‘You will die in this ring of cold stone. You have no chance, none at all. By saying yes to them, you have given them control over you. Only by saying no do you keep your honour and your dignity intact.’ He ground his jaw. ‘You have made a mistake, Dalip. If you will not let me go and tell them you will not fight, go yourself, and let them do their worst.’

‘Their worst will be to let some other wild thing in here, and it’ll kill me.’

‘If you want understanding, understand this: you will not hurt them by fighting their animals. You will only hurt them by fighting them. The only way you have of hurting them is by not playing their cruel games.’

‘Stanislav: they’ll kill me. One way or another, they’ll kill me.’

‘This is true. But they will gain pleasure out of seeing you fight, not seeing you win. It is the fighting they want. Deny them that.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought you into this,’ said Dalip. ‘Okay, I do have a choice. Die now, die later. And everything you said is true. I just don’t want to die now. I want to live.’

He got up and dusted himself down and started to prowl.

‘What will you do,’ said Stanislav, ‘when they bring in another man? Or a woman? Or a child? Will you kill them to stay alive?’

‘No. No, I won’t.’

‘You are sure of that? Once you begin to kill, it will become almost impossible not to kill. What if they push this Pigface into the ring with you? He is a prisoner of the geomancer as much as we are.’

Dalip said nothing. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, and he was ashamed that he hadn’t. If it was Pigface facing him, knife in hand, sweat streaming down his forehead and stinging his eyes? The guard would stick a blade in him without a moment’s hesitation. Did that give him the right to do the same?

Killing him could be seen as protecting the others.

‘No,’ he said.

‘So you would be prepared to let Pigface kill you?’

He imagined the knife going in, into his belly, being dragged out sideways, his guts spilling out over the floor. ‘No.’

‘It must be one or the other. Those are the rules of their game. Two go in, one comes out.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘So you must decide whether you will be prepared to end another man’s life for the purposes of entertaining our masters, or whether you will not. What if,’ said Stanislav, ‘it was me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? We are together through circumstance alone. Neither of us chose the other. If I am just another man you must kill in order to survive that day, then why not?’

‘You’ve not done anything to hurt me. Stanislav, please. I just want to live a little longer.’