As Denzel had promised, about ten minutes after he left, a petite girl wearing simple brown servant clothing came to get me out of my cage. It was obvious that he didn't trust me enough to meet me unrestrained for the moment. Not that I could blame him, my fist was quite eager to introduce itself to his face after all.

As for the girl who came to free me, she was obviously not happy to have been given the task. She was practically shaking as she opened the cage and removed the shackles on my wrists and ankles, and, at every little movement I made, she would shrink back for a moment before continuing with her task. Understanding that there was little I could do to calm her, I simply tried to stay as still as possible as she worked the locks.

Once my restraints were removed, she motioned me to follow her, saying something that I could not understand. When I followed her out of the wagon, she gulped loudly seeing me standing next to her, something that I could well understand as she reached just over my hips and I could only imagine what I looked like from her point of view.

She then guided me through the yard of packed dirt and under the colonnade that surrounded it. From there, we walked under a tall and wide archway that connected the yard I had been brought to to another, larger yard with a square patch of grass and flowers in the middle with a fountain at its center, but otherwise made with the same compacted dirt as the one before. On my left it was closed off by a mansion that was way too big, in my opinion. On the other sides it was surrounded by a wall that was actually shorter than me, interrupted here and there by various buildings. One of them was the one we had come from, which looked to be more or less square and sat in a corner of the yard in front of the left wing of the mansion. In front of it there was a simple rectangular building with no columns or particular decorations, on its right there was what looked to be the stables, which were the only building made of wood that I could see in the complex, and were shaped like a horseshoe, nested into the wall, making it lose the rectangular shape it would otherwise have. On my right, in line with the garden and the main entrance of the mansion, here was a gate made of steel that was currently open but manned by four guards, two on each side.

The guards, along with what I could only assume was the estate's gardener, kept staring at us, or rather, at me for the whole time it took the girl to show me the way to a door in the rectangular building close to the stables. The door showed signs of recent work, as the color of the bricks and mortar around it was a slightly lighter sandy color compared to the rest of the building. The fact that it was also the only door to be over eight feet tall of the building and was also quite larger than the others suggested that the room had been prepared for me well in advance and Denzel had planned to have me live here from the start.

The girl opened the door for me, and I entered, still having to bend my head a bit to pass despite the changes. The room was simple, composed by a wooden drawer, a table with a chair that I doubted was able to support me and a more robust wooden armchair that had a severe lack of cushions. The final element of the room was a large rectangular sac with rounded edges, probably full of hay or something similar that was probably meant to be a mattress, on it there were a folded sheet and a blanket. The room completely lacked any sort of decoration, it at least had two windows in the form of two holes in the walls that could be closed off with wooden shutters, one close to the door and facing the garden, while the other on the left side of the room, facing the mansion.

The girl said something, that I obviously didn't understand. Seeing as I wasn't answering in any way, she said something else and bowed her head before leaving me, closing the door behind her, but not locking it.

I shrugged and, not really having anything else to do in a city I didn't know where people spoke a language I didn't understand, I jumped on the mattress, sinking a bit as the hay gave way. It was a bit too soft for me after being used to sleeping on a simple fur on the ground for years, and the fabric, probably hemp, was a bit coarse, but it wasn't too bad.

As I lay there, I thought a bit about the situation I was in. I had no idea how I would be able to return home, nor where I were. I also had no idea what the job of a gladiator was really like. The only one I had met up to that point who could speak my language was Denzel, who was probably a noble of some kind, or at least dirty rich, to be able to afford such an estate in the middle of a city. For the moment I at least had a place to sleep and the promise of food and pay, but I needed information, and allies.