Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 1 - The Verdent Passage (4 page)

The carapace rose higher, and the legs closest to Rikus left the ground. The mul saw that,
beneath the shell, the gaj's body was divided into three white sections: the head, a
narrow midsection from which sprang all six legs, and a bloated, heart-shaped abdomen. At
the end of the abdomen was a ring of red-tinged muscle.

As Rikus pushed the shell perilously close to tipping, the gaj curled its abdomen forward
so that the ring of muscle pointed toward its attacker. The muscles tightened and opened a
hole the size of the mul's thumb. There was a loud hiss, and a puff of gas brushed the
gladiator's face.

Rikus immediately spat the fighting stick from between his clenched teeth, letting it fall
to the sand as he dropped the gaj. He spun away and ran several steps before he dropped to
his knees and retched. His throat was filled with such a burning stench that he could
hardly stand to breathe, and his skin tingled beneath a moist, foul-smelling substance.

“Think the creature is helpless, Rikus?” asked Boaz, smirking at the stricken gladiator.

Rikus tried to respond, but all he could manage was to gasp a few breaths of fresh air. He
grabbed a handful of sand and rubbed it over his face, trying to scour the stinking mist
from his cheeks.

“Rikus, you're sick!” called Yarig. “You need help!”

“No!” Rikus yelled, managing to bellow the strained reply. If the mul was
to
win his bet with Boaz and save his friends a lashing, he could not have the dwarf rushing
to his rescue.

Hoping to stop Yarig from rushing to his aid, the mul rose to his feet. To his surprise,
he stumbled and nearly fell again. He still felt nauseous, and his head was spinning as
though he had just downed a gallon of wine. The thing had poisoned him!

Through his blurred vision, Rikus saw that his efforts had only added to the dwarf's
determination. Yarig stepped toward the rope that dangled into the fighting pit. “I'm
coming, Rikus!”

“Stay where you are, Yarig!” ordered Boaz. “I'll decide when Rikus leaves the ring.”

Of course, Yarig showed no sign of obeying, but through the haze, Rikus saw Neeva
intercept him. Though she was no match for the dwarf's strength, the woman managed to
detain him long enough for a pair of guards to present their speartips to his throat. The
dwarf reluctantly stopped moving.

Rikus's vision was just clearing when both of his fighting sticks sailed over his head and
clattered against the rock wall. The mul spun around to face the gaj, his head reeling
from the quick motion.

The creature had climbed out of its shallow burrow. Now, standing on all six legs, the
crest of its shell
was
slightly higher than Rikus's head. It was clacking its mandibles and flourishing the hairy
tentacles atop its head, and three of its red eyes seemed fixed on the gladiator.

Without taking his eyes off the gaj, Rikus stumbled back toward the wall to retrieve his
sticks. On the deck above, the guards and Boaz were talking quietly, but Neeva and the
other slaves remained silent.

The gaj scuttled forward, its great pincers opened wide. Not wishing to be trapped against
the wall, Rikus moved out to meet his opponent, his sticks whistling through the air as if
they were whips. The gaj mirrored his approach, whirling its head stalks in small circles
as if they were ropes.

Rikus gave a battle yell and ran forward at the best pace his shaky legs would carry him.
He lifted a stick to strike shifting the other into a middle defense. In the same instant,
the gaj's body sank nearly a foot as it gathered its legs beneath itself.

Realizing that it was about to surprise him again, Rikus immediately kicked his feet out
from beneath himself. He landed flat on his back with a hard thump. In the same instant,
the sprang. The thing's huge body descended on him, its barbed mandibles clasping where he
had stood just a moment before.

Holding his sticks like daggers, he jabbed at the underside of the creature's soft thorax.
The ends of the sticks sank several inches into the soft tissue. Rikus had no way of
telling whether he had injured the gaj, or even whether it had felt the blows.

The gaj lifted the back of its shell, and the gladiator saw the tip of its abdomen curling
toward him. Rikus kicked at it with all his might and held his breath. A hiss sounded near
his feet. The mul withdrew his sticks and jabbed at the gaj's thorax three more times,
then rolled, beating his way through a tangle of slashing legs to pass from beneath the
carapace.

As the crimson rays of the sun touched his face and he dared to breathe again, Rikus
glimpsed Sadira and the other slaves standing at the edge of the wall, just above the rope
that dangled into the pit. The guards who surrounded them seemed more interested in what
was happening in the arena than watching the slaves.

The mul scrambled to his feet. “I'm fine!” he called, stumbling backward as he used his
sticks to parry a rapid series of wild slashes from a pair of black, jointed legs.

The gaj spun around to face the gladiator with its mandibles. As Rikus feigned a charge,
its pincers again closed on empty air. The mul leaped past. He brought his sticks down on
the pulpy mass of its head in a rapid cadence of lightning-quick strokes, snapping his
wrist as he struck to add velocity to the blow.

The gaj struck him with its hairy tentacles. Bands of searing agony shot through the
gladiator's arms and chest. His entire body seemed to be burning from the inside out, and
Rikus feared that he was about to burst into a ball of flame. The mul screamed.

He tried to leap away. His sluggish legs wobbled. Blazing pain seized his shoulders and
torso. Rikus ignored the torment, forcing his body to perform his will. It half-obeyed,
and the mul felt himself toppling over backward. Letting out a great bellow, Rikus called
upon his legs to catch him. They felt as though they were made of stone, but they obeyed
and caught him before he fell.

The gaj retracted its head, opening its pincers. Rikus stepped backward and lifted his
lethargic arms. The gaj's head shot out from beneath its shell and the mandibles closed
around the mul's midsection. He felt four sharp blows as its barbs sank into his abdomen.

Rikus did not attempt to twist free. Even in the terrible pain he was suffering, he
realized the futility of struggling against the pincers. Instead, gripping his weapons as
if they were a pair of dirks, Rikus jabbed at the closest pair of eyes. As the sticks
struck home, the red facets of the compound eyes collapsed inward. A shudder ran the
length of the gaj's body.

It gripped Rikus more tightly.

Neeva appeared at the mul's side, a guard's spear in her hands. She jabbed the point at
the gaj's head. Rikus dimly heard Boaz screaming at her. As Neeva's weapon descended, the
creature intercepted the shaft with a bristly tentacle, then jerked the spear from her
hands and flung it across the sand pit.

Yarig appeared on the other side, followed closely by Anezka, who Rikus suspected had
entered the fray only to support her partner. The dwarf swung the heft of his weapon at
the beast's head as if it were a cudgel. The halfling thrust her spear's point beneath the
gaj's mandibles, striking for the underside of the head.

When their attacks landed, Anezka's spear sank well past the obsidian point. The gaj
countered by using Rikus like a mace, whipping him from side-to-side and battering the
would-be rescuers with the mul's massive body. The other three gladiators went sprawling.

Rikus glimpsed Sadira sneaking up on the beast's flank, armed with nothing more than a
handful of sand. “Get out of here!” he cried, astonished that the slave-girl would risk
her life to save him.

He was being shaken so violently that his words were garbled beyond all recognition. Rikus
stabbed once more at the gaj's injured eyes. This time, two of the beast's antennae
intercepted his blows. The hairy stems wrapped themselves around his wrists. Waves of pain
shot up both arms, and the gladiator's muscles contracted so tightly that he feared his
bones would be crushed. He screamed and tried to yank the tentacles from their roots, but
found his arms could no longer obey him.

The third tentacle slapped him in the side of the head, encircling his brow. His mind
exploded in sheer white agony. Rikus could see nothing, hear nothing. He felt his chest
contracting and expanding as he screamed, but that was all.

Inside his head, a swarm of thumb-sized beetles appeared out of the chalk-colored
emptiness that now isolated him. All of the beetles looked like the gaj. Slowly they
scuttled through the air to the surface of his mind and began to eat away at it, leaving
behind wispy tendrils of pain as they crawled over its rippled terrain. Gradually they
created a net of blistering torment that enveloped Rikus's mind completely.

The net began to draw inexorably tighter, and the mul's panic, his memory, and even his
will to fight began to fade. Soon he could feel nothing but the horrid fire of his agony,
smell nothing but the bitter odor of his own fear, and taste nothing but the dry ash of
his thoughts slipping away.

Finally, even those bitter sensations faded. The mul was left with nothing but the long
fall to oblivion.

The Sorceress

Rikus stopped screaming.

The mul's fighting sticks tumbled from his thick-fingered hands. His shoulders slumped,
his knotted knees buckled, and his dark eyes rolled back in their sockets until only the
whites showed. The gaj raised its black pincers, displaying the gladiator's limp body as
if it were a trophy. One hairy tentacle remained wrapped around Rikus's brow, holding his
head upright, and the others still clasped his wrists.

Sadira stopped a dozen yards from the gaj's side. She had to fight to keep from gagging as
she smelled the last whiffs of a fetid vapor. The mul's body hung limply in the beast's
black pincers, with blood from the barb punctures streaming down his legs and dripping
from his toes.

To the left of the gaj, Neeva returned to her feet, clearing her head with a violent
shake. On the other side of the beast, Yarig had already stood and was lifting his spear
in preparation for a charge. Anezka, whose spear remained lodged in the beast's head, was
standing farther away than Sadira, studying the creature with a look of confused anger.

On the wall surrounding the pit, Boaz screamed, “Let the spineless mul die!”

Though it would mean a severe punishment later, none of the slaves obeyed the trainer.
When the gaj had lashed the mul with its bristly tentacles, the unfamiliar sound of Rikus
screaming and the sight of his retreat had left no doubt that he was in trouble. Yarig had
slapped aside the spears pointed at his throat, then slid down the rope to help his
friend. Out of loyalty to her dwarven partner, Anezka had followed almost immediately. In
the same instant, Neeva had plucked the spears from the hands of a trio of guards and
dropped down into the sand, not even bothering with the rope.

To everyone's astonishment except her own, Sadira had slipped past the confused guards and
followed the gladiators into the pit. No doubt Boaz and all the others believed she had
lost her coquettish head and rushed into the pit out of panic, but that was not the case.
Sadira had entered the arena so she would be close enough to cast a spell if there
appeared to be no other way to save Rikus It now seemed as if the mul would be torn into
pieces by the time the other gladiators freed him from the gaj's pincers. If the mul was
to be saved, Sadira would have to use her magicÑan act that would almost certainly place
her own life in peril. In Tyr, as in other Athasian cities, only the king and his templars
were permitted to use sorcery. Those who defied this law were put to death.

More importantly, anyone who understood the basics of spellcasting would know that Sadira
had not attained such powers on her own. Tithian, her owner and the man who would likely
interrogate her, would deduce that she was connected to the Veiled Alliance, the secret
society of sorcerers dedicated to overthrowing the king. Doubtless he would want to know
why the Alliance had recruited an agent in his pits. If he caught her alive, he would try
to force the answer from her through a long and agonizing torture.

Even with all these considerations, Sadira had no choice but to use her magic. Rikus did
not know it yet, but the Veiled Alliance had plans for him at the ziggurat games. Too much
depended on those plans to let the gladiator die.

Preparing to cast her spell, Sadira took a deep breath and looked for some indication that
the fighters were at last gaining the upper hand against their nemesis. She did not find
it. The gaj was keeping both Yarig and Neeva at bay by using Rikus's body like a massive
hammer, and Anezka seemed at a complete loss without her spear.

“Neeva, Yarig, cover your eyes!” Sadira yelled.

Neeva frowned. “What?”

“Just trust me,” Sadira said sharply. “It's for Rikus.” Without waiting for a reply, the
half-elf leveled her palm toward the ground and spread her fingers. Shutting out all other
thoughts, she focused her mind on her hand, summoning the energy she needed for her magic.
The air beneath her palm began to shimmer, then a barely visible surge of power passed
through the air, entered her hand, and moved through her arm.

To the untrained eye, it might have appeared Sadira was extracting her magic from the
ground, but that was not the case. While it was true that she drew the power for her magic
from the life force of Athas itself, like all sorcerers she could only tap this mystic
power through plants. The energy flowing into her body came to her from the smoketrees,
needlebushes, and hornbushes surrounding Tithian's slave compound. The ground was only a
medium for transferring it.

When Sadira had gathered enough power for her spell she closed her hand and cut off the
flow of energy. If she took too much power too rapidly, the plants from which she was
drawing the life force would die and the ground holding their roots would become sterile
and barren. Unfortunately, few sorcerers were so careful with their powers, and it was
their carelessness that had reduced Athas to a wasteland.