The lamb and the beast, p.1
The Lamb and The Beast, page 1
The Lamb and The Beast
Page Graves
Copyright © 2026 by Page Graves
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Chapter one
Chapter 1
The blood never fully washes out of the sawdust.
Lethe knows this the way he knows most things about the pits: through repetition, through observation, through the slow accumulation of details that no one else bothers to catalog. The sawdust in the kennels is replaced every three days. By the second day it darkens to rust. By the third it stinks of copper and piss and the particular sourness of creatures kept in spaces too small for their bodies. He spreads the fresh stuff himself when the handlers bother to bring it down, raking it even across the stone floors with a broom that's missing half its bristles, and for a few hours the air smells almost clean.
Almost. Nothing down here is ever fully clean.
He starts his rounds at dawn, though dawn is a guess. No sunlight reaches the kennels. He marks time by the bells that ring from somewhere above, muffled and distant, signaling shift changes for the guards. The first bell means the night watch is ending. The second means the crowds will start gathering in the coliseum within the hour. Between the two, Lethe has the kennels mostly to himself, and he moves through them with the efficiency of long practice.
His satchel is leather, cracked and soft from years of use, and it holds everything he needs. Needles and catgut thread. A tin of salve he mixes himself from rendered fat and calendula and a few drops of clove oil for numbing. Clean linen strips for bandages, though clean is relative. A bone-handled knife for cutting thread and lancing abscesses and, once, defending himself against a fighter who woke mid-stitch and swung blind. He keeps the knife sharp. He keeps everything organized. It is the one small territory he controls in a place where control is a luxury no one offers him.
The first cage holds a creature called Gnarl by the guards, though Lethe doubts that's the name he was born with. He's canine in shape, massive through the shoulders, with a jaw that could snap a man's femur and eyes that track movement with unsettling intelligence. His left foreleg took a bad hit in yesterday's bout and he's been favoring it since, curled in the far corner of his cage with his lips peeled back over teeth the length of Lethe's fingers.
Lethe crouches by the bars. "Morning, love. Let me see that leg."
Gnarl growls. Low, sustained, a sound that vibrates in Lethe's sternum.
"I know," Lethe says. He keeps his voice even, unhurried. "I know it hurts. I'll be quick." He unlocks the cage with the key that hangs from a cord around his neck and steps inside. He makes himself small, shoulders soft, movements telegraphed. He sets his satchel down and opens it slowly, letting Gnarl see every item he removes. "Salve first. Then I'll wrap it. You won't even feel the wrapping, I promise."
He's lying. Gnarl will absolutely feel the wrapping. But the steady rhythm of his voice matters more than the words, and by the time Lethe's fingers find the swollen joint of the foreleg, Gnarl's growl has subsided to a low, unhappy rumble.
Lethe works. He cleans the wound where the skin split over the joint, daubs salve into it with gentle fingers, wraps it in linen tight enough to support but not so tight it cuts circulation. Gnarl flinches once, hard, and Lethe stills until the tension bleeds out of the creature's body before he continues. His hands are steady. They are always steady, here. Whatever else falls apart, his hands remain sure.
"Good boy," he murmurs when he ties off the bandage. "You did so well. Rest today. I'll bring you something from the kitchens."
Gnarl's eyes close. His breathing evens. Lethe gathers his supplies, backs out of the cage, and locks it behind him.
***
Six more cages. Three need wound care. One needs a dislocated digit reset, which Lethe manages with a sharp, practiced twist that makes the creature scream and then go limp with relief. One needs nothing at all, already healing, and watches Lethe with calm, amber eyes while he checks the stitches from two days ago and pronounces them holding.
The last cage holds a fighter who died in the night.
Lethe stands at the bars and looks at the body. It's a reptilian creature, scaled and heavy, who took a blow to the skull three days ago that Lethe suspected had cracked something beneath the bone. He'd told the handlers. He'd written it down and left the note on the ledger where the pit lord reviews the roster each morning. The creature needed rest. A week, maybe two, off the roster.
It fought yesterday. It won. And now it's dead, because a cracked skull doesn't care about winning.
Lethe breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth. He notes the time by the bells. He notes the cage number. He will record this in the ledger and it will matter to no one. The creature's body will be hauled out and dumped, and the cage will be cleaned and filled with someone new, and the sawdust will darken to rust again by the second day.
He closes his eyes. Opens them. Moves on.
This is the rhythm. Tend, record, move on. Don't grieve. Grief is a luxury that gets people killed down here because it makes them slow, makes them hesitate, makes them flinch at the wrong moment. Lethe learned that early. He learned a lot of things early.
***
The afternoon rounds are harder. The arena has been running bouts since the second bell and the wounded come back in waves, hauled through the tunnels by handlers who drop them in their cages and leave without checking whether they're breathing. Lethe moves faster now, triaging by severity, his satchel refilled and his hands already stained.
He is stitching a gash on a fighter's flank when Harsk, one of the day guards, saunters past and kicks the downed creature square in its side.
The fighter lurches. Lethe's needle slips. A thin line of blood wells where it shouldn't.
"Careful, Lamb," Harsk says, grinning. "That one bites."
Lamb. Everyone calls him Lamb. He doesn't remember who started it. One of the guards, probably, and it spread the way nicknames do in closed, cruel places: because it was easy and because it fit. He's quiet. Soft-spoken. Gentle with the creatures in ways that make the guards laugh. And lamb is what you are before you're mutton. It's a name that carries its own prophecy: that the pits will devour him, that it's only a matter of time before the system chews through the last of his softness. Before Demos breaks him for good.
Lethe has been hearing it for six years. He is still here. He is still soft. He is still undevoured. None of them seem to notice the significance of that.
"He bites because you kick him," Lethe says without looking up. He re-threads the needle, wipes the blood with a clean cloth, and resumes his work.
"What was that?"
Lethe finishes the stitch. Sets it with a careful knot. Only then does he look up, and his blue eyes are steady and calm and absolutely unflinching.
"He can't fight if you break his ribs. Move."
There is no threat in it. No aggression. Just a fact delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who has said it many times and has never once been wrong. Harsk outweighs him by half and carries a short sword and a cudgel, and Lethe is kneeling on bloody sawdust with a bone needle in his hand, and the balance of power is so laughably uneven that it shouldn't work.
Harsk moves.
The fighter beneath Lethe's hands exhales, a long shuddering breath. Lethe smooths a palm over the coarse fur of its flank. "You're alright," he says quietly. "Almost done. Almost done."
This is what people miss about him. They see the softness and assume it's all there is. They see the gentle hands and the quiet voice and the way he goes still when Demos's name comes up in conversation, and they think they know the shape of him. But there is something beneath the gentleness that has kept Lethe alive in a place that discards gentle things without ceremony. Something that steps between guards and broken creatures without hesitation. Something that looks armed men in the eye and tells them to move and means it.
It isn't hardness. It isn't armor. It is something quieter than that, something that bends without breaking and flows around obstacles and wears stone smooth given time enough. The guards don't have a name for it. Neither does Lethe. He just knows it's there, and it's the reason the nickname hasn't come true yet.
***
The kitchens sit at the far end of the kennels, through a corridor that slopes upward toward the arena level. Maren runs them with an iron hand and a soft spot for Lethe that she would deny under threat of dismemberment.
"You're thin," she says when he appears in the doorway. She says this every time. She is a broad woman with forearms built by decades of kneading bread and hauling stock pots, and she looks at Lethe the way she looks at dough that hasn't risen properly.
"I'm the same as yesterday."
"Thin yesterday too." She slides a bowl across the counter. Porridge, thick, with a heel of bread tucked alongside and a drizzle of honey across the top that she definitely stole from the pit lord's personal stores. "Eat. Sit."
Lethe sits. He eats. The honey is reckless and kind and he lets it dissolve on his tongue while Maren bangs around the kitchen pretending not to watch him.
There is a black kitten asleep on a flour sack in the corner. It is one of a litter the kitchen cat produced three weeks ago, and Lethe has been watching it grow with an attention that is perhaps disproportionate. He named it Soot, because it looks like soot and he is not a creative ma n. It's a terrible name and he loves it and the kitten doesn't seem to mind.
"Heard something interesting today," Maren says, casual, scrubbing a pot that doesn't need scrubbing.
Lethe tears off a piece of bread. "Interesting how?"
"They're bringing a new beast down. From the eastern circuit. Killed two handlers and hasn't lost a fight since they caught him."
Lethe chews. Swallows. "What kind of beast?"
"The big kind. Horns. Claws. Nasty disposition, from what the guards are saying." She glances over her shoulder at him. "They're putting him in the deep cages."
The deep cages. The lowest level of the kennels, where the stone sweats and the lantern light barely reaches and the air tastes of damp and old iron. Reserved for the fighters who are too dangerous, too valuable, or too unpredictable for the regular pens. Lethe has tended creatures in the deep cages before. It is not his favorite work.
"Does he have a name?" Lethe asks.
"One of the guards said the last owner called him Zazyrus. Something like that." She shrugs. "Not that it matters. They'll call him whatever they want."
Lethe finishes his porridge. He rinses the bowl, because Maren will swat him with a ladle if he doesn't, and tucks the heel of bread into his satchel for later. "Thank you, Maren."
"Don't thank me. Eat more." She catches his arm as he passes and presses a small cloth bundle into his hand. "Extra rations. For the cages. Don't let the guards see."
He nods. Slips the bundle into his satchel alongside the bread. Maren has been sneaking him extra food since his first week here, six years ago, when he was sixteen and silent and small enough to disappear behind the stock shelves. She has never once asked what he does with it. She has never asked about the bruises, either, or the nights Lethe comes to the kitchen before dawn with his eyes red-rimmed and his gait careful. She feeds him and she doesn't ask and Lethe loves her for the mercy of her incuriosity.
He scratches the sleeping kitten behind its ear on his way out. Soot purrs without waking.
***
Devlin finds him in the corridor outside the upper cages. Devlin is one of the night guards, older than most, with a bad knee and a worse temperament that occasionally, unpredictably, tilts toward decency.
"Lamb." He falls into step beside Lethe, which is unusual. "Demos is in a mood tonight."
Lethe's stride doesn't falter. His face doesn't change. Inside, something cold settles in the pit of his stomach and stays there.
"How bad?" he asks.
"Lost money on the fourth bout. Two of his favorites went down. He's been drinking since." Devlin doesn't look at him. He watches the corridor ahead. "Thought you'd want to know."
"Thank you."
Devlin peels off at the next junction without another word. He is not kind. He is not Lethe's friend. He is a man who works a distasteful job and occasionally dispenses information that might, on a good night, allow Lethe to make himself scarce before the pit lord's attention finds him.
Tonight is not a good night.
Lethe adjusts his route. He takes the long way back to his room, through the supply corridor, past the cistern entrance, keeping to the parts of the kennels where the lanterns are dimmest and the foot traffic is lightest. He makes himself small. He's good at that. Six years of practice.
It doesn't work.
The knock on his door comes an hour after the late bell. Three sharp raps and then silence, because Demos doesn't wait for an answer and Demos doesn't need to knock at all. The knock is ceremony. The knock is a reminder that the door doesn't lock and the door doesn't need to lock because everything down here belongs to the pit lord, including Lethe, including whatever Lethe might try to keep for himself.
Lethe sits on the edge of his cot. He stares at the wall. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth and he goes somewhere far away inside his own head, the way he taught himself years ago. A quiet place. A still place. A place where none of this is happening and his body is just a body and the things done to it don't reach the part of him that matters.
He opens the door.
***
Later. He doesn't track how much later.
He stands at the basin in his room and washes his skin until it's raw. The water is cold and he scrubs until his hands shake and then he scrubs more. There are marks on his throat. On his wrists. On places he can't see but can feel, throbbing and hot, and he cleans each one with mechanical precision because this is what he does. This is the after. The during is a locked room in his head and the after is soap and cold water and the slow, deliberate process of putting himself back together so that he can function tomorrow.
His hands still. He grips the edge of the basin and stands there, dripping, and his jaw works and his eyes burn and he doesn't make a sound.
He doesn't cry. He stopped crying a long time ago. Not because the tears dried up but because the tears changed nothing and Lethe is, above all else, practical. Tears don't heal wounds. Tears don't feed the creatures in the cages. Tears don't keep his hands steady when he's three inches from the jaws of something that could take his arm off at the shoulder.
He dries himself. Puts on a clean shirt that covers the marks on his throat. Lies down.
The ceiling is the same as it was this morning. The bells ring the same. The pits breathe and groan and settle around him the way they always do. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes.
He thinks about the new beast arriving tomorrow. Zazyrus. Horns and claws that don't retract. Two dead handlers. An unbroken record in the ring.
He wonders if this new beast will give him a chance before he tears him apart.
And there it is: the thing that keeps Lethe alive. Not hope, exactly. Not faith. Something stubborner than both. The part of him that walks into cages every morning knowing any one of them could be his last, and walks in anyway, because the creatures inside are hurting and he can help and the risk is worth the work. The part of him that stood between Harsk and a downed fighter and said move and meant it. The part that Demos has been trying to reach for six years and hasn't found yet, because it doesn't live where Demos looks.
Everyone calls him Lamb, because they think they know how his story ends.
Lethe closes his eyes. His hands, finally, are still.
He sleeps.
Chapter two
Chapter 2
Two weeks is long enough.
Long enough to learn the rhythms. The bells that mark the shifts, the feeding times that come at irregular intervals because the guards can't be bothered with consistency, the fight schedules that follow a pattern only if you watch closely enough to catch it. Zazyrus watches. He has nothing else to do in this cage except watch and catalog and remember, and he is very, very good at remembering.
The first bell rings at dawn. Shift change. The night guards are lazier than the day guards but more predictable. They patrol in pairs, always the same route, always the same pace, and they talk too loudly about things that don't matter. The day guards are more varied. Some are cruel for sport, the ones who rattle cage bars with their cudgels and spit at the fighters through the gaps. Some are simply doing a job that happens to be distasteful, and those ones keep their heads down and their eyes forward and don't linger.
Zazyrus catalogs all of them. Faces. Names, when he can catch them. Habits. Weaknesses. Which ones favor their left side. Which ones drink on shift. Which ones carry keys and which ones don't.
He doesn't speak. He has nothing to say to any of them.
The cage they've put him in is the largest in the deep kennels, which tells him they know what he is and what he's capable of and have made the minimal accommodations necessary to keep him contained. The chains are heavy, blackened iron bolted to the back wall, long enough that he can reach the center of the cage but not the door. The manacles bite into his wrists and the skin beneath them is raw and weeping and infected, probably, though he can't see well enough in the dim light to be sure. It doesn't matter. He's had worse.
He's had worse than all of this. The cage and the chains and the cold stone and the stinking straw and the food they shove through the slot in the bars, half-rotten, barely enough. He's had worse owners. Worse fights. Worse nights in worse dark, and the fact that this is not the worst doesn't make it bearable, but it makes it survivable, and Zazyrus has built his entire existence around the distinction between those two things.
