She finished with a comment directed at her victim. “Think about this the next time you drop a nice girl down here.”
As she released the spell, the squirming lizards in her hand were transformed into writhing tentacles, each ten feet long and as black as the silo from which they came. They shot from Sadira’s hand like bolts of ebon-colored lightning straight for the guard’s face. He dropped his spear and yelled in surprise, but the black ribbons cut his scream short as they wrapped themselves around his face and neck. He stumbled away, gasping for air and madly tearing at the stalks constricting his neck.
If her Alliance mentor, a cantankerous old man named Ktandeo, had seen her use the spell, he would certainly have disapproved. He had forbidden her to learn or use magic of such potency. That kind of spell required the drawing of energy from a wide radius; if the radius was too small, the foliage tapped by the spell would die. Ktandeo thought the half-elf had not yet mastered her art enough to attempt such feats. Sadira thought differently, so she had secretly copied the spell and several others from his spellbook during her last clandestine visit. At the moment, she was glad she had.
The sorceress scrambled to the top of the wall. A second guard looked over the edge of the silo, a drawn dagger clutched in his hand. There was no time to cast another spell, so Sadira reached up and grabbed him by the collar.
“Come here,” she said, jerking as hard as she could on his shirt. “There’s something down here you should see.”
The surprised guard pitched forward, raising his knife to slash at Sadira’s arm. The half-elf quickly released him and pulled her arm out of harm’s way, but the man’s counterstrike did not save him. He was already leaning so far forward that he could not recover his balance. He cried out in alarm, and his dagger clattered to the floor. The guard himself followed a moment later, slipping headfirst into the darkness, his hands seizing wildly at the bricks in a futile effort to catch himself. An instant later, he hit bottom. The sharp pop and series of quick snaps that sounded from the base of the silo told Sadira that she need not worry about that particular jailer again.
She climbed out of the silo and picked up the first guard’s spear. He was still struggling with the magical tentacles that were wrapped around his face. Though he was hardly in a position to stop her from leaving, she stepped to his side and touched the spear to his ribs.
“This is for all the slaves who didn’t climb out,” she said, pressing harder on the point.
The guard stopped struggling and turned his tentacle-covered head in her direction. “No. Please!” he gasped, barely making himself understood through his constricted throat. “I … have … children-”
“So did my mother,” Sadira answered.
She pressed all of her weight against the shaft and drove the point deep into the man’s heart. A short cry of pain escaped his lips and his body trembled. An instant later, he fell motionless. Blood began to ooze from the wound.
After removing the guard’s dagger and belt, Sadira dragged his body to the silo. She dumped him on top of his partner without bothering to remove the spear from his heart or the tentacles from his head. As she pushed the stone slab over the pit, her thoughts were already turning to the next phase of her escape.
Sadira strapped the guard’s belt and dagger onto her narrow waist, then pulled a few stray strands of lizard web from her smock. She formed these strands into a small wad, then plucked a lash from her eyelid and sealed it in the silky ball. Pointing her palm at the ground, she summoned the energy for another enchantment. As she spoke the words of her incantation, the sorceress slowly rolled the wad between her fingers.
The web and the eyelash disappeared. The half-elf lifted her hand and waved it in front of her eyes. Like the rest of her body, it had become invisible.
Sadira wasted no time leaving the Break. She had only a brief time before her spell expired. In that time, the half-elf had to sneak back to her mud-brick cell and collect her spellbook from beneath the loose stone where she kept it hidden. Afterward, she would leave the estate by walking out the gate, passing beneath the noses of the guards charged with keeping her and her fellow slaves in the compound. By the time her magic lapsed, she hoped to be far away from the walls of Lord Tithian’s gladiator pits.
Though she wanted to check on Rikus’s condition, she knew that such an act held too many dangers, for guards and healers would surely surround him. She would simply have to trust in the mul’s natural hardiness and hope that he survived long enough for her to send help from the Veiled Alliance.
THREE
OLD FRIENDS
In a remote corner of his estate, Agis of Asticles sat at the edge of the muddy reservoir that provided water for all his parched lands. On the far side of the copper-colored pool, a dozen slaves marched in an endless circle, pushing four wooden crossbars that turned a creaking waterscrew and filled the small pond with bitter wellwater. Every fifty turns, two slaves were replaced by a pair who had been resting and drinking in the shade of a nearby pavilion.
Turning the screw was not particularly strenuous for twelve healthy slaves, but the scarlet rays of the sun cut through the afternoon haze like a shaft of flame. This part of the day was an insufferable inferno, a time when men collapsed simply from walking and when heavy exertion killed others. Nevertheless, the water had to keep flowing, so the slaves had to keep turning the screw.
Unlike the slaves, Agis did not have to pass the hottest part of the day beneath the sun’s crimson fury. Yet this was where the robust noble spent most afternoons, sitting cross-legged on the barren ground, his long black hair billowing on an occasional puff of wind. Usually, his brown eyes were fixed on the murky waters of his irrigation pond, staring out from beneath his dark brows with an eerie vacancy. Often the only sign that he was alive was the steady flaring of nostrils at the end of his patrician nose. His firm jaw never flinched, his strong and sinuous arms never twitched, and his solid torso did not fidget.
Like all serious students of the Way, Agis found that extremes of physical sensation, such as suffering the agony of full exposure to the midday sun, aided his meditations. It was only when he hovered on the edge of unbearable torment or unimaginable pleasure that his body, his mind, and his spirit became one, that he felt the immense power of a physical form and intellect so flawlessly joined that be could not tell where one ended and the other began. It was then he fully appreciated the great truth of being: that the energy and vitality of the body could not exist without the mind to give it form and reality and the spirit to give it all a higher meaning.
It was this simple principle that lay at the heart of all psionic power. The individual who truly understood it could tap the mystical energies that infused his own being and shape them however he wished, giving himself abilities that were as incredible as they were mysterious.
Unfortunately the Way did not yield its gifts easily. It demanded a high price of those who used it, both in devotion and knowledge. For a student of the Way, enlightenment came most often in times of physical extremes, such as during periods of complete exhaustion or terrible distress. Therefore, like most practitioners of the psionic arts, Agis spent several hours a day in considerable discomfort while he contemplated the unity of body, spirit, and mind. Usually, he chose to perform his meditations on the remote shore of his irrigation pond.
On this particular day, his mind’s eye was focused hundreds of miles and more than a decade away, on an oft-remembered place-an oasis that he had visited as a young man. In contrast to the muddy reservoir of his estate, the waters of the oasis pond sparkled blue and clear. It was surrounded by the billowing forms of damson-crowned chiffon trees and creaking canes of black-jointed whip grass. Hanging over the forest were the two golden moons of Athas, Ral and Guthay, secluded from the bloody splendor of the rising sun by a clear expanse of olive sky.