Arram nodded. “Yes, Master.” Everyone knows Varice, he thought.
“Not Master, only Hulak. You are said to be clever.” The older man watched him, his eyes seeming not to blink.
“I’m trying to be,” Arram replied honestly.
“You have left me with”—in a form of exquisite torture, the gardener pointed to each shattered jar and counted its number aloud—“seven broken vessels I had planned to use in the morning. These things are money out of my spring term budget.”
Arram saw coins—his coins—flying out of a drawer in the bursar’s office. “How mu—”
But there was that upraised palm commanding silence again. “No. More important is a student silly enough to think a garden is dead because he sees nothing above the ground.”
To add to Arram’s enjoyment, it began to truly pour. Hulak did not even seem to notice. Arram did, as mud ran down his chest, breeches, and feet. He said nothing, feeling that the worst was about to come.
“You repay me by coming each school day, at this time, for an hour.”
Arram heard himself whimper softly.
Hulak ignored him. “Today I am in the third garden from the river. Tomorrow I will be in the fourth garden, and so on, until I reach the end of this long corridor. The next day I will move south, to the first garden on that corridor, and on. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Arram mumbled.
“I will bring you better clothes for gardening, and sandals.” Hulak looked him up and down. “Mages should understand plants. Varice knows this. Now it is your turn. Tomorrow, after your monkey lesson.” He looked along the row. “Pick up the jar pieces, take them to the shed over there. Put them in the basket with others.” He returned to the row where he had been working.
Arram heaped as many shards of pottery as he could carry in half of a broken jar and bore them to the shed, walking around the garden instead of through. As he worked, one question plagued him: How had Hulak known who he was?
—
“Of course he knows,” Varice said when he finally met her and Ozorne for supper. “Master Hulak knows everything!” She patted Arram’s arm. “You’ll learn.”
Ozorne nodded. “The university paid a royal sum to woo him here from the Mohon tribes that live north of Jindazhen.”
Varice giggled. “It wasn’t the money,” she informed her friend. “Master Lindhall—he was the one who brought Master Hulak here—told him about all of the plants and trees in the East that Hulak had never seen. You just have to know how to talk to him.”
“Not this afternoon I didn’t,” Arram grumbled. “Now I have even more work before I can do my classroom studies!”
Ozorne patted his shoulder. “Just wait till we get to the Upper Academy, my dear fellow,” he said cheerfully. “You will dream of these happy, lazy days in the Lower Academy with wistful sorrow.”
Exhausted after his trying day, Arram gratefully fell into bed and slept almost immediately. It seemed as if he’d barely started a decent dream of a blond girl who beckoned him to her when thunder crashed overhead. She vanished and Arram pried his eyes open.
“That was going to be a good one,” he muttered to the gods of dreams.
The thunder—no, not thunder, but pounding on the door—resumed.
“Make it stop or I’ll make it stop,” Ozorne growled from his cubicle. “They teach me explosive spells now.”
Arram crawled out of his blankets and stumbled to the door. “What the—?” he demanded as he threw it open.
He stopped. The burly fist raised to pound again belonged to Yadeen. He looked no more awake than Arram. “If I am up and about, someone will share my misery,” he informed the youth. “The marble slabs that are the face of the imperial platform—at the great arena—fell during an earth tremor. Did you feel it?”
Arram shook his head.
“I would like you to help me put new stones in their place,” Yadeen explained. “To do so I need you to let me use your power as well as my own. Normally no one would ask this before you had learned the spells to stop another mage from drawing on you, but this is an emergency. Will you help me? I swear by Mithros, Minoss, and any god you prefer that I will make you do no lawless thing, nor hold back any amount of Gift to keep you subject to my will in the future.”
Arram gawped at the older man. Finally he found the wit to say, “Wouldn’t you rather have one of your personal students? The older ones, I mean?”
Yadeen grimaced. “For a task such as this, they lack…” He hesitated, then continued, “Sufficient raw power of the right order. I would need two or three of them, and one of my three is about to leave to serve at a quarry for a year. Rather than deal with all that, I would prefer one student, if possible.”
Arram jumped. “Yes, sir, of course, sir!” he said, and grabbed the clothes he had placed on his chair for the morning.
“Say nothing to anyone with regard to my evaluation of how many of my older students could do this,” Yadeen said, accepting a cup of tea from Irafa, who had emerged from her own room. “Both of you.” He raised his voice and looked toward Ozorne’s cubicle.
“Your secrets are safe,” the prince called back. “Though I’d say you need new students if your senior ones are this useless.”
“Their skills are elsewhere,” Yadeen retorted after a sip of tea. “Have you been asked to throw fire yet, or to work a simulacrum of yourself good enough to fool a master?”
“No, Master Yadeen,” came the grudging reply.
Yadeen took another gulp of tea. “In any case, our task is better done with a younger student if that one is strong enough. Older students have trained their Gifts in complex mental webs. It gets harder to pull them into solid ropes for great tasks. Arram, are you ready—ah, good. Enjoy your sleep, Your Highness.” Yadeen closed the door once they were in the hall with Irafa. “You brought your workbag? May I see?”
Arram handed the bag over.
Yadeen examined the items and returned the bag to Arram. “With luck you won’t need this, but there’s no telling.” He looked at Arram. “Coat and hat?”
Arram pointed to the door to the outside corridor and yawned.
Yadeen smiled. “Make certain they are there.” As Arram went outside for his things, Yadeen returned his cup to Irafa and exchanged a few words with her. Arram was struggling with his coat when the master joined him in the outer corridor.
Yadeen gripped Arram’s coat sleeves and drew them properly onto the youth’s arms. Next he thrust Arram’s broad hat onto his head. As they set off, rain blasting their faces as the wind blew, he explained.
“The emperor hosts the ambassador from the Copper Isles in three days. They wish to see our new wild beasts. The platform must be as good as new,” he said. “Old Mesaraz gets cross if things aren’t perfect when he’s showing off, particularly since this Kyprish fellow is here to talk trade. The emperor would also like to find out how he took ship at this time of year and arrived safe and sound. Lucky for us, all we need to do is smooth and polish some tons of rock and put them in place.”
Arram trotted beside the master, bubbling over with questions. He chose the one that worried him the most: “Is it true, what you said, that it’ll be hard, later, to get a single pure line of my Gift? One that isn’t already tangled with spells?”
Yadeen glanced at him, a wry look on his face. “It depends on the mage. I was largely trying to plant the idea in your friend’s head, to see if he believed it enough to hobble himself a bit. I would prefer that you didn’t say as much.”
“No, sir.” Frankly Arram didn’t believe any suggestion would have power over Ozorne, and he hadn’t felt magic pass from Yadeen when he’d said that to his friend.
“You’ll find, as you grow older, that the Tasikhe line can be erratic. There hasn’t been a mage for a generation, but the stories about the family are all about unusual behavior.” They had reached the end of the corridor. It opened onto the Fieldside Road, on the opposite side of the university f
rom the river and its road to the city. Waiting for them were two hard-looking men in leather armor. Yadeen handed his pack to Arram and went to talk to them.
At last the master beckoned him forward. The youth tied the strap that fixed his wide hat on his head and plunged through the gate. A bubble of light bloomed from Yadeen’s hand, casting illumination over four horses standing in a roadside shelter. Arram gulped. It had been a long time since he had ridden a horse, and it hadn’t gone well.
“Can’t we walk?” he asked Yadeen.
“If the coliseum master had wanted us to walk, he would not have sent horses,” Yadeen said, his voice tight. Arram raised the brim of his hat to get a better look at him and understood: Yadeen didn’t want to ride, either. Feeling sorry for both of them, he said nothing more. He let an armored man try to help him into the saddle three times before he made it all the way. At least Yadeen mounted his horse creditably. “Hand me your reins,” he ordered.
“Shouldn’t I have them?” Arram inquired, obeying. “You know, to pull on?”
“That is what I fear. I shall lead your horse. You will hold the horn and try to remain seated.” Yadeen folded the extra reins in his hand.
Arram looked about. There were so many bits and pieces on the horse’s head! “What is the horn?”
“Mithros, Minoss, and Shakith!” cried Yadeen, calling on the ruler of the gods, the judge of the gods, and the goddess of seers. “Have you never ridden a horse?”
Arram gulped. “Once, Master. The second time it wouldn’t go.”
Their guides bellowed their laughter. Yadeen wiped his rain-soaked face with a wet forearm. “It’s that thing that sticks up from the saddle’s edge, like a man’s part,” he said. “Grip it before you do fall. And you two, up front!”
One of them had the courage to glance back; the other straightened in his saddle.
“My student can do more with a finger than you can on these huge beasts,” Yadeen said. “If you cannot behave decently, I shall let him show you. Now pick up the snake-sliding pace!”
Arram gawped at the master. No one but Varice and Ozorne had ever defended him before. “Master—”
“Hush,” Yadeen said as he urged his horse into a trot. Arram’s horse followed along. “They should know even the smallest viper is a killer.” Arram opened his mouth to ask the question, but Yadeen held up a hand. “Ask Ramasu or Lindhall about vipers. They’ll say I can’t teach you about them, for all I cut one off Ramasu once.”
Arram knew vipers. Lindhall had a number of them in the menagerie, and Arram had dissected at least two, carefully, in his reptile class. Arram shuddered. Vipers made him nervous, though Ozorne liked them and had never gotten bitten.
Instead he asked the real question on his mind. “Is your using my Gift going to hurt?” he called. “Me, that is. Will it hurt me?”
“Not at all,” Yadeen called. “You’ll control the thread. If it gets to be too much, all you need do is ease down on the thread. You’ll see.” He looked back at Arram. “Are you saying you doubt my judgment?”
Arram shrank in the saddle. He knew that tone. “No, sir. Not at all, sir.”
By the time he thought his member and balls had been pounded to paste, he saw a bulk even darker than the rainy night looming ahead. It grew larger, until he realized it was a wall, not a hill. Torches with magicked shields stood in brackets on either side of a broad gate. A guard emerged from a small shed beside the gate to open one of its broad leaves, and the riders passed through.
The moment they did so, Yadeen’s power rose to cover himself and Arram with a glimmering shield. “Have to,” he murmured when he drew Arram’s horse up beside him. “This is the gladiators’ encampment. They should remain in their dormitory buildings, but it’s always best to protect yourself. Just in case.”
“But the guards aren’t warded,” Arram said as they followed their guides.
“The fighters know what happens if they assault a guard.” Yadeen pointed. The area was spotted with shielded torches, offering something of a view. “This open ground is where they practice. Barracks are over there.”
Arram nodded. Ozorne was going to be so jealous—whenever the emperor insisted that the princes attend the games, Ozorne made sketches of the gladiators and wrote down all the information he could glean. He would give anything to see this, rain or no. “What are those things? The big white rolls, the log stick figures, and the barrels?” he asked, pointing.
“The white rolls are practice dummies for wrestling and hand-to-hand combat,” Yadeen replied. “The log figures are for weapons practice. The barrels hold weapons. They must have taken the weapons themselves indoors. I didn’t know you were interested.”
Arram was saved from having to explain that the information was not for him, when more guards opened another gate in a massive wall before them and waved them through. “The arena,” Yadeen told him. To the escort he said, “We can manage.”
One of them shrugged. “Suit yourself, Master.” He and his companion rode back to the training yard. The slam of the gate as the soldiers closed it made Arram flinch. They were alone in the vastness of the sleeping arena, under the many rows of seats.
The way before them was a tall, wide corridor lit by baskets full of burning coals. Arram’s jaw dropped. An appalling stench reached his nose: at once he was reminded of what he always thought of as the Day of the Elephant, when he had met one in addition to gladiators. The day he had seen a woman die. He swallowed. Part of the smell was definitely blood, human and animal, darker than the scent of blood in his animal dissections. Another part was sweat, and still another was animal dung. It made him dizzy. He held his sleeve under his nose as he clamped his free hand around his saddle horn.
They were passing cells on both sides, large ones, barred with iron. Both smelled equally of dung and piss, but the straw gave away the knowledge that the right-hand cages were used for animals. Arram wondered why anyone would place humans who would fight the beasts in cells across from them.
The huge gate at the end of the temple was wide open. Near it he saw cells far larger than those secured with iron on both sides of the tunnel. These chambers were closed and barred with wood. “What are those?” Arram inquired.
If the stink bothered Yadeen, the master showed no sign of it. “The healing rooms,” he explained. “The wounded go in those.” He pointed to the doors on the left. “That’s if they’ve used up the tables in the workrooms on the right. Sorry—surgeries. Don’t be in such a rush to learn about them. You’ll be chopping and sewing men and women soon enough if Cosmas has his way. Got your hat on?”
Arram touched his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Out into it, then. I hope they have a dry place for us.”
Yadeen led the way out onto the wet sands as the horses protested. The rain had begun to ease, but winds swirled around the vast structure, pulling at Arram’s hat. In the distance thunder boomed softly.
“Odd to hear that!” Yadeen remarked as he steered them toward the lanterns that gleamed ahead. “Thunder, so late in the season. The storm gods are amusing themselves.”
They passed the part of the arena where Arram had once sat with his father and grandfather, the length of rail where a man had once shoved him and Musenda had caught him. Arram’s heart pinched in his chest. Was the big man even still alive? And what of Ua the elephant and her rider? He had put offerings of bits of meat at the school’s shrines to Mithros, when he remembered to, and pieces of fruit at the shrines for Hekaja, the Carthaki goddess of healing, just in case, but he had been too afraid to ask those followers of the best-known gladiators if they knew about Musenda or the elephant riders. He didn’t want to know if they had been sent on to the Dark God’s peaceful realms.
Ahead he could see the imperial seats. They stood in the blaze of mage fires over the wall. A shadowed space filled the corner of the stand where it jutted forward into the sands. A roofed structure had been built over the entire corner to keep the rain off the area. r />
Nearby was the tunnel used by the imperials and the favored nobility to reach their seats high above. Torches burned in brackets on the walls, casting their light over large white chunks of stone on sledges. Each stone had to be as tall as Arram.
Yadeen reined up and drew Arram close to him. “Keep my kit beside you,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving the stones or the half-naked men who stood between them. “No one but you must handle either workbag, understand? You will be more aware of the outer world than me. Only touch my shoulder and I will return to it.”
A burly man in a leather vest and kilt trudged out of the tunnel. “Are you coming to work or gossip?” he roared. He was short and squat, with long, knotted black hair wound into a fat roll at the back of his head. His skin was not quite as dark as Yadeen’s, but his eyes were as dark as the night around him. Hammers and chisels hung from his sagging belt.
“We are settling upon our own approach, Najau! When we are ready, we will consult you!” Yadeen bellowed in reply.
“I don’t see why you brought a toothpick, unless he’s for the elephants!” Najau shouted. “He don’t look like he could lift a pebble!” He stomped back into the tunnel.
“Who is that rude man?” Arram asked. No one addressed a master of the university in such a way.
Yadeen smiled. “That is Master Najau, head of the stonemasons’ guild. We’ve known each other for years. For a man without the Gift, he can make any stone do as he wishes. Of course the emperor demands the best for a task any decent marble cutter could do.”
Arram blinked at his master. Then he inquired, “Aren’t you the best?”
Yadeen chuckled. “I am a mage. I can do certain things with rock, such as put magic in it, and shift it in the air. I can carve it by hand only to an extent—enough to make a clumsy bowl, unless I use my Gift. If you ever visit the palace grounds, try to get a look at the temple of Minoss. Najau did all of it, from the rough cutting of the stone to the carvings.
“Now, here’s how we shall work while you keep our bags with you. I will use my Gift to prepare the stones and begin. Watch closely, particularly with your power—I shall want you to write up what we do for a paper. After a short time you will feel my summons, and you will loose only so much Gift as I need. Are you certain you will do this? As I said, you have my oath. Hold out your hand.”