Other than the very strong possibility that this was a race nobody was going to win, the first thing I noticed was how battered all the runners-slash-victims looked, many as stooped and crooked as Richard the Third, some with limbs clearly different lengths or with huge unhealed wounds, clumsily stitched. When the race began, and the first of them lost limbs to the traps and wild beasts and the armed demons, the reasons became clear: Since they couldn’t die, when they became immobilized, they were dragged off the track along with whatever limbs and other body parts happened to be lying round. If the parts were theirs, so much the better, but they were crudely attached regardless, and then the damned’s literally hellish ability to heal reconnected those limbs, no matter whose they had been.

Anyway, the race was as ghastly as you’d guess, and the crowd loved it. The fans were particularly thrilled when the temporary leader ran onto the tusks of a skeletal mastodon and was flung to the sand, stamped into something that looked like a strawberry fruit roll-up, and then hoisted on the skeletal trunk and waved like a battle flag by the triumphant beast.

I took advantage of this excitement to make my way down from the cheap seats toward the winglike awnings that marked where the nobles (including Caz, I hoped) were sitting. I bought a sack of some horrible stuff from a vendor—I think they were paper cones full of bubbling, salted slugs—just to look like I had a reason to be there, then casually made my way down the stairs to the aisle behind the covered section.

My heart started to beat very quickly when I saw a flash of silvery-golden hair in the midst of all that shadow. It was Caz, but she was sitting next to Grand Duke Eligor, and much as I wanted to run up behind him and give him the old Welcome-to-the-Theater-Mister-Lincoln, I didn’t have a single weapon that would do more than annoy him, not to mention all his guards and ugly, powerful friends.

Two of the race’s leaders were now tearing each other’s faces off with their bare fingers, something that had the folks in the enclosure whooping and calling for more firewater, but I couldn’t look away from Caz. She leaned slightly toward her captor and said something. He gave her a quick, contemptuous look, then nodded at someone. Two big, gray-skinned fellows got up to escort her. I recognized them—oh, yes, I most certainly did. It was my old pals Candy and Cinnamon, her former bodyguards, but now just her guards, I felt pretty sure.