Sandstorm (single books)

by Christopher Rowe

  Before the pair disappeared into the growing darkness, Cephas called out to them, suddenly recognizing the fatal flaw in their plan. “Wait!” he said.

  Only the short-haired woman came back to the door.

  “The fight,” Cephas said. “The one you played out. It cannot work that way on the canvas.”

  The woman raised one eyebrow, waiting.

  “Your sister played her role too well,” said Cephas. “There is no one who can swing a real hammer that way. They are too heavy.”

  This time, the grimmer sister’s smile was not just a faint echo of her happier kin’s. If anything, the woman was laughing, if silently.

  It was the only reply she offered Cephas before she and her sister faded into the night.

  Shaneerah could not tell if the elderly dwarf did anything more than narrow his rheumy eyes before each winch and wheel, sometimes muttering through his mustache, but more often just swinging one of his canes impatiently at the swordsman who so unnerved her. Then, the smiling dwarf would say, “The legate has completed his inspection and thanks you-where is the next device?” The trio would make their slow way to the next station, their pace dictated by the legate’s shuffle.

  Finally, in a redoubt that looked much the same to her as any other, the younger dwarf spoke. “Yes, this is the very apparatus we were seeking. Most intriguing.”

  They had made their way to the last of the winches Azad rigged to support the floor of his arena. Her agitation to see the men off the mote grew with each passing moment, spiking to an almost-unbearable level when she realized the bondsman had, at some point, switched from the dialect of High Alzhedo used in Calimport, to the fiery, sibilant-heavy patois of the firesouled and their efreet; the language of her youth.

  Shaneerah taught the gladiators in Azad’s pathetic stable to ignore fear-to master it, to eliminate it if at all possible. This, she said, was the way of any true fighter.

  It was not the only lie she told them.

  Shaneerah sometimes thought fear was her oldest friend, or her oldest friends, rather, for she had known countless fears. And Shaneerah realized why the smiling dwarf frightened her.

  In a life that had lasted longer than she had any right to expect, this was the first time she had met a fear she could not name.

  Cephas immediately found he had been right. The long-haired halfling woman’s imitation of his foe was not accurate; she was slow as pinesap compared to this laughing giant.

  As usual, Grinta had come for him, but this time she was even more abrupt than usual.

  “What is it?” asked Cephas, fearing that the Calishites had discovered his would-be coconspirators.

  Grinta pushed him toward the arena, where Azad already employed his gamemaster’s patter, indicating that the night’s main event was about to begin.

  “Lots of strange people about tonight,” said Grinta. “We all expected unblooded goblins and beardless boys to make up the whole card tonight since you let the Bloody Moon’s prize slip away. And we certainly didn’t expect Azad to put you up for a challenge on a single day’s rest after the beating it gave you. Too many unexpected things; too many folk I’ve never seen. Never even seen the like of.”

  They came to the outfitting rooms. “I thought you claimed to have seen every kind of man who walked the realms,” said Cephas.

  Grinta nodded. “I’ve seen goliaths, sure,” she said. “Even killed a few. Never saw one in this part of the world, though, and sure as the Hells never saw one fighting under the sponsorship of dwarves. And to top that, with his own hands, Azad brought down both his flail and his armor for you to use, while Shaneerah’s disappeared into the works passages with the dwarves. It almost makes me think she’s making a move against her husband.”

  Cephas let the older woman dress and arm him, wondering if all of the unusual events were good or bad for him. “She would never harm Azad,” he said.

  The orc spat to one side. “Shaneerah always acts in Azad’s best interests,” she said. “That doesn’t mean she won’t kill him someday.”

  Cephas hadn’t had time to ask Grinta what she meant by that before rough hands shoved him into the trebuchet’s sling and he spilled onto the canvas like an offering before this endlessly surprising fighter.

  Feints and dodges, slips that turned into thrusts, direct assaults that saw the giant bouncing away before he followed through-every move the goliath made was unexpected-or would have been, if he had not cheerfully announced every action before he took it.

  “Now watch here, Cephas,” the giant growled, the words reaching Cephas’s ears beneath the noise of the crowd and Azad’s increasingly frantic announcements. “I am a bigger man than some, so, if I drop to a knee, they don’t expect me to roll through and use the spring of the canvas to come up behind you, do they? Ha! Did you see me? It worked pretty fine, I think!”

  Cephas was too busy making his own acrobatic tuck and roll in a desperate bid to avoid the weight of the goliath’s mattock to respond. For the first few moments of the fight, he attempted to engage the man in conversation, but while the goliath clearly welcomed the idea-Cephas had thought for a moment the warrior forgot they were combatants, his greeting was so genuine-Cephas soon needed all his breath to keep up the martial dance the two of them invented move by move.

  “I like this canvas floor, did you know? We have much canvas in the wagons, but we use it for our roof and walls at our shows!” The goliath, for no reason Cephas could discern beyond the simple fact that he could, took a huge bouncing leap. Then, when he plunged back down onto the sailcloth, he stuck his armored legs straight out before him so that he hit the canvas with the seat of his breeches. When he was thrown back up into the air, the goliath whooped in clear delight.

  “Fearless!” called Azad, his voice ringing across the canyon night. “How long has it been since a thinking foe showed no fear before Cephas of Jazeerijah?”

  Cephas wanted to shout that it had just been the day before, but the goliath’s tumble turned out to conceal a subtle forward motion that brought his hammer into range.

  “I am going to swing this mattock straight at your head, Cephas! They’ll like that!”

  And they did. Goblin and human voices were harmonizing in shouts for Cephas’s blood when the stone hammer clipped him above the right ear. Cephas spun with the blow, amazed that he was still conscious. He wondered whether it was a prop, a practice weapon such as the ones Shaneerah issued them when they trained. That would explain how the giant spun it about like a fencer’s blade.

  As if in answer, the goliath said, “I saw the twins do this once up on their wire-they were being Azoun and Yamun Khahan. Do you know that story? Oh, that is a good one.”

  The goliath, Cephas was coming to realize, was not his equal as a fighter. Had Cephas ignored the endless stream of talk and set his mind on making a quick end to the fight, it would have been a formidable but conquerable task. What the man excelled at was not fighting but moving. Elaborate, outsized movements marked his style, yes, but so did subtleties and barely perceptible motions that were invisible to those in the stands.

  An example was this step and sweep move that left Cephas on his back, his own flail tangled around his arm braces.

  “See, this Yamun was one king from the East, and Azoun, he was another king from the West, and they were both humans, so that meant there was nothing for them to do but fight. Shan and Cynda make a big show of it, but this time I’m thinking of, we were up North, in country where everybody knows the story. So they spiced it up.”

  The goliath flopped down on top of Cephas, driving the air from his lungs and pinning him to the canvas. “The West-man used a steel long sword as all those West-men do in the stories, and the East-man had a curved one. The West-man wins unless you’re telling this story on the other side of the Rift.”

  The goliath rolled away, and Cephas reacted to the incoherent shouts from the gamemaster’s box by shoving free, seeking to gain advantage.

  “But as
I said, we were in the West, and they all knew what would happen, even if the twins were up on their wire. Well, weren’t they surprised when they switched out the swords in the middle of the fight! Oh, I laughed!”

  The goliath held the double flail in one huge hand and the suspect mattock in the other, the hammer’s head resting in his left palm.

  For once, the man didn’t say a word before gently tossing the mattock to Cephas. Instinctively, Cephas reached up and caught it. Instantly, he was borne back down by its incredible weight.

  It was not a prop, then.

  When Shaneerah realized the younger dwarf was not drawing in his little book, but was instead chanting something written in its pages, she thought for an instant that she could stop whatever plot was underway. She believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the dwarf could cut her down sword to sword, but if he was casting some sort of spell, he was distracted.

  The span of time from realization, to decision, to action, was less than the time it would take her to say Azad’s name, and her sword cleared its sheath almost as soon as the dwarf’s first syllable reached her ears.

  She was not nearly as fast as Legate Arnskull.

  The old man, his eyes not rheumy at all, but as clear and blue as an autumn sky, stood leaning against the wall of the hewn cavern. The dwarf’s deliberate raising of his twin silver canes matched Shaneerah’s desperate grasp for her sword, but then he bested her in the way he twisted their handles together, the silver flowing away to reveal rich, ancient wood curved back on itself into the form of a greatbow. The dwarf had no need to string the bow, because a glowing thread joined the two ends of the magical weapon. The dwarf held an arrow, tipped with glinting silver and fletched with scarlet feathers, and he spoke to her while he seated it against his golden bowstring.

  “He will be only a moment,” he said, speaking the common trade tongue with a Northern accent. “Then we will leave you in more peace than you deserve.”

  Shaneerah considered her chances of landing a blow against the chanting dwarf before the bowman could draw and release, but she dismissed the idea even as the chanting stopped.

  “So you don’t speak a half-dozen dialects of the Elemental tongue like your fellow, eh?” she asked the bowman.

  The old man didn’t answer, instead just indicating that she should step to the side so the bondsman, sword again in hand, could step past her and lean against the wall beside him.

  “He doesn’t even speak Dwarvish,” the bondsman said, then made a clicking noise that could not have come from tongue and teeth.

  Behind her in the chamber, then from the recesses across the canyon, and in the other stations around the curve of the mote, Shaneerah heard the familiar sound of the cables releasing. She had never heard all of them released at once.

  Shadows swirled around the dwarves, and they were gone.

  It was a day full of madness, so perhaps Azad had simply lost his mind and ordered the canvas to fall away, expecting Cephas to fight this secret ally in midair.

  The goliath lurched forward and grasped Cephas and the mattock. Unmindful of the plunge they were starting, he said, “I think you would have figured out a way to use the hammer. You are a wonderful fighter, Cephas.”

  The noise of the crowd was lost to the blowing of the canyon wind, and the last of the sun’s rays receded above Cephas as he fell. He kicked clear of the canvas, of Jazeerijah, and of his whole old life.

  He fell. Free.

  Chapter Four

  You are wise to realize you must trust me.

  You are wise to find this terrifying.

  -“The Marid’s Bargain”, The Founding Stories of Calimshan

  And he rose up, on giant wings.

  Cephas had heard the cries of wyverns on the night wind before. He’d even once seen the silhouette of a flight of the dragonlike predators against clouds lit up by Selune’s glow. But he had certainly never found himself sprawled across one’s back as it soared through the sky.

  The goliath was there with him, seated in a leather saddle encircling the wyvern’s sinuous torso. He shouted, but not at Cephas. “Trill!” he said. “Oh, what a bit of timing that was. Mattias will be proud!”

  Cephas had a vague impression of ground rushing by far below at tremendous speed. He could not see much beyond the goliath’s broad back and the rise and fall of gigantic, batlike wings. I wonder if that’s not for the best, he thought.

  The goliath closed a hand around Cephas’s belt and hauled him around. Cephas found himself astride the beast, in front of his recent opponent.

  “Look here, Cephas,” said the goliath. “Your flight from captivity is a flight, indeed. Trill plucked us from the air as if she were taking a brace of fat game birds! But without the killing and the rending. That would be no good, eh?”

  Cephas pieced together the disjointed flashes that made up his recollection of the last few moments. The fall was interrupted when a shadow closed over him, and then a huge claw closed around him, rolled skyward, and tossed him clear, before a gentle landing behind the goliath on the wyvern’s back.

  He gathered enough wits to answer the goliath’s question. “Yes, I’m glad we weren’t killed or … rent. I wish you had given me a bit more of a warning about what was going to happen, friend.…”

  “Tobin!” said the goliath, and the wyvern answered this lusty declaration with a high, ululating call that explained her own name. “I am Tobin Tok Tor, clanned now to Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders, but born of stone in the Dragonsword Mountains, half a world from here. I am happy to know you, Cephas, and would have told you the canvas would fall and that Trill was on the wing, had I known these things for the telling.”

  Cephas had a clearer view of the world around him now that he was upright. The mountains and canyon were black below them, but the stars were coming out, and at this height the sun was still just visible, low in the west. The wyvern carried them sunward, angling her flight down with the gradual slope of the mountains.

  “You did not know that the canvas would fall?” asked Cephas, aloud. To himself, he thought, Don’t look down, don’t look down, over and over. But he managed to keep his voice calm, and asked further, “What was the original plan?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Tobin. “Did Shan and Cynda say there was a plan? For their way of saying, I mean?”

  Shan, Cynda, Tobin, Trill. Cephas memorized the names. “They said, rather, they told me that I would meet you, and that we would fight, but only as a dumb show for the crowd. That my escape would follow on that.”

  “Yes!” said Tobin. “I suppose that is a plan. Though really not much of one if you think about it.”

  “You came to the mote, convinced the freedmen to let you fight a match, and went out onto the canvas, knowing it was all a ruse to help me escape. But you did not know how it was to work?”

  Tobin thumped Cephas on the back, as if congratulating the smaller man for some great revelation. “Yes!” he said again, and again, the wyvern echoed him. “That is how these things usually go. The twins and Mattias, they write these things out, you know? We huddle with Corvus and scratch pictures in the ground and count out the beats of songs.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Cephas, and added to himself, Any of this!

  Tobin said, “I mean like the time in Nathlekh City when we had to learn all those verses of ‘The Lonely Hunt.’

  “ ‘Don’t look back

  Just draw your blade’

  and Shan pushes the crate into the alley so that it hits the wagon bed on ‘blade’ and

  ‘Down dark track

  The kill is made’

  and that’s the cue for Corvus, of course, darkness and killing, but he was just to mimic the watch’s alert whistles and stir up some of his shadows, and

  ‘Don’t shout out yet

  Just follow the cries’

  and Mattias looses a flaming arrow and ‘whoosh’ the crates go up before the coster guards have even turned around. See, I can rem
ember all those things; it’s just not my way of doing. Though I do like that song very much.”

  Cephas decided it likely he would see Shan and Cynda soon, and also meet this Mattias, who was somehow connected to the wyvern, and also a Corvus, who Tobin had said had a way with killing. He decided that even if it were the mute halflings explaining, he would better understand them than he did this cheerful goliath.

  Cephas asked, “What is your way of doing, friend, if it is not to plan and sing, or-forgive me-to fight?”

  “Oh, you do not have to ask for forgiveness, Cephas. I know I am not a true warrior-that is why I left the mountains, partly. And as for the planning, well, the others know that improvisation is the center of my art.”

  Improvisation was something that Shaneerah had taught Cephas to avoid.

  “And what is your art, friend Tobin?”

  Cephas felt the goliath straighten in the saddle before he answered. “I,” said the giant, with enormous dignity, “am a clown.”

  They were the last of the circus to leave the mote, but Corvus and Mattias returned to the wagons long before the others by means of the kenku’s rituals.

  Corvus was not surprised to find the facade of his private wagon lowered on its chains so that it formed a platform facing away from the camp’s central bonfire. If the roustabouts had not followed his orders to lower the false wall, he and Mattias would still be on the mote, facing the Memnonar gladiator woman with their magical disguises fading around them.

  “ ‘More peace than you deserve,’ ” Corvus said, adding just a touch of melodrama to his imitation of Mattias. The kenku hopped off the platform and extended his arm to his friend. “Always a moral, isn’t there?”

  The ranger waved him off, parting the sorcerous joins that made a greatbow of his canes and already scanning the sky. “Better always than never,” said Mattias. “Trill will want feeding when she gets here-especially if she carries both of them the whole way down the canyon.”

  Corvus waited for Mattias to leave before performing his habitual check of the magical circle inscribed on the platform. Given enough time, Corvus could transport himself to this circle from anywhere in the world. He had even read of ways to travel to and from circles inscribed in other worlds altogether, but his growing ambitions and elaborate schemes had not yet taken him beyond the mortal realm.