Without the charm, kehoks were only ever reborn as kehoks, nature-defying monsters sired by muck and filth, who sprang into the world fully grown and deadly. It was an endless punishment for the worst of souls.
Tamra had the likeness of the victory charm tattooed on her right shoulder. It looked like a blue ring around a golden sun, to represent the life-giving River Aur that circles the world and the death-granting sun that scorches everything. It was faded now, after years of sun exposure, but she liked that—its age proved her decades-long commitment to the races. She wore a shirt that bared her shoulders to show off the tattoo to the sellers at the auction. She hoped it would dissuade those who thought she was a newbie they could cheat.
I can do this, she told herself. She was experienced. She was wise. She was shrewd. She was . . . never going to find what she needed for two hundred gold pieces. Really, this was a hopeless task.
Shalla . . .
Squaring her shoulders, Tamra plunged into the auction.
Cage after cage lined the street, some of them stacked three or four tall, each with a kehok raging inside. A few slept, clearly drugged into complacency, but most were left alert to show off their strength and presumable speed.
The auction was far more chaotic than the word implied—there was no auctioneer or orderly presentation of beasts, like at one of the farm auctions. Instead, everyone was buying and selling all at once, deals made beneath the screams of the monsters. With the start of the races only a few weeks away, it was especially busy. The sellers scooted between the cages, shouting the statistics for each of their creatures: height, weight, age, number of races run, number of races won. You wanted fast and strong, with a will that could be bent without breaking.
The stronger the kehok, the harder to control, but the greater the payoff if the rider was skilled enough. It was a balance—what you thought you could train versus what would kill you.
Tamra skipped over the kehoks who had already proven themselves in races. Those would be automatically out of her price range. She let the other trainers haggle over them. She also skipped the ones whose sellers promised obedience. Those were fine for students, lousy for winners. She needed a kehok with fire in its soul.
A seller grabbed her arm. “I know who you are and what you want.” His breath was rancid, stinking of overripe fish, and his fingers were as greasy as a sausage.
“I want your hand off of me,” Tamra said, yanking back hard enough that the seller stumbled. He recovered quickly and launched into his sales pitch, but Tamra was already walking on.
She ignored the whispers around her and the swirl of gossip. The seller hadn’t been the only one to recognize her, clearly. But it didn’t matter what he or anyone said—she knew she wasn’t going to buy from the likes of him. So eager to sell, he’d tell any lie about his kehoks.
She was on the lookout for a particular kind of seller. One that didn’t want to be at the auction. One that didn’t care about the sale as much as the hunt. One just like . . . him. Tamra set her sights on an overmuscled man with three cages behind him. He wasn’t calling out to any of the shoppers. In fact, his arms were crossed over his beefy chest, and he was glaring at the potential customers as if daring them to come closer.
This was the kind of man who saw the kehoks as prizes to be won. The kind who trapped the most terrifying monsters he could find without any regard to their tractability. He didn’t care if anyone bought his kehoks for a decent price. He just cared that everyone admired the fact that he’d caught such vicious brutes. Presumably by himself, bare-handed, with his eyes shut and while hopping on one foot.
Coming closer, she eyed his prizes: three vicious bruisers. One was slick with slime, dripping from its jaws and the ripples in its thick, scarred skin. Another was a two-legged beast that wore skin covered in spikes from its neck down to a deadly-looking tail that terminated in a ball of flesh with spikes as long as Tamra’s arm. The third was a massive lion. It was sheathed in black scales instead of tawny fur, its mane looked as if it were made from black metal, and its tail was split into three muscular whips.
“Which one’s your strongest?” she asked.
He pointed to the third, the metallic-black lion. “Killed a man.”
“While you were hunting him?” So, not by himself. And probably not while hopping on one foot either.
“Yesterday, at the market.”
She didn’t want a known killer. Once they had a taste for human death, more often than not it became their sole obsession. You couldn’t race a beast that cared only about death. The desire to cause death was too closely linked to the desire to feel it. Dismissing the black lion, Tamra moved on to the spiked kehok. “Has this one been tested with a saddle?”
“No.”
Not exactly practical for racing. She wasn’t certain how a saddle would fit between the spikes. The hunter had clearly caught this one just for the fun of it.
As she stepped forward for a closer look at its back full of spikes, the two-legged kehok swung its macelike tail at the cage bars. CRACK. It hit hard, but the bars held. Expecting it, Tamra didn’t flinch.
Behind her, she heard the gasps of other shoppers.
She ignored them and moved on to the kehok that oozed with its own goo. She wasn’t bothered by the thick layer of slime, though she thought it would take a special kind of rider to sit in that filth every day for hours at a time. It wouldn’t matter, though, if the beast could win. You can get used to anything if it’ll bring you what you want.
She suppressed a grin, imagining what the augurs would say about that sentiment. You were supposed to always seek to better yourself, but they probably never thought that meant subjecting yourself to daily goo.
Walking around the cage, Tamra examined each of its limbs. “Uneven legs,” she noted. One hind leg had bunches of muscles, while the other seemed to be shriveled.
The seller grunted. She couldn’t tell if that was agreement or an objection, or if he was just grunting at the heat or the stench or a hundred other things.
“This one didn’t outrun you,” she guessed.
“Caught up to it quickly. Problem was caging it. See the ooze? Burns to the touch.”
“You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”
He shrugged. “All of them are trouble. Be slaughtering them after the auction. Hunt them down again in their new bodies. Might fetch better prices next time around. Plus it’s how I test myself against them. I win if I re-catch them.”
“You know odds are they won’t remember you, right?” Except in rare cases, you couldn’t remember your past lives. Restoring your memory of your past life usually required extensive exposure to your old home and family. Most never got that chance. It was a circle: you couldn’t remember who you’d been, so you didn’t return to where you’d remember, so you couldn’t remember . . . and so on. This was part of why the augurs were so necessary—they could read both your past and future for you, and tell you whether you were on the right route or not. In the case of kehoks, who’d forfeited all rights to improving their fate, that amnesia was most likely a blessing.
Another shrug. “I remember. And the augurs back me up, when the market recordkeepers use them to do their tallies. Caught that one”—he nodded to the spiked kehok—“fifteen times.”