Sandstorm

by Christopher Rowe

  The WeavePasha nodded. “He is. And the djinn might even allow him freer rein in ruling his own people than they give that fool Marod. But I have spoken to Cephas, and while I do not know his fate, I sense that is a man who will always seek the righteous path. At least when he can see it.”

  The vizar frowned. “And yet the possibility remains. He embodies a potential threat, either as a tool of the djinn or as someone who would dare to judge you unrighteous.”

  “Enough!” cried the WeavePasha. “Are the threats to Almraiven we are sure of so inconsequential that you feel free to pursue one that exists at the far end of a causal chain even I can’t track?”

  “Respect, Pasha,” she said. “We guard against many ‘potential’ threats.”

  The WeavePasha pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Potential is something you can measure. What you’re talking about is paranoia, which can expand beyond all reason and which I will suffer in none of my kin.”

  The woman stiffened, then bowed. “As you say, WeavePasha.”

  The old man sighed again. He had not slept in so long. “They seek to cross the Plain of Stone Spiders, Granddaughter, a journey only armies and elementals have survived in more than ninety years. Measure that potentiality, and be at ease. I go to seek some myself, in my bedchamber, if one of you hasn’t turned it into an alchemy laboratory since the last time I saw it.”

  His vizar smiled. “It remains as you left it, Grandfather. Do you remember the way?”

  He raised his hand, waving her back to her seat. “Stay. Finish that bottle. It’s a new vintage from the Turmish vineyards called Wyvern’s Tears. It has to all be drunk once it’s opened or the acidity becomes unbearable.”

  After he left her alone in his inner chamber, the WeavePasha’s granddaughter sat for a long time, drinking and thinking, weighing potentialities and trying to remember if her grandfather had ever before been bested in the seat of his power. She thought about her father, missing for decades since an attempt to infiltrate the City of Brass, the extra-planar capital of the hated efreet. She thought of her fierce daughter, and of her myopic son, and of her one hundred cousins, and of all the other humans in this last human city of a land once home to millions of humans—this city she was literally bound to protect.

  “I am sorry, Grandfather,” she whispered. “The potential has weight.”

  Her nephews and their leashed demons came to mind. There were some leashes her family had held for a very long time, indeed.

  The demon leaned against its bonds, pouring all of its terrible strength into the effort of breaking them. Black rivulets of sorcery spilled from its many eyes, their fetid ducts the source of a never-ending flow of power that splashed on the rotting stone. The demon lifted several of its enormous spiked feet, finding new positions in the slurry of waste magic and crumbled rock that formed the floor of its temple prison.

  Otherwise, it did not move. It leaned. With its bloated nightmare body, yes, but also with its maelstrom of dark magic and its blasphemously ancient will.

  And its hate.

  The hate is what kept it leaning. The hate is what drove it to forever test this boundary, what fed the rituals of its bizarre worshipers on the plain above the temple, what had kept it pouring unimaginable strength and power against its leash, from this immobile position, for one hundred and twenty-two years.

  “Spider That Waits.”

  At first, the demon thought it was more chattering from the warped creatures that attended it. The spiderfolk were still more or less mortal, and mortal languages all sounded alike to it.

  An image appeared in the demon’s consciousness. It was the visage of a human woman, calmly studying it. She held a twist of leather in her hand, and when it saw that, the demon howled.

  “Qysara!” it hissed. “Perhaps the shame I felt when you first banished me was misplaced if you have survived until now.”

  The woman shook her head, and the demon noticed something. A quiver along the jawline, was it? Or an imperfect shade in the spectrum of the shields guarding her sanity? It was a weakness, whatever it was—something to sniff out; something to exploit.

  “Qysara Shoon the Fifth is dead, Zanessu, and has been these twelve hundred years. I am her descendant and namesake, Munaa yr Oma. It is I who hold your leash now.”

  The demon giggled, a sound like slow bubbles bursting through some hellish marsh. “The leash was lost,” it said. “I returned after the thousand years of exile your ancestor laid on me.”

  “Yes!” said the human. “And you spun your webs again for a time. But my grandfather spent decades rebuilding our family armories, hiding behind secret names and acting from the shadows, as our family was forced to for much of the time you rotted in the Abyss, fiend. Then, when the gods walked the earth …”

  “When the personifications of hubris you mortals call gods fell to Earth a century ago, a man came with the leash and imprisoned me here. I remember. El Jhotos …” The demon cast a dweomer of black bile at the woman’s will, but it was seared away to nothing before it could fall.

  “And now,” it continued, as if it had not tried to annihilate the woman’s soul, “Here you are. Plotting against your liege? Seeking power from a source he does not control? In search of allies?”

  Enormous, unending waves of pain wracked the demon. It collapsed in a heap, its legs curling over the filthy sac of its body while it screamed. When the pain faded, the demon sought the woman’s visage again. It saw that it had made a mistake. If there was weakness in this mortal before, it was gone now.

  “Ridiculous fiend,” she said. “You are incapable of understanding the love and loyalty I hold for the one you call el Jhotos. You think to tempt me with offers of power? You are nothing compared to him. You are a dog on a leash, and not even the dog you claim to be. Zanessu? Demon prince? Drow god? You are a jumped-up ascendant, immortal only because you were born of the venomous spittle fallen from a real power’s fangs. I could end you with a thought and a turn of my hand. You know this.”

  The demon felt a vibration in the leash that invisibly bound its necrotic soul. It felt something boiling up in the mix besides its endless hate.

  Fear.

  The Spider That Waits has eight thousand eyes,

  The Spider That Waits sees through Janna’s disguise,

  The Spider That Waits spins a web out of lies,

  Janna gets caught there, and there Janna dies.

  —Calishite Children’s Song Collected at Volothamp

  The Year of the Blazing Brand (1334 DR)

  CEPHAS SQUINTED AGAINST THE SUN, THEN RETURNED TO his study of the boulder-strewn gully wall, plotting a route before he began the climb. Ariella squatted at the top of the rise, drinking a single mouthful of water from their last canteen and keeping a westward watch. Cephas had watched her make the ascent, but he had stopped trying to follow the leaps and graceful slides she made from shifting stone to invisible handhold. The couriers of the Airsteppers’ Guild had trained the swordmage to navigate across broken country as if she were dancing.

  Cephas was no dancer.

  “Any sign?” he asked her, keeping his voice low even though they had yet to see another living thing since they entered this unnatural plain.

  Ariella did not answer aloud. She shook her head and held up the canteen, giving him an inquiring look. Cephas considered for a moment, then nodded, and she tossed it down. He took as shallow a swallow as he could manage, and again wondered whether this journey would be easier if he were manifesting the earthsoul he had known all his life.

  At least I believe it’s the one I’ve known all my life, he thought.

  Corvus’s hurried hints of explanations to come weighed on him. The joy he felt on learning another way of being faded with the knowledge that the people who rescued him from the mote apparently had intended to make some unknown use of him.

  He tried again to hear the song of the earth, but heard nothing except the wind.

  Ariella told him
not to worry. He was new to his Second Soul, and it was still coming fully into its first manifestation. “Besides,” she said, “the earth’s song is probably muted here, or warped. I know the wind is strange just from blowing over this strange ground. Don’t you hear it?”

  He did. The wind he heard with his ears was little different than the wind that blew through the canyons of the Omlarandins, but when he listened with his windsoul, he heard something different, a high and lonesome sound, almost as if the air itself felt pain.

  “Yes,” Ariella said when he told her this. “Yes, that’s it exactly. High and lonesome.” She shivered, then bounded off again in one of her masterful displays of movement.

  Cephas tucked the canteen through the webbing of his belt. He did not see an easy route up through the tumble of rock and dust, or even a difficult one. Well, he thought, I cannot hear the earth, but I can still hear the wind. He felt the wind-force gathered inside him. Yes, enough time had passed since he last released it.

  Cephas spread his arms wide, brought his feet together, and straightened his spine. With a thought, he rose from the ground, floated up the gully wall, and came down to a silent landing beside Ariella. She returned his grin. “You don’t have to do it so prettily, you know,” she said. “It is even possible to slouch in flight.”

  He addressed her gravely. “That is not the way of a strongman,” he said, and even to his own ears, his voice was a fair imitation of Tobin’s.

  Ariella laughed. “Listen to you!” she said. “Imitations, flying every chance you can, and even taking a drink of water when you are thirsty instead of grimly soldiering on. I knew I heard wind in you as well as rock.”

  Cephas smiled but did not answer. He was glad she was pleased by the behaviors that surprised him, but he hoped that listening to the wind was not the same thing as being irresponsible.

  But then, Ariella was a swordmage, and so a scholar of both spell and blade. She was a member of a guild that demanded a rigorous ethical stance and an extraordinary physical discipline, and she was risking her life to pursue traitors to her homeland. If he sensed any irresponsibility in himself, it was not because it blew in on the wind.

  There was something on the wind, though. A rushing noise that advanced, then retreated. The wind brought a scent, too, familiar, but not quite identifiable.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked Ariella. “What is it?”

  She listened, and then an enormous, excited smile lit up her face. “That, Cephas,” she said, “is the sea! Come on!”

  She took his hand, and now he had no problem following her.

  It was … enormous. Gigantic. Unending.

  “What do you think?” Ariella asked him, standing next to him on the bluff as they looked out over the water.

  Cephas cleared his throat. “Big,” he said, before he could gather his thoughts.

  She did not laugh. “It is that,” she said. “It is big.”

  The surf crashed on the rocks below. Black-winged birds with scarlet head feathers screamed and dived, dipping into the water and then arcing back up with silver fish twisting in their beaks.

  “Is that what your father hears?” Cephas asked. “And your brother? Is that endless rush the voice of water?”

  “Hmmm. One new soul is enough for you to consider right now, I think,” she said archly. Cephas smiled, content to watch the water and breathe the salt air instead of trying to fathom their call.

  He saw a triangular shape on the waves, moving east to west. He began to ask Ariella what it was, before realizing he already knew.

  “A dhow!” he said, pointing. “A fisherman’s dhow as in the stories! Do you suppose he’s had to fight off a sea dragon?”

  Ariella said, “The Almraivenar fishermen don’t come this far west, but I don’t think it’s because they fear dragons.” She laughed. “You still think every new thing you see is out of a tale of wonder. I like that.”

  The shadow of enormous wings crossed over them, and a hunting cry drowned out the waves and scattered the terrified birds. A huge serpentine shape beat hard for the little boat, which was tacking to shore.

  A figure stood in the prow, waving. It was Corvus, and the winged shadow was Trill, diving to carry him to land.

  Shan found them not long after and led them to the camp Mattias had set in the lee of a gigantic oblong boulder balanced atop a much smaller spire.

  “It’s probably been that way for a century or more,” said Mattias. “At least since the swampland petrified into what we see now.”

  What they saw, away from the shoreline, was the same terrain Cephas and Ariella had traversed for the better part of two days before their little band gathered back together. Cephas had come to think he knew what the word “plain” meant in the journey across the highlands of Tethyr. But if this brooding wasteland was also a plain, then his understanding of the word was as limited as his understanding of what “ocean” meant before Ariella led him to the seashore.

  Corvus crouched over a smokeless fire, the fuel for which consisted of dried bricks he fished from the mysterious portal in his breast. “Not too many of these stored away, I’m afraid,” he said. “But we’ll not need a fire once we get to the Calim Desert.”

  Cephas wondered if his mental image of a desert was anything like what they would find beyond the western horizon. “Because it is endlessly hot,” he hazarded, “and there is nothing to burn across the distance a camel can walk in a hundred days?”

  Mattias snorted. “Do you even know what a camel looks like?”

  Cephas sensed Ariella’s eyes on him. “It’s like an ox for the desert,” he said.

  Mattias looked at him, holding a grin, then at Ariella. Whatever he saw on her face caused him to clear his throat and rearrange his features. “Well, yes, more or less,” he said. “Good lad.” He went back to checking the gear they had managed to carry out of Almraiven, supplemented by items Corvus periodically remembered he had tucked away in his ritual-bound storage place.

  Corvus looked up. “We’ll not need a fire, Cephas, because we will be met by your kin.”

  Shan moved next to the kenku. Dark circles had appeared under the woman’s eyes over the last two days. She had a haunted look, and Mattias said she had not slept since Cynda and Tobin disappeared. She looked a question at Corvus, not troubling herself with gestures or signs.

  “And we will surrender ourselves to them,” he said, addressing her directly. “It is the fastest way to Calimport, and the surest way of finding our friends. They will treat us as prisoners at first, but when Cephas’s father learns he is in the city, we will all be taken to the arenas.” He stirred the fire with the tip of his short sword.

  Unexpectedly, it was Ariella who spoke next.

  “Past time to come clean, Ringmaster,” she said. “I believe I have divined what part I played in this game you’ve been up to with the WeavePasha.” She squeezed Cephas’s shoulder. “And I have no regrets, since I would have done nothing differently if I had met Cephas when he wasn’t chained in your coffle. But I don’t like being manipulated, or used. And I have been used less harshly than some.”

  Corvus paused for a long moment before he began to speak.

  “You’ve heard stories about the uprisings, Cephas. They’ve occurred in Calimshan for, well, essentially forever. There are countless instances in stories and songs, and in historical documents and other sources, as Ariella told us not long ago.”

  Cephas thought back to that conversation. It seemed a long time ago to him.

  “It is an unchanging feature of Calishite life. Slaves do not wish to be slaves. And they try to escape. They flee into the desert or take their chances on the sea. They flee into death, some of them. Too many of them.

  “There are whole nations founded by people like Azad and his freedmen, did you know that? Tethyr is one, though I doubt their queen would take kindly to the comparison. And there are people all over the South who make it their life’s work to win freedom for enslaved peoples.
Knightly orders and religious brotherhoods, secret societies, and even simple bandits when it suits their purpose.”

  Cephas shook his head. “Why are you telling me all this? You mean to say you and the circus are some of these people? I’m to believe you’re a knight of some kind?”

  Corvus said, “No, Cephas. I am not a knight. I am a spy. And I freed you because it suited my purpose.”

  Mattias Farseer took a deep, deep breath, but did not speak.

  Cephas tensed, growing angry. “What is your purpose, Corvus?”

  Corvus made the ticking noise at the back of his throat. “A question for another day, perhaps.”

  “That’s a day that’s been a long time coming,” said Mattias.

  “That man you all talk about, Azad,” said Ariella. “He led an uprising in Calimport?”

  “Azad the Free is not a man to lead an uprising,” said Corvus. “He simply led an escape. Before that, I have learned that for a ten-year period in the middle of this century, from the time the great djinni and efreeti nobles Calim and Memnon disappeared until twenty years ago, a human slave named Azad stalked the arenas of Calimport and Manshaka as no other gladiator in history has. He used a double-headed flail, he won over a thousand matches, and he ended his career when he was taken into the household of his owner, Marod el Arhapan.”

  “The man the WeavePasha says is my father,” said Cephas.

  “Oh, he is your father, Cephas,” said Corvus. “At least, it is his blood that runs through your veins, and that suffices as a definition of fatherhood for many. The records I consulted in Saradush, and earlier, in Airspur, suggest it. Then Elder Lin confirmed it when she examined your szuldar lines. You are a scion of the el Arhapan line, one of the oldest windsouled lineages on the planet.”

  “Then Cephas’s mother was earthsouled,” said Ariella. “An unlikely match from what I have heard of the ruling classes of Calimport.”

  “An impossible match, yes,” said Corvus. “And now we come to the key that turns the lock of our friend’s past. Who was the mother of Cephas Earthsouled?”