Sandstorm (single books)

by Christopher Rowe

  Corvus could not imagine Almraiven without slaves. He thought it likely that the WeavePasha, a man known to have bested a Duke of Hell in single combat, would see his reign ended not because he provoked the ire of enemies without, but because he held a radical opinion that his subjects within would never tolerate.

  “Almraiven without slaves,” Corvus mused again, this time whispering. There were none in the fetid alleyway to hear the revolutionary idea. Through the gloom, Corvus could just make out the trench dug at the base of a sagging brick wall that was no doubt older than some gods. A familiar, foul smell floated up from the trench, confirming for the kenku that he had not forgotten the way. Steps were cut into the jumble of old stones that lay beneath the streetscape, remnants of past Almraivens.

  A thin line of light appeared below, as a poorly hung door was forced open long enough for a figure to dump a bucket of something mostly liquid at the bottom of the steps.

  Corvus put thoughts of the WeavePasha’s mad dreams out of mind. No slaves in Almraiven-who would drink at T’Emma’s?

  T’Emma was a gnoll who had managed the minor miracle of growing to adulthood as a runt among those fierce, jackal-headed folk. Corvus had never met a more foul-tempered or sharp-tongued woman. Neither had he ever seen her anywhere but lounging behind the length of a broken ship’s mast that served as her bar. How the mast was brought to the dugout basement tavern was a minor mystery compared to how such a tavern, owned by a gnoll and serving a clientele of slaves, came into existence in the first place. But exist it did, and it had for thirty years that Corvus could bear witness to.

  The gnoll woman did not acknowledge him even after he laid his heavy purse on the stained wood. As usual, she was interested in speaking only to herself.

  “There’s that kenku again. He’ll want to know things that are none of his business. He’ll have a lot of coin.”

  Corvus said, “I seek word of any agents of the djinn of Calimport in the city.”

  “He didn’t even order a drink,” said the taverner. “Every time, he just starts right in like he don’t know he has to order a drink.”

  “Yes,” said Corvus. “He always puts it off as long as possible, because he knows that once he orders it, he’ll also be expected to drink it.” He waved a hand at the barrel behind T’Emma.

  “Look at that beak,” she said, setting down the cup. “Look at them funny eyes.”

  Corvus said, “Look who’s talking,” and threw back the drink.

  If anything, the brew was a little better than he remembered. His vision seemed unaffected by the first draft.

  “Agents of Calimport,” he said again, “in the city.”

  “There he goes. It’s like he gets something caught back in that beak and just has to worry at it and worry at it until it goes down. Or comes back up.”

  “And as you said,” Corvus continued, “I have a lot of coin.”

  T’Emma bared her fangs, their dingy brown revealing the inadequacies of her diet. She did not intend the gesture to show ferocity. T’Emma revealed her ferocity through her words. “I remember one time I took his gold, then sent him down the wrong alley in Caravan Ward.”

  Corvus ran a talon along a wide scar on his shoulder, hidden beneath feathers and leather. “I remember that time, too. It’s how I can tell when rain is coming.”

  “That time, he gave out that he meant to rob a man bringing girls down from the Banites in the Ithal Pass. But he was just looking to kill one of the girls.”

  Corvus signaled for another drink. “She wasn’t a girl; she was a forty-year-old adept of the Redeemer’s Guild, secreted in the coffles by the Banites and disguised by their rituals to appeal to the tastes of a client of mine. It was his coin you took, by the way.”

  “Priests start fighting, the wise go to ground. But there was that big beak, poking in. Lots of priests died around that time. Ugly deaths for ugly men.”

  Cephas drank, and the old familiar haze misted up in his peripheral vision. “I didn’t get paid, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Banites stopped running girls down the pass, at least. ’Cause of them Janessar picking up their raids out of the Alimir Mountains.”

  This was what had taken Corvus years to puzzle out. The slave population of Almraiven lived under a somewhat lighter yoke than many others. They had enough freedom of movement that they formed communities. They managed to keep familial relations active even when kin were sold apart, and they maintained a culture coherent enough to support a shadow economy-an economy where the coins were struck from information, not the Weave Pasha’s gold.

  The chief exports were rumors, the principal trading partners were the Janessar abolitionists who attacked the slave trade all over the South, and the high minister of trade was a runt of a gnoll woman who never left a dugout dockside tavern.

  T’Emma was the principal agent of the Janessar within Almraiven. He realized this when he noticed that her self-directed growls only aided his activities when the deaths of slavers were involved, or, usually coincidentally, the possibility of escape for slaves. She was an invaluable source of information, when it served her cause.

  Or could be made to believe it would.

  “These agents seek a man under my protection. A man I’ve brought to the WeavePasha.”

  The taverner’s laugh sent Corvus back to terrifying night runs across the plains of his youth, the desperate efforts to avoid hunting packs unleashed by his teachers. When her barking changed to a cough and the cough yielded a yellow bolus spit on the bar, T’Emma said, “Oh, listen at him talk. Fine friends in high places he’s got.”

  Corvus turned his cup upside down over the woman’s spittle. He slid his purse next to it. “The WeavePasha believes this man to be the son of Marod el Arhapan.”

  “That’s an evil mouth. Naming such names in the company of a lady.”

  “He wishes to shape this man into a blade, and set it against the throat of the master of games.”

  “Thinks a person is something to be honed and used up and thrown away.” There was a shift in the gnoll’s timbre, and Corvus realized with a start that, for once, T’Emma really was talking only to herself. “That’s what they all think.”

  Corvus tapped his claw on the bar next to the leather pouch. “If there are agents of Calimport in the city, they will learn of this man and warn their master. They will kill him, and the Games will go on.”

  “Listen to him. Like he thinks the Games would cease with a splash of el Arhapan blood. Like he knows who any masters are.”

  Corvus wondered if he should try another tack. Usually, she would have sent him on his way by this point, whether she offered hindrance or aid. She reached out with her grizzled paw and swept the pouch beneath the bar.

  “He probably thinks those firesouled Akanulans serve only one master. As if he ever did.”

  Corvus knew better than to thank her. He left without another word.

  Corvus hurried across the city, cursing himself for having discounted Ariella’s mention of members of the Firestorm Cabal in Almraiven as unimportant.

  These firesouled-efreeti-kin, some called them-must have some unlikely connection with the djinn-dominated Emirate of Calimport. The genasi of the South were almost universally declared for either Air or Fire, carrying on a war begun on another world so long ago that the immortals who waged it had forgotten its origins. Calim and Memnon, founders of the cities that still bore their names, blasted the lands they found on Faerun down to rubble, then blasted the rubble down to sand.

  Only the so-called high magic of the elves put a temporary halt to the devastating war. The elves imprisoned the djinni and efreeti nobles in a pretty crystal and told themselves it would last forever-this, in a world where even the gods didn’t believe in eternity.

  Above, according to the priests, the gods donned new masks or traded old ones, reshuffling their pecking order like understudies in a mummers troupe on a night when the star takes ill. Below, according to the histori
ans, the common folk of the Realms did the only thing they could, the only thing they ever did. They dealt with the consequences as best as they were able.

  One consequence came in the deep desert of Calimshan, in a place called the Teshyllal Wastes: the breaking of a crystal. Whether the Spellplague was the means of that shattering or it simply presented the opportunity for some unknown force, Calim and Memnon made the only use of their newfound freedom their alien minds could imagine. As they had seven thousand years before-and as some believed they always had-they made war.

  Corvus read once that in the final years of the last human caliphate of Calimport, the city’s population approached two million people. The historian could only estimate, of course, because the Calimien kept slaves, but they did not count them.

  Corvus had never visited Calimport, but neither was he the only spy in the South. The governments of the Sword Coast generally agreed that the current population of the windsouled-held city was around sixty thousand.

  In the scant decades of the renewed conflict, of the Second Era of Skyfire, or Calim’s Second Rule, or Memnon’s Blessed Return, or whatever name was used, well over twenty-five times that number perished in one city alone. Calimport had been the largest city the natural world had ever seen. Now, it must be the most haunted.

  Corvus considered all this as he made his way back to the WeavePasha’s palace. Allies of the Memnonar, the faction that counted that unimaginable loss of life as a victory, were now spying on behalf of Calimport’s rulers?

  The kenku clicked his tongue. Well, that was it, wasn’t it? These northern genasi from Akanul considered their cousins in the Emirates to be barbarians. The Akanulans kept no slaves and divided the rulership of the nation, even though their people, like the genasi of Calimport, were mostly windsouled. Indeed, many Akanulans were mutable, shifting from manifestation to manifestation, something considered abhorrent by the bloodline-obsessed followers of Calim and Memnon.

  Thinking of T’Emma’s last words, he could only guess that the motivations of these cabalists must be as tangled as his own.

  The blue light fell on Corvus when he was forty paces from the WeavePasha’s palace. Its walls loomed above the surrounding rooftops, blocking the stars in the eastern sky.

  The stars in the western sky were blocked by the blue glow of a djinni’s endless whirlwind.

  Corvus drew his short sword, even knowing it was useless against the floating giant who descended upon him.

  “Shahrokh,” Corvus said, “the WeavePasha’s wards will already have sounded. Best flee before he boils you down to nothing.” Corvus backed against the alley wall and wondered if he dare draw his shield from the portal concealed in his breast feathers.

  The djinni vizar, managing an expression combining imperiousness and boredom, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. Pain blossomed in Corvus’s head, as if an ice pick had been driven through one eye. He wretched and fell to his knees.

  “The human’s … competence … is known. As are his motivations. To face me out here in his beloved city would be to bring it down around him, even if he managed to destroy me in the process. But do not worry, spy. If alarms are ringing within el Jhotos’s cursed palace, they warn him of nothing more than a sending. Only my semblance is polluted by this human-fouled air. My essence soars above Calimport.”

  “What do you want?” gasped Corvus.

  The djinni lord laughed. “As I have told you before, you are incapable of understanding the answer to that question. What you wish to know is why I am here, why I suffer your presence, even remotely.”

  The invisible spike withdrew from Corvus’s eye, but an all-too-visible threat replaced it. Corvus had not realized he had dropped his sword until it floated up from the ground.

  “It amuses me to offer a warning. You and your companions present an unexpected level of … martial efficacy. The standing membership of El Pajabbar has been completely wiped out just once before in its history, and Memnon the Hunter himself took the field that day. The remaining yikaria in Calimport are on the edge of open rebellion, and may have to be put down.

  “Circumstances have changed. Should the WeavePasha enspell the pasha of games’s heir and send him as an assassin, the heir will be put down. Return Marod yn Marod to us untampered with.”

  Corvus found that he could not move. The sword’s point traced the fine lines of the guild symbol carved into his beak, its presence invisible to most and its meaning unknowable to even the few who might detect it. How is he doing this? the kenku wondered.

  “I will try,” said Corvus, “but that is all I can do. I have no influence over the WeavePasha.”

  With a gesture, the djinni sent the short sword plunging deep into the flesh of Corvus’s thigh. Still held immobile, the kenku could not even fall.

  “You risk your life to speak, and then choose an obvious lie? Your influence on el Jhotos is known.”

  The weakness he felt spreading throughout his lower body could not be attributed to any special quality of the blade beyond its sharpness. Corvus coated his weapons only with poisons he was immune to. The djinni must have opened a vein.

  “I will try,” said Corvus again. “This is all I can promise.”

  “Corvus Nightfeather works best when he is offered unusual incentives,” said Shahrokh. “This is known. Return the heir. Meet your other, more pressing obligation to me. Do this and earn a favor you will count a blessing. When the pasha of games sends the goliath and the halfling woman into the arena, I will ensure they do not face each other.”

  Shahrokh’s disappearance was instantaneous and absolute. Without the blue glow, the alley was pitch dark.

  But I can see in the dark, thought Corvus, not realizing it was an interior blackness washing over him. Why can’t I see in the dark?

  Chapter Eleven

  The pasha who would be numbered among the elect demands the loyalty of the strong, and holds it only for himself. Likewise, it is only to himself that the pasha tenders loyalty.

  — Erlo Elraedan, The Blood-Drenched Throne, Printed and Bound at Calimport

  The Year of Ocean’s Wrath (1212 DR)

  Cephas sat, legs crossed, at the center of a glade of towering trees. The closely trimmed lawn he rested on was on the opposite side of the great circular garden from the cluster of tents.

  Ariella faced him, her legs also crossed. Their knees had to touch because, she said, they must be close enough to join hands. Before they found this secluded spot, she returned to her tent and changed into the same loose-fitting clothes Cephas wore, though she still had her sword. The weapon lay to one side, its tooled scabbard and belt draped over the satchels holding Cephas’s piecemeal armor and double flail.

  She told him to sit quietly and seek a place of peace within himself that matched the peace without. He looked around, and said, “I have not seen trees like these before, though there were only a few different kinds on the highland plains in Tethyr. There were none at all in the canyon, or on the Spires of Mir.”

  Ariella angled her head up at the rugged bark and silver-backed brown leaves in the canopy high overhead. “They’re weirwoods, I think, though I’ve never seen one, either. Said to be rare. But perhaps one of the spires we saw in Argentor was once of a kind with these, before they all changed to stone. Do you find talking about trees brings you to a peaceful state, Cephas?”

  He grinned. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked about trees at all. Unless Grinta the Pike’s advice on the killing of treants counts, though her technique is not peaceful.”

  When Ariella laughed, he remembered that her voice had reminded him of bells the first time he heard it-bells on a weapon harness. Perhaps I don’t know what an inner place of peace is, he thought.

  “You told me you knew thirty-one ways to block a morning star,” she said. “My own fighting style is less formalized than the ways you were taught, I think. But I wonder if any of those ways is a block of the returning swing. Did you ever fall before a blow, then strike
while you opponent was extended, so you needed to defend only against the weaker backhand strike?”

  Cephas answered, “The Fluttering Leaf style. I’m no master of it, but I know it. It is better suited for …” He stumbled, not wanting to offend her. “For more delicate fighters than I.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “By which you mean weaker. I am not as strong as you, Cephas Earthsouled, but strength does not win every battle.”

  Cephas pictured bullheaded axemen and spinning silver blades. “I know. I’ve seen Shan and Cynda fight,” he said.

  “Just so. Though I would not look to them to learn peace of mind. The Fluttering Leaf, now, when a practitioner of that art accepts the opening strike, what does he do?”

  A thousand days of drills came to mind. “Well, nothing. The blow falls, and you fall before it. You hold no stance; you raise no warding shield. It passes over you.”

  “You need to take every thought that comes to you and fall before it. Anything that rises up, let it pass by. Even the energy you call the earth-force. Let that flow away. To achieve a Second Soul, a windsoul, you must empty the one you already possess.”

  Cephas tried. The first thing he realized was that trying to think of nothing yielded the opposite of the desired effect. A floodgate of memories, worries, idle thoughts, and unfocused observations was opened by his effort. Her voice sounded like bells.

  “I grow more peaceful inside when you’re talking, Ariella.”

  She smiled. “I will tell you, then,” she said, “that I myself express no other soul than the wind. I have never felt a need to listen for anything other than its call.”

  Cephas said, “But you think you can teach me this trick?”

  “It is not a trick, Cephas. It’s a discipline, like your gladiatorial fighting styles or my sword spells. I can show you how to open yourself to the wind, because I have heard the wind in you.”

  Cephas found that other thoughts ceased to press on him.

  “Those genasi who take on more than one soul are one of the great proofs that we are all one people, despite the differences in our abilities and appearances,” she said.