Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 1 - The Verdent Passage (2 page)

“Sadira,” Tithian interrupted, supplying the name of the only half-elf he owned, before
the slave could continue. “She's a scullery maid in my personal training pit. I'm aware of
her association with the Veiled Alliance.”

Dorjan frowned at Tithian. “I suppose you'll also claim to know that she's trying to
disrupt the games celebrating the ziggurat's completion?”

“Of course, but I haven't yet determined the exact nature of the Alliance's plan,” Tithian
replied, concealing his surprise by gazing at the scaffolding on the seventh tier.
“Fortunately, it appears I have more than enough time to complete my investigation.”

Giving no indication of whether or not he believed Tithian, Kalak looked to Dorjan. “It
does seem that Tithian has several weeks to uncover my enemy's plan, does it not?”

Dorjan reluctantly nodded and did not meet the king's gaze. “He does.”

Kalak scowled. “I thought as much,” he said, casually grasping the battered slave by the
back of the head. “Let's see if we can help Tithian with his investigations.”

“No!” The slave tried to pull away and hurl himself off the terrace, but the king's grip
remained secure. Kalak closed his eyes, and the man screamed.

With only casual interest, Tithian watched the king enter the slave's mind, for he had a
better understanding than most men of what the king was doing. As a youth, his parents had
required him to study the psionic arts for a time, enforcing a strict regimen of
self-denial and painful rituals in the name of harnessing the spiritual and mental powers
of his being. Under the harsh discipline of his master, Tithian had learned to use these
energies to probe another's thoughts, to make objects move with the force of his mind
alone, even to picture in his head what lay on the other side of a thick wall. But the Way
of the Unseen, as his mentor had called the disciplines, was a difficult path to follow.
He had left the school as soon as he grew old enough to make his own decisions, opting for
the much easier and more lucrative life of a king's templar.

A slight smile crossed Kalak's papery lips. The slave gurgled incoherently and began to
drool, his pulverized face contorting in agony and terror. Then his jaws clamped together
violently. The detached tip of his tongue slipped from between his swollen lips and
dropped to the floor.

At last, the king opened his eyes and took his hand away from his victim's neck. The
slave's one good eye rolled back in its socket. His bloody mouth gaped in a silent scream.
Then the wretch tumbled to the brick terrace in a heap.

Ignoring the dying man, the king glared at Dorjan and shook the bone amulet at her. “There
are two more somewhere in my ziggurat!”

Dorjan's jaw fell slack. She shook her head in denial, but could not utter any words.

“The slave's thoughts were easily read and quite specific on this matter,” said Kalak
evenly.

The slender templar moved backward two steps, the color draining from her face. “You'll
have them by dusk.”

Kalak shook his head. “Not from you.”

Dorjan looked away, avoiding the king's gaze in a useless effort to save herself. “Mighty
One, give meÑ”

Her plea ceased in midsentence as the king fixed his narrowed eyes on her face. The power
of Kalak's assault was so great that his attack flashed briefly in Tithian's mind as well
as Dorjan's. Tithian almost screamed as the image of the Dragon's body appeared in his
head. Its immense tail lashed back and forth angrily, and a cloud of yellow gas billowed
from its sharp-toothed maw. Its staffs were pointed away from its body like weapons. At
the end of one staff, a ball of red lightning crackled. At the end of the other, a small
green flame licked the wood.

Just when Tithian feared Kalak's anger would inadvertently destroy him, the Dragon faded
from his mind. Dorjan screamed and began to shake her head violently. A wave of astonished
murmurs rustled along the terrace as the jozhals and their overseers stopped to stare at
the source of the agonized screeching.

The high templar watched his rival's pain in grotesque fascination. Certainly he was happy
to be rid of her, but her sudden demise was a sobering reminder of the price high templars
sometimes paid for their positions of power.

Dorjan's scream quickly became a feeble wail, then she abruptly fell silent and lifted her
chin. Her eyes went blank, although Tithian fancied for a moment that he could see red
lightning crackling and flashing deep inside them. Yellow smoke began to seep from the
woman's nose, and a gout of green flame spewed from her mouth. Tithian stepped away,
narrowly avoiding injury as a ball of emerald fire engulfed Dorjan's head.

The woman dropped to the terrace in a lifeless heap. Tithian watched her head burn down to
a pile of ash in uneasy silence, until Kalak drew his attention away by handing him the
bone amulet.

“Congratulations. You're my new High Templar of the King's Works,” said Kalak. “Finish my
ziggurat in three weeksÑand find the other two amulets.”

The Gaj

Rikus slid down the rope and dropped into the fighting pit, anxious to finish the morning
combat before the day grew hot. The crimson sun had just risen, sending tendrils of
fire-colored light shooting through the olive haze of the morning sky. Already the sands
of the small arena were warm, and the rancid odor of blood and decaying entrails hung
heavily in the air.

In the center of the pit waited the animal he would fight, a beast that Tithian's hunters
had captured somewhere in the desert wastes. It was half-buried in the shallow
entrenchment it had dug. Only its scaly, rust-orange shell, about six feet in diameter,
showed above the sand. If it had limbsÑbe they arms, legs, or tentaclesÑthey were either
tucked inside this dome or hidden beneath the sand churned up around its body.

Rikus saw the thing's head lift from the sand. Attached to the near end of the shell was a
spongy white ball. Compound eyes were evenly spaced in a row across the front. Three hairy
antennae crowned the pulpy globe, all of them pointed toward Rikus. Over its mouth dangled
six fingerlike appendages, flanked by a pair of mandibles as long as a man's arm.

Caught between these pincers was the savaged body of Sizzkus, a nikaal. He had been the
beast's keeper, at least until the evening before. Now the corpse hung between the
creature's vicious hooks, partially coated with blood and sand. Sizzkus's pointed chin
rested on his scaly chest. From beneath his black mop of hair stared a pair of vacant,
lidless eyes. His three-clawed hands were draped over the beast's pincers, which had
crushed his shiny green carapace into a splintered tangle. In a half-dozen places, pinkish
ropes of intestine looped out of gashes in the nikaal's hide. By the number of wounds on
Sizzkus's body, Rikus guessed that he had not died without a hard fight.

Rikus found it surprising that the nikaal had been forced to fight at all, for Sizzkus had
been extremely cautious with new creatures in the pit. Not long ago, the nikaal had
explained to Rikus that monsters, as well as the so-called “New Races,” were developing in
the desert all the time, but most quickly died out because they were not strong enough to
fight off the other creatures of the wastes. Those that did survive, however, were the
most vicious and dangerous of all, and worthy of a beast keeper's caution.

Rikus looked away from the mangled corpse and removed his fleece robe, revealing a
scarred, athletic body clad only in a breechcloth of drab hemp. Slowly he began to
stretch, for he had reluctantly come to realize that his youth was behind him, and his
battle-worn muscles would now pull and tear when cold.

Fortunately for Rikus, his body did not outwardly show its maturity. He took great pride
in the fact that his bald pate was still taut and smooth, his pointed ears still lay close
to his head, and his black eyes remained clear and defiant. His nose still ran straight
and true, and there was not so much as a hint of loose skin beneath his powerful jaws.
Below his brawny neck, his hairless body was composed of knotted biceps, hulking
pectorals, and bulging thighs. Despite the initial stiffness caused by old wounds and
poorly mended bones, he could still move with the grace of a rope dancer when he wished.

Rikus had weathered his decades as a gladiator remarkably well, and there was good reason.
He was a mul, a hybrid slave bred expressly for arena combat. His father, whom he had
never seen, had bestowed on him the strength and durability of the dwarves. His mother, a
haggard woman who had died in the slavehouses of far-off Urik, had given him the size and
agility of men. The brutal trainers who had raised him, whom he recalled as hated tyrants
and murderers, had coached him in the ruthless arts of killing and survival. But it was
Rikus himself who was responsible for his greatest asset: determination.

As a child, he had believed that all boys trained to be gladiators. He had assumed that
after they fought their way through the ranks, they became trainers and perhaps even
nobles. That illusion had lasted until his tenth year, when the lord who owned him had
brought his weakling son to see the practice pits. As Rikus had compared his own tattered
breechcloth to the frail boy's silken robes, he had come to understand that no matter how
hard he practiced and no matter how talented he became, his skills would never win him the
privileged status into which the youth had been born. When he reached adulthood the frail
boy would still be a nobleman, and Rikus might still be his slave. On that day, he had
sworn to die a free man.

Thirty years and as many brief escapes later, he remained in bondage, but he also remained
alive. Had he been anything but a mul, he would have been dead or free by now, either
killed as punishment for his repeated escapes or allowed to disappear into the desert
after it became too expensive to hunt him down. Muls were too valuable for either option,
however. Because they could not reproduce their own kind and because most women died while
carrying or giving birth to such big-boned babies, muls were worth more than a hundred
normal slaves. When they escaped, no expense was spared to recover them.

Rikus's status was about to change, however. In three weeks, he would fight in the
ziggurat games. The king himself had decreed that the winners of the day's contests would
be freed, and Rikus intended to be among that number.

As the mul finished stretching, he glanced again at Sizzkus's lifeless body, wondering how
such an experienced handler had fallen prey to what appeared to be a relatively slow and
clumsy beast.

“Couldn't anyone save him?” Rikus asked.

“No one tried,” answered Boaz, the gladiator's current trainer. Boaz had the peaked
eyebrows and pale eyes of a half-elf, with sharp, raw-boned features that gave him a
rodentlike appearance. As usual, his blue eyes were blurry and bloodshot from a long night
in the wineshops of Tyr. “I wasn't about to risk my guards for a slave.”

Along with a dozen guards and four other slaves, Boaz stood on the broad deck that capped
the rock wall encircling the fighting pit. The small practice arena sat in an isolated
corner of Lord Tithian's country estate, amid a cluster of mud-brick cellhouses that
served as home to the fifty slaves who staffed the high templar's personal gladiator
stable.

“Sizzkus was a good man,” Rikus countered, glaring up at the half-elf. “You could have
called me.”

“The gaj caught him while you were sleeping,” Boaz replied, his thin lips curled into a
sneer. “And we all know what happens when a gladiator your age fights without warming up.”

The guards chuckled at the trainer's affront.

Though they were all husky men wearing leather corselets and carrying obsidian-tipped
spears, Rikus glared at them. “I can kill Boaz and six of you before taking so much as a
scratch,” the mul growled. “I hope you aren't laughing at me.”

The guards immediately fell silent, for the mul had made good on such threats before.
Rikus had killed his last trainer just two months earlier. Only the memory of the threat
he had received on that occasion kept Boaz alive now.

After his previous trainer's death, Lord Tithian had come to Rikus's cell with a young
slave and a purple caterpillar. A pair of guards had held the youth down while Tithian
carefully laid the caterpillar on the slave's upper lip. In a flash, the thing had crawled
up the boy's nostril. He had started screaming and snorting in an effort to dislodge it,
but to no avail. A few seconds later, blood had begun to stream from the boy's nose, and
then the poor wretch collapsed, unconscious.

“The worm is making a nest in Grakidi's brain,” Tithian had
explained. “Over the next six months, he'll go blind, forget how to talk, start drooling,
and do other things too unpleasant to discuss. Eventually, he'll turn into an idiot, and
sometime after that a moth will claw its way out of one of his eyes.”

Tithian had paused for a few moments to let Rikus study the unconscious youth, then had
fetched a small jar containing an identical caterpillar from his cassock pocket. “Don't
make me angry again.”

The high templar had released the slave and left without another word. Today Grakidi was
already lame and blind in one eye. He could not speak so much as his own name, and
sometimes he lost his way as he went from cellhouse to cellhouse emptying slopbuckets.
Still, there was always a grin on his face and he seemed happy in the typical way of
idiots. Rikus could hardly bear to look at him, however, for the mul could not help
feeling responsible for the slave's condition. He had made up his mind to kill Grakidi as
soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Finally responding to the mul's threat against his guards, Boaz glared at Rikus. “I pay
these men, so they can laugh at my jokes if they want,” he said. “Don't threaten them,
slave.”

“Would you rather I just killed them?” Rikus asked.