Venture Unleashed (The Venture Books) (3 page)

Oh, no.
How much of what he’d dreamed had been out loud?

“Everybody shut up and get back to sleep!” Parker barked at them. “We’re running an hour before daybreak.”

There was a rustle of blankets and a creaking of the wooden boards beneath them as the other boys lay back down on their straw mattresses. Venture continued to pace. He needed to feel the floor under his feet a little longer, smell the cold mustiness of all of the guys and their many-times-sweated-in clothes all packed together.
You’re here. You’re at Champions.
But it had seemed so real.
It was real.
 

“Everybody! That means you, Delving!”

He just needed to be awake a little longer, a little longer so he knew for sure, so it didn’t come back. If he lay down now, it would come back; he knew it.

“Delving!”

Venture jerked his head in the direction of Parker’s bunk, and in that instant, he was fully awake, fully aware, and fully humiliated. He turned away from Parker and looked at the smirking faces on either side of him. Venture shot a look of hot contempt along the bunk rows on each side of the room as he strode to the door. He opened it, then slammed it shut behind him. Parker ought to understand that he just needed a minute. A minute to himself. Just one minute without people watching him, picking him apart.

He sagged against the wall, slid down it until he was sitting on the rough wooden floor. The heat deserted him and his sweaty body felt cold and wet. He shivered, then wrapped his arms around himself. It hurt his mat-burned elbows, but he hugged himself just the same. It was so cold.

Now that those guys had seen his weakness, they were going to devour him. And the worst part of it was, he didn’t even know whether he cared anymore. Whether he could stay here, like this.
What am I going to do now? Earnest
, he tried to summon him with his thoughts,
what should I do?

The door to their room opened and Parker stepped out. He closed the door behind him with menacing deliberation, then stood before Venture with his arms crossed.
 

“You disregarded a clear order, Delving. And then you slammed that door.”

“Just give me a minute, all right?”

“I hear you’re a bondsman. That true?”

Venture stiffened. Did they all know now? “Yeah,” he said, “it’s true.”

“Then you ought to know a thing or two about following orders. Maybe if you’re given sole responsibility for the privies, you’ll remember your place in this world.”

“Is that what I deserve for how hard I’ve worked?”

Parker laughed. “You don’t deserve to be here at all, you worthless bastard pile of waste! You’re not even worthy to be a point-fighter. I don’t know how you ended up here, but I can guess how you got to be bonded. Your whore mother abandon you?”

“My mother’s dead. What did your mother do to you to make you like this?”

Venture saw it coming—Parker’s foot, boots on—for what purpose other than this—aimed directly at his face. He reacted swiftly, instinctively, and caught Parker’s boot heel and scooped it toward him with such force that Parker was pulled up, his body horizontal to the floor. He landed hard, flat on his back. Venture had stood up as he pulled the threatening foot out from under Parker, and now he let it go and leaned over him, almost disbelieving what he’d done. He looked down on Parker, still silent, the wind knocked out of him. Now was Venture’s chance to speak.

“What did you think, that I was just going to sit here and let you break my nose?” He was loud, and doors cracked open. Boys peered, blinking, into the narrow, shadowy hallway. “If you start something with me, you’d better be prepared to finish it. Do you understand, Parker? You’re not my master. You’re paid to help me, to help all your boys. If you want some more, then get up and have at it.”

Venture folded his arms and stared down at the still immobile Parker, who could only glare at him and cough.
 

“Yuh.” He tried to speak, but his voice was weak, his breath still shallow.

“That’s what I thought.” Venture’s words reverberated up and down the hallway.

He turned back to his doorway. The boys stood there, gaping. They parted to let him through, and he climbed into his sweat-damp bunk, pulled the blankets up, and turned toward the cold, bare wall, feeling strangely calm. The others rushed back in after him and crowded around.

“Vent, Vent, by the gods, what did you do?” Lance said.

“Go to sleep,” Venture grumbled.
Oh, my God,
he thought
, is there any help for me now?

“He laid him out! He laid him flat out!” Nick laughed deliriously.

Venture, still facing the wall, couldn’t help half a smile.

“How’d you do it? Did you punch him in the face? Kick him where it counts?” someone said.

Venture sat up. “I don’t want to talk about it. Now all of you get off my bed. Back off. I’m tired.”

The boys took a couple of steps back, but kept staring at him. He knew it was ridiculous, the idea that he could just act like nothing happened, like the hallway wasn’t full of commotion, and turn around and go to sleep.
 

“Oh, man, do you hear that?” Lance said.

“What?” Nick tilted his head toward the door.

“It’s Fisher! Fisher’s up!”

“They went and got Fisher?”

Venture threw his covers back and swung his legs over the side of his bunk. Whatever was going to happen to him wasn’t going to wait until morning. Fisher himself was coming for him. He couldn’t change what he’d done now. This could be his last night here, and he wasn’t sure anymore whether he wanted it to be his last or not.

“It’s been nice knowing you, Vent,” said one of the boys from Frost’s.

Everyone but Venture jumped when Fisher threw open the door and let it crash into the wall.

His fiery eyes darted from one to the other of them. Following the stares of the boys, he spied the likely culprit. “Get up!”

Venture rose immediately, determined to keep it together and appear unintimidated.

“Sir?” he said, with the ease of a servant accustomed to taking orders.

“Get out here.”

Venture’s stomach lurched. For an instant he was sorry. He was so sorry, not for what he’d done to Parker, but because he’d chosen to come here, and now he was never going to see anyone he loved again.

“You get in a lot of trouble, boy?” Fisher said once he had him in the hall. Parker was waiting out there, arms folded, scowling.

“Only when my trainer tries to kick me in the face.”

Fisher whacked him hard across the chest with his forearm, sending Venture crashing into the wooden wall. The whole building shook with the impact, and Venture bent over in pain. Fisher glanced at the open doorway to the dormitory room, then grabbed him by the collar, twisting Venture’s shirt tight around his neck.

“Come on,” he said through gritted teeth.

Fisher dragged him down the hall like that, muttering about how he deserved the wrath of Felsan, the god of pain and death. Parker followed behind them, silent. Whenever Venture resisted, the shirt tightened around his neck, and darkness crept in on his vision. Venture reached up, grabbed a fistful of fabric, and ripped it. His vision sharpened and he took a deep breath. But Fisher didn’t miss a step. His hands were big enough that he easily gripped the back of Venture’s neck, his fingers pressing in below his ear on one side, his thumb on the other, cutting off the blood flow to his head. Venture stopped resisting, but Fisher kept him on the verge of passing out the whole time, only releasing the pressure whenever his body started to go limp.

Fisher took him out the door, not to the half-sheltered breezeway between the new fighters’ dormitory and their training room, but into the open winter night, through a foot-deep layer of crunchy snow that stung Venture’s bare feet, to a side entrance of the massive, robust stone building that was the heart of Champions Center.
 

Fisher tossed him inside, onto the hard stone floor. Then Parker shut and locked the heavy oak door behind them.

CHAPTER THREE

Venture sat there on the floor for a moment, trying to think of what he should do, trying to figure out Fisher. Would he really hurt him? Not just hurt him, injure him? Even kill him?

“Get up!” Fisher said.

Venture did. Fisher kept his hands to himself, for now.

“Where are we going?” Venture dared to ask.

“To my training room.”

His training room. Maybe this was going to be okay. He’d have to run, do drills all night. Something like that. Venture followed Fisher down the hallway.

Lanterns glowed here and there from rectangular insets in the stone walls. After the thin plank walls of the dormitory, it felt good and warm to be in something so solid, so spacious. And after the stench of those tight living-quarters, with no washing for boys or their clothes, the smell of pee in one of the insets hung curiously in the clean air. Undoubtedly sprayed with a laugh to extinguish the lamp, it left the wick limp, that one inset a small, dark, soiled spot in the vast grandness of the hall.

The old stone floor was smooth and polished. White granite was inlaid in a pattern among the gray, forming a long vertical line of white intersected by a shorter horizontal line near the top. Venture’s hand went to his chest, to the place where the little carved wooden emblem, the one that had been his mother’s, usually hung. Not there. He always took it off to train, and hadn’t put it back on since the day he got here. The training had been so constant, and he’d been so tired.

How strange, that the symbol of the Faith of Atran was on the floor of Champions Center. This must have been one of the great temples of the Faith, before public worship was banned in order to end the violent conflict between the worshippers of the different religions Richland’s many immigrants had brought here generations before. He wanted his pendant, wanted to feel it under his fingers, against his skin. He would put it on as soon as he came back—if he came back.

They entered a training room twice the size of the biggest one at Beamer’s Center. Mats matching those on the floor were mounted all around the bottom half of the unplastered stone walls. A rhythmic tap-tap-slap filled the silence. Someone was hammering away at a striking bag. Who would be training in the middle of the night?

Two wooden bleachers, each about fifteen feet long and four rows high, blocked his view of the corner the sound was coming from. Venture followed Fisher through the gap between the bleachers, and the whole mat area came into view.

It was Dasher Starson.

“What are you doing here, Starson?” Fisher said.

“Couldn’t sleep.” He steadied the bag and crossed the mat. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got some business to take care of here,” said Fisher.

“What kind of business?” Starson looked Venture up and down.

Venture stood up a little straighter. Those words Starson had said to him,
quick hands, quick feet
, had helped keep him going all this time. They reminded him of Earnest, reminded him that he was a fighter.

“Mouthy little bastard needs to learn a lesson,” Fisher said.

“He’s a bondsman, too,” Parker added with a sneer. “Can you believe that?”

“A bondsman?” Starson said slowly, not taking his eyes off Venture. “I’m all warmed up. Why don’t you let me take care of it?”

Fisher shrugged. “Just make sure you do it right.”

Starson nodded to Fisher, then looked Venture straight in the face. “What did you do?”

“Talked back to me,” Fisher said. “And—”

Parker said, “Picked a fight with his trainer,” and Fisher said, “Knocked him flat,” at the same time.

Parker glared at Fisher, and Starson raised his eyebrows.

Now the Champion of All Richland knew that he was a bonded servant and a trouble-maker. Venture might as well risk him thinking he was too bold. Venture offered his hand to Starson. This was his chance, maybe his last chance, to officially meet him. Venture introduced himself with the most confident smile he could muster.
 

“Venture Delving.”

Fisher folded his arms and frowned. “Delving?” he muttered.

Starson gave Fisher a puzzled look, shook Venture’s hand, and said, “Dasher Starson.”

“I know who you are,” Venture said.

“You do? Then why do you look so pleased to see me? Have you never seen me fight?”
 

“I saw you in a point-fighting tournament, when you were younger. Last year you beat Will Fisher—,” he glanced anxiously at Fisher, but Starson had a pleased smirk on his face, so he pressed on, “for the Championship title, your first year being old enough to absolute fight. Everyone said you should’ve tried for an exemption to the age requirement when you were younger. That you might’ve been able to take the title when you were still under nineteen.”

Fisher clenched his fists and regarded Venture with utter contempt.

Starson said, “It worked out all right,” and stepped between him and Fisher. “Sounds like you know enough to understand I’m going to beat the stuffing out of you, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”
 

Starson shook his head. He muttered something about the kid being crazy or stupid. “You want to stretch out first?” he offered.

“No thanks. What’s the point, really?”

Starson laughed. “Let’s get this done, then.”
 

“Mr. Starson?” Venture asked as he followed him to the middle of the mat.

“Yes?”

“How does this work? Can I fight you back?”

“I hope so. It won’t be much fun if you don’t.”

Right away, Venture was foot-swept, then punched in the face as he lay on his back. From there, Starson took hold of both of his arms, expertly locked both of them at once, and forced him to tap out with his foot.

“How old are you, kid?” he asked once they both stood up again.

“Fourteen.”

“What are you doing here? A bondsman
and
too young.”

“I’ll be fifteen in two weeks.”

The whistle blew again.

“Well, happy birthday, kid!” Starson kicked him right in the gut.

He tossed him around for awhile and choked him several times, but this rough, yet relatively damage-free treatment didn’t please Parker. Or Fisher.