The thirty-ninth ringdom of Merris Tet spangled like pyrite in a prospector’s pan. Plates of nacre scaled the half dome of the open-air auditorium, focusing sunlight upon the deep stage and its elaborate set. Spectators, some ten thousand strong, picnicked on tiers of marble risers guarded by sculptures of archers with nocked arrows aimed at the naked sky.

Many of those in attendance had staked their claims before dawn, marking their territory with variegated rugs, parasols, and bottles of lemon brandy. They perspired in the indolent sunlight as they observed the stage and the army of black-cloaked technicians who uncovered pits and lowered dozens of zinc pails from the batten above.

Atop the thrust that protruded from the main stage, a lavishly garlanded table stood attended by three golden thrones, all of which faced away from the audience. Brass horns, large as a tuba’s bell, curled from the back of each noble seat like august periscopes.

The event’s host appeared from behind a leg of the main curtain. From a distance, he seemed to wear a gramophone upon his back. The cumbersome instrument clashed with the delicate ruffle that embellished the breast of his purple suit, which had been carefully tailored to embroider his short stature and pinch his middle. Though crowned with a thinning fringe of ashy white hair, his handsome face was still youthful, if not assisted by several applications of cosmetic paint.

The host minced to center stage, skirting the fuming pits and chasing off the lingering stagehands. He spoke into what seemed a silver daffodil, a device that caught his voice and transmitted it through a dangling cord to the wooden cabinet on his back. His words emerged from the lacquered trumpet that arched over his shoulder at a volume that outshouted the grumbling wind and the nattering crowd alike: “Good afternoon, and welcome to Dance for Your Life, a weekly competition that pits five couples in a battle royal where the prize for one lucky pair is a full pardon, and for the rest, a reprieve from the tedium of existence. I am Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie, and it is my great pleasure to once again introduce our judges. A round of applause, please!”

As the audience whistled and warmed their hands, Oren swept an arm toward the first chairback at the bloom-drowned table. “In our first seat, a man in need of no introduction, though I am contractually obligated to try. Whenever he passes a library, the books all leap from their shelves! The hods love him; the royals loathe him! Yes, it’s the Scourge of Publishers, the Terror of Towers, the one and only Luc Marat!”

The first throne revolved to face the crowd, and the zealot raised one hand as if to catch the applause. He leaned forward to speak into the mouthpiece that curled like a ram’s horn from the arm of his throne. “Hello! You’re looking fit as ever, Oren. Tell us, what’s your secret?”

“Clean leaving, an early bedtime, and a voracious tapeworm!”

Again, Oren Robinson swung out a purple sleeve, and the next throne turned to face the stands. “In our second seat, Billboard Icon Award winner and survivor of interdimensional tornados, hailing from the far-off shores of the Block, the Tower’s most beloved adopted daughter, the fantastic, phantasmagorical Jennifer Lopez!”

“Hi, Oren! I’m so excited to be here. But I didn’t realize we had a special guest tonight!”

Oren put a fist to his hip. “A special guest? Who?”

“The most beautiful audience in the world!” Jennifer Lopez stood and unrolled her arms from her shoulders, a grand embracing gesture that made the picnickers roar.

“You are a treasure! And in the final seat… An immortal question mark who can’t help but pose as an exclamation point! That riddling chrysalis of myth and mayhem, our saint of secrets: The Sphinx!” The throne churned about, revealing the silvery dish and inky shroud of the Tower’s most enigmatic figure. Oren cleared his throat, making his discomfort plain to even the most distant observers. “And how are you this fine midday, Sir Sphinx?”

The Sphinx’s robes wavered in the breeze, as the bowl of his mask answered Oren with a mountainous sky, an azure desert, and barren silence.

The host swallowed noisily. “Charming. Now, I’d like to take a moment to call onto stage one of the favorites going into tonight’s competition. And I’m not just calling them favorites because they represent my home ringdom of Pelphia. No, the bookkeepers of Oyodin give them a 2 to 1 edge over their opponents. So, please join me in welcoming Mr. Iren Iren and her dance partner, my very dear friend, the Leaping Lady of Pelphia, Miss Voleta Pennatus Contumax!”

Iren and Voleta broke through the silver curtains in a confusion of swinging arms and rattling chains. The long leash of the manacle that connected them at the wrist clattered upon the stone floor as they stormed toward center stage. Iren strained at the seams of a faded tuxedo that was several sizes too small. The trousers were short enough to show the tops of her ankles, a sight that was further emphasized by her bare feet. Voleta’s dress was a shipwreck of pink silk. The hem was tattered, the waist puckered, and the neckline frilled, not from design, but abuse.

“Let me start with you, Mr. Iren Iren, or may I just call you Iren?” Oren Robinson proffered the bud of his vocal wand to the amazon.

Bending stiffly at the waist, the amazon answered, “No.”

Oren performed an unconvincing impression of laughter, which the audience gamely echoed. “And what will be your strategy going into this evening?”

“Steer clear of the clogworm pit and kill Luc Marat.”

The audience gasped, and Oren hurried to assuage their horror with a lighthearted scoff. “He is the arbiter we all love to hate! And you, Miss Voleta—I know this is a heady time, but have you had a chance to reflect upon the splendor of this happy occasion?”

Grasping his wand, Voleta answered in an angry rush: “We didn’t do anything wrong! Those other fellows started it. We were just defending ourselves.”

Oren struggled to regain control of his vocal wand. “I believe you defended one of their heads off.”

“He fell on his own gun!” Voleta shouted.

“The magistrate saw it differently. But we aren’t here to sift through yesterday’s ashes. Any last thoughts or quotable tidbits?”

“I hope your tidbits rot off!” Voleta lunged at the host, but Iren and their shared chain hampered her attack.

“All right, back you go! The both of you, back! Back!” He swatted at them with his wand, and they retreated to the curtained proscenium, scowling over their shoulders the whole way.

“Now, while our contestants ready themselves, a brief review of the rules. Our dancers must adhere to their prepared routine. Deviations, including missed steps and loss of poise, will result in the emptying of a penalty pail. The content of each penalty pail is—of course—a surprise, but just to whet your appetite: past pails have included such amusements as flaming pitch, broken glass, and electric hagfish.” As he spoke, a percussionist played a solemn tattoo on the timpani, and the judges all turned to face the stage.

“Then there are the pits that our dancers must negotiate. Today’s pits feature several crowd favorites, including scorpion crickets, piranha rats, and Mr. Iren Iren’s preference, the marrow-sucking clogworm. Naturally, there are also the usual vats of boiling oil, spiked plates, and sausage grinders.”

Raising one arm over his head and twirling his wrist like a lariat, Oren’s voice rose an octave as he delivered the commencement: “Now, fill your cups and strike up the band! It’s time to dance for your life!”

As the dancers wheeled from the wings at the back of the stage, the players in the orchestra pit embarked upon a jolly polka. The couples were all outfitted in ill-suited, threadbare evening clothes and manacled together, but even without these obvious indicators, no one would ever have mistaken any of them for a member of the bourgeois. Their whiskers were untrimmed, their skin pocked and blighted, their hair tangled and unwashed. Only one couple out of the five were comprised of a man and a woman. Other than Iren and Voleta, the remaining dancers were pairs of men, one of whom wore a gown and rouge that appeared to have been applied with a mop by someone riding on horseback.

There was nothing graceful in their gamboling, but their scowls of concentration seemed to suggest they were all trying their best. The causeways between pits formed a sort of maze. Those avenues were generally no wider than a plank, and some were as narrow as a yard stick.

Reporting the action from alongside the judge’s table, Oren Robinson said, “The couple from Simbersae are off to a roaring start! They’re a virtual blur! A dervish of red noses and elbows, and oh, good heavens! They’ve careened right into the fire pit. Oh, the howls! Who knew crinoline was so combustible?

“We’re down to four couples now, and what’s this? The couple from Elodonia have stumbled! Oh, Luc Marat has raised his penalty flag, and there goes the first penalty pail! What’s inside? What is it? What is it? Oh, my god, it’s spiders! A bucket full of drove spiders. How sinister! The arachnids have fallen like a pall over the unhappy pair. Will they be able to keep their bearings? Perhaaaaps, but no! They’ve tumbled into the wringer, spiders and all! It’s got them by the toes. They’re being pulled down between the rollers. They’re already up to their hips… Farewell! Bon voyage! Don’t forget to tip the devil! And pop they go like a pair of overripe tomatoes!”

The cheers from the audience were somewhat tempered by a refrain of retching as the weaker stomachs in attendance announced themselves.

Iren observed the quick loss of their unwilling opponents with horror. And yet, there simply was no time to linger upon the anguished shouts and geysers of gore. She had a scarcely rehearsed and intricate routine to perform.

Lifting Voleta off her feet, Iren tangoed across a narrow beam that spanned the den of a gaunt chimney cat. Though he was chained by the neck to a ring in the floor, the beast still leapt up to nip at Voleta’s dangling heels. Iren felt the animal’s hot slaver spatter the tops of her bare feet. When she reached the other side, she drew Voleta to her chest, and the young woman hooked one arm around her neck as they performed a step called “the grizzly bear.” Curling her hands into faux claws, Iren stepped to one side, then the other, toeing a half-drowned pit. The black water roiled with the humping backs of clogworms, each thick as her forearm and long as a jungle snake. Their mouths, when they appeared above the surface, churned with rings of needle-sharp teeth. The sight of them made her falter, and Iren had to wobble onto her heels to keep from pitching forward into the ditch of vivified nightmares.

Though Iren had managed momentarily to block out Oren Robinson’s jabbering, his voice intruded once more, as he joyfully declared, “Ah! Judge Marat has signaled a penalty for the Pelphian pair! And here tips the pail to spill her secrets!”

The gray powder that fell upon their shoulders seemed briefly innocuous, and Iren wondered if someone hadn’t accidentally swapped a pail of ashes for a bucket of vipers. But then her eyes began to tear and sting and swell. She felt as if she had inhaled fire. Her lungs burned, and her nose ran like a wellspring.

Pepper. They’d been doused with black pepper.

“I can’t see!” Iren bayed.

Still hanging from her neck, Voleta sneezed a dozen times before managing to get out. “Me neither! I don’t want to be played out on a polka, for heaven’s sake!”

“We have to make a run for it,” Iren said.

“A run for what, certain death? Wait a minute! Let me think. We need to—"

“I’m sorry!” Jennifer Lopez said, resting her chin upon the bridge of her immaculately painted nails. “I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but this is called Dance for Your Life, and I don’t see a lot of dancing right now. You’re obviously both very nice people. But nice isn’t enough, you know? This isn’t a nice business. Even on your worst days, you still have to bring it. Leave everything on the stage. And all the rest of it, the pepper and the worms and the blood, none of that matters. You have to believe you should be here.”

“But we shouldn’t be here!” Voleta shouted blindly.

“See, that’s my point! That’s the problem. It’s all about mental toughness, and you just…you just don’t have that. So, anyway, I’m going to have to ask for another penalty, Oren.”

“All right, that’s enough,” the Sphinx said, rising from the throne, and clambering onto the tabletop. Pulling away the mirror mask, Captain Edith Winters shrugged the black cowl from her shoulders. Beneath the shroud, she held in one hand her cocked hat and in the other, a snub-nosed pistol, which she swung to aim at the astonished audience. The flare leapt from the barrel with a whump and flew over the heads of the picknickers, bathing their faces in a scarlet glow.

The State of Art rose above the risers and surged forward over the scattering crowd. Its wedge-like prow nosed through the proscenium arch until its portside hatch came level with the fear-frozen Iren and Voleta. The door swung open, and Byron poked out his head. “You both look a little…over-seasoned.”

Iren sneezed like a freight train, a fit that shook Voleta from her neck. The stag reached out and caught her by the front of her miserable gown and hauled her aboard. Unprompted, the stag tugged a handkerchief from his sleeve and offered it to the dewy ingenue.

As Voleta mopped her face and shucked black pepper from her hair, she said, “Well? How’d we do?”

“I’ve seen better dancing at the gallows, frankly. Now, wipe your feet.”