. Even so, the little shells remember. They remember rope-slick decks and wave-slap and his mother’s voice humming night-songs while she threaded them, oil-slick fingers moving faster than the tide. They remember the ship’s last roll, a world turned vertical, and the sudden, awful silence in the water when all the other voices went out.
They stir now like fish brushing the underside of a boat, testing the planks. A wash of cool runs along the cords into his skin, up the tendons in his neck, down the meridians of ink twined on his forearms. His tattoos answer in a low shimmer, not light exactly, more a hint of depth, like seeing the darker current beneath calm water.
Under his bare soles, the arena’s stone hums. Not friendly. Not his. A different god’s laughter lives in that vibration, sharp-toothed and hungry. The cowries click back at it, a nervous, defiant chatter. For a breath, he feels another presence between shell and skin: the familiar press of river-kin, the listening hush that used to pool around a whispered offering at a village jetty.
He waits for a shape, a name, even the softest brush of an ancestor’s mood.
Nothing answers clean.
Instead, eddies of intent slide across him. Their regard is there, cool and weighty as deep water, but kinked sideways, caught in the academy’s buried channels and well-mouth chains. Their silence is not absence. It is constraint.
The cowries fret on, caught between old pacts and new walls.
He reaches for it anyway, gut before mind: the old drag in his blood, the dependable lean of tide and current that has always been there, the way a hull learns the sea’s moods until wood and water share one thought. On a deck, that answering pull comes up through his soles as a steady lift, a broad-shouldered hand under the keel. Here, barefoot on consecrated stone, it comes thin and far-off, like a tide heard through a conch pressed to someone else’s ear.
He braces his stance, breath syncing to the phantom rhythm he knows by heart: in on the swell, out on the fall. He lets his weight tilt as if a wave is rising to meet him, invites the old covenant to catch and carry him. For a beat, something shifts. Pressure gathers along his calves, a suggestion of buoyancy, the ghost of green water cupping his legs.
Then it snags. The pull shears sideways, diffused through unseen cuts in the rock. The rivers are here, he can feel that much, listening under his feet, running in hidden veins, but their regard is muffled by quarried stone and temple sigil. They know him. They are watching. And they are holding their answer back.
Along his forearms, the ocean-ink stirs in answer. What were only faint coils before swell and sharpen, wave-crests picking themselves out from the darker whorls of whirlpool and ripcurrent. The lines seem to rise under his skin like something trying to surface. Each curve catches a light that isn’t the arena’s ghostfire, a submarine gleam that pulses in time with his heart. His pores bead with sweat, but the ink runs colder than river-stone at dawn, tracing old channels his teachers here have never mapped. This is no neat sigil-work, no palm-leaf diagram. It is the memory of coasts and crossings etched in flesh, flexing, listening, ready to braid itself to whatever raw flow the spirits will finally release.
Yet the wells’ bound presences, those crowded, disciplined ancestor-voices stitched into the academy’s bones, stay stubbornly mute; no whisper rises up the stone throat, no cool palm settles at the nape of his mind. The hush has weight. It presses like deep water. This is not distance or sleep. This is held breath, deliberate, waiting to see what he does alone.
Storm-night claws up from the deeps of him in jagged snatches: the scream of wind through parted sail, mastbone snapping like a neck, the deck going sideways under his feet, a call-and-response hymn strangled mid-verse as black water took the answering voices. He forces it down, clamps it where it has lived since he crawled out of the surf, offering the roaring arena only a weathered sailor’s shrug, a storm-eaten grin, and the barest sketch of a name and trade that mean nothing of the drowned oaths still knotted behind his ribs.
The battle-priest’s voice drops into a resonant cadence as he plants his bare feet beside the altar, toes curling against the damp stone. The channels at the pit’s edge answer with a faint, anticipatory shiver. He lifts his spear high so its gold-inlaid head catches the ghostly blue fire from the hanging gourds, metal drinking that light and throwing it back in sharp, cold shards across the masked faces tiered above.
“Let the gods of overturning witness,” Deko intones.
The words land heavy, not loud. Each syllable is measured, hammered flat and exact. They strike the air like drumbeats on a war-mask, like fists on a ship’s hull from the wrong side. Makeno feels them as much as hears them: little concussions against the skin, nudging his balance, setting the hairs on his arms to rise along the brightening tide-lines of ink.
“That this trial tests not only flesh and craft,” Deko continues, pacing the phrase so the arena itself seems to lean in with him, “but the truth of river-oaths brought into our walls.”
A susurrus ripples through the stepped stone seats. Not speech. Breath. Intake, held. The crowd’s tension knits with the priest’s cadence until it is one woven cord, wound around Makeno’s chest.
He tastes metal and river silt at the back of his tongue. Truth. Oaths. Brought inside. The words are shaped to sound clean, but he can feel the hook buried in them, barbed and smiling. Trial, not verdict. Test, not sentence. Yet the gods Deko calls do not come to watch without appetite.
Spirit-thick air settles against Makeno’s shoulders like a wet cloak. The trickster-masks overhead grin down, their carved lips parted just enough to show the promise of teeth.
The altar-stone bucks under Deko’s blow.
The spear-butt hits with a dull, stone-on-stone crack, but the sound does not behave like sound. It flattens, widens, is caught and turned by the carved ribs of the arena. It rolls out in a low, swelling boom that seems to slip free of air altogether and go hunting through denser things. Makeno feels it take him.
It goes up through his soles, through callus and scar, climbs the narrow ladders of his shins, rattles his kneecaps. His spine drinks it like a struck mast; his ribs tremble around his lungs, a cage suddenly made of tuning forks. His teeth buzz against one another until they ache. His eardrums pop and then stop mattering, because the boom is in his blood now, thudding along the lines of his tattoos, making the ink prickle and creep as if trying to crawl off his skin.
Above, the storm-painted ceiling seems to flex. The masked trickster-statues tilt in his peripheral vision, not moving yet somehow nearer, their carved eyes deepening into hollows that promise attention and appetite.
Around the pit, the stone channels answer before any human can. Water jerks up from stillness in a series of low, circling surges that slap cold against Makeno’s bare shins, shocking the heat from his skin. The first touch is a test. The second is a claim. The currents twine his calves like many-fingered hands, knuckles of chill brine pressing into tendon and bone, spinning him a half-step off his sailor’s stance before he can brace.
They do not move as one river. They shear against each other eddies folding over, slipping under, braiding tight. The pull gathers with patient malice, tightening into a slow, enclosing whirl that has nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with choice being stripped away.
The weight in the air swells, packs itself tight around him. It settles on his shoulders, chest, skull, layer on layer, like a harness hauled in by unseen hands, each notch biting deeper. Every stare from the tiers, every hissed curse and name, knots into that invisible yoke. His lungs scrape at the limit of a shallow, grudging breath. When he reaches for more, some vast, half-drowned presence he cannot see but knows in his bones slides cold around his ribs. One continuous, tightening tide that does not merely press, but claims.
The grip keeps tightening. Expectation has teeth. Deko’s words hang above the water’s hiss, picked up and chewed by a hundred unseen mouths. The masked faces lean in, all carved laughter and empty eyes, while the priest-choirs spool a low chant that coils around his name. Law weighs him. The crowd weighs him. The gods weigh him. His skin crawls with the sum of their judgement. Backing away is not refusal now; it is treachery. The thought of saying no hits his stomach like bad tide, sour and dizzying, and his spine knows, before his mind admits it, that to step back would be to step out of the world that has agreed to hold him.
The divine weight in the air thickens, pressing down as if the whole stone hill has sunk onto his shoulders. Heat crawls into his chest, packing his lungs with a cloying, incense-sour heaviness that tastes of rust and old blood. Each breath drags like he’s hauling air through soaked sailcloth. The blue ghost-fire above seems to dim at the edges of his vision. Sound comes at him in waves, the drums, the stamping feet, the roar of voices layered under the priest-choirs’ braided chants, until it’s all one pounding tide grinding against his skull.
The pressure is not just weight. It has shape. Intention. It slides cold fingers under his ribs, seeking his heart, measuring its stutter. His knees threaten to fold, tendons quivering, as if some unseen hand is trying to drive him to the stone. The floor’s faint tremor underfoot feels like a deck in the first clutch of a storm, but there is no give, no sway, only rock that wants him small.
He grits his teeth until his jaw aches. Every instinct drilled into him by river uncles and storm-lashed aunties screams to go to one knee, flatten his body, show respect before a power that can drown him. That is what you do when the river rises. You bow. You listen.
But this is not the river. This is a trickster’s pit, carved and painted by soft-handed priests. The weight in the air stinks of their god’s delight in spectacle, in breaking men open to see what spills out.
Makeno forces his shoulders back against the invisible press. Vertebrae crackle. His spine feels like a mast about to snap, but he locks it upright. He will not bend for Deko’s calm, stone-cut stare, nor for the masked gods leering from the walls, nor for the rows of students and clergy watching from the shadows to see if the sailor will break.
Salt-stiff dreadlocks cling to his neck with sweat. Ocean-ink along his arms itches, wanting current, wanting wind, wanting the clean pull of real water. He denies the urge to cough, to gasp. He keeps his face loose, almost amused, like he’s back on some cheap river barge being shaken by bad cargo instead of divine pressure.
He lets his gaze flick, just once, to the channels veining the arena floor. The water there lies flat and dull, a dead tide. No whisper rises from it to meet him.
Fine. Let the priests’ god lean harder.
Makeno squares his stance, plants his bare soles on the cold stone like he’s braced on a heaving deck, and refuses to bow.
He reaches for the one comfort that has never failed him in any storm. Not for spear, not for stance. His hand goes to his throat. Fingers find the cord there, the familiar rasp of cowries rubbed smooth by years of spray and thumb-grease. Each shell carries a memory: his mother’s laugh over slapping waves, a cousin’s song on a midnight watch, the hush that falls when the river turns in its sleep. The shells are warm against his skin despite the chill sink of the arena.
The divine pressure tightens, as if resenting the touch. His knuckles bump the biggest cowrie, the one carved with a faint spiral like a river eddy. He feels the ghost of river-breeze against his damp neck, or maybe just sweat cooling. Good enough.
He hooks the cord hard. The strand bites his skin, then snaps with a soft, decisive twang. Cowries spill into his palm in a pale, rattling cascade, clinking together like a handful of tiny bone-boats. For an instant the sound is surf on stone, then the drums surge and try to swallow it whole.
He cages the shells in both hands, thumbs sealing their click to a faint, private rattle. Lips barely part. The words ride his breath more than his voice, a hoarse thread of sound braided from salt, smoke, and childhood. It is an old call, a low watch-song his mother beat into his bones between creak of timbers and slap of wave: meant for black-water bends and reed-choked inlets, not this hollow, hungry stone. Each syllable tastes of river-mud and palm wine and lantern oil, nothing of incense. His free hand moves without thinking, sketching the remembered curve of swell and lift from hip to knee to open air, tracing a slow, rising arc meant to lure water up beneath his soles, to make the ground remember how to float.
For the span of a single heartbeat, something in the arena answers. The damp sheen on the stones shivers, fine ripples racing out from his bare feet. The channels’ surfaces quiver as if a submerged thing were turning over to listen. Coolness brushes his ankles, a thin, clean breath cutting through incense-heat. The hairs along his forearms lift. For that instant, the river feels near: leaning close through rock and carved sigils, testing the space around him, ready to shoulder him up and away from the crushing gaze of masked gods and the packed-dark eyes of spectators.
The priest-choirs’ voices climb, braiding into a hard, glittering wall of sound that snakes down the carved pillars and around his hunched shoulders. It wraps his whispered formulae, tightens, crushes. Counter-chants hook into his river-words and drag them under. The ripple dies. The channels’ brief swell exhales into slack, sulking water, dull and deaf, turned away like kin refusing to answer his knock.
The failure rebounds viciously.
The answer he called for twists like a hooked fish. Instead of rising clean beneath him, the water bucks sideways, temper snapping. The damp sheen on the flagstones jerks into a hard, slanting shove. Sluice-grooves he hadn’t even marked a breath ago flash wet-raw as hidden plates grind and tilt under the arena’s thin layer of sand.
The floor moves.
Not just the water. Stone itself kinks and shudders in its bedding, as if the whole pit were the hull of some half-sunken ship lurching in cross-current. Teeth of rock gnash under his soles. The soft grit he trusted for purchase slides treacherous, running like loosened ballast as narrow channels gape and close with a clacking, bone-joint sound that crawls up his shins.
His breath catches. Instinct screams to widen his stance, to ride the shift like a deck roll, but the ground refuses to roll in any way a river-born body knows. It jinks in sharp, temple-learned angles: right where he expects curve, drop where he expects swell. The sluice-plates answer not the pull of his pact, but the clipped authority in the priest-choirs’ woven song.
Their voices drive the misstep home.
A harsh cadence knifes through his softer river-notes, snapping the currents sideways. What little lift he tried to coax becomes a side-surge that slams against his calves. Water, denied the simple act of buoying, becomes a striking limb, a shoulder-check. It batters his balance instead of bearing his weight. Coolness that should have been a friend comes in from the wrong quarter, wrong timing, wrong shape.
For a heartbeat he’s back in the spirit storm: deck tilting under him in impossible directions, rigging screaming, sea climbing the sky instead of the hull. The same betrayal of all his learned measures. Stars gone. Wind screaming through knots in a tongue he cannot parse. Only here, the scream is drums and choir, the wind the crowd’s roar, and the betrayal is his own river turning its back at the gods’ command.
He grits his teeth as his weight slides where he didn’t put it, the stone under his forward foot easing down, down, not with the patient sag of riverbank mud but with the mechanical certainty of a trap answering a pulled line. The sluice’s iron bones answer the hymn, not him.
The channel under his lead foot does more than simply drop; it splits like a mouth, stone jaws grinding apart in a jagged line that was not there a blink before. His weight commits forward at the same instant the flagstone’s hidden seam unzips, and there is no time to pull back. Cold seizes him. His ankle plunges into a narrow, whirling throat of black water that feels far deeper than the shallow channels should allow, a tight, spiraling drag that bites bone and tendon. The gutter doesn’t just take his foot: it clamps around his leg with the merciless precision of crafted trap-work, water and stone closing like conspired fingers. The sudden torque wrenches his hips sideways. His other leg, left searching air, scrapes at vanishing purchase as grit and sand sluice away under him in a mocking rush. Balance (so holy on any deck) goes, ripped free in a heartbeat. The suck of the hidden current yanks him down and across, turning his forward drive into an ugly, flailing pivot that offers his whole side open to the pit.
White-hot pain knifes up his calf, sharp as a snapped harpoon point. His knee wrenches sideways with a wet, grinding pop that turns his stomach. The trapped leg belongs to the gutter now, pinned and twisted; the other becomes a useless, panicked thing. His free foot skates along the slick stone lip, heel smearing sand into mud, toes clawing for the kind of rough, honest grip a deck would give. There is nothing. Only polished treachery under his nails. The thin film of water gleams like oil, slicking every edge. The hidden current below tugs and tugs, not like a river asking, but like a hand with humor in it. A cruel, laughing pull that plays with him before it takes.
The galleries answer with a breaking wave of sound. Voices crash and rebound from the rock, a roar thick with delight at bloodless disaster. He reels, arms windmilling, while spray and cold river-mist explode upward in a wide, shimmering halo, every droplet caught and held, shaped for spectacle: not his call, but the arena’s hungry, gloating craft.
The mist hangs a heartbeat too long, lit by the guttering blue gourds overhead, each flame stuttering as if laughing. It rims his outline in trembling silver, fixing him in the pit like a painted target. Lines of wet stone kink and realign around Deko, subtle teeth in the floor’s pattern, the arena’s hungry geometry closing like a jaw preparing its preferred meal.
Across from him, Deko stands unshaken in the rising currents, planted like a carved pillar in a flood. The water that tried to drag Makeno under only curls and eddies around the priest’s ankles, gentled, tamed, as if it has remembered whose altar this is. Gold-dusted scars along his torso ignite one by one as the choirs switch rhythm, drum-patterns snapping from river-flow to war-march. The soft looping roll of current-song hardens into a sharp, stamping cadence. Each strike of leather on hide slams through the stone, shakes the channels, hammers the air into shape.
Light answers that hammering. It crawls out of Deko’s wounds like molten script. Lines of fire rise from the inlaid dust, thin at first, then thickening, braiding, settling into runes Makeno cannot read but can feel in his teeth and bones. Each thundered beat bites a fresh stroke into his chest and arms, strokes that do not bleed but burn, setting his whole frame in rows and verses, every muscle turned into a line of doctrine. The glowing scars knit into orderly stanzas while the blue gourd-light gutters around his silhouette, cowed.
Makeno tastes iron on the back of his tongue. His own half-formed call to mist is still hanging above the pit in a silver, useless bloom, not answering him, answering the crowd. Deko lifts his shield and the hanging droplets shiver toward its curve as if magnetized, tracing its rim in trembling halos. Drum and chant climb together, the priest-choirs braiding counter-song into the beat, tightening the arena’s rules. Makeno feels it as pressure in his ears, a hand clamping down over any word that is not written, not sanctioned.
When Deko breathes in, the river-lines in the floor bend like reeds in a sudden gust, not toward the sailor’s outstretched will, but toward the battle-priest. Currents that should run downhill kink and reroute, drawing neat arcs around his planted feet. A thin stream leaps its carved channel altogether to lick the edge of his spear. The water beads there, clinging along the shaft in precise increments, each droplet a bright punctuation mark in the war-text burning down his arms.
Makeno reaches instinctively for the river-mothers, for the broad, forgiving bodies of flood and tide he has known since boyhood. The answer comes back thick and muffled, as if through many walls. Their voices smear into drum and choir and vanish, flattened under the war-god’s laughter. The arena has set its tongue. Here, current obeys script, not story. Here, the water does not remember his name.
Deko rolls his shoulders once, getting the feel of his blessings the way a man tests a new helm. Fire-script flexes with the movement, but the lines do not break. They tighten. His eyes, hard river-stone before, deepen to something darker, pupils blown wide with trance. He looks not at Makeno’s face but at his trapped leg, at the gutter-mouth’s grip, measuring distance the way a butcher measures a cut.
“See?” His voice rides the drumbeat like another drum, clean and unstrained. He does not need to shout; the stone carries him. “The river wavers. The word does not.” He dips the spear-point, and the water clinging along its length slides down in perfect sequence, each drop falling on the floor to match the priests’ next roll of rhythm. The arena’s channels answer those tiny impacts, lids of stone shifting a finger-width at a time, re-etching the pit’s pattern beneath Makeno’s flailing hands.
The sailor feels the change as a sick lurch in balance. The gutter’s pull sharpens in one direction, eases in another, not natural at all, not the honest quarrel of tide and shore, but lines drawn on a slate and then enforced. Every breath he takes scrapes against that enforcement. Every thought that reaches for open water hits the invisible grid the choirs are singing into place.
Deko steps forward into the shifting floor without hesitation. Where his heel should slip, the stone rises a fraction to meet him. Where the current should surge, it dips instead, leaving his footing dry. War-god light crawls merrily up his spear to meet his grip. The arena has chosen its grammar, and it is written in his scars.
Each thundered beat takes a bite out of the dim air and sinks it into his flesh, carving fresh lines of light across chest and arms. Not wild flares, not the ragged, living shimmer Makeno knows from river-swell, but straight, merciless strokes, laid down in strict measure. The glow that wakes in those scars is not a blaze so much as a script, each mark a word in a language of obedience and hurt. Lines cross and braid, settling into orderly stanzas that march down his ribs and coil his shoulders in neat verses of war-law. The blue gourd-light around him shrinks and gutters, bullied into the gaps between those burning lines, until Deko stands as the brightest thing in the pit, the arena’s favored text. Shadows bend away from him like wrong arguments. Even Makeno’s spray of failed mist seems to hush, its silver halo paling, thinning, as the war-fire writing claims the space, claims the air, claims the rules the water must now follow.
When he draws breath, the whole pit seems to inhale with him. The arena’s shallow river-lines shiver, then loosen like ropes cut free, ankle-deep surges unknotting from Makeno’s side of the circle. The chill that had lapped his calves breaks away in nervous threads, currents peeling off his skin as though ashamed to touch him. They slide across the stone with unnerving purpose, not sloshing, not wandering, but curling in tight, obedient spirals toward the battle-priest. Water that should seek the lowest path climbs tiny rises, lips low ridges, pooling at Deko’s feet in neat, mirrored arcs. With each of his heartbeats, the channels bow a little deeper his way, abandoning the sailor as if some unseen script has revised their loyalties.
“Here,” Deko says, not shouting, just letting the stone carry him, his words riding the drumline like another hammer-blow. “Your ancestors’ whispers are guests down here. They may rattle the bars: but my god wrote the floor. He inked these channels, measured these steps. And his script,” he taps his burning chest, “favors those who can read.”
He walks in like he has all tides to spend, shield riding easy on one shoulder, spear-tip lazy at first. Then the point lifts, dragging fire through the clinging scraps of Makeno’s mist. Ember-light bites a clean path, shaving the fog down to a single, bright loop that snaps shut between them. Not random. Not wild. A perfect, jeering sigil hung in the pit’s throat.
The insult lands like a thrown weight. It thuds into the drum-hum and hangs there, dragging on his muscles, on his breath. Makeno’s shoulders hitch as if someone has slipped a yoke across his back. He rolls them once, twice, trying to shake it off, but the words cling. Guest. Read. Favors those who can read. His fingers clamp harder around the worn haft of his boarding hook until old calluses flare, until bone grinds bone. Salt and iron rise on his tongue. His jaw knots; a muscle leaps in his cheek. He refuses to look away from that neat little ring of fire.
Stormwater eyes take it in in one hard swallow then the arena falls out from under him.
For a blink, the stone circle blurs, and another ring tightens around him instead.
He smells tar first. Tar and wet rope and palm-oil smoke. Hears the slap of loose canvas, the bruise-deep groan of a hull shouldering waves. The earth-firm weight of the arena tiles dissolves into the treacherous sway of deck under his bare soles, salt-slick planks giving a little under each heartbeat. Lantern light swings in a mad arc, rain coming in sideways sheets that sting his eyes and bead on his lashes. The world is smaller, tighter. Rail to rail. Mast to mast. A circle drawn in wood and wind.
His hook is a different weight in that memory. Crewmen blur at the edges of his sight, shadow-shapes in rain-silver, boots thudding, curses torn away by the gale. Above it all: his captain’s laugh, sharp and bright as lightning. The old man stands at the center of the pitching world, bare feet planted like roots, one palm thrown wide to the black heave of sea.
“Look,” that laughing voice cuts again through the storm and drums alike, overlapping the present until Makeno cannot tell which circle he stands in. The captain’s fingertip traces invisible loops on the chaos of waves, inscribing paths only he seems to see. “Currents don’t read your temple-lines, boy,” he had said, teasing, rain running in streams down the ropes of his beard. “They answer to their own moods. You learn to feel that, they carry you. You try to fence them with priest-scripts, they drown you for your arrogance.”
Back then, Makeno had believed every word. Had watched the sea heave and dip and thought he saw patterns rising to meet the captain’s hand. Thought the ocean was a companion that only needed listening to.
Now, the memory bites.
Because he remembers, too, the last time he dared the same soft buoyancy-chant his captain had taught him. The last time he whispered to the under-tug of the water, asking it to cradle his ship instead of crush it. He remembers the way the waves had shuddered, gone wrong-quiet. How the foam had blown flat from the peaks, how all the familiar chop had smoothed like a breath held too long.
The circle had closed then, too. Not in flame, but in stillness.
The sea had gone glassy and strange around their hull, a perfect, waiting ring. No swell. No give. Just a held promise. And then the storm had dropped on them all at once, not rolling in as storms should, but slamming down like a lid on a pot. Masts torn. Sails ripped. Men screaming. No answer in the water when he’d begged. Only that eerie, suffocating calm under the breaking.
Here, under stone and sigil and priest-choir, he feels that same refusal prickle under his skin. The arena’s channels have already turned their backs, sliding toward Deko in tidy, docile sweeps. His ancestors are caged in wells above his head. The insult is not just in Deko’s mouth; it is in the water itself, choosing.
Makeno’s grip spasms once on the hook, knuckles pale against dark skin. He drags himself out of the old circle and back into this one, taste of drowned wood and lost voices thick in his throat.
Deck-boards slam up under him in that flash. Salt-slick planks he knows by every groove and nail, warped where cargo once slid, scarred where anchors bit deep. Tar bleeds up with each rise of the hull, sharp in his nose. His old captain is there in the downpour, barefoot and laughing, grey braid plastered to his spine, rain streaming from his beard like riverfalls. The man’s feet grip the dancing deck as if it were steady earth, toes curled over the seam of two planks Makeno could still find blindfolded. One broad hand clutches the rail; the other carves easy loops into the air above the black heave of sea, fingertip sketching invisible paths on white-capped backs.
“See, boy?” that laugh rides thunder, not drums, teeth bright in the storm-glow as he draws helixes and spirals only he seems to see. “True currents bow to no temple, no sigil, no priest. They don’t read scripture. They listen. You learn their moods, they carry you. You try to chain them in some clerk’s ink, ” his hand snaps the air, dismissing whole sanctuaries of carved stone “, they drown you for the insult.”
Memory hits harder than any shield. It slams into his ribs, knocks the air out of the arena and replaces it with rain. He hears his own younger voice answer that laughing captain, high with salt-dumb courage, trying on the same swagger like a borrowed coat. Hears himself swear he can feel the under-tug already, that the sea hums for him when he sings to it. Spray had burst between his teeth as he grinned into the gale, buoyancy-chant riding his tongue in a clumsy, earnest rhythm meant to coax, not command. The words were barely past his lips when the sky tore open, clouds splitting on a line he could not see, and the storm came down like a god dragged too close, too fast, too hungry to refuse.
He had shaped the same cadence then that he just flung at the arena now and watched, sick to the marrow, as the waves about the hull went glass-flat and leaden instead of lifting. A held breath. Then the ship wrenched sideways, timbers shrieking, dragged like a hooked fish into the blind maw of the spirit storm that spared only him, spitting him back alone onto a world suddenly ruled by priests and written pacts.
The remembered impact knives through his chest the instant the arena’s channels hiss and peel away from his will, river-murmurs throttled beneath the trickster choirs’ rising braid of mockery and praise. Guilt and cold foreknowledge twist together. He knows this tilt, this wrongness: another ring of stone, another priest-fed storm. A killing-ground whose buried pacts kink the water sideways, make it look at him like a stranger.
Deko drives in on that flinch like surf through a breach, three sure-footed strides eating the painted sigils between them as the drums crest. The world narrows to his advancing silhouette. Gold-inlaid scars flaring, spear angled low, shield rising like a second, harder horizon. Makeno’s cowries clack against one another as he jerks his weight to meet him, the shells suddenly loud as teeth, stormwater eyes scanning for an opening that the fickle channels refuse to grant.
He reaches for mist by reflex, for that soft, blinding veil that has turned so many decks into his ocean, but the air in the Arena of Turning Tides is already spoken for. The priest-choirs have carved it into rules and edges with their song. His whisper hits a wall of rhythm and slides off, useless as foam against cliff.
Stone shivers instead. A groove at his back deepens with a wet suck, hidden sluice-mouth yawning wider as if amused by his intent. Water slops up around his ankles, not at his call but at the war-god’s, a sideways surge that tugs his stance half a thumb-width off true. Not much. Enough.
Deko feels it. Of course he feels it. Battle-trance sigils along his ribs and shoulders flare in time with the drums, drinking the crowd’s roar. Each stomped footfall lands as if the floor has been shaped to receive it, channels bowing under his weight rather than betraying him. The spearpoint wavers at Makeno’s thigh, then his gut, then settles, hungry, on the line between them.
Makeno adjusts, trying to ride the shifting current the way he would a treacherous bar, but the water here does not want to be read. It sloshes in the wrong rhythm, out of phase with the beat he knows. Ancestral murmurs that should coil up from the damp stone are thin as smoke, frayed by drum-thunder and the trickster choir’s bright, cutting harmonies. The wells’ voices that once spoke clear beneath his feet now come as distant coughing through walls.
He feels naked. Not in the way of bare skin, but in the way of a sailor flung overboard in dead calm, no swell to read, no wind to lean on. Just flat, glassy waiting.
Deko’s eyes track that flicker of uncertainty the way a shark tracks blood. He does not rush, even though his strides are swift; everything about him says chosen moment, not scramble. The shield’s rim kisses the stone once, testing, and the floor hunches obediently, one flagstone lowering a hair so his next step flows smooth. Makeno watches it and understands, too late and with a cold, sinking clarity, that the arena itself is taking Deko’s side.
He shifts anyway, weight rocking from heel to ball, left foot angling for a patch of stone that has not yet betrayed him. The cowries at his hairline click again, a nervous, staccato prayer he does not let reach his tongue. There is no room here for the old river-names, not with the air this thick with sanctified spectacle.
He drags a breath through his teeth, tastes incense, rust, wet stone. No salt. No sea. The water licking his boots is river-fed, yes, but its surface carries only the reflected flicker of blue ghost-flames and the echo of other men’s oaths. The current under it runs sideways, down into channels he cannot sense, braided into the arena’s hidden gut.
The drums climb higher. The galleries lean in, a living cliff of masked faces and gleaming eyes. Their hunger presses on his skin, a humid weight that wants a story where wild magic fails and written law stands unshaken.
Deko’s spear dips a fraction, inviting a parry that will come too slow from that numbed arm. Makeno feels his own body begin to answer, years of shipboard brawls and alley scrapes rising in the muscles. But there is no deck roll to help him here, no faithful heave of hull and tide to turn a misstep into a spinning dodge. Only treacherous stone and water that answers to another’s god.
He tightens his grip on the boarding hook until his knuckles ache, forcing sensation back through the creeping numbness. If the arena will not give him distance, then he will have to make a storm inside arm’s reach.
The impact hits like a boarding ram. Deko’s shield slams into Makeno’s hastily raised forearm, a flat, brutal disc of bronze that turns his block into punishment. Bone and muscle ring; something grinds in the joint. Shock flares along the ulna like lightning in a mast, nerves exploding into white noise that drowns even the drum-beat for a heartbeat.
His boarding hook meets the shield’s boss at a bad angle. The curved iron kisses polished bronze and skitters, shrieking, throwing up a fan of sparks that vanish in the ghost-light. No purchase. No drag. No satisfying jolt that would twist the shield aside. Just a useless scrape and the sickening feeling of his weapon glancing off a wall that the whole arena wants standing.
The numbness that started at the point of impact races down to his fingertips, then back up again, a cold tide surging the wrong way. His hand might as well belong to some other man on some other deck, fingers distant as lanterns on a far-off shore, flashing but out of reach, slow to answer his will.
Before he can drag breath or feeling back into his arm, the spear’s haft whips low, smooth as a turning rip, varnished wood kissing wet stone before biting deep into the hollow behind his knee. Makeno starts to shift, too late. Deko isn’t there anymore as a man; he’s a pivot point, a fulcrum wrapped in gold scars and god-favor. He yanks and twists in the same motion, using Makeno’s own half-rise to peel his stance wide open. The sailor’s heel skates on slick rock as the channels underfoot convulse, bulging, parting, letting water muscle between stone and skin. His leg goes out from under him. He slams down sideways into the churning shallows, kneecap cracking hard against a hidden ridge, a bright spike of pain that bursts up his thigh. Cold water surges high, slapping his ribs, soaking his sash, trying to roll him onto his back like wreckage caught in a backwash.
Spray blinds him for a heartbeat; cold river slap across his eyes, the ghost-flames smearing into streaks. In that blur, Deko’s spear snakes past his ear, close enough that Makeno feels the wind of it and the hot kiss of metal singe a bead from his shell-tied hair. The iron point screeches on stone, then halts, the haft twisting with practiced cruelty. Salt-crusted dreadlocks catch and tangle along the spear’s socket and the jagged lip of a drainage groove. With a vicious downward torque, Deko levers the shaft, grinding hair and scalp into the gap between flagstones, jamming the locks deep. Makeno’s head wrenches sideways, throat bared, neck vertebrae protesting; any sudden wrench to free himself will peel skin and hair from bone.
“Look well!” Deko’s voice knifes through drum and water, the arena’s hungry stone cupping it, fattening it, turning taunt into sermon. He leans his weight through the spear, nailing Makeno to the rock like wreckage on a reef. “This is what ‘wild’ currents do when faced with law and oath. They drown the foolish and spare only those we choose.” The roar that answers is not mere applause; it swells and thickens, each shout another knot in the tale Deko is braiding. Makeno feels himself written into it as caution, not hero. His forced stillness, slick with humiliation, burning in his cheeks and scalp, rises like bitter incense while the priest hammers the moment into doctrine.
Makeno grits his teeth against the spear’s pressure, jaw aching, the haft a cold, merciless rod pinning bone to stone. The current grinds his kneecap against some jagged shelf hidden under the murk, each pulse of water another hammer-blow right into the joint. Pain spits up his thigh in raw, white arcs. His toes scrabble for purchase in shifting gravel and find none. The more he tries to ease the weight, the more the current seems to lean into him, grinding flesh thinner, as if the arena itself wants to etch him down to bone and story.
Above, the roar does not break; it climbs. Drums punch through his ribs, thudding against his heart until his own pulse stutters to match their pace. Sound coils in the vaulted rock and drops back heavy, not just from the living crowd but from deeper throats. Echoes layered on echoes, past combats and past sermons, all of them pressing toward this moment. The air is thick with watching. Even with his face turned and half-blinded by spray, he feels it: a thousand eyes, a thousand hungers, mortal and more-than-mortal, all craning toward Deko’s tidy parable of wild water brought to heel.
The choir behind the masks never falters. Their braided voices rise and fall in counterpoint to Deko’s breath, to the flex of his shoulders, to the twist of his planted feet. Each syllable seems to tug on something in the stone, in the water, in Makeno’s own blood. It is not just a fight being watched; it is a lesson being written. He tastes it, bitter and chalky, like sigil-dust on the tongue. The arena’s attention settles on his skin like wet clay, heavy, shaping fingers already smoothing him into the role it wants: survivor turned warning, stray magic collared and displayed.
He can almost feel the story taking shape around his body, lines tightening like ropes. In that unseen amphitheatre beyond the flame-lit seats something leans closer, eager. The pressure is as real as the spear on his scalp. It dares him to thrash. It dares him to break on cue.
The water chewing at his trapped leg is no river he has ever named. It climbs his calf in greedy tongues and tastes of rusted iron and altar smoke, of knives quenched in throats and chains cooled in prayer. Blood thinned by time yet never rinsed away slicks his tongue with a sour-metal film, every breath clogged with the ghost of incense burned to gag protest, not honor any god. Each chill slap against his skin carries the memory of hands on a struggling neck, a palm on the back of a bowed head, pushing down, always down, toward the shimmering lip of a basin that never asked consent. It is not the cool, laughing touch of home waters that once lifted him through storms. This current has been taught to kneel and to make others kneel. It drags at him with the slow, relentless insistence of doctrine, like a sermon poured into stone and liquid both, insisting that sacrifice is natural, inevitable, and that his thrashing now is only part of the rite.
In the warped echoes riding that current he strains for the familiar cadence of foremothers and drowned uncles, for the click and slide of cowries in ancestral hands, for the low, steadying murmur that once cut through gale and panic. Nothing answers in that pattern. What comes instead are ragged fragments of other endings, torn loose from their own shores. Broken cries ricochet through the stone like birds netted mid-flight, wings beating uselessly against rock. He catches snatches of languages he half-knows from distant coasts, prayers sheared in half by impact, a child’s wail that drops into a gurgle. A chorus of shipwrecks and executions, all their stories swallowed, filings ground off and recast as holy verdicts in some priest’s neat mouth.
The understanding hits with its own kind of impact: this is not just deadened river, it is made of what he has been straining to hear. All that muffled outcry and thwarted blessing bled into channels, tutored to flow in circles that feed the gods of spectacle. Every bound current here is stolen testimony, repurposed to hold his kind up as warning, not as warning bell.
Vision tunnels down to a single sharp line. He sees the story Deko is etching in blood and echo: Makeno the lone survivor not as riddle but as verdict, a moral hammered flat. The storm becomes righteous culling, his crew condemned, their silence proof that only temple chains keep hungry dead at bay. If that hardens here, sets like bronze in shrine-molds, their last night ceases to be wound or question. It becomes statute, lesson, a case cited in future sermons. The real break will slide under silt and doctrine, unreachable, as if it never was.
From the archway, Olu notes how the arena’s river-channels no longer mirror only Makeno’s footing but the crowd’s appetite, each swell of water answering their chants as if the trickster gods themselves are leaning in; the cool, damp air that once smelled of sweat and incense now tastes metallic, like the moment before a blade is drawn in judgment. The blue fire in the hanging gourds flickers off-beat with the drums, casting Makeno’s shadow long and thin across the shifting stones, stretching it toward the masked statues like an offered sacrifice.
He narrows his eyes. The patterns in the channels are wrong. In a fair bout, the water answers balance. Now it surges when the crowd howls for blood, even when Makeno’s stance is solid and his opponent overreaches. A spray of droplets leaps higher not with a landed blow, but with a shouted insult against “river-wanderers.” The arena itself is taking sides.
Olu feels it in his old burns too. The scars along his neck itch and tighten the way they did the night of the great fire, when chants twisted from praise to accusation in a breath. The air presses on his lungs, damp and heavy, as if every spectator’s exhale is another hand on Makeno’s shoulders, forcing him down into the script Deko has written.
The river smell deepens, souring. Beneath incense and sweat comes a faint stink of drowned wood and old rope: the ghost of shipwreck clinging to the rising mist. The spirit echo of some broken hull answers each drumbeat with a creak only men like Olu hear. This is not a simple proving ground anymore. It is a crossroads altar, and Makeno’s struggle is being weighed as an offering.
Olu shifts his grip on his staff, leg throbbing, gaze running over guard posts, exits, choir lofts, measuring. The channels’ glittering curves sketch out a story in water and stone, and he can see, too clearly, how it ends if he lets the gods and clergy have their clean arc. The arena is listening, impatient. It wants a turning point.
The masked choirs tilt their heads in unison at a tiny hand-sign from an officiant cloaked in shadow, a gesture so economical Olu almost misses it. Then the gold along their cheekbones flares, not randomly but in staggered waves, sigils waking like embers breathed to life. He has seen that pattern before, smeared across charred stone in the aftermath of the great fire, sketched in red ink on reports he was ordered to forget. It is the lattice used when the academy wants someone ended and remembered in one stroke. An execution rite wrapped in the language of “instruction.”
The drums obey. What had been a hot, scrambling rhythm fit for wagers and laughter lengthens, spaces opening between each strike like slow heartbeats. The cadence is the one used when bodies are walked down to the river’s edge, when names are spoken three times and then never again. Every beat tells the watching spirits: attend, a verdict is being written. Every rise and fall of sound is a hammer, and the tale they are about to fasten will not come free without blood or blasphemy.
Watching Deko pace the periphery of the pit, Olu reads the choreography the way other men read ledgers. The priest never comes close enough to stain his own feet, yet every small gesture (tilt of chin, twist of wrist, measured stamp on the flagstones) ripples through the officiants and the living rock. Feints from Makeno’s opponent arrive always from the side where the stones are driest, driving the sailor toward channels already murmuring, their water poised to surge on cue. Invocations bloom at Deko’s soft-spoken prompts, each liturgical phrase shunting Makeno’s raw, ancestral pull into awkward eddies, making his instincts seem wild, ignorant, unsafe. This is not a test, Olu realizes, but choreography for a public taming or a beautiful breaking.
Voices roughen into a chant that isn’t quite prayer, isn’t quite mob, pounding against the stone like surf against a hull. The words hook into the choir’s harmonies, braided and tightened until even silence feels like agreement. Olu hears the story hardening with every roar, an invisible decree: whatever happens to this one sailor will become the fate-script for all his kind.
He tracks the sigil-glow up to the officiant’s ledge and sees, set with ceremonial care, lacquered tablets and low red bowls rimmed in dried salt and old brown crust. Not tally-mark tools. Covenant tools. Whatever is etched and poured here will be copied in sealed chambers above. Let Makeno break, kneel, or blaze defiant. This bout will become scripture used to chain his kind.
The name grates out of the stone like a blade dragged on bone and Olu’s mouth goes dry. His whisper stutters, then dies. Air rasps in his scarred throat as the syllables settle, familiar as an old burn. He has not spoken that name aloud since the inquiry hearings, since they wrote it neat and blameless on palm-leaf and pretended it had never been shouted over crackling beams and falling roof-tiles.
Up on the shadowed ledge, the officiant’s silhouette shifts. A hand lifts, two fingers crooking in a lazy, practiced arc. Below, the arena’s channels answer: water hesitates, then tilts toward Makeno’s footing like a tongue tasting fear. Olu’s eyes narrow. That rhythm. That calm. He hears another night through it: orders given in the same level tone while smoke poured under doorways and students screamed in the dormitories.
He remembers the way his section’s relief patrol simply never came. How the rotation chalked on the board at dusk did not match the boots that pounded the halls when the first alarm gongs rang. How the corridors toward the archival vaults filled with sprinting clergy and robed aides while the servants’ barracks and junior guard posts were left to choke.
Now those same careful hands rest on lacquered tablets. Those same shoulders incline toward the Iron Court’s champions and away from anyone who counts only as ash already spent.
Olu’s fingers tighten on his staff until the knuckles pale against old burn-scars. The threshold-spirit’s presence presses at his ear, grainy and impatient, waiting for his answer. Rage surges up hot and dizzy: thirteen years of living as a half-trusted cripple while the one who weighed his life against a ledger of sacred assets now scripts a new sacrifice in polished red bowls.
Not hierarchy, then. Not bad luck. The man who signed away his section’s relief now writes Makeno’s fate into covenant ink.
The world narrows to cadence.
Not memory. Not now. Both, layered.
The priest’s voice does not need to rise. It folds itself into the drum-beat, into the choir’s climb and fall, riding the sound the same way it rode the roar of the fire years ago. Measured. Unhurried. Never straining, even when boys coughed blood and the rafters screamed.
Below, the masked choirs dip their heads in that same practiced angle, sigils winking like small, pleased eyes. They watch Makeno’s near-slip. They watch the water lean against his ankles, probing, then suck obediently back when the priest’s fingers ease. Not one moves to steady him. Observation only. Assessment only. As it was in the burning dormitory, when robed witnesses marked down how fast the flames traveled and how long a door would hold.
Olu tastes soot at the back of his tongue.
This is not some distant cousin of that night. Not some faceless mechanism of rank. It is the same hand, the same doctrine. The same man choosing, again, which bodies are kindling and which are covenant. The pattern repeats by intent, not accident.
The spirit’s voice rasps on, patient and merciless, scraping meaning into him with every grit-thick word. This is no quick favor, no little nudge of luck on a wet stone. To lean the thresholds, to make the cracks and seams of this place shiver in Makeno’s favor, is to twist the arena’s own spine against the songs being sung above. The trickster gods will feel it as a slap, a joke turned back on the jester. They like surprise, not theft. And the man on the ledge: he will feel it sharper still. He will not taste it as nameless omen, but as insult. As challenge. As proof the guard he once fed to the fire refuses to stay dead in the ledger.
Olu’s breath saws shallow. The old rule that kept him breathing, bend, vanish, obey, shivers and splits. To meddle here is to step naked into a ring drawn for other men, to let cleric and god both fix his name to this night’s ledger. Not rumor. Not unlucky guard. Intent. A hand reaching across sacred stone to slap back.
He stops weighing. There is no scale that is not theirs. There is only yes or crawl.
Olu leans until his brow brushes cold stone, lets the crack drink his breath. He gives the names, the bargains, the memory of boys burning and a sailor drowning on dry rock. When he is done, he knows the ledge above has heard. The Iron Court has marked him for erasure.
The nearest threshold-spirit answers first.
Cold lifts out of the stone, not air but the memory of river-mist in harmattan, and slicks around Olu’s fingers. It moves with intent. Not a breeze. A tongue. It tastes the ash-dust still caught in the lines of his palms, the bitter grit beneath his nails, the faint smoke that has lived in his skin since the day the roofs fell in and boys screamed into cinders.
It follows the scent of offering up his arm. Over old burns. Over the shiny ridges where skin melted and grew back wrong. Each pass tightens the flesh, like wet cloth shrinking over a drum. Nerves howl, but his breath stays caged behind his teeth. He has learned not to waste air on sound.
The chill finds the hollow in his chest where the beads used to hang. Three knots of clay and ash, worn smooth by years of thumb-rubbing, tuned to catch the poison out of every breath. Gone now, ground under his own hand into the damp dust in the crack.
The spirit noses that gap, presses in.
Olu feels it slip between ribs as if bone were reeds in floodwater. A cold weight settles where scar-tissue webs over old hurt. His lungs seize. For one heart-stopping beat he is back in the collapsing hall, smoke packed so thick the world went black and grainy and full of sparks.
The spirit sucks.
Not air. Not blood. It draws out the faint trickle of soot the beads had held at bay, pulls at the ghost of every cough he did not let the captains hear. Each tug leaves his chest barer, thinner, as if some invisible lining is being peeled away and eaten.
Greedy, the thing shivers, contracts, and drinks deeper. Its chill floods his back, his throat, his jaw. Tears sting his eyes. He does not blink.
When it is done, it sighs. A sound like a tide withdrawing through broken mangrove roots. The cold retreats from his bones, leaving only damp stone at his forehead and a sweat-chill along his spine.
He draws his next breath.
The air cuts.
It comes in harsh and naked, no ash-filter between lung and world. The old ache flares raw, a rasping scrape along each inhale, like breathing through a woven mat of thorns. His chest burns, then hollows. There is more air, too much air, but none of the soft cushion the beads had brewed over years of faithful worry.
The spirit’s presence thins back into the wall, satisfied. It lingers just enough for him to feel the curve of its attention, like a cat’s tail flicking once along an ankle before it vanishes under a house.
His lungs shudder, adjusting to the new emptiness. Each breath now is a bargain with pain, no talisman between him and the academy’s chalk-dust, incense, and arena-reek. Every draw of air writes its cost sharp along his ribs.
The offering is accepted. The debt has teeth.
From a drain-slit overlooking the arena floor, another spirit noses awake.
It is small, but old. A gutter-thing, born where blood and wash-water meet. It listens as Olu hisses the panic codes into stone, each clipped consonant a footstep in an empty corridor, each soft vowel a door eased shut without a squeak.
The spirit drinks.
Syllables strike the damp rim of the channel and flare, brief and hungry. Phosphorescent sigils skitter along the stone like startled minnows. Some take the shape of crooked keys. Some look like little running men with no heads. For a heartbeat they cling, hissing against the arena’s older wards.
Then they slither.
Lines of light thin and stretch, eel-slick, burrowing into mortar, vanishing between grains of rock. Olu can feel them going, the way a man feels a rope pay out of his hands. Routes he once ran blind in smoke and alarm (through laundry arches, along gutter ledges, across forgotten roofs) unspool in his mind as the sigils sink.
Those paths are not his any longer. The secret shortcuts, the blind turns that let a guard vanish between heartbeat and shout, bleed out of his keeping and into the stone. Elsewhere in the arena’s bones, unseen fingers will find new doors where he once found refuge, new angles of approach where he once slipped away.
The drain-spirit burps, a wet little chuckle in the dark, and settles deeper into its crack. The academy’s hidden veins rearrange themselves, no longer answering to a limping man with a staff, but to something colder, watching from the walls.
His body remembers smoke and collapsing ceilings. For an instant his leg twinges with phantom heat, a hot nail driven through old scar and ruined muscle. His throat tries to close on the last code, the last trick, the one path he has never spoken aloud to any wall. Instinct rises, sharp and animal: keep one secret back. Keep one door only you can open. That hoarded scrap of safety has kept him breathing all these years, a private ledge above the flood.
He grinds his teeth and forces it down. These are not captains or clergy he is bargaining with. If he salts the gift with fear, they will taste it. They will smell the withheld path, shy at the leash in the heartbeat Makeno needs them most, and twist his careful offering into another half-measure sacrifice: good spectacle, perhaps, but a bad rescue.
So he strips himself bare. Every remembered step, every hidden turn, every last unsounded alarm passes his lips and sinks into stone. The shiver that answers from the walls is greedy and pleased. Somewhere deep underfoot, the arena’s secret corridors rearrange like a beast rolling in stolen scent.
The arena twitches.
Along the pit’s rim, a hairline seam sighs open, just enough for a silver thread of river-water to seep out and trace a fresh groove toward Makeno’s circle. One hanging gourd’s blue fire stutters, then catches the rhythm of his steps, flaring on each shift of weight. Olu feels it: the spirits testing boundaries, nudging stone and light to tilt fortune, careful to sweeten spectacle instead of smother it, probing how much they can bend the stage before the trickster gods bare their teeth.
He sags back into shadow, suddenly lighter and more breakable, as if someone has unbuckled invisible armor and left only smoke-stung lungs and bad memories. A chill crawls under his scars where the ash once sat. The walls hum, pleased and predatory. Olu tastes ash and river-iron and the old terror of flame, knowing he has wagered himself empty on one boy’s thin hope.
The drum pattern knots in on itself. What had been a rolling thunder becomes a tight, three-strand weave, strokes snapping like ropes over a capstan. Olu knows that cadence. Once you heard it, you never forgot. It had rung above the crackle of burning beams and the screaming of trapped students, above the wet cough of a man bleeding out in an execution circle. Each drumbeat is a loop thrown, then jerked, around a neck, around a choice, around one last possible escape.
Down in the pit, the sound drives Makeno and his opponent into smaller arcs. No more wide testing circles, no more loose-feinting. The rhythm herds them, tugging at reflex and tendon, funneling the fight toward one clean, final line.
“Atun stroke,” Olu breathes, not quite aloud.
On the raised stone dais, the officiant straightens. His mask is a blank, gleaming thing, gold-leaf hammered over carved river-ochre, mouth without opening, eyes slitted and dark. He lifts his spear in both hands until the iron head almost kisses the painted ceiling of wrecked ships and storm mouths.
The gourds above answer.
Blue fire inside them swells at once, thin flames fattening into tongues that lick their glass skins. For a heartbeat the arena is drowned in that ghost-light. Stone sweats with it. Faces in the galleries bleach to bone-colored ovals, their features lost so that only hunger and attention remain. Even Makeno’s stormwater eyes flash pale, caught in the flare like a fish rolling just under a wave.
Every gourd flares in perfect unison. No wandering flicker, no lagging lamp. The timing is ritual-precise, the signal burned into the arena’s memory from a hundred deciding passages. Heatless brilliance lances down into the pit and washes over spearpoints, wet stone, the slick lines of spilled blood.
The officiant’s lifted spear fixes the moment, pins it like an insect on a scholar’s board.
Around Olu, the air tightens. The roar of the crowd does not grow louder; it sharpens, countless throats pulled onto the same note of expectation. Spirits in the lintels and floor-cracks shiver against his senses, crowding forward, tasting what is about to be written.
This is the call. The formal declaration, sung in drum and fire, that the bout has left the muddle of trading blows and entered its narrow throat of fate. One exchange. One sequence. The pattern that will decide who walks and who is carried.
Olu’s scars prickle. Somewhere in the stone beneath his feet, all his surrendered secrets twist and settle, aligning themselves with that raised spear, with the braided rhythm that squeezes the world smaller and smaller around a lean sailor in a ring of turning light.
The carved channels answer the drums.
What had been a dark, obedient sheen along the grooves kicks up without warning, river-quick. Water bulges, then spills its banks, spinning into tight, ankle-deep eddies that snatch at Makeno’s footing and lick cold up his calves. Across from him, his opponent’s stance widens on instinct, heels seeking purchase as the floor itself turns treacherous.
The current does not move as one body. It coils in separate threads, some sliding under Makeno’s soles to lift, some knotting around the other fighter’s shins to drag. From the archway, Olu watches the pattern of it. No random surge, but a weaving, a question. How far can the spirits lean without snapping the story?
Around him, the threshold-things he bargained with huddle close, unseen except in the way the stone’s breath roughens. He feels them flinch at the officiant’s raised spear, then lean forward like gamblers over a board. This is the narrow mouth they named. The “turning stroke.” One breath where their touch may pass for blessing, not blasphemy, if they ride the spectacle instead of drowning it.
Weight drops out of the air.
It is not wind, not sound, but the thick, velvet hush that comes before a sky splits. The blue fire in the gourds steadies, hardens; even the drifting flecks of stone-dust seem to hang, caught between falling and flight. Under his palm, the archway stone grows cold and slick, like a rock under a rising tide.
In that squeezed breath, Olu feels the bout shiver open.
Not in sight, but as a net of almosts strung taut across the pit. A dozen first cuts. A hundred answering angles. Feints that become stumbles, parries that become broken arms. Each heartbeat another rung offered, then kicked away, the whole ladder of futures creaking toward the one the gods mean to freeze.
The officiant drives his spear-butt into the rock. The crack of impact snaps through stone and bone alike. A shudder ripples the pit. Above, the priest-choir’s song jerks into a higher, cutting key, bright and thin as drawn wire. That note is a seal half-pressed, the gods’ attention narrowing to the next handful of strokes.
Around Olu’s boots, the hidden ones surge.
They funnel toward the drainage slits and mortar-cracks, a press of yearning without bodies. The air at his ankles seethes, cold and abrasive, their whispers rasping against one another until they blur into a single, fevered hiss. They crowd the seam they showed him before, the little slack left in the pattern, testing its edges like tongues on a blade. One nudge, they promise. One tilt. Enough to make the story gasp, not break.
Sweat needles Olu’s burned neck as he counts the shrinking space between drumbeats, each thud another door slamming on clean intervention. The spirits press, frantic for direction. He must name it now, whose footing to steal, whose strike to sweeten, or the pattern will harden like quenched iron. After that, any hand upon it will read as naked insult to the watching gods.
Smoke claws up from the past and stuffs his lungs.
Not scent, not truly, but the memory of it so thick his throat forgets the difference. The arena’s damp stone becomes baked brick beneath his fingers; blue fire becomes orange glare. In his mind the roof is already sagging, beams weeping sparks. Children’s sandals slap the flagstones. Someone is screaming his name. Someone else is screaming orders.
He had been standing in a doorway then, too.
Corridor forked before him. Left into a dim stairwell furred with smoke, right toward the “secure route” stamped into his training until it might as well have been carved in his bones. Ahead and below, over the crackle and roar, came the high, tearing shrieks of students caught where flame had jumped the wards. To the right, a superior’s palm, heavy on his shoulder, fingers lit with bright, clean sigils of command.
“Guard rotation holds the south,” that voice had gritted in his ear. “You break, the line breaks. Move.”
Olu had seen the glow at the stairwell mouth. Not yellow. Not the dull orange of dropped torch-grease. Blue-white lines like temple script racing up the bannister, biting into carved wood, turning prayers into kindling. Clergy marks. Wrong, his gut said. Ordered, his training replied.
His foot had twitched toward the cries.
The sigiled hand shoved. Habit slammed shutters over instinct. One heartbeat. Two. That was all. He’d told himself he was waiting. To be sure, to find a better way, to confirm what his eyes swore they already knew. In that thin span, the fire chose for him. The beam went. The stairwell folded in on its own heat. The shrieks cut off like a rope.
Doing nothing had taken less than three breaths.
The academy had called it discipline. The fathers in his town called it dereliction. The spirits of that day, when he felt them at all, called it by its true name, scratched into his sleep: you left them.
Coward had not been spoken aloud in the tribunal hall. It had not needed to be. It lived instead in lowered gazes, in the way junior guards straightened when he passed, careful not to brush against his ruined neck. It lived in the empty mat where his younger cousin used to sit during festivals, before the town barred their door to him. It lived in his own muscles, in that traitor stiffness that seized him whenever choice drew blood on either hand.
It seizes him now.
The Arena of Turning Tides falls away. For a breath, there is only another narrowing, another fork choked with heat. Drums become collapsing beams. The officiant’s spear-strike becomes the crunch of falling stone. Makeno’s slight form in the pit blurs into a knot of smaller shapes trapped at the stairwell landing, faces turned up, eyes full of the impossible belief that he will come.
His chest locks like a door-beam swollen in its frame.
The spirits’ cold rush at his ankles registers as fire licking close, testing his boots. Their hiss stacks with remembered crackle until he cannot tell past from now. His fingers spasm on the archway stone. Every hard-won instinct that has kept him alive since that day rises, heavy and reasonable as a captain’s hand.
If he names the wrong thing, he argues with himself, he could make it worse. If he asks them to twist too far, the trickster gods may notice, may crush not only him but the boy in the pit, and what good would that be? Better to see how the first exchanges fall. Better to read the pattern more clearly. Better to. Watching the way out burn closed while he convinces himself caution is care.
The knowledge claws at him from the inside, but it does not loosen his ribs. Between one drumstroke and the next, Olu stands helpless at two disasters at once: the one that made him, and the one closing around Makeno now.
His breath snags on old smoke. The first appeal goes sideways in his throat, comes out a stuttering half-prayer that trips over itself. “Not like before… you must, no, wait, listen.” The words scrape the air, thin and broken-backed, more plea than pact. Instead of the single, cutting command the hidden ones begged for, what spills from him is a muddle of warnings and half-built routes. “Turn what you must, but don’t. No drowning, no snuffing, only… only let the story show itself. Let every blow be seen. Let no one look away.”
He is still bargaining with ghosts of tribunals and captains, still trying to buy time by weighing every angle aloud, as though carefulness could be an offering.
The spirits grow impatient. The cracks in the stone tighten with their offense. Their cold gathers, not around Makeno’s name, but around the bright edges in Olu’s babble: turning, tipping, spectacle, no smothering. They crowd closer, pressed face-first into the pattern, their hunger sliding past his fear toward the promise of sharper, cleaner chaos they can feed to the waiting gods.
The answer comes back like a change in current more than sound. The stone under his palm quickens, grains grinding against one another as if sharpening. In the drainage slits at his feet, grit extrudes and retracts in needle-pricks, testing angles, savoring the idea of misplaced steps. Threads of seep-water creep up the wall, hesitate, then spill themselves deliberately, rehearsing where ankles might skid, where a spear’s butt might glance and turn. They have heard him. Not the shaking silence where protection should have stood, but the bright, sharp phrases he wrapped around it. Turning. Tipping. No drowning, no snuffing. Let every blow be seen. The rustle that answers is eager, predatory. Yes, they pulse through stone and trickle. We will make every risk bloom. Whether the boy survives it is not what was sworn.
He hears himself, as if from a distance, and understands the trap he has sprung. Every plea he shaped around spectacle now glitters like a hook in stone-teeth. Justice, not mercy. Truth, not shelter. The cracks chuckle without sound. Channels flex their thin muscles. They will grant him revelation, yes: by stripping Makeno bare in the teeth of sharpened chance.
The next drum-strike falls like a hammer on a half-forged blade, and its echo clamps around Olu’s chest. Heat bites between his shoulders, a brand laid by his own tongue. Down in the rock, the little powers twist themselves into the arena’s hunger, not softening a single edge. His brief, useless wish for mercy calcifies into something else: witness. Every nudge they grant from now on will tilt toward blood, not safety, and he has bound himself to watch it happen.
The first tremor is almost delicate. A shy shiver through the bedrock that tickles Olu’s bad leg, climbs the old burn-scars at his neck, and sets the arena’s hanging gourds to a slow, uneven sway. Blue fire sloshes inside them like trapped lightning in bottles. Shadows drag long and short in time with the stone’s new breathing.
Down in the pit, Makeno and Deko shift before they know why. Ankles adjust. Toes dig for purchase. Their stances narrow a hair, knees softening as instinct tries to catch a rhythm that keeps changing. The sand at their feet writes and rewrites faint rings around their soles, erased as soon as the next heartbeat comes. The ground is no longer still; it listens, inhales, waits.
Along the wet seams of the arena, the spirits Olu bargained with wake properly. They skim and coil in the hairline cracks like pale eels in mangrove roots. Patient as reef crabs, yes, but keyed up now, claws flexing, eyes on every shift of weight. A drainage slit widens just enough that a footing stone loses its proud edge. Another stone lips higher, proud where it used to sit shy. It is all tiny, all deniable. It is everything.
Makeno feels it as a wrongness in the current that is not his. The channels around the pit give a tiny, anticipatory sigh, water drawing back from the lip like breath taken before a shout. His stormwater eyes flick down, then up, taking in the sour gleam of rock sweat and the faint quiver in Deko’s spear-tip. The priest feels it too, because his grin shows teeth now, not piety.
The arena has turned its head. The little powers are in position, their attention hooked to Olu’s vow and the trickster gods’ thirst both. When the next lunge comes, they will not break it. They will polish it. Every stumble will be a spotlight. Every near-miss, a question. Every wound, a syllable in the revelation Olu has demanded and cannot now recall.
Up in the masked choirs, something small and sideways enters the sound. A new counter-beat slips under the main drum pattern, a half-step late and a shade too sharp, pricking at the skin rather than lifting it. It is off by a hair from the academy’s usual cadence, syncopated in a way Olu remembers from nights when the “trials” never ended with applause. Execution rhythm. Blood-rhythm.
The gold-dusted masks tilt as one, vertebra by vertebra, until every painted grin faces the pit. Their hollow eyes fix on Makeno like sighting along spearshafts. The hymns thicken. What was chant becomes cutting wire, each phrase tightening around certain sounds. Any hint of “ancestor,” any curve of “river,” draws a sudden harmonic that rasps like hooked blades being honed. Words that smell of wild water and unlicensed dead are seized, twisted, fed back to the crowd as dissonant snarls.
In the tiers, the shift is invisible yet total. Spines lengthen. Hands curl on knees. The crowd’s murmur grows teeth. With each sharpened note, their mood slides a finger’s breadth from unease, through fascination, toward something leaner and hungrier: the satisfaction of watching a man judged and broken in the god’s own light.
Makeno feels that pressure as a drag in his limbs and in the air itself, the sanctioned magic of the arena trying to press him flat into a tale already carved in priests’ ink: reckless wanderer humbled by doctrine, salt-boy broken on temple stone. His breath comes rough. Each inhale tastes of incense and old blood, thick as river-mud after flood.
He plants his bare foot to pivot, trusting the quick give of sand and the slow honesty of rock. And the stone there slicks itself a heartbeat too early. Water sweats up from nowhere. His sole skates, calf jerking, a warning skid yawing through his balance. He catches himself with a desperate twist, shoulder rolling, cowries at his throat clacking like startled teeth.
The slip is small. The message is not. The arena is no longer just a place but an active opponent, a clever shoreline rearranging itself between steps. Its currents pull at his joints, trying to guide his fall toward a shape it prefers. He feels the story tightening around him like wet rope and, for a hard, bright instant, bares his own will against it.
Across from him, Deko reads the same omens as advantage. He prowls forward with measured patience, testing the restless floor with the iron-shod butt of his spear, each tap a quiet inquiry the stone seems eager to answer. Battle-trance seeps into him like hot oil, braiding with the arena’s shifting geometry until his breath, his god, and the tilting ground move as one intention. Every feint, every half-committed lunge, worries at Makeno’s footing, herding him step by grudging step toward a deceptively plain patch of sand where the drainage slits Olu has marked now gape a finger-width wider, black and glistening like a waiting mouth.
Above and below, pact-struck spirits and trickster clergy lock into a lethal duet. Cracks along the walls sip harder at the channelled river, fattening hidden reservoirs beneath chosen stones; hairline seams glisten, then go still. The choirs swell toward an unseen peak. Olu feels the pattern cinch like a net as Deko drives in, shield first, the whole arena tensing to turn that single impact into orchestrated ruin.
Makeno doesn’t feel the first impact so much as hear it before the world snaps sideways and his spear-guard flies wide. The blow drives the breath from him in a wet grunt, air torn out like a sail in squall-wind. His boots scrape uselessly for purchase, skidding over slick stone, as his lean frame is flung toward the patch of floor Olu saw sink moments before.
The arena comes at him in jerks and blurs. Red walls. Masked gods. A flash of Deko’s gold-scarred chest driving after him like a second impact already on its way. His ribs flare fire where the shield hit, his right arm numb from elbow to wrist. Fingers spasm on his spear-haft. It tears from his grip, clattering somewhere behind, orphaned.
Stone teeth grind and lower under the roar of the crowd. The flagstones ahead of him gape apart, a jagged mouth opening right where his spine is about to land. The arena’s floor doesn’t just drop; it yawns, deliberate and hungry, like a dry tidal hollow carved to catch and break whatever the shield sends. Dust and mist puff up from the widening seam, catching blue ghost-light, turning the air between him and the drop into a thin, sparkling veil.
His stomach lurches as his weight tips over that new edge. For a heartbeat he hangs there, heels sliding, arms pinwheeling for a balance that isn’t there. The smell of wet stone and old blood surges up from the forming pit. Far above, the painted storm on the ceiling looms, waves forever about to break over tiny inked ships. He hears drums folding in on themselves, the rhythm stumbling as if even the hidden choirs flinch from the sudden hunger in the rock.
His heels hit the lip of that sudden drop just as the whole arena seems to draw breath. The stone under him flexes, not enough to save him, only enough to make falling feel slower and cruel. Then the walls exhale.
The narrow channels that had been quietly drinking the river’s flow convulse and spit it back. The trickle becomes a convulsion. Water that had only kissed their ankles a heartbeat ago bucks like a struck horse, bulging up against its cut-stone banks before leaping free in a single, stomach-lurching surge. It shouldn’t climb like that. The slope runs away from him, toward the far gate, but the flood comes sideways, slamming across the arena as if some invisible hand dragged a net of current through it.
Cold hits first. Then weight. A waist-high, hammering sheet of river crashes into his hips, drives into the half-open pit, roars around his thighs. The carved stormships on the painted ceiling seem to pitch with it, ghost-fire swinging wild, hulls tilting as if the whole shrine were rolling in unseen waves and he is suddenly back in that killing sea.
The force of the reversal does not choose. It rips through both fighters with the same blind hunger as open sea. Makeno’s boots sheer off the stone; his legs fly out from under him, body going near-weightless for a sick instant before gravity remembers him. His right shoulder slams the raw edge of the lowered pit with a splintering crack that pops stars across his vision. White fire lances up his spine, jaw locking on a breathless cry, the impact spinning him sideways so half his torso hangs over the dark, jagged drop.
Deko is not spared. His carefully timed spear-wheel, already mid-arc to follow the shield-bash into a killing thrust, lurches wrong as the ground bucks. The wide sweep that should have chased Makeno’s retreat instead meets the sudden sideways drag of the water. His stance, textbook-solid a heartbeat ago, shatters. One heel skids, weight pitching onto his back leg, shield wrenching him off-center. The round of it, gold-scarred and wet, becomes an anchor pulling him down instead of a wall driving him forward.
The haft in his hands goes wild. The reversed current rams the spearhead, shoving it off its murderous line, the long ash-wood bucking like a live thing. Tendons jump in Deko’s forearms as he fights to keep his grip, the river trying to twist the weapon from his fingers and hurl it spinning into the dark.
For a heartbeat they are not fighters but flotsam in a seized tide. The floor goes treacherous beneath them. Lowered stones grind, rise, sink again in stuttering pulses, channels yawning and snapping shut so every flagstone feels unmoored, set adrift on a game-board the gods have flipped mid-throw. Around the hollow’s mouth the reversed water claws and slaps at Makeno’s hips, sucking and wrenching, searching for that last, fatal inch that will peel him loose and spill him into the grinding dark.
Up in the shrouded galleries the mask-rows jolt. Robes sway, beads click. The practiced call-and-response tears apart mid-phrase, chopped into stray shouts as the shrine bucks the script written for it. The roar that had been rising with every clash snaps ragged. No longer clean blood-hunger but a sharp intake of breath, a hiss-rattle of warding names, disbelieving laughter strangled before it can grow teeth. Drums stumble. Ghost-fire inside the hanging gourds gutters low, painting the storm-ships overhead in smeared, jittering light. For a blink the arena feels unsanctioned, feral: stone, river, and storm-paint shrugging off priest-song to drag the bout somewhere no oath has mapped.
Deko does not flail.
He drops his weight in a single clean line, knees bending, stance widening until he is a low, braced wedge of flesh and bone. The onrushing water hits him full in the gut and chest, roaring white around his thighs, but his boots bite stone. Shield cants forward just enough that the surge climbs it and splits, a foaming V that claws past his sides instead of ripping him loose.
The gold-dusted scars carved across his bare chest flare as the river slams him. Lines that had been ember-soft blaze like struck coin, each ritual groove drinking the force and giving it shape. His breath comes in deep, even pulls, not the ragged gasps of a caught fighter but the measured inhale-exhale of a man inside prayer.
Once.
Twice.
With each breath the wild rush finds edges. The swirl at his knees steadies into a steady shove. The drag that should tear at his ankles becomes a conveyor, a rude but harnessed hand. Deko rolls his shoulders into it, turns his hip, and the current that tried to carry him away now shoulders him forward, inch by relentless inch.
Spray lashes his face. His spear-hand, dragged sideways by the first shock, recovers with brutal economy. Fingers tighten, tendons standing out like carved cords as he chokes up on the haft, shortening its reach but carving back control. The point comes down and forward, low and hungry, tracking the line of Makeno’s exposed flank without needing to see it.
Behind the war-priest, the drum-thunder overhead catches his rhythm. What had stumbled now locks to his heart’s beat, a hammering pattern of closure. Endings. His patron rides that sound. The light in his scars pulses with it, each flare a silent answer to the hidden choir’s shifting song.
The arena feels his acceptance.
The shifting stones nearest him slow their stutter, giving his feet firmer purchase even as the rest of the floor bucks and slides. Channels gape and slam shut at his flanks instead of under his heels, the shrine’s fickle geometry favoring his line. The water still roars, still claws, but it moves with him now, not against.
He lowers his center of gravity another inch, becomes a moving pillar, a temple post driven through spray and chaos. Every muscle in his back and thighs knots to hold that line. Pain flickers where old arena wounds pull and threaten to give, but his god’s pressure settles heavy on his shoulders, refusing collapse.
Deko bares his teeth in something too cold to be a grin.
This is the moment he was cut for.
Where others drown, he plants his feet and walks.
Makeno, lungs burning, takes the force full across his flank. It is not a clean push but a sideways, treacherous shove that rips his feet from the stone. The flagstones under him are no longer floor but loose teeth, grinding down and away, slicked with a skin of churning foam. His boots skid. The edges he had mapped in the first heartbeat of the surge vanish under a smear of white and shadow. His calves try to bite for purchase, to dig in as Deko did, but his battered muscles fire late, nerves sluggish from old bruises and fresh blows.
His knee goes first. Pain flashes up the joint, bright and useless. The other leg folds a breath behind, not from any slackening in his will but because the meat and bone have reached that quiet, treacherous moment when they simply stop obeying. His thighs quake. The familiar deck-sway of ships, his oldest ally, betrays him here; his body tries to ride the heave as if on timber, not living rock, and finds no rhythm to lock onto.
He pitches sideways into the water’s pull.
The reversed current hooks him like a crooked finger, jerking at hip and shoulder, twisting his spine until pain scrapes fire along each vertebra. The world slews sideways. Masked faces and ghost-lit ships wheel in a smeared ring above while the black mouth of the lowered pit yawns at his back, hungry and very near. His left arm flails wide, not the trained guard of a fighter but the raw, panicked windmill of a man losing all axes at once. Fingers claw empty spray. The motion rips his torso open to the oncoming line of steel, ribs flared like slats of a shattered hull. Deko’s spearhead tracks that bright, betraying target as if the water itself is sighting for him.
Overhead, the faltering drums jolt, then knit themselves into a single, closing cadence, each beat a heavy palm on the back of his neck. The sound drags at the stones. Channels cinch. Pathways that were options a heartbeat ago seal like wounds. The arena’s will curls tight around him, squeezing choice down to one narrow, punishing line.
Makeno’s palm smacks the drowned stone, skin splitting on grit, fingers raking for a crack, a lip, a mercy. Nothing. Only algae-slick rock and the cold slide of his own blood mixing with floodwater. Copper floods his mouth as his teeth cut his tongue. Iron and river. A shipwreck taste. One clean thrust away from being broken to the god’s design.
For one stuttering heartbeat he hangs between stone and flood, spear and pit, and the old dread claws up his throat: the memory of water unmoored, of currents gone mad under a sky split white with spirit-fire. Not fear of Deko’s steel. Not really. Steel is simple. Honest. It does not change its mind mid-strike.
It is the water that terrifies him.
Not this shallow rush licking his ribs, but what lies inside it. The sense, sharp as a hook in his gut, that other hands move beneath the surface. Priest-hands wrapped in law and hymn. Trickster-hands wrapped in gold dust and laughing masks. They have their fingers in the channels, in the ley-rivers knotted under the Iron Court, in the very ache of his bones.
The roar around him thickens. It is no longer just runoff and ritual flood. It is the muffled bellow of a storm packed into stone, looking for a way out. Each shove of the reversed flow slams against his skin with the weight of open sea, pressing old ghosts to the back of his eyes. Deck planks buckling. Rigging shrieking. Men crying out as the sky twisted itself into a whirling throat and drank the ship down.
This current feels the same.
Wrong in the same way. Hungry in the same way.
His first, tight-schooled reflex is to lock every muscle, to claw for anchorage: anything hard, anything that is not moving. Stone. Shield. Even Deko’s body if he could get hold of it. To refuse the pull as if refusal alone could unmake it.
But his body has more years at sea than at shrines, more tide-marks than ink-lines. Deep in his shoulders, in the old scars along his spine, another lesson wakes. The one beaten into every child who ever rode a river in flood.
Do not brace against a claiming current. It will tear you in half.
You haul with it or you drown broken.
His nails scrape stone, desperate, then slow. The clutching grip falters. That other knowing, the river-born one, pushes up through terror like a hand through sand. It whispers through salt-scabbed muscles, through the ache in his ribs: This is the same storm that took your ship, yes: but you are not the same boy.
And if the priests think they own this water, they have forgotten whose blood it tastes like.
He peels his fingers from the stone one by one, each knuckle a rusted hinge, shoulders loosening even as the bruise from Deko’s shield blooms fire down his side. The pit’s lip grazes his hip. His body screams to claw backward, to find height, dryness, anything not shifting under him.
He exhales instead.
Lets his weight sag into the rush. Surrenders the lie of solid ground.
The water hits fully then, not as a blow but as a body taking his, lifting him half-clear of the grinding rock. He rolls with it, not scrambling against the pull but folding himself into its curve, shoulders angling, knees bending to the sweep like he is ducking a low boom on a stormed deck. Breath falls into an older cadence: in on the rise, out on the drop. Wave. Trough. Wave.
Drum-thunder and crowd-roar smear into a single, distant pounding. Underneath, softer, he catches another rhythm. A ghost of song. The click and hum of his river-mother’s teaching voice, threading up from memory: the pattern of safe crossings, the lilt of current-names he has not dared give tongue since stepping inside these wards. They move through his mind without sound, each unspoken syllable a touch on his inner ear, turning his attention away from panic and down, down, into the cold sheathing his legs.
Feel first. Name later.
Do not fight the river. Find where it wants to go. Then make that wanting yours.
The reversed torrent resolves from chaos into structure. Threads of force twist under the surface like braided mooring lines, crossing and knotting with deliberate intent. They are not river-random. They are laid. Chosen.
Makeno’s awareness slips along those unseen strands the way his hands once traced anchor cables in the dark, palm reading for fray and true-spun core. Here too he finds tension and slack, sudden tightness where priest-sigils cinch the flow, pockets of treacherous calm where eddies curl back like waiting hands. What had seemed wild flooding now feels eerily familiar: the same spiraling pull, the same stacked layers of undertow that marked the spirit maelstrom that swallowed his crew. Only here that storm runs in penned circuits beneath carved stone, like a hurricane forced into a harness.
Depth replaces distance. He is no longer in a pit with a man and a spear; he is inside a living engine of water and will. The grooves under the flagstones are not drains: they are sentences. Commands. Each looping turn of the channels a verb that seizes flow, each constriction a clenched fist, making the river flex on command. The diagram brightens in him, not as light but as compulsion made visible, veins of force throbbing in time with the priest-choir’s rising chant. The same twist to the pull. The same hungry spiral. The very cadence of the storm that once tore his ship apart, now domesticated, collared, and made to kneel to temple law.
The knowing slams through him as the surge shoulders him clear of the pit’s bite. They did not just meddle at the edges. They rooted their holiest ground in the very taboo they chain his kind for, lacing the Iron Court’s belly with the same coiled grammar of pull and push he hunted from delta to delta. Shipwreck omens, ancestor-silence, Deko’s hungry gaze: each clicks into place around this hidden twin to his storm. The water doesn’t merely carry him; it yields, eager, to the touch of his will, and he feels himself treading not only out of a killing line but onto the bare, flexing spine of Odu Ile-Imo’s true law.
The floor bucks like a living back beneath him.
What had been a neat, obedient lattice of priest-made pull convulses, channels swelling against their carved margins as his will knots across them. The lazy feeds that lapped at Deko’s stance fatten, then sheer away; a new vector rams through the old, a lean, fast current cutting across the circling drag like a knife through mooring lines.
Stone groans. Water rears.
It is not a simple surge. It is design striking design. The arena’s planted pattern tries to hold. Makeno’s push comes in sharp and sideways, a delta-quick shove that knows how to cheat a bend. The two logics meet and refuse each other. Pressure has to go somewhere.
It hammers up through the flagstones in a low, grinding shudder. The shock snaps through Makeno’s wet soles, up his calves, into the hollow of his spine. Teeth click. Knees threaten to fold. Across from him, Deko’s stance jolts wide, shield dipping a finger’s breadth as the water under his back foot suddenly slides the wrong way.
Above, the painted storm on the ceiling seems to flinch. Ship-prows tilt, sails bellied by an invisible gust. For a heartbeat the whole arena lists in the bones, like a vessel taking an unexpected swell broadside. Spectators clutch for balance, unsure if the stagger is in their legs or in the stone.
The channels answer in kind, some sluices collapsing flat while others balloon, their polite ankle-deep trickles rearing to Makeno’s hip. What was meant to be a choreographed seep becomes a tangle of rip-roaring crossflows. Ripples slap against his thighs, not in temple rhythm now but in river tempo. The priest-choir’s song snags. A drumbeat fumbles, then redoubles, harsher, as hidden throats drag the melody back toward sanctioned form. Sigils carved along the arena’s rim flare in angry gold, then gutter as his stray current skates under them, refusing to thread the grooves as designed. The very law of the floor feels momentarily unsure of itself, pulled between the wide, slow circle and his cutting line.
Makeno rides the instability like a half-broken wave, every instinct from years at sea screaming recognition. This is what it feels like when a tame tide remembers the ocean.
The impact does not stop at the stone. It rips straight through him, a jag of force threaded with heat. His weight jars, his spine jars, and then the fire comes.
It starts where the ink lives.
Ocean-lines that were always a quiet gleam under his skin flare all at once, each curl and crest along his forearms going from cool shimmer to raw coal. Pain sprints along the paths of the tattoos, racing wrist to shoulder in a single, merciless pull. It feels like someone is dragging hot wire through old scars, like every oath he ever made to the water has turned around and is biting.
His fingers lock on the haft of his spear-hook. Knuckles blanch, then redden, as if the heat is rising through bone. The air around his arms wavers. He can smell his own singed sweat, sharp over incense and blood-damp stone.
Copper floods his mouth. Brine too, sharp and wrong, as if he has bitten the tongue of the sea itself. The flavor rides a vibration in his ribs: a low, thrumming note coiling in his chest. It is not the brisk, restless voice of river spirits he learned as a boy. It is the belly-deep, world-heavy hum from that night years ago, when the horizon tore itself open and the sky-water came down in a single, spiraling wall.
His lungs stutter on it. Every breath drags over the hum like paddle over rock. For a moment he cannot tell if the shudder in his ribs is fear or resonance. The forbidden pattern, those tight, spiraled pulls the elders never named, the ones he chased in storm-wake whispers, presses against the inside of his bones, answering the arena’s buried grammar beat for beat.
Pain folds him from the inside. Muscles jitter around it, wanting to curl, to shield his chest, to make himself small. But somewhere under the burning, under the lead-weight ache in his spine and the shaking in his thighs, there is a sick, dropping recognition.
This pressure is not new.
It is the same crushing insistence that wrapped his last ship like a fist. The same sideways drag that tore men and mast and memory out of the world and left him gasping in a circle of impossible calm. Back then it was outside, a monstrous hand closing from all horizons at once. Now it is inside, pushing out through ink and bone, trying to align him with the arena’s turning tide.
His body remembers before his thinking mind can. Tendons, ribs, the small jointed bones of his feet. They all settle into the strain like they are finding old notches. Each flare of heat along his tattoos slots into a waiting groove in his nerves, agony folding into a pattern that fits.
The realization chills him even as sweat runs hot down his back.
Some part of him has been braced for this exact weight. Years of unease, of hearing only whispers in the academy wells while the open sea went quiet, turn suddenly into a straight line that ends here, in this pit, on this bucking floor. The shipwreck was not an ending; it was a beginning cut short. The storm did not just spare him.
It set him to this key.
As the pressure climbs, as the forbidden curve of the current-binding tries to lock with the arena’s coiled law, the terror that claws through him is not that he will break.
It is that, at last, he might fit.
Across from him, Deko’s stance falters for the first time.
It is not much. A half-breath’s stagger. A single toe skidding as the water at his feet betrays its ordained course and knifes sideways, shaving the foundation from a killing lunge he has already thrown his weight behind. The spearpoint dips a finger’s breadth, enough to turn a heart-stab into a gutting rake, enough to show that even consecrated footing can lie.
Gold-dusted scars across his chest flare, then misfire. Their glow stutters against the new rhythm pulsing through the floor, caught between amplifying his battle-trance and refusing this unscripted tide. The blessings hitch. For an instant, raw muscle stands alone.
He doesn’t gasp. He snarls (low, almost pleased) eyes narrowing as he tracks the stray current’s line back to Makeno, recognition hardening into intent.
Around the pit, the nearest acolytes recoil from the soaking, robes plastered to thin chests, then edge forward again with something like hunger sharpening their eyes. Fingers knot white around railings gone slick with arena-damp; whispers hiss through carved mask-slits as they register that this is no sanctioned flourish, no priest-choir trick, but a raw seizure of the shrine’s own veins. A few make warding signs and do not stop watching. Up in the higher tiers, older clergy in crimson-trimmed sashes go rigid, jaw-lines locking as if struck. Their hands fly through discreet counter-sigils, tracing practiced loops meant to calm channels and close unauthorized flows. Yet the glyphs skid uselessly over the altered current, lines of light bending away as if repelled. Whatever Makeno has brushed is too deep, too closely kin to the arena’s buried spine, to be smoothed back into doctrine with a few hissed charms.
The bound echoes of past fights stir like disturbed silt. Half-seen figures flicker at the edges of vision: ghost-gladiators caught mid-strike, their after-image blows now dragged sideways with the new flow instead of along ordained paths. A spectral spear lunge realigns toward him, then snaps, spray of phantom droplets sucked into the live water at his call. Stone remembers differently. The arena’s memory is being rewritten bead by bead, and every watching spirit, trickster, ancestor, and something older in the riverstone’s black seams, turns its full gaze to the sailor who has dared to lay hands on the hidden pattern and pull.
The sudden silence between drumbeats is a cliff-edge; his balance goes with it. Then the ghostly choir’s new song knifes through, lean and merciless, all blade and no balm. Harmonies that once swelled the crowd into one warm animal now rake across his skin like hooked currents, each braided voice a fine, invisible tether feeling for his ribs, his spine, the wet knot of power he has kept small and folded.
They do not sing to inspire. They sing to seize.
The notes slide under his ears, bypassing hearing, sluicing straight into bone. Every rise in their melody tightens, every fall yanks. His tattoos flare cold, not with river-mother blessing but with the prickle of hands that are not his own trying to steer the flow. Lines of ink lift a fraction from his skin, like eels wanting to leap.
Beneath him, drums return, slower, harder, no longer the broad thunder of spectacle but a measured pounding, like stakes driven into riverbed. Each beat lands out of time with his heart, trying to set a new rhythm inside his chest. His pulse fights it, stuttering, then catching, almost syncing before he tears it sideways with a gasp.
The choir’s chant threads around that stubborn beat, a many-voiced net. Words he does not know become pressure between breaths. With each phrase, another strand settles over his magic, trying to drag it back into neat, written grooves: the wells, the shrines, the safe, measured flows under priest-control. The wild current he just loosed shivers as those lines touch it, trying to name it, box it, chain it to doctrine.
The crowd roars, but their noise is distant, muffled by the song’s clamp. All his senses narrow to the pull of those invisible cords and the raw, half-woken surge in his gut that refuses to kneel.
The taste blooms sharp, then spreads, iron and mud and old coins left too long in a reedbed. It slicks his tongue, seeps into the back of his teeth, as if the arena means to mark him from the inside. The weight that drops over him is not the bright, laughing hook of a trickster demanding a show. This is riverbed-weight. Floodgate-weight. A slow, grinding regard that measures and does not yet judge.
Around his calves, the water he flung loose bucks. It races, then stutters, muscles in a beast’s flank caught between two riders. The clean line of his will, down, roll, carry me clear, meets the stiff, angular insistence of priest-sigils burning cold along the stone. The channels’ flow kinks. Small whirlpools flower about his ankles, biting, indecisive. One moment they cup his stance, bracing him against the shifting floor; the next they twist, trying to slide his feet toward the nearest carved ward, toward the neat grooves the clergy have carved in wet stone for generations.
The current itself trembles, answering him, resisting him, testing which master it will choose.
Makeno feels the moment crystallize, hard and bright as a reef just beneath murky water. The easy guise of the wandering deckhand peels off him under that pressure, flensed away by drum and chant, leaving only the raw, forbidden knack the elders at home warned him never to show inland. Their voices rise in memory ringing against the war-thunder.
He wants to heed them. He is so tired of cages that call themselves shrines.
But his body is already committed. Breath falls into cadence with the racing tide around his legs. Spine stacks. Hips drop. He squares himself inside the trembling circle, and the arena, suddenly attentive as a listening god, now knows his true name even if no human tongue has spoken it.
On the far side of the swirl, Deko’s stance shifts, almost lazy, but his eyes harden like stones feeling a change in current. He drinks in the altered beat, lets it coil through his scarred ribs, and something in him answers. This is license, not warning. A priest’s summons to peel the sailor down to whatever naked storm the academy can own.
Water heaves between them, no longer mere hazard but a low, resonant hum, sketching a second dueling circle atop the first: one inked in converging fates instead of chalk. In daring to steer that hidden pattern before masked gods and listening stone, Makeno stops playing the academy’s game and starts rewriting it. The arena feels it. Its grip cinches, hungry to weld his next movement into something that cannot be undone, that will brand either his body or his oath forever.
The chant climbs him like a net.
Each braided syllable hooks into the air, into sweat, into river-mist, until the phrase “break the wanderer open” is no longer just sound but a pressure inside Makeno’s ribs. It beats there, off-time with his own heart. Stone picks it up, humming. The whole pit seems to pulse with that borrowed rhythm, an organ of rock and water contracting around him.
He tastes iron on his tongue, though he has not yet bled.
High above, in the gloom where the ghost-flame gourds sway, the statues shift. Or seem to. Carved masks that never knew breath lean a finger-width forward in the mind’s eye. Painted lips, split in stylized mirth or bared teeth, gape wider in the flicker, catching the blue light so that every smile looks like it is about to bite. Jeweled inlays in their sockets flare and dim like watching pupils.
For a heartbeat, Makeno feels every gaze in the arena, mortal, stone, and spirit, narrow to the ragged swing of his lungs.
His stagger has nowhere to hide. Each rough inhalation drags mist. Each exhale ghosts steam into the cold blue light. The jeweled eyes follow that steam. Track it. Weigh it. Measuring not his spear, not his stance, but the invisible swell and ebb that answers inside the water when he wills it to move.
The choir’s voices ride that noticing. Their melody tightens. Words roll from the cloaked gallery like cast stones, skipping across the arena’s surface. Every time “wanderer” lands, the channels shiver. Every time “open” lands, the hanging gourds flare, casting quick, skinless glimpses of him upon the slick rock: a lean figure blurred in spray, ribs lanterning with something too bright, too wild for a bound shrine.
He feels the trickster gods tasting the edge of that light.
Deko feels it too. The priest’s head tilts just enough to bare more of his scarred throat to the glow, as if in answer. Gold-laced cuts along his scalp drink the chant and return it in a faint, answering shimmer. Where Makeno’s heartbeat skips, Deko’s locks into the drum-pattern below, steady, deliberate, a hammer to match the stone’s new pulse.
“Break,” the choir sings, and the word lands like a palm between Makeno’s shoulders, trying to shove him forward.
“Wanderer,” and the water around his calves clutches as though it would hold him in place for the blow.
“Open,” and something unseen fingers the knots of his being, groping for whatever storm-thread lies coiled there.
The statues’ jeweled eyes flash again, and in the brief, sharp light he has the sick sense that the arena is already imagining him split: his bones as offerings, his breath as incense, his buried current-binding peeled free and pinned like a rare shell for the academy to name and own.
He forces the thought down. Forces his gaze away from the tiers, from the masks that lean, from the shadowed mouths of priest-choir alcoves. He drags his attention back to the water’s feel against his skin, to the swirl of eddies around Deko’s planted feet, to the tiny hesitations in the lifted shield.
But the chant does not let go. It keeps threading itself through his sense of the currents, re-marking their lines with temple intent, trying to turn his own gift into the blade that will cut him open.
Underfoot, the arena responds like muscle to command: drainage slits seal to hairlines, channels pinch to narrow throats, and the once-flowing water thickens into dragging weight around ankles and calves. The easy slick that had let him skim and slide turns to clutching mud made of river and will. Each subtle shift steals Makeno’s sailor’s footing and blesses Deko’s rooted stance, re-sculpting the battlefield so that balance, retreat, and delay become treacherous illusions.
He goes to rock back, to let the next surge carry him sideways, and the floor denies him. The current resists like a hand on his shins, grinding at his joints, twisting his knee until pain sparks bright behind his eyes. Deko barely needs to move; the priest’s weight sinks through the water into stone, a living pillar where every god-fattened rule now rests.
Makeno feels it in the way the drag favors straight lines. Forward and through. No more looping arcs, no more wandering circles to bleed time. The arena is herding his choices, stealing every path except two: stand and break, or leap and be caught.
The pressure sharpens, losing all the soft give of air. It packs itself into planes and angles, invisible ribs bracing the pit. Makeno can feel them when he breathes: hard edges that his chest scrapes against with every drag of mist, every ragged exhale. Not threat. Edict. The gods’ will poured into a frame around his heart.
His old sailor’s instincts reach for tricks: a stumble here, a feigned slip there, the long circling that tires bigger men. Each impulse meets that unseen lattice and slides off, blunted. Feints no longer ripple the crowd. Testing jabs no longer stir the water. The arena has redrawn what counts as true. Only strikes that risk breaking something, bone, oath, fate, will land at all.
In that tightening grip, the arena translates the choir’s hunger into sacred ordinance, carving its verdict into stone-vein and river-vein alike: no circling, no quiet surrender, no honorable draw, no clever stall. Every path the currents sketch beneath Makeno’s skin now kinks toward a single, knife-bright point where choice and chance will fuse into blow, vow, or shattering that cannot be recalled or unwritten.
The terms click into place inside him, hard and cold as set bone, carrying the same unwelcome clarity he reads in Deko’s trained, measuring gaze. Either the priest’s next clean strike will maim him, nailing his storm-sense and sea-gift into temple chains, or some oath torn from his mouth in the clash’s fever will sink into the academy’s founding pact, twist it, and bind them both. No clever half-pledge, no sailor’s sidestep of meaning. Whatever he gives or loses here will not wash out with time; it will fix his name in the academy’s stone and drag them, heartbeat by heartbeat, into the reckoning crouched just beyond this pass.
Makeno’s shoulders scrape as he tries to slide sideways, but the god’s carved knee juts into his ribs, penning him where stone and crowd-noise press together until his own breath sounds distant. The granite is slick with oil and old libations; his tunic snags on some chipped edge, holding him there like a fish pinned against a river rock. The statue’s laughing mouth hangs above his head like a second, mocking sky, teeth worn smooth by years of worshippers’ hands; tonight its blind eyes watch him with the same hungry expectancy as the masked spectators, their drum-synced clamor beating against his skin harder than Deko’s measured footfalls.
The roar folds over itself in waves. Stamping feet. Hands slapping stone. Chants rising, breaking, rising again. It all funnels down the hollow of his spine, into the tight place between his lungs where fear curls like a wet rope. He tastes chalk and copper on his tongue. Every breath he pulls feels borrowed.
Deko’s steps cut through that noise. Unhurried. Certain. Each heel-strike on the shifting floor rings clear as a knell, like the god himself nodding in approval of the priest advancing under his stone laughter. Makeno can’t see the priest’s face from this angle, only the spear-point glinting and the dark oval of the shield riding his shoulder, steady as a rising moon.
He risks a glance up. The tiers above are a stacked storm-front of bodies and masks, feathers and painted metal, all leaning in. Some sway with the drums, some sit perfectly still, hands clasped as if in prayer, but every gaze hooks into him. He feels flayed open, his own story stretched on a rack for their god to pick over. The arena’s blue fire paints their lower faces in corpse-light, but their eyes burn hot, bright, ready to feast on whatever ending spills from him next.
The stone under his feet is no longer one piece. Hairline seams swell into hungry mouths, slabs breathing, settling, tilting just enough to unteach his balance. Channels he’d thought were mere carvings yawn wider, taking the water like open veins. What had only kissed his boots a moment before thickens and rises, cold bands climbing his shins, flowing against the natural fall of the ground, shouldering upslope as if the hill had turned itself into a river running the wrong way.
It clings, not like honest current, but like hands. Each slow tug tries to pin his soles, to slide them where the arena wants him, not where his body knows to step. The cold is wrong, too: no fresh rain, no living river. It tastes of kept basins and stone throats, steeped in the copper of old blood and the cloying, bitter-sweet tang of years of incense offerings rotted into the cracks. With every ripple, the smell thickens until he feels it in his teeth. The water answers the crowd’s chant, not his call: each surge a sullen, echoing agreement with their hunger.
He reaches for the three mouths of the world the way a drowning man reaches for air. Oshun’s laughing bend. Kora’s slow brown weight. Dja’s knife-bright pull out to blue water. He expects the old welcome, that clean slide of current through his chest, moon-skins flashing along his thoughts.
Nothing answers.
Not silence, exactly. A held breath. A sea gone flat under a sky that will not speak its storm-name. His inner compass spins and finds no north.
The tug comes from below instead. From stone guts. From the grid of wells and shrine-throats laced through the hill. A different beat pushes up his bones. Heavy. Off-time. His stormwater eyes blink: and the sound becomes sight.
Doors under pressure. Great, swollen planks banded in rusted iron, their hinges screaming in slow motion. Salt-bloated hulls, ribs shuddering as invisible waves slam them sideways. A hatch hammered from the inside by fists that cannot break skin or wood. Knuckles split, bone showing white through red, still pounding.
He knows those hands.
Crewmen who never rose with him from the black boil of the spirit storm. Faces blurred now into pressure and pain, but the rhythm is the same as the last moments before the deck went out from under them. Their blows land not on shipwood this time but on something thicker, stickier. On the lids of clay jars stoppered with priest-sigil wax. On the skin of the academy’s own wards.
They are not knocking to be comforted. They are testing. Bruising themselves against the shape of their prison, searching for a seam.
It hits like cold weight in his gut: this is not the free-braided laughter of river-mothers but the academy’s shackled dead, their paths kinked, knotted, hammered flat into the sigil-web that keeps these walls from falling. Their murmur swells where open current should rush. A thick pressure behind his ears, along the faintly lit coils of ink on his arms. They are pounding not only for him but against the pact that tethers them, a smoldering, muffled insistence that he name his side now, that he spend his breath like an oath or waste it. The water licking his calves begins to vibrate in answer, each tiny shiver keeping time with those unseen fists below, turning ankle-deep flood into a drumskin stretched over buried doors.
Deko does not hurry. He eats the distance between them in small, exact steps, like a priest pacing out a litany. Spear butt kissing stone with each placement. Shoulders loose. Jaw easy. Every inch of him says foregone conclusion. The point never leaves Makeno’s heart-line, then dips, a lover’s feint, angling for the soft meat of hip and shoulder, for tendons that make sailors climb and fight. The killing edge has been planed away, polished into a tool of ownership. Not a weapon to end a life, but to open it, neatly, and pour its use into temple hands.
Around them, the Arena of Turning Tides seems to lean in, losing its sense of width and breath. The ring of stone closes like a noose drawn one notch tighter. Wide channels that a moment ago lay open as river mouths begin to narrow, lips of rock lifting from beneath as if the ground itself were clenching its jaw. Slick walls creep up out of the floor, herding the water, forcing it into a few thin cuts that flash and twist like drawn blades.
Those trickles fatten. Not politely, not with the slow obedience of tide and moon, but in jerks and jolts that match the drum-thunder in the galleries. Each pulse hits his calves with new weight, a slap of chill that climbs to his knees, then drops, then rises again, never still long enough to trust. The water braids around Makeno’s bare ankles in cold, insistent loops, crossing and re-crossing until it feels less like flood and more like fingers learning the shape of his bones.
The currents do not flow past him. They circle. They linger. Each surge nudges his heels a fraction inward, a breath off his planted stance, as if probing where his balance ends and the fall begins. He feels the slight drag on his left foot first, then a sudden slackness under the right, stone slicking over with a film so fine it could be oil or spirit-sweat. His toes grip for purchase and find only the trembling skin of water stretched thin over rock.
The pull is not random. It has direction. Inward, always inward, toward the exact center of the consecrated circle where blood drains quickest and oaths ring loudest. Toward the line of Deko’s waiting spear, the weapon already angled to catch that next inevitable stumble, to turn one stolen step into surrender dressed up as fate. The arena floor shifts its breath to match Deko’s, each tightening of stone and surge of chill making the path behind Makeno feel steeper, the path ahead the only flat ground left to stand on.
Above, the masked statues of the trickster-war gods seem to lean down, their carved grins carving sharper shadows across the pit. Ghost-light crawls along their cheekbones and teeth, catching in inlaid eyes of cowrie and obsidian so that each frozen face looks a breath from laughter or bite. The hidden priest-choirs behind the walls drive their chants higher, voices weaving in tight, merciless braids. Call. Response. Call. Response. Each answering surge folds over the last until the many-stranded song pulls into a single rising thread, a hooked sound that sinks into the arena’s bones.
Stone underfoot takes that note and hums with it. A faint vibration climbs Makeno’s soles, runs through his shins, settles behind his teeth. Deko’s spearhead drinks in a lick of blue fire from the hanging gourds, metal darkening, edge haloed in storm-glow. The crowd’s roar blurs, words lost, bodies erased, until all that remains is a throbbing pulse that beats in Makeno’s ears and chest, a second heart not his own, pumping on some god’s rhythm that wants to set his next step for him.
Olu’s wager ripens in that pressure-thick air, not cleanly, but like a wound forced to bloom. The muttered vows he smeared into door-lintels with calloused thumbs, the way his old burns had flared and wept when he bent his head to gutter-spirits and hinge-guardians. Every scrap of that pain-paid pleading slips, sideways, through a hairline crack in the arena’s woven rules. For a breath the sound goes wrong. Drumskins sag off the beat, chants drag and tangle, the crowd’s roar stretching thin as pulled bark-fiber. Makeno’s lungs seize. The pit reels. His vision does not dim; it shears. The world splits along some unseen grain, opening sideways into a dozen, a hundred overlapping reflections of the same stone circle, each one already waiting for his next step.
The echoes jostle, crowding his skin, each a slick, feverish near-now. He feels the phantom drag of binding cords on his own wrists, the sting of carved sigils burning into phantom flesh, the soft give of his brow hitting cold stone in someone else’s surrender. There is craft in some, cowardice in others, but the end is always the same: owned.
He tastes the shape of those endings in his own mouth: blood-thick silence, a name ground down to a case study, a miracle turned into somebody else’s sermon. The pit wants him refined into a lesson, slicked and slotted into precedent. Even rebellion has grooves worn for it. Every shimmering path is a story already owned, a choice already priced.
For a sliding instant, that empty strand he had glimpsed in the echoes (death without bargain, without pageant) swings into place over the now. It is not absence. Not nothing. It lies across the other futures like a skinny, silt-choked creek crossing a dredged shipping channel, easy to miss if you only follow the marked buoys. Makeno feels it take shape under his feet, a narrow cut running cross-grain to everything the arena has carved into him.
The packed futures crowding in smell of incense char and polished bronze. Of codified glory and licensed grief. Victories there end in collars disguised as garlands: temple marks seared into shoulder and tongue, his storm-sense bent into a tool for other men’s omens. Defeats end in neat obliteration: his name scraped clean from ship-logs, his story filed under “necessary loss,” his drowned crew reduced to a cautionary proverb for first-years. Even the paths where he snarls and breaks rules end up smoothed into legend, his defiance turned into one more teaching-text with commentary in the margins.
The lone unlit channel carries no such polish. It tastes in his mouth of cold rain sluicing off bare planks, of brine on cracked lips, of smoke from burning pitch and wet rope. No temple perfume, no chant-thickened air, only the raw sting of unclaimed water. It smells like the wreck. Like every night he stood alone on some creaking deck and knew the sea might take him and nobody would be watching but his own dead.
He feels the statues ringed around the pit without looking: their painted eyes and gold inlays, the thick, hungry regard of the god they front for. None of that attention falls on this thread. Their gazes rake the bright, bloody options: the brave refusal, the cunning feint, the desperate rally that folds neatly into liturgy. This other path lies under their notice, like a forgotten gutter behind a shrine.
His gut clenches around that knowledge, a hard, sour knot that feels more like recognition than fear. Every other outcome in the swarm comes with a price stamped on it, value measured, spectacle weighed. This one offers nothing to tally. No lesson. No clean arc. Just him stepping where the story thins and drops away.
Terror licks up his spine, sharp as the first time a wave lifted the deck out from under him and left only sky and yawning dark. It would be so easy to slide back into one of the scripted currents, to take the blow properly, to twist it into some admired, survivable defiance. To live as an example, even if chained.
But his sailor’s bones know water when it changes, when it slips free of banks and stone. This current runs slantwise under the arena’s rules, too small for barges, too crooked for processions. No priest has charted it. No clerk has written its tolls.
His terror folds into something fiercer, a lean, salt-hard resolve. The realization hits with the clean bite of wind off an unsounded reef: this is the only course they have not already sounded and staked. The only way through that does not belong to the laughing god, to the academy, to anyone but him and the dead who ride in his wake.
The wells throb now, close as a second pulse, beating slow and measured like a drum under a priest’s thumb. Their power comes to him filtered, strained through carved lips of stone and rings of chalk, each surge caught and counted, offered in rationed sips. It is a captive tide: obedient, domesticated, made to turn millstones and grind petitions smooth.
Beyond that penned horizon, he feels the other presence gather. Not near, not kind: sharp and cold as rain knifing sideways across open decks. It is the lean, hungry notice of storms that break keels and swallow masts whole, the watching weight that had pressed down on his neck the night the sea opened its throat and took his ship. Those dead ride restless, salt-bitter, their regard slicing clean through the muffling sigils wrapped around the academy.
The two currents meet inside him and refuse to mingle. Temple pulse and storm-foam snarl and sheer off one another, gnawing at his bones in contrary rhythms. In that grinding seam, he feels himself stretch, not torn but spanning, a narrow human channel no god has dredged or claimed. A bridge they never meant to build.
His skin answers before thought can catch it. The ocean-ink coiled along his arms and ribs lifts in a slow, crawling wake, as if a squall wind has found him here under rock. The usual soft gleam that comes when he mouths river-phrases slips sideways, deserting the neat whorls the clergy taught him to trace. Light gathers instead along old work-scars and rope-burn bands, along the faint white ladders where salt once chewed him raw on open decks. Beneath that, deeper still, other lines unbury themselves. Not ink. Not temple mark. Fine, ghost-grey script pressed into him by collapsing lungs and the crushed silence between panicked heartbeats; by his crew’s last, shredded prayers. They surface now as a cold counter-rhythm to the arena’s furnace heat, drowned voices braiding through the war-drums with a cadence that bows to no shrine and signs itself with no god’s name.
The drum-thunder and the crowd’s roar flatten around him into weather. Not sound now, but pressure. The close, crushing weight before a squall snaps its back. In that shift he hears the one hard truth every honest sailor learns early or dies: the sea does not bargain. No hymn ever sweetened a breaker. No clever oath ever talked a spiral cloud into being anything but itself. His power was never in bracing against that pull, pretending he could stand outside it. It has always lived in where and how he leans when the water takes hold. The futures spinning at the rim of his sight all want him to lean their way (to bow to academy rule, to feed the gods a tidy story, to nod to the quiet threat of living half-owned) but the scar-taught part of him, the boy who read hidden reefs in the way terns lifted and smoke crawled low over swells, knows better. Some whirls only tighten when you fight them. Some traps only open if you drive straight into their throat and trust the deep to cough you out changed.
Under the god’s stone grin, his practiced skin sloughs off: easy smile, deferent nod, careful half-lies peeling away like rotten caulking in a hard gale. What stands bare inside him is reef-stubborn and storm-hungry, the man who would rather aim straight into a black squall than rot in safe, breathless calm. That core takes the helm: not to win, not to flatter any shrine, but to drive his own flesh in as sounding-weight and force every watching power to ring true. The knowledge drops clean through him, salt, iron, fear, that he is staking bone, blood, and name on this charting, and whatever answers rise will carve themselves into gods and ghosts alike.
The arena seems to close around that single choice. Not the wound yet, not the oath coiling on his tongue, but that small betrayal of every lesson he has been fed since he limped through the academy gates: his hook leaving his palm. The boarding iron hits the slick stones with a quick, ugly clang, too thin to be grand, too sharp not to be heard. The sound slices up between drumbeats like a cracked bell, a wrong note that makes heads jerk, throats catch, chants stagger for half a beat.
For that heartbeat the spirit-echoes stutter. All around him, the ghost-fighters who had been moving in tandem with living flesh (shadow-arms blocking, spectral feet pivoting, ten different Makeno-futures stepping neat aside from ten different deaths) tear away like mist in a hard harmattan gust. The arena floor is suddenly naked of their guidance. No pale after-image rises to meet Deko’s thrust. No kindly old champion leans in his ear with a whisper of better angles.
All that remains is the bright, lethal thread of the spear’s line. A clean stroke, ordained by doctrine and spectacle, traced from Deko’s braced heel through corded thigh and shoulder, out along the shaft to where iron waits for meat. Makeno sees it with an almost obscene clarity, as if the air itself has parted to show him the path his own flesh is about to open.
His body moves faster than thought. Not with a duelist’s clipped poise, not like the academy fencers who treat distance as numbers and timing as polished verse. This is uglier. Older. The brutish commitment of a deckhand who has judged the swell wrong but leans into it anyway, throwing himself into a green wall that will either lift his hull or fold it in half.
Muscles hardened by hauling wet rope and fighting for footing on slick planks take over where temple drills fall away. His bad ribs remember the crush of a breaking mast, not the measured push of practice spears. He steps in, not aside. Shoulders hunch, chin tucks, arms spread just enough to catch wood, not ward away steel. It is the same motion he used a lifetime ago hurling his weight against a storm-shoved tiller, knowing the wave does not care whether his spine holds.
Around him, the roar tilts. A hundred expectations shatter at once: the gamblers who had laid coin on a long, showy bout, the priest-choirs who had tuned their counter-songs for a dance of edged mercy, even the masked statues carved in permanent, mocking laughter. Gasps rip through the lower rows. Someone curses, sharp and disbelieving. Someone else begins a protest-chant and swallows it bloodless as the arena’s hungry hush drops for that one stretched instant.
Deko’s eyes flare, then harden. For a fraction of a blink his killing line wants to waver, trained instinct shouting to pull, to adjust, to spare just enough to make the lesson last. But the sacred pressure here does not like broken lines. The oath-bound rhythm he has already called down locks his muscles into the promise of the strike. The arena itself leans behind him. And Makeno, storm-marked fool that he is, does not flinch away but drives his own chest and side into that oncoming certainty, choosing the break over the bend.
The spear-head finds him.
Not the shallow cut the crowd expects, not the theatrical slice across muscle meant to bleed pretty and teach obedience, but a driving, hungry bite. Iron parts flesh and skids along rib, a bright, grinding kiss that shudders all the way into his spine. Heat detonates through his side, so sharp it is almost cold, a white crack of lightning under skin. His breath vanishes in a punched grunt; for a blind instant the world narrows to the taste in his mouth: iron tang, old river-mud, and the faint sour chalk of academy wards.
Pain rings out from the wound in hard, clean strokes. It jumps into his teeth, into the stone under his bare soles, into the haft locked in his hands. Sanctified rock hums back, taking the hurt like a drumhead takes a stick. The arena drinks it and answers.
The drums do not miss the cue. Skins swell and slam in a single, uncanny alignment, every beat landing with the twinned cadence of their hearts: Deko’s measured thunder and Makeno’s ragged, stumbling pound. Each strike feels like a smith’s hammer falling on red metal. Each echo nails this moment into the bones of the place, forging his choice, his wound, into something the Arena of Turning Tides will remember long after the blood dries and the gods have picked their favorite lie from the truth he’s about to speak.
Around them, the Arena of Turning Tides answers. The water in the floor-channels leaps as if slapped awake, swelling from a thin slick to a surging, ankle-deep current that coils eager and cold around Makeno’s bare feet, licking at his calves like a pack of river dogs catching blood-scent. It drinks the red clouding from his side in greedy spirals, carrying it out along the carved lines toward the pit’s rim. Each pulse of his heart sends another dark bloom into the moving veins beneath him, and the whole floor seems to throb with it.
In his blurred edge-sight the masked trickster statues loom taller. Their painted eyes glint wet. Carved mouths seem to crack wider, laughter riding the drum-thunder, caught between delighted shock and sharp, hungry disbelief at a fool who steps into the blade instead of away.
The crowd’s reaction slams over him like another wave (cheers, sharp gasps, a few thin, horrified cries) collapsing into a single exultant roar that the stone swallows and squeezes back as pressure on his skin. Above, behind carved screens, priest-choirs pivot key and rhythm; their battle-hymns begin to twist toward a pattern he knows too well. Bold challenger struck down. Priest-champion unshaken. Lesson carved neat into flesh, doctrine confirmed, wagers safely paid. The music gropes for that shape, trying to pour his blood into its old, pious mold, to harden this moment around him like cooling bronze. He feels it setting, grain by grain, as if even his pain is being arranged to fit their favorite ending.
He refuses to let it harden that way. Fingers slipping on his own blood, he clamps both hands around the spear-haft, not to shove death aside but to nail it here with him, to make this hurt an anchor instead of a leash. Agony rips fresh fire through his ribs; he rides it, forces his quivering knees to lock, feet braced in the cold rush. Iron, stone, river, and a hundred watching gazes pin him like a beetle to a god’s board. In that vise, he drags his breath into order, not to cast a grand working but to seize the one magic the arena cannot fully tame: who names this wound, and what tale it seals into the rock.
He drags in a breath that tastes of metal and incense and old, wet stone. The spear’s quiver hums through his ribs, a second heartbeat lodged in his side, every tiny tremor ringing his bones. The drums lurch for the next stroke, the choirs’ voices swelling, reaching to wrap their words around his bleeding form and lift it into their neat, shining lesson.
He will not be their lesson.
He pitches his voice not up to the officiant’s raised hands or to the veiled balconies where priest-choirs lean over their books, but down. Down into the rock that has drunk too much blood. Down into the cold, climbing water that curls red around his ankles like something waking from a long, bitter sleep. He lets his sound fall where their songs do not bother to go.
His first word is not a title. Not “Lord,” not “Most Cunning,” not any polished praise-name that can be caught and turned and worn as a joke by the laughing gods who haunt these seats. He speaks rough, sea-scarred vowels, gutter-port consonants never blessed in any liturgy. He sends them tumbling into the narrow stillness between drum-strikes, driving his raw cadence like a wedge.
The arena pushes back. He feels it. The air thickens, as if the whole pit inhales to listen past him, to the choirs that have always set the meaning. Masked faces above seem to lean, waiting for the sanctioned refrain that will fix him in place. He hears the priest-singers drawing breath to name his wound for him.
Makeno shoves his own voice into that stolen pause. No prayer-form. No call-and-response. Just the stripped, salt-tanged speech of a man on a heaving deck, shouting into storm-wind so the sea cannot pretend it did not hear. He speaks to the water licking his calves, to the quartz veins in the rock, to the iron taste on his tongue, as if they are the only congregation that matters.
He shapes no praise-name, no careful honorific that the arena’s trickster gods might twist into a jest; instead he rips his throat open on the simplest thing he has left: names. Not titles, not ranks, just the rough, work-worn syllables of men and women who bled salt with him. He calls bluntly to those who have been denied voice: his crewmen whose faces still surface in his storm-dreams, the helmsman with the gap-tooth laugh, the boy who sang off-key to calm the cargo goats, the captain whose last order broke off in a mouthful of green-black water, the nameless passengers whose final prayers drowned with them: hauling each of them up out of the dark like nets snagged on wreckage.
He does not stack them as offerings on some god’s plate. He does not beg them to save him. He names them as witnesses, as eyes and ears bound to this second, deliberate wounding. His blood in the channels. Their deaths in his mouth. A line thrown back across the years, tying this spear-thrust to the storm that swallowed them.
His voice drops lower, roughening, as it reaches for the other captives whose shapes he has learned by absence and pressure instead of carved praise-signs. Not the bright, paraded ancestors whose names are inked on shrine-stones, but the ones he has felt only as a slow, resentful pulse under the academy: presences pressed into the throats of wells until their songs run thin, elders woven flat into ward-scripts so that their wisdom holds up walls instead of children. He feels them now as a tremor in the quartz-veins, as a chill that climbs his shins with the swelling water. Not free to rise, but listening. Pulled toward the raw gap his wound has torn in the arena’s carefully bound story.
He does not beg them to save him. He bears down on the pain and flings his will like a weighted net into black water, staking every drop he spills as wager, not tribute. He offers no kneeling loyalty, only the risk of his own extinguishing as bright, bleeding bait for any spirit ruthless enough to seize it and tear this bout out of safe, priest-written spectacle.
Then, loud enough that even the furthest masked statues seem to lean in, he hammers intent into one cutting vow, each word a hooked barb in the air: whichever spirit (river-wild or well-bound, drowned sailor or elder crushed into the foundations) dares to claim his life within this consecrated circle must, by that same claiming, haul into daylight the hidden bones of the storm that broke his ship. Not rumor, not softened parable, but the bare, naming truth of who called it, how the rites were shaped, and why his crew were weighed as acceptable loss: dragged screaming into sight before academy, clergy, and crowd, so that his death cannot be taken cleanly, without the revelation that birthed it.
The arena’s old vows flex like a net catching a new, thrashing weight; threads of unseen law cinch tight around Makeno’s words, drawn to the spectacle of his bleeding, unguarded body and the roar-silenced air. The trickster-war gods, bound to savor overturned certainties, cannot treat this as mere bravado: he has staked his life on revelation before their chosen stage. Every prior oath of glorious victory, clean defeat, and obedient silence strains against this new, jagged clause that demands exposure instead of tidy sacrifice.
Somewhere in the stone, the first pacts of the arena wake. Old blood-promises, spoken by champions long dead, twist like hooked fish on a new line. Vows that swore to keep what happened beneath this painted ceiling forever folded into ritual now feel their bindings heated, softened, forced to stretch around a condition they were never meant to hold: truth, dragged up screaming, instead of spectacle neatly swallowed and forgotten.
The masked statues ringing the pit seem to lean closer without moving. Their painted eyes catch the swinging blue fire and fracture it into sharp, accusing shards. Around them, inscriptions cut into their plinths flare dimly, sigils of silence and clean contest blinking like startled lids as Makeno’s oath scrapes across them. What was written as a promise of safe forgetting meets what has just been spoken as a price for death, and the clash throws sparks in the unseen ledgers of gods.
In the hidden choir-niches, priest-singers falter on their woven counter-songs. Their verses were tuned for outcomes the arena understands. Victor raised, loser humbled, both bound tighter to temple stories. They were not tuned for a fighter offering himself as a lever to pry open the academy’s drowned secrets. Their harmonies snag on his vow, notes sliding off-key as the arena’s spiritual architecture buckles and resettles around the new demand.
The crowd feels the shift without knowing its name. Their hunger for blood and clean endings thickens into something heavier, metallic at the back of the tongue. Drums that had been driving for a neat climax stutter, pick up, then fall into a slower, watchful rhythm. The sound pulls the arena’s many oaths into a single, taut point: Makeno’s voice, his spilling life, and the question he has nailed to his own possible ending.
Old promises of silence try to smother that question. The arena’s founding ward-scripts, etched to keep clergy secrets folded under layers of ritual awe, flare in resistance. Yet the trickster-war gods that haunt this place are oath-gourmands; they feast on wagers that cut across expectation. They feel the edge in what he has offered: no plea for safety, but a gamble that makes his death costly in a way no prior pact anticipated.
In that friction, law changes texture. The net of vows that once kept revelations sunk under stone now must decide whether to tear, or to stretch wide enough to carry both blood and truth to the surface.
Beneath his feet, the carved channels answer first. Water that had been lapping tame at his ankles rears up in a sudden, vertiginous swell, slick as the back of some huge, unseen fish. It catches under his soles and calves, lifting him half a finger-span off the stone before gravity and iron drag him down again. The shaft jolts in his hands. The spear-head bites deeper as his weight shifts, a hot, clean stab that locks breath in his chest and nails him to this single, narrowing moment. Yet the buoyant surge steals some of the killing edge from the blow, robbing it of the neat, temple-script finality Deko had aimed for. It leaves him suspended in a cruel in-between. Neither cleanly impaled nor cleanly spared, held as if the arena itself refuses to decide.
The water feels wrong. Colder than any river, colder than the well-mouths’ muttering depths. Its touch crawls. Fine, electric prickles race up his shins, the unmistakable sensation of many hands brushing his calves and ankles, testing tendon and bone as merchants test a rope, as gamblers weigh loaded dice.
Light scours down through him like a falling tide. The gourds’ meek glow tears open into a hard, salt-white glare that erases every comforting shadow. Flesh, stone, and spray flatten into the same bleached mask. The painted storm above no longer looks like art. Each wave-crest stands out, knife-edged. Each breaking hull shows ribs and spars with anatomist’s precision. Tiny, inked bodies fling from decks into curling whiteness, mouths O’d in a soundless roar that still finds his bones.
Among them, one ship is wrong in a way that is horribly right. Not memory. Not vision. Simply there, as if it had always been inked into this ceiling: her patched sail, her crooked mast, his mother’s helm-amulet carved on the prow, frozen at the instant before the sky tore.
Along the edges of the pit, the spirit-echoes that once replayed old bouts like half-forgotten dreams halt mid-strike and mid-fall, jerked out of their loops. One by one they turn toward him, gladiators, students, condemned traitors, faces water-blurred, eyes dark and depthless. Behind and between them, other shapes surface: figures in sailors’ wraps, braids heavy with river-clay, uniforms from ships that never reached this hill, all fixing him with terrible, patient attention. Their gazes hook into his words, his blood, as his oath threads into their unfinished deaths and tugs them toward reckoning.
Sound collapses inward. Drums miss their marks. Breath steams and hangs, unmoving, over packed bodies. The trickster’s carved grin above him seems to strain, teeth bared not in laughter but in anticipation. Deko’s spear-hand tightens, yet some instinct older than training holds him back from finishing the stroke. The whole shrine tilts around Makeno’s bleeding chest, as if the world has narrowed to that pulsing, accusing wound. Under his skin, under the stone, something old and shackled shifts, tasting spectacle, tasting truth, deciding whether to break its chains or drag everyone here down with it.
The shudder that follows is deeper than thunder. It rolls up through the soles of Makeno’s feet, through his ribs, through the buried rock itself. Stone steps tremble. Dust leaps from carved joints. Masks rattle on the walls as if chattering their painted teeth. The sound is not just heard; it is tasted, a bitter grit on his tongue.
Above, the painted storm begins to move.
Not just the trick of blue fire and smoke. Not just the old illusion games the Iron Court loves. Clouds crawl across the curved ceiling, thickening from grey to bruised purple. White streaks of ship-splintering lightning crackle along the plaster, then bend, then twist, becoming the jagged outlines of masts. Sailcloth snaps in a wind that does not exist. Broken hulls grind against each other in the sky-sea.
The whole ceiling roils as if it were water, the arena nothing but the dry bowl of a riverbed beneath a coming flood.
Each painted breaker crashes in perfect time with his hammering heart. Boom. Boom. Boom. The rhythm punches the air from his lungs, matches the pulse pounding in his wound. Spray, only paint, only pigment, bursts out from the storm mural in great silent fans. Yet he feels cool flecks on his face. Salty. Familiar. The taste of open water, not river.
His knees wobble. For a half-breath he is back under real clouds, on real decks. Screams. Cracking beams. That wrong, high keening in the wind that no storm should make. The moment the sky had snapped and turned inside out.
Not now. Not here.
Makeno drags his focus downward, away from the ceiling’s churning ships and toward the vibrating stone beneath his bare, wet feet. The arena is waking. Or remembering. Or both.
The white-flared gourds cast no shadows now. They strip colour from the world, bleach every face into a skull-mask, teeth and hollows and eye-sockets slick with reflected stormlight. The crowd becomes a ring of bone above the pit. Even Deko’s gold-inlaid scars look grey and dead under that glare.
Cold swells around Makeno’s calves. Water climbs his legs in quick, greedy breaths, not the steady rise of a tide but the clutching drag of a river-mouth whirlpool. His soaked robes wrap and twist about his thighs, then slip away, then clutch again, fabric gone heavy as fingers that do not want to let him stand.
The spear in his side rises with each surge, lifts from the stone as if it, too, might float free. Its haft knocks gently against his ribs, bobbing, half-buoyant, feathered tassels streaming in the current like weed. Each tug pulls fire through his flesh. Each lift feels like the arena itself testing his weight, rolling him in its palm.
Not yet claimed. Not yet released. Held at the edge, as if the stone and the spirits cannot decide whether to spit him back into air or drink him down.
Around him the ghost-sailors wheel and circle, no longer random echoes but a loose, watchful ring that mirrors the living crowd above. They hang in the white glare like figures seen through blown spray, half-there, half-rent from some other drowning. Ropes trail from their shoulders and throats. Barnacled beads click at their wrists. Some still clutch splintered oars, some coils of phantom net, some nothing at all but the memory of a helm. Their drowned eyes fix not on his blood, not on the spear jutting from his side, but on the frozen line of Deko’s poised killing-blow. A whole ring of the dead, staring past the sailor to the priest, as if weighing whose oath has truly broken.
One phantom brushes past Makeno’s shoulder in a rush of impossible cold, and with it comes a flicker of memory: not his own, but a deck splitting under green-black waves, clergy sigils burning on the horizon, the taste of iron in lungfuls of flood. The image jolts through him, searing itself into the knot of his oath until his vow feels suddenly older than his life, woven with dozens of other drownings that never had a witness.
Up in the stone tiers, that rush of not-their-own drowning slams through chests and marrow. Scholars, acolytes, masked clergy. Spines stiffen as the circling dead align, a pattern clicking into place. This is no longer spectacle but summons. Each heartbeat spent watching feels taken as an oath, binding throat and breath to stand as witness to whatever verdict the pit will birth.
Makeno lies half-submerged where the arena floor has dipped, cold water lapping at his ribs, the chill biting deeper than the spear wound in his side. The channels have overflowed into a shallow basin around him; each breath makes a small ripple that shivers outward, lost beneath the heavier pull of unseen currents. His own blood ghosts through the water in threads, thinning, vanishing. Vision tunnels on the spearpoint hovering a handspan from his throat.
The blue-white glare from the flaring gourds smears Deko’s outline into something more than a man. Broad shoulders and tilted spear made into a jagged idol hacked from shadow and fire. The priest’s face is a mask of stone above him, unreadable, framed in a ragged halo of steam where the damp air meets the heat rolling off his scar-lines.
The spear does not fall.
It hangs there, unwavering, so close Makeno can feel the metal’s breath against his skin, a cold kiss above the pounding hollow at the base of his throat. He waits for the world to lurch forward into impact. It does not. Instead, the air around the spear’s tip wavers as if battered by invisible surf. Light bends. The pointed shadow on his neck flickers but never quite touches flesh.
Pressure gathers, thick and tidal. It clamps down on time itself.
Sound drags. The arena’s roar thins into a far-off, underwater drum. Droplets arcing from the churning channels slow to a string of glass beads, hanging, refusing to fall. Makeno can see each bead hold a warped shard of Deko’s snarling profile, of his own gray-tinged lips, of ghost-faces crowding the water’s skin.
He feels the pressure in his bones, in the split edges of his wound, in the knot of his spoken oath. It is the same weight as the deep ocean moments before a storm breaks, that breathless hush when even the swells seem to listen. The spearpoint quivers once, not forward but back, as though some vast, unseen hand has pinched the world at that single, lethal instant and refused to let it pass.
The first surge of backlash hits like a lightning-struck wave. It slams down through spear haft and bone, a vertical current that does not care for flesh. Gold-dusted scars along Deko’s arms and neck flare open, not as wounds but as mouths, each line a channel vomiting light. Threads of molten brilliance race their etched paths, searing along collarbone, shoulder, jaw. Every scar the god ever carved on him answers at once.
His spine bows. Muscles lock into a brutal arch that lifts him half onto his toes. The spear trembles in his grip, its point jerking a finger’s breadth closer, then stalling as if it has struck invisible iron. Heat pours from his skin, turning the cold arena mist to writhing veils around him.
A roar tears through him, but it has nowhere to go. It stays trapped behind his teeth, pressed into the cage of his ribs, a titanic bellow only he can hear. His pupils blow wide, swallowing iris and almost the whites, as the god behind his oaths yanks hard on the tether between them, hauling, not to lend strength, but to wrench it back.
For a heartbeat he fights it. Tendons stand out in his forearm, cords in his neck, jaw clenched hard enough to grind enamel as he tries to drive the spear home and salvage the narrative he has so carefully arranged. This is supposed to end clean: heretic slain, god appeased, crowd steered back into safe awe. He pushes into that script with all his trained will.
The script burns.
The glow in his scars stutters, then reverses. Light that had been flooding outward now sucks back as if the god is inhaling. Each channel brightens to a white-gold knife-edge, then gutters inward with a wet, searing hiss that smells of singed incense, river-mist, and old sacrificial smoke. Heat crawls under his skin in the wrong direction, climbing from hand to heart. For an instant his fingers go numb on the haft. His breath leaves him in a sharp, startled gasp that rips free despite all discipline, misting the air between them as the weapon quivers and stills, suspended in that impossible handspan between intention and prohibition, murder and its denial.
The refusal tears down his arm into his chest, a hooked current ripping against bone. His shoulders jerk, then fold, ritual stillness splintering as golden agony knots along his spine and drags his frame earthward. One knee plunges into the swelling water, sending pale ripples across drowned faces. The battle-priest becomes a kneeling outline, pinned by invisible hands before the watching gods and crowd alike.
Across the flooded pit, Olu drags himself from behind the cracked pillar, staff biting into stone, more splint than spear. Each breath rasps smoke and river-damp; each cough sends knives through his ribs. He reads the tableau at a glance (the kneeling battle-priest, the spear stalled a finger from Makeno’s skin, the galleries frozen mid-chant) and his eyes rake the tiers for movement. Masked faces. Blood-dark robes. Students huddled or fleeing. He counts every upright shape, every slumped one, tallying who saw the god flinch and who will carry that tremor back into corridors and council-chambers once they claw their way out of this drowning pit.
The priest-choir’s drums stagger, then fall into a jagged, off-beat thunder as their voices clash: half still driving toward a kill-chant, half already slipping into the tonal pattern of closure. The discord grates against the arena’s tuned stone; blue fire in the hanging gourds gutters and spits, throwing harsh, strobing shadows over Deko’s halted spear and Makeno’s heaving chest.
The arena does not like the confusion.
Makeno feels it under his palms where they press into slick stone. A low, teeth-buzzing hum rises through the floor, through his knees, up into the knots of his spine. The water round his shins shivers, not with cold but with offended rhythm. Channels along the pit’s edge cough, then surge; knee-deep becomes almost thigh-deep in a breath, a sudden, sucking swell that tugs at ankles and scatters the reflected torchlight into broken shards.
Drumskins boom out of time. One priest strikes the head of his drum a blink too late, another too soon, until the whole beat turns into a stuttering storm. Their voices ride it badly. Some throats cling to the sharp, ascending intervals that call for sacrifice; others have already dropped into the rounded cadences of dismissal, of benediction. Kill and close slam against each other in the air, same words twisting into different meanings on different tongues.
The stone remembers which songs it’s meant to carry. Tonight it cannot choose.
Blue fire in the gourds above flares, then chokes down, then flares again, as if something is covering and uncovering an unseen mouth. Every pulse of light cuts the arena into stark frames: gold-scarred priest locked mid-lunge; sailor-mage sprawled, chest sawing; Olu limping through rising water with his staff like a broken mast. Between flashes, ghost-wash from the channels paints other figures on top of them: half-seen sailors dredged from some drowned history, arms reaching, mouths moving in bubbled curses or prayers.
Thunder from the drums turns ugly. Not triumphant, not solemn. A limping rhythm, like a heart that has forgotten how to beat in time with itself. Each mis-struck note skids against the arena’s enchantments, sends small, visible shivers through the carved faces of the trickster gods that ring the pit. Stone eyelids do not blink, but the shadows beneath those brows deepen, flexing with some slow, amused irritation.
Makeno feels the dissonance snag in his own chest. His lungs seize on the wrong part of a beat, forcing his breath to hitch just as he tries to pull a clean, steadying draft of air. Salt and old river-silt sting his throat. Somewhere under the noise, under the roar and clash and shouted oaths, he hears another pattern trying to rise. A tidal drag in the drums. A back-current in the chant.
They cannot agree on his death.
The water knows it first. It slaps, then draws back from Deko’s braced foot, curling around Makeno’s instead with the shy, testing touch of a tide about to change direction.
Sound shears inward from all sides at once.
The priest-choir sucks a single, ragged breath and rams its scattered notes together. Discord collapses into one long, grinding chord that does not rise or fall so much as thicken, packing the air until it hurts. It shoves at eardrums. It crawls into jawbones. Teeth vibrate. Skulls ring.
It tastes like metal being chewed.
Makeno’s molars ache as if he is gnawing spearheads. His tongue prickles, then goes numb, as if a smith has run hot wire along its length. Around the pit, masked spectators flinch as one. Mouths clamp and then wrench open. Spit hits the flooded stone in dark flecks; some cough scarlet, some clear, but all of them are spitting something out they cannot name.
Iron floods every palate. Old coin. Fresh-cut blade. A remembered nosebleed. The taste spreads and will not wash away, even when men and women gulp river-wet air, even when they drag knuckles across their lips.
The arena is in their mouths now.
It refuses more blood.
It makes them share the refusal.
A masked officiant lurches up from the front rank of the choir, joints knocking like loose pebbles beneath his layered robes. The consecrated staff in his hands jitters, gold inlay catching the guttering blue fire as he lifts it overhead. The drum-beat stumbles, then gutters out around him. Silence does not fall so much as grind into place. When he speaks, the ritual cadence starts true, long syllables, rising, falling, as drilled into every officiant’s bones, but shatters on the key phrase. “Unresolved by blood… yet sealed by oath.” Each word lands off the beat, scuffed sideways, as if shoved through sand. The fracture in rhythm is louder than the sentence itself, a clear stutter of defiance from powers that want clean kills, clean verdicts.
As the final syllables leave his mouth, pale-gold characters boil out of the air like breath on cold glass, each sigil rimmed in a faint, needling halo. They stream toward the stone in thick, fevered skeins. They spiral along the curve of the arena, over statues, gallery rails, and the lip of the flooded pit, casting every face in turning verdict-light: accused, witness, judge. For a heartbeat the circling band of script burns bright enough to bleach even the blue gourds, then the letters gutter, one by one, sinking into rock like cooling embers, leaving afterimages seared on retinas and a ghost-itch of writing under the skin.
The galleries do not roar. They sag and tighten and splinter into fretful knots instead. Students hiss arguments about precedent and pact-law. Gamblers claw at damp ledgers, cursing odds that no longer mean anything. Junior priests mutter over omens and loopholes, already scheming revisions. Even the devout trade measuring glances. The wall-script has marked Makeno as sanctioned uncertainty now, a living breach they cannot ignore, cannot safely erase, must carry like a loaded charm inside their own house.
The controlled chaos hardens into ritual order, like foam tightening back into a single wave-line. Attendants in short, dark fighting-wraps slog through the knee-deep, omen-stirred water, feet feeling for treacherous gaps as if walking a riverbed that keeps changing its mind. Overseer-priests along the ring bark cadenced commands, clipped calls and counter-calls that ride the damp air. They slam staff-butts against stone in set patterns, and drum-signals answer from the galleries, syncing with the arena’s own hungry pulse. Each beat steadies a section of floor. Each pause lets the living rock settle. Under Makeno’s ribs the rhythm thuds like a second, borrowed heart, holding the shifting stones just shy of swallowing anyone whole.
Ropes, oiled and sigil-branded, hiss down from the higher tiers. Hands catch, loop, and knot them to the bases of the masked statues that watch over the pit. The trickster-gods’ carved mouths are slick now with condensed mist, beads of water trembling on stone lips before sliding off in tiny, shining falls. The droplets taste of brine and iron where they tap Makeno’s face, like sea-spray flung from a broken hull.
A pair of attendants brace themselves against one of the larger idols, its mask a half-laugh, half-snarl. They heave the first rope taut, testing. The statue groans, not with weight but with waking. Gold dust in its engraved teeth flickers, answering the faint glow in Deko’s distant scars. For a breath, Makeno feels caught between those two glints, priest and idol, as if they are haggling over which of them owns the moment.
“Hold the line,” an overseer intones, not quite shouting. The words are half-command, half-prayer. The arena listens. The ground’s lurching subsides to a sullen roll. Ropes steady. Platforms lock into place with slow, grinding clicks, giving the attendants just enough certainty to move without drowning in stone.
Around Makeno, other bodies are being slung into nets, wrestled onto stretch-boards, sorted with brutal efficiency into the living, the dying, and the already given back to the gods. The water presses against his thighs, cold as river midnight, tasting the blood that streams from the spear wound and from smaller cuts he can’t yet feel. It curls around him, curious, then surges away toward louder stories, leaving him hanging in the harness of hands and rope, halfway between the pulled-back chaos and the hardening ritual that is closing over the arena like a new crust of law.
Healing gourds are cracked open over the rising currents, stoppers snapped with sharp knuckle-pops that sound like breaking shells. Their phosphorescent contents stream out in milky ropes, too bright for mere medicine, more like captive river-light that has remembered how to flow. Wherever the liquid kisses the churning water, the surface shivers and flattens. Ghost-waves slacken mid-crest, their hungry rims blurring. Drowning after-images (kicking legs, reaching hands, mouths full of remembered foam) smear into pale threads that lose their panic and coil, slow and docile, back toward the waiting floor channels.
Sand-bearers follow on bare, quick feet, baskets slung from scarred shoulders. They cast consecrated grains in tight spiraled patterns, wrists turning with the smooth assurance of long practice. Each arc of sand hits the damp stone with a hiss, weighing the currents down, pinning their fury in layered sigil-circles. The water’s chop subsides to a reluctant sway. What moments ago tried to claw up to the seats now sulks along its proper paths, the arena’s temper coaxed from open frenzy into a controlled, sullen ebb that still mutters of storms under its breath.
At the pit’s center, Makeno’s world narrows to heat and cold. Heat: the spear, a nailed sun burning through his side with every breath. Cold: the insistent, professional grip of ritual hands, fingers hard as river stones. Attendants knot a splinted brace tight around the embedded haft, their wraps soaking in his blood as they murmur under-breath formulae that stitch bone-memory to wood-grain, fixing weapon and flesh into one reluctant, temporary truce so the iron cannot grind deeper when the arena hauls him skyward. Ropes creak; a sling-net bites under his shoulders. As he lifts, a scribe-priest leans close, palm slick with inked river-clay, and slaps a wet sigil to his brow. It burns like ice. The glyph crawls, unfurling across his skin as the name “Ariwo-Enu”, Mouth of the Tempest, is spoken three times into binding, each repetition knotting the sound to law, to stone, to watching gods.
The title ripples outward through the arena’s acoustic bones. Priest-choirs falter mid-hymn; the hanging gourds flare white, gutter to bruised blue, then steady. In the galleries, gamblers and acolytes alike recoil from the railings, hands hovering, unsure whether to bow, spit, or trace warding cowries in the air against a man suddenly framed as omen instead of spectacle. Below, Makeno’s branded skin throbs. The sigil’s chill threads down his spine and into the damp stone, teasing open hairline cracks in the academy’s carefully mortared silences. Along those fissures, half-silent ancestor-presences flicker at the edge of his hearing, startled, as if the new name has gone hammering along drowned pathways, knocking on doors that were never meant to answer while priests watched.
Across the blood-slick stone, Deko stands rigid within a tightening ring of senior clergy whose faces are carved from the same rock as the arena idols. Their hands move over his gold-inlaid scars with brisk, impersonal care, fingers probing each line as if glossing a damaged manuscript for heresy. Questions drip in low, measured tones and with each inquiry a different thread of test-prayer thrums through his flesh. Some scar-lines flare obediently, bright as fresh-forged wire. Others gutter, or stay ominously dull. In that uneven burning the watching priests take their measure: not triumph, but a hairline fracture in certainty, a faint, dangerous suggestion that both champion and patron have been brushed by doubt.
Olu keeps moving, but each step feels like pushing upstream. Every face he passes is already turned inward, ears not on his barked orders but on something deeper, some echo rising from the stone. Mouths move without seeing him. Eyes are glassed, reflecting not torchlight but remembered blue fire.
Words ride the corridor air ahead of him, thin and hot as steam. “The tide refused the kill,” someone breathes near a staircase alcove, half in awe, half in fear. “No blood for them this time,” another voice answers, trembling. “Or not that blood.”
He turns a corner and runs into a knot of junior guards pretending to adjust their gear. They fall back at the sight of his limp, his scars, but their attention snaps past him almost at once, following the rumor’s wake. One whispers, loud enough for the walls to hear, “They say a storm was called by name. Spoke to it right in the god’s ear.”
Olu grits his teeth, pushes past. The stone under his boots feels oddly responsive, vibrating, as if carrying gossip like a drumskin carries rhythm. Along the plastered walls, old fire-smoke stains seem to darken, coiling into curls that resolve, for a heartbeat, into breaking waves and shattered masts. He blinks hard. They are only stains again. But the sense remains: the building is listening.
“The sailor bleeds and the gods blinked,” someone laughs too loudly from an open guardroom, a laugh with panic showing at the edges. “Blink too long, they’ll miss their own game,” another mutters back, voice rough with incense and fear.
Every repetition sharpens the tale. The arena’s verdict shrinks to something quick and dangerous that can fit between teeth. By the time it leaves each mouth, the story cuts cleaner, carries further. Like sparks leaping from coal to dry thatch, it needs only a little wind to set the whole hill alight.
At the first main junction he slows. It is not just rumor running ahead of him now; the stone itself is answering back. Door lintels breathe with a faint, sickly light, sigils along their edges swelling and shrinking like pupils in a startled eye. The carved faces of threshold-spirits, usually dull with long service, seem slick with attention. Their chipped cowrie teeth glimmer as he passes. Their eyes, mere hollows rubbed smooth by generations of hands, gleam wet for an instant, tracking his limp the way a shoreline dog tracks the tide.
He ducks under an archway banded with old fire-scars and river-shells. The two door-spirits set into either side of the keystone stir as if waking from a heavy sleep. Their mouths do not move, but their overlapping whispers drip down on him from the stone.
“Living…witness…” croons the left-hand spirit in a cracked, riverbed voice.
“…until the sea speaks,” answers the right, syllables grinding like wet gravel.
They roll the phrases between them like gamblers tasting unfamiliar dice. Testing the new oath against their own ancient bargains. Seeing if it sticks.
The nearest guardroom is clogged with heat and stale palm-wine. The usual lazy clatter of dice has stilled; the bone cubes lie forgotten in a spread palm, sweat beading between carved pips. A knot of junior warders and one bleary-eyed lieutenant hunch around a crackling memory-gourd, its surface pulsing with smeared images: two figures as storm-shadows, a spear made of river-light, blue fire flaring white and then…stuttering. No sound, only the gourd’s dry hiss.
Olu pauses in the doorway just as his own name spits from the gourd’s throat, braided with “spirit storm” and “arena backlash.” Heads jerk. Someone fumbles to dim the gourd. Silence slams down, heavy and calculating, as every man in the room reassesses which shore of the coming divide he means to stand on.
Farther on, a side door stands ajar, leaking lamplight and incense. Olu slows. Inside, robed tutors and lesser priests knot around a low shrine-table, lamp-smoke stretching their shadows into hooked-beaked things on the walls. Their hissed words slip out between drumbeats from below: “If he dies, the oaths unravel.” “The rivers will demand accounting.” “Bind his movement, bind his tongue. No tighter than the vow allows.” Another voice, sharp with fear, adds, “He walks as proof and threat. Spill him wrong, and the wells come open.” Olu moves on, jaw set. They are not arguing if Makeno should be chained, only which knots will hold without tearing their buried pacts loose from the one chest still breathing for them.
He halts at one pillar, palm braced to steady the shake in his leg, and feels the stone hum under his skin like a muffled throat. Below, faint lights crawl along the riverbanks as if the towns themselves are restless. Somewhere out there a ship’s horn keens, off-season and wrong. Olu swallows. Storms that are given can be steered. Storms that are owed come hunting.
Olu forces himself away from the stair and into motion along the colonnade, staff ticking against stone, lungs burning with the sharp memory of smoke. He keeps his pace even by will alone. Every step wants to shorten, to fold him back toward the concealed stair and the roar muffled under rock. He knows better than to look back. Fires grow teeth when you give them your eyes.
Torches gutter in their brackets as if flinching from some unseen recoil below. The air along the colonnade tastes wrong: too damp for this height, carrying a copper tang that is not all from old offerings. Fine grit jumps and skitters with each distant drumblow, as though the stone itself twitches.
The drum-patterns drifting up through the floor no longer boast of victory or blood. They wobble, slide off old grooves. A call meant to crown a winner slurs into a searching roll, doubles back on itself, breaks. The rhythm walks in circles like a drunk elder, like a priest whose script has burned mid-chant. Olu feels it in his bones more than his ears, that stutter and drag. A pattern that does not know how to end.
Each paused beat feels to him like a question the gods have thrown back into the clergy’s faces. You swore this. Did you mean it? You bound him. Will you pay? The gaps between drumstrikes stretch too long, thin as overpulled taffy, then snap back with a shiver that climbs his bad leg and settles in his teeth.
He passes an open arch where students huddle in whispering knots, their eyes darting between the floor and the riverward sky. None of them speak the arena’s name. None have to. The academy’s whole body seems to be listening with him now, waiting to hear whether the next drumbeat will sound like a verdict: or like the first crack in a dam.
He slips through a servants’ arcade and down a side ramp that skirts the Iron Court, moving by habit through pockets of shadow where patrols rarely look up. The path smells of old starch and palm oil, broom-straw and cooled iron from kitchen braziers. His limp forces a rhythm that matches the staggering drums beneath, step-drag, step-drag, as if the arena’s disordered heart is trying to climb into his bones.
Beneath his palm, the carved notches of his staff begin to prickle, one after another, like beads on a string being thumbed by invisible hands. Old threshold spirits, bound into the wood during fires and panics past, rouse at the disturbance. They do not like changes that were not bargained for. Olu can feel them turning their many small attentions downward, toward the shuddering verdict under stone, then back along the corridors where oaths travel faster than feet.
He pauses at a low side-door used by laundry girls and ash-carriers and presses his mouth close to its soot-dark lintel. The grain of the wood is slick with years of touch, warm from the bodies that pass beneath it. He murmurs a half-remembered calming phrase into the lintel, an old guard’s trick from a gate long burned. A litany of hinges and safe returns, of doors that open only to the living.
The wood shivers in answer, a subtle flinch that rattles dust from the frame. The spirit curled there pushes back a muddled wash of sensation that is closer to panic than speech: Deko’s name, sharp as a cracked gong; the taste of brine flooding a mouth that is not a mouth; the slick feel of wet rope burning through hands; the sting of a promise pulled too tight. Over it all hangs the sour reek of broken oaths, like water gone stale in a sealed jar. The door knows only that something below has been bound wrong, that a kill was called and then refused. It does not know what shape the refusal will take when it climbs the stairs.
At the far end of the passage he halts, the ache in his leg drowned by a heavier pressure. The weight of the place has shifted. Stone, sigil, beam. Everything feels minutely tilted, as if the whole academy has leaned a finger’s width toward the River Court and its churning wells. The drums below drag into a slower, hollow cadence he knows too well. Not victory. Not mourning. The thin, echoing patterns beaten only after riots the clergy failed to contain, after fires they could not explain away. Rhythms used when they must name a change they cannot reverse.
In that hollow thunder Olu can almost taste Deko’s frustration. A hunter forced to circle a wounded quarry without striking, muscles locked, teeth bared, held back not by mercy but by fear that one more drop of blood will show his own god’s footprints in the kill. The pattern keeps folding back on itself, never landing, never crowning a winner. Not absolution. Not condemnation. A held breath struck into skin and stone.
Turning toward the inner terraces, Olu glimpses processional lanterns bobbing in the distance where an escorted knot of figures crosses toward Quiet Court and its deepest wells. He cannot see faces from here, only the bundled motion of guards, attendant acolytes, and a single uneven shape at their center carried on a litter. Still, the air around that slow-moving cluster feels different: charged like the breath before lightning, the very paving-stones seeming to lean aside as they pass, as if the academy’s pathways themselves adjust to make room for a man the spirits have now been forced to notice in public, a living riddle being borne toward the mouths that once only whispered his name in secret.
By the time he reaches the shadow of a shrine arch, the carved wards seem unchanged, red stone cool beneath his fingers, sigils steady in their grooves. Yet the wind that snakes through the courtyard has a new edge, tasting of far-off rain and overturned offerings, like breath drawn before a verdict. Olu’s grip tightens on the staff. The old lines of power have slipped their channels; one sailor’s sanctioned, stumbling heartbeat has been knotted into the academy’s oaths like a fuse through dry raffia. Once that fire runs its length and meets the waiting rivers, he knows, no priest, no drum-choir, no clever doctrine will be able to gather the sparks back into silence.