But despite the posh, old-world, “I can buy and sell you like cattle” vibe, it was still basically a casino. Even late on a Sunday night with no fight scheduled, there was still a good crowd of fancy-dressed people lining up to empty their pockets at the felt-covered poker tables and red-curtained VIP rooms. I was scanning the crowd to see how many washed-up celebrities I could spot when a new security officer—this time dressed in a tux rather than armor—darted in front of us.
“Great Yong,” he said, clearly panicked but still bravely positioning himself between my father and the other guests. “The Gameskeeper has been informed of your presence. Please follow me.”
I blinked in surprise. Despite how easily we’d bowled over the guards at the door, I hadn’t actually expected my father’s plan to work quite this smoothly. Clearly, I’d underestimated the power of an angry dragon. The guard in the suit wasn’t even trying to distract us with free drinks or gambling vouchers. He was doing exactly as we’d asked, leading us toward a door at the back marked “Private” at slightly less than a terrified run. The surprise victory made me feel a lot better about our endeavor. When he led us through the door, though, the hallway on the other side was not what I’d expected.
In my experience, wealthy people liked nice stuff. Given how much money he made and how fancy the arena’s VIP area had been, I’d expected the walk to the Gameskeeper’s personal office to be wall-to-wall gold plating, naked models, and piles of coke. What I got was a cement maintenance tunnel lined with electrical cables. There was barely enough room for the three of us to walk single file, and my dad had to duck several times to avoid banging his head on the flickering fluorescents.
In hindsight, I should have suspected something like this. The arena was huge with multiple different facilities and levels. All those different parts demanded an expensive back-end infrastructure to support them. Manticores and teams of homeless gladiators didn’t just pop out of nowhere. All those kitchens for the restaurants and medical areas Nik was constantly being sent to had to go somewhere, not to mention the plumbing needs of thousands of drunk people. There was a lot to the arena we didn’t see, in other words, and we’d just stepped into it. But while that explained all the electrical wires, hissing pipes, and fiber-optic cables, what stopped me in my tracks was the writing.
The narrow hallway our terrified escort was hurriedly leading us down was absolutely jam-packed with spellwork. Magical instructions had been carved into the cement walls from floor to ceiling, running down the hallway in small, neat lines that—after staring so hard at Nik’s curse this morning—I instantly recognized as Kauffman’s handwriting.
The equations were so long and complicated, and written so tiny, I couldn’t make out what they did without leaning my face right up to the wall and giving myself away. Sibyl could have done it using text recognition, but my phone was buried under my dress, and I wasn’t about to blow our ruse by digging it out, especially since it wouldn’t do any good. Even with Sibyl looking everything up for me, I couldn’t have deciphered this much Thaumaturgical jibber-jabber if I’d had a month to work on it. But while I couldn’t read what the spellwork here actually did, I had a pretty good guess.
From the moment my dad had shown me that all the magic in the arena was moving in a circle, I’d known there had to be something making it happen. At the time, I’d had difficulty believing anyone could create a magical circle capable of controlling so much power. Walking past the endless spellwork, I realized I hadn’t been thinking big enough. There had to be a thousand lines in this hallway alone, and every time we passed a fork, I saw the functions running down the other halls as well. If these tunnels ran beneath the bleachers all the way around the arena, that would definitely form a circle large enough to channel the roaring magic I’d felt last night. The only part I still didn’t understand was what the spellwork was telling all that angry, bloody magic to do.
It had to be something big. There was enough spellwork in here to launch a mission to Mars, and it was all active. As we walked closer to the arena’s center, I realized I could still feel the angry magic from last night pulsing in the air. It wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as it had been, but considering the arena was closed tonight, the fact that the magic was still here almost twenty-four hours later felt significant. As did the fact that the deeper we pressed into the arena, the thicker it got.
By the time the hall we’d been following dead-ended at an unmarked security door, I felt like I was swimming through syrup. Even my dad was starting to look uncomfortable, shifting his feet as our guide knocked on the security door’s steel surface, nodding to the camera on the wall as he did so. There was a heavy click a second later as the magnetic latch decoupled, and the door slid open just enough for our guide to squeeze his head inside.
“Master?”
I held my breath. From his stillness, I knew that my dad was doing the same. I hoped his dragon ears caught more than my human ones, because I didn’t hear a thing. Something must have been said, though, because our guard nodded like a bobbleheaded doll
