Page 32 of Shackled to the Orc

“Busy. Not all pitmasters have their own doctors, and the general staff are real butchers. I was working in the Capital, you know. I was doing real work there.”

“You lost your license for drinking on the job,” says one of the guards, laughing. The doctor grimaces.

The sound of the wheels changes, clunking along over cobblestones, and I can hear the sounds of the city, people on the streets selling food and drink, calling out their wares, sometimes interrupted by a racking, dry cough that afflicts the villagers who go to work here for the higher wages.

The timber of voices changes, and we stop, the side door opened from the outside by the driver. We are in a transportation hub, hay on the floor, other wagons piled in. I walk out, and three gladiators in a prison wagon whistle at me.

“This way,” says the white-haired doctor, as I scan my surroundings. The transportation hub leads out into the street, the air foul, but on the other side it is against the wall of the arena, where barred doors lead inside. It must be where the gladiators sit while they wait to be taken home, and there’s only a few guards, bored, sitting on wooden chairs and watching over multiple wagons.

This would be the most chaotic place to try to escape…but then you’d have to get through the streets, and past the walls of the city itself.

I follow the doctor through a door down a hallway, until we get to a low-ceilinged room, claustrophobic but lit up with even light by long, glass tubes that somehow illuminate the area with some royal technology. Empty beds line the walls, neatly arranged and waiting for injured combatants, doctors and nurses chatting idly with each other. For them, it’s just another day at work. The beds on the left side are twice the size of the others, made for the orcish species.

At least one of those beds will be filled today.

On the far wall, all the tools I could need are hung up. Shared implements, and there are barrels from which a chemical stink is emanating, and I realize that their sanitization method must be simply dipping the tools in the barrel and using them on the next gladiator.

The white-haired doctor makes a beeline for a young nurse who’s arranging bottles of medicine on a table, and she winces visibly as he approaches, obviously trying his luck constantly with her.

“Hey, you working for Shug?” asks a tall doctor with jet-black hair. He’s young, around my age, and he’s got a cocky smile that says he knows exactly how handsome he is. If this was a week ago, I’d have been nervous around him. He’s just got that self-assured look—but now, I can only picture how tiny he would look standing next to Khan.

I nod.

“You any good? I hate working with Cordell. He’s an absolute butcher.” He’s got a posh accent, sounding like he came from the Capital, and I’m surprised to see him in this pit.

“I’ll do my best.”

He extends his hand. “James. I’ll be working a practice up north next month. The head doctor likes his trainees to put some time in the pits. You learn more here in a week than in four years of medical school.”

“Maya,” I say.

“It’s quiet now, but in about an hour, it’s going to be chaos. Feel free to yell for me if you need any help.” There’s a subtle difference in the way he speaks to me that takes me a second to pick up on. It’s not his boasting flirting. It’s that he doesn’t know I am a slave, and he speaks to me like a human, where Shug’s guards treat me like an object.

“Thank you,” I say, mentally steeling myself for what is to come.

19

MAYA

“Get me a fresh stack of bandages,” I say in a hard tone over the screams of grievously wounded men. Cordell rushes to replenish my supplies. I took over when I saw him try to pour an herbal mixture used to treat insomnia into Tanner’s deeply cut chest. He was the gladiator who called Garvin an executioner, and I packed his bleeding wound up with anti-infectious herbs and bandages, stemming the bleeding, all while he gritted his teeth against the pain.

I glance out at the hallway, and my stomach sinks. On a stretcher, Felix’s corpse is barely recognizable, his head split nearly in two. Cordell returns with what I asked for.

“Where do they take the bodies?”

“Down to transport hub, a wagon brings them back to the—oh, shit,” says Cordell, looking out at the hallway.

A second stretcher is being walked towards the morgue. Ethan. His chest is caved in, and he is laying back, motionless, but he makes eye contact with me and mouths the wordplease.

“He’s still alive!” I yell, rushing into the hallway.

“He’s a goner,” grunts one of the men carrying him, in an annoyed tone of voice. I point to the medical bay, and he’s diverted and dumped unceremoniously on one of the beds.

“Put pressure on his arm,” I say to Cordell. He grabs the wet, bleeding arm awkwardly, and I get a wave of fetid alcohol breath from him. In the last hour, he’s managed to go from sober to dead drunk, and I didn’t even see him drinking. His hand slips off Ethan’s arm and blood spurts out.

“James!” I yell, and the handsome young doctor is there in a flash, pushing aside Cordell and applying pressure as I analyze the wound. Ethan’s chest is indented and cut from a huge swing of a battle-axe. There’s no time to clean it. I splash anti-bacterial, and I’m about to wrap it, when he wheezes painfully, unable to breathe.

I reach down for the metal tube and without hesitation plunge it into his throat. His breath whistles through the tube, and he looks shocked but grateful, able to breathe again. James is already tightening a bandage around his arm, but the situation is stabilized.

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