Batiatus lunged. Pelorus, with the slow, economical grace of a man who had dodged death forty-seven times, sidestepped. He used his stump to hook Batiatus’s wrist and his good hand to drive the little whittling knife—the one he’d been sharpening for ten years—up under the lanista’s chin.
As Spartacus and the others fled into the night, Pelorus sat down on his stool one last time. He took out the olive wood he had been whittling. It was nearly finished: a small, crude figure of a woman, her face upturned. He set it on the ground, leaned his head against the cool stone wall of the gate he had guarded for a decade, and closed his one good eye. spartacus: blood and sand
He pointed toward the city. “There is a horse trader two streets east. He owes me a favor from my fighting days. He will take you to the mountains. Go. Be the storm Batiatus feared.” Batiatus lunged
“No,” Pelorus said, tossing the purse to Sura’s killer—he did not yet know she was dead. “I am the one who opens the gates.” As Spartacus and the others fled into the
He would lean in, his piggy eyes glittering. “Then came the forty-eighth. A brute from Germania, a butcher with a two-handed axe. Pelorus had him bleeding in three exchanges. The crowd was chanting his name. But the German, in his death throes, swung wild. Took two fingers. Pelorus fell. He didn’t die. Worse, he flinched after that. In the next bout, a simple Thracian rookie feinted, and Pelorus dropped his net. The mob laughed.”