Beady eyes watched through the fronds of a potted fig, watching with eager anticipation as her prey blundered into her trap.

"Show yourself!" her quarry announced with all the authority a ten year old voice could muster. A boy dressed in a vest of yellow silk and crisp white cotton trousers scanned the garden. His eyes passed briefly over her hiding spot, and she froze so as to not call attention to herself. By luck, his eyes fell upon another potted bush, which must have seemed a better hiding spot and so he went over to investigate. 

"You can't hide from me!" the boy taunted, brandishing a sword of carved wood. A shrill battle cry from behind him proved him dead wrong.

She lunged from behind the cover of the potted tree and brought her own wooden sword down to bear on the boy with a ferocity seldom seen in children. The boy spun on his sandals to face the attacker; a girl in a patched shirt and pants of roughspun linen roughly the same age as he. He swung his sword in time to block hers and the sticks met with a sharp clack. The girl was not deterred, she continued the offensive, sliding down her opponent's blade in order to 'lop off' his wrist. With practiced efficiency, the boy drew back into a chicken-winged stance, allowing the blade to rush past his arm and open her sides to his own strike. He swung, but the girl stepped back and replied with a stab at his protruding belly.

And so their dance of swords continued on, both trading strikes and blows with the other. The echoing clack of their crashing sticks rang against the walls of the courtyard. A pair of servants hefting vessels of water paused to watch the dueling children for a moment before stepping aside their battle.

But the duel ended at last when the girl struck the boy's elbow with a smarting smack. The boy let out a yelp of pain, but his cry did not yield any mercy from his opponent. The girl delivered the coup-de-grace, and drove her wooden sword underneath his armpit - the closest one could get to running an opponent through with a wooden sword. Victory belonged to Kali.

"I win!" Kali declared between labored huffs, grinning widely enough to show a gap in her teeth where a sprout of a canine was bursting through the gums. Being one year Ismal's senior, Kali won more often than not, but Ismal always managed to make it a close battle.

"Yes," Ismal admitted, sitting down and drawing in a deep breath. "You've gotten quite good." That was one of the things that Kali appreciated most about Ismal - his humility. For the Prince of Farai, young Ismal was an exceptionally good sport. It was hard to believe that he and that pampered brat Raiza were brother and sister.

After the children had taken a moment to catch their breath from their battle, Ismal took his wooden sword up in his hands and attacked Kali once again in an attempt to surprise her. Kali blocked a flurry of strikes before taking off in giggling flight. The young prince pursued, swinging his wooden sword at her heels but striking only brick and paver. The chase went through the courtyard for a time, bobbing and weaving between potted plants and the plaster pillars holding up elevated patios and mezzanines. Kali threw her sword at Ismal, laughing as he stopped to retrieve her fallen weapon. With her pursuer distracted for a moment, Kali raced up the spiraling steps of one of the palace's numerous guard towers.

Ismal soon caught up to Kali on the palace's ring of outer ramparts. She had stopped to catch her breath on the ramparts, panting deeply as she leaned against one of the wall's plaster parapets. She saw Ismal approaching out of the corner of her eye and took off again. This time it was too late - the "blade" of her own wooden sword smacked against the back of her calf. She made a show of it as she collapsed to the rampart, howling in pretend-agony as she mimed nursing a newly-dismembered stump of a leg. Ismal pressed his two swords gently into her heaving belly, making a squishing sound with his lips to imitate the sound of swords goring her.

"Now, [i]I[/i] win."

Kali dusted herself off as she got up, and then peered between the blocky crenelations out to the sprawling city beyond. A city of plaster and carved stone radiated down and outward from the base of the rocky hill upon which this palace was built. The narrow streets between each building were rivers swollen with crowds, all of which drained into a writhing sea of humanity in a central plaza surrounding the base of a huge, gnarled tree. And beyond the city's walls, a tent city had sprung up on the sands outside of the city. Even by Farai's standards, the city was absolutely teeming today.

"Father said that this is the week of the Grand Caravansary," Ismal recalled. "The Yushmeg Caravan has returned from Quarthine or some such place and people from all across Azoth will be here to trade with them before their caravan goes to the Great Sea." Even at a young age, it was apparent that the the cyclic trade patterns to which Farai owed much of its wealth and splendor had been impressed upon the young prince. Kali looked over the throngs and gazed upon the coliseum on the far side of the city.

"Do you suppose they will host fights in the arena?" Kali asked.

"Without question." Ismal affirmed. "Father will have spared no expense in drawing as many traders into the city as possible. They always host bloodsport when this many people are in the city. Father has always said that savagery in the arena keeps it out of the streets."

"I have always wanted to see a battle in the coliseum," said Kali.

"As have I. I have asked Father to let me go with him to see the fights, but he always forbids me. He says that it is too dangerous for me to be out on the streets with this many people in the city, and that I am too young to see the fights in any case."

"Why not just go to the arena anyway?" 

"Kali, you know as well as I do that the guards know not to let us out of the palace, [i]especially[/i] when we are together."

"I know a way out of the palace that the guards do not know about," Kali said with devilish grin. "Follow me."

Kali proceeded to lead Ismal down a guard tower, through the courtyard, the date garden, up another sentry tower, and across the far ramparts to a segment of the palace walls that were built alongside a rocky promontory. This was the far side of the palace, removed from most windows and guard towers. The terrain below this segment of the wall was so rocky and treacherous that few guards bothered to keep vigil over this area. It seemed they also failed to conduct routine maintenance here, because a patch of twisting vine had been allowed to crawl all the way up the palace walls from the rocky ground below and wrap itself around a crenelation. A handful of fist-sized, purple-orange fruit growing off of the thick vines suggested that a careless guard had spat out a mouthful of kwavi seeds over the wall. 

"This is our way out," Kali declared as she tore an accessible kwavi off the vine. She bit into the leathery rind and slurped up the fruit's creamy, seed-riddled pulp.

Ismal seized a length of the knotty vine and tugged deftly against it. Leaves rustled and overly ripe fruit fell from the stem to their doom on the rocks below, but the vine held fast against his weight. With a length of vine in each hand, he stepped between the crenelations and over the edge of the precipice. He stepped down gingerly against the wall, rappelling slowly to the ground. He made the mistake of looking down and found himself seized by acrophobia as he saw torn-off leaves pirouette gently to the rocks below.

"You are doing excellent," Kali reassured through a mouthful of seeds. "Just don't look down."

Ismal did as he was told, and reverted his gaze to Kali's face peering down from between two crenelations. Step by step, Ismal continued his descent. Kali's face shrunk against the azure sky above until he felt his heel brush against the rocky soil below. Ismal let go and allowed gravity to finish the last foot or so of his descent, falling with a rustle into the sprawling vase of the kwavi vine.

Up above him, Kali had already started her descent. She stepped down against the wall and allowed the vine to slide through her hands, never once laying eyes on the ground below. A few feet off the ground, she released her grip and met Ismal on the ground.

"You did excellent," Kali congratulated.

"It was a little scary," Ismal confessed, "but fun also."

Kali scanned their surroundings and pointed to a goat path leading down the promontory to an alleyway between a pair of daub plaster buildings. "This will take us into the city. Let us make our way to the coliseum now, I do not wish to miss a single fight."