Sandstorm

Chapter Sixteen

The Year of the Broken Blade (1260 DR)

On another night, the bizarre incident that saw a herd of minotaurs finally chasing a goliath into the pits would be the most memorable part of the Games. This would not be the case tonight Marod realized, when a horrified silence fell over the south stands. Nor would the day be remembered because of a fight between twin Arvoreeni adepts.

The silence was replaced by screams, and wholesale panic descended on the arena as eighteen thousand people stormed the exits. The gamemaster’s box was set beneath a billowing tent, so he had to lean out to see why the crowds ran.

His house was not falling as fast as a stone cup cast onto the field might, but its speed was increasing.

From her waiting room in the north wall of the arena, Shan heard the panic and made a quick check of the door between her and the sands. She did not know what disaster was befalling the genasi, but it would doubtless affect her plans. Besting the door’s lock would take no time.

On the opposite side of the arena, the Spiritbreaker’s assistant did not answer when he asked her to report what she saw outside. The disloyal woman stuck her head out the spyhole and didn’t even take the time to draw it back in before she engaged the magic in a ring he hadn’t even known she wore. She faded from view.

He frowned and crossed to the door, which opened at a command. The arena was a scene out of a nightmare. The air was full of windsouled flying for the roofline-so many of them that he witnessed a dozen brutal collisions at a glance. Thousands of human and halfling slaves, along with minotaur guards and genasi, either possessed of a lesser soul or already exhausted by a failed effort at flight, packed the dozen exits cut into the stands, climbing and crawling and mindlessly killing in their panic. He saw a yikaria warrior climb up a watersouled nobleman’s back and disappear out an entrance by striding across the heads and shoulders of the packed mob.

A shift in the crowd was occurring. An enterprising pair of earthsouled women had smashed through the decking beneath the sands and beckoned other slaves through the gap they’d made down into the pits.

A sudden parting in the crowd of flying windsouled revealed the source of the mayhem. The Spiritbreaker did not at first recognize the structure making a ponderous descent toward the western grandstand, but the rain of furniture, potted trees, artwork, and tiles that fell from it was so voluminous and, even from his vantage point, bespoke such wealth that he knew it had to be the manor house of one of the great families crashing into the Djen Arena. Then he realized it had to be the el Arhapan mansion where he himself lived, and, oddly, the thought that came to mind then was that he was pleased he kept his books in cases that closed and locked.

Given the size of the estate and the rate it was falling, the destruction would be enormous, and it might take several tendays for the slaves to dig out his rooms near the center of the complex.

He turned, and there was the halfling woman, still holding her short sword and dagger. He made a brief mental review of his various options, and decided that, regrettably, there was no way to escape with her in tow-a pity, but he had learned a great deal from their time together.

He smiled vaguely at her, and as he did so, their eyes met. The potions of the Pasha of Apothecaries were still at work. Her eyes were slow to track his movements, and she seemed barely to recognize him.

He paused. Her reaction was quite interesting, because she shouldn’t be tracking the movement of anyone taller than she was. And, of course, she shouldn’t recognize him even a little.

It was the last thought he ever had.

To conserve the brief moments of flight Ariella could manage while burdened with him, Cephas made a strange and strenuous climb. With the swordmage clinging to his back, he used the regularly spaced joins in the elemental foundation of the el Arhapan estate as finger and toe holds, and as the manor fell downward, he made a great effort to keep to its pace, climbing as fast as he could and so descending toward the arena at a slower rate than the structure.

Ariella had found him soon after he crashed through the foundation stone. As he fell, the strap that secured his right shoulder guard had caught, swinging him hard against the shifting underside of the estate. One end of the floating artificial island was disproportionately heavier, and when the house began to fall, it first listed sharply, until it was at right angles to its former position.

“The lesser foundation stones must have enough lifting force to slow the fall!” Ariella shouted. “We’ll have to time this carefully to avoid being crushed when it hits the arena!”

Cephas was grimly satisfied with what he saw below. Household guards of the genasi had fought their way to defensive positions at the exits and were organizing a doomed escape into the cavernous spaces below the stands. This left the vastly more numerous slaves to their own devices, but those devices proved the better. The exodus of the slaves through the many holes blasted in the sands of the arena was much better managed than the mad scrums at the exits, or the general free-for-all in the air above the arena where windsouled attempted flights over distances far outside the range of their powers. Cephas hoped the slaves would all escape without injury, though he understood this was a slight possibility.

The nobleborn, though, could be damned.

Seeing one world crash down into another, seeing thousands of people fleeing and fighting for their lives, seeing chaos and tumult unlike anything she had ever known, Shan pared her plan back to its barest essentials.

Find Cynda.

The gamemaster’s tented area was an island of relative calm in the chaos at the far end of the arena. She judged it the best place to begin.

Five hundred paces of hell separated Shan from her immediate goal. She glanced skyward and, making an estimate of how much time she had to cross, considered her options.

She grazed the hilt of her parrying dagger with the thumb and forefinger of her left finger. She might be able to cut her way across.

Cynda. It was Cynda she sought.

Shan drew the dagger and slid it through the straps that held the cuirass of her leather armor tight. She bent, used the dagger’s edge to part the laces of her high boots, and stepped out of them.

She ran, and as she came to the outer edge of the panicked mob diving into the warren beneath the arena, she sprang, extending her hands and finding purchase on the shoulders of a man methodically pushing other slaves into the closest pit. She somersaulted through the air, her feet briefly grazing the upraised shield of a household guard who had abandoned her post in the stands.

Shan was a warrior and a scout. She had learned those skills from the finest teachers in the world.

And she was an aerialist. She had learned that skill from her sister.

“Where is Shahrokh?” roared Marod. “Where are any of the damned djinn?”

When his aide did not answer, the master of games turned to find that the man was gone. Fled with all the rest, he thought. How could this have happened? What could cause an entire estate to fall, and how could the djinn disappear at the same time?

Little matter. He would learn who was behind the destruction of his beautiful arena soon enough, and then they would pay. He was already thinking of ways to continue the Games. The Sabam could be repurposed for more traditional combats, perhaps, or, even better, he could relocate to Manshaka while the djinn rebuilt here.

For now, his best course of action was to retreat into the hidden tunnel that led to the stables and wait out the immediate crisis. He twisted a particular ruby setting in his ornate chair, and rotated the entire seat, revealing a downward-sloping passage.

As soon as he set foot in it, he saw that it was not empty. He would have sworn that no one knew of this passage except himself, Shahrokh, and the earthsouled who dug it and who were killed when they finished their labors.

But there was a halfling slave he did not recognize, just finishing a task he must have been at for some time. The passage between the pasha of games and the halfling was coated with an oily, smoking substance that ate away at the stone.

“Yeah, you don’t want to come down this way,” said the halfling. “These walls is fixing to collapse.”

The pasha gathered his windsoul, preparing to launch through the air at the man, but the halfling had spoken true. The brickwork walls began to crumble, and the ceiling slumped.

Seeing no way through, the pasha stepped back from the hidden entry and shouted in rage. “Who are you?”

The halfling shrugged, and before Marod’s escape route was completely closed to him, he heard the reply from beyond the falling rubble. “We don’t use names.”

The manor crashed to earth.

Sensing Ariella’s exhaustion, when he saw a clear spot through the dust clouds below, Cephas relaxed his grip and dropped a distance perhaps three times his height. He tucked and rolled when he landed, coming back to his feet with flail held ready, probing the shifting mass of rubble that marked the location of the Djen Arena with his earthsouled senses.

Ariella landed beside him, sword drawn, and stood so that they were back-to-back. “After the fall,” she observed. “Quiet? Not what I expected.”

There were calls and cries in the far distance, but in the immediate area, the only noises came from the clatter of stones and the hiss of sand as the rubble settled. One entire side of the Djen Arena was gone, flattened by the mass of the el Arhapan estate. The interconnected structures built atop the elemental foundation had fared much the same. The parts of the estate that struck first were reduced to nothing, while some walls and even windows retained their integrity, even if they were set askew. The presence of the floating stonework in the rubble led to less devastation in the el Arhapan buildings than might otherwise have been expected.

“No sounds,” he said. “There was time for most of the crowd to escape below then, and I trust that if Corvus lives, we’ll know soon enough. We should try to find the others.”

On the north side of the grounds, they discovered an area of rubble-free sand. The collapsed walls beneath the gamemaster’s box formed an impenetrable barrier on one side of the clearing, and the badlands of ripped-open flooring and rubble encircled its other sides.

Marod el Arhapan lounged in a veranda chair at the center of the sandy space.

The man watched them approach. For a moment Cephas wondered if perhaps his father did not recognize him in his earthsouled manifestation, but he was merely waiting for them to close within conversational distance.

“Your work, of course,” said the pasha. “I suppose I should have guessed, but I trusted Shahrokh to sniff out any plot you’ve been put up to by the WeavePasha or your mother’s degenerate kin or whoever supplied you with the means to offer me this setback. What have you done with the djinn, by the way? Some repelling magic item? They’ll not be happy.”

Ariella stepped forward and said, “I would prevent Cephas from patricide, Calimien, but there would be no shame in my blade finding your heart. Have a civil tongue. We only want to find the adepts and the goliath, and then we’ll leave you to lord over what’s left of your domain.”

Cephas put a hand on Ariella’s shoulder. “I don’t know why your protectors have abandoned you now, Marod el Arhapan,” he said to the man before him. To Ariella, he said, “And no patricide is possible. I would have to be his son. He would have to be my father.”

The pasha snorted. “It seems that the only thing we share besides our blood, Cephas, is the wish that we shared not even that much. But if you doubt my patrimony, you are a fool. Even wearing your mother’s cursed secret, it’s clear you are an el Arhapan.”

Cephas studied the man. “That is the second time you have said that, about the secret of my mother’s earthsoul. And yet you said hers was a newly elevated noble family. Your marriage was a cause for controversy, you said. An earthsouled noble making a secret of her earthsoul seems-”

“Seems like a story concocted by a vizar who seldom troubles himself with the finer points of genasi society, yes. I would have pointed out the inconsistencies to him, except that, frankly, I did not care. You would have discovered the truth soon enough. Your mother was a scheming earthsouled slave who somehow learned to manifest windsoul and managed to disguise herself long enough to cost me much trouble and treasure.”

Cephas narrowed his eyes. There was still something wrong with Corvus’s version of his mother’s life story. “What do you mean, treasure?”

The pasha spit. “The escapees. They had to be replaced, all of them. Another flaw in your philosophers’ arguments, Akanulan. If you free a slave, you simply create the need for another slave to take its place.”

Cephas said, “My mother-”

“Your mother was a liar and a whore. I thought her treatment of the slaves eccentric, but I didn’t learn of her activities with the Janessar until after you were born. I didn’t know how much I was freeing myself when I set her before Azad.”

A tremendous crash sounded nearby, and the three genasi ducked as a sizable chunk of wall flew over their heads. A new cloud of dust rolled out of the rubble, and a pair of coughing figures stumbled into the clearing. Caked in dust and wearing pants sewn together from a dozen slaves’ tunics, Tobin could almost have been back in the circus. As for Corvus, his feathers looked as if they had turned white, until he made a shivering motion that shook most of the dust free.

“Here’s another man who would kill you for me, Father,” said Cephas.

Corvus looked at the genasi as if he were studying a tableau he was not quite convinced warranted inclusion in a circus performance. “If you like,” he said at last. “I owe you far more than that. It isn’t necessary, though. If the djinn suffer him to live, the life they leave him will be more punishment than anything we’ll mete out.”

There was another flurry of motion, and then Shan was among them. She carried a miserable form in her arms. Cynda, eyes shut and holding a bloody short sword in a curiously loose grip that left its tip dragging the sand, seemed aware of nothing but her sister’s strong arms, which she sought to burrow deeper into when the companions cried out.

Cephas watched Shan turn and shield Cynda from even the gentle ministrations offered by Tobin. No one would ever again have difficulty telling the women apart, unless whatever terrible tortures scarred Cynda were also visited on Shan. He realized he would do anything to prevent that from happening.

Marod el Arhapan stood and looked from the twins to Cephas. He rolled his shoulders and spread his arms wide.

Cephas dropped his flail to the sand and spoke to Corvus. “I do not think you know what punishments I am capable of meting out, Ringmaster.”

Corvus did not try to stop him.

They met on the sands of an arena, but their fight was not an entertainment. As he rushed toward the windsouled man who only resembled him on the outside, Cephas knew that what was about to happen was brutal, ugly, terrifying.

Marod el Arhapan was a connoisseur of fighting, not a fighter himself.

When Cephas took his life with a single wrench, it was not an entertainment. It was a punishment, one long overdue.

The WeavePasha considered the extraordinary mess in his scrying chamber. He considered again whether to allow his granddaughter to supervise her apprentices in cleaning it, but again decided it was too dangerous.

No, there was nothing to be done but to survey the damage caused by the kenku’s escape, and salvage what he could.

“That’s odd,” said the WeavePasha. Speaking of Corvus Nightfeather, he could have sworn he had given the kenku the particular volume of centaur verse at his feet several decades past. In fact, there was something peculiar about all of the rubbish tumbled in the center of the chamber.

It was mostly books, and they weren’t as damaged as they should have been after the conflagration. They were all very rare books; so rare that they weren’t even all to be found in his own library.

The familiar vibration of an activating portal came to his arcane senses. The old man whispered a few words and drew the knife that was always at his belt. He could sense who this unexpected, and most unwelcome, visitor was.

Shahrokh’s preparations were impressive, the WeavePasha supposed, for a djinni.

Ninlilah felt the dressing at the jagged end of her left horn. It was dry, and she decided she would have to wait only another few days before she could dispense with it. She had little to do out here but wait, after all.

She had already practiced enough since her injury that she was comfortable with her axe again. The odd change in her balance that followed the fight in the Spires of Mir had required a change in some of her techniques, and this training camp was the ideal place to develop those. It would have gone easier if some of the gladiators had stayed to practice with her, but they had elected to leave with all the other slaves when she descended on the camp’s overseers out of the desert night.

There was another deep agent of the Janessar like herself in the camp. He had been furious that she had broken cover, but there was little the man could do besides lead the compound’s slaves north when she told him her plans.

Eventually, Marod el Arhapan would travel here to check on his stable. And then the man whose black will she had enacted for so long, even to the point of letting dear Valandra die, would die himself.

She’d seen Cephas through the flames-after all these years, Valandra’s son. And no sooner had she found him than he was lost forever.

She did not know what she would do after she killed el Arhapan. It largely depended on whether he was accompanied by a djinni when he came through the portal. In that case, she would most likely die, too. If he came alone, or was accompanied only by windsouled, then she would survive.

The Janessar might be sympathetic because of her reasons, some of them, but they would not allow her to work with them again. She supposed she might try to make it into Calimport and convince the other yikaria to leave the Emirates once and for all.

The circle of fine white sand she’d poured as a warning signal around the chamber stirred. Air was blowing inward.

At last, el Arhapan was coming. She shouldered her axe.

And she saw people she had never thought to see again. The goliath-the strongest fighter she had ever faced-was the most instantly recognizable. She did not see a deadly archer among them, but she had barely spotted the archer in the Spires of Mir, either. This was no good; there were too many.

And then there he was. He spoke to her.

“Put down your axe, ’Lilah,” said Cephas.