The Crimson Legion

by Denning, Troy

  The wraith threw herself at Rikus. In midair, she changed from an armored knight into a strange, man-sized horror that resembled nothing the mul had ever seen. Its underside was protected by a black carapace, save for a snapping, red-rimmed maw that stank of carrion and offal. This mouth was surrounded by six tentacles, each ending in a gnarled hand with three sharp claws. The thing had no head that the mul could see, merely a dozen eyes located at various places along the lip of the black shell guarding its body.

  Desperate to escape, Rikus imagined himself turning to air. A surge of energy rose from deep within his body, and he suddenly felt very weak and tired. The beast landed over him, its tentacles holding its mouth mere inches from its body. It lowered itself until Rikus began to choke on its stinking breath, then it opened its maw for the bite of death.

  Rikus felt an eerie tingle as he changed to air, then the monster’s jaws snapped shut. They passed right through the mul’s intangible body and clacked closed without causing him any pain or injury.

  The figure over him became Tamar again, her ruby-red eyes glowing from behind her helm’s visor. Rikus felt completely exhausted, and despite the terrible danger, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open.

  “If you fight like this, you die,” Tamar hissed, a gray fog billowing from behind her mask. “Now sleep.”

  “What about Neeva?” Rikus demanded. His words whispered like the wind, and even he could barely understand them.

  “Forget about Neeva,” the wraith growled, spewing gray mist into his eyes.

  Rikus sank into oblivion. Thoughts of Neeva, the Scourge of Rkard, even Tamar, fled before the waves of exhaustion that overtook the mul.

  Later, someone called his name, and Rikus felt the warm glow of the morning sun on his face. The air was rich with the honey-scent of the chiffon tree, and a cool breeze danced across his leathery skin.

  “Rikus, stop waiting. Get up.”

  It was K’kriq’s voice.

  The mul opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the olive-tinged sky of early morning. He sat up and immediately looked about. He found nothing but his belt and sword, a dozen full waterskins, and a pile of diamond-shaped scales that K’kriq had discarded after eating the lirrs.

  “Where’s Neeva?” the mul demanded, rising. “Is she hurt?”

  “Neeva with Caelum,” the thri-kreen reported, clicking his mandibles impatiently. “Caelum with pack. Both healthy to hunt.”

  “And where is my pack?” Rikus asked, his eyes searching the oasis for signs of his legion. Save for himself, K’kriq, and a few winged lizards, the pond was deserted.

  “Styan take pack yesterday,” K’kriq explained. “Say to tell you message: ‘legion cannot wait. Maetan call reinforcements to village.’ Styan say you catch legion today. Fight soon.”

  “Styan!” Rikus yelled, snatching his belt and sword off the red moss. He hardly noticed that, save for the festering sore over his heart, all of his injuries and wounds had been healed. “Who is he to say when my legion marches?”

  K’kriq slung the waterskins over his four arms. “Styan become pack leader when you die at the citadel,” he explained.

  “I didn’t die,” Rikus snapped, starting northward. “The first thing I’ll do when I catch up to the legion is show Styan—and everyone else—that I’m still very much alive!”

  ELEVEN

  MAKLA

  “STOP WHERE YOU ARE!” ORDERED THE SENTRY.

  The dwarf stood behind a low rock wall, moving his long spear back and forth between Rikus and K’kriq. Beside the stocky guard, a half-elf gladiator groaned as she heaved a small boulder atop the barrier. She gave the mul and the thri-kreen a casual glance, then turned to pick up another heavy stone.

  “You know who I am,” Rikus snarled, scowling at the scene before him.

  In both directions, gladiators were laboring to encircle the camp with a wall of stones. Caelum’s dwarves were spaced every twenty or thirty feet, their eyes dutifully peering into the lengthening shadows of dusk. In the center of camp, the templars stood in a tight circle, their attention turned inward toward the glowing light of a roaring campfire.

  After waiting another moment for the dwarven sentry to move his spear away, the mul angrily slapped the shaft aside and leaped over the rock wall. He grabbed the dwarf by the throat and lifted him off the ground. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “I have my orders,” the dwarf gasped, reaching for the hand-axe on his belt. “No one is permitted to enter camp without Styan’s permission.”

  Before the sentry could free his axe, Rikus passed the dwarf to K’kriq, saying, “If he calls out or draws that axe, kill him.”

  The thri-kreen accepted the sentry with three arms, clacking his mandibles in anticipation. The dwarf moved his hand away from his weapon, but did not give up on trying to stop Rikus from entering camp. “You’re to wait here until Styan prepares a proper reception,” he said.

  Rikus ignored the dwarf and went to the half-elf gladiator laboring to build this section of the wall. Taking a heavy boulder from her hands, he asked, “What’s happening, Drewet?”

  The half-elf frowned in confusion. “We’re building a wall,” she said.

  “What for?” Rikus asked. “And why are gladiators the only ones working on it?”

  Drewet shrugged. “Because those are the orders Styan gave.”

  “Styan!” Rikus bellowed. He turned and threw the boulder he had taken from Drewet, knocking a great hole in the section of wall that she had been laboring to build. All of the gladiators nearby stopped working and looked toward the disturbance. “Why would anyone do what he says?” Rikus demanded.

  The half-elf raised her peaked eyebrows. “Because he’s your second-in-command, of course.”

  “Second-in-command!” Rikus thundered. “Is that what he told you?”

  “He told us that after you disappeared into the citadel,” she said, her brown eyes now flashing with anger. “With Neeva and Caelum staying behind to wait for you, it seemed natural.”

  “Natural? You thought I would put a templar in charge of my legion?” Rikus yelled. “So he could treat you like a bunch of slaves?”

  Without waiting for a response, he faced the gladiators nearby. “The days when we build walls for templars are gone!” he roared. “Pass the word and come with me—Styan has some apologies to make!”

  Leaving K’kriq to hold the dwarven sentry at the edge of camp, Rikus took Drewet and marched toward the templars. As word of Styan’s deception was passed, a long series of angry shouts sounded around the perimeter of camp. By the time the mul neared Styan’s company, an angry mob of gladiators was following him, and the templars had turned to face outward. When Rikus approached, they drew their short swords.

  “Stand aside or die,” Rikus said. He did not draw his own weapon, fearing that, as angry as he was, he would use it. “I’m in no mood for defiance.”

  “Styan’s orders are to let only you—”

  Rikus lashed out and smashed the speaker’s nose with a fist. As the astonished templar fell to the ground, the mul raised his blood-covered hand and said, “Styan is not in command—I am. The next man who questions that will die.”

  Drewet stepped to one side of the mul, then Gaanon pushed his way forward to stand at the other. Like Rikus, they did not draw their weapons. After a moment’s hesitation, the templars reluctantly opened a narrow lane through their ranks. Flanked by Gaanon and Drewet, Rikus pushed his way through the crowd, widening the path as he went.

  At the center of the crowd, the mul found Styan seated on a large, square stone that someone—no doubt a gladiator—had moved into place to serve as a stool for the templar. The mul was glad to see that Jaseela, Neeva, and Caelum had not chosen to lend Styan legitimacy by joining him at his camp.

  As Rikus stepped toward the fire, Styan looked up and fixed his sunken eyes on the mul’s face. “It pleases me that you have caught up to us,” he said, his face washed in orange fir
elight. “We would have missed you at tomorrow’s battle—”

  “Stand up,” Rikus ordered.

  Styan glanced around the crowd, his brow furrowed as he tried to judge the mood of both his templars and Rikus’s gladiators. Finally, he waved his wrinkled hand at a place near the foot of his rock. “Sit,” he said.

  Rikus grabbed the templar by his unbound gray hair and jerked him to his feet.

  “You misbegotten spawn of an elven gutter wench!” Styan yelled. Several templars stepped forward to defend their leader, but the old man waved them off. Instead, he looked to Rikus and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Rikus jerked Styan forward, then thrust him toward Drewet and the rest of the gladiators. “Apologize, and tell your templars to do the same.”

  “For what?” the templar demanded. “For keeping the waterskins of our warriors full and not wasting their lives on foolish attacks?”

  “For treating my gladiators like slaves,” Rikus snarled. “Tyr is a free city, and this is a free legion. One warrior does not labor while another tells jokes by the fire.”

  “Well said!” shouted a gladiator.

  Another added, “Since you disappeared, Rikus, they’ve been sleeping while we work!”

  “Apologize,” Rikus said. He put his mouth close to the templar’s ear and added, “Then I’ll punish you for usurping my command, and for all the lies you’ve told.”

  Styan’s face went pale and, in a trembling voice, he said, “Never!”

  Somewhere in the crowd of templars, a man’s voice called, “I’ll not beg forgiveness of any slave!”

  “Then you’ll die!” came the immediate response.

  The chime of clashing weapons followed, and the unseen templar voiced his death scream. The night was filled with angry shouts and shrieks of pain as the two Tyrian companies tore into each other. Bodies began to fall one after the other—more of them templar than gladiator.

  Styan spun around to face Rikus, leaving a handful of his hair in the mul’s grasp. “See what you’ve done?” he demanded. “We should be fighting Urikites, not each other.”

  “From what I’ve seen, your men are as bad as Urikites. I won’t miss them, and neither will Tyr.”

  “It’s not that simple,” spat the templar. “What of the dwarves? They follow me.”

  “Then they die with you,” Rikus answered, reaching for his steel dagger. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “Wait,” Styan said, gently laying a hand on the mul’s wrist. He stared at Rikus for a moment longer, listening to his templars cry out as they fell to the mul’s angry gladiators. “You’d do it,” he said. “You’d sacrifice half your legion to retain command of it.”

  “Only the useless half,” Rikus answered, drawing his dagger.

  Styan sneered at the weapon. “That won’t be necessary.” He turned around and raised his hands, then yelled, “I apologize, freed men of Tyr!”

  When only a few of the combatants stopped fighting, Rikus bellowed, “That’s enough! Stop!”

  Rikus’s powerful voice reached the ears of many more warriors than had Styan’s, and, as they passed the mul’s command on to their fellows, the melee gradually subsided. Soon, templar and gladiator alike were facing Styan, and the only sounds that could be heard in the mob were the moans of the wounded.

  “I apologize,” Styan said, his weary eyes on Drewet’s face. “My templars apologize. We did not mean to offend you or any other freed slave.”

  Drewet glanced at Rikus with a questioning look in her eyes. When the mul nodded, she looked back to the templar. “I accept your apology, for myself and for my fellows.”

  A tense silence hung over the crowd. No one moved to help the injured. Both companies seemed to sense that, although a truce had been reached, the matter of the legion’s leadership had not yet been resolved. Rikus kept his black eyes fixed on Styan, waiting for the old man to acknowledge his defeat.

  Finally, Styan faced the mul and, in a weak voice, he asked, “As for usurping your command, what shall my punishment be?”

  Someone in the ranks of the gladiators threw a coiled whip forward, and it landed at the templar’s feet. “The lash!”

  Rikus nodded, then bent down and handed the whip to Drewet. “Twenty-five strokes,” he said. “And when you give them, remember all the times a templar has whipped you.”

  “I will,” Drewet said, taking the coiled strap.

  Gaanon took Styan to the boulder the templar had been using as a throne. There, the half-giant pulled the old man’s cassock off, then laid him over the stone.

  As Drewet took the first stroke, the crowd began to turn away. The matter had been decided and, gladiator and templar alike, they had seen enough men whipped during Kalak’s reign not to enjoy the sight of flayed skin.

  At the base of the ash-covered mountain stood Makla, a small hamlet surrounded on three sides by a high stockade of mekillot ribs. Inside this barrier lay dozens of slave pits, each enclosed by a mudbrick wall capped with jagged shards of obsidian. Scattered haphazardly among the pens were the long barracks that housed the garrison, as well as the slovenly huts of the craftsmen who kept the slave-keepers supplied with whips, ropes, and other utensils of bondage.

  At the core of the village, a trio of marble mansions marked three sides of a public square. There was a great cistern of steaming water at its center. A clay duct ran from this basin toward the fourth side of the plaza, ending at the tip of a short wooden pier. The pier sat over the shallows of the Lake of Golden Dreams, a body of water whose vastness was lost in the clouds of foul-smelling steam that rose from its boiling depths.

  “It seems awfully quiet,” Rikus said, glancing upward. Fingers of predawn light were already shooting across the sky, casting a faint, eerie glimmer over the mountainous terrain below.

  The mul’s companions did not answer, for they were all staring spellbound at the sulfur-colored lake. No one in the legion had ever seen so much water in one place before, and the spectacular sight had taken their minds off the coming battle.

  “By now, the outbound quarry gangs should be readying to leave,” Rikus said, trying to direct his lieutanants’ attention to the matter at hand.

  “Maybe nobody’s going out,” Gaanon offered. In imitation of the robe Rikus wore to conceal Tamar’s ruby, the half-giant had sewn two wool blankets together and slung them over his shoulders like a cape. “The highlands look dangerous,” he continued, pointing a huge finger east of the village.

  In the direction Gaanon indicated rose a range of fire-belching mountains covered by thick layers of cinder and coarse-grained rocks. Near the summits of many peaks, lakes of molten stone cast a dome of orange light into the dark sky. In the winding canyons, fiery curtains of red incandescence hung over slow-moving rivers of burning rock. It was in that barren wilderness of cinder and lava that the quarry gangs wandered for days at a time, searching out and chipping away long ropes of glassy black obsidian.

  Rikus said, “The Smoking Crown always looks dangerous, Gaanon. That wouldn’t stop the quarry masters from sending out their gangs.”

  “What does it matter?” Neeva demanded, casting a sour look at Rikus. Though Caelum had healed the wound on her stomach, it was still marked by an ugly red scar. “You marched us up here in the dark so we could attack at dawn. Let’s not lose the advantage of surprise you kept talking about.”

  “Fine,” Rikus snapped. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The mul stepped to the top of the ridge, then looked down the other side at his silent legion. With the exception of the dwarves, who stubbornly remained standing, the warriors all lay on their backs, their feet braced in the loose ash to keep from sliding down the steep slope. In the entire group, no one stirred or even uttered so much as a whisper.

  “Get ready!” Rikus ordered, keeping his voice low enough that the morning wind would not carry it over Makla. As the warriors struggled to their feet, the mul went back down the hillside and sent his subcomman
ders up the slope to organize the army. Neeva started to follow, but Rikus stopped her. He had tried to talk to her last night, but apparently angry about her injury, she had refused to speak with him.

  The mul waited for the others to move out of earshot, then said, “I don’t want to go into this battle with bad blood between us.” He gestured at the long scar on her stomach. “You know I’d never attack you on purpose.”

  “I know you didn’t mean to cut me,” Neeva answered, meeting his eyes with a cold gaze. “That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “I wouldn’t!” Rikus snapped. “What do I have to do to prove it?”

  “Explain yourself,” Neeva said. “Who were you yelling at when you attacked me? It was like you were in a trance.” She pointed at his left breast, where the robe hid the festering sore on his chest. “And why can’t Caelum rid you of that ruby?”

  The mul dropped his gaze to his feet. “I didn’t tell you the truth before. The gem has nothing to do with Umbra,” he said, almost mumbling.

  Neeva was silent for a moment, then demanded, “Why’d you lie to me?”

  “Because Caelum was there,” Rikus said, meeting her gaze. “If I say how I came by this stone, you’ve got to promise not to tell him.”

  “You let Caelum try to cure you without knowing what he faced?” Neeva gasped.

  Don’t tell her! Tamar urged, her voice coming to Rikus on the rhythm of his own heart.

  Quiet! Rikus commanded. To Neeva, he said, “Swear, or I can’t tell you.”

  Neeva snorted in disgust, but touched her hand to the waterskin dangling from her shoulder. “I swear on my life.”

  If she knows, she’ll tell the dwarf, warned the wraith. I’ll kill her before I allow it.

  No! Rikus objected.

  And I’ll do it with your hands, the wraith assured him. That’s why I made you wound her with your sword—so you’d know I could.

  “Well?” Neeva demanded.

  The mul looked away. “I can’t tell you.”

  Neeva scowled. “I swore on my life,” she said. “Isn’t that good enough?”