The region of Tra stretched on for two full days before the first stone of the city itself appeared on the horizon.
Two days crossing expanses that nothing seemed willing to bound, fields giving way to bare hills, which in turn gave way to low, twisted forests none of the three gladiators dared comment on out loud.
The landscape had something almost unreal about it to Atlas, like something pulled out of a world that should never have existed inside his own.
Tra was one of the vastest regions on the continent, nearly a country in its own right, and Atlas understood, crossing it, why Burn-Head could say, with such contempt, that Tra thought itself important. A territory this size didn't need anyone's approval to feel legitimate.
The first day passed without them meeting a living soul, aside from a few isolated shepherds who turned their eyes away as they passed. The second day was different.
First they passed a cart, then two, then an entire line of people on foot, bundles held tight against their chests, moving in the opposite direction from theirs. No one was running. No one looked exactly panicked.
But there was a contained urgency in the way they walked, the urgency of people who had decided to leave before the decision could be made for them.
Burn-Head slowed the wagon just enough to call out to a man carrying a sleeping child on his shoulder.
"Hey, you, with the kid. Where are you all headed?"
The man didn't stop walking. "Away from here." He shot a wary look at the chains visible inside the wagon, then at Burn-Head . "You, on the other hand, are headed straight into it. Good luck."
He said nothing more, quickening his pace to catch up with the rest of his family.
Burn-Head spat on the ground and got the Moribonds moving again without a word. But Atlas caught, for one second, something crossing his burned face, something unexpected. Hesitation.
Sounds like even he doesn't know what we're walking into, or where all these people are running to.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of people passed through his field of view, an almost dizzying sight, this great migration. He saw children smiling, chasing each other around the adults who kept walking without pause, elders riding in carts pulled by another kind of animal, a stockier version of the Moribonds, the same six legs but much shorter.
What are they running from? Atlas wondered.
The city appeared first as a smear. Red. A red so dominant it eclipsed everything else in the landscape.
"Wow," Dran exclaimed, some color having come back into him since they'd left the camp. He leaned his face close to the bars, his dark eyes, his shaved head like the other two gladiators, pressed almost against the edge like a child. "Tra, the Red City. So it wasn't just a legend."
It shouldn't have surprised him this much. He'd had nearly a week to get used to the grays and blues that seemed to be all this world had to offer, the ash colored sky, the snow that was never quite white, the blackened stones of the Crahar. But Tra, seen from a distance, looked like an open wound in the middle of a landscape that had long since given up on carrying any color at all.
"That's impressive," Atlas said, almost against his will. This world's colors kept catching him off guard, each in its own way.
As they got closer, the shade sharpened. It wasn't blood, or paint. It was the clay itself, a deep red terracotta the region seemed made of down to its roots, one the people of Tra had clearly decided, generations ago, never to hide. The roofs, the walls, the towers breaking the skyline, all of it carried that same color, darker or lighter depending on the building's age, as though the whole city had been shaped out of a single quarry, the very shade that had eventually given the city its name in the mouths of everyone who had never seen it themselves.
The wagon passed through the first gates by late morning, and that was when the stares began.
First one, then ten, then an entire street that seemed to slow down as they passed. It wasn't fear, or even simple curiosity. It was something closer to unease, the kind of look you give a sight you're not used to seeing dragged through your own streets. A woman pulled her child against her leg as they went by. An old man spat on the ground, though it wasn't quite clear at what.
They don't like this, Atlas realized. I thought gladiators were a common enough thing on Odyssey. Looks like, once again, my view of the world wasn't wide enough.
He noticed the detail before he'd even finished processing it, that same new sharpness that had settled into him since the night at the camp, deeper than plain sight or hearing. He wasn't just seeing the city anymore. He could almost feel it, the smell of sun warmed clay in places, the weight of a look before he'd even met the eyes behind it, an overall texture he would never have known how to name before this week and now perceived without any effort at all. A kind of sense of mastery, as if the whole world could be held in the palm of his hand. It was only a feeling, though. He was still, after all, chained, forced to fight for someone else's profit.
It was both useful and a little frightening, this sudden ease at reading things an average student should never have been able to read.
Hercles stayed unmoved by the sight, eyes half lidded, no doubt already far more used to this kind of scene than they were. Dran, on the other hand, looked like a child. Something new was shining in his eyes. He kept looking everywhere at once, even tried speaking to passersby, who shied away from him and never answered, of course, some of them staring at him with undisguised pity. Dran didn't seem to care in the slightest.
Past the first few streets, a public crier, perched on a wooden crate at a crossroads, kept repeating the same announcement, his voice already hoarse from saying it too many times. "The investiture of the new Sceau in three days! A grand market on the square, favors from the new Sceau for every honest citizen of Tra!" No one seemed to really be listening, but no one walked away either, as if his mere presence were reassuring enough on its own.
Further along, a cloth merchant was stacking her red fabrics with a nervousness that had nothing to do with business. When her eyes met Atlas's through the bars of the wagon, she looked away so fast she nearly knocked over her entire pile.
The city, for all that, didn't seem to be bracing against them. Banners in a red even brighter than the walls hung from one façade to the next above the main streets, some already faded in patches, others clearly put up in a hurry. Stalls sold crudely carved wooden figurines, drinks poured into waterskins stamped with a seal Atlas didn't recognize yet. A celebration was being prepared, there was no doubt about that.
But underneath that celebration, something didn't quite add up. Too many guards posted at the crossroads for a simple investiture. Conversations that cut off a little too sharply as the convoy passed, not because of them, but picking back up afterward at a lower volume, as if the original topic now needed protecting. A tension running underneath the color, like a crack under a fresh coat of paint.
No one, however, seemed willing to say so out loud. Or maybe no one could.
The arena of Tra stood apart from the city center, less massive than the Crahar, but built from the same red clay as the rest of the city, which gave it, from a distance, the look of a heart exposed to open air.
Burn-Head spat on the ground at the sight of it.
"This isn't a Rohar arena," he said, as if he needed to apologize for it. "Officially, you're not fighting. Unofficially, make sure the new Sceau is happy, and everyone goes home in one piece."
At the entrance, a young man, a leather ledger tucked under his arm, came to meet them before Burn-Head had even had time to climb down from the wagon.
"You're late," he said, no greeting, already flipping through his ledger. "The Sceau's steward was expecting your arrival this morning."
"We've been on the road since dawn," the other guard answered in Burn-Head 's place, rushed, as if he dreaded what Burn-Head might say if allowed to speak first.
Burn-Head , his anger visibly rising, added anyway. "Tell your steward he can wait a bit longer, or come say it to my face himself."
The man didn't rise to the tone. He noted something in his ledger, glanced quickly into the wagon, visibly counting heads rather than faces, then snapped his ledger shut. "Three fighters. Is that all you have to offer the Sceau?" he said, in a faintly haughty tone, before moving straight on to something else, ignoring Burn-Head's anger entirely.
"Noted. Fights begin the day after tomorrow, at dawn. Until then, they'll stay here, under your watch. The Sceau has high hopes for them. He's heard nothing but good rumors out of the Crahar." He was already walking off toward the next group waiting a little further down, without waiting for a reply.
The inside of the arena was already swarming, workers finishing up temporary stands, merchants loudly negotiating access to the best seats. And then there were the other fighters.
They stood in small clusters near the entrance arcades, no chains, no guards stationed at their shoulders, joking with each other with the ease of people who had never had a reason to lower their voices.
One of them, a shaved headed woman with geometric tattoos covering her forearms, stopped talking as she saw them approach, her gaze sliding over the chains with something that looked more like annoyance than curiosity.
"Rohar dogs. Here?" she said, not really to them, more to the man beside her, who shrugged, uninterested.
Hercles, having caught the remark, opened his eyes slightly, finally interested.
"Tch. You're weak. Are you even worthy?" he answered, without hostility, almost amused.
"Arrogant" she snapped, visibly a little stung. Her gaze lingered on Atlas afterward, a beat longer than it needed to. "We fight because we choose to. That makes us worthier than you, who never had that choice. No one in Tra fights with a leash around their neck." She spat on the ground, as if offended by her own words, then tipped her chin at the chains on Atlas's wrists.
"That must be a strange feeling. And here you are, talking to me about dignity, when you're nothing but a chained dog."
"You get used to it" Hercles answered, putting his plam on Atlas shoulder, perfectly calm, a smile in his voice.
She didn't look convinced. "Ilena," she finally offered, as if the name cost her something to give to Rohar fighters. "Since we'll probably cross paths again before the week is out."
Atlas found nothing to say back. It hadn't really been a question anyway, and the name, given so grudgingly, felt more like a courtesy than an opening.
Dran, who had stayed out of the whole exchange, had shifted mood entirely. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, as if simply being seen by free men amounted, in itself, to one more humiliation he no longer had the strength to add to the list.
The man beside Ilena, older, his jaw eaten away by an old scar, finally added, quieter, almost to himself. "I fear the worst. The old Sceau would never have..."
Ilena shot him a look sharp enough to shut him up.
No one said anything more. The small group scattered, leaving Atlas alone with that unfinished sentence, which refused to fit anywhere in what he thought he already understood.
The old Sceau would never have what?
The question went unanswered, and something told him he wouldn't get one anytime soon. It settled in anyway, stubborn, alongside all the others he'd already been carrying for days, about Isaac, missing for too long now to be a coincidence, about this collective silence blanketing the entire city like a coat of paint just a little too fresh to be honest.
Three days before the investiture, and already, here as everywhere since they'd left the Crahar, no one seemed willing to say what had actually happened before they arrived.
Shortly after, they were led, without gentleness but without brutality either, toward a low wing along the arena's flank, where a row of cells waited, as red as the rest of the city, their very bars seeming to have been dipped in the same clay before being forged.
They had nothing of the dripping dungeon of the Crahar. A bare bed, a clean mat, a narrow window set high up through which a little of that same red light from the street filtered in. It wasn't comfort. It was upkeep, the difference between an animal you mistreat and an animal you keep presentable enough to put on display.
Dran sat in a corner without a word, knees pulled to his chest. Hercles stretched out on his own mat with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had slept in far worse places.
Atlas stood for a long while in front of the narrow window, watching the little gray sky it was willing to offer him, that unanswered question still turning over somewhere beneath his ribs.