The panthers moved forward in a coordinated unit, tails thrashing, lips curled back to expose saberlike fangs. Ulrich planted his booted feet apart and held his curved sword, ready to face the feline attackers. The crowd cheered, energized and titillated.
Nicci watched the troka split apart. One sand panther approached the target directly, while the other two cats spread out to each side, assessing their enemy, studying his reactions.
Ulrich turned slowly, trying to watch all of them. The flanking panthers circled, then switched sides while the ancient warrior rotated to protect his back, then swung back to face the closest panther.
“Dear spirits, I know Mrra, but I’ve never seen a troka work together,” Nathan said. “Is that what attacked you and poor Thistle in the canyons?”
“Yes,” Bannon said. “We fought them. We had to.”
“We killed Mrra’s sister panthers, but I healed her,” Nicci said. “Her troka must have escaped from the animal pits here.”
“Just like the combat bear,” Bannon said.
“Perhaps the animals were intentionally let loose.” Nicci thought about Mirrormask and his rebels, how they meant to instill chaos, how they had also freed other slaves and sent them fleeing into the countryside.
Down in the arena, the foremost panther sprang ahead in a frontal attack on the ancient warrior. Ulrich brought up his sword and slashed, but the cat dodged and received only a scratch. A red stripe of blood stood out on her ribs, not a deep wound. The attack had just been a feint.
The impact of a second panther struck Ulrich from the side and sent him reeling. The cat lunged in, raking claws down the warrior’s biceps. In a normal human, such an attack might have ripped his arm off, but the claws left only white gouges in the grayish skin, which quickly hardened over. The crowd muttered and gasped.
Nathan leaned forward, fascinated. “He’s still part stone!”
Bannon said, “I think he’s only half recovered from the spell.”
Even Ulrich seemed surprised at his invulnerability, looking at the wound. With greater anger, he raised his curved sword and brought the pommel down hard on the sand panther’s flat skull. The crack of the blow resounded throughout the arena.
The people cheered, as if they didn’t really know which outcome they preferred. The third panther pounced from behind, slamming into Ulrich and driving him facedown in the sand. The cat tried to claw his back, raking white gouges down the armor, which should have been shredded.
The second panther bit down on Ulrich’s wrist, dragging his sword arm, but the ancient warrior pummeled the cat with a stone-hard fist. The injured cat limped away, obviously wounded. Ulrich heaved himself to his feet again as the other two panthers closed in, but now they were wary.
One of the cats lunged, and the warrior slashed viciously with the short sword, leaving a gash in the tawny fur. Ulrich was damaged, too, his armor broken in places, white gouges marking his neck, his arms. But he fought as if he considered himself invincible. The battered sand panthers circled out of his reach.
“Such a warrior seems hard to kill,” Nathan observed. “Imagine hundreds of thousands of them.”
The crowd grumbled when the cautious panthers refused to press the attack. The troka circled, made tentative advances, then backed off. Nicci felt sorry for the cats, knowing they had been manipulated by the chief handler to become killing animals. The sister panthers were united but confused by this unusual opponent.
Finally, another figure strode through the barred gate from which the panthers had emerged, a burly man who wore no armor. Chief Handler Ivan.
He walked forward as if he had a hurricane in his veins. For a weapon he carried an enormous war hammer with a thick shaft and a head a foot wide, weighted with stones and capped with iron on each end. Ivan moved without hurry, letting the huge mallet swing like a pendulum at his side.
Ulrich turned to his new opponent. The wounded panthers kept circling, but the ancient warrior ignored them, knowing they had been injured physically, defeated psychologically.
Ivan let out an animal growl of his own. Without speaking a word, he began to sprint, taking heavy strides, using the giant mallet for momentum.
Ulrich raised his curved sword, cocked back his claw-marked arm, but the blade was laughably small. When Ivan swung the giant mallet, the impact struck the hilt of the sword and broke off the ancient warrior’s entire forearm at the wrist. Ulrich staggered backward and looked down at his stump, which looked like broken rock that oozed thick strands of red.
He roared a hollow, incomprehensible challenge to the chief handler, but Ivan was impatient, not wanting to continue the sport. As the big man ran forward, he drew back the mallet, and when it reached the extent of its swing behind him, he put all of his strength into the weighted war hammer. He lifted it up in a smooth arcing motion, timed perfectly so that his last footfalls brought him right up to Ulrich.
The massive mallet crashed full into the ancient warrior’s chest—and it was as if a mountain had struck him. The mallet shattered Ulrich, broke his torso, splintered his ribs like kindling, plowed through what would have been his heart.
He collapsed, a mixture of gore and stone, the rubble of what had been a living being.
The audience cheered, but Nicci detected an uneasy undertone in their cries. Ivan did not revel in the adulation of the crowd. He stood with the mallet over the destroyed warrior; then he raised the huge weapon over his head and brought it down again, obliterating the gray hardened face of Ulrich into the sand of the arena.
The spell-bonded panthers were pacing, obviously in pain from their wounds. The chief handler turned from his victim, stretched a hand toward the troka, and released his gift. He manipulated the big cats, nudged them, forced them. All three snarled and resisted, fighting back. One even made a tentative lunge toward Ivan, but the chief handler grimaced with additional effort, twisted his fingers, and released a burst of magic. The rebellious sand panther seemed hobbled, forced away. Ivan drove the three animals back through the barred gate and into the pits beneath the arena.
“Quite an exciting combat, hmmm?” Andre sounded delighted. He looked to Elsa, Damon, Quentin.
“Too bad Renn couldn’t be here to see it,” Elsa said.
“He’d better hurry and get back in time,” Maxim said. “Otherwise we may need to find a new duma member.” He didn’t seem dismayed by the prospect.
Bannon hunched in his seat, wrestling with grief and anger. “Ulrich just wanted help. We don’t know why he woke up, why the spell wore off.”
Nicci looked around the arena, watched the citizens shift and jostle as they departed from the stands. She said in an ominous voice, “And that warrior was only one of many thousands.”
CHAPTER 35
Nicci stood at the ruling tower’s wide observation windows, peering out at the precipitous drop, which plunged down to the clustered buildings and tangled alleys of the city. The breezes that wandered into the open chamber were cool and crisp.
She stood with her back to the gathered duma members, uninterested in their droning irrelevant nonsense. The muscles in her back twitched and rippled as if some ghostly hand had brushed her. Nicci’s blond hair hung to her shoulders, and her intense blue eyes stared out at Ildakar, focused on what she knew, rather than what she saw. The city had not settled down since the previous day’s combat exhibition.
Sovrena Thora sat on her high throne like an ice queen. Behind her, a pair of silent slaves erected a set of empty songbird cages, while others carried silken nets that held small struggling captives. The hunters delicately extricated the birds one by one, placing the larks inside the golden cages. They twittered and cheeped in terror, but Thora sat back in her chair with a cool smile. “It is good to be surrounded by music again, although the others were delicious.”
“Crunchy bones,” said the Norukai captain, who wandered about the duma chamber, looking for something to amuse himself. Kor and his comrades had marched into the ruling tower
, uninvited. Taking any available seats, the Norukai looked bored. Dar announced he had secured a shipment of wine casks and dried Ildakaran fruits, but he still intended to get some freshly butchered yaxen. “Easier cargo than walking meat,” he said.
The captain grumbled, scratching the implanted shark’s tooth on the side of his shaved skull, “But just as expensive.”
“And yet you keep coming back to Ildakar whenever our shroud is down,” Maxim said. “You seem very curious about our city.”
“King Grieve is curious, and so we come back,” Kor said. “But I would rather be home on our islands.”
Nicci turned from the wide windows. Every time she thought about the Norukai, she wanted to unleash her gift and incinerate these abhorrent beings. She also wanted to take down the preoccupied and heartless council members and free the people, as Mirrormask intended.
But she had to find a way that would not be a futile gesture. Nicci was confident she would come up with an approach that would free Ildakar.
Bannon was off again with his friends, but Nathan joined the group in the ruling chamber for the opportunity to talk with Andre. “Fleshmancer, as there are no crucial items on the agenda, couldn’t we perhaps go back to your studio? Keep working to restore my gift?”
Andre brushed him aside as if he were a persistent fly. “Right now it’s imperative that I study the fragments of the dead stone warrior. What if the wizard commander’s entire spell is fading? We must be concerned.”
“My spell is not fading,” Maxim said. “Something has changed in the underpinnings of the world.”
Nicci stepped away from the window. “We told you that already. Lord Rahl caused the star shift and sealed the underworld for all time. You can see the difference in the night sky.”
“Thank you for your information,” Thora said, her words as sharp as the edges of broken glass. “But our solution is obvious.”
Nathan unconsciously brushed the green silk of his sleeves. “I’m afraid it’s not obvious to me, Sovrena. What solution did you have in mind?”
“We will work our magic from the pyramid. The Norukai have delivered enough slaves to us, so we should raise the shroud again with all due haste, even if it is just a temporary measure, as before. Then our beloved city will be safe from that great army, even if it should awaken.”
“An army of statues might not be the worst threat you have to worry about,” Nicci said quietly.
Elsa and Quentin looked up, surprised. Chief Handler Ivan picked at his fingernails with a stubby dagger. “What threat is that?”
Uninterested in the discussion, Captain Kor said, “Just keep your damned shroud down until our ships are away. We plan to stay a few more days.”
“Preparations will take time,” Maxim said. “You have plenty of opportunity to cause trouble in Ildakar before you sail back downriver.”
Kor, Lars, Yorik, and Dar chuckled mischievously at the invitation.
“We’ll still go home with plenty of gold,” Kor said.
“And an extra barrel of bloodwine for King Grieve,” Dar added.
Nicci looked at Nathan, knowing that neither of them wanted to be bottled up in Ildakar for years. But they each still had important work to do here.
Interrupting the malaise of the meeting, one of the city guards burst into the main council chamber with a clatter of footsteps. “There’s been another killing! Sovrena, it’s…” He fell silent, sickened.
Maxim brushed lint from his black pantaloons. “Murder? Is it those vile malcontents again?”
Tears streamed from the breathless guard’s eyes. “Sovrena, I ran to tell you, but they are just behind me—”
A procession hurried up the stairs, marched into the open chamber. Uniformed guards carried a body wrapped in cloaks. Patches of blood were already soaking through the silken cloaks that covered the body. The men were somber and shaken.
Thora stood tall in front of her throne. Maxim hurried across the blue marble tiles, curious rather than horrified. “And what have we here?” He pulled one of the cloaks away to reveal a stained red shoulder pauldron.
The first guard’s face was flushed from exertion and fear. “It is High Captain Avery! He was out on night patrol, and we found his body this morning. It was hoisted up in the slave market and left on display.” He choked out his words as Thora stepped down from the dais, visibly shaking. “He was stabbed repeatedly with mirror shards.”
Horrified, Thora turned white and removed the silken cloak from the corpse’s face. She stared at Avery’s handsome features, now marred by gashes and dried blood. His eyes had been gouged out, and long crystalline shards had been thrust into his chest, his throat, his mouth, left there to reflect the pain of his dying.
Thora let out a keening wail. “Nooo!” Her immaculately coiffed hair wafted and her skin seemed to crackle as her fury summoned the magic within her. “Those savages must be eradicated.” Grief-struck, she backed away, covering her face.
Maxim was flippant. “You will find other lovers, my dear.” He intercepted the guard procession before they could set the body on the marble floor. He shooed them away. “You will not leave him here, and we will not let his body lie in state as an honored gifted noble.”
“But he was the high captain!” said the lead guard.
Maxim gave the man a withering frown. “Any guard captain who would let himself be killed by street rabble is worthless.”
Nicci stepped forward, even though she knew they didn’t want to hear her speak up. “This is a sign of dangerous unrest in your city. You should do something about it, understand why the people would react this way. Let me and my companions help, and maybe we can release the pressure before it’s too late. Avery should be the last guard who needs to die.”
“Avery didn’t need to die!” the sovrena shrieked.
Maxim seemed more amused than horrified. “Ildakar has been a fine and stable place for many centuries.”
Nathan continued to look at the bloody body wrapped in cloaks. “It doesn’t appear to be entirely fine and stable.”
Thora wasn’t listening. She shook her head, closed her eyes, and retreated to her raised chair, where she collapsed, weeping.
Maxim shot a glance at Chief Handler Ivan. “Feed the body to the arena animals. That way he can at least serve some small purpose other than as a sexual plaything for the sovrena.” He made a vehement gesture, and the unsettled guards hurried out with their bloody burden.
Ivan cracked his knuckles. “An excellent suggestion, Wizard Commander. I can use it for training purposes.” As he followed them out, the body left a trail of blood on the polished blue marble floor.
The visiting Norukai looked after the murdered guard captain and seemed to find the entire scene amusing.
CHAPTER 36
After watching Ulrich slaughtered in the combat arena, Bannon was angry. As he sat in the gathering darkness outside the villa, he remembered how distraught and confused the ancient stone warrior had looked upon awakening after fifteen centuries. Bannon had tried to help him, as he always tried to help those in need, but Ulrich was tricked and betrayed.
How the audience in the combat arena had cheered! Just as they had cheered when Ian, the champion, also fought for his life in front of the crowd. And the same people had watched so eagerly when the Norukai dragged in scores of abused captives to the slave market.
Bannon did not belong here in this city; he knew that in his heart. He didn’t understand the people of Ildakar, and he just wanted to go away. This was not the adventure he had been seeking, but he had to stay here until Nathan got the assistance he needed, and until Bannon found a way to free Ian from his long nightmare. Despite promises and reassurances, Amos had done nothing to gain Ian his freedom. He didn’t seem to care, but Bannon didn’t know what else to do.
“You look so glum, my friend!” Amos clapped him hard on the shoulder, startling him as he sat outside the villa on a stone bench. “It’s nighttime, when the pleasures of Ildakar c
ome alive.” He flashed a bright grin. His two ever-present companions also came up behind him, dressed in fine fur-trimmed silks of blue, green, and orange.
“Come with us,” said Jed. “We’ll distract you.”
“I’m not in the mood,” Bannon said. “I’d rather stay in my quarters for tonight.”
“You have quarters here because we allow it,” Amos replied sourly, with a hint of a threat. “You tell brave stories of your great battles, but you’re afraid to join your new friends? Come, we’re going back to the silk yaxen. Now that you know what to expect, maybe you’ll have a better time at the dacha.”
“Sweet Sea Mother…” Bannon muttered to himself. “I told you that isn’t something I’d like to participate in. You go ahead.”
“At least accompany us,” Brock prodded. “Look at the beautiful ladies if you don’t want to touch them. There’s no requirement for what you have to do.”
“But you promised you’d help my friend Ian.”
Amos grimaced at the reminder. “We will, but not tonight. He’s been here for years, so there’s no hurry. Now, come with us.”
Bannon felt trapped, but he felt trapped by many things in Ildakar. He longed for when he, Nicci, and Nathan could travel the open countryside again with Mrra loping beside them. Ildakar seemed so crowded, with small spaces, tiny dwellings, narrow streets. Now he felt pressure from the three young men staring at him.
Maybe he would have a chance to talk more about Ian.… “All right, I’ll go with you.”
Laughing, the young men led the way. Now that they had coerced Bannon to join them, they barely bothered to notice him.
He let his thoughts wander as they went down the winding streets. He imagined somehow breaking Ian free from the training pits and escaping from the city. The two of them could survive out in the hills, find some of the towns or cities not far from Ildakar. Or, Ian could travel with their group and explore the vast Old World, have wondrous adventures … and Ian and Bannon would have a chance to recover their friendship.