POV: nomad
Summary
Nomad wakes manacled spread-eagle to a sheet of metal on the outside of one of the arena ships. The ring is still assembled and the crowd still in place; a smaller ship with a four-pillared podium has settled into the centre, with Glowing Eyes addressing the spectators from it. Aux apologises that he has caught only a word or two of the speech — something about Nomad, something about an "example". When Nomad was hauled out of the mud the soldiers examined Aux in crowbar form, judged him worthless, and threw him aside; he is lying out in the muck off to Nomad's left, ready to be summoned.
Officials lead a few ragged captives up onto the podium ship. Glowing Eyes seizes each in turn by the throat; their skin greys, they slump dead, and the ember in his chest brightens with each one. Nomad watches him eat lives the way a fire eats logs. The crowd cheers harder when the next captive is dragged up — the long- surviving woman who had given the ember people the most trouble in the arena. Nomad assumes for a moment that she is being rewarded for fighting well. She isn't. Glowing Eyes pulls the sheath off a spear whose head is a glowing white-hot ember bright enough to leave a trail in Nomad's vision, and rams it into her chest. He yanks the shaft free; the ember stays. The woman drops to her knees as the fire spreads outward from her heart, jets and sparks scoring her arms and face, leaving streaks that keep glowing after the central fire dies down. She slumps to the side with her eyes open, the small flame in her chest still lit.
Aux puts the obvious together — that is where the ember people come from. Nomad agrees, sickened, and guesses the choice rule: the weak captives get drained, the strong and agile ones get the spear. Aux estimates an ember spear holds a few thousand BEUs — not enough for a Skip, but plenty to give Nomad a Connection to the planet and let him understand the language with reserve to spare. They both work out, dispassionately, that Nomad will be the showpiece — Glowing Eyes wanted him dead in front of everyone and his people failed, so the next humiliation will be to elevate him as the spectacular finish. If Glowing Eyes touches the spear to him, Nomad's ability to metabolise foreign Investiture should let him absorb the charge whole. Aux is already calculating how to handle the recycling.
Two spears are brought out. So there is one more captive ahead of him in the queue. They drag the second person up onto the podium. It is the gap-toothed man — the heavyset peasant who pulled Nomad onto the top crate in the arena and grinned at him. Nomad realises why: by his own elevation rule, this man fits the profile. The poor soul pulls against his guards and screams. Nomad tells himself, again, that it is not his problem and closes his eyes. And in the dark behind his own eyes, something moves — a memory of words he once spoke in a moment of true radiance. The person he had been once would not have been able to do nothing.
He opens his eyes, hauls his right hand out of the manacle hard enough to shatter his thumb and tear the skin along the side of his palm, and throws Aux from the mud the moment the metal flashes into his bleeding fingers. Aux comes spinning through the air as a silver Blade some six feet long and slams hilt-deep into a podium pillar inches from Glowing Eyes's head — Auxiliary's deepest form, summonable again because Nomad had intentionally aimed away from the man. The crowd goes silent. Aux remarks that he thought Nomad could no longer do that. Nomad cannot do it twice; the Torment has been caught napping once and will not be caught again. When he resummons Aux into his hand he can only manage a pole, a wrench, a crowbar — never the Blade.
But Glowing Eyes has seen the Blade and is now visibly hungry. He abandons the gap-toothed man entirely, stumbles down off the podium with the spear in hand and walks toward Nomad as if drawn by a magnet. Good. Nomad eggs him forward — come and try to take his slave, come and command him to give the sword up. Glowing Eyes hesitates a few feet off and brings the spear to Nomad's eye, demanding something. Aux translates: he wants to be shown how the tools are summoned. Nomad answers by spitting in the man's eye — the spittle hisses on hot skin — and gets the spear lowered to his chest at last. He tells Aux to wait as a receptacle on his chest and absorb the charge as the spear goes in. He braces. And at that moment, somewhere across the arena, one of the nearby ships explodes.