Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 2 - The Crimson Legion (7 page)

Rikus felt himself falling, and Neeva cried out at his side. He shoved her forward with
all his strength, sending her sprawling half-a-dozen steps ahead of himself. An instant
later, the mul landed face-first in the sand.

The blackness did not overtake the rest of his body. He lay sprawled on the dune, groaning
loudly as his mind struggled to make sense of the contradicting sensations of scalding
sand beneath his torso and the icy numbness in his legs. Rikus looked over his shoulder
and saw that Umbra was gone, or rather had spread his entire body over the gentle slope.
The mul lay at the edge of the shadowy form, his legs lost in the blackness behind him. In
addition to himself and Neeva, Drewet and perhaps six more gladiators had escaped the
frigid cloud, some of them by narrower margins than the mul. Most of the company had been
engulfed.

Neeva limped back to Rikus, then kneeled at his head and asked, “Are you hurt?”

“I can't feel my legs,” Rikus answered. As he spoke, a terrible thought occurred to him.
“Pull me out, please!” Rikus peered over his shoulder at the darkness beneath his thighs.
“My legs must be gone!”

“Calm yourself,” Neeva said, gripping the mul under the arms. “Everything's going to be
fine.”

She pulled him from the shadow. His legs were as white as ivory, but at least they
remained attached. The mul put a hand to his thigh. It was colder than anything he had
ever felt, and there was no sensation in the leg.

“What's wrong with them?” the mul cried, wondering if the heat would ever return to his
frozen flesh.

As he spoke, Umbra's black shadow shrank to the size of a normal man. Where the shadow
beast had lain, the sand was clean and sparkling. There was not a single corpse, stray
weapon, or even a puddle of blood to suggest that there had ever been a battle on the dune.

The shadow slipped down the slope and assumed his rightful place at Maetan's feet. The
Urikite commander hardly seemed to notice, studying the site with an air of distaste.
Finally, a small sandspout rose around his body, hiding the mindbender from the mul's
sight.

Rikus pushed off the ground and drew his numb legs up beneath him, then tried to run down
the slope. His knees remained stiff as stones,
pitching him face-first into the burning dune.

Maetan's sandspout rose high off the ground, then drifted out into the valley and hung
over the heads of a throng of Urikite soldiers that was being pursued by a mob of
bloodthirsty gladiators. For a few moments, Rikus feared that Maetan was awaiting an
opportunity to launch some devastating mental attack, but at last the whirlwind traced a
semicircle in the air and shot up the valley.

Neeva helped Rikus to his feet. “I hate to admit it, but I'm a little surprised,” she
said, slipping his bulky arm over her shoulders. “We won.”

“Not yet,” Rikus said, watching the sandspout fade from view. “Not until we have Maetan.”

Village in the Sand

The thirsty Tyrians stood beneath an arch of golden sandstone, taking what shelter they
could from the white-hot sky. Their eyes were fixed far below, on the slowly spinning
sails of a small windmill. With each rotation, the mill pumped a few gallons of cool,
clear water from a deep well and dumped it into a covered cistern.

Unfortunately, the cistern stood in the middle of a small village. The plaza surrounding
it was basically round in shape, with a jagged edge of curving salients that resembled
tongues of flame. The circle was paved with cobblestones of crimson sandstone, and the
whole thing reminded Rikus too much of the scorching ball of fire hanging in the center of
the midday sky.

The huts enclosing the plaza also resembled the sun, with rounded red flagstone walls. The
buildings stood only about five feet high, and none were covered by any semblance of a
roof. From his position on the hillside, Rikus could look directly down into their
interiors and see the stone tables, benches, and beds with which they were furnished. Of
course, on Athas there was little need to protect one's belongings from rain, but the mul
thought it foolish that the residents left themselves and their belongings exposed to the
brutal sun all day long.

The huts, standing in a series of concentric rings, were enclosed by a single low wall of
red brick. At the moment, the wall was manned by eight hundred Urikite troops. Two hundred
more stood at the edges of the plaza, their spears pointed inward toward a frightened mass
of men and women huddling together in the circle.

The prisoners were all short, standing only about chest high to their guards, and with
squat, angular builds that made even Rikus look undermuscled by comparison. Their bodies
were completely hairless and sun-darkened to deep mahogany, save for a patch of orange
skin covering the ridge of thick bone along the top of their heads.

Towering above the dwarves, in the center of the circle next to the cistern, stood Maetan
of Family Lubar and four large bodyguards. Though the distance separating them was great
enough that Rikus could not make out the Urikite's expression, the mul could see that the
mindbender was sipping water from a wooden dipper and staring up at the arch where he and
his companions stood.

The mul shifted his gaze from his enemy to the terrain surrounding the dwarven town. On
the side closest to Rikus, slabs of orange-streaked sandstone, speckled with purple
spikeball and silvery fans of goldentip, rose at steep angles to become the foothills of
the Ringing Mountains. The other side of the village was dominated by a barren mound of
copper-colored sand.

Thirsty Tyrian warriors covered the dune and the sandstone slabs, sitting in plain sight
and staring down at the cistern with yearning eyes. In the olive-tinged hours just after
dawn, Rikus's legion had taken up positions surrounding the village and had been awaiting
the order to attack ever since. But with the Urikites waiting for his troops to make the
first move, Rikus was in no hurry to give the order.

“If we attack, Maetan kills the dwarves,” the mul growled, shaking his head and facing the
five people with him. “If we don't, we die of thirst.”

The Tyrian army had run out of water two days ago, after five days of tracking Maetan and
fighting a running battle to keep him from regathering the Urikite army. Thanks to his mul
blood, Rikus was not suffering too badly from the lack of water. The same was true of
K'kriq, who only drank once every ten or twelve days in the best of times.

Unfortunately, the rest of their companions were not so hardy. Neeva's full lips were
cracked and bleeding, her green eyes sunken and gray, and her skin peeling away in red
flakes. Jaseela's black hair had become stiff as straw and the tip of her swollen tongue
protruded from the drooping side of her mouth. Styan's throat was so constricted that he
could hardly gasp when he tried to speak.

Gaanon was the worst off, though. Because of his great size, he required more water than
most warriors, and thirst was taking its toll on him faster than anyone else. His throat
was so swollen that it choked off his breath if he didn't consciously hold it open. Simply
taking a few steps strained his big body so severely that he had to lie motionless in
order to calm his pounding heart. To make matters worse, the wound in the half-giant's
thigh had festered, and now a steady dribble of yellow pus ran from the puncture. Rikus
had no doubt that Gaanon would die if he did not have water soon.

“I don't know what to do,” the mul admitted.

“There is only one thing we can do,” Styan whispered. Still dressed in his black cassock,
he was the only one of the group wearing anything more than a breechcloth, halter, and a
light cape. He claimed the heavy cloak trapped a layer of moisture next to his skin, but
Rikus had his doubts.

“Yes,” Jaseela agreed. “We must leave.”

“Are you mad?” Styan croaked.

“I won't be responsible for the death of an entire village,” the noblewoman countered,
waving her hand toward the crowded plaza below.

“They're only dwarves,” objected Styan. “And crazier than most, judging from their
village.”

Rikus raised his hand to silence them. Their comments had provided no help, for he was
already well aware of the situation: either his legion died, or the dwarves did. “What do
you think?” he asked Neeva.

She did not hesitate. “This is our fight, not that of the dwarves. We can't sacrifice them
to save ourselves.”

“We're also saving Tyr,” Styan added.

“You care less about Tyr than you do about the dwarves,” Jaseela hissed.

“That's enough.” Rikus stepped between them. “I know what we have to do.”

“What?” gasped the templar. From his hostile inflection, Rikus knew that Styan would not
be happy with any answer that did not mean water.

Rikus faced the village again, where Maetan was wasting water by pouring it over the heads
of his captives. “We'll capture the cisternÑwithout letting Maetan kill anyone.”

“It's well to say such things,” Styan said, “but as a practical matterÑ”

“We'll try!” Rikus snapped, keeping his gaze fixed on Maetan. Though he did not say so
aloud, he feared that Maetan would wipe out the dwarven village even if his legion left.
At the very least, the hungry Urikites would loot the dwarves to the point of starvation.

“How?” It was Jaseela's soft voice that asked the question.

The mul had no answer. Not for the first time that day, his thoughts turned to Sadira and
Agis, but he quickly tried to put them out of his mind. By now, they were halfway back to
Tyr. No matter how much he lamented the absence of the half-elf's sorcery or the noble's
mastery of the Way, he and his legion had to solve this problem on their own.

For what seemed an eternity, Rikus simply stood and watched Maetan dump water on the
dwarves. Finally, a plan occurred to the mul. “We're going to surrender,” he said, facing
his companions.

“What?” they asked together.

Rikus nodded. “It's the only way to put ourselves between the Urikites and dwarves before
the fight starts.”

“This is beyond belief!” Styan said, his strained voice cracking with anger.

“Without weapons, we'll be at a severe disadvantage,” Jaseela said. “We'll lose a lot of
warriors.”

“Not if we lead with gladiators,” Rikus offered. “In the pits, before you learn to fight
with weapons, you learn to fight without them.” He glanced at Neeva and asked, “What do
you think?”

The big woman remained quiet for several moments. Finally, she asked, “Are you doing this
because you're afraid we won't catch Maetan again?”

“If Maetan was all I'm after, we would have attacked by now,” Rikus snapped. Neeva's
question hurt more than it should have, and he realized there was some truth to what she
implied. Still, he thought he was making the right decision. “Besides, this is the only
way I see to give both us and the dwarves a chance to survive.”

When Neeva offered no further argument, Styan said, “The templars won't have any part of
it.”

“That's your choice,” Rikus said. “If you think this is a bad idea, I won't ask you to
send your company along.”

“We're ready to fight, but for TyrÑnot any dwarven village,” he sneered. The templar
reached into his pocket and withdrew the small crystal of green olivine that would allow
him to contact Tithian. “And I don't think the king will want us to sacrifice our warriors
for a bunch of dwarves, either. I warrant we'll have a new commander in a matter ofÑ”

Rikus clasped the templar's hand. “This isn't the king's decision,” he said, prying the
stone from Styan's fingers. “You have only two choices. Join us and help, or wait here and
hope we succeed.”

Styan stared at Rikus, then jerked his hand out of the mul's grasp. “I'll wait.”

Paying the templar no further attention, Rikus slipped the stone into his leather belt
pouch, then gave Neeva and Jaseela instructions to be passed along to the others. Rikus
laid his cahulaks aside, then moved to leave.

K'kriq stepped to his side and started down the sandstone slope with him. Rikus stopped
and shook his head, “I have to go alone, K'kriq,” he said. Though the thri-kreen was
quickly learning Tyrian, Rikus spoke in Urikite. He did not want any misunderstandings.

The thri-kreen shook his bubble-eyed head and laid a restraining claw on the mul's
shoulder. “Pack mates.”

Rikus removed the claw. “Yes, but don't come until the fight starts,” he said, starting
down the hill again.

K'kriq ignored his order and followed. The mul stopped and frowned at the thri-kreen. As
much as he valued the mantis-warrior's combat prowess, the mul remembered how easily
Maetan had taken control of K'kriq's mind in the last battle. He did not want to risk the
same thing happening before the fight was in full swing.

Deciding to put his order in terms that K'kriq seemed to understand, Rikus pointed at
Gaanon. “If I'm a pack mate, so is Gaanon,” he said. “Stay here and protect him.”

The thri-kreen looked from the mul to the half-giant. “Protect?” His mandibles hung open
in confusion.

“Guard, like your young,” the mul explained.

“Gaanon no hatchling!” K'kriq returned, cocking his head at Rikus. Nevertheless, the
thri-kreen turned away and went to the half-giant's side, shaking his head as though the
mul were crazy.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Rikus descended the sandstone slope alone. As he approached
the village gate, which did not stand even as tall as he did, he raised his hands above
his head to show that he was unarmed. The mul could have reached the top of the village
wall without leaving his feet, and caught the railing atop the gatehouse with a good leap.

When Rikus had reached a comfortable speaking distance, a Urikite officer showed his
bearded face above the wall. “That's far enough,” he called, using a heavily accented
version of the common trade dialect. “What do you want?”