Sandstorm (single books)

by Christopher Rowe

  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 combi
nation, 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.

  Chapter Eight

  There is a path running only one direction,

  through a gate that never closes.

  — The Nar’ysr’s Last Prophecy (apocryphal)

  The worst of it, by far, occurred when Shan closed her hands around Marashan’s mouth and nose.

  The girl had fought her way back to consciousness at the sounds of her brother’s terrible last cries. Marashan gathered earth-force, and Cephas shouted above the screams.

  “No! He does this for you!”

  Marashan’s breath cut off and she trembled for a moment, then became still. Before Cephas could speak, a small, calloused hand found his and moved his fingers against the genasi girl’s neck, where he felt a thin pulse. Shan knew he thought her capable of killing the girl, and wished to ease his mind.

  It was that moment, not the long night of waiting that followed, that Cephas kept returning to as he watched the Argentori bury their dead. He supposed it was because that was the only moment during the long and terrible night of waiting when they were moving, acting. Otherwise, they had not spoken and barely stirred except to draw shallow breaths.

  On Jazeerijah, the dead were thrown over the side for scavengers to find, but more than one of the Founding Stories took the tomb cities of the desert for their setting. He knew what a grave was.

  Maybe Elder Lin sensed his worry that this dirt cell would become their grave when she detected their life-forces in the smoldering canvas ruins. She had caused the ground her son shielded them beneath to explode outward. Even aware that the remains at her feet were those of Flek, she took the time to look all four of them in the eye, speaking to the twins and Cephas as gently as to her own daughter, saying, “You are alive.” It was not an exclamation of relief. It was a reminder.

  She issued other reminders as she opened the cracks in the center spires of the village, six in all. These would hold the remains of those earthsouled who died by fire or blade. “The Old Mother birthed these souls,” she said, “and now the Old Mother gathers them back up. They died in violence, but they lived in peace, so their sleep shall be untroubled. The earth abides.”

  All the villagers, and many of the circus folk, were gathered at the spires. The genasi answered their elder with an echo. “The earth abides,” and some among the circus troupe whispered other imprecations and blessings. The circus would bury its own dead in the afternoon.

  In addition to Candasa-the clown Candle-four others of Whitey’s family had died the previous night. The man Candasa tried so hard to save had been Kip, the youngest of them all. Cephas did not believe he had ever spoken to the boy.

  Micha and Green Beth, two other clowns, died when they tried to roll the b
urning roof back onto its scrollworks. One more of Whitey’s family lay in a cool cave offered by Elder Lin, swaddled in soft bandages and driving a hard bargain with the Lord of the Dead. This was his wife, Melda, who took a minotaur’s axe and rushed into the burning fall of the southernmost canvas wall when it settled over the stone kraal where her oxen were stabled. She led every team free before she collapsed.

  Now the troupe waited on word of Tobin and Mattias, who had disappeared into the spires before dawn. Trill was tied down, her efforts to take flight pathetic but dangerous to any who came near, so the goliath volunteered to accompany the old man in her stead.

  From the fire, the efforts of Cephas and the twins, and his arrows, Mattias counted eleven dead minotaurs. Down on the road, where Trill descended on the attackers like an angel of death, the roustabouts found the corpses of twelve more, along with the lances and javelins they had used to poison the wyvern.

  “Twenty-five,” Corvus told his old friend. “El Pajabbar always number twenty-five.”

  Mattias nodded, signaled Tobin, and faded away, silent on his canes.

  Escorted by Elder Lin, Cephas and the twins arrived at the wagons as they were leaving.

  “I should go with them,” Cephas said.

  “They should not go,” said the Elder.

  Corvus shook his head, though it was unclear to which of them he was responding. “All the decisions are being made elsewhere,” he said, as if to himself. “That has to change.”

  Sword in hand, Ariella Kulmina appeared in the air above the lowered facade of a circus wagon. Smoke rose in the near distance, turning the first rays of dawn a red that bathed the spires around her in a light the color of blood.

  No living thing stirred.

  The silver-skinned woman floated to the ground, holding her blade in a high guard position, and sent out her awareness, wary of enemies concealed by magic.

  The enemy that found her did not strike from concealment.

  Unbelievably fast, an earthsouled fighter in the regalia of a gladiator sprang from between two wagons, spinning an enormous double-headed flail as easily as a child wielding a sling. The swordmage had been told the genasi of the village were pacifists, but she had stepped through the WeavePasha’s teleportation portal with defenses raised nonetheless.