Shortly before the circus was to begin its performance, Corvus called Cephas and Whitey to his wagon. Rummaging through a trunk, he withdrew a small wooden box and a set of three interlinked rings. Giving these to Whitey, he said, “Show Cephas the way of these. I’ll see to the lights.”
Whitey was already costumed and made up, deep in character. The clowns of his tradition did not speak, so he sketched a comical bow to the ringmaster as acknowledgment and motioned for Cephas to follow him to the tent.
He handed off the box and rings for Cephas to carry, then took the short walk across the Welcome Terrace as an opportunity to warm up for the night.
Walking ahead of Cephas in a curious, shuffling gait that was half dance and half waddle, Whitey reversed direction, whipping toward Cephas in a lurching backhandspring. The clown spun his arms, dropped his shoulders unevenly, and landed on his backside.
A hissing noise sounded, and Whitey’s confused expression mirrored Cephas’s own. The clown peered over his left shoulder, over his right, and then rolled backward into an impossible pose, his feet flat on the ground but his back arched so severely that he was still looking straight at Cephas. He was bent in two with his hands around his ankles, his head tucked between his legs, peering out over the seat of his pants, with his generous bottom pointed at the sky. It was his pants that were hissing.
Like all his brothers and sisters, and now Tobin, Whitey wore colored pantaloons in performance that were woven of enough cloth to make a four-person tent-if four people could be found willing to sleep in a pink and green tent edged with silk sashes. All that cloth stretched to its limits as the seat of the clown’s pants inflated, ballooning larger and larger, and Cephas saw it being lit from within by flickering yellow light.
Whitey clapped, and Cephas looked down to see that he had somewhat untangled himself, enough that his chin rested on the flagstones. He released his hold on his ankles and wormed his hands up into his pants legs. In the glowing balloon above, Whitey’s hands appeared, his delicate wrists and long fingers recognizable to Cephas even in silhouette.
The silhouettes became something different, as Whitey wove his fingers together into the shape of a dragon, a castle, a man with the head of a crow.
“Whitey!” The voice belonged to Corvus, calling from his wagon. “Save it for the audience!”
Whitey’s hands changed from a kenku to a clown, which shrugged. The glowing light shifted from yellow to green. Then, as the shadow puppet beckoned for Cephas to follow, Whitey gently floated into the air, carried aloft by his enormously inflated pants, and drifted across the courtyard.
The magic of the linked rings Corvus gave Whitey enabled them to expand and retract, separate, and rejoin. At the mental direction of the ringmaster, the rings changed size and configuration from act to act as the circus progressed. Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders was not a large concern, and the troupe rarely staged more than one act at a time, but they almost always began one act while another was just ending. “No transitions,” said Corvus. “Never give them time to think about what they are cheering about.”
For some performers, the rings did not define the space an act took up, as with Mattias and Trill. Cephas was scheduled to make his debut as a strongman after their centerpiece act. “While they’re still breathless-they’ll glide right over the rough patches as long as you don’t make too much of them yourself,” Corvus said.
The ringmaster’s advice was foremost in Cephas’s thoughts. He was so focused on his own act and the cue to come near the end of Mattias’s performance that he wondered if he would remember anything of the historical reenactment preceding his debut.
He needn’t have worried.
Corvus caused the floating limelights to shift from red, through gold and amber, darkening all the while to recall the colors of a setting sun. Minor magics in the silver-lined smoke pots hanging just below the canvas ceiling sent glowing clouds of deep purple through the air. The roustabouts took the mists boiling around their positions in the peaks as their signal to pull away one section of the roof, their work concealed from the crowd by light and mist. As Whitey’s youngest brothers finished mugging for the crowd, Corvus amplified his voice and let an enormous whisper roll through the big top like a high plains wind.
“Here we are, friends, taking our ease, you in your seats and we on our stage. We laugh and sing in the shadow of the Marching Mountains, separated by the whole length of that storied range from another stage, one where laughter was rarely heard in the dark years performers danced across it, and where now, the only audience is the restless dead. I speak of Monrath Teshy Mir, the ruined city of emperors, the fell and fallen capital of the Sixth Age of Empire … Shoonach!”
When Cephas unfolded the grandstand from its magical box, he’d seen the hideaways concealed beneath the audience’s seats. Circus folk hidden there gasped and whispered. Their practiced unease spread among the earthsouled, the young whispering questions and their elders whispering explanations.
In the haze at the back of the tent, the vague silhouette of a distant city of minarets and spires wove itself out of dust and smoke. A blue ribbon of a river flowed beneath the image, rippling like a bolt of cloth being unrolled by unseen hands, which, in fact, was what it was.
“Shoonach!” shouted Corvus, bringing his voice up from a whisper to a baritone strike. The attention of anyone in the crowd who might have studied the backdrop returned to the ringmaster. Melda and a roustabout whipped the woolen current of the River Agis into a historically questionable frenzy.
“Named by the Shoon emperors in their hubris, built by the labor of their fallen enemies, unassailable by the brave across four hundred years of its cursed existence. No hero ever dared to face the necromancer kings in their place of power.”
Twin lines of rope stirred in the sawdust of the central ring, and Corvus made a signal for the drummers standing on either side of him to sound thunder.
The noise served its purpose, drawing the audiences’ collective attention again, long enough for the ropes attached to the wheeled cart Mattias stood on to be lost in the general gloom. Tobin and another clown cranked the barrel winch attached to the lines. Across the tent, Melda whipped the blue cloth high just as the erstwhile Imperial Barge and its occupant came floating into the center ring.
“Behold!” said Corvus, “The villain of the Age, Kodos el Jhotos! Qysar Shoon the Seventh!” The circus folk concealed below the crowd did not have to boo and hiss to stir the genasi. Even Cephas had heard the name Shoon VII, used as a curse and threat by the Calishites of Jazeerijah, by the merchants of Saradush, and even among the goblins of the Omlarandins. Any culture in the South could be counted on to have stories of the Necroqysar, Corvus claimed. “It’s what makes him such a great villain,” said Corvus. “Everybody fills in his own details.”
Every story of the Qysar featured his infamous Staff of Shoon. Mattias held up a prop staff in a dazzling beam of light, showing off an ivory shaft topped with an opal the size of a human fist. Waves of black necrotic energy spilled down from the gem, flowing like water over Mattias’s fist, then up his arm to invest his elaborate costume with a glow that made the old man stand out in the darkened tent.
Corvus claimed the hardest part of a ringmaster’s job was deciding when to use real magics to accomplish an effect, and when to use more mundane means. “Sometimes making someone fly with wires and winches is more convincing than making him fly with sorcery,” he said.
Up in the big top’s peaks, roustabouts cranked handles and slid pulleys back and forth across guy wires. In the center ring, Qysar Shoon VII rose into the air, brandishing his staff and glaring at the audience.
“I killed a hundred unicorns to forge this implement of power,” Mattias growled, swooping low over the section of the seats where most of the adolescent earthsouled had segregated themselves. “And I spend my nights hunting children, because the Staff of Shoon thirsts for blood!”
His last word stretched out long, it
s sound merging with crashing cymbals and rolling drums. Mattias swept his staff down at the earthsouled, who shrank away and ducked, clinging to one another and shrieking, though laughter could also be heard. One genasi alone stood up and made an energetic leap, trying to wrest the staff from Mattias’s hands. The old ranger was too quick for the girl-Cephas would wager any amount that it was Marashan-and he pulled the staff back, managing a quick rap of the offender’s knuckles and eliciting more laughter from the audience.
“No hero can stand against me and my deadly magics of magical death!” Mattias screamed.
“No hero, Qysar?” called Corvus in response. “What of another villain, then?” The drums rolled. “What of your greatest enemy? What of the Terror of Tethyr? What of the Azure Death, the Shatterer of Bhaelros and Destroyer of the Eclipse, Mother of Bluetalon and Devourer of the Necromancer’s Arm? What of the Dragon Qysara, what of the elder wyrm, what of Iryklathagra, whom men call-”
In the stand, many voices roared a name. Corvus anticipated them and timed his loudest shout yet to join them in chorus.
“Sharpfangs!” The word blasted through the tent, up and out into the night sky, where it was answered.
His task of storing the wheeled miniature barge done, Tobin came and stood beside Cephas. The goliath was made up like all the other clowns, costumed in their garish jackets and pantaloons and enormous shoes. His features were concealed beneath white greasepaint and highlighted with brightly hued patterns. A green wig resembling a fern covered his bald head.
“Of all the dragons she plays,” Tobin said, “I think Trill likes this blue one the best.”
The wyvern screamed again, then dived through the misty clouds concealing the big top’s roof. The gallons of paint that went into her costuming were even more brightly colored than Tobin’s. Trill positively glowed blue, and through no magic beyond sapphire tints, the rising lights, and, all could see, her own enormous pride. She wheeled above the crowd, then brought her wings close and darted to the edge of the tent, turning at the last instant to beat her wings again and glide in a great circle encompassing the whole of the interior. She made the arc with her back to the performance ring, rushing from spotlight to spotlight, and the countless pieces of costume jewelry pasted to her scales glittered and shone.
She screamed again, and this time she landed in the exact center of the tent, stretching her legs and buffeting the air with her batlike wings. The crowd shouted and stomped. Trill responded by screaming still louder and opening her jaws wide. Then, unexpectedly, she quieted and attempted a surreptitious glance sideways at Corvus. The gesture’s subtlety was lost on those watching, since her head was the size of a rain barrel. Corvus gestured impatiently for her to open her mouth again and turn back to where Mattias brandished his glowing staff. Trill ducked her head in a bobbing nod and shook her wings. She opened her jaws wide again, but still darted her black eyes back and forth between her supposed archenemy and the ringmaster.
Corvus rolled a wand over the back of his ebony claws, and a bolt of lightning manifested out of thin air in front of Trill’s snapping teeth. The energy of the blast lit up the whole of the tent, and the bolt struck at Mattias, forking all around him and raising the smell of ozone. Mattias held his staff high, and the lightning spilled over a penumbra of flickering shadow, exhausting itself into the ground around him-but still driving him to his knees.
“That’s the part she likes, the lightning,” said Tobin. “Corvus won’t let them run this act when we’re farther north because that dragon Trill’s playing, Iryklathagra, she’s supposed to wake up from a long sleep sometime soon. Corvus says we shouldn’t risk her coming to a show.”
A green-gloved hand reached between him and Tobin, angled up, and gave the goliath’s bright red nose a good twist.
“Ouch!” said Tobin. “Why did you twist my nose, Candle?”
Whitey’s sister, who was paired with Tobin for the night’s performance, was named Candasa, but while in her face paint she answered only to Candle. She mimed fastening a button in front of her lips.
Awareness lit up Tobin’s eyes. “Yes!” he said. “I am sorry, Cephas, but I forgot-I am not Tobin now, but Tuber the Clown. I do not speak!”
He said this loud enough that the genasi in the stands closest shushed him. Trill had quieted out in the main ring and Mattias’s voice could be heard.
“May your body rot and your scales crumble!” Mattias shouted, his voice shaking in a vibrato as he pitched it much higher than his usual baritone. “May your fangs grow dull and your wings wither! Iryklathagra! I will dine on your flesh and make a mantle of your wretched hide! Tonight, you die!”
As he said the last word, Mattias thrust the staff forward. Cephas did not think any in the audience noticed that the old man was sometimes using the staff to lean on. A spectral skull, glowing green but with eye sockets of bottomless black, grew from the staff’s end like a bubble from a child’s clay soap pipe. With a popping noise, the skull floated free of the staff, still growing. It shook and vibrated in time to the music that rose from the players marching out beneath it, all of them dressed in more sedate versions of Mattias’s imperial finery and wearing green skull masks themselves.
The skull opened its mouth and joined the musicians’ song:
“On a dark, dark mount
Oh so long ago
She lurked and pounced and screamed
And she prowled back to and fro.”
Trill shook her wings again, then rose up on her legs and stalked back and forth in front of the skull, snapping and hissing at the crowd. The tip of her tail ticked back and forth in time to the music.
“On a dark, dark mount
Oh so long ago
Beneath Selune’s Tears
The necromancer was her foe.”
Mattias twirled his staff like a stave fighter beset on all sides, black bolts crackling from its end to explode against the ground, the canvas above, and in midair just over the heads of the audience.
“On a dark, dark mount
Oh so long ago
Wyrm and wizard met to fight
But ’twas the chained who felt the blows.”
Roustabouts moved in around Cephas, and he knew there were others running outside the back tent wall, readying the props for the next act-his act. In the run-throughs, Corvus said that he would improvise patter to narrate Mattias and Trill’s exit and his own entrance, but as Cephas listened in the dark, the speech did not sound improvised to him.
“The great city of Shoonach was a city of the South. Most of those who lived there, and who died there in the terrible wars fought by Sharpfangs and the Necroqysar, were slaves. Like the djinn who ruled before them and all the Calephs who’ve followed down the long count of years since, the Qysars of the Shoon Imperium built their empire on the backs of the enslaved.”
Trill charged across the tent and snatched Mattias up in her jaws. The ranger struggled and cursed, swinging his staff wildly and releasing more black bolts. More and more of them exploded, barely short of the upturned faces of the hushed crowd of genasi.
Crouching deep on her powerful legs, Trill jumped into the air and brought her wings down. The wind raised by the wyvern’s taking flight stirred sawdust and blew swirling designs in the glowing smoke above.
Trill flew around the circus tent once again, this time spiraling upward. Mattias bucked and squirmed in her mouth, and the black bolts kept increasing in frequency until they became a single beam of screaming, smoking ruin. All around the three empty rings, bolts of lightning struck from nowhere, arcing from point to point, dazzling in their blue fury.
The backdrop of the city’s skyline was cranked up again, but this time instead of a river in the foreground, dozens of miniature buildings spread out-low, straw-thatched huts of mud brick. When the lightning struck among them, blasting them to bits, there was a suggestion of tiny figures running and ducking, shadow puppets that disappeared into the rubble or were obliterated by the black energies of Ma
ttias’s staff.
“The mightiest of the mighty, friends!” shouted Corvus. “Names that shake the Realms a thousand years on! A battle the histories called inconsequential, costing nothing more than the lives of seventy-five thousand slaves.”
Trill flew up through the gap in the canvas ceiling, Mattias already swinging his leg around to find his customary seat on her back. Cephas saw this from where he now lay on his back in the center ring, hidden from view by the low clouds of dun-colored smoke that boiled around his props. The roustabouts finished arranging the artfully constructed rubble and scurried offstage. Most of the bricks and stones were painted muslin stretched over wicker frames, but the heavy blocks they heaped atop Cephas were quite real. Casting the stones away would take an effort. And it had to be an artful effort, he reminded himself.
The lights shifted their colors, lightening to a more sprightly tone matched by the music played by the musicians. When the audience turned their attention back to the center ring, they saw a full-size version of one of the collapsed huts from the finale of Mattias’s act. Cephas was invisible but for one sandaled foot.
“Only a figure out of legend could withstand such a catastrophe,” said Corvus. “Today, none walk among us with the might and vim to survive. Look at this collapsed structure before you, brought at great expense and under the direst circumstances from the hidden ruins of far Shoonach itself. Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders counts itself blessed to ply our trade tonight before people wise in the ways of rock, earthwalkers and stonemasters unparalleled in all Faerun. Friends, your expert eyes tell you the truth of what lies before you. No ordinary mortal could survive the force that fell on this building. Any poor soul inside would be instantly crushed! Even, if by some miracle they survived, there would be no hope of escape, not when tons of rubble lay above.…”
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