“He’s my brother.” Feena glared at the thri-kreen with her ice blue eyes. “But fine, if you don’t want to help, then I’ll travel to Urik myself. I’m sure I can find a caravan headed that way.”
“We saw one posted at the station,” Zabaj added. “The two of us will take that.”
Shira tut-tutted. “Come now, Feena, don’t be ridiculous. We can’t let you go off on your own like that. You’re one of us, and we look out for our own.”
“So’s Gan.”
At that, Shira’s face soured. “Hardly. And Rol and Fehrd certainly aren’t.”
“Fehrd’s dead,” Komir said bluntly. “And that alone is cause for concern. Besides which, Lyd isn’t one of ‘our own,’ either, but we risked getting blackballed in Raam forever, and possibly getting arrested, just to help her out.”
Torthal raised an eyebrow. “There was profit in that one.”
Komir glared at Serthlara. “A few hundred gold isn’t worth what we risked to game Belrik. But Lyd’s friendship was. Are you all going to stand here and tell me that Feena’s blood tie with Gan is less powerful than Lyd’s with us?”
“Yes,” Shira said bluntly. “We chose Lyd as a friend, and she’s been there for us in the past. We’re stuck with Gan.” Zabaj opened his mouth to speak, but Shira wouldn’t let him finish. “However,” she added quickly, “that doesn’t mean that Gan is unimportant. And, if it comes to that, it’s been a few years since we gamed a slaver.”
Torthal nodded. “That alone is worth the trip.”
“Very well, then,” Shira said with the utmost reluctance. “We’ll go. Let’s try to find out anything we can about the slaver who took them before we go.”
“Not us,” Feena said. “They know us there now.”
Komir hopped off the carriage. “I’ll do that.” Anything to get away.
Karalith smiled and rolled her bracelets up her arms. They always fell back down again, and Komir had spent most of his life to date wondering why she did that. “I’ll go with you.”
“Good,” Torthal said. “Be back by sundown.”
As they walked away from the bazaar—which was in shutdown mode, with all the merchants packing themselves up, and occasionally indulging a last-minute customer who just had to have one last item—yes, I know you packed it up, but could you please pull it out for me?—Komir stared over at his twin sister, who was the same height as he. “You didn’t participate much.”
She shrugged. “No point. We were going to Urik no matter what, I just didn’t feel like going through Mother and Father’s motions.”
Komir sighed. “This was another of their life lessons, wasn’t it?”
In a fair impersonation of Torthal, Karalith said, “ ‘Can’t just make a decision, child, you have to understand it.’ Gan is family—that’s all that should matter. But they decided to play devil’s advocate just so we’d all understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
“Well, they do have one point.”
Karalith stopped walking and glared at her brother. “You’re even more sick of their nonsense than I am.”
“Oh, absolutely.” Komir nodded emphatically. “But not every family member of someone in the emporium is going to be worth saving. I think they wanted us to make sure it wasn’t automatic in case someone’s related to a ne’er-do-well.”
“Gan is a ne’er-do-well,” Karalith pointed out.
Komir shrugged. “Yeah, but he’s our ne’er-do-well. And he’s a good guy, honestly, he just doesn’t shut up. If he could stay quiet—”
“And Rol could stop sleeping with anything that moves …”
With a grin, Komir said, “Yeah, they’d be a force to be reckoned with.” The grin fell. “I still can’t believe Fehrd’s gone.”
Karalith scratched her chin with her index finger. Komir leaned in to pay close attention, as Karalith generally did that when she had a good idea. “Yeah,” she said, “but Feena said that the two of them didn’t talk much about Fehrd to the caravan. That could work in our favor …”
CHAPTER
SIX
Gorbin stood across from the stocky elf in the arena, bored to death as he punched him repeatedly in the stomach.
After ten years, it had become routine for the mul. He got into the arena. His opponent stood across from him, either looking very cocky or scared to death. The elf was one of the cocky ones. Unusually bulky for his race, the elf called himself Sehmet, and claimed to be the best fistfighter in Athas.
When he showed up in Urik, he stood in the town square challenging anyone who’d come to beat him, and he always won. He also ended each fight with the following statement: “I can beat anyone—even Gorbin. Especially Gorbin!”
Finally, he got his wish, invited by the owners of the Pit of Black Death—a tapped-out obsidian quarry that had been converted into the premiere gladiatorial arena in Urik—where Gorbin had been the main event for a decade.
“You’re done today, Gorbin,” Sehmet said. “This is the day you go down.”
Gorbin said nothing. He didn’t like to talk while he fought. Sorvag always told him that it wasted energy.
They circled each other for a minute or so, the way fighters always did, waiting for the other one to show some kind of weakness. The scared ones usually just waited for something to happen, but the cocky ones like Sehmet often got bored and attacked first.
The elf didn’t disappoint—he lunged for Gorbin with a massive overhand right punch.
Gorbin caught the punch in his left hand. The impact was impressive, but nothing the mul couldn’t handle.
Sehmet looked stunned, gaping at his fist lodged in Gorbin’s hand as if he’d never seen the like before. He probably hadn’t.
Then Gorbin flexed his hand, breaking Sehmet’s arm at the wrist. The elf screamed in pain as he fell to his knees, and then Gorbin let go of the fist and just started punching.
About a minute later, Sehmet was dead. Had he been a fellow slave, Gorbin would have left him alive, but challengers like him deserved what they got.
Gorbin had yet to lose a single fight in the arena.
In fact, he was still waiting for his first real challenge.
It was really getting boring.
He was the biggest and the strongest, and he’d been training his whole life. Part of it was his being a mul, of course, but he’d known a few muls in his time, and none of them were as big and strong as he was.
When he thought about it—which wasn’t often, as thinking had never been Gorbin’s strong suit, and besides, it usually just got in the way of the fighting—he figured that he owed it to Sorvag.
Gorbin had been an infant when Sorvag found him in the wastes, apparently abandoned by his parents for reasons he would never know. Gorbin still had no idea why Sorvag hadn’t just left him there. After all, he’d been just a mewling half-breed infant. Over the years, Gorbin had seen hundreds of infants; they were small, smelly, noisy, and utterly useless in every way. Sure, they grew up to be adults eventually, but prior to that, they were just horrible. Gorbin simply could not imagine that anyone would willingly take a baby into his life the way Sorvag did.
Perhaps Gorbin should have asked Sorvag that at some point before he killed him.
It was Sorvag’s own fault. He’d trained Gorbin for longer than he could remember. Sorvag had told him that he’d found Gorbin as an infant in the wastes, abandoned, and took him in. Sorvag fed him special nutritional food, made him only drink water—never fruit juice, nor any alcohol—and had him exercise constantly.
At the age of four, Gorbin had his first fight, against a ten-year-old who made fun of his face. Gorbin looked different from the other children he met in Urik. He only met one other mul, but she was a sickly little girl who died a few days after Gorbin met her. The rest had different eyes, different ears, different teeth, and that made him reviled.
One of them decided to make his revulsion verbal, and he expressed his dislike at a very loud volume.
So Gor
bin hit him as hard as he could.
The boy stopped talking after that. And the revulsion went away too. Or at least happened out of his hearing, which was good enough for Gorbin.
As Gorbin got older, he got bigger and stronger, and he also learned more and more about how to fight. Dozens of men came to Sorvag’s house to show Gorbin this technique or that hold or this block or that punch.
Gorbin wasn’t the only child that Sorvag trained, though he was the only one who lived with Sorvag. He was also the only mul—children of elves, dwarves, goliaths, and even the occasional thri-kreen spawn would be brought by to Sorvag’s house in order to learn how to fight. Some of them only stayed to train for a week or two, some for months on end, some would come once a week. Gorbin worked with a few of them sometimes, but mostly Sorvag kept Gorbin’s lessons separate.
When Gorbin turned fifteen, Sorvag said he had a surprise for him. At that point, Gorbin had done everything Sorvag told him to do. It seemed reasonable—Sorvag fed him, clothed him, housed him, and let him beat people up pretty much any time he wanted. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Sorvag.
Gorbin came into the kitchen of Sorvag’s house, and a skinny old man stood there. “This is Calbit,” Sorvag said to Gorbin. “He and his partner run the Pit of Black Death.”
“Really?” Gorbin’s eyes went wide. He knew all about the Pit, of course. Sorvag had taken Gorbin to a few of the matches, and Gorbin had always said he wanted to fight there. “I can take any of those guys,” he’d said many times.
Sorvag had always been cagey in response to Gorbin’s pleas, never confirming that the mul was destined to someday fight in the arena.
But Gorbin could feel it in his bones—that day was the day. Why else would he have been training for a decade and a half?
“Do I get to fight there?”
Calbit snorted, a noise that sounded like a crodlu when it was unhappy. “Ain’t like you’re gonna have a choice, boy.”
“You see,” Sorvag said, “the Pit owns you.”
Gorbin blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand.” Calbit then turned to Sorvag. “I thought you explained it to him.”
“Not in so many words,” Sorvag said weakly.
Gorbin walked up to face the man who’d been everything to him. “You’re selling me into slavery?”
“You were always a slave from the beginning,” Sorvag said. “I didn’t find you in the wastes, you were purchased by Calbit here and brought to me to train. You’re a mul—there’s nothing for you but the arena.”
“You lied to me?” Gorbin asked the question in a whisper.
For fifteen years, Sorvag always told him what to do. He had earned the authority he had over Gorbin. So to find out that he’d lied to him all that time was devastating.
Sorvag suddenly looked sad and pathetic—just like the people Gorbin hit shortly after he hit them—and muttered, “I’m—I’m sorry.”
Gorbin beat him to death right there.
When he was done, Calbit was just standing there calmly, unconcerned by the pulpy mess that Gorbin had made of Sorvag’s head, or by the blood mixed with brain and bone that was all over the kitchen.
No, Calbit was just looking at him. “Guess this means we’ll have to find someone else to train the kids. Ah, well, least I don’t have to pay his rates anymore. Damn thief, is what he is.” Calbit looked at Gorbin and smiled. “And a liar too. Idiot.”
It never really occurred to Gorbin to turn and beat Calbit to death, even though the old man couldn’t have done anything to stop it. But with Sorvag dead, Gorbin had no idea what to do next. He had spent all fifteen years of his life on Athas doing what Sorvag told him to do.
So he simply gravitated to the next available authority figure. Besides, Calbit would have simply called in the soldiers if he disobeyed, and while Gorbin had every confidence in his ability to win any one-on-one fight put before him, he didn’t think he’d be able to take on a cadre of soldiers.
So they branded his left bicep with a distinctive mark that said he was their gladiator—an action that only hurt for a few hours—and for the next ten years, Calbit and his partner Jago put Gorbin in the arena.
In many senses, his life improved. Sorvag’s home was a decent, if ramshackle, house in the Old District. With the Pit, Gorbin had a comfortable cubicle that was larger than any of the rooms in Sorvag’s house.
True, it was a cage by a nicer name, but it was still luxurious by the standards he was used to. Calbit also fed Gorbin better food than Sorvag ever did. “I don’t hold with all of Sorvag’s nonsense about nutrition,” Jago had said once. “People should eat what they want to eat.”
In his first fight for the Pit, Gorbin went against a malnourished troll Calbit had found in an alley. Gorbin hated how hot it got, with the sun bearing down into the arena, the obsidian walls holding the heat so that the fighters were sweltering.
Gorbin beat down the troll in less than a minute.
Then he fought a succession of opponents in bouts that were of even shorter duration.
After that, Jago insisted on putting him in the main-event fights. On any given night at the Pit, there were up to four fights. Up to that point, Gorbin’s bouts had all been opening matches—the undercards. The main event, though, was reserved for the real fighters.
Jago was fairly certain that Gorbin was that. So was Gorbin, if anyone asked him—which they didn’t.
Calbit wasn’t sure, but he decided to go ahead and let Gorbin face Mochri the Half-Giant. Mochri wasn’t the best fighter, but he was pretty good. Calbit liked to use him to test the newbies, see if they could handle the main event.
Gorbin took Mochri down in five minutes. Mochri never fought again after that day, falling into screaming fits any time they tried to bring him near the arena. Jago finally had him beaten to death as punishment.
Meanwhile, Gorbin worked his way up to the top of the main stage. Dwarves, elves, humans, half-giants, thri-kreens, goliaths, even one dray.
And Gorbin beat them all.
The dray was a tough one, but Gorbin was pretty sure he was lame. That still made him more formidable than anyone Gorbin had faced.
As a youth, Gorbin had gained some notoriety in the Old District where Sorvag lived, mainly from the other kids—the ones who tried to make fun of him when he was smaller and later the other ones who trained with Sorvag, who spread rumors about Sorvag’s prize pupil.
But that was nothing compared to the fame fighting for the Pit granted him. Everyone in Urik knew who Gorbin was. He found that he liked that, at first.
For the better part of a year, Gorbin fought regularly against Szanka. Those matches were almost interesting. Szanka was fast and smart, which almost made up for the fact that he was nowhere near as big and strong as Gorbin. He was able to avoid many of Gorbin’s blows, and therefore actually had some staying power.
But then one night, Szanka went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Nobody knew why, though one of the other fighters—a slave who’d been captured in one of Urik’s wars—said it probably had something to do with Gorbin hitting him in the head so often.
Ultimately, Gorbin was the biggest and the strongest and, thanks to Sorvag’s tutelage, the best trained. Which meant that he always won. And everyone knew him, and he was cheered every time he came into the arena. It was wonderful.
A decade later, it grew much less wonderful. Sure, everyone knew him, but mostly as the person nobody could beat—the person who made the Pit boring.
It got to where few people wanted to fight him. His fights were either against people who were so scared from his reputation that they folded in an instant, or idiots who thought they’d be the ones to unseat Gorbin from the top spot. The latter were invariably incompetents who folded in two instants.
He kept fighting because he didn’t have a choice. Oh, escape was a possibility, but he tried that a few times and found that he had nowhere to go. Everyone in Urik knew who he was, s
o he couldn’t hide from the soldiers. As a slave, he had no resources he could truly call his own. And the only skill he had was fighting. True, there were other arenas in Urik, and they would kill to have an attraction as popular as Gorbin, but as soon as he fought for one of them, Calbit and Jago would send the soldiers.
Gorbin had never been outside Urik. He had no idea how to survive in the wastes, didn’t know what direction to go once he departed the city-state’s borders.
He was trapped.
So he fought. No matter how bored he was.
Every morning, he woke up on the floor of his cubicle. Over the years the cubicle had gotten bigger and better apportioned, and he had a large comfortable bed, on which he never slept. Sorvag always made him sleep on a hard floor. “So you can sleep anywhere,” he’d said at the time. And it was true, up to a point. He could sleep anywhere, as long as it was hard and unyielding. Put anything cushioned under him, though, and he’d toss and turn.
So he stuck with the floor and the bed continued to lay unused against one well-decorated wall of his lavish cubicle. He’d been told that there were nobles whose houses were less fancy than his cubicle.
But he still slept on the floor.
One morning, he woke up to Jago bellowing at him. “Gorbin! Wake up! Calbit’s back. And he’s got fresh meat.”
For some reason, Jago always wanted Gorbin to see the new slaves that came in. “You’ve earned the right to pick your opponents,” Jago would say, and then Calbit would usually add: “And which of these useless bags’a bones you don’t wanna fight.”
Gorbin trudged out of his cubicle, bleary-eyed, and walked out into the corridor to follow Jago.
The co-owner of the Pit was short and stocky while his older partner was skinny and bony. Given how big and strong Gorbin was, he could easily break Jago in two.
If only he had somewhere to go after he killed Jago. Or maybe Calbit would have the soldiers finally kill him.
The corridor went past several other cubicles, where the other slaves were allowed to continue sleeping. To Gorbin, that meant it was still early in the morning.
Under the Crimson Sun Page 9