“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 slaver.”
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 sometime after that a moth will claw its way out of one of his eyes.”
Tithian had paused for a few moments to let Rikus study the unconscious youth, then had fetched a small jar containing an identical caterpillar from his cassock pocket. “Don’t make me angry again.”
The high templar had released the slave and left without another word. Today Grakidi was already lame and blind in one eye. He could not speak so much as his own name, and sometimes he lost his way as he went from cellhouse to cellhouse emptying slopbuckets. Still, there was always a grin on his face and he seemed happy in the typical way of idiots. Rikus could hardly bear to look at him, however, for the mul could not help feeling responsible for the slave’s condition. He had made up his mind to kill Grakidi as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
Finally responding to the mul’s threat against his guards, Boaz glared at Rikus. “I pay these men, so they can laugh at my jokes if they want,” he said. “Don’t threaten them, slave.”
“Would you rather I just killed them?” Rikus asked.
Boaz’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “I should have known better than to reason with a stupid mul,” he said, turning his angry gaze away from Rikus and toward the four slaves standing atop the wall nearby. “One of your friends will pay for your disrespect. Who shall I have flogged? Neeva?”
The trainer pointed at Rikus’s fighting partner, a blond woman of full human blood, who stared at Boaz with deep, emerald eyes. Her cape hung open in the front, revealing a husky physique almost as knotted with muscles as that of Rikus. With a pair of full red lips, a prominent, firm chin, and pale, smooth skin, she looked both divine and deadly.
Rikus had reason to be glad that her appearances were not deceiving. He and Neeva were a matched pair, which meant that in addition to sleeping together, they fought in games against similar fighting teams. In fact, the contest in which he hoped to win his freedom was a matched game.
When the mul’s only response to Boaz’s query was a menacing glower, the trainer shrugged. “How about Yarig and Anezka? They’re small, so we’ll have to whip both of them.” he said, pointing at another of Tithian’s matched pairs.
Yarig, the male, scowled at the trainer indignantly. Like all dwarves, he stood around four feet tall and was completely bald from head to heel. His features were square and angular, with the distinctive dwarven crest of thickened skull crowning his bald head. Yarig’s stocky body was even more muscular and sculpted than Rikus’s. The mul had often thought that his friend resembled a boulder more than a man.
“You’re not being fair, Boaz,” Yarig said firmly. “Size makes no difference.”
“I’m not interested in being fair,” Boaz snapped, barely granting the dwarf a sidelong glance.
Yarig would not be dismissed lightly. “Size makes no difference to flogging,” he insisted. As was typical for a dwarf, he was so caught up in trivial details that he was oblivious to larger issues. “When you’re flogged, it hurts just as much no matter how tall you are.”
Anezka stepped to her partner’s side and tried to drag the dwarf away, frowning at Rikus all the while. She had been lashed as punishment for the mul’s defiance once before, and she made no effort to hide her resentment of him. Standing no more than three-and-a-half feet high, she was a halfling female from the other side of the Ringing Mountains. She looked like a scrawny child, save that her figure and face were those of a mature woman. Her hair grew from her head in a tangled bush that had never been brushed, and her cunning brown eyes had a deranged look to them. Her tongue had been cut out before she’d become a slave, so no one had ever been able to determine whether she was truly unbalanced, or just seemed that way. Most didn’t debate the question for long, especially since Anezka liked to eat her meat while it was still alive.
Yarig pulled away from the halfling and stubbornly stepped toward Boaz. “You should only flog one of us.”
Two of the trainer’s guards leveled their spears at Yarig’s chest, preventing even the single-minded dwarf from advancing farther. “Boaz isn’t going to flog either one of you,” Rikus noted.
“Then who will it be?” Boaz asked, his lips spreading into a cruel smile. “If not your pit-mates or your fighting partner, then perhaps your lover?”
Rikus groaned inwardly. He did not hide his dalliances from Neeva, but open discussion of his romantic liaisons never failed to upset her. At the moment, the last thing he needed was an angry fighting partner.
Boaz pointed at the last slave on the deck, a voluptuous scullery wench named Sadira. He motioned for her to come to him. Like the trainer, Sadira was a half-elf, with peaked eyebrows and pale eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Where the trainer’s features were sharp and raw, the young woman’s were slender and winsome. Her eyes were as clear and unclouded as a tourmaline, and her long, amber hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves.
The wench wore a hemp smock with a wide neckline that hung off both shoulders, and a ragged hem that barely reached the middle of her slender thighs. The smock was the same as those worn by the all the slave girls of the compound, but on Sadira the simple shift seemed as provocative as any noblewoman’s most revealing dress.
When the scullery slave reached Boaz’s side, the trainer laid a pasty hand on her bare shoulder. Sadira cringed as the trainer ran his lecherous fingers over her smooth skin, but did not dare object to his touch. “It will be a pity to blemish such beauty with flogging scars, but if that’s what you want, Rikus-”