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

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 he 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 slave.”
    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