“How dare you come before us in such rags,” Sacha snarled. “And did your father not teach you to bow before your king?”
“Kill him!” spat Wyan.
The color drained from Taiy’s face. “I beg your forebearance, Honored King,” the youth said, bowing.
“You have it-for now,” Tithian replied, amused by the youth’s anxiety. “Let us hope your news justifies my patience.”
Swallowing hard, Taiy stood upright. “Honored King, I have just returned from hunting in the Dragon’s Bowl.”
“That’s near Urik, is it not?” Tithian asked scowling.
“Which is the point of my visit,” Taiy answered. “As my party was returning to the road, we saw a great cloud of dust approaching from the horizon. When I investigated, I found an army, complete with siege engines, a war argosy, halfling scouts, and five hundred half-giants. They were marching under the banner of the lion that walks like a man.”
“King Hamanu’s crest!” hissed Wyan.
“He’s coveted our iron mines for five centuries,” added Sacha, sneering at Tithian. “How will you defend the city? You’ve an empty treasure vault and no army.”
Tithian cursed, barely keeping himself from lashing out at the young noble who had brought him this disastrous news. He would not have bothered to restrain himself, except that his subjects credited him with Agis’s endless stream of reforms, and Tithian wanted to cultivate his reputation as a noble ruler.
Inside, Tithian bit his lips and stared out over the city. At last, a wicked smile crossed his lips. He still had no idea of how to stop Hamanu’s army, but he had hit upon a way to remove the problem of Agis and the three slaves without resorting to Wyan’s minstrels.
Tithian dismissed Taiy with a wave of his hand, simultaneously addressing his chamberlain. “Summon the freed slaves Rikus, Neeva, and Sadira, as well as Agis of Asticles.” The king felt a pang of regret as he spoke his old friend’s name, but he shrugged off the feeling and continued with the business at hand. “Tell them the safety of Tyr hangs upon their swift arrival in my audience chamber.”
ONE
AMBUSH
Rikus looked down the steep slope to where his warriors waited in the shadow of the sandstone bluff. The two thousand Tyrians stood in a quiet column, their thoughts fixed on the coming battle. There were humans, half-elves, dwarves, half-giants, tareks, and other races, most of them gladiators who had fought in Tyr’s arena until being freed by King Tithian’s First Edict. In their hands, they carried double-bladed axes, sabers of serrated bone, fork-headed lances, double-ended spears, and a variety of deadly arms as infinite as man’s desire to murder.
Rikus was certain they would make a fine legion.
He stood and waved his arm over his head to signal the attack. His warriors roared their battle cries, then charged forward in a single screaming mass.
“What are you doing?” demanded Agis, stepping to Rikus’s side. The noble was robust for a man of his class, with a strong build and square, handsome features. He had long black hair, probing brown eyes, and a straight, patrician nose. “We need a plan!”
“I have a plan,” Rikus answered simply.
He looked to the base of the hill. There, in the sandy valley, stood a single rank of Urikite half-giants, all wearing red tunics that bore the crest of Hamanu’s yellow lion. They cradled huge battle-axes with obsidian blades, and their only pieces of armor were bone bucklers strapped to their enormous forearms.
“Attack!” Rikus shouted.
With that, he rushed over the crest of the hill. Discovering that the sandstone slope was too steep to descend gracefully, Rikus fell to his back and continued his drop in a controlled slide.
Had he been a full human, he might have reconsidered his method of descent, for only a hemp breechcloth protected his bronzed skin from the grating surface of the sandstone. But Rikus gave the scouring little thought. He was a mul, a human-dwarf crossbreed created to live and die as a gladiatorial slave, and he was as inured to pain as he was to death. From his dwarven father he had inherited a heavy-boned face of rugged features, pointed ears set close to the head, and a powerful physique that seemed nothing but knotted sinew and thick bone. His human mother had bestowed upon him a proud straight nose, a balance of limb and body that made him handsome by the standards of either race, and a supple, six-foot frame as agile as that of an elven rope dancer.
Rikus had descended only a few feet before Neeva, his longtime fighting partner, slid into place at his side. Although a full human, she was protected from the abrasive stone by the lizard-scale cloak she wore to shield her fair skin from the sun. In her hands, the big blond held a steel battle-axe nearly as large as those carried by the half-giants below. Most women could not have lifted the weapon, but Neeva was almost as heavily muscled as Rikus and, as a freed gladiator, more than capable of swinging the mighty blade. Despite her powerful build, she retained a distinctly feminine figure, full red lips, and eyes as green as emeralds.
“Our legion is outsized five times over!” she exclaimed.
Rikus knew that she referred not to the hundreds of half-giants directly below, but to the thousands of Urikite regulars in the valley beyond. The long column of soldiers was already past the point of the Tyrian attack and was continuing onward at a steady pace, relying on the half-giants to protect their rear. Following close behind the regulars came dozens of siege engines, carried on the backs of massive warlizards called driks. The rear of the long file was brought up by the lumbering mass of an argosy, a mammoth fortress-wagon full of weapons, supplies, and water.
Her eyes fixed on the long procession, Neeva demanded, “What can you be thinking?”
“One Tyrian gladiator is worth five Urikite soldiers,” Rikus responded, fixing his gaze on the half-giants below. The huge soldiers were cradling their battle-axes and glaring defiantly toward the side of the bluff, where the Tyrian mob now approached in a tumult of wild screams. “Besides, this is the king’s doing, not mine. Tithian’s the one who would give me only two-thousand warriors.
“He didn’t tell you to get them killed in a reckless charge,” Neeva countered.
“It isn’t reckless,” Rikus answered.
The pair ran out of time to debate the issue, reaching the bottom of the slope just as the first wave of gladiators spilled into the sandy valley. Rikus and Neeva had come down near the flank of the enemy line, only a few dozen paces from several glowering half-giants. The towering Urikites held steady, waiting for the mul and his partner to move into striking range.
Rikus looked toward the pair of half-giants anchoring the end of the enemy line. In contrast to most of their kind, they were stoutly built, with a powerful shape to their torsos. Their hair had been shaved away from their thick-boned foreheads, and their drooping jaws showed no sign of the customarily flabby chin of the race. They were even somewhat taller than most half-giants, standing at least twice as high as the mul.
“Those are our two,” Rikus said, raising his weapons. He carried a pair of cahulaks, which resembled two flat-bladed grappling hooks connected at the base by a rope. “Come on.”
Before Neeva could object, he took off at a sprint, angling away to force the half-giants to leave their formation. At first, Rikus did not think they would fall for his ploy, but an officer finally barked, “Cut them off!”
A tremendous clatter sounded from the center of the enemy line as the first wave of Tyrians reached it. A few half-giants bellowed in pain and collapsed to the hot sand, but most used their small bucklers to deflect the gladiators’ assaults. In unison, the Urikites hefted their black-bladed axes, and Tyr’s first wave of attackers disappeared in a spray of blood.
Rikus felt a knot of anxiety forming in his stomach, but the hiss of heavy feet shuffling through deep sand drew his attention back to his own foes. The two half-giants he had lured away from the line were almost upon him and Neeva.