Gold to Dust

Chapter Three

THREE

She wasn't sure exactly what she'd been expecting the ring to look like. Maybe a dirt cave with people holding torches, a circle drawn in the sand to create the "ring". Whatever it was, it definitely didn't amount to what was before her.

The room was something of an anomaly: in plain sight and- unbelievably- undetectable. Down the alley, they'd found themselves standing directly in front of a solid, immovable wall. And a man. "Names?" he'd asked, and the girls lowered their faces to whisper the names of the men at the bar, Lare and Yuri. He snorted. "Back again, are we?" Chuckling, he dusted away sand beneath his feet, revealing a large wooden circle. A trap door. The hole in the ground led down deep with a ladder descending into the darkness. Ellegra went down first, then Tamshie, who dragged the wooden door back over them and swatted sand from her face. Torches lit the entire tunnel with yellow light, and the sound of laughter and cheers were not far away.

The room was made entirely of stone and sand with another entrance behind a ring that people filed around. A makeshift bar lay to their right, several people scurrying behind it hurried to serve drinks while another took money as bets and placed it under the counter into what Ellegra assumed was the pot. Men bounced from the bar to the the mass of huddled bodies gathered around the ring. It was indeed a ring: a large circle made of cracked and chipped, hard clay almost the circumference of the large oasis just overhead. Two people swung at each other inside the circle, faces red and noses bleeding. The shorter of the two was surprisingly holding his weight against the taller, much fatter man. With minor cuts and a broken nose, he seemed to be doing just fine. He delivered several blows, only two of them actually making contact with the fat man's robust stomach. A wet smack was buried under the laughter and scattered applause of the audience, who were all rooting for the fat man. Even Tamshie was watching the fight with childlike wonder. Ellegra surveyed the room, carefully noting how every pair of eyes absorbed the action in the ring with the same look of excitement and hunger on their faces.

Except one.

He stood at the very end of the bar, his back against the wall, watching her with his jaw firmly set, head tilted back to rest against the wall so that his chin protruded into the air. But she could see his eyes, slanted ever so slightly and completely focused on her. The intensity of his glare put knots in Ellegra's stomach that painfully wrung her insides. Fire and ice raged inside her, panic and adrenaline fighting to take hold of her. She hooked fingers around Tamshie's wrist and pulled the girl back, out of his line of sight. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath until their eye contact was severed, but now that she wasn't being drilled into her breaths were almost gasping chokes for air. Tamshie looked at her quizzically, concern drawing her eyebrows together. "What's wrong?" she said lowly.

Ellegra fumbled over her breathing to speak. "There's a man over there at the end of the bar. He's staring at us."

Tamshie's concern dropped away and morphed into a look of annoyance. "Ellegra, half the men looked at us when we walked in here before they all looked away. We're walking into an illegal place as obvious newcomers. Everyone here is on the edge, but now they're all preoccupied. The next fight will be starting soon I think. He's probably just bored waiting." Ellegra knew that wasn't it. Suspicious or not, no one stared at someone like that. She could still feel his eyes burning a hole into her back.

Her nerves jumped under her skin. "I think we should leave."

"We haven't even betted yet." Tamshie wrenched her hand away, looking betrayed. "I thought you said you trusted me."

"I do. I just don't trust these people."

Tamshie rolled her eyes and turned back to the fight. "Despite that incessantly annoying feeling in your gut, no one here cares about us. We are one of many doing something completely illegal, us more than them as it is. Relax, Ellegra. No one is watching us." The sounds of the fight momentarily faded as people switched places and new fighters stepped forth.