The mul slowed enough to look around and see that Umbra’s appearance had stopped his gladiators as well. The warriors were standing motionless on the slope, their jaws slack with astonishment and their eyes locked on the huge shadow beast. Rikus would have hesitated to say that they were frightened, but they were certainly spellbound.
Umbra pointed a finger at the routed Urikites, then, in a throbbing voice so deep it seemed bottomless, he said, “Fight! Stand and fight, or I swear I’ll take you with me when I return to the Black!”
As if to emphasize the threat, the thing strode halfway up the dune in two steps, then reached down and closed his sinuous fingers around the torsos of two Urikites. Their chests and midsections disappeared in darkness. In vain, they cried for mercy as Umbra’s shadow crept down to their feet and up over their heads. Within an instant, their forms had simply melted into the creature’s black shape.
“Now, form your lines!” Umbra cried. He pointed toward the Tyrians. “For the defense of Lubar and the glory of Urik, die like heroes!”
The Urikites turned around and dressed their lines, pointing their black swords toward the Tyrians.
“For the freedom of Tyr!” Rikus yelled, charging.
Neeva followed close behind, screaming, “For Tyr!” An instant later, a hundred voices were crying the same thing.
Rikus reached the enemy before they had completely reformed their wall, tearing into it in a maelstrom of whirling cahulaks and kicking feet. Almost before he realized it, he had ripped the swords from a pair of Urikites’ hands and felled two more with crippling kicks to the knees. To Rikus’s right, Neeva hacked a defender nearly in two, then killed another with the backswing as she pulled her axe from the body of the first.
No sooner had Rikus and Neeva cleared their opponents away than a tremendous crash reverberated across the sandy dune as the rest of the gladiators hit the enemy line. The clatter of bone and obsidian weapons filled the air, followed by a growing chorus of pained cries. A handful of enemy soldiers threw down their weapons and turned to flee. Umbra prevented the rout from spreading by snatching the cowards and absorbing them into his shadow.
Rikus caught sight of a black blade streaking toward his ribs. He blocked with the shaft of a cahulak, then raked his other weapon across the soldier’s throat. The man dropped his sword and turned away, grasping at the bleeding wound below his chin.
The mul spun around to attack the person who had slammed into his back, then stopped when he realized that she was one of his own gladiators, a red-haired half-elf named Drewet who had earned her fame in the arena by killing a full giant single-handedly. At the other end of her two-pronged lance hung a gasping Urikite, but beyond her were nothing but more Tyrians.
The mul faced the other direction and saw that, on the other side of Neeva, Tyr’s gladiators were beating the last of the Urikites into the sand. At the bottom of the dune, Maetan had not moved. He stood alone, watching the battle with no indication of concern.
Rikus was about to start down the slope when a rustle of astonished cries rose from the Tyrian ranks; Umbra had opened his blue mouth and was facing the battlefield. A wispy stream of blackness shot from between the thing’s lips and poured over the gladiators like a thick, sticky mist. As the billowing mass spread over the slope, Umbra shrunk as if he were spewing his own body over the dune. Horrified screeches and anguished screams rose from whomever the black haze touched.
“Run!” Rikus yelled. He grabbed Neeva’s wrist and sprinted forward, angling toward the bottom of the dune and away from the spreading vapor.
As fast as they ran, it was no use. The black fog caught them only a few steps later, lapping at their legs like the waters of an oasis pond. Instantly, an icy wave of pain shot through Rikus’s feet and up into his thighs. The closest thing he had ever felt to it were frigid rains in the high mountains, but this pain was a hundred times worse. The rain had been uncomfortable and made him shiver, but the darkness stung his skin and numbed his flesh to the bone. His joints stiffened and would not move, reducing his legs to dead, aching weights.
Rikus felt himself falling, and Neeva cried out at his side. He shoved her forward with all his strength, sending her sprawling half a dozen steps ahead of himself. An instant later, the mul landed face-first in the sand.
The blackness did not overtake the rest of his body. He lay sprawled on the dune, groaning loudly as his mind struggled to make sense of the contradicting sensations of scalding sand beneath his torso and the icy numbness in his legs. Rikus looked over his shoulder and saw that Umbra was gone, or rather had spread his entire body over the gentle slope. The mul lay at the edge of the shadowy form, his legs lost in the blackness behind him. In addition to himself and Neeva, Drewet and perhaps six more gladiators had escaped the frigid cloud, some of them by narrower margins than the mul. Most of the company had been engulfed.
Neeva limped back to Rikus, then kneeled at his head and asked, “Are you hurt?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Rikus answered. As he spoke, a terrible thought occurred to him. “Pull me out, please!” Rikus peered over his shoulder at the darkness beneath his thighs. “My legs must be gone!”
“Calm yourself,” Neeva said, gripping the mul under the arms. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She pulled him from the shadow. His legs were as white as ivory, but at least they remained attached. The mul put a hand to his thigh. It was colder than anything he had ever felt, and there was no sensation in the leg.
“What’s wrong with them?” the mul cried, wondering if the heat would ever return to his frozen flesh.
As he spoke, Umbra’s black shadow shrank to the size of a normal man. Where the shadow beast had lain, the sand was clean and sparkling. There was not a single corpse, stray weapon, or even a puddle of blood to suggest that there had ever been a battle on the dune.
The shadow slipped down the slope and assumed his rightful place at Maetan’s feet. The Urikite commander hardly seemed to notice, studying the site with an air of distaste. Finally, a small sandspout rose around his body, hiding the mindbender from the mul’s sight.
Rikus pushed off the ground and drew his numb legs up beneath him, then tried to run down the slope. His knees remained stiff as stones, pitching him face-first into the burning dune.
Maetan’s sandspout rose high off the ground, then drifted out into the valley and hung over the heads of a throng of Urikite soldiers that was being pursued by a mob of bloodthirsty gladiators. For a few moments, Rikus feared that Maetan was awaiting an opportunity to launch some devastating mental attack, but at last the whirlwind traced a semicircle in the air and shot up the valley.
Neeva helped Rikus to his feet. “I hate to admit it, but I’m a little surprised,” she said, slipping his bulky arm over her shoulders. “We won.”
“Not yet,” Rikus said, watching the sandspout fade from view. “Not until we have Maetan.”
THREE
VILLAGE IN THE SAND
The thirsty Tyrians stood beneath an arch of golden sandstone, taking what shelter they could from the white-hot sky. Their eyes were fixed far below, on the slowly spinning sails of a small windmill. With each rotation, the mill pumped a few gallons of cool, clear water from a deep well and dumped it into a covered cistern.
Unfortunately, the cistern stood in the middle of a small village. The plaza surrounding it was basically round in shape, with a jagged edge of curving salients that resembled tongues of flame. The circle was paved with cobblestones of crimson sandstone, and the whole thing reminded Rikus too much of the scorching ball of fire hanging in the center of the midday sky.
The huts enclosing the plaza also resembled the sun, with rounded red flagstone walls. The buildings stood only about five feet high, and none were covered by any semblance of a roof. From his position on the hillside, Rikus could look directly down into their interiors and see the stone tables, benches, and beds with which they were furnished. Of course, on Athas there was little need to protect one’s belongings from rain, but the mul thought it foolish that the residents left themselves and their belongings exposed to the brutal sun all day long.