Wolfram used a twist of pig gut to tie back his long mane of white hair, getting it out of the way as he prepared for his meal. The Proud Offal Eatery around him was empty, save his good friend Cruddy (short for Valkyr the Crudmeister), who worked sanitation further down the grotto. On any other Loam Day—the Tsallis day of rest—the Proud Offal would be buzzing. Today, it seemed all of Korsak was out in the main grotto awaiting Wolfram’s match. They could wait. He never fought on an empty stomach.
“Why you want to go topside anyway?” Cruddy asked. “Ain’t nothing on the Jorsham surface but sand and ice, ‘cept those raiders, and they ain’t nice to toilet-users like you and me.”
Wolfram snorted. “That’s why you’ll always be clearing backed up sewer lines. You think too small.”
“All right, smart boy, why then? Why try to win a Surface Qualification tournament?”
“To do Agent work,” Wolfram replied. “And not for the pay, which amounts to the price of middling root and maggot mix. No, Cruddy, I want to put my boot on the neck of interlopers who come into the dense circles of the Firmament to harvest shards, but then retreat to the polished chrome and marbled halls of their sanctums to gloat about it.”
Cruddy brayed laughter. “Then you are going into sanitation work, after all.”
Wolfram smiled his toothy grin as the waiter brought him a steaming bowl of pickled fish and root mash. Several eyeballs bobbed in the hot broth. He took a long whiff, delighting in the sour rotting smell of fish left to ferment in a briny crock over precisely five winters. Then he put his face directly into the bowl and sucked it dry.
“How do you stand that stuff?” Cruddy asked. “Smells like a public toilet.”
Wolfram wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Ma used to add pepper drake, made it spicy.”
Cruddy was quiet a moment. “I was sorry to hear about your Ma. She was like clean pipes, she was.”
Wolfram waved that away. “She was the best Tsallis drop-shipper that ever battled her way out of the Jorsham grottos. Chaos take me, Cruddy, she’s the one who taught me arena-fighting tactics in the first place. Used to throw me around the bathing pool, teaching me leverage, lung control, and howl tones.”
Cruddy nodded. “She could howl, all right.”
Per usual, the waiter then brought Wolfram a frothy mealworm ale. It had the viscosity of Cruddy’s sanitation pipes, but the warm earthy taste of fresh crawlers. Wolfram drank it down, stifling a belch.
Beyond the door of the Proud Offal, the grotto began to get loud with cheers and jeers and rants and railings.
“Heavy-lips Petrowski must have entered the battle arena,” Cruddy said. “They say his skull is twice as thick as most Tsallis. You might want to aim for his more tender parts.”
Wolfram shook his head. “I got my own tricks.”
“Fine, but I’ve bet two weeks of vacation on this bout. You lose, and you’re not only not going topside, but you’re coming with me on all my impactions.”
“Sounds lovely,” Wolfram said, standing. “Let’s get on with it.
Together, Wolfram and Cruddy left the Proud Offal and made their way around to an arcing bridge that took them to a battle circle set at the center of the main Korsak grotto. The battle “cage” was a circle of earth raised fifty feet above the main grotto floor. The moment Wolfram stepped onto the bridge, thousands of Tsallis saw him and began to shout and heckle and call out odds. He was the underdog, and though betting margins were slim, no one wanted to see him beat the oddsmakers—fifty percent of the bet was good loam-money, and Heavy-lips was popular with the ladyfolk. The only truly neutral party was the cage medic who’d be working either way, patching up the loser with splints and blood-cream and such.
Cruddy walked him to the edge of the arena, which stretched thirty paces across. “I bet the bonus for bone breakage. So, maybe you could crack his finger or something at least, just in case you lose the match.”
“Always thinking small,” Wolfram repeated. He then bent toward a table of weapons set at the edge of the arena and picked up a couple of iron rods with heavy balls at the ends. He swung them each once and marched to the center of the round.
Heavy-lips was waiting there for him with the cage judge. Heavy carried a massive two-handed hammer.
“Now, maggots, there’s only one rule,” said the judge, picking his teeth, “this isn’t a death-match. Bones were meant to be broken, teeth to be shattered, and egos to be humiliated. Please do all of the above. But I’m not paid for undertaking or body collection, and Surface matches are meant to show you might make a good Agent for a willing broker. So, try to channel your fury appropriately, will you? The name of the game is harm, not homicide.”
He then waved Wolfram and Heavy-lips back to opposite sides of the arena. As he waited for the signal, Wolfram looked up at the sheer size of the grotto that rose all around him. It measured hundreds of paces across, and just as many high. Tiers of homes and shops and snaking tunnels laddered up and out of sight. And at the edge of every winding road and window were Tsallis brothers and sisters eagerly awaiting this cycle’s Surface Tournament finale—most of them with a bet on Heavy-lips.
How Wolfram would love to make them all wrong.
The cage judge backed away to the nearest bridge, turned and let out a whistling howl to start the match. Heavy charged in. Wolfram smiled and did the same.
By tradition, they held their weapons down as their skulls crashed together like battering rams running at full speed. Wolfram took the brunt of it, nearly losing his feet. His vision swam with white and black splotches, and a moment later he felt Heavy’s hammer slam into the back of his knees, dropping him to the ground.
The crowd roared, thinking Heavy had made short work of Wolfram. But, like his Ma had taught him, Wolfram rolled. Heavy’s hammer slammed the ground where Wolfram had just lain, and Heavy’s boot-falls chased after him, stomping wildly at his chest and gut.
Wolfram shoved himself to his feet and whipped his rods around at Heavy, driving him back long enough for him to get his bearings. He was near the arena’s edge. Heavy just had to push him off the circle and he’d win by default—no knockout necessary.
Heavy charged again, his time swinging his hammer in wide, swooping arcs, meant to force Wolfram to lose his footing or maybe jump down in abdication.
Wolfram timed Heavy’s third hammer swing and slipped past it, leaping forward to tackle him to the ground. The crowd moaned, the sound resounding in the climbs of the grotto. Wolfram relished their disappointment.
Then Heavy slammed a foot into Wolfram’s chest, driving out all his air. He doubled over, trying to catch a breath, but couldn’t.
Heavy got to his feet and hefted his hammer, preparing to crush Wolfram’s leg and arm bones. The medic began pulling bandages from his satchel. The crowd erupted with chants of “Heavy-lips, Heavy-lips.” The oddsmakers began to pull coins from their money belts, ready to pay out. And the entire grotto geared up to celebrate their favorite son’s victory.
But just before Heavy could swing his hammer, Wolfram forced open his lungs—as he’d done splashing around the bathing pool with his Ma, after he’d been held under for long stretches—and drew a mighty breath. He shot to his feet, dropped his jaw, and let out a throaty wet belch. It came like the tearing of cloth, the gas of it nearly visible in the russet grotto light.
Heavy’s face twisted with disgust, like he’d fallen into one of Cruddy’s impactions.
In that moment of hesitation, Wolfram shifted the belch into a howl drawn up from deep down inside his belly.
The sound rose to fill all the grotto like a great horn. It had the bright angry trill of a bugle and the deep bawl of an eight-foot ground tuba all at once. The sheer concussive force tore Heavy’s hammer from his grip, and dropped him to his knees. Still howling, Wolfram reared back and brought both rods down on Heavy’s thick skull.
The odds-favorite battler dropped to the arena floor like a sack of old grain.
The crowd went silent, unsure, it seemed, just how to react to Wolfram’s victory. Most of them had just lost money, but the manner of Wolfram’s triumph… Well, it was good, old fashioned Tsallis combat. In only seconds the grotto swelled with a sound like thunder, as Korsak acknowledged their newest Surface Champion.
Wolfram raised a hand to accept their adulation, as the medics rushed forward and declared the victory by knockout and non-lethal skull fracture—which fetched a thirty percent payout increase for those who bet the bone-breakage bonus.
Cruddy sauntered across the bridge and up to him.
“We got the breakage bonus,” he said.
“We?”
Cruddy looked down at the medics tending to Heavy. “Howl victory. Nice.” He then sniffed at Wolfram’s breath. “But one thing I’ve learned about pipes is that their danger is as much the gas of their trapped stench as it is the pent-up energy of their impaction.”
“Could you for once not speak in sanitation lingo?” Wolfram grumbled.
Cruddy picked a bit of pickled fish from his beard. “You got him with a belch first. Then the howl.”
Wolfram smiled. “I got him both ways, baby.”