ON TYRAK’S SIDE, EVERYONE looked on in stunned silence.
Tyrak moaned. For the first time in a decade or more, he felt pain. Not mere pain, but agony. Blinding, piercing, shooting pain in every joint, bone, and muscle group. So intense, he broke out sweating all over his body.
Somehow, impossibly, he forced himself to regain his feet. He himself hardly knew how he accomplished it, but he was aware that he could not remain supine. Staying down itself constituted defeat, and he would not be defeated.
He could not be defeated.
He was Tyrak.
Lord of Arrgodi.
King today, emperor tomorrow.
He rose, staggering and blinking at the shock of the pain coursing through his nerves. He had never thought such agony was even possible, let alone that he could experience it.
He willed his injured bones to knit, his damaged flesh to heal, his body to grow denser than ever before. And he succeeded: the injuries reversed themselves, the healing was astonishingly rapid, and the body that had been like iron now became even denser and stronger.
He faced his opponent again. “I will—” he snarled.
Before he could finish the threat, Drishya came at him.
The boy leaped at him, grabbing hold of his head in the triangular space of his left arm, throwing Tyrak backward.
The boy was but a stripling, yet Tyrak was thrown back in a crashing fall, landing with a punishing thud on his spine.
Drishya’s arm was in a chokehold on Tyrak’s throat.
Tyrak felt he could break free of the chokehold easily. All he had to do was—
. . . was . . .
. . . was . . .
He felt the world fade, the day grow dark, all thought, vision, touch, smell, sound, recede to a distant point.
Then he heard his own neck break. It was an impossible sound. Even the strongest wrestlers in the world, bodies enhanced just as his own, had tried and failed to break that neck. To break that neck would require a force greater than that required to move a mountain.
Yet he heard it distinctly.
The world spun around him. He saw the arena, the thousands of staring faces. Somewhere among them were two that mattered to him: Ladislew. And Jarsun. He had glanced in their direction before he went to fight the Slayer. They were sitting in the same block, the royal pavilion. Jarsun on the throne that was Tyrak’s by rights, and Ladislew several rows lower, with the retinue of advisors and officers serving the throne. She was seated beside her husband, dressed in a fine gown that showed off her beauty quite fetchingly.
He tried to look in that direction, to find her in that crowd of faces.
His head would not do as he bid. His neck would not turn.
He lay in the dust, the sky spinning overhead.
He tried to see out the corners of his eyes.
There.
He could just about make out the royal pavilion. Unmistakable with its bright colors and pageantry. The royal throne shone in the sunlight, the gold catching the rays and reflecting them. They glittered at the edges of his vision. He thought he could see Jarsun there, and imagined he could see Ladislew too. What were they thinking right now?
Suddenly, he knew.
Ladislew had moved to join Jarsun, and was seated close to him now, leaning over and speaking. Through blurring vision, Tyrak saw Jarsun tilt his thin, long face and say something in response, to which Ladislew laughed loudly. They seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of Tyrak’s last moments. He knew then that she had misled him from the very start; all that she had done, she had done with an ulterior motive. Why else should she have given him the antidote to the debilitating concoction that Jarsun had drugged him with? What, then, of her story of seeking vengeance on Jarsun for the slaughter of her sister Maatri back in Reygistan? Tyrak was too far gone to even attempt to understand all the devious twists and turns of her endgame. All that mattered to him right now was that she had gained his trust—his friendship!—and had betrayed him in the end. Far from assassinating Jarsun, she was allied with him now.
As for the Krushan, his mentor, his benefactor, his guru, his emperor, his father-in-law, Jarsun’s mind was the easiest of all to read.
Jarsun simply didn’t care. He could raise a thousand Tyraks and probably had. His goal was a far bigger one than merely the future of Arrgodi. Even if he lost Arrgodi, lost the entire grassland, he would find a way to wrest it back eventually. His target was the Burnt Empire. The Burning Throne was the throne he really wanted to sit upon, not this one. In fact, now that Tyrak thought about it with the clear mind of a dying man, he wondered why Jarsun had chosen him at all. What part had he played in the Krushan’s great game? Had he served his purpose? Was that why he was dying now? Yes, that must be it. Jarsun had done all this, played this long hand over so many years, only to achieve some other goal, something Tyrak would probably die never knowing. All the lives expended here, including Tyrak’s, were meaningless to Jarsun. They were insignificant pawns in the great game and his part had been played.
He too had been played.
Tyrak closed his eyes, ending his own part in this monstrous game.