Commodus’ amphitheater looked a lot like the famous colosseum in Rome, except longer and about five times bigger. I’m pretty sure you could pack a few hundred thousand people into it, or what passed for people down here. A track extended around the entire length, but there was a separate space at the middle, clearly meant for something like gladiator fights. The sands of the track and the arena were rusty with dried blood.
Down in the lower part of the stands near the center of the amphitheater, a large section was sheltered by roofs of stretched skin, like giant albino pterodactyl wings. Since there was no sun in Hell, I was pretty certain the roof was for privacy for Hell’s most important, and perhaps to protect them from the missiles and saliva of the braver or at least crazier of the less fortunate above and behind them.
I wandered around long enough to get a feeling for the Circus, paying close attention to exits, hiding places, and good and bad spots for making a desperate last stand. Then I sloped back to my room at the Ostrich to rest and think. Neither of those came easy. Every time I started to get a little focus, I would see Caz’s wan face again in that mirror and my thoughts would be scattered like bowling pins. I had never dreamed it was possible to want something or someone so much, and the fact that I had almost no chance of getting her just made me more obsessive. I fell asleep and dreamed of her, of course. In the dream she kept telling me to forget her, to turn away and go back, but even in my dream I couldn’t give her up, and so I followed her into endless shadow.
What went on at the Amphitheater of Commodus on the first day of Wolf? Well, it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect during a holiday in Hell in front of a quarter of a million gathered demons and damned souls, and all of it was ugly, ugly, ugly.
The holiday festivities began with the ritual slaughter and dismemberment of dozens of types of animals and damned souls, the kind of fun that would have been familiar at a real Roman colosseum, except neither the animals nor the damned could die. That didn’t stop horrendous, bloody things from happening, and in many ways it was worse to see creatures suffering that badly and knowing that even death wouldn’t end their pain. Then the races began, leading up to the big one, the Lykaion Rally, which drew most of the betting action. The track around the outside length of the amphitheater had been turned into an obstacle course with every manner of hard, hot, and sharp object you can imagine, then a gang of a hundred or so naked sinners were set loose at the same time to make their way once around the track, probably about two or three miles long. They had to make this circuit past the “ordinary” obstacles—pits of flaming oil, forests of barbed wire, and what looked like minefields—but also dozens and dozens of armed demons and ferocious beasts.
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.
I watched that beautiful, somber face go past me, only yards away, her bearing slow and dignified, the two guards so close that they were nearly pinning her elbows. She climbed up the stairs toward the top of the amphitheater and for long moments I couldn’t understand what she was doing. But when she got to the top, Caz merely stopped along the wall and turned her back on the amphitheater, staring out across Pandaemonium as though pretending she was somewhere else. The air must have stunk just as badly up there as it did anywhere else in the city, but I guessed she still preferred it to the air next to Eligor.
Candy and Cinnamon stared at her in irritation for a moment, then moved a short distance away so they could watch the action below, but they were still keeping a close eye on her. She was definitely a prisoner, and probably had been the whole time I was back in the safe and comfortable real world, trying to decide whether I should come after her. I wasn’t liking myself much just then.
I moved farther along, then climbed up an aisle so I was also in the topmost tier, although with hundreds of people between us. Then, when one of the racers below fell into a pool of flaming oil but continued his race as a shrieking torch—which the audience just loved—I snuck a quick glance over the edge of the amphitheater.
I was in luck. There were harnesses for banners or perhaps some kind of windbreak along the outside, and a stone track where workers could stand below the outside rim, putting these harnesses up or down. I waited until the burning runner was being extinguished by a laughing giant with a club, which brought a large part of the audience to its feet, yelping in glee, then I slipped over the rim of the amphitheater and onto the ledge. It turned out to be a great deal narrower and less sturdy than it had looked.
I made my way along the stone track by sheer strength of fingers and toes until I had reached the approximate spot where Caz had been standing, her guards hopefully still another ten or fifteen yards farther away, then pulled myself up carefully. I had to take my feet off the ledge and use finger-holds, and it was a long way down. Still, when I popped my head up, there she was, her white-gold hair shining red, reflecting the light of the wall beacons.