“Inhuman,” Arram moaned to himself as he lurched up the gently sloping path. “Should have—have stayed home with the family business. No friend keeping me up all night asking how I knew ’bout power if it was outside a shielded wall….” He stopped for a yawn that made the hinges of his jaw crack. Then he turned down the roofed corridor that would lead him to the master’s workroom. Of course it was at the end of the walkway, past three gardens. Each had spraying fountains set in patterns of colored stones. Arram would have loved to stick his head in a fountain to cool off—the sun had already turned hot, in only an hour!—but he had a long day ahead, beginning with Yadeen.
The last workroom on the corridor was open. Arram found Yadeen leaning against the far wall. He always forgot how big the man was!
He bowed. “Good morning, sir,” he said nervously.
Yadeen, wearing a loose pale linen shirt and breeches, nodded. He was turning something over in his large hands. Before Arram could guess what it was—it was small enough to be hidden in Yadeen’s grip—the master said, “Catch,” and tossed it to him.
The wooden ball hit Arram in the middle of the chest—not hard, but enough that Arram noticed it was there. “I’m sorry,” he said as he fumbled and dropped the ball. He retrieved it. “I wasn’t—”
“Catch.” Yadeen calmly tossed another ball at him. Arram reached for it and dropped both that ball and the one he already held.
“The idea,” Yadeen said, “is for you to catch the first ball one-handed so you will be able to catch the second ball with your other hand.” When he saw Arram glance around at the shadowy room, he said, “Let’s go outside, where we’ll have more light.” He led the way to a patch of bare earth next to the building.
“I don’t understand,” Arram said when they halted. “What is this for?”
Yadeen collected the balls from Arram’s hands and walked until he was fifteen feet away. “It is for concentration and coordination,” he said, raising his deep, accented voice so Arram could hear. “Until you can fix your attention on one thing while your hands do another, you will be a very dangerous young mage, and not for the proper reasons. Catch.”
Arram caught the first ball with both hands. This time he only missed the second ball, since he remembered to keep the first in one hand. “I’m sorry,” he called.
“Don’t apologize,” Yadeen ordered. “Learn.”
Through autumn, Midwinter, and into spring term, Arram, Ozorne, and Varice worked hard. Arram might have felt sorry for himself given the extra hour with the stern Yadeen in the mornings, but the same day that Arram began the study of juggling, Ozorne announced he was to apply himself to an hour of swordplay, on his mother’s orders. Varice, who never slept past sunrise if she could help it, decided to volunteer in the kitchens, in defiance of her father’s wishes. Unlike many of their fellows, the three never complained of trouble falling asleep.
At Midwinter, Arram had the pleasure of buying more than trinkets for his friends. He got a fine pocket dagger for Ozorne and a carving knife of good steel for Varice. Each of them had obtained books that he had coveted all season but refused to buy, since he’d been saving his coin for presents. And for his birthday he got more gifts, not just from his friends, but from Masters Cosmas, Dagani, and Yadeen.
“It is the custom for a master to do this for the student, but not the other way around,” Yadeen said when he handed a package to Arram. “It is assumed the student needs every nit he can find, if not for now, when he has a stipend, then later, when he is on his own. Don’t bother to be grateful,” he said when Arram opened his mouth. “I do poorly with gratitude. Open it.”
Arram gently unfolded the beautiful blue-violet shoulder drape the master had used for wrapping—where he’d wear such an elegant garment he had no idea!—to find a polished red wood box, figured with dragons and griffins. He opened it to discover hand-sized balls, six of them, each different shades of reddish, brown, or black wood.
“Juggling balls,” he said blankly. He looked up at Yadeen and realized the master’s eyes were dancing. It was the first time he’d seen the man look humorous. “I don’t know what to say,” he joked, keeping his tone flat.
Yadeen clapped him on the shoulder. “I knew you would be pleased. Try them out before classes begin again.”
Gifts from Cosmas and Dagani were books. Dagani’s was on great illusions, including one that was supposed to have lured all the world’s griffins out of the Mortal Realms and back to the Realms of the Gods. Cosmas’s book told of unusual mages: those who did not follow the normal path to a position as a teacher or a serving mage for a government or for a noble or royal house. Ozorne and Varice both leafed through it and shrugged, uninterested. They didn’t offer to show Arram the books they had received from Cosmas and Dagani, and Arram didn’t ask. He was too interested in his own books.
If asked later, Arram would have said he didn’t remember the passing of the weeks. He did recall students from the Upper Academy lingering around Varice in the late afternoons. Arram was taking evening strolls through the halls with dark-eyed Sheni in January and early February, before she tired of his “headache-making big words.” She left him for a student who hoped to be a healer when he reached the Upper Academy. It was just as well: Ozorne was bleak again and needed attention and reminders to take his medicine, as he had the previous spring.
Varice ignored the older students. She made extra money giving new turns to spring garments for other girls, stitching on lace, taking in seams or letting them out, and sewing on embroideries. When Arram pointed out one evening that surely her stipend covered all her expenses, she looked down her nose at him.
“There’s the future to think of,” she informed him, holding her work up so she could be certain the seam was even. “I’m putting money by for that.”
They were in one of the empty cubicles in Arram’s room. Although they tried to talk quietly, Ozorne heard. He was in bed; they thought he’d been sleeping off another shadowy spell. “I told you, you’re going to live with me,” he called. “We’ll have our own place, in the mountains or a forest….”
“And if we’re sent journeying once we’re working for a mastery?” Varice inquired. She picked up a handful of lace and began to roll it neatly. “You know they do it to a lot of them. I for one don’t intend to sleep on the ground on a ragged blanket, eating charred rabbit I cooked on a fire!”
Arram snorted. Ozorne began to chuckle. The idea of Varice—of any of them—living in such conditions was too amusing to consider seriously.
“You know they’ll settle us with a master elsewhere in Carthak, or somewhere north,” Ozorne said as he sat up and threw off the blanket. “They don’t just cast people they’ve taught so much into the winds of chance!”
Varice sniffed. “I hope so, but I’m not taking those chances if I can help it.”
“I wouldn’t permit it,” Ozorne told her cheerfully. Arram believed him, and his heart sank a little. It would be fun to wander alone, learning whatever he pleased. Perhaps Ozorne would let him off the leash now and then, when the time came.
The afternoon of the following day, he was so fascinated reading a book Yadeen had loaned him that he lost track of time. It began to rain. Only the appearance of a wet spot on the page, and the boom of the sixth-hour bell, jarred him from his trance. He yelped. He had promised to work on illusions with Ozorne and Varice; he was an hour and a half late!
Hoping to gain time, he jumped the waist-high wall to an herb garden. His plan was to run crossways over the rows of bare mounds that waited for warmer weather, which would cut his distance in half. He had not expected there to be a line of large jars positioned on the other side of the wall.
Down he went with a crash, spilling forward onto a mound with several shattered jars. The ground beneath him was decidedly damp. When he struggled to his feet, he found he was muddy from chin to toe.
His first instinct was to run and let someone else take the blame. His second thought was that this would be truly stupid. A mage could track him by the print his body had left in the mud. This occurred to him just as a man who had been kneeling near the corner of the wall rose to his feet.
He was stocky, not much taller than Arram, with skin a ruddy golden-brown. His black hair was cut short and streaked with gray. Dark eyes with long, sloping lids that lengthened at the corners looked Arram over. He wore a sturdy wool shirt under a sleeveless vest equipped with a number of pockets. His breeches, also covered with pockets, were heavily burdened with the tools of a working gardener. When he stood, it was easy to see that his legs were widely bowed, like someone who had spent a large part of his life on horseback.
Arram knew him. Everyone did who paid attention to the university gardens. He gulped. “Master Hulak, I’m so sorry! I never would have jumped the wall—”
“If you knew I was here?” the school’s head gardener, also a master in the study of plants, medicines, and poisons, asked gently.
Arram’s knees wanted to give way. “No, Master!” he protested. “If I’d known there was work being done here! I thought it was too early for…” His voice locked in his throat.
Hulak studied him for painful moments before he said, “So you think because you see no plants there is no work to be done? It is fine to gallop over my rows?” He raised a hand for silence when Arram would have defended himself. Clearly he was still thinking. At last he inquired, “You are Arram Draper, Varice’s friend?”
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 from 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.
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.”
Arram wavered, then offered a hand. There was a dent in the palm from his clutch on the saddle horn. Yadeen dismounted and walked over to Arram’s horse. Drawing a small dagger from his belt, he slashed his palm and pressed it against the dent in Arram’s.
The youth jumped. “Sir, you didn’t have to do that! I trust you! I—”
Yadeen sighed. “This part is necessary for the spell. I am perfectly fine, see?” He held up the palm he had pressed against Arram’s hand. A number of little scars marked his skin, including the most recent one, rapidly healing before their eyes. Arram looked at his own palm. He, too, had a mark.
“Don’t tell the other masters,” Yadeen says. “Only a few of us still work with tribal magic here, and Sebo would scold me for using it on a student. But I began with tribal magic. It is how my Gift speaks for me with the bigger magics.”
Arram nodded. He felt like he was glowing even more brightly than the torches. Did the master feel it, too?
“Let’s get started,” Yadeen said. He picked up the reins for the two horses and walked toward the tunnel.
A woman in a coarse linen tunic, her feet bare, met them at the opening to take charge of the mounts. The moment they saw her, the horses surged forward more willingly than they had for Yadeen and Arram. They thrust their heads against her chest, whickering anxiously.
“Don’t be rude,” she chided them softly. “I’d guess they wasn’t no happier’n you, out so late in slop for footin’. Can you dismount?” she asked Arram. “They’s big babies and snobs to boot, knowin’ when folk aren’t easy. They’ll act proper if you want to get down yerse’f.”
Arram froze. Yadeen rescued him, unwinding his hands from the horn and drawing him from the saddle. The youth looked away from the woman, knowing that he blushed.
Yadeen handed both workbags to him and stripped off his own coat as the woman led the horses away. Arram could hear her scolding them gently as they vied with each other for the chance to lip her hair and shift.
“She’s very unusual,” he commented, taking the master’s coat and trotting to keep up as he headed for the tunnel.
“She’s like the Banjiku people from the Far South, bonded to a certain kind of animal,” Yadeen said. “It is a kind of magic that is not taught at the university, because we are either born with it or no.”
“But shouldn’t we study it anyway?” Arram inquired.
Yadeen glanced at him, his mouth forming a crooked line. “Not everyone wants to learn everything, boy,” he said.
Arram sighed. “That’s what Ozorne always says.”
Najau walked over to them, gesturing to a six-foot-tall, six-foot-wide block of white stone with tiny marks of black and gray stone inside. “Unicorn white marble,” he said, with as much pride as if he had given birth to it. “Brought by sea around the tip of the Roof of the World. Anyone caught with it without an imperial writ of sale is sold himself. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Yadeen walked up to the stone and leaned his head against the rough side. Najau and Arram watched him for a long moment before the stonemason turned and saw the boy. He stared at Arram briefly, then said, “Go on, you. Touch it.”
Arram hesitated. “I…I couldn’t….I…”
Najau snorted. “I stammered, too, when I was a lad and got worked up. I don’t any longer—some of us lose such things as we get older, more confident. If I say you can put your hands on it, you can.” He flapped his hand, ushering Arram over to the great stone.
Arram obeyed, carrying the workbags. Standing near Yadeen, he reached out and touched the marble slab. Nothing happened. He was wondering what he was expected to do when a voice very like Yadeen’s, loaded with amusement, boomed through the stone, up his arms, and into his skull.
Open your Gift to the stone, boy!
Oh, Arram thought, of course! He closed his eyes and let his power flow into the unicorn white marble.
It was cooler than it looked from the outside.
He was caught up in threads of stone, black, white, clear crystal, all of different sizes. The white ones were dominant. They hummed to him, rattling his teeth agreeably. They sang of the embrace of the deepest earth as it pressed and turned each tiny bit of them to shaped edges and points. Then black chunks, small ones that had collected in different pockets, found them, and clear ones. All twining together to become immense, proud stone.
A massive hand gently thrust him backward. Enough for now, Yadeen said. You don’t want to spend forever holding up the emperors of Carthak, do you? Back to yourself.
Arram awoke inside his normal body, gasping for air. He was flat on his back, staring up at the marble. “That was wonderful!” he cried. “When can I do it again?”
Najau crouched beside him and held a leather flask to his mouth. “Drink,” he ordered. “Slowly.”
Arram drank as cautiously as he was bid. It was not some strange beverage, but water so cold it made his teeth hurt, flavored with mint and lemon. “That’s so good!” he exclaimed when he returned the bottle to Najau. The beverage was the opposite of the stone, moving where the stone had only exact places to go, water and leaves and fruit where the stone was only stone. He felt himself, human.
The stonemason was looking him over more carefully than he had before. “I see why Yadeen brought you,” he remarked at last. “You’ll do all right—better than those jumping crickets he’s fetched to my place before.”
“I told you he would be fine.” Yadeen stepped away from the marble, rubbing his hands together. “This is a sound block. I won’t have any trouble doing the work.”
“Did you think I would choose flawed stone?” demanded Najau, indignant. “I, the finest stonemason on the Northern coast of the empire? Possibly even the Western coast?”
Yadeen took the bottle from Najau and tipped it up, drinking as he poured.
“I said nothing of the kind, you silly old hen,” he retorted. “The boy needs a blanket. I’ll let you know when I have pieces finished. How many slabs will you need?”
Najau tapped his teeth with his thumbnail, then said, “Six for safety, I think. Once this noise over the ambassador is done, I’ll be testing the others in the stand to see if more stones are ready to drop.”
Yadeen nodded. “With Arram’s help I’ll craft six, if you have the raw stone.”
Najau pointed back into the tunnel, where more chunks of marble waited.
“Very good.” Yadeen looked at Arram. “Are you ready?”
Arram nodded vigorously.
“Until I tell you otherwise, follow only,” the master commanded him. “Do not try to use your Gift. You don’t know the spells to make the cuts straight and smooth along the entire face of the stone. I will teach them to you one day, but it’s too complex now.” They walked to the first stone. Yadeen drew his hand over the surface, bringing it away covered with marble dust. He rubbed his palms together and raised them to his face, smelling them. Arram, hesitant, did the same. The dust had its own dry scent, pleasing to his sensitive nostrils. It lingered as he sat cross-legged next to Yadeen.
“Relax and wait,” Yadeen told him. “Meditate. I will come to you when I need you.” He closed his eyes and was gone, his power flowing into the stone. Arram watched with his Gift as the master’s green-and-brown streaked fire rolled into the stone and spread, forming a thin sheet inside the marble face.
As Yadeen moved on and on, Arram withdrew. He knew he’d be seeing enough of the stone’s insides in time. Instead he let his Gift spread over the sands, cringing from the touch of old blood and bits of bone. But there were also faded pieces of flowers and ribbons that the arena keepers hadn’t cleaned up, bird droppings—he didn’t want to think about why birds might come to the arena grounds—and bits of fur. He roamed up to the seats, wondering why people came to such a sad place. Among the rows he found reasons: greed, lust, fury, excitement, all the feelings of people who forgot everything but the combats, including their struggling daily lives.
Yadeen was calling. Relieved, Arram let himself fly back to the master. He was no sooner returned to his body than he felt the gentle tug on his power. He let it mingle with Yadeen’s, until they formed a cord between them that was one magic. Then they returned to the marble. The stone traveled inner paths that showed as white-hot fire crystals. Turning, they fit themselves into walls that lined up as the magic demanded, perfectly.
Then Yadeen drew Arram out, away from the stone. In the sudden cold outside the marble, he released his student.
Arram cried out and covered his ears from an assault of noise: voices, things banging, the crunch of footwear on sand, wind in the tunnel, and…the mumble of elephants? He forced his eyes open against the torchlight. At the front of the tunnel, elephants peered in curiously. The closest one had its trunk extended. Many-petaled flowers were painted on its forehead. A very large black man, as dark as Yadeen, with scars and a shaved head, petted the elephant as he cooed to it. Arram squinted, blinking rapidly to rid himself of the water spilling from his eyes.
“Mu-Musenda?” he croaked.
Yadeen was getting up. Arram remembered his duty to his teacher and struggled to stand until Yadeen gripped his wrist and lifted him to his feet. “You know Musenda?” he asked as he waited for Arram to get his balance.
The gladiator advanced, frowning. “You look familiar…,” he said, puzzled. “We’ve met, haven’t we?”
As if impatient with the slowness of human introductions, the orchid-blossomed elephant thrust her way into the tunnel, wrapped her trunk around Arram, and lifted him up so she could peruse him, first with one eye, then the other. He laughed and leaned against her forehead. “Ua, I hoped I would see you!” he cried. “How are you, you gorgeous thing?” He looked down at the staring workers and told Yadeen, “Musenda and Ua saved my life when I was younger!”
“Now I remember!” Musenda boomed. “The boy who fell into the arena! You’ve grown so much I didn’t know you! What brings you here?”
He and Yadeen talked briefly while Arram plucked straw from Ua’s stiff forehead hair and whispered how beautiful she was. Finally Najau shouted, “This is sweet as spring flowers, but we have work, all of us! Get down here, boy!”
Arram coaxed Ua to release him; the elephant reluctantly obeyed. “We’re here to cart the marble slabs to the stand,” Musenda explained. Four more heavy-muscled gladiators of mixed color and nationality came forward with large flatbeds of wood attached to wheels. As Arram watched—Yadeen waved him away from this part of the task—Yadeen produced his Gift in waves. It wrapped around the first slab they had finished and lifted it as smoothly into the air as if it were a feather. Arram was shocked to see the flat edges and sharp corners on the slab, as well as the brightly polished front and rear faces. He barely remembered anything that might have been working the marble in that shape.
“We did all that?” he asked Yadeen when the master had settled the piece onto the wagon. Musenda was leading Ua and another elephant to the front, where workers fashioned their harnesses to the flatbed. Someone cried out, the elephants groaned, and the wagon began to move forward.
“We did all that,” Yadeen said, his eyes on the marble. “We drew it in to be flat and smoothed it sharp, all from the inside. It’s tricky work—you did better than I thought. You’ll have to tell me how you met Musenda and Ua, but later. We must do three more, and then there’s putting the slabs in place.”
“I thought we had to do…six,” Arram said, his voice faltering. Two more perfect slabs lay where the first boulder of marble had been. Yadeen was already using his Gift to raise one of them onto the newest wagon.
“It’s easy to get caught up,” Yadeen said. “And one plane inside the stone—one area we smooth out—looks much the same as the next after a while. We made three slabs from the first stone.”
When the last of the finished slabs from the first block were gone, they moved to the next stone. They got only two finished pieces from it. Yadeen decided they could do two more out of the next, using all the boulders in the tunnel.
“There’s a relief!” Musenda commented. He had just come in for the slabs from the second boulder. “Otherwise we’d have had to cart them away after all the trouble it took to bring them in. It makes a fellow cross.”
Arram frowned. “It’s not right, you having to fight and push boulders around, too.”
Musenda touched a forefinger to his mouth. “We’re at the emperor’s service,” he told Arram. “Us second- and third-rankers do whatever is required when we aren’t fighting. It builds us up.” Lowering his voice, he said, “And the master of gladiators reaps a pretty thaki or three from jobs outside the games.”
“That’s wrong!” Arram protested angrily.
“That’s the world,” Musenda replied.
“Learn it now or learn it later,” Yadeen murmured. “But a wise man does learn it.”
Musenda saluted Yadeen and went to see the finished pieces taken to the stand. Arram and Yadeen made themselves comfortable beside the last piece of unfinished stone and went to work, Yadeen leading Arram inside the many lines and tracks of stone. Twice he had to call Arram’s attention back to work: Arram hadn’t realized he was drifting away. When he finally returned to himself in the tunnel, it took him several tries to get to his feet. His head was spinning. When he did stand, he was greeted by a foggy shape in a gaudy orange overgarment, topped in black.
“Yadeen,” snapped the newcomer, “why are you dawdling? I can’t dry things and harden the setting material until you have put the pieces where they belong!”
Arram wished he were at home and in bed. It was Ozorne’s master, Chioké. He squinted at the green-and-brown fire that was Yadeen. He didn’t even really need to see the master’s body at this point. Yadeen could have walked down the road outside while Arram was still inside the marble and Arram would have pinpointed his location. “Master, why is he here?” he asked. “I didn’t invite him. Did you?”
Yadeen clapped a large hand over Arram’s mouth and pulled him into the shelter of his arm. “The boy has been assisting me, Chioké,” he said, his voice flat. “Plainly I have overworked him. Najau!” he bellowed. To Chioké he said, “I will join you at the stand as soon as I send the boy on his way.”
“I know him,” Chioké said. “That’s the Draper boy who tags along after His Highness.” He said the word “draper” as if he emphasized poverty, as if Arram were a commoner who did no more than weave and spin. Arram stiffened. He was proud of his family’s craft. Chioké continued, “Don’t tell me he contributed much.”
“We have worked the stone together,” Yadeen said. “I will see you shortly.” It was a plain dismissal.
Chioké whirled around, splattering both of them with the water from his wide coat, and walked rapidly out into the rain.
“Who stepped on his toes?” Arram asked. He rubbed the drops over his face: they were nice and cold.
“No doubt both of us. We aren’t nearly wellborn enough for the likes of him.”
A short, broad, fuzzy shape joined them as Arram remembered what Yadeen had said. “I don’t want to go. You said I was helping.”
“You were helping. Now you’re exhausted.”
“I am?”
“You’re barely on your feet, lad,” Najau said. “I’ll get him back to school.” He rested a hand on Arram’s shoulder. “I’ve got a courier that’s going to the city. He’ll see to it you get home.”
Arram frowned, swaying on his feet. He’d let Yadeen down. “I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough.”
Yadeen squeezed his shoulder. “You did far better than I had expected. Now go. Tell Irafa I said you were to sleep as much as you like.”
“Come along, boy,” Najau ordered.
As Najau led him down the tunnel to a waiting horse and rider, Arram asked, “Can Musenda go with me?”
“You’re drunk on marble. Musenda’s a slave, boy,” Najau reminded him. “He doesn’t go anywhere outside without chains on. Now, next time you come to the arena, we’ll make sure he gives you a special salute, to thank you for this night’s work.”
Arram said nothing, even as the rider took him up behind him. He remained silent except to thank the man once they reached Arram’s dormitory. He would much rather have had Musenda walking freely beside him, telling Arram about his life.