Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 1 - The Verdent Passage Read Free Page A

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 limbsÑbe they arms, legs, or tentaclesÑthey were either
     tucked inside this dome or hidden beneath the sand churned up around its body.
    Rikus saw the thing's head lift from the sand. Attached to the near end of the shell was a
     spongy white ball. Compound eyes were evenly spaced in a row 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.