“Kammani!” Dagan yelled, panic flickering in his eyes as I came into view. Nasu raised a bloodied sicklesword.

I gurgled, kicking at Uruku’s shins. I thrust my elbow into his breastplate and tried to wrench myself away, but he pressed a dagger to my rib cage.

Dagan called to us. “Free her, Uruku, and I will kill Nasu right now to prove myself innocent! I swear!”

Nasu squared off to him, anger rising on his face. “You’d never best me, and you know it.”

“Why don’t we see how this plays out.” Uruku dragged me to the center of the ring, ten paces away from Dagan. Dagan’s hand twitched, his dagger poised to throw, but Uruku kept me in front of his body. Dagan had no clear shot!

“Guardsmen! Finish the trial! Spare one of them. The other two must die!” Uruku screamed almost gleefully, his forearm firmly around my windpipe.

Gasping for air, I felt the horror of what was to come rain down on our shoulders like fire as the gate creaked open, and more guardsmen than I could count poured out and encircled us, armed to their teeth, shields flashing in the sun.

“Serve justice! We must have the truth!” Uruku cried in my ear, his voice heightened with malicious triumph.

The guardsmen stood shoulder to shoulder, helmets pulled down over their brows. They carried battle-axes and maces. Sickleswords and spears. One accurate throw and we’d be done. Humusi’s writhing body as she’d been impaled spun through my mind in nauseating waves.

So this is how we will die.

Dagan and Nasu tensed together, chests heaving, blood spattered across their faces. Dagan’s emerald dagger glittered in his right hand, a sicklesword in his left. Nasu clutched one gory mace and his own sicklesword. No match for any of these men.

“Dagan!” I screamed, my throat raw, as I wriggled under Uruku’s hold. My blood grew cold, and the Boatman flickered to life in front of me and ghosted away. I grabbed for his image with my mind, but Uruku’s forearm pressing, pressing, into my throat was making me see stars instead.

As the guardsmen slowly advanced on Dagan and Nasu, who stood back to back, ready to meet their fates, Uruku hurled me forward onto my knees into the sand, and retreated with a guardsman out of the Pit. Dagan’s face was a mask of terror.

“Run to the ladder!” he yelled to me as a guardsman swiped at Dagan’s head with his sicklesword while another stepped forward and lunged for Nasu. Another, his beard bigger than I was, advanced on me, a spear gripped in his mighty fist. My heart trembled in fear.

I held up my empty hands. “Please sir.” I stayed on my knees, ready to dive should he throw it.

“Kammani!” Dagan screamed. His sicklesword clanged against a guardsman’s shield on his right, and two more guardsmen advanced on his left. He was surrounded. “Go!”

A cry tore from my throat as the big guardsman took another step toward me. Then another. But my scream was not as loud as the shriek that rose from the gate of the Pit. Nor was it as loud as the resulting cries of terror—of fascination, of triumph—that rose from the crowd around me.