Sandstorm

Chapter Seven

Ninlilah Adh Arhapan, Musar of El Pajabbar, sent no scouts and attempted no secrecy. During the long run across the plain, the scent of horses fleeing before them alerted the minotaurs to spies even before they found the carcass of a pony in a dry gully. The beast had been put down with a single, swift strike, bespeaking a level of skill that Ninlilah respected.

The spies-two or more halflings by their footprints-did not hide the body, and neither did they make any effort to conceal signs of their flight through the prairie grasses. They traded stealth for speed, rejecting the skulking ways their kind typically embraced.

This was something else Ninlilah respected.

El Pajabbar would be met by foes warned of their coming. Whether those foes would be prepared was another question. The master of games said “earthsouled,” which could mean strength to rival the minotaurs’ own, but he also said “peace loving,” a phrase the genasi used for cowardice.

It did not matter. The heir of the master of games was somewhere among these spires of stone. The people who hid him from her would fight or not, and so they would die or not.

He is found, Ninlilah thought to herself again. Again, she stifled the primal bray she was moved to sound. Marod yn Marod is found.

A strange scent flared her nostrils, and Ninlilah raised one mailed fist. Behind her, the two lines of warriors clattered to a stop, cursing and bellowing.

She ignored their petty insubordination, seeking among the hulking silhouettes for the downward-pointing horns of a particular male. Seeing that one of her fighters already turned his muzzle up to the air, she knew her impulse to stop and investigate the alien smell was wise.

Wrinkling his broad, red nose, the bullock came to stand by Ninlilah. “Sultana-” he said, then staggered, spitting blood and teeth when she struck him across the muzzle.

“You are to call me Musar!” she roared, and brought her chain-draped hoof down on the warrior’s dewclaw.

He did not cry out in pain. He valued his life too much for that. Instead, the young minotaur ducked his head in ritual submission and said, “A thousand pardons would not excuse my offense.”

Ninlilah snorted, because it was clear from his tone that the bullock was not sure what offense he had given. “You are too free with your words,” she told him. “The yikaria have no herd rank, by the vizar’s order.”

The bullock kept his head down. “This is known,” he said. “But so far from Calimport, so far from the djinn’s hearing …”

Ninlilah resisted the urge to strike the fool again. “There is no place outside the vizar’s hearing,” she said. “Marod el Arhapan may have sent us here without Shahrokh’s knowledge, but I assure you the djinni knows all by now. His spies among the Banites would have informed him even if the pasha’s ritualists did not hurry to him as soon as they closed the gate behind us. Have care. Now, use the gifts the Forgotten God gave you.”

The male raised his head, sniffing again. All of the minotaurs could track and hunt by scent, but as was the case with many of the red-faced clans, his sense of smell was preternatural.

“It is like the drakes the windsouled sometimes use in the arena,” he said. “And something else. Like a hunting bird, a raptor.”

Ninlilah wondered what manner of creature these earthsouled might be using to guard the heir.

An image of the boy came to her mind. Stout and fierce, he had just begun to walk when Azad adh Arhapan stole him away and made an oathbreaker of her. But before that, before he was stolen, his unsure steps always brought him to her side, wherever she was.

The bullock took a cautious step backward. Ninlilah realized she was sounding a warning, so low that only another yikaria would hear it-another yikaria, or any predator so foolish as to threaten a calf.

“Get back in line,” she told him. “Tell the others to poison the spars of their javelins and guard against fliers.”

The bullock nodded. “And I will guard my tongue,” he said, retreating.

She tossed her head, the vicious upswept horns of a yikarian woman stabbing the night like spears. Yes, guard your tongue, she thought, and mind the words you use. Ninlilah adh Arhapan-Ninlilah, slave of the el Arhapans-was not a sultana but a sergeant, because this was no herd of yikaria, but a platoon of minotaurs.

Just as the lost heir of the Arhapans, Marod yn Marod was the son who bore the father’s name. Never mind the teasing name by which the house slaves called him, giving him another mother after his blessed Valandra died. He was Marod yn Marod; not Marod yn Ninlilah.

Cephas had them. Marashan and the young genasi seated in a roiling knot around her, and the younger children scattered among the crowd; all watched Cephas with their eyes wide, amazed by his displays of prodigious strength. Elder Lin and the other adults wore broad smiles, and Flek leaned forward so far he must have been close to tumbling out of his seat, an expression on his face that managed to combine deep suspicion with careful study.

“Find the fellow who thinks he can best you as soon as you can,” Tobin told him at one of their lessons. “And mark him, so the clowns will know who to pull out when you need the volunteer.” When Cephas asked if the script ran any differently if the fellow who thought he could best the strongman was, instead, a woman, the goliath was mystified. “I have known women who are stronger than me, Cephas,” he said, “but none of them ever needed to show it off for an audience. It will be a fellow.”

Cephas was glad it was a fellow he knew, as he sensed Flek would take the act with good humor. Even more, he was glad the clowns and the roustabouts were clearly enjoying the show. He had spent his life in performances, though he never knew it until the last few days. The thrill it gave him tonight was new, untethered from the possibility of death.

The act proceeded as planned. Cephas lifted boulders and bent bars, tossed barrels full of nails from one end of the tent to the other, and even, once they were fastened into the special canvas chairs backed with stout handles, juggled Elder Lin and two other women of the village.

The juggling worried him. He had not yet mastered the steady rhythms of the art, and he found that he did best when he watched one of the clowns who coached him, mirroring his tosses and catches. Corvus had hit on the trick of having Whitey stand behind the audience and juggle batons, giving Cephas a model to follow.

It worked well, though Cephas was confused when it was Tobin, not Whitey, who acted as his unseen prompter. The confusion grew when Whitey did make an appearance, but not in his clowning gear.

“A great display of skill,” said Whitey from the ringmaster’s place. “But not of strength, for surely the women of Argentor can never be said to be burdens. Why, my heart is lightened just watching these ladies float through the air. Applaud your elders, Argentor!”

The tone and color of Whitey’s patter differed from Corvus’s ominous pronouncements and raucous cries. Where could the kenku be? Cephas wondered.

But only briefly, because now it was time to bring up the proof of goods, as Tobin called it. The clowns elicited laughter with tricks and pratfalls, the aerialists earned their cheers with feats most would never dare, and Mattias and Trill … Well, Mattias and Trill were a frightening old man and a vicious predator recreating one of the deadliest episodes in history. The audience trusted the other performers on instinct.

“See,” Tobin told him, “a strongman does something that they think one of them could do, or that any of them could fake.”

And so the finale.

Tobin, or Tuber rather, made an elaborate farce of picking a volunteer from the crowd. Candle moved through the stands with enormous steps, wallowing her way among the old and young alike, rejecting every able-bodied young man Tuber picked with derisive toots of her horn or gouts of colored ribbon shot from a crossbow made of balloons.

Eventually, Candle offered herself as the opponent in the finale’s contest of strength. Tuber reacted by setting himself against her instead of letting Cephas take the spotlight again. A few quick pratfalls and failed lifts led to the two clowns’ attempt to raise a platform off the ground while they stood on it. Finally, Tuber lifted Candle over his head and threw her into the audience.

This last bit was an innovation, an addition to the act that made Tobin uncomfortable. “I am a clown now,” he had said. “Yes,” Whitey told him, “and you’re the strongest clown in the world. You think we’re not going to use that? Nine Hells, you think I wouldn’t throw my sister across the tent if I could?”

So, the intercession of the clowns ended with Candle in a graceless, spinning flight that was nevertheless perfectly timed and executed. She landed precisely where she wanted to-in Flek’s lap.

“You there!” Whitey shouted. “Unhand that clown!”

Flek realized he was to be the lucky volunteer. “All right, Cephas,” he said, rising to his feet and setting Candle down on hers, “I will test my strength against yours.” The good-natured roar of approval from the crowd was accompanied by several less-than-delicate whistles and shrill wishes of good luck from the girls sitting with Marashan. She quieted her friends with sharp elbows and rolling eyes.

Cephas grinned and held out his hand, welcoming the other young man to the ring. Cephas was a warrior, trained in harsh conditions all his life. He was not the equal of Tobin in raw strength, but it was a close thing. None in the audience could doubt he was possessed of enormous musculature after a single glance. He was stronger than Flek.

For all that, Cephas had been impressed with the young earthsouled man’s grit and wiry strength when Flek taught him the earthshock, the gathering and release of power that every member of this audience mastered at a far younger age than Cephas. He owed Flek.

“Any man can lift and throw,” Cephas shouted, “but only those who have the greatest strength, and who have mastered that strength, can wield the double flail!”

With that, he flipped over one of the hollow boulders, revealing the weapon stand that it hid from view. He retrieved Azad the Free’s prize and made a few flashy passes with the chains, spinning the spiked heads and releasing just enough of his tectonic energy to throw spirals of dust into the air.

When the miniature sandstorms died away, he offered the weapon to Flek, who eyed the flail suspiciously. The young man only took it after more than one nervous glance in the general direction of his mother. When its weight rested in his hands, he raised his eyebrows.

Flek called over his shoulder to his fellow villagers. “You know, it really is quite heav-”

He did not finish the sentence, because at that moment, the unmoving form of Trill, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, dropped through the canvas ceiling into the center ring.

The genasi of Argentor did not mistake the eruption of noise and violence around them as part of the circus performance for even a moment. The whipping guy wires and shattered smoke pots Trill bore down to the sawdust would not have allowed any such mistake to stand for long, in any case. But the genasi proved coolheaded in dangerous circumstances.

For a moment, Cephus stared in shock. He started moving only when Flek stepped in front of him and handed the flail back.

“Listen!” he shouted, both to Cephas and the crowd, “There is fighting outside!”

The tent became a tumult of motion and noise. Only after Whitey and Tobin rushed to Trill’s side did Cephas notice that she was not saddled, and that Mattias was nowhere to be seen. When Candle whipped off her wig, stuck a dagger between her teeth, and began a swift handover-hand climb up one of the hanging lines, he saw that a roustabout struggled to gain freedom from a tangle caused by Trill’s crash, and that the man was directly beneath a section of the roof that had caught fire.

A high ululating call sounded, and Cephas wondered if it was a war cry from whatever forces attacked the circus outside. But no, it was Elder Lin, signaling the Argentori to withdraw using a cut opened in the tent behind the stands, where Melda stood waving them through.

When the war cries did come, they were not high.

Low and loud, the bellows at the far end of the tent might have been voiced by demons. The fires spreading across the ceiling and the back wall of the tent made Cephas wonder if he had stumbled into the Abyss. Then he saw Mattias, struggling through falling sailcloth, fighting to drag himself across the sawdust toward Trill, his canes a blur in the smoke.

Figures moved behind him, giving chase, but the old man ignored them. Protectors covered him-Shan and Cynda had returned, and the acrobatics they displayed shamed any performance they might have made for the villagers. Spinning and leaping, ducking and diving, the sisters’ blades rang through the noise of fire and battle and panic.

At last, Cephas caught sight of what attacked them. Taller than he, as tall as Tobin even, armored and stamping, huge warriors pursued the sisters, making ferocious swings with enormous axes. They were bestial and furious, with the heads of cattle and gleaming horns. They were figures out of a nightmare.

Out of his nightmare.

He is small. Even though his arms and legs, and any part of him he can see in this dim place, are no different than in the waking world, through all the countless nights of this dream, Cephas comes into it knowing he is small. If nothing else, the towering doors and the great distance he has to climb down from his bed prove that.

His size, though, is not his only inadequacy. There is more wrong with his body than just that.

His feet are bare on the cold, blue floor. That’s another part of it-that’s something else hateful about him. His feet are on the floor.

And he is ugly. He knows that even more surely than he knows he is small. He does not look at his arms and legs again.

There is a sound outside the open door. It is laughter, and that terrifies him. He will have to run, or they will come and laugh at him. He will have to find her so she can hide him.

He rushes to a different door. Walking is … difficult. It must be practiced in secrecy, because it is shameful.

The laughter sounds again, and he runs until a shadow falls over him. He panics but knows not to cry, because that is the worst of his weaknesses. But then he cries, anyway, because the shadow is hers, and she sweeps him up in her unimaginably huge arms. She is so strong, surely she can protect him. She is so wise; surely she can find him a hiding place.

She sings with her strange voice, and the words are senseless because she sings in a slave’s language. Then she says words he does understand. “Stay close to us,” she says. “We will always be around you.”

He knows this is as true as everything else in the dream. He knows that her horns are sharp, but that they will never be turned against him.

But he knows, too, that she always carries him back.…

“Help us, Cephas!” someone cried, snapping him out of his paralysis. He ducked, just in time to avoid a flaming rope that whipped down across the center ring. The voice belonged to Blue, appearing with two of his brothers, all of them made up as clowns and bearing heavy footman’s crossbows empty of quarrels.

Mattias crawled over Trill’s body, which still sprawled motionless under the burning big top and was still, ridiculously, blue. He moved with deliberation, pouring drafts of a clear liquid from a clay jug, dousing each of her wounds. The three minotaurs who chased him into the tent slowed their advance, hampered by the detritus of the collapsing ropeworks and the tumbled blocks of his props, but even more by the martial dance of the twins.

Cephas had imagined they would be a deadly team, but he saw that his imagination was incapable of predicting the threat the women presented together. They did not fight as a team, or as a pair. They fought as a single warrior, one with four lightning-fast hands who could separate and combine, attack, and defend in a way that did not resemble any style Cephas had ever seen. They were beating the three minotaurs. Males, thought Cephas, noting their turned-down horns. But how do I know that?

A pair charging in from the right would flank the women, though. Cephas stepped into the minotaurs’ path, sweeping the flail out before him.

“How do we reload these?” Blue shouted as Cephas engaged the roaring minotaurs. He and his brothers held up the empty crossbows, or at least he and one of his brothers did. The third clown, grunting, made a game attempt at throwing his crossbow at one of Cephas’s opponents.

“That’s what you wanted my help with?” Cephas cried, unbelieving. “How did you load them in the first place?” One of the minotaurs bore a greataxe like those wielded by the beasts fighting the twins, but the other wielded a glaive, and Cephas shifted his defenses toward the second foe. “Anyone who uses a polearm is a brute,” Shaneerah always said. “The brutes who think they’re clever use glaives.”

Blue and the other clown must have been satisfied with the result of their brother’s experiment, because a pair of crossbows arced into the shifting triangle Cephas made with the minotaurs. The glaive-wielder was distracted by the makeshift missiles, and Cephas found a lapse in the fighter’s bristling defenses. His distal flailhead wrapped around the glaive’s shaft, gaining momentum before it whipped up and under the creature’s muzzle. Blood sprayed, and the beastly man fell.

“Corvus handed them out before he disappeared into his wagon,” Blue called. “We all shot at the same one, as he said, but he didn’t tell us what to do after that.”

Movement out of the corner of his eye told Cephas that Trill had gained her feet, which would surely end this fight. But no, she wasn’t standing; she was being lifted. “Strongest clown in the world,” Cephas observed. More loudly, he said, “Go help Tobin and your brother get Trill out of the tent before it collapses!”

He did not have time to see if the trio followed his directions, because the axeman launched a redoubled assault. The greataxe this bullheaded warrior spun was notched in several places on its cutting edge and pitted with age. The minotaur made an advantage of these imperfections, anticipating the snags and skips the chains of Cephas’s flail made when he tried to trap the axehead. White hairs in the mostly midnight black of the warrior’s broad face added to Cephas’s impression of a grizzled veteran. There would be no lapses of attention from this one.

If only the same could be said for Cephas.

“Cephas!” He did not recognize the voice at first. “Push him toward me!”

Oh no, thought Cephas. Behind the old minotaur, Marashan struggled with the glaive she’d pulled from the grip of the foe Cephas had already bested. She set its base against a flagstone prop, like a hunter setting a spear to receive a boar’s charge.

But a glaive is not a spear, and the soldier engaging Cephas was no dumb animal.

The minotaur did not even turn from Cephas, feinting forward. The thrusting axehead forced Cephas to duck back while the ironshod butt end of the great weapon swung around behind the minotaur, knocking the glaive from Marashan’s fingers with ease. The minotaur’s reflexes were among the sharpest Cephas had ever seen.

Still using both ends of his greataxe, still engaging foes before and behind, the fighter reversed the arc of his swing. Melda’s voice came to mind. “Oxen don’t need eyes in the backs of their heads,” she’d said, responding to some jibe of Tobin’s. “They can see almost all the way around ’em with just the two they got.”

Cephas whipped both flailheads up and in, parrying the swing of the axe, then driving it back. He instantly saw his mistake. The force of Cephas’s strike powered a pivoted blow against Marashan. Defenseless, the girl watched the blunt iron coming. Then, even faster than the axe’s strike, she vanished.

She had fallen to the ground, like the minotaur who came so close to ending her life. Cephas felt a surge of tectonic energy boil up from the ground, its flavor familiar from the times he attempted to match its effects over the long morning. Flek stood above his sprawling sister, his foot planted in the spot from which he’d chosen to launch his attack.

Except it wasn’t an attack, Cephas thought, rushing to capitalize on the minotaur’s fall. That’s not what Flek intended, and neither was its effect. Flek sent a pulse through the earth to literally undermine her, and Marashan fell clear of the bull warrior’s blow. But that force, that shaped strike, Cephas understood, could be used in combat.

Not now, Cephas thought, not when I need only strength and skill to finish this fight. The old minotaur spun and rolled on the ground, trying to the last to win clear of the lethal flail, but Cephas’s anger burned as hot as the tent around them. This creature had meant to kill Marashan as a distraction.

Taking in the whole of the ground meant for performance and now hosting battle, Cephas saw that the clown troupe had made the rent with Trill, though their efforts were hampered by the wyvern’s struggling back to consciousness under Mattias’s continued ministrations. The ranger’s canes were tucked through the back of his belt, and he hobbled along with one hand on Whitey’s shoulder while the other still splashed healing ointment over his companion’s wounds.

In the center of the tent, the twins continued to fight-the odds evened as one of their foes collapsed onto his knees, making a useless attempt to stop the bloom of blood fountaining from his throat. The wounds that caused that fountain had struck simultaneously, with a chirurgeon’s knowledge of anatomy and a gem cutter’s precision.

A closer look told him the twins were being pressed. These minotaurs were vicious and brutal, but they coupled those traits with ruthless discipline-a rare and deadly combination, and Cephas hoped that these two were the last of them as he went to aid the twins.

He spotted another-there was at least one more minotaur to fight. The largest he’d yet seen trotted into the far entrance, an archway of flame. She snorted and stamped, and even if her size had not suggested it, her superior arms and armor, and her bearing, marked her as the leader of these mysterious attackers.

She saw Cephas.

Corvus willed himself to ignore the sounds from outside his wagon. The burning of the tent roared as loud as any fires he’d ever set himself, and he heard death in it. He heard death in the screams of the Argentori genasi and in the hoarse directions Melda screamed at her husband’s kin. Corvus knew what death sounded like, and he would not listen.

Whitey had pulled him from the ring with a terrified look, then buried it beneath decades of showmanship to keep the audience away from whatever was coming as long as possible. Out in the night, it took Shan a single gesture-a hooking sweep of her hand with first and fourth fingers extended-to tell Corvus what doom had found them.

He would need details later-and he would have them, no matter what methods had to be used to glean them-but for the moment his course was set. He’d uncovered the cache of weapons hidden beneath the water barrels and handed them out. He heard Trill on the wing and the eldritch twang of Mattias’s bowstring. Shan and Cynda were exhausted but remained upright, and a pair of Arvoreeni adepts on their feet could swing the course of a full military engagement.

He could not imagine why the Calimien would loose El Pajabbar on him at this point in the game, but he knew his people would make it a decision the minotaurs’ masters in Calimport would regret.

In his wagon, Corvus passed over his pen and ink and did not even consider drawing out his book. Instead, he took a large conch shell into his clawlike hands.

The WeavePasha’s secrecy would be endangered if he used the speaking horn, but secrecy was already compromised, and the human’s wizardly pretenses at protocol be damned.

Corvus whistled a note through the ancient conch shell and felt it warm in his hands. As soon as the oceanic whisper issuing from its depths faded, replaced by the sounds of gentle conversation and cutlery clinking against expensive plateware, Corvus knew the audible link to the WeavePasha’s earring was established.

“Acham el Jhotos!” he shouted, positive that whoever was dining with the wizard would hear his voice, and that the WeavePasha himself would be clapping a hand to an ear and screaming blood. “Your plans are found out! Your foes descend! Your agent demands aid!”

A scream sounded from above. Trill? thought Cephas, but no, this was a man’s scream-a man’s dying scream.

Above, Candle tried to approach her brother, who had lost a desperate battle to stay clear of the flames and watched his death burning its way up his legs.

Cephas swore, looking for some way to climb, but all the ropes had burned away and every wall was now fully engulfed. The interior of the tent was brighter and hotter than any day he had ever known. He could only watch Candle, blisters rising through her greasepaint, swing back and forth, trying to gain enough momentum to reach her brother. The man’s screams ceased, his body curling in on itself.

The only sounds discernible above the fire were screams-screams from Candle, swinging and hopeless; screams from Flek, dragging his sister clear; screams of fury from the pair of minotaur warriors facing the tiring sisters. There were also the screams of the huge minotaur woman, seeking a path through sheets of burning canvas that fell from every direction.

The woman could not get closer. None in the tent could see a way clear of the small hells each found himself in, clear of the few patches of earth free of fire.

Earth …

“Shan! Cynda!” Cephas shouted. “To me! You have to find a way to me!”

Cephas began a different sort of defense than any he’d ever had to weave, swinging the flail to knock floating embers away, and ducking clear of gouts of fire. He made his way to Flek and Marashan, finding her unconscious and the young man dazed.

“We cannot get out!” shouted Cephas. “We have to go down!”

Flek, vastly more experienced with the powers of the earth than Cephas, saw the gladiator’s plan and nodded.

The twins bounded through the flames, leaving frustrated roars in their wake. Flek took his sister up in his arms as Shan spun her sister around, patting out the wisps of smoke that threatened to make a torch of Cynda’s heavy ponytail.

“Cephas!” Flek shouted. “You must do this! I used all that was in me to buckle the ground beneath Marashan. But it’s soft here now! Dig a cavern, Cephas, some small space that will hold us all. Leave no more room than is needed for air to breathe. Shape it!”

With a tremendous roar, the ceiling gave way. Candle did not struggle as she fell.

Cephas thought of the only small space he could, the place he knew better than any other, the only home he could remember. He set his foot, and the ground below fell away, making a rocky replica of his cell on Jazeerijah.

The twins leaped in, then reached up and pulled Cephas down after them. Flek dropped his sister into Cephas’s arms. He said, “Someone has to remain above to close it in, you see.”

After an instant of fire, there was earth, and Cephas went down beneath it.