Sitting beside Devoth was the most unnerving experience Rialus had ever lived through. The Auldek had all the brutal physicality of their Numrek cousins. If anything, they had distilled it to its essence and then stirred into it a strange gentility that was all the more incongruous. Something like ferocious anger seethed beneath Devoth’s tanned features, but above it lay a veneer of boredom. Rialus could not decide whether Devoth was passionate about life or completely fatigued by it. That was confusing, but even more unsettling was that the Auldek oozed more aristocratic confidence than any Acacian noble Rialus had ever seen—and he had seen many.

Devoth leaned back in his seat, one arm propped at an angle, his knees splayed wide. It was a posture of complete relaxation that also managed to convey that he could spring to his feet at any moment and stride across the world lopping off heads. Devoth now wore a shirt, a thin, somewhat dandyish white cotton garment with crimson satin buttons that matched his trousers. A gold band ringed his thick neck. The tips of his long fingernails had been glazed silver, and his eyes—if Rialus was not mistaken—were lined with black makeup. If Rialus had seen a Numrek so dressed in Acacia he would have laughed at the absurdity of it; here, the effect was almost dashing.

“Rialus Leagueman,” Devoth asked, “how do you enjoy being our guest?”

They were sitting with a few others in a private box, beneath an awning of a silken fabric that sheltered them from the strength of the sun. Above and below them stretched a stadium to rival Acacia’s Carmelia. The terraced benches surrounding it rose at a steep angle to a dizzying height. Rialus knew that the field was actually dug into the earth; the appearance of height was actually one of depth. But, situated as he was at the midpoint of its height, the view below and the expanse above made him queasy.

“You’ve no complaints, I hope,” Devoth prodded. “Rialus Leagueman?”

Rialus Leagueman! What an annoyance! He had tried several times to make the Auldek understand that he was not part of the league. He hated them, as a matter of fact. They had brought him here as a prisoner! He spat on leaguemen and had nothing in common with them! So he had said, but it never sank in. One guard had even squeezed Rialus’s skull and murmured something about the egg shape of it, and then laughed at Rialus’s sputtering refutation that there was anything leaguelike about the shape of his head.

Curses and exclamations bounced around in a fury in Rialus’s mind, but he had to bite back his complaints and reply, “You’ve been most … kind.”