The Verdant Passage

ONE THE GAJ

Rikus slid down the rope and dropped into the fighting pit, eager to finish the morning combat before the day grew hot. The crimson sun had just risen, sending tendrils of fire-colored light shooting through the olive haze of the morning sky. Already the sands of the small arena were warm, and the rancid odor of blood and decaying entrails hung heavily in the air.

In the center of the pit waited the animal he would fight, a beast that Tithian’s hunters had captured somewhere in the desert wastes. It was half-buried in the shallow entrenchment it had dug. Only its scaly, rust-orange shell, about six feet in diameter, showed above the sand. If it had limbs-be they arms, legs, or tentacles-they were either tucked inside this dome or hidden beneath the sand churned up around its body.

Attached to the near end of the shell was the spongy white ball of its head, with a row of compound eyes spaced evenly across the front. Three hairy antennae crowned the pulpy globe, all of them pointed toward Rikus. Over its mouth dangled six fingerlike appendages, flanked by a pair of mandibles as long as a man’s arm.

Caught between these pincers was the savaged body of Sizzkus, a nikaal. He had been the beast’s keeper, at least until the evening before. Now the corpse hung between the creature’s vicious hooks, partially coated with blood and sand. Sizzkus’s pointed chin rested on his scaly chest. From beneath his black mop of hair stared a pair of vacant, lidless eyes. His three-clawed hands were draped over the beast’s pincers, which had crushed his shiny green carapace into a splintered tangle. In a half-dozen places, pinkish ropes of intestine looped out of gashes in the nikaal’s hide. By the number of wounds on Sizzkus’s body, Rikus guessed that he had not died without a hard fight.

Rikus found it surprising that the nikaal had been forced to fight at all, for Sizzkus had been extremely cautious with new creatures in the pit. Not long ago, the nikaal had explained to Rikus that monsters, as well as the so-called “New Races,” were developing in the desert all the time, but most quickly died out because they were not strong enough to fight off the other creatures of the wastes. Those that did survive, however, were the most vicious and dangerous of all, and worthy of a beast keeper’s caution.

Rikus looked away from the mangled corpse and removed his fleece robe, revealing a scarred, athletic body clad only in a breechcloth of drab hemp. Slowly he began to stretch, for he had reluctantly come to realize that his youth was behind him, and his battle-worn muscles would now pull and tear when cold.

Fortunately for Rikus, his body did not outwardly show its maturity. He took great pride in the fact that his bald pate was still taut and smooth, his pointed ears still lay close to his head, and his black eyes remained clear and defiant. His nose still ran straight and true, and there was not so much as a hint of loose skin beneath his powerful jaws. Below his brawny neck, his hairless body was composed of knotted biceps, hulking pectorals, and bulging thighs. Despite the initial stiffness caused by old wounds and poorly mended bones, he could still move with the grace of a rope dancer when he wished.

Rikus had weathered his decades as a gladiator remarkably well, and there was good reason. He was a mul, a hybrid slave bred expressly for arena combat. His father, whom he had never seen, had bestowed on him the strength and durability of the dwarves. His mother, a haggard woman who had died in the slavehouses of far-off Urik, had given him the size and agility of men. The brutal trainers who had raised him, whom he recalled as hated tyrants and murderers, had coached him in the ruthless arts of killing and survival. But it was Rikus himself who was responsible for his greatest asset: determination.

As a child, he had believed that all boys trained to be gladiators. He had assumed that after they fought their way through the ranks, they became trainers and perhaps even nobles. That illusion had lasted until his tenth year, when the lord who owned him had brought his weakling son to see the practice pits. As Rikus had compared his own tattered breechcloth to the frail boy’s silken robes, he had come to understand that no matter how hard he practiced and no matter how talented he became, his skills would never win him the privileged status into which the youth had been born. When be reached adulthood the frail boy would still be a nobleman, and Rikus might still be his slave. On that day, he had sworn to die a free man.

Thirty years and as many brief escapes later, he remained in bondage, but he also remained alive. Had he been anything but a mul, he would have been dead or free by now, either killed as punishment for his repeated escapes or allowed to disappear into the desert after it became too expensive to hunt him down. Muls were too valuable for either option, however. Because they could not reproduce their own kind and because most women died while carrying or giving birth to such big-boned babies, muls were worth more than a hundred normal slaves. When they escaped, no expense was spared to recover them.

Rikus’s status was about to change, however. In three weeks, he would fight in the ziggurat games. The king himself had decreed that the winners of the day’s contests would be freed, and Rikus intended to be among that number.

As the mul finished stretching, he glanced again at Sizzkus’s lifeless body, wondering how such an experienced handler had fallen prey to what appeared to be a relatively slow and clumsy beast.

“Couldn’t anyone save him?” Rikus asked.

“No one tried,” answered Boaz, the gladiator’s current trainer. Boaz had the peaked eyebrows and pale eyes of a half-elf, with sharp, raw-boned features that gave him a rodentlike appearance. As usual, his blue eyes were blurry and bloodshot from a long night in the wineshops of Tyr. “I wasn’t about to risk my guards for a slaver.”

Along with a dozen guards and four other slaves, Boaz stood on the broad deck that capped the rock wall encircling the fighting pit. The small practice arena sat in an isolated corner of Lord Tithian’s country estate, amid a cluster of mud-brick cellhouses that served as home to the fifty slaves who staffed the high templar’s personal gladiator stable.

“Sizzkus was a good man,” Rikus countered, glaring up at the half-elf. “You could have called me.”

“The gaj caught him while you were sleeping,” Boaz replied, his thin lips curled into a sneer. “And we all know what happens when a gladiator your age fights without warming up.”

The guards chuckled at the trainer’s affront.

Though they were all husky men wearing leather corselets and carrying obsidian-tipped spears, Rikus glared at them. “I can kill Boaz and six of you before taking so much as a scratch,” the mul growled. “I hope you aren’t laughing at me.”

The guards immediately fell silent, for the mul had made good on such threats before. Rikus had killed his last trainer just two months earlier. Only the memory of the threat he had received on that occasion kept Boaz alive now.

After his previous trainer’s death, Lord Tithian had come to Rikus’s cell with a young slave and a purple caterpillar. A pair of guards had held the youth down while Tithian carefully laid the caterpillar on the slave’s upper lip. In a flash, the thing had crawled up the boy s nostril. He had started screaming and snorting in an effort to dislodge it, but to no avail. A few seconds later, blood had begun to stream from the boy’s nose, and then the poor wretch collapsed, unconscious.

“The worm is making a nest in Grakidi’s brain,” Tithian had explained. “Over the next six months, he’ll go blind, forget how to talk, start drooling, and do other things too unpleasant to discuss. Eventually, he’ll turn into an idiot, and sometime after that a moth will claw its way out of one of his eyes.”

Tithian had paused for a few moments to let Rikus study the unconscious youth, then had fetched a small jar containing an identical caterpillar from his cassock pocket. “Don’t make me angry again.”

The high templar had released the slave and left without another word. Today Grakidi was already lame and blind in one eye. He could not speak so much as his own name, and sometimes he lost his way as he went from cellhouse to cellhouse emptying slopbuckets. Still, there was always a grin on his face and he seemed happy in the typical way of idiots. Rikus could hardly bear to look at him, however, for the mul could not help feeling responsible for the slave’s condition. He had made up his mind to kill Grakidi as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Finally responding to the mul’s threat against his guards, Boaz glared at Rikus. “I pay these men, so they can laugh at my jokes if they want,” he said. “Don’t threaten them, slave.”

“Would you rather I just killed them?” Rikus asked.

Boaz’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “I should have known better than to reason with a stupid mul,” he said, turning his angry gaze away from Rikus and toward the four slaves standing atop the wall nearby. “One of your friends will pay for your disrespect. Who shall I have flogged? Neeva?”

The trainer pointed at Rikus’s fighting partner, a blond woman of full human blood, who stared at Boaz with deep, emerald eyes. Her cape hung open in the front, revealing a husky physique almost as knotted with muscles as that of Rikus. With a pair of full red lips, a prominent, firm chin, and pale, smooth skin, she looked both divine and deadly.

Rikus had reason to be glad that her appearances were not deceiving. He and Neeva were a matched pair, which meant that in addition to sleeping together, they fought in games against similar fighting teams. In fact, the contest in which he hoped to win his freedom was a matched game.

When the mul’s only response to Boaz’s query was a menacing glower, the trainer shrugged. “How about Yarig and Anezka? They’re small, so we’ll have to whip both of them.” he said, pointing at another of Tithian’s matched pairs.

Yarig, the male, scowled at the trainer indignantly. Like all dwarves, he stood around four feet tall and was completely bald from head to heel. His features were square and angular, with the distinctive dwarven crest of thickened skull crowning his bald head. Yarig’s stocky body was even more muscular and sculpted than Rikus’s. The mul had often thought that his friend resembled a boulder more than a man.

“You’re not being fair, Boaz,” Yarig said firmly. “Size makes no difference.”

“I’m not interested in being fair,” Boaz snapped, barely granting the dwarf a sidelong glance.

Yarig would not be dismissed lightly. “Size makes no difference to flogging,” he insisted. As was typical for a dwarf, he was so caught up in trivial details that he was oblivious to larger issues. “When you’re flogged, it hurts just as much no matter how tall you are.”

Anezka stepped to her partner’s side and tried to drag the dwarf away, frowning at Rikus all the while. She had been lashed as punishment for the mul’s defiance once before, and she made no effort to hide her resentment of him. Standing no more than three-and-a-half feet high, she was a halfling female from the other side of the Ringing Mountains. She looked like a scrawny child, save that her figure and face were those of a mature woman. Her hair grew from her head in a tangled bush that had never been brushed, and her cunning brown eyes had a deranged look to them. Her tongue had been cut out before she’d become a slave, so no one had ever been able to determine whether she was truly unbalanced, or just seemed that way. Most didn’t debate the question for long, especially since Anezka liked to eat her meat while it was still alive.

Yarig pulled away from the halfling and stubbornly stepped toward Boaz. “You should only flog one of us.”

Two of the trainer’s guards leveled their spears at Yarig’s chest, preventing even the single-minded dwarf from advancing farther. “Boaz isn’t going to flog either one of you,” Rikus noted.

“Then who will it be?” Boaz asked, his lips spreading into a cruel smile. “If not your pit-mates or your fighting partner, then perhaps your lover?”

Rikus groaned inwardly. He did not hide his dalliances from Neeva, but open discussion of his romantic liaisons never failed to upset her. At the moment, the last thing he needed was an angry fighting partner.

Boaz pointed at the last slave on the deck, a voluptuous scullery wench named Sadira. He motioned for her to come to him. Like the trainer, Sadira was a half-elf, with peaked eyebrows and pale eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Where the trainer’s features were sharp and raw, the young woman’s were slender and winsome. Her eyes were as clear and unclouded as a tourmaline, and her long, amber hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves.

The wench wore a hemp smock with a wide neckline that hung off both shoulders, and a ragged hem that barely reached the middle of her slender thighs. The smock was the same as those worn by the all the slave girls of the compound, but on Sadira the simple shift seemed as provocative as any noblewoman’s most revealing dress.

When the scullery slave reached Boaz’s side, the trainer laid a pasty hand on her bare shoulder. Sadira cringed as the trainer ran his lecherous fingers over her smooth skin, but did not dare object to his touch. “It will be a pity to blemish such beauty with flogging scars, but if that’s what you want, Rikus-”

“It’s not what I want and you know it,” Rikus said, stopping short of making another threat. “If you’re going to flog someone, flog me. I won’t resist.”

Smirking at Rikus’s submission, Boaz shook his head. “That won’t do at all. You’re much too accustomed to physical pain,” he said. “If we are to teach you anything, your lesson must be of a different kind. So, which one of your friends will pay for your defiance?”

A tense silence followed. “There’s no need to hurry your decision,” Boaz said, pointing toward the center of the fighting pit. “You can choose after you fight the gaj.”

Deciding the trainer’s concession would at least give him thinking time, Rikus faced the center of the pit. The gaj waved its antennae in the mul’s direction, then opened its mandibles and tossed Sizzkus’s body aside with a flick of its head. When the nikaal landed twenty yards away, Rikus made a mental note not to put himself in a position where the beast would be able to throw him around the same way.

“I’ll take your cloak,” offered Sadira, kneeling at the edge of the wall. “You wouldn’t want it torn if the fight moves over here.”

Rikus picked up the robe from the ground and tossed it to the slave-girl. “My thanks.”

Catching the cloak, Sadira whispered, “Rikus, I don’t like the way Boaz is smirking.”

The mul smiled, revealing a set of white teeth. “Don’t worry about him. I’ll tear him apart before I let him lash you.”

Sadira raised her peaked eyebrows in alarm. “No!” she hissed. “That’s not what I meant. I can take a flogging if I have to. I only want you to be careful.”

The beguiling half-elf’s reaction surprised Rikus, for he had thought she would be terrified of being disfigured. Before he could comment on her bravery, however, Neeva stepped to the half-elf’s side. Taking Sadira by the arm and roughly pulling her to her feet, Neeva said, “Tell me what weapon you want, Rikus. Our friend is clacking its pincers.”

“No blades or points,” Boaz interjected, eyeing Rikus. “The gaj is a special surprise for the ziggurat games. Tithian will sell you into the brickyards if you kill it.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the gaj. The strange beast’s mandibles stopped clacking and remained open. After studying his opponent for several moments, the mul turned back to his trainer. “Are you a betting man, Boaz?”

“Perhaps.”

Rikus gave the trainer his most provoking smile and pointed at the gaj. “I’ll fight with nothing but my singing sticks. If I win, you flog me instead of someone else. If I lose, you lash us all.”

“Those pincers will clip your sticks like straw!” Neeva objected.

Rikus ignored her and kept his attention fixed on Boaz. “Do we have a bet?” When the cruel trainer smiled and nodded, the mul looked to his fighting partner. “Get my sticks.”

Neeva refused to move. “They’re too light for that thing,” she said. “I’m not helping you get yourself killed.”

“I’m sure Rikus knows what he’s doing,” Sadira said, moving away from the edge of the pit. “I’ll get the singing sticks.”

Neeva started to follow, but Boaz signaled to his guards and they stopped her with the tips of their spears. A few moments later, Sadira returned with a pair of vermilion sticks about an inch in diameter and two-and-a-half feet long. Made from a fibrous wood that contracted instead of breaking, the sticks were extremely light and relied upon speed rather than mass to generate striking power. They had been carefully carved so that the ends were slightly larger around than the centers, and a special oil made them easy to grip.

Sadira dropped the weapons, and Rikus caught one in each hand. The gladiator turned to face the gaj, simultaneously twirling the sticks in a figure-eight pattern. As the weapons sliced through the air, they emitted the distinctive whistle that gave them their name. Although Rikus seldom used singing sticks in contests to the death, they were his favorite sparring weapon, for their effectiveness depended upon skill and timing rather than strength and brute force.

Deciding that his best attack was against the beast’s head, Rikus started forward, his sticks trilling as he absent-mindedly traced a variety of defensive patterns in the air.

The gaj waited, motionless, its eyes blank and unresponsive.

“Can that thing see me?” Rikus asked.

The only response was an amused chuckle from Boaz.

The gladiator stopped his advance a few yards from the gaj’s head. A sweet, musky odor hung in the air, masking the stench of the entrails that still dangled from the barbs of the creature’s mandibles.

Rikus took another step forward, waving his sticks in front of the gaj’s eyes. It did not react, so he feinted a strike to its head. When there was still no response, he slipped to one side of its wicked mandibles. Holding one stick ready to parry an attack, he flicked the end of the other at one of the red, multi-faceted eyes, striking it with a light tap.

The gaj jerked its head to one side, smashing the outer edge of its mandible into Rikus’s hip and sending him staggering backward. The mul paused and frowned at the beast, trying to figure out what made it so special in Tithian’s eyes. There was no doubt that the creature was powerful, but he was far from impressed so far. Had he been carrying a bladed or pointed weapon, the gaj would have been dead when he made his first feint.

“Something’s wrong with it,” Rikus called over his shoulder. “The hunters must have blinded it when they captured it.”

Boaz erupted into a fit of high-pitched laughter.

Neeva called, “Just hit the damn thing and see what happens.”

Gnashing his teeth at his partner’s sharp tone, Rikus turned back to the gaj. Pointedly ignoring the beast’s vacant red eyes, he strolled to one side of its head. He gave the white sphere a sharp rap, and the stick landed with a dull throb that felt as though he had struck a mattress filled with straw.

One of the hairy antennae lashed out and wrapped itself around the stick, then wrenched the weapon free of Rikus’s hand with an effortless flick. The astonished mul leaped away and somersaulted backward to put more distance between himself and the gaj. As he sprang back to his feet, the guards and Boaz roared with glee. The mul frowned, as angry with himself for allowing the gaj to surprise him as he was with the guards for laughing at his carelessness.

The gaj did not move, although it was using its bristly antenna to swing Rikus’s stick through the air. After a moment of watching the creature, Rikus realized that it was performing an awkward imitation of a defensive figure-eight pattern-the same pattern he had traced through the air after Sadira tossed him the weapons.

Immediately the mul realized two important things about his opponent. First, it seemed the antennae atop its head were more akin to tentacles, for he had never before seen an animal use an antenna as a grasping organ. Second, the gaj was a lot smarter and more observant than it appeared at first glance. The beast was mimicking a formal fighting pattern, and he doubted that it was mere chance.

Rikus turned, growling, “So, you want to do a little stick fighting?”

He began whirling his remaining stick in a series of randomly changing patterns, then advanced on the gaj behind the blurred, whistling shield he was creating with his weapon.

As the gladiator stepped within striking range, the front side of the gaj’s shell rose two feet off the ground. Rikus glimpsed a pulpy white body and a tangle of knobby-jointed legs. Suddenly the beast withdrew its head beneath the shell, taking the singing stick along with it. The shell dropped back to the ground. The gaj’s barbed mandibles, all that remained visible of the head, clacked once and reopened menacingly.

“Now what, Rikus?” cried a guard.

“Crawl under there and fight it!” suggested another.

His face reddening with embarrassment, Rikus looked over his shoulder. Only Neeva’s face remained serious. Even Sadira was grinning at his predicament.

“This thing doesn’t want to fight,” he called. “Why don’t three or four of you come down here instead?”

His challenge brought a fresh round of chuckles from the spectators, but none of them volunteered.

Rikus placed his stick between his teeth and circled around to the gaj’s side, where its pincers would not be able to seize him. He squatted down next to the shell and grabbed the underside of the lip, then heaved with all his might.

The carapace rose from the ground, and something clattered inside. Rikus heaved harder, pushing it higher. Six canelike legs shot out and planted themselves firmly in the sand, three to a side. The shiny black limbs were about as thick as Rikus’s forearm, divided into five segments by a series of knotted joints. Each limb ended in two-pronged claws that now clutched at the sand in a futile effort to hold the shell down.

With the singing stick still clenched in his teeth, Rikus shifted his grip and lowered his body again so that he could push the shell the rest of the way over. This time, it required more effort to raise the beast. On the opposite side of its body, the gaj had extended its legs well beyond its shell and was using them to counter its attacker’s efforts. Nonetheless, Rikus was slowly lifting one side. Even a creature like the gaj was no match for the dense muscles of a mul.

The carapace rose higher, and the legs closest to Rikus left the ground. The mul saw that, beneath the shell, the gaj’s body was divided into three white sections: the head, a narrow midsection from which sprang all six legs, and a bloated, heart-shaped abdomen. At the end of the abdomen was a ring of red-tinged muscle.

As Rikus pushed the shell perilously close to tipping, the gaj curled its abdomen forward so that the ring of muscle pointed toward its attacker. The muscles tightened and opened a hole the size of the mul’s thumb. There was a loud hiss, and a puff of gas brushed the gladiator’s face.

Rikus immediately spat the fighting stick from between his clenched teeth, letting it fall to the sand as he dropped the gaj. He spun away and ran several steps before he dropped to his knees and retched. His throat was filled with such a burning stench that he could hardly stand to breathe, and his skin tingled beneath a moist, foul-smelling substance.

“Think the creature is helpless, Rikus?” asked Boaz, smirking at the stricken gladiator.

Rikus tried to respond, but all he could manage was to gasp a few breaths of fresh air. He grabbed a handful of sand and rubbed it over his face, trying to scour the stinking mist from his cheeks.

“Rikus, you’re sick!” called Yarig. “You need help!”

“No!” Rikus yelled, managing to bellow the strained reply. If the mul was to win his bet with Boaz and save his friends a lashing, he could not have the dwarf coming to his rescue.

Hoping to stop Yarig from rushing to his aid, the mul rose to his feet. To his surprise, he stumbled and nearly fell again. He still felt nauseous, and his head was spinning as though he had just downed a gallon of wine. The thing had poisoned him!

Through his blurred vision, Rikus saw that his efforts had only added to the dwarf’s determination. Yarig stepped toward the rope that dangled into the fighting pit. “I’m coming, Rikus!”

“Stay where you are, Yarig!” ordered Boaz. “I’ll decide when Rikus leaves the ring.”

Of course, Yarig showed no sign of obeying, but through the haze, Rikus saw Neeva intercept him. Though she was no match for the dwarf’s strength, the woman managed to detain him long enough for a pair of guards to present their speartips to his throat. The dwarf reluctantly stopped moving.

Rikus’s vision was just clearing when both of his fighting sticks sailed over his head and clattered against the rock wall. The mul spun around to face the gaj, his head reeling from the quick motion.

The creature had climbed out of its shallow burrow. Now, standing on all six legs, the crest of its shell was slightly higher than Rikus’s head. It was clacking its mandibles and flourishing the hairy tentacles atop its head, and three of its red eyes seemed fixed on the gladiator.

Without taking his eyes off the gaj, Rikus stumbled back toward the waIl to retrieve his sticks. On the deck above, the guards and Boaz were talking quietly, but Neeva and the other slaves remained silent.

The gaj scuttled forward, its great pincers opened wide. Not wishing to be trapped against the wall, Rikus moved out to meet his opponent, his sticks whistling through the air as if they were whips. The gaj mirrored his approach, whirling its head stalks in small circles as if they were ropes.

Rikus gave a battle yell and ran forward at the best pace his shaky legs would carry him. He lifted a stick to strike, shifting the other into a middle defense. In the same instant, the gaj’s body sank nearly a foot as it gathered its legs beneath itself.

Realizing that it was about to surprise him again, Rikus immediately kicked his feet out from beneath himself. He landed flat on his back with a hard thump. In the same instant, the gaj sprang. The thing’s huge body descended on him, its barbed mandibles clasping where he had stood just a moment before.

Holding his sticks like daggers, he jabbed at the underside of the creature’s soft thorax. The ends of the sticks sank several inches into the soft tissue. Rikus had no way of telling whether he had injured the gaj, or even whether it had felt the blows.

The gaj lifted the back of its shell, and the gladiator saw the tip of its abdomen curling toward him. Rikus kicked at it with all his might and held his breath. A hiss sounded near his feet. The mul withdrew his sticks and jabbed at the gaj’s thorax three more times, then rolled, beating his way through a tangle of slashing legs to pass from beneath the carapace.

As the crimson rays of the sun touched his face and he dared to breathe again, Rikus glimpsed Sadira and the other slaves standing at the edge of the wall, just above the rope that dangled into the pit. The guards who surrounded them seemed more interested in what was happening in the arena than watching the slaves.

The mul scrambled to his feet. “I’m fine!” he called, stumbling backward as he used his sticks to parry a series of wild slashes from a pair of black, jointed legs.

The gaj spun around to face the gladiator with its mandibles. As Rikus feigned a charge, its pincers again closed on empty air. The mul leaped past. He brought his sticks down on the pulpy mass of its head in a rapid cadence of lightning-quick strokes. As he struck, he snapped his wrists, adding velocity to the blows.

The gaj struck him with its hairy tentacles. Bands of searing agony shot through the gladiator’s arms and chest. His entire body seemed to be burning from the inside out, and Rikus feared that he was about to burst into a ball of flame. The mul screamed.

He tried to leap away. His sluggish legs wobbled. Blazing pain seized his shoulders and torso. Rikus ignored the torment, forcing his body to perform his will. It half obeyed, and the mul felt himself toppling over backward. Letting out a great bellow, Rikus called upon his legs to catch him. They felt as though they were made of stone, but they obeyed and caught him before he fell.

The gaj retracted its head, opening its pincers. Rikus stepped backward and lifted his lethargic arms. The gaj’s head shot out from beneath its shell and the mandibles closed around the mul’s midsection. He felt four sharp blows as its barbs sank into his abdomen.

Rikus did not attempt to twist free. Even in the terrible pain he was suffering, he realized the futility of struggling against the pincers. Instead, gripping his weapons as if they were a pair of dirks, Rikus jabbed at the closest pair of eyes. As the sticks struck home, the red facets of the compound eyes collapsed inward. A shudder ran the length of the gaj’s body.

It gripped Rikus more tightly.

Neeva appeared at the mul’s side, a guard’s spear in her hands. She jabbed the point at the gaj’s head. Rikus dimly heard Boaz screaming at her. As Neeva’s weapon descended, the creature intercepted the shaft with a bristly tentacle, then jerked the spear from her hands and flung it across the sand pit.

Yarig appeared on the other side, followed closely by Anezka, who Rikus suspected had entered the fray only to support her partner. The dwarf swung the heft of his weapon at the beast’s head as if it were a cudgel. The halfling thrust her spear’s point beneath the gaj’s mandibles, striking for the underside of the head.

When their attacks landed, Anezka’s spear sank well past the obsidian point. The gaj countered by using Rikus like a mace, whipping him from side-to-side and battering the would-be rescuers with the mul’s massive body. The other three gladiators went sprawling.

Rikus glimpsed Sadira sneaking up on the beast’s flank, armed with nothing more than a handful of sand.

“Get out of here!” he cried, astonished that the slave-girl would risk her life to save him.

He was being shaken so violently that his words were garbled beyond all recognition. Rikus stabbed once more at the gaj’s injured eyes. This time, two of the beast’s antennae intercepted his blows. The hairy stems wrapped themselves around his wrists. Waves of pain shot up both arms, and the gladiator’s muscles contracted so tightly that he feared his bones would be crushed. He screamed and tried to yank the tentacles from their roots, but found his arms could no longer obey him.

The third tentacle slapped him in the side of the head, encircling his brow. His mind exploded in sheer white agony. Rikus could see nothing, hear nothing. He felt his chest contracting and expanding as he screamed, but that was all.

Inside his head, a swarm of thumb-sized beetles appeared out of the chalk-colored emptiness that now isolated him. All of the beetles looked like the gaj. Slowly they scuttled through the air to the surface of his mind and began to eat away at it, leaving behind wispy tendrils of pain as they crawled over its rippled terrain. Gradually they created a net of blistering torment that enveloped Rikus’s mind completely.

The net began to draw inexorably tighter, and the mul’s panic, his memory, and even his will to fight began to fade. Soon he could feel nothing but the horrid fire of his agony, smell nothing but the bitter odor of his own fear, and taste nothing but the dry ash of his thoughts slipping away.

Finally, even those bitter sensations faded. The mul was left with nothing but the long fall to oblivion.