Vendors sold food and spiced wine, and bookmakers shouted odds. The festival was unpretentious and profane, like most of what went on in Thee-And-Thine.

The crowd was not all human.

"Where are the scabmettlers?" Bellis said, and Silas began to point, seemingly randomly, around the arena. Bellis struggled to see what he saw: he was indicating humans, she thought, but their skin was blanched grey, and they looked squat and strong. Scarification marked their faces.

Bloodhorns sounded, and by chymical trickery the lights of the stage burst suddenly red. The crowd brayed enthusiastically. Two seats along from her, Bellis saw a woman whose physiognomy marked her as scabmettler. She did not cheer or shout, but sat still through the vulgar enthusiasm. Bellis could see other scabmettlers reacting similarly, waiting stolidly for the holy-day battles.

At least the general bloodlust was honest, she thought, contemptuous. There were enough scabmettler bookies to show that this was an industry, whatever the Shaddler elders might pretend.

Bellis realized wryly that she was tense to see what would happen. Excited.

When the first three fighters were ferried over to the arena, the crowd fell silent. The scabmettler men stepped onto the platform, naked except for loincloths, and stood in a triangle back-to-back in the center.

They were poised, all of them well muscled, their grey skin pallid in the gas jets.

One of the men seemed to be facing her directly. He must have been blinded by the lights, but still she entertained the fancy that it was a private performance for her.

The fighters kneeled and washed themselves, each from a bowl of steaming infusion the color of green tea. Bellis saw leaves and buds in it.

Then she started. From their bowls each man had pulled out a knife. They held them still and dripping. They were recurved, the cutting edge curling like a hook or a talon. Skinning knives. Something with which to score, to pare off flesh.

"Is that what they fight with?" she turned to Silas to ask, but the sudden mass gasp from the crowd pulled her attention back to the stage. Her own cry came an instant later.

The scabmettlers were carving furrows in their own flesh.

The fighter right before Bellis was tracing the outlines of his muscles in wicked strokes. He hooked the knife under the skin of his shoulder, then curled around with surgical precision, drawing a red line that linked deltoid and biceps.