Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 2 - The Crimson Legion (20 page)

“Come with me!” called Umbra, moving toward the citadel. “You will be safe in here!”

The shadow giant's lie worked easily, for the panicked soldiers were anxious to seize any
hope of salvation. There was no obvious entrance to the fortress, but Umbra could see a
stairway in the deep hollow between the great wagon's stone wheels. Followed by the
fastest of Maetan's cowards, he led the way to these steps and began climbing.

They passed through an opening on the lowest deck and came out on a balcony on the first
level. In the middle of this loge was the lifelike statue of a fully armored woman
smashing a spiked club into the floor. Beneath this club lay a shattered, sun-bleached
skull, and scattered over the rest of the deck were the splintered bones of another
half-dozen skeletons.

Umbra slipped over the bones silently, moving toward the door that stood at the back of
the small balcony. He had time to glimpse a bright room at the end of a long hallway
before a gray, insubstantial form appeared at the end of the corridor and drifted toward
him.

“A wraith!” Umbra hissed.

He retreated from the corridor immediately, though not because he was frightened. No being
from the Black had need to fear a wraith, for undead spirits were themselves merely
shadows of the living. If it detected Umbra at all, the wraith would regard the shadow
giant as a human might an oasis spirit: something dimly sensed and best left alone.
Unfortunately, the same would not be true for the Urikites. The wraith would sense the
life pulsing in their veins and try to drive them away.

The gray silhouette slid past Umbra and slipped over the woman's statue like a pall. The
stone sculpture darkened to
a dusky shade of brown, and its blank eyes suddenly glowed with a ghastly red light. As
the first Urikite tried to slip past, the stony woman cried, “No!”

She swung her club, driving a dozen long spikes deep into the soldier's neck and chest. He
flew off the balcony and crashed onto the heads of his fellows below. They hardly seemed
to notice, for the Tyrians were closing in and a battle was already beginning to rage
within a dozen yards of the citadel.

Had the choice been Umbra's, he would have abandoned Maetan's plan and gone to search out
Rikus that instant. Even if he could find another way into the citadel, he doubted the
Urikites would survive for very long. Unfortunately, if he did not follow Maetan's
commands to the word, the mindbender would not be compelled to deliver the obsidian he
traded for Umbra's services. The shadow giant could not allow that, for his wives needed
the glassy rock. It was almost egging season.

Umbra stepped toward a narrow catwalk that led from this balcony to the next, pausing to
address the men who had been following the dead soldier. “Fight past the statue,” he
ordered. “I'll find another entrance.”

When the Urikites hesitated, Umbra pointed back down the gorge. “Fight past the statues or
die!” he snapped. “Tyr does not take slaves, so
surrender brings
only death.”

* * * * *

Rikus stood knee-deep in Urikite bodies, his gaze fixed on the top floor of the strange
citadel. There, standing as tall as the winged statue of the bearded man, was Umbra. The
shadow giant's blue eyes were studying the battlefield below, as if he were searching the
bodies for a single Urikite survivor.

“What's he doing up there?” Rikus asked.

“And how did he get past all the statues?” Neeva wondered, pointing at the balconies on
the citadel's lower level. Next to her stood Caelum, who was also looking at the uppermost
loge, and K'kriq, who was staring at the dead with as much interest as Umbra.

Rikus studied the lower levels of the building. There was a gap in the stone railing of
the first loge, and the statue that had been guarding the door behind it now lay scattered
in the rocks below, broken into a dozen pieces. Despite their success in destroying the
stony woman, that was as far as the Urikites had gotten.

The statue of an armored man had moved from the second loge and still patrolled the
balcony, a four-bladed axe in one hand and a wide-bladed dagger in the other. Sprawled
over the railing and lying beneath the balcony were more than a dozen Urikites with
slashed throats, missing limbs, and smashed skulls.

As Rikus studied the rest of the citadel's lower level, he noticed that only the loge from
which this statue had come was empty. On each of the other balconies stood another
lifelike statue, each cradling some sort of fantastic weapon in its inert hands.

After studying the stone figures for a moment, Rikus took a deep breath, then said, “Let's
go.”

“Go where?” asked Neeva.

The mul pointed at Umbra, whose blue eyes now seemed to be locked onto him. “Up there.”

“Rikus, I've seen you do a lot of stupid things in your life, but this would be the
worst,” Neeva said. “Hasn't it occurred to you that if half a Urikite company couldn't
make it past the first balcony, then neither will we?”

“No,” the mul answered. He started toward the stairway concealed beneath the foundation.
When he did not hear footsteps behind him, he stopped and turned around. “Aren't you
coming?”

K'kriq was the first to answer. “No. T-too scared.” Rikus scowled and, not bothering with
Caelum, looked to Neeva. “What about you?”

“If you can tell me how we're going to get past those statues, I'll follow you,” she said.

Rikus pointed his sword toward Umbra. “The same way he did.”

“How was that?”

The mul shrugged and started toward the stairs again.

Neeva did not join him until he had set a foot on the bottom step. “You're as one-sighted
as a dwarf and about as smart as a baazrag,” she growled.

Behind her came Caelum. Only K'kriq, who had turned his attention to picking through the
Urikite bodies, did not join him.

“Even if we make it past the statues, Umbra will kill us all,” said Caelum, half-hiding
behind Neeva.

“No one told you to come along,” the mul answered glaring at the dwarf.

“I asked him,” Neeva said. “If anyone can save us, it will be him.”

Rikus grunted, then climbed the stairs. As he stepped onto the first loge, the statue
moved swiftly to meet him. It was a burly man dressed in what appeared to be a full suit
of plate armor. From beneath his open-faced helmet dangled long, straight hair, and his
pudgy jowls were covered by a bushy beard.

“No!” the statue boomed.

He swung his four-bladed axe. The mul ducked the blow easily, but barely managed to raise
the Scourge of Rkard as the statue lashed out with his other hand. There was a loud chime
as the dagger met the magic sword, then the stone blade snapped in two. Rikus countered
immediately, slashing at the statue's legs.

The stone man skipped out of the way, retreating to the far side of the loge. His glowing
red eyes remained fixed on the Scourge of Rkard for a moment, then dropped to the Belt of
Rank girding Rikus's waist. After a moment, the statue surprised the gladiator by crossing
his arms in salute.

The mul stepped onto the balcony. Keeping a wary eye on the statue, he crossed to the
catwalk on the other side. When it made no move to stop him, he motioned to Neeva and
Caelum to follow. “Hurry, before he changes his mind.”

As soon as Neeva approached the balcony, the statue cried, “No!”

He raised his weapons and leaped forward, moving with as much grace and speed as any
gladiator Rikus had ever fought. Neeva barely managed to keep her head by ducking the axe
and dashing halfway down the stairs. She smashed into Caelum and sent him sprawling all
the way to the bottom.

“I don't think I'm welcome,” Neeva called.

“Then wait here,” the mul said. “I'll take care of this myself.”

“It could be a trap!”

“If it is, it's the strangest one I've ever seen,” Rikus answered, shaking his head at all
the Urikite bodies strewn about the balcony. “You can watch me kill Umbra from below.”

“Or catch your limp body when he throws it down,” she answered, descending the stairs.

Rikus followed the catwalk to the next loge. Instead of Urikite bodies, it was covered
with splintered, sun-bleached bones. At the back of the balcony was a door that led into
the interior of the citadel, but the mul did not even bother to peer down it. He had come
here to kill Umbra, not explore a ruin.

He followed the catwalk around the rest of the building, crossing a long series of loges.
To one degree or another, they were all littered with bones and, occasionally, broken
weapons or weathered armor. On each balcony, there also stood a statue of gray stone
frozen into a lifelike pose, its weapon planted in a set of white ribs or resting atop a
shattered skull.

Finally, on the thirteenth loge, Rikus found the stairway that led up to the highest
balcony. Clutching his sword tightly, he rushed up the stairs.

Upon reaching the top, he found a dark doorway on one side of the deck and the huge statue
of a winged man on the other. Unlike the other balconies, the statue on this one was not
surrounded by bones scattered over the stone blocks around it. There was also no sign of
Umbra.

“Where are you, shadow?”

There was no answer. Fearing that his prey had fled, Rikus looked over the edge of the
balcony. With some difficulty, he picked out Neeva's form from the hundreds of gladiators
still milling about the battlefield. “What happened to Umbra?” the mul yelled. “Did he
leave?”

“No,” came the reply.

“Then I'm going inside.”

“Rikus, no!”

The mul faced the shadowy doorway and took a deep breath, then rushed forward. An eerie
prickle ran down his spine as he stepped out of the blazing sun and into the cool darkness
of a long corridor. His steps rang off the walls as he advanced down the hallway, and soon
the musty smell of mildew filled his nostrils. A soft light rose from the floor of the
room ahead, but it was much dimmer than the Athasian day and Rikus felt half-blind.

As he stepped out of the corridor, an icy hand seized his wrist. His whole arm went numb
and painful fingers of chilling cold shot clear into his torso.

“Rikus,” Umbra hissed.

The mul ripped his arm free and dove blindly away. He did not hit the floor. Instead, his
stomach rose into his chest and he felt himself tumbling head over heels into a deep pit.
He glimpsed dozens of soft rays spilling across a white floor beneath him, crossing and
recrossing each other from all directions. As his body turned over, he saw above him the
narrow gallery walkway from which he had jumped.

Finally, Rikus's shoulder struck the hard floor. He stretched out to his full length to
absorb the impact along his entire body. At the same time, he slapped at the ground with
his numb arm, trying to counter the force of his landing. If the effort did him any good,
he could not tell. His head hit the stone floor with a resounding crack, his body exploded
into bone-jarring agony, and the breath blasted from his lungs in a pained howl.

“My master wishes you dead,” Umbra hissed, his words echoing off the stony walls of the
pit. They came to Rikus as though from a great distance. “So do I.”

Acting on instinct alone, the mul tried to scramble to his feet. Instead, he found that it
was all he could do to draw breath into his laboring lungs. Every inch of his body stung
and ached at the same time. His vision was blurred, he felt sick to his stomach, and his
head throbbed with pain.

For what seemed an eternity, the mul lay on the floor, trying to make sense of the wash of
colors around him. Far above he saw the brown abyss of the vaulted ceiling.

Beneath it was a beam of light that silhouetted Umbra's fuzzy black form. The shadow
creature was peering down at Rikus and speaking in a deep, rumbling voice. The mul could
make no sense of the words.

Rikus felt his eyes closing. For a moment he wanted to let them. Nothing seemed more
inviting than to slip away from this pain-racked body. He could not tell how far he had
fallen, but it seemed more than twice Gaanon's height. A tiny voice inside him seemed to
say that even a mul could not fall so far and escape injury. There was no use fighting, so
why not just let your eyes close and be done with the pain?

The mul would have none of that. He held his eyes open and forced himself to concentrate
on the pain. As long as there was pain, he told himself, there was life.

Slowly, the mul's vision cleared. Seeing that Umbra had disappeared from the railing
above, Rikus rolled onto his belly and rose to his knees. The effort sent waves of pain
shooting through his back, his ribs, and especially his head. He felt dizzy. His vision
blurred again, and he remained kneeling until the feeling passed.

It looked to him as though he had landed in the citadel's central room. In the middle of
the chamber, near where he kneeled, a three-sided banister marked a narrow staircase that
descended deeper into the fortress. Along the walls, thirteen hallways, set between high
walls of dark marble, ran from the circular room like the spokes of a wheel. Each corridor
ended at one of the thirteen balconies ringing the citadel's second level.

Rikus tried to stand. His knee buckled and his collarbone popped, dropping him back to the
floor in a torrent of blazing agony. The mul grabbed his arm and realized immediately that
the fall had dislocated his shoulder. He could not tell what was wrong with his leg, for
it throbbed with a terrible ache from the hip down to the ankle.

The mul knew that if he fought Umbra now, he would surely die.

Again he tried to stand, this time placing all his weight on the side of his body that had
not struck the floor. To his relief, his leg held. Using his left arm, he picked up the
Scourge of Rkard and put it in its scabbard, then braced the sword against the ground like
a cane. He started to limp forward, heading toward a balcony.

“It's too late to run,” Umbra hissed, dropping into view from the murky underside of the
gallery.