Sandstorm (single books) Page 2

  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.”

  Chapter Two

  “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 ofkan’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 cover
s. 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 Selune 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.

  “These are the Founding Stories,” he would say, casually flipping pages as if he were not casting the most potent magic Cephas could imagine. “This collection here.” Azad’s bottle of palm wine would find his lips at this point. “This book was made on the order of Kamar yn Saban el Djenispool, the leader, the great human leader of all Calimshan, sometime … I don’t know, sometime back in those old days.”

  A book was a sort of box made of leather, and its contents the rustling stuff of dreams. Dreams, Cephas had long ago learned, could be captured with an elixir called ink and locked in prisons called pages. To set them free again, one had to know a sort of magic that the Calishites kept from Cephas, a discipline called reading.

  One night long ago, when Cephas was not even half the height he would grow to, around the time of his fiftieth escape attempt, Azad read aloud a story called “The Chain That Set Bashan Reaver Free.” It told of a human slave who learned to slip his iron collar at night, and who discovered that the very chains that bound him could be used as weapons in his desperate quest for freedom. In the tale, the slave Bashan became a desert raider with thirty wives to do his bidding, and a thousand camels.

  Then Azad brought out a double-headed flail-this double-headed flail-and held it high above his head. “Do you remember this, Brothers?” he asked. “Do you remember the chain I used to wear; the chain I used to set us free?”

  Everyone in the stands, even Cephas, awkwardly crouched on his high-soled clogs, had cheered. Cephas, though, had been cheering for Bashan Reaver, not for Azad.

  Now the master of games lifted his hand from the weapon and walked over to another wooden stand. This one swiveled so that the object it held was concealed from view until Azad slowly rotated it toward Cephas. It held the Book of Founding Stories. For a moment, Cephas thought Azad really was going to read aloud, probably a story meant to teach him a lesson about the futility of escape, but the young man didn’t mind. He had yet to hear a story from the book that he did not learn something valuable from, even if what he learned was not what the story-or its reader-meant to teach.

  “Yes, I thought I would read you a story,” said Azad, opening the book. “But which one? Which one could teach the lesson that I mean to impart?” Azad was among the oldest of the Calishites, perhaps even as old as Grinta the Pike, but he was heavil
y muscled, with the build of a brawler. Still, his thick fingers managed the delicate act of turning pages nimbly.

  “And then I realized the time for lessons is past. You have ignored so many, after all. No, now is the time for punishment.”

  Cephas tensed, but Shaneerah had not moved from her relaxed stance. In fact, there was a glint of amusement in her eye.

  “So now is when I tell you, Cephas,” finished Azad, “that you will never see this book, or hear any of its stories, again.”

  Chapter Three

  The claims of the elf sages may be disregarded,

  as they are born of vanity and fancy.

  The dwarves depend on legends, not scholarship.

  History is clear. The djinn invented war.

  — Akabar ibn Hrellam, Empires of the Shining Sands, vol. IV, Printed and Bound at Keltar 960 DR

  For all his faults, and he was more than willing to admit they were many, the freedman Talid was no fool. He knew what his fellow former slaves thought of him. He knew, too, that the only time he was ever assigned guard duty on the downland bridge was when Azad and Shaneerah judged that there was no threat from that direction. Other than a few hapless wildcat miners scratching in unpromising places, the western mountains were empty.

  That suited Talid just fine. He regretted he wouldn’t be able to liberate any whiskey from the kitchens during the night’s matches, but he knew he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of actually watching the downslope trail, either. Talid usually managed to get a great deal of rest on guard duty.

  He was not yet fully asleep when the rumbling sound came from behind him, and a wave of cool, moisture-laden air flowed over the canyon rim. Talid turned just in time to see a boulder that had sat immobile by the trail since the Calishites had arrived, a boulder under which he had been shaded on more than one occasion, fall back to the ground with a heavy thud, as if it had hovered in the air before he turned around.

  The bandit quickly forgot any questions about levitating boulders when he spotted the three figures standing before him. Talid had seen dwarves many times, of course. The savage clans on the jungle islands south of Calimport were a favorite source of new talent for the genasi who had owned him. And these mountains were home to their own variety of the squat, muscle-bound little men. Once or twice a year one would show up on the canvas, usually lasting longer than most humans.