The Crimson Legion

by Denning, Troy

  PRISM PENTAD

  THE VERDANT PASSAGE

  THE CRIMSON LEGION

  THE AMBER ENCHANTRESS

  THE OBSIDIAN ORACLE

  THE CERULEAN STORM

  Prism Pentad • Book 2

  The Crimson Legion

  ©1992 TSR, Inc.

  ©2008 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  ©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  DARK SUN, D&D, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Hasbro SA, Represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: Brom

  Map by Robert Lazzaretti

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-6126-9

  640-48908000-001-EN

  U.S., Canada, Asia Pacific, & Latin America, Wizards of the Coast LLC, P.O. Box 707, Renton, WA 98057-0707, +1-800-324-6496, www.wizards.com/customerservice

  Europe, U.K., Eire & South Africa, Wizards of the Coast LLC, c/o Hasbro UK Ltd., P.O. Box 43, Newport, NP19 4YD, UK, Tel: +80457 12 55 99, Email: wizards@hasbro.co.uk

  Visit our websites at www.wizards.com

  www.DungeonsandDragons.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One - Ambush

  Chapter Two - The Black Wall

  Chapter Three - Village in the Sand

  Chapter Four - Tower of Buryn

  Chapter Five - Wrog’s Ring

  Chapter Six - Assassins

  Chapter Seven - Umbra’s Return

  Chapter Eight - The Citadel

  Chapter Nine - The Thirteenth Champion

  Chapter Ten - Lirr Hunt

  Chapter Eleven - Makla

  Chapter Twelve - Crater of Bones

  Chapter Thirteen - Caelum’s Victory

  Chapter Fourteen - Parley

  Chapter Fifteen - Slave Gate

  Chapter Sixteen - The Crimson Legion

  Chapter Seventeen - Hamanu’s Wrath

  Chapter Eighteen - The Book of Kings

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  CONCENTRATE.

  A white globe appeared in the black grotto that was the mind of King Tithian I, casting a brilliant light over the warped spires and gloomy depths of the cave’s snarled terrain. Sable-winged bats and ebon-feathered birds—dark thoughts given form by his mind—fluttered away into murky nooks and alcoves, angrily screeching and chirping.

  “I’ve done it!” Tithian reported.

  You’ve done nothing until you project it, came the answer, echoing inside the king’s mind.

  Tithian opened his eyes. Before him sat the disembodied heads who were tutoring him in the elusive art of the Way. One was sallow-skinned and sunken-featured, with cracked lips that looked like shriveled leather. The other was grotesquely bloated, with puffy cheeks and eyes swollen to narrow, dark slits. Both wore their coarse hair in long topknots, and the bottom of their necks had been sewn shut with thick black thread.

  “Where?” Tithian asked.

  Over the arena, answered Sacha, the bloated head.

  “Yes. It’s time your subjects learned to fear you,” agreed Wyan, now speaking aloud.

  Being careful to keep the ball glowing inside his mind, Tithian looked toward the stadium. From his pedestal atop the roof of the Golden Tower, he could see the largest part of the vast arena, which lay between the tower and the crumbling bricks of the previous king’s ziggurat. Instead of gladiators, the immense fighting pit now swarmed with craftsmen and free-farmers bartering a wide variety of goods—thornberries, sweet lizard meats, ceramic vessels, and knives and spoons of carved bone. They had all covered their wares with tattered cloaks and shabby blankets, for a hot driving wind was scouring the field with sand and dust.

  At the sight of the bazaar, the king could not help recalling how the marketplace had come to exist. At the suggestion of his boyhood friend Agis of Asticles, Tithian had written an edict converting the stadium to a public market. When he had sent it to the Council of Advisors for approval, Agis and his fellow councilors had removed mention of the levy the king wished to impose for selling goods in the stadium. Without advising Tithian of what it had done, the council had then issued the edict across the entire city. By the time the king had seen a copy of the edict “he” had issued, the field had been filled with cheering citizens.

  Agitated by the memory, Tithian’s dark thoughts took to their wings and fluttered about his mind. He pinched his eyes closed, desperately trying to brighten the light and force the errant beasts back to their nests. It was a losing battle, for angry thoughts teemed out of their black holes in countless numbers. They swarmed the light, shrieking and screeching in frenzied hatred. Tithian fought back, summoning as much energy as he could. A stream of warmth rose from deep within his body and flowed into the glowing ball.

  A brilliant glow erupted from the king’s eyelids and a deafening clap of thunder blasted the Golden Tower, shaking it from the foundations to the merlons. The boom reverberated through Tithian’s chest like a drum and set his ears ringing.

  “Did I do that?” he gasped, opening his eyes again.

  Sacha rolled his eyes. “We’re having a storm.”

  The king looked up and saw that the day had grown as dark as his mood. A black haze of wind-borne silt hung over the city, reducing the crimson disk of the sun to a pink shadow of itself. The billowing mass of darkness reminded Tithian of the rainstorm he had seen ten years ago, but he knew better than to hope a downpour would quench the thirst of his city today. The thunderclouds overhead were filled with dust, not water.

  “You couldn’t get a spark from striking steel, much less create a lightning bolt,” added Wyan. “Your meditations are pathetic.”

  Tithian closed his eyes again. The ball of light inside his mind had disappeared entirely. All that remained in that black grotto was a whirl of dark thoughts.

  “Don’t bother trying again,” said Sacha.

  “You’re about to receive a messenger,” explained Wyan.

  “When you hear his report, your pitiful mind will neglect the ball of light anyway,” finished Sacha, his snarl revealing a set of broken yellow teeth.

  Knowing that the malicious heads would not reveal the messenger’s news even if he asked, Tithian unfolded his aching legs and slipped his gaunt body, clothed only in a breechcloth, off the pedestal. Regretting the laziness that had kept him from mastering the Way of the Unseen as a youth, the king asked, “Am I really so hopeless?”

  “Completely,” answered Wyan.

  “Absolutely,” added Sacha.

  The king grabbed his two confidants by their topknots and walked toward the edge of the roof.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Wyan.

  “If I have no hope of mastering the Way, then I’ll never become a sorcerer-king,” Tithian growled. “That means I have no need of you two!” He heaved the two heads off the tower roof.

  Instead of falling into the gauzy moss-trees at the base of the palace, the heads simply hung in the air, a dozen feet from
the roof. Tithian’s jaw fell slack, for he had never seen Sacha or Wyan levitate. Still, he suspected that he should have known they would not be destroyed so easily. The pair could not have survived a thousand years by being as helpless as they seemed.

  “Quite amusing,” said Wyan, baring his gray teeth at Tithian.

  “Kalak would have gotten an axe and hacked us to pieces,” added Sacha. “You’re not brutal enough.”

  “That can be remedied,” Tithian warned.

  “I doubt it,” Wyan returned. “You’re a coward at heart.”

  Before Tithian could rebut Wyan, Sacha added, “You’ve ruled Tyr for six months, and the Golden Tower’s treasury is emptier than when you killed Kalak!”

  Tithian could not deny Sacha’s charge. Instead, he spun away and looked toward the city’s bustling Merchant District. Now that the iron mine had been reopened, Tyr was once again doing a booming mercantile business, but the Council of Advisors was using every coin of the caravan levy to fund the pauper farms surrounding the city. Of course, that was Agis’s doing—as were all of the programs diverting the treasures that should have been filling the king’s vault.

  Reading the king’s thoughts, Wyan suggested, “Assassinate him.”

  Despite his past relationship with Agis, it was not friendship that made Tithian hesitate. “That would only make things worse,” he growled. “Rikus, Neeva, and Sadira would take Agis’s place in an instant. A self-righteous noble is bad enough, but slaves …” Letting his sentence trail off, the king turned back to the heads and saw that they were drifting toward the roof.

  “Kill all four,” said Wyan.

  “You can’t believe that things are that simple,” Tithian growled. “Half of Tyr saw Rikus wound Kalak, and it’s common knowledge that Agis and the others finished the task. If I execute them, the city will rise against me.”

  “I have the names of several minstrels adept with poisons,” offered Wyan, his sunken eyes burning with murderous light. “Kalak often used them to good effect.”

  “All four dying of mysterious illnesses? How stupid do you assume the citizens of Tyr to be?” Tithian snorted. “I’ll find another way.”

  Tithian’s chamberlain climbed onto the roof, putting an end to the debate. She was a blond woman of stauesque proportions, with icy blue eyes and a humorless mouth. Like most of Tithian’s bureaucracy, she had been recruited from the ranks of the templars who had previously served Kalak.

  Behind the chamberlain came a haggard young man wearing dusty riding leathers. Though he was covered with grime, Tithian could see that his clothes were well-made and his hair trimmed. He had a patrician nose and a proud jawline that was slack with amazement at the sight of the floating heads.

  “I present Taiy of Ramburt, second son to Lord Ramburt,” said the chamberlain, raising a brow at the floating heads.

  “How dare you come before us in such rags,” Sacha snarled. “And did your father not teach you to bow before your king?”

  “Kill him!” spat Wyan.

  The color drained from Taiy’s face. “I beg your forebearance, Honored King,” the youth said, bowing.

  “You have it—for now,” Tithian replied, amused by the youth’s anxiety. “Let us hope your news justifies my patience.”

  Swallowing hard, Taiy stood upright. “Honored King, I have just returned from hunting in the Dragon’s Bowl.”

  “That’s near Urik, is it not?” Tithian asked scowling.

  “Which is the point of my visit,” Taiy answered. “As my party was returning to the road, we saw a great cloud of dust approaching from the horizon. When I investigated, I found an army, complete with siege engines, a war argosy, halfling scouts, and five hundred half-giants. They were marching under the banner of the lion that walks like a man.”

  “King Hamanu’s crest!” hissed Wyan.

  “He’s coveted our iron mines for five centuries,” added Sacha, sneering at Tithian. “How will you defend the city? You’ve an empty treasure vault and no army.”

  Tithian cursed, barely keeping himself from lashing out at the young noble who had brought him this disastrous news. He would not have bothered to restrain himself, except that his subjects credited him with Agis’s endless stream of reforms, and Tithian wanted to cultivate his reputation as a noble ruler.

  Inside, Tithian bit his lips and stared out over the city. At last, a wicked smile crossed his lips. He still had no idea of how to stop Hamanu’s army, but he had hit upon a way to remove the problem of Agis and the three slaves without resorting to Wyan’s minstrels.

  Tithian dismissed Taiy with a wave of his hand, simultaneously addressing his chamberlain. “Summon the freed slaves Rikus, Neeva, and Sadira, as well as Agis of Asticles.” The king felt a pang of regret as he spoke his old friend’s name, but he shrugged off the feeling and continued with the business at hand. “Tell them the safety of Tyr hangs upon their swift arrival in my audience chamber.”

  ONE

  AMBUSH

  RIKUS LOOKED DOWN THE STEEP SLOPE TO WHERE his warriors waited in the shadow of the sandstone bluff. The two thousand Tyrians stood in a quiet column, their thoughts fixed on the coming battle. There were humans, half-elves, dwarves, half-giants, tareks, and other races, most of them gladiators who had fought in Tyr’s arena until being freed by King Tithian’s First Edict. In their hands, they carried double-bladed axes, sabers of serrated bone, fork-headed lances, double-ended spears, and a variety of deadly arms as infinite as man’s desire to murder.

  Rikus was certain they would make a fine legion.

  He stood and waved his arm over his head to signal the attack. His warriors roared their battle cries, then charged forward in a single screaming mass.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Agis, stepping to Rikus’s side. The noble was robust for a man of his class, with a strong build and square, handsome features. He had long black hair, probing brown eyes, and a straight, patrician nose. “We need a plan!”

  “I have a plan,” Rikus answered simply.

  He looked to the base of the hill. There, in the sandy valley, stood a single rank of Urikite half-giants, all wearing red tunics that bore the crest of Hamanu’s yellow lion. They cradled huge battle-axes with obsidian blades, and their only pieces of armor were bone bucklers strapped to their enormous forearms.

  “Attack!” Rikus shouted.

  With that, he rushed over the crest of the hill. Discovering that the sandstone slope was too steep to descend gracefully, Rikus fell to his back and continued his drop in a controlled slide.

  Had he been a full human, he might have reconsidered his method of descent, for only a hemp breechcloth protected his bronzed skin from the grating surface of the sandstone. But Rikus gave the scouring little thought. He was a mul, a human-dwarf crossbreed created to live and die as a gladiatorial slave, and he was as inured to pain as he was to death. From his dwarven father he had inherited a heavy-boned face of rugged features, pointed ears set close to the head, and a powerful physique that seemed nothing but knotted sinew and thick bone. His human mother had bestowed upon him a proud straight nose, a balance of limb and body that made him handsome by the standards of either race, and a supple, six-foot frame as agile as that of an elven rope dancer.

  Rikus had descended only a few feet before Neeva, his longtime fighting partner, slid into place at his side. Although a full human, she was protected from the abrasive stone by the lizard-scale cloak she wore to shield her fair skin from the sun. In her hands, the big blond held a steel battle-axe nearly as large as those carried by the half-giants below. Most women could not have lifted the weapon, but Neeva was almost as heavily muscled as Rikus and, as a freed gladiator, more than capable of swinging the mighty blade. Despite her powerful build, she retained a distinctly feminine figure, full red lips, and eyes as green as emeralds.

  “Our legion is outsized five times over!” she exclaimed.

  Rikus knew that she referred not to the hundreds of half-giants directly below, but
to the thousands of Urikite regulars in the valley beyond. The long column of soldiers was already past the point of the Tyrian attack and was continuing onward at a steady pace, relying on the half-giants to protect their rear. Following close behind the regulars came dozens of siege engines, carried on the backs of massive warlizards called driks. The rear of the long file was brought up by the lumbering mass of an argosy, a mammoth fortress-wagon full of weapons, supplies, and water.

  Her eyes fixed on the long procession, Neeva demanded, “What can you be thinking?”

  “One Tyrian gladiator is worth five Urikite soldiers,” Rikus responded, fixing his gaze on the half-giants below. The huge soldiers were cradling their battle-axes and glaring defiantly toward the side of the bluff, where the Tyrian mob now approached in a tumult of wild screams. “Besides, this is the king’s doing, not mine. Tithian’s the one who would give me only two-thousand warriors.

  “He didn’t tell you to get them killed in a reckless charge,” Neeva countered.

  “It isn’t reckless,” Rikus answered.

  The pair ran out of time to debate the issue, reaching the bottom of the slope just as the first wave of gladiators spilled into the sandy valley. Rikus and Neeva had come down near the flank of the enemy line, only a few dozen paces from several glowering half-giants. The towering Urikites held steady, waiting for the mul and his partner to move into striking range.

  Rikus looked toward the pair of half-giants anchoring the end of the enemy line. In contrast to most of their kind, they were stoutly built, with a powerful shape to their torsos. Their hair had been shaved away from their thick-boned foreheads, and their drooping jaws showed no sign of the customarily flabby chin of the race. They were even somewhat taller than most half-giants, standing at least twice as high as the mul.

  “Those are our two,” Rikus said, raising his weapons. He carried a pair of cahulaks, which resembled two flat-bladed grappling hooks connected at the base by a rope. “Come on.”

  Before Neeva could object, he took off at a sprint, angling away to force the half-giants to leave their formation. At first, Rikus did not think they would fall for his ploy, but an officer finally barked, “Cut them off!”