"Fantastic," Calliope sighed, sinking back against the stone wall. Her body ached prodigiously from the battering it had taken in the arena. Her wrists were stiff and her hips pulsed with flashes of pain that throbbed in time with her heart. There was a commotion as several palace servants bustled in to the room, four of them held short swords and one of them had an ornate bell mouthed firearm inlaid with brass traceries. Calliope had no doubt that it was effective for all it's garish ostentation. A pair of servants carried a tray of fresh fruit and cold meat. The gunmen gestured them back from the bars and the door was unlatched so that the food could be set inside. Calliope considered the feasibility of a rush, but charging a door covered by a coach gun was suicide. 

"Now we are talking," Calliope sighed, picking up a quince and biting into into it, spitting the rind through the bars at the retreating servants. She was gratified to see them flinch, despite the barriers between them.

"Yes, we are talking," came a voice from the darkness. Azim Abbasi stepped from the shadows, the light glittering from the rings he wore on every finger. Calliope threw the quince at him, the fruit bouncing from his right eye and sending him staggering backwards. One of the servants struck at her with the hilt of his sword, but Calliope danced back from the bars to avoid the blow.

"Charming," Azim said with a half snarl, wiping juice from his cheek. "Shame you didn't have the decency to die quietly. It would have been so much easier to pay one of the slaves to strangle you. Can't do that now given the impression the pair of you made."

"Sorry to disappoint," Calliope replied, pulling the tray back into the cell out of reach of the servants.

"I can yet be made whole," the Vizier replied, his oily smirk returning as he wiped away juice with a handkerchief.

"The pair of you have just become the stars of this little show and so I cannot have you simply killed, what I can do is set up a series of bouts featuring the pair of you, something sure to kill the pair of you."