Sandstorm

Chapter Eleven

The Year of Ocean’s Wrath (1212 DR)

Cephas sat, legs crossed, at the center of a glade of towering trees. The closely trimmed lawn he rested on was on the opposite side of the great circular garden from the cluster of tents.

Ariella faced him, her legs also crossed. Their knees had to touch because, she said, they must be close enough to join hands. Before they found this secluded spot, she returned to her tent and changed into the same loose-fitting clothes Cephas wore, though she still had her sword. The weapon lay to one side, its tooled scabbard and belt draped over the satchels holding Cephas’s piecemeal armor and double flail.

She told him to sit quietly and seek a place of peace within himself that matched the peace without. He looked around, and said, “I have not seen trees like these before, though there were only a few different kinds on the highland plains in Tethyr. There were none at all in the canyon, or on the Spires of Mir.”

Ariella angled her head up at the rugged bark and silver-backed brown leaves in the canopy high overhead. “They’re weirwoods, I think, though I’ve never seen one, either. Said to be rare. But perhaps one of the spires we saw in Argentor was once of a kind with these, before they all changed to stone. Do you find talking about trees brings you to a peaceful state, Cephas?”

He grinned. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked about trees at all. Unless Grinta the Pike’s advice on the killing of treants counts, though her technique is not peaceful.”

When Ariella laughed, he remembered that her voice had reminded him of bells the first time he heard it-bells on a weapon harness. Perhaps I don’t know what an inner place of peace is, he thought.

“You told me you knew thirty-one ways to block a morning star,” she said. “My own fighting style is less formalized than the ways you were taught, I think. But I wonder if any of those ways is a block of the returning swing. Did you ever fall before a blow, then strike while you opponent was extended, so you needed to defend only against the weaker backhand strike?”

Cephas answered, “The Fluttering Leaf style. I’m no master of it, but I know it. It is better suited for …” He stumbled, not wanting to offend her. “For more delicate fighters than I.”

She arched an eyebrow. “By which you mean weaker. I am not as strong as you, Cephas Earthsouled, but strength does not win every battle.”

Cephas pictured bullheaded axemen and spinning silver blades. “I know. I’ve seen Shan and Cynda fight,” he said.

“Just so. Though I would not look to them to learn peace of mind. The Fluttering Leaf, now, when a practitioner of that art accepts the opening strike, what does he do?”

A thousand days of drills came to mind. “Well, nothing. The blow falls, and you fall before it. You hold no stance; you raise no warding shield. It passes over you.”

“You need to take every thought that comes to you and fall before it. Anything that rises up, let it pass by. Even the energy you call the earth-force. Let that flow away. To achieve a Second Soul, a windsoul, you must empty the one you already possess.”

Cephas tried. The first thing he realized was that trying to think of nothing yielded the opposite of the desired effect. A floodgate of memories, worries, idle thoughts, and unfocused observations was opened by his effort. Her voice sounded like bells.

“I grow more peaceful inside when you’re talking, Ariella.”

She smiled. “I will tell you, then,” she said, “that I myself express no other soul than the wind. I have never felt a need to listen for anything other than its call.”

Cephas said, “But you think you can teach me this trick?”

“It is not a trick, Cephas. It’s a discipline, like your gladiatorial fighting styles or my sword spells. I can show you how to open yourself to the wind, because I have heard the wind in you.”

Cephas found that other thoughts ceased to press on him.

“Those genasi who take on more than one soul are one of the great proofs that we are all one people, despite the differences in our abilities and appearances,” she said.

“There are others? Other ‘great proofs,’ I mean?”

Ariella said, “The Firestorm Cabal actually makes one positive contribution. They have kept genealogical records that span centuries and track lineages across different worlds. They don’t publicize this, but their cabal was founded here, in the South. The genasi who first drew swords in the Second Era of Skyfire were Firestormers. They brought their records north and joined them with the annals of my people, and found that the clans and families are related in deep time. Their work is related to the third great proof.”

“What is that?” Cephas asked.

Surprising him, she blushed. Her silver cheeks turned the same blue iron shade that colored her crystal hair. “Genasi, no matter which soul they express”-she cleared her throat-“breed true.”

Cephas found he was at the edge of his experience. “Oh.”

She laughed. “The Cabalists believe the great clans of earthsouled and stormsouled and all the others should keep their lineages apart. They use words such as ‘pure’ and ‘inviolate.’ When couples of different expressions, well, have children together, for instance, the Firestormers say they’ve blurred the szuldar.”

Cephas asked, “This is widely believed?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to say. There are many who find the idea repellant, this programmatic separation of the expressions. I know I do. And my parents. My father is watersouled, and my mother most often expresses as fire.”

“Yet you are windsouled?”

Again came the laughter like bells. “My mother was born windsouled but found the fire suited her better. She is a famous chef in our city. My father has always been watersouled, as has one of my brothers. He followed Father into the Waveriders, the Akanulan navy.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” said Cephas.

“I have two. The Waverider is the eldest. My younger brother is windsouled, and says he will join the Airsteppers’ Guild like me. I think he’ll change his mind once he learns it’s something more than an adult version of the races he and his friends run among the skymotes.”

“The motes of Airspur host better games than Jazeerijah, then,” Cephas said.

She looked at him. “It’s when you talk about that place that I hear the wind in you the loudest.”

Cephas despaired of finding the peace of mind she described. “How did your mother learn the firesoul?” he asked. “You said she was not born with that expression.”

Ariella blushed again, even deeper this time. “Mother’s story …” she said, hesitating. In the short time Cephas had known Ariella, he had never seen her hesitate. “It has to do with a man she knew before my father. She says it involved ‘certain fiery circumstances.’ ”

Cephas pursed his lips. He did not quite know why that caused Ariella to blush and hesitate, but it gave him an idea.

“Well,” he said, gazing up at the trees, “perhaps what we need is something related to the powers the windsoul grants. If I learn to fly, we could seek ‘certain heightened circumstances.’ Though I don’t know what those could be.”

He felt her hand on his chest and thought of lightning.

“I know something we could try,” she said.

A time passed that was as endless as the span of a heartbeat.

After, he felt weightless. Ariella was in his arms, her limbs wrapped around him. She was no burden, though. She did not bear him down, but up.

Eventually, he opened his eyes and dared to look at her. After the first giddy moments when they untangled each other from their clothes, she had filled up every sense. But still, he suspected that he would never see enough of her, never hear her enough, never feel her strong arms clasped behind his neck enough.

She was watching him with a smile on her face that was gentle and mischievous both. He twined his fingers in hers and drew her hand to his lips. The silver tones of their skin matched perfectly. Silver tones?

He looked at her again. She raised her eyebrows, then glanced down. “Maybe we should put our clothes on and go introduce you to the others.”

He started to ask what she meant, but his voice failed him when he saw their clothes strewn across the glade, far below where they hung, clinging to each other while slowly rotating in midair.

She kissed him. “Welcome,” she said, “Cephas Windsouled.”

The WeavePasha’s scrying room had no doors and no windows, and he could count on the ringed fingers of one hand the number of people aware of the chamber’s location: himself, a regrettably deceased apprentice, and the eldest of his grandchildren, the powerful sorceress who served as his chief vizar.

So he was confident that he was alone and unobserved as he took a cross-legged seat in midair before one of the room’s many untidy workbenches. He swept aside various instruments of minor magic, but he took more care in setting aside a tray of crystal fragments, the clay handle and spout of an inert lamp, and numerous scrolls half covered in his own spidery handwriting. Finally, he found his favored scrying device, a mundane brass-backed mirror of questionable taste and little monetary value.

He could use this mirror-he had used it-to spy out the secrets of the most powerful beings in Faerun. Now he breathed magic onto the scratched silver surface of the mirror and whispered syllables of power. “Where are you, Corvus?” he asked.

“Right here, Your Grace,” said the kenku from behind him.

The WeavePasha did not turn around. Instead, he found a pen, dipped it in a pool of gelid ink spreading from an overturned pot, and made a note to himself on the closest scroll. Self, dead apprentice, granddaughter, and kenku, he wrote. Aloud, he said, “Do you know, Corvus, that I believe you’re a sort of lodestone for hubris in the mighty? Where intemperate pride is at its greatest, well, there you are. Or rather, here you are.”

“An interesting theory, WeavePasha, but I have never been to Waterdeep.”

There was an unusual strained tone in the kenku’s mellifluous voice, and the WeavePasha turned, asking, “How about Calimport?”

He saw that Corvus bled freely down one leg, leaning on the grim-faced halfling adept, Shan. The spymaster said, “No need, Your Grace. Calimport has come to me.”

Cynda gave the kitchener’s apprentice a disapproving look and swung a sloshing pail back up onto the cart, using one knee to buck the heavy container over the sideboard.

“Please, mistress,” the disheartened boy said. “That is very valuable wine, a vintage of your own kin in the Purple Hills. The cost of what you spilled there would pay my wages for a year.”

Tobin reassured the apprentice. “It would have all been gone if we took it to Trill, now wouldn’t it? The WeavePasha is too generous. This brace of sheep is more than enough, and more like the simple fare she is used to. Though we are grateful for it all, to be sure.”

The boy still looked doubtful. “The mutton is no simple fare, sir. The spices and herbs the chef used in their preparation are very fine. Their flavors guided my choice of wine. Are you sure the dragon would not like just two or three of these casks?”

Cynda gave him a firm shake of her head. She spelled out a word in the sisters’ fingertalk.

“Nonthal?” said Tobin aloud. “That is a town-”

“In Turmish, yes!” the apprentice said. “They have a wonderful varietal of ruby that would go very nicely with the mutton. Is that the problem? I have plenty of it laid in.”

But Tobin recalled why Cynda had thought of the town. “Young fellow,” he said, “I am sure you are right about the wines. But you are wrong about Trill. She is a wyvern, not a dragon. And should you ever find yourself in Nonthal, there are many there who can explain why wyverns should never be given wine.”

With that, Cynda completed her culling of Trill’s midday meal and indicated that Tobin should shoulder the pair of dressed and roasted whole sheep.

Tobin could never have found his way back to the straw-filled fountain where Mattias waited with the impatient Trill, but Cynda did not hesitate as they walked the branching paths of the artificial woodland. He told this to Cynda, and she smiled, acknowledging his compliment, but also tapped her ears and pointed to his.

Tobin said, “Well, yes, I suppose that I would not have been lost forever. She does make quite a racket when she’s waiting for her food, doesn’t she? And, of course, if I took too long, she would have come to find me.”

A voice said, “You’ll not be easily found where you’re going, goliath.” Another voice sounded at the same time, muttering words beneath the first.

Tobin was counted fast among goliaths, but Cynda was counted fast among the swiftest fighters of the South. By the time he dropped the sheep and brought up his huge fists, she had launched four silvered darts and leaped into a tumbling charge after them.

The darts struck a transparent barrier, which flashed red long enough for Tobin to see its domed shape and realize that he and Cynda were trapped. Cynda stopped her headlong spring just short of the invisible wall, crouching low, next to where her darts lay in the gravel. A smell of sulfur filled the air, paired with a thin line of smoke trailing from the spot where the four darts had struck.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” said the firesouled Akanulan Flamburnt, who stood beside his fellow Firestormer. “There must be something unusual about those darts. No matter, they did not get through.” He paused and glared up at Lavacre, who stared at the wisp of smoke and absently rubbed his throat. When Flamburnt struck him in the side, he remembered himself and hastily muttered in the language of fire.

Cynda ignored both men. She took up a handful of gravel and tossed one stone at a time against the barrier, working her way around Tobin. She held her short sword drawn in one hand.

“Testing the strength of my spell, halfling?” Flamburnt asked. “Finding the limits of your cell? Don’t worry, you won’t be in there much longer.”

Tobin asked, “What are you doing, Flamburnt? We are guests of the same host. We have not raised our hands against you.”

Cynda suddenly leaped back against Tobin’s legs, holding her sword before her. She kicked up more gravel, and Tobin saw that it now fell much closer to them than it had just a moment before. Already, Cynda’s darts lay outside the shrinking barrier.

“It looks as though the magic Shahrokh gifted me will not last long, clown,” said Flamburnt. “If your friends are wise, they will forget you. But since you have all bound yourself to Ariella, then they are all certainly fools. They will seek to rescue you. This, as the djinn say, is known.

“And since there is the barest possibility that you will see the windsouled bitch again before you die, I bid you tell her this. We may be among the lowest ranked at the Motherhouse of the Firestorm Cabal in Akanul. But we are ranked among the highest at the Sacred Hunter’s Lodge in Memnon.”

Tobin began to reply but found he could not draw breath to speak. There was no more air in the shrinking dome, as the interior whirled with black and red waves of fiery magic. He crouched, bent over Cynda, and pulled her close.

And then he knew no more.

The WeavePasha used tongs to pull out the filthy rags the kenku had stuffed into the wound on his thigh, laying them in a tray to one side. The tray had held a collection of glowing rings a moment before, but the wizard had casually spilled them onto the floor when he cleared the table where Corvus lay.

The old man sniffed. “Is that … orvas? Gods above, Corvus, you have to stop reading old books. I have forbidden even the ingredients of this vile concoction from the city, so I know it came from your blade, not this trash you used for bandages.”

Corvus hissed in pain when the WeavePasha plucked a bloodstained feather from his leg. “It affects only mammals, Your Grace,” he said. “The more common blade oils are less finely formulated. And I would lie here poisoned by my own sword but for my old books and their secrets.”

The WeavePasha took a clay vial from a rack, removed its cork stopper, and peered at the contents. A doubtful expression crossed his features before he shrugged and turned the vial upside down over Corvus’s leg. Yellow steam boiled from the wound, and Corvus would have fallen from the table as he convulsed had Shan not rushed to hold him.

“Whatever poison was borne in the mud and garbage of the alley has sickened you well enough. That tincture will boil it out of your blood, though.”

Corvus snapped his beak open and closed several times. “The choice was between possible infection and certain blood loss. I judged that Shan would find her way over the wall in time to deal with the first, but not the second. And as I was blinded by the djinni’s spells, I could not see what I was using to staunch the flow.”

The WeavePasha frowned. “Yes, that’s the most troubling aspect of this business. He spoke the truth about only being present by semblance. If a magician of his power had appeared in Almraiven, I would not have been the only one to sense it. As I should have sensed his spellwork this close to the palace. The djinni is digging deep in his stores of knowledge and making use of ancient items of power. He has to be. The question is why. If they’ve discovered my plans for Cephas, there was no need for such a display.”

Shan passed her dancing fingers before Corvus’s eyes. “Your Grace,” he said, “Shan asks about the vizar’s threat concerning a goliath and a halfling.”

The WeavePasha waved dismissively. “I would know if any dislocative sorceries were attempted against my defenses. Be at ease, adept. My wards are not so easily defeated coming in as you found them to be going out.”

If Shan was embarrassed by the WeavePasha’s chiding, she did not show it in her expression, which remained worried despite his assurances.

Corvus sat up on the table, steadied himself, then hopped down to the stone floor. He bent his right leg a bit farther than his left on landing, but there was no other sign of his recent wound. “Still, perhaps it would be best if we check on our friends. It seems that we will be in Almraiven longer than we had intended, now that you must abandon your plans for Cephas.”

The WeavePasha narrowed his eyes. “I have no such intention. The windsouled woman has just now finished the task I chose her for, and through a means I had not anticipated.” He smiled. “Remarkable woman.”

“I wondered what her role was in your game,” said Corvus. “But even so, Shahrokh is aware of the gambit. It makes no difference that Cephas has gained a Second Soul that will see him welcomed by his father. You cannot hide a death spell in him, because the djinn know it will be there.”

Shan stood very quietly, watching each man in turn.

“The djinn will look for it,” the WeavePasha said. “They will not find it, and their pride will allow them to announce the return of Marod yn Marod and parade him before the windsouled nobility of Calimport. The plan-which you devised, I will remind you-remains sound. I will enact the ritual tonight.”

Corvus shook his head. “You know I bow to no one in my respect for you and your abilities. But I fear that it is you who are blinded by pride, not the djinn. Your powers are legend, but as you yourself said, Shahrokh is expending enormous magical capital. What if they detect your sorceries inside Cephas?”

The WeavePasha waved aside the protest. “That was always an acceptable risk.”

Corvus eyed the wizard up and down. “You remain true to yourself, old friend,” he said eventually. “My first judgment of you stands. You will do anything for this city.”

The old man looked sharply at the assassin. “And my first judgment of you stands. You are here, and alive. The genasi is below, expressing his mother’s shameful secret no more, and alive. These things are true, Corvus, because you will do anything at all.”

“Enough,” whispered Mattias.

Trill understood his tone better than his words, as always. She ceased the prattling and complaining she’d voiced as they ambled along the path. She stretched her neck out long and low, balancing it with the lashing spike of her tail. She held her wings close, unlike a wyvern in the wild when faced with fight or flight. Mattias was on the ground, and she would take no action without first seeing him safe on her back.

The ranger saw the silver glint from three hundred paces away. Alone, he would have made a cautious approach, secreting himself in the trees and stealing closer, silent as a ghost. Trill’s presence precluded stealth, though it presented other advantages.

One hundred paces away, Trill’s nostrils flared and she fluttered her vestigial lips. “Yes,” he said. “Fire magic, but coupled with air. Anything is possible here, girl, but el Jhotos usually confines such experimental dabbling to his workrooms.”

Fifty paces from the reflection, Mattias saw what the afternoon sunlight sparkled on. Trill sensed his alarm and surged forward, the keen of a clutching wyvern separated from her fledglings rising in her throat.

“Wait!” he told her. “Stand watch. I must glean what I can from the ground here before we hunt.”

Trill answered with a quizzical chirp.

“Oh, yes,” he said, already calculating how long it would take him to find the others. Already he was wondering if he had seen the last of Corvus Nightfeather, or if the kenku would be at his side when he shook the dust of these gardens from his boots.

“Oh, yes,” he assured her. “We will hunt.”

In a way, the WeavePasha was glad to learn he could still be surprised. Whatever signal passed between the kenku and the halfling, he saw no sign of it. He only saw the woman raise her hands, and his first thought was that the control the Arvoreeni adepts were said to hold over their own bodies must be even greater than was rumored, because while no magic flared in the chamber, her closed fists sprouted a forest of silver talons.

Ah, darts, of course, he thought, as she flicked her wrists. Missiles flew in every direction. The woman even had the temerity to launch one at him, though he sent that one flying wide with a thought. Many of the others, however, found targets.

She had to have chosen at random. He himself did not know the contents of all the bottles and jars on the cluttered workroom tables, and had cataloged only the smallest fraction of the artifacts brought to him from around the world. And as mirrors crashed and vials exploded, his concern was not great. A conflagration born of the untidy release of many disparate magics was a heartbeat away, but there were contingencies for such mixed into the mortar of the room’s walls, and his personal protections could stand against a god.

The woman was not intent on testing those. She drew a short sword that came near to dazzling the WeavePasha’s magic-sensitive vision, matched the draw with a parrying blade in her left hand, and leaped-not at him, but at Corvus.

The kenku’s unreadable black eyes, the WeavePasha found, had not shifted their gaze from his own when the halfling launched her insane attack. The only movement the assassin made was a light cock of his head, as if puzzling over something. Then he was lost in the shadows that swirled around him, and the charging woman became lost in them as well, as they both faded from view.

A vast explosion wracked the chamber. The WeavePasha felt the warp of reality buckle, and he cursed. He would have to take a moment to see that the mystic energies boiling around him did not entice some otherworldly threat to descend on the city, which bought the kenku a little time.

Summoning his power, the WeavePasha wondered at the kenku’s luck in managing this distraction. Then he chuckled, remembering that Corvus Nightfeather never relied on luck.

“Contingencies, indeed,” he said, and went to his weaving.

As they made their way back to the tents, Cephas imagined that nothing would ever make him let go of Ariella’s hand, even though the clasp of their intertwined fingers was light. As it turned out, all it took was the strike of a wyvern, diving at speed from on high.

Trill closed her great claws around the windsouled pair, barely slowing before she beat on, gaining altitude and wheeling toward the fountain, which Cephas could see below. The impact of Trill’s gathering them up had knocked the breath from his lungs, but as soon as he could speak, he said, “Are you all right?”

Ariella nodded, dazed by the sudden, unexpected flight.

In his new body, Cephas was still heavily muscled, but not as broad of shoulder and hip as when he was earthsouled. He learned this when they dressed in the glade, and Ariella laughed at his baggy shirt and how he held his trousers up with a gather of cloth in one fist. Cephas made short work of adjusting the straps of the patchwork scale armor in his satchels, and was glad he wore it since Trill took less care with her grip of him than she did with Ariella. In fact, the wyvern seemed troubled by him.

They lurched to one side as Trill performed a wingover roll and ducked her snakelike neck down and in so that her enormous face studied Cephas briefly before she had to straighten to maintain their flight. In that instant, her tongue darted out and its tip struck Cephas full in the face, as solid as a blow from a quarterstaff. His head snapped back.

“Ah!” he cried, and would have brought his hands up to wipe the wyvern’s stinging spittle from his face, except his arms were pinned by her grip. “Why did she do that?”

“She’s confused by your new appearance!” called Ariella. “You are you but not you, so she had to check!”

“I hope none of the others use the same technique!” he said as Trill dropped them a few arm spans above the courtyard. Matching Ariella, Cephas found the wind in himself and floated down to the ground.

Their smiles died when they saw Mattias, coolly holding an arrow nocked and ready, his canes twisted into their form of a curving greatbow. The old ranger narrowed his eyes on seeing Cephas, but other than that, his only reaction was to say, “Of course. The elite of Calimport are windsouled, so Corvus and el Jhotos must have a windsouled.”

Before anything else could be said, a swirl of shadows twisted out of nowhere by the fountain, and Shan came rolling out. Like Mattias, she was fully armed and armored, blades bared like her teeth, casting about for an enemy. When she did not recognize Cephas, she charged, rejecting the twin’s usual flourished rolls and spins in favor of a full-on sprint, blades extended.

“No!” The cry came from two directions, Ariella at his side drawing her sword and Corvus behind Shan, holding out one hand.

“Shan, it’s me!” Cephas said. “It’s Cephas.” His tone was gentle, which sounded odd to his own ears. Ariella had told him that the changes in his body and abilities would be mirrored by changes in his mood and feelings.

Shan skidded to a stop, forgot his presence, and ran for the tent she shared with her sister the previous night. She stopped when Mattias called after her.

“She’s gone, Shan. So is Tobin.”

The kenku gestured for Cephas, Ariella, and Shan to approach. When they all stood together, he said, “I was attacked by a djinni skylord of Calimport. I know him to be the vizar to the pasha of games there, the man the WeavePasha believes is Cephas’s father. The djinni threatened to capture a halfling and a goliath from among my companions.”

“He’s done so,” said Mattias. “The firesouled Cabalists were his agents. They used magic far beyond what they should be able to wield, some combination of fire and air I have never seen. Cynda fought, but she and Tobin were taken. Where, I cannot say. The firesouled left by sorcery. El Jhotos had to have known they brought powerful items with them onto these grounds, Corvus.”

The kenku shook his head. “I don’t think so. Or if he did, I think their nature was disguised. Appearances deceive, functions change.” He looked at Cephas, taking in his silver skin and the short strings of crystal that served as hair where he was smooth-pated before.

“But it makes no difference,” he added. “The WeavePasha is no longer our ally and seeks to prevent us from mounting a rescue. Cephas, I have placed your life in danger, and I will offer explanations and apologies soon. For now, we have only enough time to attempt escape, and you must accept that as amends.”

Cephas did not know what to make of this swift change of circumstances, but something inside him welcomed it. He looked to Ariella, who gave him a curt nod.

“I can get out of the city on my own,” Corvus said. “Old man, can you and Trill win past whatever the WeavePasha sends against you?”

Mattias did not hesitate. “Yes. Shan can ride behind me. And Trill can carry Cephas and Ariella, at least for a time. That is, if the lady is accompanying us.”

“Even if I did not have other reasons,” Ariella said, “it is my duty to track down Lavacre and Flamburnt. If they acted at the direction of a Calimien djinni, as you say, then they acted for the enemies of my queen and stewards. The swordmages of Akanul are trained to deal with traitors.”

A long blast sounded from a brass horn atop one of the minarets of the palace. A hum rose in the air, and the tiny crystals in Cephas’s hair caught a vibration that churned his stomach.

“The WeavePasha comes!” said Corvus. “Mattias! The petrified delta of the Quag!” Shadows boiled around the kenku.

“He will know we flee in that direction!” shouted Mattias.

Corvus said, “But he dare not follow there,” and disappeared.

Mattias cursed and signaled Trill to lower her head. “But of course we dare go there. Shan! Where are you?”

The halfling came running from Ariella’s tent, a bundle strapped to her back.

Cephas kept a wary eye on Trill’s launch and approach after Shan leaped up behind Mattias, aiming to have some influence over where her claws closed around him this time. “I guess Shan thinks you’ll want your armor!” he called to Ariella as they were caught up again.

“I’m beginning to wonder if I should ever take it off around you!” she shouted, and then, despite the circumstances, when she saw his crestfallen expression, she laughed.

Many hours later, bells rang three times in the WeavePasha’s darkened inner chamber, indicating that his high vizar sought permission to enter.

He waved a hand and the woman, eldest of his grandchildren, materialized before him. She looked exhausted, and her boots and cloak were coated with dust. Before she spoke, he pointed at the decanter and crystal goblets on a nearby rosewood table. The vizar’s thanks were in her sigh, and she trudged across the room to pour a glass.

After she drained the wine in a single draft, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Mattias Farseer,” she said, “is a devil. And Corvus Nightfeather does not exist. At least, my mages can find no trace of him on this or any other plane of existence.”

The WeavePasha chuckled. “Mattias is a human man. One of tremendous talents and extraordinary dedication, perhaps, but I have begun to wonder if it isn’t unshakable fidelity that defines humanity. Or at least its heroes.”

The woman across from him had heard the WeavePasha say such things every day of her life, and she was approaching her one hundredth winter. “Your dedication to the city is unshakable, Grandfather,” she said. “His dedication is to a wild animal and a handful of criminals. It is you who are the hero.”

The WeavePasha heard the note of fanaticism in her voice and sighed, knowing he’d planted it there. He trusted she would grow out of it. They always did-all but him.

“Did he kill anyone?” he asked, and stood, deciding that he, too, wanted a drink.

“The ranger? No.” She hesitated. “Though in truth, he could have.” A different note came into her voice, and the WeavePasha refilled her glass before pouring a half measure of ruby wine into his own. “In truth, Grandfather,” she said, “he could have killed me. The charms you sent with us dampened the enchantments of the bow, at least temporarily, but even after it was nothing but a length of heartwood casting mundane arrows … The reach of the thing. The speed he shot with. And he was prepared for the disenchantment. When the aetheric string failed, he pulled a length of gut from his beard-his beard! — and was shooting again instantly. That is a mighty bow you made, Grandfather.”

The WeavePasha inclined his head. “And yet,” he said, “when my magics were drained from it and its wielder faced the mightiest of my descendants, he still escaped.”

His granddaughter took a seat on a footstool, her shoulders slumping. “Yes. He and the halfling that rode behind him on the wyvern’s back. The genasi she carried dropped away in the scrubland along the coast, perhaps half a day’s ride west by horseback. I have sent out a company of the city guard, but …”

“But they will find nothing,” he said, gently finishing her sentence. “Because the windsouled will enter the Plain of Stone Spiders long before our horsemen arrive, and our commanders know they are forbidden to enter those lands.”

“Not that they would, anyway,” said his granddaughter. “Not that anyone sane would.”

“So you believe there will be deaths after all, eh?” he asked.

The woman shifted uncomfortably. “If they are fools enough to cross the old course of the River Quag, yes. But, my lord …”

“Ah,” he said. “We come to Corvus.”

“There were no deaths among those of us who flew in pursuit of the wyvern.” She saw his darkening features and rushed on. “And none of those who sought the kenku were harmed, either. But the summoners among them believed their spectral hounds had his scent near the docks and called up a chain of runespiral demons.”

“Within the city walls?” he demanded, anger in his voice. “The kin I set to guard against such things unleash them in my city?”

“In a district of empty warehouses, WeavePasha, in the Street of Stolen Stones. They judged the risk acceptable, and they never lost their grip on the leashes. The demons all converged on the same ruin, and … they all died, Grandfather. Six of them.”

The WeavePasha considered another glass of wine but decided against it. “A creditable effort,” he said dryly, “for a man you believe not to exist.”

She spread her hands. “I offer no apologies with these explanations, Grandfather. My daughter stands ready to relieve me as your high vizar.”

“Your daughter?” he asked. “You think I don’t feel old enough already?” He waved her closer and embraced her. “You performed well under circumstances I would have found challenging myself. The kenku threw the dice well-knowing what faces they would show when their tumbling stopped. He threw them on a table he believes I will not play at.”

“You believe them all to be gathering on the plain,” said the vizar. “You would go out and face them there yourself? I know you will send no others to that place.”

The WeavePasha sighed. “No, Granddaughter. I will not leave the city, as the kenku anticipated. Probably not ever again, unless the fleet your uncles build finds its ways to the waters we have dreamed of. No, Corvus Nightfeather has escaped, and he has taken a tool with him we might have used to keep the djinn occupied and away from our walls for quite some time. It might even have destroyed a few of the haughty bastards.”

The woman thought about this. “Grandfather,” she asked, “is this a tool that can be used against us? If your assassin takes the el Arhapan heir to Calimport, will he not one day be the leader of our enemies? From what you told me of the boy, he is far more formidable than his father.”

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.