All That Lives Must Die by Eric Nylund Page B

Eighth Edition.
    11 . The Ludus Magnus was the name of the Great Gladiatorial Training School unearthed in 1937 C.E. adjacent the famous Roman Colosseum, said to have trained countless professional killers. —Editor.

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    LUDUS MAGNUS
    Fiona peered down a long shadowy corridor that led into the Ludus Magnus. She heard distant cheers, angry shouts, and cries of pain. Part of her was afraid and wanted to run away, but part of her was curious and wanted to see.
    Dante led the group into the vaulted entrance, through a passage lined with old bricks and ancient stones—even a few skulls and bones had been cemented into the mix.
    They came out on a grassy field half a city block wide. In the center sat the most unusual structure Fiona had ever laid eyes on. It was a lattice of posts and crossbeams, a honeycomb of ladders, ropes, and metal poles. It looked like a crisscrossing three-dimensional web spun by an army of mechanical spiders.
    In the lower part of the structure, a person could barely squeeze through, with sinuous crawlways, tunnels that angled underground, even a canal filled with roaring white water.
    Higher, however, the structure was wide open and towered six stories tall with ropes dangling, rickety bridges, and wooden spans barely a handsbreadth wide—which all swayed in the breeze.
    “This is the gym,” Dante said. “It is part obstacle course and part battlefield. You will learn to hate it by the end of the year. Today four sophomore volunteers will give you a demonstration.”
    Eliot looked sick.
    Fiona moved closer for moral support. This “gym” looked like everything her brother wasn’t good at—running, climbing, and dealing with heights.
    Four students ran onto the field. They wore sweatpants and sneakers. Two wore red T-shirts; the others wore green. They ran past, giving Team Scarab a polite wave, then halted in front of the gym, eyeing one another with mischievous grins.
    Dante clapped his hands. A red and a green banner unfurled at the very top of the structure.
    “Winning is simple,” Dante explained. “Your team must get half their people to their own flag before the other team gets to theirs. Each team has ten minutes to accomplish this, or neither wins.”
    Dante raised his arms. The sophomores tensed.
    Dante dropped his hands. Both two-man teams scrambled onto the lattice and climbed.
    “You can take a safer but slower route,” Dante said. “Or you can go faster, which is more dangerous.”
    Fiona saw a green-team student stop climbing about a third of the way up and get onto a narrow beam. There was only a slender iron pipe alongside to help him balance.
    “Aye, there be a bit more to it than that,” Jeremy said, and pointed higher.
    Two boys were thirty feet off the ground. Both clambered toward a rope swing.
    The red-team boy got there first, leaped for the rope, swung around, and knocked the other boy—
    —off the platform. The green-team boy twisted and turned through the air . . . bounced off a ladder . . . landed with a thud in the dirt.
    Fiona moved toward him, but Dante stepped in front of her. “No interference,” he said. “It has to play out.”
    “Is he—?” Eliot asked, unable to finish his thought.
    They watched as the boy who’d fallen slowly got up, his arm hanging at an odd, clearly broken, angle.
    “Apparently not,” Dante replied.
    “You may use any means to get to your goal,” Dante continued. “And you can use any means to prevent your opponents from getting to their goal—short of bringing weapons onto the field.”
    Fiona thought it a razor-fine distinction between getting kicked off a thirty-foot-high platform and not using weapons. Both were potentially lethal.
    Meanwhile, the boy who’d knocked his opponent off swung across a wide chasm, landed, traversed across monkey bars, and then grabbed the red flag.
    “Red wins,” Dante announced.
    “This will be more complicated,”