Sandstorm: A Forgotten Realms Novel Read online

  Or so it appeared to the crowd, who hooted and jeered, glad of the reprieve their captured champion was granted.

  Scrambling back onto even footing with Cephas, the cat spit. What Cephas shouted next, unheard on the mote in the noise of the crowd, was not another war cry. “I could have hurt you then,” he said, “perhaps even forced you over the edge!”

  Again the cat spit, and the writhing motions of its spiked tentacles quickened, matching the spins Cephas made with the flail. “I am not toying with you, cat,” he said. “Those over there, they are toying with us. They are not hunters—just killers.”

  The cat’s answer was to hurl itself forward, engaging the flail with its tentacles as it extended its sinuous neck, seeking Cephas’s throat with its teeth. Cephas fell back, pushing off the cat’s twin blows with no time to spare. The cat’s bite came so near to closing on his flesh that Cephas felt moisture; whether it was his blood or the cat’s spittle, he could not have said. He maneuvered for a counterblow, only to notice that the beast’s tentacles were wrapped around the chains of the flails, far from the weapon’s shaft, decreasing the reach of its lunge.

  “Yes! You see it! We do not need to kill each other. We both want to escape. We need to help each other!”

  Again, the cat’s response came as a terrifying series of slashes, bites, and blows. Again, Cephas came as close to death as he had at any time during the match. The goblins howled. They felt the momentum shifting against Cephas.

  Momentum, thought Cephas, and wondered whether he had imagined the intelligence he saw in the cat. “We have to go over the side,” he shouted, retreating under strike after strike from the cat’s tentacles. “They won’t expect that!”

  Whether it understood him or not, the beast’s assault faltered enough for Cephas to regain the initiative. The gladiator drove the beast across what remained of the killing floor’s breadth. Either by its design or happenstance, the cat was soon exactly where Cephas wanted it. For the first time since the battle began, the crowd silenced as it collectively drew in its breath.

  Cephas lowered his head and charged the gigantic cat. The beast raised its tentacles and opened its maw, and the goblins were ecstatic to see it welcoming Cephas’s suicidal move. The crowd watched as the cat misjudged its own position or the strength of its enemy, for both of them fell over the edge—

  And twisted and clawed and grabbed at the dangling canvas until they found purchase—the cat by sinking its claws into the frayed edges of the cloth, and Cephas by hanging on to the closest thing to a lifeline he could find—the viciously barbed appendages at the end of one of the cat’s tentacles.

  Ignoring the pain, Cephas brought his legs together in the manner he had long ago learned gave him some control when he flew through the air after a trebuchet’s launch. The canvas hung far below the sight of those on the mote, and the cat snarled at its end. The force of their uncontrolled fall caused them to swing inward toward the underside of the mote, and Cephas stretched himself out as long as he could, the undulations of the cat’s tentacle ceasing so that the gladiator was a deadweight at the end of a fantastic pendulum of arena, fighter, and foe.

  “Come on, come on!” shouted Cephas as he felt them reaching the end of their arc against the mote. An outcropping rose up in Cephas’s vision, and he angled his legs. Their movement came to a slow, almost lazy stop just as Cephas’s boots brushed the stone. He buckled his powerful legs, and, as their backward swing began, he kicked off with all his might.

  This time, he could not ignore the pain in his hands. Cephas’s weight caused the razor-sharp cilia on the end of the tentacles to extend, shredding the calloused flesh of his palms. But he hung on, searching the far wall of the canyon as they swung down, then back up; if Cephas had wondered at the madness of his plan before, only at that last moment did he realize that everything did not depend on his strength or cleverness, or even on his desperate attempt to cajole a beastly opponent to help him in his attempt to escape the Island of the Free. At the final moment, everything depended on simple timing.

  On the timing of a cat.

  The omlarcat retracted its claws and Cephas’s stomach lurched.

  Up, up, and out the combatants flew. They hurtled through space, clearing the canyon’s edge. As they fell together, the cat wrenched its tentacle from Cephas’s grasp and laid a long wound open across his back. Cephas took this as an indication that their temporary alliance had ended.

  By comparison, the crash into a stand of thorny bushes felt almost comfortable. Cephas struck his head against a rock and blinked away the doubling in his vision to find the cat springing away into the hills. From where he lay bleeding on the ground, Cephas, bruised and broken in more than one place, heard something he never had in a life spent entirely on the floating world of Jazeerijah.

  Cephas forgot his injuries, because of the singing.

  A deep, wordless thrumming rose up from below. The ground itself sang to him.

  He was still listening, coming to understand what the Calishites had spent two decades keeping from him, when Azad the Free and two guards armed with crossbows appeared above him. The tips of their bolts were smeared with brown paste.

  The master of Jazeerijah gestured, and the bolts flew toward Cephas’s chest.

  Corvus’s ebony beak pointed up to the blackening sky. The extraordinary escape had taken the combatants to a spot directly above his and Mattias’s heads, where the pair had watched the Calishite leader running with guards even as the young gladiator began his impossible pendulum swing.

  “They knew what he was doing,” said the kenku. “The freedmen knew he would try to escape their arena in the sky and were ready for him.”

  “It wasn’t hard to predict,” Mattias said.

  The kenku cocked his head sideways. “Why?”

  Counting, Mattias thought back over his month spent studying the earthmote and its people. “I’ve watched that lad fight sixteen times now,” he said.

  “And he’s used combat to launch an escape attempt once before?” asked Corvus.

  Mattias shook his head. “No, old friend,” he said. “He’s used combat to launch escape attempts fifteen times before.”

  “Yes, my arms are thin.

  It’s my wits I’ll use to best you!”

  —“Clever Janna and the Fire Giant”

  The Founding Stories of Calimshan

  Printed and Bound at Calimport

  The Year of the Broken Blade (1260 DR)

  CEPHAS WOKE IN HIS CELL WITH THE STENCH OF kan’challanah strong in his nostrils. This was the paste the Calishite freedmen bought from the goblin shamans. The tribes used the foul substance, ground from a black fungus that grew in the shady ledges of the canyon, to incapacitate the monsters they brought to serve as their champions on the Canvas Arena.

  A sharp pain distracted him from the smell. Grinta the Pike crouched over him, dabbing the pair of shallow bolt wounds in his chest with a stick wrapped in rags. When he tried to move a hand to block her none-too-gentle ministrations, he found that his arms and legs were chained.

  Grinta saw he was awake and gave him her ugly, snaggle-tusked grin. “The word our masters use for that excrement means ‘unbreakable chain.’ Seems he trusts iron more than goblin alchemy, though.”

  If Cephas had a friend on the earthmote, it was the old orc woman. On the orders of the Calishites, she had taught him much of what he knew about arena fighting. They did not know she had taught him other things as well, such as snatches of the language they used among themselves but forbade their slaves to use. She had even taught him a bit about the wider world off the mote, which, as far as Cephas could remember, he had never seen.

  “My husband trusts only two things in this world, drudge,” said another woman’s familiar—and unwelcome—voice, coming from outside Cephas’s cell. “His mind, which forms his will. And my hand, which carries it out. Finish your work there and bring the dirt djinni to our chambers.”

  Once, long ago, he had
watched Grinta the Pike wield the wicked polearm that named her against a mated pair of dire wolves. The beasts had been starved to madness and baited to fury by a band of elf adventurers seeking to win the earthmote itself in a high-stakes wager with Azad. The wolves had fallen, but Grinta had been torn open from left shoulder to right hip. The scars she still bore across her torso were thick as ropes.

  Even then, forced to push her own guts back inside with her own hands, Grinta the Pike had shown no fear.

  Only Azad’s wife, Shaneerah, could make Grinta show fear.

  “Yes, my lady,” said the old orc woman, and dug a dirty fingernail into one of Cephas’s wounds. He gasped in pain instead of voicing the taunt he wanted to throw at Shaneerah. “I’ll patch him up and strap him into his sandals straightaway.”

  The Calishite woman, called the Queen of the Rock by slaves and freedmen alike, tossed a brass key onto the planked floor of Cephas’s peculiar cell on leaving, her shadow departing the low grate that formed its only egress.

  Grinta slapped Cephas across the mouth with the back of her hand. “Fool!” she said. “Azad keeps that woman’s rage in check when it comes to you, gods know why, but he’ll not stay her hand against me. I came just close enough to besting her on the canvas when she trained me up to know that I could never match her, even in the old days.”

  Grinta used the key to open the shackles at Cephas’s wrists and ankles. Rubbing the dark marks left on his gold skin by the iron, Cephas said, “I wouldn’t let that happen. Azad knows I would refuse to fight if he harmed you. And if he did harm you, he knows I’m as skilled as Shaneerah.”

  Cephas’s cell was barely large enough for the two of them, so Grinta had to scoot backward to slide open the grate. One of the mysterious and extraordinary measures the freedmen took to ensure Cephas never touched bare earth was the design of the cell, the only home he’d ever known. A wooden box slightly less than his height in each of its dimensions, it hung from a hook extending from one of the ancient engines that dotted the mote.

  Grinta slid through the entrance and stopped the slow spin their movement had caused in the hanging cell. Indicating that Cephas should stick his feet out first, she answered his boast about the couple who ruled Jazeerijah. “You may match Shaneerah’s skill. May, I say. But she would meet you on the canvas with more than just speed and strength. A fighter must have something—”

  “A fighter must have something to fight for—yes, you have told me that a thousand times. Haven’t I answered you?”

  Grinta took down a pair of wooden sandals with comically thick soles from a peg beside the grate. She strapped them to Cephas’s feet and said, “Perhaps you have,” she said, “if your answers are your attempts to escape. Have you answered a thousand times?”

  The grate, in the middle of one wall and flush with the floor, was so narrow that Cephas had to turn his broad shoulders at an angle to pass through. Balancing on the wooden sandals, he shrugged, and said, “Today made six hundred and forty answers. I owe you some yet.”

  The prod she gave him in the back nearly toppled him over. He recovered his balance and walked along the boardwalk the freedmen had laid that described the borders of his life. Except for when he was on the canvas, he was allowed only those places where the boardwalk led—his cell, the kitchens, the training grounds, and the hollow stone outcropping where Shaneerah lived with Azad. It was to this last location that Grinta took him.

  As he raised his hand to knock on the wooden door, Grinta signaled him to wait. “The flail you fight with, Cephas, never forget Azad once wielded it in the desert hell these freedmen escaped. They claim he was the finest gladiator in their homeland. It’s not just Shaneerah you’ll face on the day you push him too far.”

  Cephas furrowed his brow. “I cannot imagine such a thing,” he said.

  “That Azad the Free would fight you?” asked Grinta.

  Cephas shook his head. “That Azad the Free would fight anyone at all.”

  One of his long-dead instructors had said of Corvus that if the kenku had a heart, it must be sewn down one side and bound in leather covers. Corvus rarely thought of the men, women, and stranger creatures who had educated him in the ways of shadow. Books, though, were rarely far from his thoughts.

  As soon as he and Mattias stepped out of the shadowy portal that had taken them from the canyon side to this hidden camp, he drew forth his most prized possession from the otherworldly cache he accessed through his own breast feathers, a volume covered in dark blue scales he called his journey book. It contained rituals, recipes, maps, notes—any form of information that might be scribed down on pages could be read in the thick book, though there were few people in the Realms who could read the alphabets Corvus used most often.

  Dark snow had collected on his and Mattias’s clothing as they traveled the shadow ways, but the kenku noticed that the old man did not bother to brush it from his cloak. They were much farther down the mountain at this hidden camp, and the heat of the early afternoon melted and then evaporated the flakes.

  The women rushing into Mattias’s arms ignored any dampness as well; even the dampness caused by the tears on the old man’s cheeks. He had not seen any of his companions from Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders for long tendays, least of all those of Corvus’s secret corps of operatives gathered here. Shan and Cynda, twin halflings, supported Mattias’s weight even as they brushed aside his canes to embrace him. The women did not speak in greeting him, since they never spoke at all.

  Such could not be said of the third and final figure who had waited for them at the foot of the canyon. If he had kept still, Tobin, the rocky-skinned goliath, might have been mistaken for a pillar of granite. The huge man towered over Mattias in much the same way the ranger towered over the sisters. “Mattias!” he said, his voice booming. “It has been too long since you left the wagons!”

  Mattias lifted his hand in greeting but cast his gaze about for another missed companion. He spied a tumbled heap of leather harnesses and brass chainwork on the far side of the smokeless fire. “Where is she?” he asked.

  Tobin clapped a heavy hand down on Mattias’s shoulder, and the twins had to scramble to keep themselves upright. “She is looking for food. We left the wagons at sunset last night and have been climbing hard since then. I could have carried enough for her, but Corvus—”

  “Corvus instructed you to make haste,” interrupted the kenku, “which I see you have, and to move stealthily, which I continue to delude myself into asking of you, you great lummox.”

  The goliath shrugged. “This is rocky ground, Ringmaster,” he said. “The sounds of my passage are natural enough. And the twins make no noise, even when they climb and leap so that it is hard for me to keep up.”

  “Yes, well,” said Corvus, “we’re all here now, and there was no sign on the earthmote that any of us have been spotted. We get to go in on our own terms for once.”

  Mattias scoffed. “When have you ever done anything not on your own terms?” he asked.

  Corvus did not answer, but with one talon began sketching a surprisingly accurate rendition of Jazeerijah in the sand. “Our principal objective is a rescue, or possibly a kidnapping, depending on how things develop.” Drawing in the canyon, he spotted redoubts that housed the chains of the Canvas Arena, and the other four leaned in.

  “Some of us will approach by stealth, tonight, and some of us in disguise, tomorrow,” Corvus continued. “Our exits will be less subtle.”

  Azad the Free claimed that the shaft of the double flail, currently resting on a stand in his quarters, was carved from the heartwood of a tree an ancient guild of smiths had tended for six hundred years, then cut down and carved until nothing remained but a rod as thick as Cephas’s wrist and as long as a running man’s stride.

  Each end of the rod was capped with a boss of blacksmelt fused so perfectly to the wood that Cephas’s calloused fingertips could not feel the joins when he used the weapon in the arena. The metal was black by its nature, and
the wood was black by its age, but the chains hanging from the bosses were a sparkling silver. The links appeared too delicate to bear the heavy weight of the barbed spheres at their ends, but when Azad the Free lifted the double-headed flail from its velvet-lined stand, expertly rolling it over the back of his hand in a lazy arc, the strength and balance of the weapon appeared perfect to Cephas’s experienced eye.

  Azad never had any guard but his wife, Shaneerah, when he called Cephas to the apartment carved in the stone behind the gamemaster’s box. The Calishite woman stood at her husband’s shoulder, one hand resting on the pommel of the throwing dagger tucked in her belt.

  “I called you here because my wife believes I should use this flail to kill you, Cephas. But I thought I would read you a tale, instead.”

  Keeping a tradition from the days when his human ancestors still ruled in their desert homeland, Azad sometimes brought the denizens of Jazeerijah together in the arena stands. These were nights when there were no games held for merchants up from the lowlands or tribesmen down from the peaks. There, he would stand in the gamemaster’s box and speak to “his people.” Grinta called this “playing at patriarchy.”

  On some nights, he would rant drunkenly at his fellow countrymen, reminding them that the mission of the Island of the Free was to build an army, and that he, the greatest gladiator who ever stalked the sands of Calimport, would lead this army south to retake the ancient city from the djinni scum who had usurped it. Cephas first learned to sleep with his eyes open during these harangues.

  On certain other nights, Cephas paid very careful attention, indeed. On those nights, when the moon Selûne cast bright-enough light, Azad brought forth something in the presence of which Cephas would never dream of sleeping. Some nights, Azad brought forth a book.