Troy Denning - The Verdant Passage

Agis gently stretched the noblewoman out on the cobblestones, then kneeled at her side and checked once more for obvious wounds. As far as he could tell, all of the blood had come from the half-giant.

Caro stepped out of the suphouse. “What happened?”

“No time to explain now,” Agis said. “I’m going to need you to keep Jaseela from being jostled as we leave. Do you feel well enough for a little pushing and shoving?”

The dwarf nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

Without further comment, Agis laid his hands on the ground next to the noblewoman, then called on his psionic powers to create an invisible bed of pure force beneath her. His fingers and hands began to tingle, and Jaseela’s body rose off the ground. Agis laid a palm on her stomach to keep her stable and used his other to take her hand. He stepped toward the alley through which he had entered the square, thinking he might be strong enough to keep her levitated until they had left the Elven Market.

When Agis lifted his eyes from Jaseela’s unconscious form, he found himself facing a large man wearing a blue robe, a white scarf pulled across his face. The brown eyes peering out from beneath the white brow seemed as ancient as Caro’s, but there was a depth and power to them that Agis found both alarming and awe-inspiring. In one hand, the wizard held the noble’s bloody dagger, and in the other he carried the obsidian-pommeled cane that Agis recognized as belonging to the old man who had given him directions to Shadow Square.

The figure offered the dagger to Agis without saying a word.

“You?” the noble gasped.

The sorcerer ignored the question and placed the dagger in Agis’s hand, then turned to go. The senator caught him by the shoulder. “Wait. We’re part of this now. We want to help.”

Using his cane, the sorcerer knocked Agis’s hand away. “We don’t need your help.”

With that, he took a single step away from the nobleman. Before Agis’s eyes, the old man’s body grew translucent and faded from sight.

Rikus stood atop a peninsula protruding from a cliff of orange shale. A cool breeze danced over his face, and tall, wispy rods of ruby thornstem scratched his bare shoulders. At his back lay a vast plain of rusty desert mottled by delicate clumps of white brittlebush and green globes of tumbling spikeballs. Before him hung a void filled with still, ashen haze that stretched from below the cliff to the zenith of the sky.

The mul had been peering into the gray murk for a long time-he couldn’t say whether it had been minutes or hours or days-hoping for some glimpse of what lay on the other side. So far, the curtain had not parted, and he was beginning to think he was looking at the Sea of Silt.

Rikus did not remember crossing the desert at his back, and he had no idea how he had come to be standing on this cliff. The last thing he recalled was seeing his friends rush to his rescue as the gaj burned his mind. He feared that his lapse of memory was due to damage caused by the creature’s attack.

To the mul’s right, the gray haze finally stirred, churning itself into an oval eddy as tall as a man. Rikus stepped away and raised his fists to a fighting guard, prepared to defend himself. The eddy simply continued to whirl.

“Step through,” spoke a voice at Rikus’s back. It had a smooth, melodious timber that was neither male nor female.

The mul turned. A vaguely human shape stood beside him. The figure wore a gray burnoose with the hood pulled over its head so that neither its face nor eyes were visible. It held its arms before it, its hands neatly folded into the opposite sleeves.

“Who are you?” the mul demanded. His heart was suddenly beating hard with confusion and fear, and he did not like the feeling.

“No one,” came the reply. The figure lifted an arm and pointed toward the swirling eddy. There was no hand at the end of its sleeve. “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” Rikus answered, staring at the sleeve.

“Then you have found it.”

Rikus stepped toward the figure. “What’s happening here?”

“Nothing,” came the reply.

The mul scowled and peered beneath the shadows of the hood. When he saw only empty darkness, he reached up and pulled the hood away.

The figure had no head. Even the burnoose’s collar was as empty as the sleeves and the hood.

With a start, Rikus realized why he could not remember crossing the desert. “Is that it? I’m dead?” he demanded, waving a hand at the curtain of grayness. “This is all a lifetime of pain and bondage comes to?”

“This is all everything comes to,” the figure replied, its dulcet voice sounding from the empty space above its collar. With its empty sleeve, it gestured toward the swirling eddy.

Rikus shook his head. “It’s not enough,” he said. “Not for me.” He turned toward the desert plain and started walking.

The gray figure appeared in front him. “There is nothing more,” it said, raising its empty sleeves to block his way. “You can’t escape.”

“I can try,” the mul hissed, reaching out to clutch the cloak. “Besides, what’s to stop me?” He wadded the empty robe into a bundle and tossed it over his shoulder. “Nothing.”

He walked for miles, then tens of miles. The terrain never changed, save that the gray curtain at his back grew more and more distant. Ahead of him, an endless plain of orange shale stretched to the horizon, the dreary monotony broken only by the white caps of brittlebush, the green dots of spikeballs, and the barren stalks of thornstem waving in the breeze.

Finally Rikus’s legs grew weary. He sat down to rest, then yawned and realized he could not remember the last time he had slept. The mul leaned back, ignoring the sharp edges of shale that poked him in the shoulders and ribs. There was no sun in the yellow sky, only an ethereal haze that radiated an amber glow. Rikus closed his eyes.

When he woke, he was no longer in the desert. Instead, he lay in the center of a square room. Over his head hung a ceiling of mekillot ribs, lashed together to form a grid of squares. Above the bone grid, the twin moons, Ral and Guthay, shone through a scaly roof of stretched hide, filling the room with dim, yellow light.

The walls and floor were of solid stone, save that there was a large gate of iron bars in one wall. Once unlocked, the gate could be raised into a special slot by means of a sturdy giant-hair rope-and-pulley system located outside the cell.

“What am I doing here?” Rikus asked no one in particular.

Beneath him lay a pile of dirty rags that had been serving as his bed. The cell stank of offal and sweat, and through the gate came the roars, chirps, and shrieks of a dozen kinds of beasts.

Rikus sat up and shook his head, sending waves of throbbing pain through his skull. His back, arms, and legs were stiff and sore, and his abdomen burned where the gaj’s barbed pincers had punctured his skin.

The mul groaned, taking his first good look around the pen. In one corner, Yarig and Anezka lay curled up together. At Rikus’s side, Neeva’s massive form was stretched out on the stone floor, covered only by her heavy cape.

“I’m alive,” Rikus said.

“So it would seem,” answered a familiar, sarcastic voice. “What a pity.”

Rikus lifted his eyes to the gate. Boaz stood in the corridor beyond. The half-elf wore a cape of blue silk and carried an open carafe of milkwine. His eyes were blurry, and he stood awkwardly braced on stiff legs, as if he would pitch forward at any moment. At his waist hung a ring of keys and a steel dirk.

“No guards?” asked Rikus. In his mind, the saw the trainer standing atop the practice pit wall, wanting to know which of the mul’s friends should be flogged in punishment for his disrespect. The memory filled the gladiator’s heart with bitter anger. “That’s careless of you, Boaz.”