Troy Denning: The Verdant Passage

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.

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 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 magic-an 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.