Sandstorm

Chapter Twelve

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?”

Cephas asked, “The pasha of games has no wife?”

“By all accounts, Marod el Arhapan is a remarkably focused man. His passion is the arenas his family rebuilt after the departure of Calim. He has enormous political power, but rarely uses it unless he is made to by his vizar, the djinni Shahrokh. Otherwise, he is content to be the master of games. The only times he leaves his floating palace or the arenas are when he travels to the training camps he maintains in the deep desert. He is known to have married just one woman and to have fathered just one child. They both disappeared from Calimien society decades ago.”

“When Azad led his freedmen north?” asked Cephas. “Bringing me with them? What of this gamemaster’s wife?”

“His wife-your mother, Cephas-died in the Year of the Malachite Shadows, twenty years ago. Not long after giving birth to an earthsouled boy.”

“Which the el Arhapans could not countenance,” Mattias interjected. “Why did they allow Marod to marry an earthsouled woman in the first place?”

Cephas, not Corvus, answered. “Because they did not know,” he said. “She wore a Second Soul.”

Corvus nodded. “Marod could not have known.”

“Why did she keep it a secret?” asked Ariella. “She had to have known the child might reveal her.”

“The answer to the first question is rooted in Southern genasi society. Even before the return of the djinni lords, the el Arhapan windsouled were involved with the earliest incarnations of the Firestorm Cabal. In the South, the sect is even more radicalized than in Akanul. They preach division of the various souls, yes, but with the renewal of the war between Memnon and Calimport, the different chapter houses proposed ranks. The genasi must be divided by their forms, because one form is naturally superior to the others. Which form is held supreme depends on where a given chapter house was located. In Memnon and Teshburl, they teach that the firesouled are foremost. In Manshaka and Calimport-”

“The windsouled,” said Cephas, studying the backs of his silver hands. “That is two. What of storm and water? What of the earth?”

“As with anything else in the Emirates, the interference of the Plane Below compels. Air and fire hold sway because the djinni followers of Calim and the efreeti followers of Memnon hold enormous power over the genasi and any others living in the Skyfire lands. Of all the aspects of the genasi, earthsouled are ranked the lowest. At least, that is what the ruling windsouled and firesouled say. It’s one of the few things they agree on.”

“Are we slaves there?” asked Cephas.

“Yes, some earthsouled live as slaves. This is what Elder Lin believes to be your mother’s story. The matrilineal szuldar she traced on you belong to an obscure family of earthsouled who have been held in slavery in Calimport for generations. They are not even recorded by the Firestormers in Akanul, or by the High Heralds. Marod el Arhapan married a woman who did not escape slavery into the desert or onto the sea, then,” said Corvus. “She found a Second Soul, and sought escape through it.”

Cephas stared at the kenku. “What was my mother’s name?”

“I do not know. Not really. As the pasha’s wife, she was known as Valandra el Arhapan, without reference to her own family name. That’s not unusual when the windsouled nobility marry someone from a low-ranking family, and she would have used a false name in any case. The Argentori have abandoned the naming conventions of the Emirates, but Lin said the most common name among earthsouled of your lineage is el Shelsper.”

“Valandra el Shelsper,” said Cephas. “Marod el Arhapan. Do you know, I never spent any time at all imagining my parents? My daydreams were all versions of the stories in Azad’s book, with me taking the hero’s part. But if there are any stories in that book about parents and children, he never read them.”

“I know a little more, yet,” said Corvus, quietly. “I know the end of your mother’s story.”

They all watched the fire, though there was little light in it. Even its heat was faltering since Corvus had ceased to tend it.

Cephas said, “Tell it.”

Corvus said, “A tenday after you were born, Valandra el Arhapan’s name was struck from the genealogies of every Cabal chapter house. And, though I did not connect them at first, the name Valandra inh Yikaria was entered into another set of records.”

“ ‘Inh’?” asked Ariella. “I do not know that article. ‘El’ is of the family and ‘yi’ is of the place. ‘Adh’ is the slave of.”

“It is rarely used,” said Corvus. “And when it is, it is considered an insult. It means ‘sister of.’ ”

“Valandra, the sister of Yikaria?” asked Cephas. The word was so familiar …

“ ‘Sister of the Yikaria,’ I believe,” said Corvus. “As to who they are, you know them. Or have seen them. You fought them. It is the name El Pajabbar use for their own people.”

“What?” asked Cephas. “My mother’s name was listed with those of minotaurs?”

“No, Cephas,” Corvus replied. “She was listed with slaves bound for the arenas.”

“Oh, Cephas,” said Ariella.

“The day after you were born, your mother was turned into the pits below the Djen Arena. She was issued a pail and a cotton shift, and her face was branded with the Calimien slave mark. She survived there for ten days, until her name appeared on the card of gladiators and threw the wagering into disarray, because she was unknown and had drawn a famous opponent.

“She was handed a spear and driven onto the sand, and, before eighteen thousand spectators, she met the greatest gladiator of the era, and she died, Cephas. She died as the last opponent faced by Azad adh Arhapan.”

The prey moved about less than they had earlier, but the vibrations of their steps and sighs and endless prattle still carried along the stone strands. All the scouts felt it, and joined their minds together, then their minds with stone. They agreed. The prey was stuck, their position was fixed, and the fighters would come from the north.

Web and rock, thought the scouts, web and rock.

The demon sent its awareness through the stone strands, obliterating the personalities of all the plaguechanged aranea joined with it. The demon ignored the chaos this engendered in the ranks of his worshipers. The barely discernible individual personalities of the spiderfolk did not concern it, as long as their fighting prowess was unaffected.

The demon moved south over the plain, testing the limits of its leash. It had briefly imagined it was testing the limits of its freedom, but as soon as the concept came to its mind, the torment returned. The human woman was watching closely.

The demon did not consider the possibility of escape. It could not be said to be wise, but the demon was canny, and it knew any such attempt would find its physical body destroyed and its wretched soul sent spinning into the blackest pit in the universe. It had crawled out of that pit once already, and would not risk being cast down into it again.

The sorceress would never free it. She would not even reward it, as the demon doubted she possessed the depravity of imagination necessary to conceive something it would find rewarding. Except that she held the leash, the woman was a poor stand-in for the wizard who imprisoned it in the temple more than a century past. She was not even a pale shadow of the Qysars she claimed as ancestors.

The demon realized the woman might sense this direction in its thoughts, so shied away from them, fearing her psychic lash. But the lash did not fall.

A message coalesced out of the vibrations in the stoneweb. The shamans were joined in their awareness. They were the caste of aranea who believed the demon to be a god, and who had reshaped their warped and forgotten people when the land around them desiccated from nightmarish swamp to chthonic badland. The shamans pooled their thoughts from points scattered widely across the plain, where their naked bodies stretched across the ground, attuned to the tiniest trembles in the earth. They collectively decided on an action, then communicated their will to the vast, immobile eggmothers, who plucked the stoneweb and directed the hunters and scouts and fighters.

The demon felt a warning tug on its leash and turned its attention back to the wailing shamans.

The prey was stuck in the far southern reaches of the web, they told it. The scouts have fixed the particular junction of strands, and the fighters approach. Do they wait for its majestic and terrible coming?

The demon listened, waiting to see if the sorceress would offer direction. Nothing came, and it judged the distance to its prey to be such that it could drag its enormous body there in a moment or two-no farther than a human could walk in a day, certainly.

Send in the fighters, the demon told the shamans. The one that survived receiving the message passed it on.

A bolt of liquid stone shot out of the dark, enveloping Cephas’s head and shoulders and making it impossible for him to breathe. He dimly heard shouts and the rasp of steel clearing leather, then the screams of a wyvern intent on destruction.

A tremendous blow fell, shattering the net covering his face. He blinked rock from his eyes and looked up to see Mattias standing astride him, one of his canes held in both hands like a club.

“Keep your head down,” said the ranger. “We don’t know what they are, but these webs they cast are hard to clear off.”

He twisted his canes together, and the thin gold line of the bowstring shone in the dark. “Surprised the bastard didn’t have them disable it permanently,” Mattias muttered, then said, “Ariella was on watch at our right flank, beyond the balanced rock.”

Before they bedded down, after Corvus promised to explain the WeavePasha’s plot at first light, Cephas had made a long, careful check of his equipment. He turned the double flail over and over, wondering about its age and powers. About its provenance, and about the great value it held for Azad the Free. Corvus saw him and said, “I have no way of knowing, Cephas. He used a flail on the sands. Whether it was this one in particular …”

The kenku had not finished the thought, and now that Cephas heard the sounds of fighting out on the plain, he found that it did not matter. For now-for tonight, at least-the flail was just a tool he would use to help Ariella.

Mattias’s climbing of the rock was a hard thing to watch, but for all his awkwardness, the ranger made the top of the balanced tor quickly. The strength in his arms must be enormous, thought Cephas, as he trotted around the stone. As he went, he shouted over his shoulder. “Where are the others?”

A flaming arrow flew away from the rock. An explosion followed out in the dark, and inhuman screams of pain rose up.

“You will see Corvus and Shan only if you’re in trouble!” Mattias called. “Trill is on the wing. She’s in a testy mood.”

So am I, Cephas realized. It felt good to have implacable anger surging through him, energizing him. Did I become earthsouled again while I slept? he wondered.

But no, it was the wind-force gathering, and the heft of the double flail was different in his hands-not lighter, precisely, but suited for a more fluid style of sweeps and swings than the inexorable crushing blows he usually favored. He was going to fight differently, he sensed, but he was still going to fight.

An alien figure rose up from a cluster of boulders on his left, hefting a crude, stone-tipped spear and chattering from the mandibles that dominated the lower half of its face. Their attackers were like nothing out of a story, and like nothing from Grinta the Pike’s lengthy catalog of past and potential victims.

Cephas flexed his left arm, dropping the distal flailhead and bringing the proximal around high and hard. The spiked steel sphere struck the creature in the face, rupturing one of its enormous faceted eyes. It fell without casting its spear, the eerie chattering dying with the thing that sounded it.

“Another one!” Ariella shouted. “Behind you!”

Even as he turned, her glowing blue sword whipped out of her hand and swung in a wide arc around him, leaving a trailing wake of golden sparks that floated to the ground, guarding the two windsouled in a circle lit by magic. The blade cut through the spear arm of one of the creatures, but another ducked back, only to stop still and sink to the ground with white bile pouring from its mouth. Cephas caught the briefest hint of shadowy movement behind the thing and knew Corvus was near.

Very near, in fact. When Cephas turned to face Ariella, the kenku stood between them.

“Imaginative namers of places, Calishites,” Corvus said. “Plain of Stone Spiders, indeed.” A rushing wind above their heads caused them to instinctively duck, and when they straightened, the motionless silhouettes of three more of the spiderfolk plummeted to the ground, killed and dropped by Trill.

No other threats were apparent nearby, though the steady song of Mattias’s bow did not diminish. Every note his weapon sounded was followed by an answering scream or percussive shock.

“Shan saw another group of them circling around to the south and went to meet them,” said Corvus.

“This seems an ill-considered attack,” said Cephas. “Unless it is a probe of our strength.”

Corvus cursed, and Ariella looked grim.

“Of course,” said the kenku. “Something else is coming.”

Cephas nodded sharply. “Then we should gather together and guard against it,” he said. He turned toward the camp. “Perhaps where Mattias stands and shoots.”

Corvus said, “If it is where Mattias chose to stand, then it is the strongest place on the field.”

“Ariella can carry you up,” said Cephas. “I will find Shan.”

“I have my own means of getting there,” Corvus said. The last word floated out of the shadows, and Cephas had no doubt the kenku stood beside Mattias in an instant.

“He said she was to the south,” Cephas said to Ariella. “Come on!”

Weapons at the ready, the pair of windsouled ran, curving wide of the camp in case more spiderfolk were drawn there. When they came to a wash or a sinkhole, they took to the air, and it was when they were floating down from such a leap that they found a clutch of dead spiderfolk, five or six in all.

Shan stepped out of the dark, breathing hard, her arms coated to the elbow in gore. She did not greet them, but stepped past them to the fallen creatures. She bent and retrieved dart after silvered dart from the corpses.

“Shan,” said Ariella, “we’re to join Mattias above the camp. Corvus fears-”

The halfling woman held up one hand, cutting the swordmage short. She brought her fingers to her lips, signaling silence. She looked north, and it was then that Cephas and Ariella heard the sound-heard and felt it.

Tremendous crashes sounded, growing louder, above something else, a sound almost like the sea in its liquid swell and fall, but thicker, contained.

“It’s like a giant dragging a wineskin over gravel,” Ariella said.

Cephas said, “If the giant has many legs.”

“Come, Shan!” said Ariella, and the halfling leaped onto the swordmage’s back. The windsouled pair ran for a moment, and then they flew.

At the direction of Mattias, even Trill came down from her hunt, awkwardly wrapping her long body around the rock so that the companions watched the thing that approached over a parapet of scale and muscle.

“I don’t understand,” said Cephas. “I see it, yet I cannot say what it is I see.”

“Foul magic,” said Ariella. “It is a nexus of fear and hate.” She rubbed her hand across her upper lip, the scant light making the blood flowing from her nose appear black against her silver skin.

The thing dwarfed the rock where they stood. Cephas wondered if it might even be as large as Jazeerijah. The milky white sac it dragged behind its countless grasping legs had something of the shape of the earthmote. The massive, distended body was bulbous near its front, then tapered to a spiked protuberance that left a trail of slime stretching over the northern horizon, glowing with heat or sorcery.

The impossible creature was still beyond the farthest range of even Mattias’s bow, but for all that its movements were a kinetic chaos, with the bulk of its body dragging over uneven ground and its tree-trunk legs clattering and pulling a half-dozen different directions, it approached with the speed of a galloping horse.

“It is a demon,” said Corvus. “An abomination of the Abyss and a stain on the fabric of the world. Oh, Acham el Jhotos, I never dreamed you would go so far.”

“Hmmm,” said Mattias, and he said it with such calm, that the others dragged their gazes from the nightmare on the plain to look at him. “Do you know, Corvus, that now that it’s come right down to it, I think you’re slandering the old tyrant? I doubt it’s his hand that guides that thing. Ah. It hardly matters.”

Corvus said, “But perhaps it does. If I can reach the WeavePasha, he might-”

“Swordmage,” said Mattias, interrupting Corvus’s rush of words. “What does your magic tell you? Can you send your thoughts as far as the edge of this rock? Can you even feel your own power within that thing’s aura?”

“No, Mattias,” she said.

“Of course you can’t,” he answered. “I can’t even tell what time of night it is, and I’m about as sensitive as a turnip. Corvus, you’re a hobbyist with a very impressive collection of toys built by your betters. But the only tools you have right now are your shadows and your blade. And against that thing, they’ll avail you as well as … well, as turnips.”

“So we stand here and die?” Cephas asked. Trill constricted her body, struggling to wrap them in her coiled torso and sheltering wings.

“Not at all,” said Mattias. “The plan is unchanged. Corvus will finally tell the whole truth about something. The djinn of Calimport will find you in the desert and sneer elaborately. Shan”-he turned, crouched, and looked the woman directly in the eye-“Shan will find Cynda, and the blood of those who hold her will make a warning sign, a ward that keeps the wise away so that they will sing of Shan’s descending on them for a hundred years.”

The old man winked at Cephas. “Didn’t know I liked stories, too, did you?”

Corvus stopped him. “What is this? What are you saying?”

Mattias pulled a quiver from his back and drew the first of its score of arrows. He stuck its point down in a crack that ran by his feet, then set another there, and another. He set out more and more of the black-fletched shafts as he spoke.

“I am doing what I’ve always intended, Corvus,” he said. “I am offering up my own secret at last. I am telling you why I have stayed by your side, through blood and darkness, tempering what I could and mourning what I could not. Telling you why I’ve made this journey of-gods, has it been forty years?”

Corvus waved his hand impatiently. “Shan,” he said, “climb down to the camp and gather all the food and water you can carry. Ariella, you remember the way to the coast? Go ahead, scout a route around any spiderfolk who still live. The dhow I piloted must have washed ashore on the tide, and with luck-”

“With all the luck in the world, with the goddess Tymora flying down to kiss your lipless mouth, we would make it the length of a drunkard’s song,” said Mattias. Anger flooded his voice. “Corvus Nightfeather! Death and doom approach, and they will not be stayed by your schemes! Our enemies have unbarred the gates of hell and set a hunter against us who will never pause, except for blood!

“But you can save these people. You can save yourself. I will do what I have always intended.”

“What are you talking about, Mattias?” asked the kenku. “What are you going to do?”

Cephas heard notes in Corvus’s voice he never imagined he would. He heard pain. He heard bewilderment, and grief.

“Ah, there it is, finally,” said Mattias, and he must have been talking about the demon, because he plucked an arrow from the ground, drew it to his cheek, and released. A tremendous explosion sounded in the night.

He turned, one last time, to Corvus.

“I am going to ensure your escape.”

Trill did not protest.

This shocked Cephas as much as anything else. Mattias paused in his shooting just long enough to put his hand on the wyvern’s head and say, “Take our friends as far as you can, girl, then flee north. Find others of your kind in the mountains. Stay far from the settlements of men and elves. You are free.”

The wyvern relaxed her grip on the balanced tor and fell away. The sound of her wings rose up from below, then was lost in another devastating release of magic from one of the ranger’s arrows. At the last instant, Shan leaped after Trill, darting past Mattias so that her shoulder brushed against his blurring hand. When the wyvern wheeled around with open claws, the halfling’s face was visible between her wings, white against the boiling clouds of black on the plain behind them.

Cephas and Ariella did not get to say good-bye before they were swept up.

“The kenku!” called Ariella.

Cephas looked down. The spider demon seemed to grow ever larger even as they retreated, but Mattias and Corvus were small figures on the distant rock. Corvus was leaning close to the ranger, as if he were saying something. Shadows rose and Trill dipped in her flight.

“He is above now, with Shan,” Cephas said.

The sounds of the ranger’s arrows were a long time in the fading, and were still discernible when Trill dived and deposited the four companions on the western bank of another petrified river. She did not pause after the halfling and the kenku slid from her saddle, even though Cephas approached with the intent of cutting her harness clear. The wyvern leaped back into the air, dipped her wing in something that might have been parting, and flew away, back to the east.

“She is ignoring Mattias’s wishes,” said Cephas. “She is going back to fight with him.”

Corvus shouldered his pack and started walking away from the river. “She is going back to die with him.”

Shan scrambled after Corvus, but Ariella and Cephas stood for a moment, torn between listening to the sounds of battle behind them and trekking after the kenku.

“Is that what he told you on the rock?” Cephas called.

“No more words passed between us than what you heard,” Corvus replied. “Now come on. These are the banks of the old Volomir River, still short of the desert. But we can be there by dawn.”

Another blast, the loudest yet, sounded behind them. Cephas imagined he heard Trill’s battle cry in it.

They walked through the dark, the way clear beneath bright stars. For a long time, none of them spoke.

When Corvus broke the silence, it was clear to the others that they should not respond.

“Well, he was a fool, of course,” said the kenku. “He spent his whole life making the wrong decision every time he was presented with a choice.

“He might have been a scholar, if you can imagine that. For all that he was raised among woodsfolk who valued tracking more highly than reading, he had a sharp mind and his family valued it, at least enough to send him to schools in the Silver Marches towns during the winters. He always went back when the thaws came, though. Always back to the forests.

“So, he decided to become another anonymous ranger. The North is full of them. But it turned out-and I suppose this is something that might have proven valuable if he had actually followed through-it turned out that Mattias Farseer was destined to be the greatest archer the world has ever seen.

“You think you have seen him shoot? In Berdusk, they sing a song about the flight of a single arrow he loosed when he was nineteen years old.

“But he was a fool, as I said, and chose a lesser path.

“These northland rangers, you see, in the main they train as swordsmen or archers, but some among them set those ways aside in favor of the companionship of animals, can you believe it? Even Mattias wasn’t fool enough to hold such an intention, but, that shot out of legend? The one from the song? He felled a striking wyvern from a thousand paces away. The beast was feeding off a village’s sheep herd and they hired him to save their spring lambs.

“He took less gold than he deserved and headed home. On the way, he heard a cry in the forest. There was a nest, and a single fledgling wyvern. When she saw him, she attacked. No larger than a dog, but she was all claws and teeth. He could have shot her dead, of course, but remember this is a story about a fool. She ripped open his belly and shattered his hips, and he never even drew his dagger.

“And they both lived, somehow. He sewed up his own guts and survived the fire in the blood that comes with that kind of wound. He brought her a roebuck to feed on when he finally managed to take one down. His aim was off, because of the fever, I suppose, or the deer could hear him dragging himself through the woods.

“But they both lived. And after they could travel, they found that they had to move farther and farther south. Farther and farther away from civilized people who wanted nothing to do with a wyvern. Farther from woodlands that had no place for a crippled ranger.

“And do you know, that even after all that, he managed to do something even more foolish? Do you know what he did?

“He joined the circus.”

In her workroom, Munaa yr Oma el Jhotos, High Vizar of Almraiven, collapsed onto a couch. Drawing in the demon’s leash had proven far more difficult than she anticipated.

She held no illusions about her own powers. She might be counted among the mighty in a city famous for its mages, but the making of the leash was far beyond her. It had been very nearly outside her ability to hold it.

But the demon was once again imprisoned in the apostoleum beneath the plain. Her grandfather’s bindings were woven anew. She was confident they would hold.

She considered whether the risk had been worth the taking. The el Jhotos heir had escaped, along with her grandfather’s former assassin and one or two others.

Pouring the last of the wine she’d brought from the WeavePasha’s sanctum, she decided that, on balance, the night must be judged a success. She had not managed the death of the one her grandfather thought might one day be a threat, but she had managed the death of the one he feared.

Exhausted, she raised the glass to her lips, then spit out the wine.

It had gone bitter.