The Verdent Passage Read online

  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 weeks—and find the other two amulets."

  ONE

  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 limbs—be they arms, legs, or tentacles—they 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 m
ake 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.

  Boaz's bloodshot eyes narrowed. "I should have known better than to reason with a stupid mul," he said, turning his angry gaze away from Rikus and toward the four slaves standing atop the wall nearby. "One of your friends will pay for your disrespect. Who shall I have flogged? Neeva?"

  The trainer pointed at Rikus's fighting partner, a blond woman of full human blood, who stared at Boaz with deep, emerald eyes. Her cape hung open in the front, revealing a husky physique almost as knotted with muscle as that of Rikus. With a pair of full red lips, a prominent, firm chin, and pale, smooth skin, she looked both divine and deadly.

  Rikus had reason to be glad that her appearances were not deceiving. He and Neeva were a matched pair, which meant that in addition to sleeping together, they fought in games against similar fighting teams. In fact, the contest in which he hoped to win his freedom was a matched game.

  When the mul's only response to Boaz's query was a menacing glower, the trainer shrugged. "How about Yarig and Anezka? They're small, so we'll have to whip both of them," he said, pointing at another of Tithian's matched pairs.

  Yarig, the male, scowled at the trainer indignantly. Like all dwarves, he stood around four feet tall and was completely bald from head to heel. His features were square and angular, with the distinctive dwarven crest of thickened skull crowning his bald head. Yarig's stocky body was even more muscular and sculpted than Rikus's. The mul had often thought that his friend resembled a boulder more than a man.

  "You're not being fair, Boaz," Yarig said firmly. "Size makes no difference."

  "I'm not interested in being fair," Boaz snapped, barely granting the dwarf a sidelong glance.

  Yarig would not be dismissed lightly. "Size makes no difference to flogging," he insisted. As was typical for a dwarf, he was so caught up in trivial details that he was oblivious to larger issues. "When you're flogged, it hurts just as much no matter how tall you are."

  Anezka stepped to her partner's side and tried to drag the dwarf away, frowning at Rikus all the while. She had been lashed as punishment for the mul's defiance once before, and she made no effort to hide her resentment of him. Standing no more than three-and-a-half feet high,

  she was a halfling female from the other side of the Ringing Mountains She looked like a scrawny child, save that her figure and face were those of a mature woman. Her hair grew from her head in a tangled bush that had never been brushed, and her cunning brown eyes had a deranged look to them. Her tongue had been cut out before she'd become a slave, so no one had ever been able to determine whether she was truly unbalanced, or just seemed that way. Most didn't debate the question for long, especially since Anezka liked to eat her meat while it was still alive.

  Yarig pulled away from the halfling and stubbornly stepped toward Boaz. "You should only flog one of us."

  Two of the trainer's guards leveled their spears at Yarig's chest, preventing even the single-minded dwarf from advancing farther. "Boaz isn't going to flog either one of you," Rikus noted.

  "Then who will it be?" Boaz asked, his lips spreading into a cruel smile. "If not your pit-mates or your fighting partner, then perhaps your lover?"

  Rikus groaned inwardly. He did not hide his dalliances from Neeva, but open discussion of his romantic liaisons never failed to upset her. At the moment, the last thing he needed was an angry fighting partner.

  Boaz pointed at the last slave on the deck, a voluptuous scullery wench named Sadira. He motioned for her to come to him. Like the trainer, Sadira was a half-elf, with peaked eyebrows and pale eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Where the trainer's features were sharp and raw, the young woman's were slender and winsome. Her eyes were as clear and unclouded as a tourmaline, and her long, amber hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves.

  The wench wore a hemp smock with a wide neckline that hung off both shoulders, and a ragged hem that barely reached the middle of her slender thighs. The smock was the same as those worn by the all the slave girls of the compound, but on Sadira the simple shift seemed as provocative as any noblewoman's most revealing dress.

  When the scullery slave reached Boaz's side, the trainer laid a pasty hand on her bare shoulder. Sadira cringed as the trainer ran his lecherous fingers over her smooth skin, but did not dare object to his touch. "It will be a pity to blemish such beauty with flogging scars, but if that's what you want, Rikus—"

  "It's not what I want and you know it," Rikus said, stopping short of making another threat. "If you're going to flog someone, flog me. I won't resist."

  Smirking at Rikus's submission, Boaz shook his head. "That won't do at all. You're much too accustomed to physical pain," he said. "If we are to teach you anything, your lesson must be of a different kind. So, which one of your friends will pay for your defiance?"

  A tense silence followed. "There's no need to hurry your decision," Boaz said, pointing toward the center of the fighting pit. "You can choose after you fight the gaj."

  Deciding the trainer's concession would at least give him thinking time, Rikus faced the center of the pit. The gaj waved its antennae in the mul's direction, then opened its mandibles and tossed Sizzkus's body aside with a flick of its head. When the nikaal landed twenty yards away, Rikus made a mental note not to put himself in a position where the beast would be able to throw him around the same way.

  "I'll take your cloak," offered Sadira, kneeling at the edge of the wall. "You wouldn't want it torn if the fight moves over here."

  Rikus picked up the robe from the ground and tossed it to the slave girl. "My thanks."

  Catching the cloak, Sadira whispered, "Rikus, I don't like the way Boaz is smirking."

  The mul smiled, revealing a set 'of white teeth. "Don't worry about him. I'll tear him apart before I let him lash, you."

  Sadira raised her peaked eyebrows in alarm. "No!" she hissed. "That's not what I meant. I can take a flogging if I have to. I only want you to be careful."

  The beguiling half-elf's reaction surprised Rikus, for he had thought she would be terrified of being disfigured. Before he could comment on her bravery, however Neeva stepped to the half-elf's side. Taking Sadira by the arm and roughly pulling her to her feet, Neeva said, "Tell me what weapon you want, Rikus. Our friend is clacking its pincers."

  "No blades or points," Boaz interjected, eyeing Rikus. "The gaj is a special surprise for the ziggurat games. Tithian will sell you into the brickyards if you kill it."

  He glanced over his shoulder at the gaj. The strange beast's mandibles stopped clacking and remained open. After studying his opponent for several moments, the mul turned back to his trainer. "Are you a betting man, Boaz?"

  "Perhaps."

  Rikus gave the trainer his most provoking smile and pointed at the gaj. "I'll fight with nothing but my singing sticks. If I win, you flog me instead of someone else. If I lose, you lash us all."

  "Those pincers will clip your sticks like straw!" Neeva objected.

  Rikus ignored her and kept his attention fixed on Boaz.. "Do we have a bet?" When the cruel trainer smiled and nodded, the mul looked to his fighting partner. "Get my sticks."

  Neeva refused to move. "They're too light for that thing," she said. "I'm not helping you get yourself killed."

 
"I'm sure Rikus knows what he's doing," Sadira said, moving away from the edge of the pit. "I'll get the singing sticks."

  Neeva started to follow, but Boaz signaled to his guards and they stopped her with the tips of their spears. A few moments later, Sadira returned with a pair of vermilion sticks about an inch in diameter and two-and-a-half feet long. Made from a fibrous wood that contracted instead of breaking, the sticks were extremely light and relied upon speed rather than mass to generate striking power. They had been carefully carved so that the ends were slightly larger around than the centers, and a special oil made them easy to grip.

  Sadira dropped the weapons, and Rikus caught one in each hand. The gladiator turned to face the gaj, simultaneously twirling the sticks in a figure-eight pattern. As the weapons sliced through the air, they emitted the distinctive whistle that gave them their name. Although Rikus seldom used singing sticks in contests to the death, they were his favorite sparring weapon, for their effectiveness depended upon skill and timing rather than strength and brute force.

  Deciding that his best attack was against the beast's head, Rikus started forward, his sticks trilling as he absent-mindedly traced a variety of defensive patterns in the air.

  The gaj waited, motionless, its eyes blank and unresponsive.

  "Can that thing see me?" Rikus asked.

  The only response was an amused chuckle from Boaz.

  The gladiator stopped his advance a few yards from the gaj's head. A sweet, musky odor hung in the air, masking the stench of the entrails that still dangled from the barbs of the creature's mandibles.

  Rikus took another step forward, waving his sticks in front of the gaj's eyes. It did not react, so he feinted a strike to its head. When there was still no response, he slipped to one side of its wicked mandibles. Holding one stick ready to parry an attack, he flicked the end of the other at one of the red, multi-faceted eyes, striking it with a light tap.