The Crimson Legion

EIGHT THE CITADEL

A sharp pop sounded a few feet away, near the granite outcropping that dominated the center of the gorge. A fleck of scarlet light appeared in midair and began to hiss and crackle. In the blink of an eye, it grew into an orb of crimson flame the size of a fist.

“Get down!” Rikus screamed.

Temporarily abandoning his pursuit of the fleeing Urikites, the mul dropped to his belly. Neeva landed at his side. All around them, gladiators cursed as they banged their elbows, knees, and even heads on rocky points and edges. The red ball grew into a roaring globe that blotted out the sun itself, its mottled surface crossed and recrossed by rivers of orange flame. A black seam appeared on the sphere’s underside and slowly lengthened. At any moment, Rikus expected the joint to burst and shower his warriors with liquid fire.

Instead, the rift opened slowly, revealing a fiery yellow interior so bright that it hurt the mul’s eyes to look at it. The silhouette of a woman’s form appeared in this crack, then dropped out of the ball and landed on the rocky ground in a crumpled heap. Wisps of smoke rose from her blackened tabard. Her face had turned as red as the sun, and her scorched hair hung over her shoulders in stiff and brittle locks.

“Jaseela!” Rikus gasped, rising to his feet.

As the mul rushed toward the woman’s scorched form, K’kriq dropped out of the sphere. The thri-kreen landed next to the noblewoman and used his body to shield her from the heat of the orb. Caelum came next, then the globe closed up and began to shrink. By the time Rikus reached the three warriors, the ball was gone.

The trio stank of singed hair and burned cloth. The heat had darkened even K’kriq’s tough carapace and raised small white blisters where Jaseela’s skin was exposed. Only Caelum had emerged unharmed, though his lips were swollen and cracked.

As soon as she saw Rikus, Jaseela’s tongue appeared from between her lips as she tried to say something. He kneeled at her side and placed his ear to her lips. Her words were so faint that, had he not been holding the Scourge of Rkard, the mul would not have heard them.

“Why didn’t you warn me about the shadow?” she gasped.

The mul glanced around the gorge. He and his gladiators had just followed the Urikites through the gap in the shimmering curtain, so he had not yet had time to inspect the area. Still, he realized, this was where Jaseela’s company should have made its stand. Instead of a battlefield, he saw a barren expanse of rocks. There was not even a single body to suggest that the noblewoman’s company had fought here.

“What shadow?” Rikus demanded. “Where’s your company?”

When Jaseela could not find the strength to answer, Caelum did it for her. “Umbra destroyed all of them,” said the dwarf. “I tried to warn her.”

Rikus laid the noblewoman’s head down, then summoned a pair of gladiators. “Take her to the oasis. She needs water and shade.” The mul looked to Caelum and K’kriq next. “You two go with her. You need rest too.”

K’kriq crossed his antennae. “Hunt not over!”

At the same time, Caelum frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“Avenge Jaseela,” Rikus said, waving his warriors after the Urikites. “Finish the hunt.”

“Didn’t you hear me?’ Caelum objected, following along. “You can’t go after the Urikites. Umbra is with them!”

“And he’s hurt,” Rikus said. “If I’m ever going to kill him, it’ll be today.”

“But he breached the sun’s fence!” Caelum exclaimed. When Rikus paid him no mind, he added, “If more of our warriors die, it will be on your head!”

“You’re wasting your words,” Neeva said. “Go on to the oasis and find out how the templars and dwarves are faring.”

Caelum fell silent and stared at Rikus in exasperation. At last the dwarf turned his red eyes on Neeva. “If you’re with him in this foolishness, then so am I.”

A short distance from the gorge, Maetan of Urik stood before an ancient citadel, awaiting the return of his defeated legion. The fortress’s builders had chiseled the structure from living rock, shaping it like a great, top-heavy argosy that sprang from the hill’s limestone flanks. Four stone wheels, each twice the height of the half-giant, were carved into its foundation and decorated with concentric rings of stone flowers.

Above these unturning wheels, a square platform supported a massive edifice of tall columns and balconies with gaping, dark doors behind them. Lifelike statues of male and female humans, all armed with fanciful weapons like double-edged scythes or four-bladed battle-axes, stood scattered over these balconies.

At the top of the citadel was a deck with a single balcony that overlooked the front of the temple. On the prow of this loge stood the huge statue of a handsome man with a great mane of hair and a tightly curled beard. Unlike the figures below, he carried no weapons, and a pair of large leathery wings sprouted from his back.

“Is this edifice so interesting?” asked Umbra, gliding across the rocky canyon floor to join his master.

Maetan looked away from the citadel. Behind the shadow giant, the first wave of his defeated legion was just rounding the sharp bend that hid the rest of the gorge from view.

Looking back to Umbra, Maetan observed, “You failed.” The mindbender made no comment on the dark vapor oozing from the shadow giant’s wounds. He had been watching the battle through his servant’s eyes and knew how he had come by them.

“What did you expect?” Umbra asked. “Your men are cowards.”

“When they are led by a fool,” the mindbender retorted.

“You call the Tyrian mul a fool, yet his warriors would rather die than retreat,” observed Umbra.

Maetan bit back a caustic reply, for he knew how little time he had to waste arguing with Umbra. The Tyrians were following his legion up the canyon, and it would be only a minute or so before they were standing where he was now. Instead, the mindbender pointed at the ancient citadel, then said, “Perhaps my soldiers will prove braver inside a fortress.”

The corners of Umbra’s blue mouth turned down. “They will be trapped,” he said. “At the most, they will last seven days before running out of food and water.”

“That will be long enough. I need only ten days to return to my family’s estate,” Maetan said.

“And what will you do there? Explain to your family how you sullied its precious honor?” asked Umbra.

“No,” Maetan answered. “I will redeem it. He reached down and picked up the shoulder satchel that he had prepared for himself, then slipped his hand inside and patted the cover of the book Book of the Kemalok Kings. “Stay with the cowards until they die,” he said. “Perhaps your presence will convince the dwarves that what they seek is inside the citadel.”

The mindbender took a deep, steady breath, calling upon the Way to aid with his escape. He pointed a finger at the top of the cliff and imagined that all the space between himself and that location did not exist. A surge of energy rose from deep within himself, flowing outward to make what he wished temporarily so. When he opened his eyes again, where there had been only flakes of orange sandstone a moment earlier, Maetan saw a silvery tuft of ground holly growing from the crevice of a broken slab of limestone. It was, he knew, the terrain at the top of the gorge.

Maetan started to step onto the clifftop, then decided to give Umbra a last instruction. He stopped halfway there, with one foot on the sandstone in the bottom of the gorge and the other planted squarely on the limestone atop the cliff.

To Umbra, it looked as though the mindbender had divided his body in half. One part stood before him in the gorge, and the other stood far overhead, barely visible at the top of the cliff.

“One more thing,” Maetan said. “Kill the mul.”

Umbra raised the throbbing stump of his missing hand. “Nothing would please me more.”

The mindbender nodded, then stepped all the way onto the clifftop and left the gorge altogether. Umbra took a moment to look up and watch his master climb away from the cliff edge, then turned his attention to the task of rallying Maetan’s cowardly soldiers. Already, the first Tyrians had appeared at the bend and were busily hacking down the slowest Urikites from behind.

“Come with me!” called Umbra, moving toward the citadel. “You will be safe in here!”

The shadow giant’s lie worked easily, for the panicked soldiers were eager to seize any hope of salvation. There was no obvious entrance to the fortress, but Umbra could see a stairway in the deep hollow between the great wagon’s stone wheels. Followed by the fastest of Maetan’s cowards, he led the way to these steps and began climbing.

They passed though an opening on the lowest deck and came out on a balcony on the first level. In the middle of this loge was the lifelike statue of a fully armored woman smashing a spiked club into the floor. Beneath this club lay a shattered, sun-bleached skull, and scattered over the rest of the deck were the splintered bones of another half-dozen skeletons.

Umbra slipped over the bones silently, moving toward the door that stood at the back of the small balcony. He had time to glimpse a bright room at the end of a long hallway before a gray, insubstantial form appeared at the end of the corridor and drifted toward him.

“A wraith!” Umbra hissed.

He retreated from the corridor immediately, though not because he was frightened. No being from the Black had need to fear a wraith, for undead spirits were themselves merely shadows of the living. If it detected Umbra at all, the wraith would regard the shadow giant as a human might an oasis spirit: something dimly sensed and best left alone. Unfortunately, the same would not be true for the Urikites. The wraith would sense the life pulsing in their veins and try to drive them away.

The gray silhoutte slid past Umbra and slipped over the woman’s statue like a pall. The stone sculpture darkened to a dusky shade of brown, and its blank eyes suddenly glowed with a ghastly red light. As the first Urikite tried to slip past, the stony woman cried, “No!”

She swung her club, driving a dozen long spikes deep into the soldier’s neck and chest. He flew off the balcony and crashed onto the heads of his fellows below. They hardly seemed to notice, for the Tyrians were closing in and a battle was already beginning to rage within a dozen yards of the citadel.

Had the choice been Umbra’s, he would have abandoned Maetan’s plan and gone to search out Rikus that instant. Even if he could find another way into the citadel, he doubted the Urikites would survive for very long. Unfortunately, if he did not follow Maetan’s commands to the word, the mindbender would not be compelled to deliver the obsidian he traded for Umbra’s services. The shadow giant could not allow that, for his wives needed the glassy rock. It was almost egging season.

Umbra stepped toward a narrow catwalk that led from this balcony to the next, pausing to address the men who had been following the dead soldier. “Fight past the statue,” he ordered. “I’ll find another entrance.”

When the Urikites hesitated, Umbra pointed back down the gorge. “Fight past the statues or die!” he snapped. “Tyr does not take slaves, so surrender brings only death.”

Rikus stood knee-deep in Urikite bodies, his gaze fixed on the top floor of the strange citadel. There, standing as tall as the winged statue of the bearded man, was Umbra. The shadow giant’s blue eyes were studying the battlefield below, as if he were searching the bodies for a single Urikite survivor.

“What’s he doing up there?” Rikus asked.

“And how did he get past all the statues?” Neeva wondered, pointing at the balconies on the citadel’s lower level. Next to her stood Caelum, who was also looking at the uppermost loge, and K’kriq, who was staring at the dead with as much interest as Umbra.

Rikus studied the lower levels of the building. There was a gap in the stone railing of the first loge, and the statue that had been guarding the door behind it now lay scattered in the rocks below, broken into a dozen pieces. Despite their success in destroying the stony woman, that was as far as the Urikites had gotten.

The statue of an armored man had moved from the second loge and still patrolled the balcony, a four-bladed axe in one hand and a wide-bladed dagger in the other. Sprawled over the railing and lying beneath the balcony were more than a dozen Urikites with slashed throats, missing limbs, and smashed skulls.

As Rikus studied the rest of the citadel’s lower level, he noticed that only the loge from which this statue had come was empty. On each of the other balconies stood another lifelike statue, each cradling some sort of fantastic weapon in its inert hands.

After studying the stone figures for a moment, Rikus took a deep breath, then said, “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” asked Neeva.

The mul pointed at Umbra, whose blue eyes now seemed to be locked onto him. “Up there.”

“Rikus, I’ve seen you do a lot of stupid things in your life, but this would be the worst,” Neeva said. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that if half a Urikite company couldn’t make it past the first balcony, then neither will we?”

“No,” the mul answered. He started toward the stairway concealed beneath the foundation. When he did not hear footsteps behind him, he stopped and turned around. “Aren’t you coming?”

K’kriq was the first to answer. “No. T-too scared.”

Rikus scowled and, not bothering with Caelum, looked to Neeva. “What about you?”

“If you can tell me how we’re going to get past those statues, I’ll follow you,” she said.

Rikus pointed his sword toward Umbra. “The same way he did.”

“How was that?”

The mul shrugged and started toward the stairs again.

Neeva did not join him until he had set a foot on the bottom step. “You’re as one-sighted as a dwarf and about as smart as a baazrag,” she growled.

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 late 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.