Sandstorm (single books)

by Christopher Rowe

  “Your work, of course,” said the pasha. “I suppose I should have guessed, but I trusted Shahrokh to sniff out any plot you’ve been put up to by the WeavePasha or your mother’s degenerate kin or whoever supplied you with the means to offer me this setback. What have you done with the djinn, by the way? Some repelling magic item? They’ll not be happy.”

  Ariella stepped forward and said, “I would prevent Cephas from patricide, Calimien, but there would be no shame in my blade finding your heart. Have a civil tongue. We only want to find the adepts and the goliath, and then we’ll leave you to lord over what’s left of your domain.”

  Cephas put a hand on Ariella’s shoulder. “I don’t know why your protectors have abandoned you now, Marod el Arhapan,” he said to the man before him. To Ariella, he said, “And no patricide is possible. I would have to be his son. He would have to be my father.”

  The pasha snorted. “It seems that the only thing we share besides our blood, Cephas, is the wish that we shared not even that much. But if you doubt my patrimony, you are a fool. Even wearing your mother’s cursed secret, it’s clear you are an el Arhapan.”

  Cephas studied the man. “That is the second time you have said that, about the secret of my mother’s earthsoul. And yet you said hers was a newly elevated noble family. Your marriage was a cause for controversy, you said. An earthsouled noble making a secret of her earthsoul seems-”

  “Seems like a story concocted by a vizar who seldom troubles himself with the finer points of genasi society, yes. I would have pointed out the inconsistencies to him, except that, frankly, I did not care. You would have discovered the truth soon enough. Your mother was a scheming earthsouled slave who somehow learned to manifest windsoul and managed to disguise herself long enough to cost me much trouble and treasure.”

  Cephas narrowed his eyes. There was still something wrong with Corvus’s version of his mother’s life story. “What do you mean, treasure?”

  The pasha spit. “The escapees. They had to be replaced, all of them. Another flaw in your philosophers’ arguments, Akanulan. If you free a slave, you simply create the need for another slave to take its place.”

  Cephas said, “My mother-”

  “Your mother was a liar and a whore. I thought her treatment of the slaves eccentric, but I didn’t learn of her activities with the Janessar until after you were born. I didn’t know how much I was freeing myself when I set her before Azad.”

  A tremendous crash sounded nearby, and the three genasi ducked as a sizable chunk of wall flew over their heads. A new cloud of dust rolled out of the rubble, and a pair of coughing figures stumbled into the clearing. Caked in dust and wearing pants sewn together from a dozen slaves’ tunics, Tobin could almost have been back in the circus. As for Corvus, his feathers looked as if they had turned white, until he made a shivering motion that shook most of the dust free.

  “Here’s another man who would kill you for me, Father,” said Cephas.

  Corvus looked at the genasi as if he were studying a tableau he was not quite convinced warranted inclusion in a circus performance. “If you like,” he said at last. “I owe you far more than that. It isn’t necessary, though. If the djinn suffer him to live, the life they leave him will be more punishment than anything we’ll mete out.”

  There was another flurry of motion, and then Shan was among them. She carried a miserable form in her arms. Cynda, eyes shut and holding a bloody short sword in a curiously loose grip that left its tip dragging the sand, seemed aware of nothing but her sister’s strong arms, which she sought to burrow deeper into when the companions cried out.

  Cephas watched Shan turn and shield Cynda from even the gentle ministrations offered by Tobin. No one would ever again have difficulty telling the women apart, unless whatever terrible tortures scarred Cynda were also visited on Shan. He realized he would do anything to prevent that from happening.

  Marod el Arhapan stood and looked from the twins to Cephas. He rolled his shoulders and spread his arms wide.

  Cephas dropped his flail to the sand and spoke to Corvus. “I do not think you know what punishments I am capable of meting out, Ringmaster.”

  Corvus did not try to stop him.

  They met on the sands of an arena, but their fight was not an entertainment. As he rushed toward the windsouled man who only resembled him on the outside, Cephas knew that what was about to happen was brutal, ugly, terrifying.

  Marod el Arhapan was a connoisseur of fighting, not a fighter himself.

  When Cephas took his life with a single wrench, it was not an entertainment. It was a punishment, one long overdue.

  The WeavePasha considered the extraordinary mess in his scrying chamber. He considered again whether to allow his granddaughter to supervise her apprentices in cleaning it, but again decided it was too dangerous.

  No, there was nothing to be done but to survey the damage caused by the kenku’s escape, and salvage what he could.

  “That’s odd,” said the WeavePasha. Speaking of Corvus Nightfeather, he could have sworn he had given the kenku the particular volume of centaur verse at his feet several decades past. In fact, there was something peculiar about all of the rubbish tumbled in the center of the chamber.

  It was mostly books, and they weren’t as damaged as they should have been after the conflagration. They were all very rare books; so rare that they weren’t even all to be found in his own library.

  The familiar vibration of an activating portal came to his arcane senses. The old man whispered a few words and drew the knife that was always at his belt. He could sense who this unexpected, and most unwelcome, visitor was.

  Shahrokh’s preparations were impressive, the WeavePasha supposed, for a djinni.

  Ninlilah felt the dressing at the jagged end of her left horn. It was dry, and she decided she would have to wait only another few days before she could dispense with it. She had little to do out here but wait, after all.

  She had already practiced enough since her injury that she was comfortable with her axe again. The odd change in her balance that followed the fight in the Spires of Mir had required a change in some of her techniques, and this training camp was the ideal place to develop those. It would have gone easier if some of the gladiators had stayed to practice with her, but they had elected to leave with all the other slaves when she descended on the camp’s overseers out of the desert night.

  There was another deep agent of the Janessar like herself in the camp. He had been furious that she had broken cover, but there was little the man could do besides lead the compound’s slaves north when she told him her plans.

  Eventually, Marod el Arhapan would travel here to check on his stable. And then the man whose black will she had enacted for so long, even to the point of letting dear Valandra die, would die himself.

  She’d seen Cephas through the flames-after all these years, Valandra’s son. And no sooner had she found him than he was lost forever.

  She did not know what she would do after she killed el Arhapan. It largely depended on whether he was accompanied by a djinni when he came through the portal. In that case, she would most likely die, too. If he came alone, or was accompanied only by windsouled, then she would survive.

  The Janessar might be sympathetic because of her reasons, some of them, but they would not allow her to work with them again. She supposed she might try to make it into Calimport and convince the other yikaria to leave the Emirates once and for all.

  The circle of fine white sand she’d poured as a warning signal around the chamber stirred. Air was blowing inward.

  At last, el Arhapan was coming. She shouldered her axe.

  And she saw people she had never thought to see again. The goliath-the strongest fighter she had ever faced-was the most instantly recognizable. She did not see a deadly archer among them, but she had barely spotted the archer in the Spires of Mir, either. This was no good; there were too many.

  And then there he was. He spoke to her.

  “Pu
t down your axe, ’Lilah,” said Cephas.

  Epilogue

  And he shall come from a great house of pain

  with hair of spun gold and eyes of the sea.

  He shall break the bonds that hold him,

  light the end of Oppression’s Road for many,

  and free the tortured peoples

  from the evil grip of bondage.

  — The Nar’ysr, Augury 22, The Phoenix Prophecies

  For all that a clown twice his height made for an odd spectacle, it was even odder that Talid felt, for some reason, that he should recognize the man.

  The three clowns behind the goliath, though, the ones with crossbows, Talid was sure he had never seen them.

  As was his habit when guarding the upland bridge, he waved them through without a word, along with the kenku that followed, and the pair of halfling women wearing terrifying terra-cotta masks-one scowling, one smiling.

  Cephas flew through the air over the canvas, tumbling. He wore a loose cloak over his armor so that his silver skin was not obvious, but he cast this off as he dived.

  When he struck the arena floor, he struck as earthsouled. The crowd was small, but it roared.

  Grinta the Pike was standing along one side of the canvas, leaning back against an extended bridge and keeping a pair of human men at a distance with her namesake weapon. If she was surprised to see him, she made no sign.

  Instead, she made a quick pass with the pike, and the two mercenaries found themselves disarmed. They looked back and forth between the orc and Cephas with confusion and fear.

  “Come on,” Grinta said to them, climbing onto the bridge as it retracted. “I have a feeling we’re about to see a better show than the one we were putting on.”

  “Come out, Azad,” said Cephas. “Come out onto the canvas.”

  He searched the stands and saw more people there. All the slaves and freedmen of Jazeerijah filed in, joining the handful of dozing goblins already present.

  Azad answered from the gamemaster’s box, his response hesitant but still amplified enough to ring out across the canyon.

  “Is that why you came back here, Cephas? You want me to fight you?”

  The crowd buzzed at that, and Cephas caught the barest hint of the old bloodlust.

  “No,” he shouted, answering Azad but speaking to all. “I have learned who you once were, Azad. I know that I bear the arms and armor you once wore, and that you were a mighty gladiator. But those days are long gone. I want something else. I want you to tell a story.”

  Azad shook his head. “You took my book, Cephas. I don’t tell stories anymore.”

  “This is a story that was never written down,” Cephas said, turning to address the crowd. “The story of the last fight of Azad the Free!”

  “My last fight was long ago,” said Azad.

  “Yes,” said Cephas. “Yes, that is the story I want to hear.”

  In reply, Azad the Free sobbed.

  It was a single, wracked cry; he swallowed it and cursed, but it rang across the canyon. The crowd grew silent.

  Then, Azad said, “It is not a story. It is a lie. It was a lie.

  “Marod told me he would send the deadliest fighter of the age against me to prove my glory forever. I thought he meant Shaneerah. I told him I would not fight her, but he said there was a woman even deadlier. He said she was a master of the feint and the hidden blow. He said she was impossible to predict. She was … She was a tired, ill woman who did not know how to hold a spear. But I did not know. I thought …”

  “You thought it was a trick,” said Cephas. “And it was. But not the one you looked for. You were promised a glorious last battle, and instead you were used as a headsman’s axe, then rewarded with retirement all the same. And when you went to your reward, the woman’s son-”

  “You could barely even speak,” said Azad. “You toddled around, hiding from everyone but the yikaria. Marod couldn’t stand the sight of you. And when he grew tired of having me at his table, he decided it would be amusing to give me a duty worthy of a household slave. I was to read his son to sleep.”

  Cephas studied the canvas. This was so difficult, but he had come here for a reason.

  “Azad, come out onto the canvas,” he said again.

  The shattered old man at the lectern shook his head. “I will not fight you, Cephas,” he said.

  Cephas held the flail up for all to see. He dropped it. “I did not come here to fight you, Azad. Or any of you.” He looked at the others. “I came here-we came here-to set you free.”

  The slaves of the mote peered at one another, and at the Calishites, but stayed quiet. The voice that answered was Shaneerah’s. “You may take the slaves, earthsouled,” she said. “No, I offer even more. We will leave, my husband and I, and any others who want to come. But you are giving us nothing. My husband is Azad the Free. We are his freedmen. We have no chains you can break.”

  Her voice carried strangely, and Cephas realized it was because she was moving as she spoke. She appeared behind the lectern and put one arm around her husband’s shoulder. Ninlilah and Ariella shadowed her.

  Cephas said, “Not all chains are forged of steel, Shaneerah.”

  Azad had withdrawn so far into himself that he reminded Cephas of those first bad months Cynda had before Elder Lin’s healing began to bring her back around. Shaneerah was the very opposite of Lin, her hate pure and undiminished.

  “We have no chains you can break,” she repeated, and led her husband away.

  Corvus joined Cephas at the podium as the last of the cables was drawn back in. Down in the canyon, Whitey and Melda supervised the newly freed slaves of Jazeerijah in rolling the canvas onto a wagon-mounted frame. The master clown believed there was enough of the sailcloth for a big top and two sizable side tents.

  “Your formula didn’t get all the bloodstains out,” Cephas said, watching the work.

  “Stains we can see and chains we can’t,” said Corvus. “Your cousins in Argentor will be impressed by all this symbolism.”

  Cephas smiled with sadness, thinking of Sonnett’s and Lin’s disappointment with him. “More impressed than they are with my plans, anyway.”

  Corvus clicked his tongue. It was not the sound he used for laughter, but a lower, hollower noise he had sounded more and more often in the last months. Cephas had still not decided exactly what it indicated, and he wondered if the kenku knew himself.

  “They will not countenance violence, and we must not ask them to. But if you mean to take an active stance against slavery to complement Acham el Jhotos’s plans of centuries, and the Janessar plans of secrecy, then you must use the tools you have. My sword. Your flail.”

  Cephas laughed. “I think I might make use of other tools of yours than just your short sword, old friend. I have arms and armor for this fight that the pashas cannot imagine.”

  Light came up from below. The cookfires were being set among the wagons of the circus, and Whitey’s family and the other circus folk set aside their work.

  Corvus stared out over the Island of the Free, where the freedmen who had not followed Shaneerah deeper into the mountains were pulling down the last of the old buildings under Tobin’s enthusiastic direction.

  The twins and Ninlilah were spending the night with Grinta and her Bloody Moons, cementing their unlikely alliance, so it would be a quiet night in the canyon.

  The kenku almost spoke aloud, but Ariella joined them, reaching her arm around Cephas.

  So Corvus spoke to himself, and only to echo the earthsouled. “Arms and armor they cannot imagine, my friend. That they cannot imagine.”

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  Rowe, Christopher

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