“Stand aside or die,” Rikus said. He did not draw his own weapon, fearing that, as angry as he was, he would use it. “I’m in no mood for defiance.”
“Styan’s orders are to let only you-”
Rikus lashed out and smashed the speaker’s nose with a fist. As the astonished templar fell to the ground, the mul raised his blood-covered hand and said, “Styan is not in command-I am. The next man who questions that will die.”
Drewet stepped to one side of the mul, then Gaanon pushed his way forward to stand at the other. Like Rikus, they did not draw their weapons. After a moment’s hesitation, the templars reluctantly opened a narrow lane through their ranks. Flanked by Gaanon and Drewet, Rikus pushed his way through the crowd, widening the path as he went.
At the center of the crowd, the mul found Styan seated on a large, square stone that someone-no doubt a gladiator-had moved into place to serve as a stool for the templar. The mul was glad to see that Jaseela, Neeva, and Caelum had not chosen to lend Styan legitimacy by joining him at his camp.
As Rikus stepped toward the fire, Styan looked up and fixed his sunken eyes on the mul’s face. “It pleases me that you have caught up to us,” he said, his face washed in orange firelight. “We would have missed you at tomorrow’s battle-”
“Stand up,” Rikus ordered.
Styan glanced around the crowd, his brow furrowed as he tried to judge the mood of both his templars and Rikus’s gladiators. Finally, he waved his wrinkled hand at a place near the foot of his rock. “Sit,” he said.
Rikus grabbed the templar by his unbound gray hair and jerked him to his feet.
“You misbegotten spawn of an elven gutter wench!” Styan yelled. Several templars stepped forward to defend their leader, but the old man waved them off. Instead, he looked to Rikus and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Rikus jerked Styan forward, then thrust him toward Drewet and the rest of the gladiators. “Apologize, and tell your templars to do the same.”
“For what?” the templar demanded. “For keeping the waterskins of our warriors full and not wasting their lives on foolish attacks?”
“For treating my gladiators like slaves,” Rikus snarled. “Tyr is a free city, and this is a free legion. One warrior does not labor while another tells jokes by the fire.”
“Well said!” shouted a gladiator.
Another added, “Since you disappeared, Rikus, they’ve been sleeping while we work!”
“Apologize,” Rikus said. He put his mouth close to the templar’s ear and added, “Then I’ll punish you for usurping my command, and for all the lies you’ve told.”
Styan’s face went pale and, in a trembling voice, he said, “Never!”
Somewhere in the crowd of templars, a man’s voice called, “I’ll not beg forgiveness of any slave!”
“Then you’ll die!” came the immediate response.
The chime of clashing weapons followed, and the unseen templar voiced his death scream. The night was filled with angry shouts and shrieks of pain as the two Tyrian companies tore into each other. Bodies began to fall one after the other-more of them templar than gladiator.
Styan spun around to face Rikus, leaving a handful of his hair in the mul’s grasp. “See what you’ve done?” he demanded. “We should be fighting Urikites, not each other.”
“From what I’ve seen, your men are as bad as Urikites. I won’t miss them, and neither will Tyr.”
“It’s not that simple,” spat the templar. “What of the dwarves? They follow me.”
“Then they die with you,” Rikus answered, reaching for his steel dagger. “It’s all the same to me.”
“Wait,” Styan said, gently laying a hand on the mul’s wrist. He stared at Rikus for a moment longer, listening to his templars cry out as they fell to the mul’s angry gladiators. “You’d do it,” he said. “You’d sacrifice half your legion to retain command of it.”
“Only the useless half,” Rikus answered, drawing his dagger.
Styan sneered at the weapon. “That won’t be necessary.” He turned around and raised his hands, then yelled, “I apologize, freed men of Tyr!”
When only a few of the combatants stopped fighting, Rikus bellowed, “That’s enough! Stop!”
Rikus’s powerful voice reached the ears of many more warriors than had Styan’s, and, as they passed the mul’s command on to their fellows, the melee gradually subsided. Soon, templar and gladiator alike were facing Styan, and the only sounds that could be heard in the mob were the moans of the wounded.
“I apologize,” Styan said, his weary eyes on Drewet’s face. “My templars apologize. We did not mean to offend you or any other freed slave.”
Drewet glanced at Rikus with a questioning look in her eyes. When the mul nodded, she looked back to the templar. “I accept your apology, for myself and for my fellows.”
A tense silence hung over the crowd. No one moved to help the injured. Both companies seemed to sense that, although a truce had been reached, the matter of the legion’s leadership had not yet been resolved. Rikus kept his black eyes fixed on Styan, waiting for the old man to acknowledge his defeat.
Finally, Styan faced the mul and, in a weak voice, he asked, “As for usurping your command, what shall my punishment be?”
Someone in the ranks of the gladiators threw a coiled whip forward, and it landed at the templar’s feet. “The lash!”
Rikus nodded, then bent down and handed the whip to Drewet. “Twenty-five strokes,” he said. “And when you give them, remember all the times a templar has whipped you.”
“I will,” Drewet said, taking the coiled strap.
Gaanon took Styan to the boulder the templar had been using as a throne. There, the half-giant pulled the old man’s cassock off, then laid him over the stone.
As Drewet took the first stroke, the crowd began to turn away. The matter had been decided and, gladiator and templar alike, they had seen enough men whipped during Kalak’s reign not to enjoy the sight of flayed skin.
At the base of the ash-covered mountain stood Makla, a small hamlet surrounded on three sides by a high stockade of mekillot ribs. Inside this barrier lay dozens of slave pits, each enclosed by a mudbrick wall capped with jagged shards of obsidian. Scattered haphazardly among the pens were the long barracks that housed the garrison, as well as the slovenly huts of the craftsmen who kept the slave-keepers supplied with whips, ropes, and other utensils of bondage.
At the core of the village, a trio of marble mansions marked three sides of a public square. There was a great cistern of steaming water at its center. A clay duct ran from this basin toward the fourth side of the plaza, ending at the tip of a short wooden pier. The pier sat over the shallows of the Lake of Golden Dreams, a body of water whose vastness was lost in the clouds of foul-smelling steam that rose from its boiling depths.
“It seems awfully quiet,” Rikus said, glancing upward. Fingers of predawn light were already shooting across the sky, casting a faint, eerie glimmer over the mountainous terrain below.
The mul’s companions did not answer, for they were all staring spellbound at the sulfur-colored lake. No one in the legion had ever seen so much water in one place before, and the spectacular sight had taken their minds off the coming battle.
“By now, the outbound quarry gangs should be readying to leave,” Rikus said, trying to direct his lieutanants’ attention to the matter at hand.
“Maybe nobody’s going out,” Gaanon offered. In imitation of the robe Rikus wore to conceal Tamar’s ruby, the half-giant had sewn two wool blankets together and slung them over his shoulders like a cape. “The highlands look dangerous,” he continued, pointing a huge finger east of the village.