Behind her came Caelum. Only K’kriq, who had turned his attention to picking through the Urikite bodies, did not join him.
“Even if we make it past the statues, Umbra will kill us all,” said Caelum, half-hiding behind Neeva.
“No one told you to come along,” the mul answered, glaring at the dwarf.
“I asked him,” Neeva said. “If anyone can save us, it will be him.”
Rikus grunted, then climbed the stairs. As he stepped onto the first loge, the statue moved swiftly to meet him. It was a burly man dressed in what appeared to be a full suit of plate armor. From beneath his open-faced helmut dangled long, straight hair, and his pudgy jowls were covered by a bushy beard.
“No!” the statue boomed.
He swung his four-bladed axe. The mul ducked the blow easily, but barely managed to raise the Scourge of Rkard as the statue lashed out with his other hand. There was a loud chime as the dagger met the magic sword, then the stone blade snapped in two. Rikus countered immediately, slashing at the statue’s legs.
The stone man skipped out of the way, retreating to the far side of the loge. His glowing red eyes remained fixed on the Scourge of Rkard for a moment, then dropped to the Belt of Rank girding Rikus’s waist. After a moment, the statue surprised the gladiator by crossing his arms in salute.
The mul stepped onto the balcony. Keeping a wary eye on the statue, he crossed to the catwalk on the other side. When it made no move to stop him, he motioned to Neeva and Caelum to follow. “Hurry, before he changes his mind.”
As soon as Neeva approached the balcony, the statue cried, “No!”
He raised his weapons and leaped forward, moving with as much grace and speed as any gladiator Rikus had ever fought. Neeva barely managed to keep her head by ducking the axe and dashing halfway down the stairs. She smashed into Caelum and sent him sprawling all the way to the bottom.
“I don’t think I’m welcome,” Neeva called.
“Then wait here,” the mul said. “I’ll take care of this myself.”
“It could be a trap!”
“If it is, it’s the strangest one I’ve ever seen,” Rikus answered, shaking his head at all the Urikite bodies strewn about the balcony. “You can watch me kill Umbra from below.”
“Or catch your limp body when he throws it down,” she answered, descending the stairs.
Rikus followed the catwalk to the next loge. Instead of Urikite bodies, it was covered with splintered, sun-bleached bones. At the back of the balcony was a door that led into the interior of the citadel, but the mul did not even bother to peer down it. He had come here to kill Umbra, not explore a ruin.
He followed the catwalk around the rest of the building, crossing a long series of loges. To one degree or another, they were all littered with bones and, occasionally, broken weapons or weathered armor. On each balcony, there also stood a stood a statue of gray stone frozen into a lifelike pose, its weapon planted in a set of white ribs or resting atop a shattered skull
Finally, on the thirteenth loge, Rikus found the stairway that led up to the highest balcony. Clutching his sword tightly, he rushed up the stairs.
Upon reaching the top, he found a dark doorway on one side of the deck and the huge statue of a winged man on the other. Unlike the other balconies, the statue on this one was not surrounded by the bones scattered over the stone blocks around it. There was also no sign of Umbra.
“Where are you, shadow?”
There was no answer. Fearing that his prey had fled, Rikus looked over the edge of the balcony. With some difficulty, he picked out Neeva’s form from the hundreds of gladiators still milling about the batttlefield. “What happened to Umbra?” the mul yelled. “Did he leave?”
“No,” came the reply.
“Then I’m going inside.”
“Rikus, no!”
The mul faced the shadowy doorway and took a deep breath, then rushed forward. An eerie prickle ran down his spine as he stepped out of the blazing sun and into the cool darkness of a long corridor. His steps rang off the walls as he advanced down the hallway, and soon the musty smell of mildew filled his nostrils. A soft light rose from the floor of the room ahead, but it was much dimmer than the Athasian day and Rikus felt half-blind.
As he stepped out of the corridor, an icy hand seized his wrist. His whole arm went numb, and painful fingers of chilling cold shot clear into his torso.
“Rikus,” Umbra hissed.
The mul ripped his arm free and dived blindly away. He did not hit the floor. Instead, his stomach rose into his chest and he felt himself tumbling head over heels into a deep pit. He glimpsed dozens of soft rays spilling across a white floor beneath him, crossing and recrossing each other from all directions. As his body turned over, he saw above him the narrow gallery walkway from which he had jumped.
Finally, Rikus’s shoulder struck the hard floor. He stretched out to his full length to absorb the impact along his entire body. At the same time, he slapped at the ground with his numb arm, trying to counter the force of his landing. If the effort did him any good, he could not tell. His head hit the stone floor with a resounding crack, his body exploded into bone-jarring agony, and the breath blasted from his lungs in a pained howl.
“My master wishes you dead,” Umbra hissed, his words echoing off the stony walls of the pit. They came to Rikus as though from a great distance. “So do I.”
Acting on instinct alone, the mul tried to scramble to his feet. Instead, he found that it was all he could do to draw breath into his laboring lungs. Every inch of his body stung and ached at the same time. His vision was blurred, he felt sick to his stomach, and his head throbbed.
For what seemed an eternity, the mul lay on the floor, trying to make sense of the wash of colors around him. Far above he saw the brown abyss of the vaulted ceiling. Beneath it was a beam of light that silhouetted Umbra’s fuzzy black form. The shadow creature was peering down at Rikus and speaking in a deep, rumbling voice. The mul could make no sense of the words.
Rikus felt his eyes closing. For a moment he wanted to let them. Nothing seemed more inviting than to slip away from this pain-racked body. He could not tell how far he had fallen, but it seemed more than twice Gaanon’s height. A tiny voice inside him seemed to say that even a mul could not fall so far and escape injury. There was no use fighting, so why not just let your eyes close and be done with the pain?
The mul would have none of that. He held his eyes open and forced himself to concentrate on the pain. As long as there was pain, he told himself, there was life.
Slowly, the mul’s vision cleared. Seeing that Umbra had disappeared from the railing above, Rikus rolled onto his belly and rose to his knees. The effort sent waves of pain shooting through his back, his ribs, and especially his head. He felt dizzy, his vision blurred again, and he remained kneeling until the feeling passed.
It looked to him as though he had landed in the citadel’s central room. In the middle of the chamber, near where he kneeled, a three-sided banister marked a narrow staircase that descended deeper into the fortress. Along the walls, thirteen hallways, set between high walls of dark marble, ran from the circular room like the spokes of a wheel. Each corridor ended at one of the thirteen balconies ringing the citadel’s second level.
Rikus tried to stand. His knee buckled and his collarbone popped, dropping him back to the floor in a torrent of blazing agony. The mul grabbed his arm and realized immediately that the fall had dislocated his shoulder. He could not tell what was wrong with his leg, for it throbbed with a terrible ache from the hip down to the ankle.
The mul knew that if he fought Umbra now, he would surely die.
Again he tried to stand, this time placing all his weight on the side of his body that had not struck the floor. To his relief, his leg held. Using his left arm, he picked up the Scourge of Rkard and put it in its scabbard, then braced the sword against the ground like a cane. He started to limp forward, heading toward a balcony.
“It’s too lat
e to run,” Umbra hissed, dropping into view from the murky underside of the gallery.
The shadow creature stood silhouetted against the creamy light that poured down the narrow hall at his back. He now stood just a little larger than Rikus, his wounds still oozing black fog and his blue eyes burning with an icy spark.
The mul turned toward a different corridor, but Umbra blocked the way before Rikus could escape. “Did I not hear you claim you would kill me?” the shadow beast chortled.
“I will,” the mul answered with a confidence he did not feel.
Rikus half-hopped and half-limped toward the narrow stairway in the center of the chamber, realizing Umbra would never permit him to flee from an obvious exit. The shadow creature rushed forward, his hiss echoing off the walls like that of a viper. Rikus threw himself at the stairs, screaming in pain even before be reached the opening.
The mul plunged into a black pit, then tucked his chin to his chest and bounced head over heels down a long flight of rocky stairs. By the time he hit the bottom, agony had numbed his mind and confused his thoughts. For several long moments, he could not figure out which way was up, for he had plummeted into a pool of darkness and could not find the light.
Just when Rikus thought he had fallen unconscious, his dwarven vision began to work. The walls and floors radiated the subdued blue tones of cold stone, and he could see that he had landed in a small foyer where three dark corridors met. Here and there, green gossamer tresses dangled from the ceiling, nearly sweeping the floor with the tips of their gauzy strands. Red, fist-sized crustaceans scuttled down the draping webs on six pinkish legs, their wicked claws held before their bodies and ready to seize any prey they touched.
Behind Rikus, Umbra’s resonant voice cursed in his strange gurgling language. The mul looked toward the eerie sound and saw the shadow creature’s silhouette at the top of the long stairwell, angrily glaring into the utter blackness that separated him from his quarry.
Rikus forced himself to stand. He could not help groaning in pain, but he did not think it would make any difference to the coming battle. Umbra knew that he was injured.
“If you want to fight, come down,” the mul called.
He used his sword scabbard to clear a wide circle of crustacean webs.
Umbra did not respond to the challenge. Instead, the shadow creature cursed again, then stepped away from the stairwell. Rikus resisted the temptation to climb the stairs, reasoning that if his enemy was reluctant to come after him, it was best to stay where he was.
When the shadow giant did not return within a few moments, Rikus inspected his battered body. His sword arm hung limp and useless at his side, the shoulder shoved a little less than a hand’s length forward of its socket. The mul thought it would be a simple thing to push it back into place, but he also knew it would hurt. In one of the fights that had convinced Maetan’s father ro sell him, the mul had allowed a young half-giant to hit him with a stone club. The result had been a similar injury, and he would never forget the pain he had suffered when the healer had returned the arm to its socket.
Before running the risk that the agony would render him unconscious, as it had the last time, Rikus turned his attention to his leg. From what he could see, it was in better shape. His ankle was swollen to the size of his calf, but it seemed to be in line with his shinbone. He placed a little weight on it, and a dull ache ran up as far as his thigh. There was none of the sharp pain that he had felt on the many occasions he had suffered broken bones in the arena, so the mul breathed a sigh of relief and went on with the inspection of the rest of his leg. Although the entire thing was extremely tender, especially around the knee, there were no unusual lumps or protrusions. He had probably just bruised the bone when he landed. The last time he suffered such an injury had been shortly before he escaped from Tithian’s slave pits, when he had allowed a dwarven friend to best him at cudgel practice.
Cursing himself for being such a softling, Rikus gradually placed more weight on the bruised leg. It throbbed to the bone, but did not collapse—even when the mul stood on it alone. He gritted his teeth against the pain and forced himself to keep weight on the leg until he became accustomed to the discomfort.
Finally, Rikus was ready to attend to his injured arm. He grabbed the dislocated shoulder and shoved it toward the socket, letting out a terrible scream as it popped back into the joint.
From the top of the stairs, Umbra called, “There’s no need to scream—yet.”
The mul looked toward the shadow creature’s voice and saw that Umbra had returned. In the palm of his good hand burned a brightly flickering flame.
At first Rikus was puzzled, though less by how Umbra could hold a burning flame in the palm of his hand than why the shadow giant would want to. The mul could not imagine that such a phantom was incapable of seeing in the dark, but that seemed the only explanation—until Rikus recalled how Maetan had summoned the creature.
A thin smile creased the mul’s lips. “What’s a shadow with no light?” he whispered, drawing the Scourge of Rkard.
Rikus pressed himself against the wall. The pain of resetting his shoulder had made him nauseous and dizzy. He felt like he would topple to the ground and fall unconscious at any moment. The mul clenched his teeth and fought to stay awake.
The flame in Umbra’s hand cast its flickering light over the floor of the small foyer, but it seemed to take the shadow giant forever to descend the dark stairwell. At last, Rikus saw a tongue of flame glimmer from around the corner.
The mul attacked, launching himself into the stairwell and swinging his sword at Umbra’s good arm. As Rikus’s torso met the shadow creature’s, a terrible chill rushed through him, compounding the agony already wracking his battered body. The shadow giant cursed, spewing black fog from his mouth that filled Rikus’s lungs with an icy, foul stench.
The mul continued his swing, slicing through the wrist of the dark beast’s good hand. As the hand and the fire it held dropped to the floor, Umbra cried out in surprise and pain. The flames continued to burn.
“I see the scorpion retains his sting,” Umbra hissed. He reached for Rikus with the stumps of both arms, spraying the mul with noxious black vapors that chilled him as badly as the shadow’s grasp had.
Rikus dropped to floor, throwing his body onto the fire in a desperate attempt to extinguish the light.
The mul landed on the flame squarely, screaming in pain as it seared the skin of his bare chest. An instant later, Umbra’s cold form settled over his back and a terrible chill sank deep into his flesh. The stairwell went dark and everything fell silent.
NINE
THE THIRTEENTH
CHAMPION
RIKUS LAY IN A STONE BOX THAT REEKED OF DECAY. Though it was barely large enough to hold his body, the mul’s captor had thoughtfully placed a jug of water on one side of the gladiator’s head and a loaf of moldy bread on the other. The Belt of Rank still girded his waist, and he had even been allowed to keep the Scourge of Rkard. The long sword lay atop his burning chest, his hands neatly folded over the hilt.
Rikus had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there, but he knew he wanted to leave. The damp chill pierced him to the bone, and his joints felt as though they were lined with frost. His shoulder throbbed with a deep, cold ache, and his sore leg felt like a slab of ice.
As miserable as he was, he did not think Umbra had taken him to the Black. The prison did not seem quite horrible enough to be the shadow giant’s home. The cold should have been biting, the kind that turned the skin white and froze toes and fingers solid. The darkness didn’t seem right, either. While it would have been difficult for the blackness to be more absolute, the mul’s dwarven vision allowed him to see the cold blue tones of his stone box, the yellow-hued bread, and his own reddish skin with perfect clarity. Whatever Umbra’s “Black” was like, the mul did not think he would be able to see in it with any form of vision.
“It makes no sense,” Rikus grumbled, more to hear the sound of hi
s own voice than because he thought it necessary to proclaim the fact.
Speaking the words make him conscious of his dry tongue and throat. He had no idea how long he had been trapped inside the box, but it had been long enough to make him thirsty.
The lid of the mul’s prison was only a few inches above his face, so there was no hope of sitting upright to drink from the water jug. He reached up and turned the vessel so that its small spout pointed toward his mouth, then tipped it slightly.
The fluid surged from the jug in a yellow-hued glob, filling the mul’s mouth with the sour taste of vinegar. Rikus reflexively sat up to spit out the gummy fluid, banging his forehead into cold stone. The lid budged open enough for him to glimpse a pale flicker of yellow light, then the foul liquid in his mouth slipped down the mul’s throat. He dropped back into the box and smashed his head against the bottom of the stone prison. The lid returned to its place with a sharp bang.
Where he had banged it into the stone, the mul’s skull ached terribly, and the foul water he had swallowed was already making him nauseous. Nevertheless, Rikus had to restrain himself from crying out in joy. He placed a hand on the lid and shoved with all his might. The stone slab slipped off the box and crashed to the floor with a loud boom that echoed off walls not too far distant.
Returning his good hand to the hilt of his sword, the mul sat up. He found himself in a small chamber with a low ceiling. It was dimly lit in a dozen different colors, each cast by a magnificent glowing gem set into the lid of a stone sarcophagus. Carved into the top of the twelve coffins was the bas-relief figure of a sleeping warrior. On the box next to Rikus’s, a huge citrine cast an eerie glow over the figure of a broaded-shouldered woman with close-cropped hair.
“A tomb!” Rikus gasped, a cold knot of fear forming in his chest. He did not voice the question that consumed all his thoughts: who had brought him here, and why?
The mul struggled out of his sarcophagus, his injured shoulder and leg aching terribly as he stepped over the coffin’s cracked cover. The carving on it represented a bald human with features so rugged and blocky that he might have been a dwarf, if not for his round ears and long bushy beard. His eyes were sunken and wild, with a heavy brow covered by a thick line of hair. Though the dark orbs were made of stone, they seemed almost live with ire and hatred.
The Crimson Legion Page 16