But scabmettler blood provided another defense. As the man’s flesh parted, his blood gushed out and over his enemy’s blade. Unthinned by anticoagulant, it set almost instantly as it met the air, in an ugly, unsculpted knot that grasped the scimitar’s metal like solder. The wounded man bellowed and spun, ripping the sword out of his opponent’s hand. It juddered absurdly in his wound.

The third man stepped in and cut his throat.

He moved with speed, at such an angle that although his blade was spattered with quick-setting gore, it was not trapped by the glacier of blood that bloomed and froze in the ragged hole.

Bellis was holding her breath with shock, but the defeated man did not die. He fell to his knees in obvious pain, but the rime of scab had immediately sealed his wound, saving him.

"You see how hard it is for them to die on that arena?" murmured Silas. "If you want to kill a scabmettler, use a club or a bludgeon, not a blade." He looked briefly around him and then spoke intensely and quietly, his voice muffled by the spectators. "You’ve got to try to learn things, Bellis. You want to defeat Armada, don’t you? You want out? So you have to know where you are. Are you accumulating knowledge? Godspit, trust me, Bellis; this is what I do. Now you know how not to try to kill a scabmettler, right?"

She stared at him, eyes widening in astonishment, but his brutal logic made sense. He committed to nothing and collated everything. She imagined him doing the same thing in High Cromlech and The Gengris and Yoraketche, hoarding money and information and ideas and contacts, all of it raw material, all of it potentially a weapon or a commodity.

He was, she realized uneasily, more serious, far more serious, than she. He was preparing and planning all the time.

"You have to know," he said. "And there’s more to come. There are some people you need to know."

There were other scabmettler fights, all with their oddly stunted savagery: varieties of scab armor, different styles of combat all executed with the stylized movements and ostentation of mortu crutt.

And there were other contests, between humans and cactacae and all the nonaquatic races of the city-displays of stampfighting.

Combatants used the bottom of their clenched fists, as if they were banging a tabletop-a blow called a hammerpunch. They did not kick with the front of the foot but stamped with the base. They swept and pulled and tripped and slammed, moving with quick and jerky sinuosity.

Bellis watched minutes and minutes of broken noses, bruises, blackouts. The bouts blurred into one. She tried to see possibilities in everything, tried to hoard what she saw, as she sensed Silas was doing.

Little waves lapped over the edges of the stage, and she wondered when this display would end.