He stopped when he saw the end of the staff swing around. Tobin held it across both shoulders like the burden staves the kitchen slaves of Jazeerijah used to haul two pails of water at once. Cynda reached out with one hand as she fell, caught the staff, and swung in a circle all the way around in a move that ended with her standing easily atop the narrow pole, hands in her pockets.
The crowd laughed and whistled. With a start, Cephas realized this was the first night he’d ever heard cheering that didn’t include calls for blood.
Cynda bowed, bending nearly double but maintaining her balance atop the staff, which Tobin kept still and solid as rock. She grasped the wood between her feet and brought her legs up into the air until she attained a position exactly opposite that from which she started. Then, in a display of steadiness and strength that Cephas would never have expected from so small a woman, she lifted one hand and held it out to her side, holding her whole weight above her as she scissored her legs back and forth in an elegant dance in the air.
For a moment, it seemed that her weight was too much for that single arm, because Cynda bent her elbow, but it became clear the collapse was by design. Her long locks of chestnut hair spilled around her face as she brought her lips close enough to the wood to give it a cheeky kiss, before she extended her arm straight again with sufficient strength to launch clear of the makeshift “aerialist” stage. Tobin must have anticipated the move, because he angled the staff back down, and when the halfling woman completed the arc of her last leap, she landed on the narrow ramp, ending her performance in a relaxed, languorous pose, reclining against the staff, legs crossed before her as if she simply warmed her toes by the fire.
Cephas joined the thunderous applause that the other members of the circus offered Cynda. The halfling acknowledged them all with a gesture, then turned to offer her own applause to Tobin, who waved her and the others off. “I only held a stick; it is nothing.”
“It was a great display of strength, my friend,” said Corvus, who joined them. Shan was nowhere to be seen, her place at the kenku’s side taken by the old man, Mattias. “Done with just the right amount of flair and finesse, as ever.” Corvus turned to Cephas.
“Tobin is our circus strongman. He is expert at making the audience believe that the things that are easy for him are difficult, and that the things that are difficult for him are easy. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of all our roles.”
Cephas appreciated the goliath’s extraordinary strength, especially after having faced him on the canvas, but asked, “Is a strongman a sort of clown?”
Tobin opened his mouth to speak, but Corvus held up a single taloned finger that silenced him. Even in his relaxed state, Cephas noticed that all the people of the circus grew quiet when the kenku raised his hand.
“Why yes, in fact,” said Corvus. “Just as Tobin’s performance offered us an example describing what all of us do, that word, ‘clown’—and oh, it’s an old one, Cephas, as old as any story Azad yi Calimport ever read—that word describes what most of us are. It’s a supple word. Though what Tobin meant when he told you he was a clown means something very particular. Something, alas, that he has yet to find the opportunity to master, given the demands of the road.”
Tobin blushed, looking anywhere but at Cephas. A kind-faced man, thin and wiry, stood and thumped Tobin on the back. “Here now, boss,” he said, “you know we’ve taken the big fellow as our ’prentice. And we all heard you tell him he could leave off bending steel and juggling village elders if he could find his own replacement.”
This time Tobin did speak, even though he made an unconvincing attempt at a whisper. “Quiet now, Whitey,” he said. “Please?”
Every eye turned to Cephas. Mattias spoke, looking at Cephas but directing his question to the kenku ringmaster. “You’ll try to claim you didn’t have this in mind, I suppose?”
Corvus appraised Cephas the same way that Cephas often did his opponents, measuring width of shoulder and deepness of chest, trying to gauge how hard the coming blows would fall. “I did not,” Corvus said to Mattias. “This is just another happy coincidence. Another wonder to delight all those good folk whose delight earns us our bread and wine.”
Mattias appeared unconvinced, but it was only Cephas who saw the old man’s expression, because everyone else gathered around Tobin and talked at once. They were congratulating the goliath on his new role, and the huge man was so overcome with joy that he began to cry.
Tears of joy; this was yet another new thing in a day full of them. And even though his instincts told him it was too soon to trust these people, there was only one thing to say when Tobin bent down and crushed him in a delighted hug.
“How much,” asked Cephas, “does a village elder weigh?”
Even here, alone and hidden from the view of any possible observers by far stronger shields than just the closed shutters of his wagon, Corvus took care to make it appear that he plucked the quill from his own heart feathers. He made a sound—a gasp of pain—and mimed a flinch to indicate the shock of pulling a living feather out by its root. Corvus practiced this little deception even now, this late, when the only people in the camp awake to appreciate the performance were those who had drawn the watch, who knew better than to disturb him, and Trill, whom he knew better than to disturb.
The quill, which he summoned with a mental command from the magical storehouse Mattias called his “nest,” did not come from a kenku, even though Corvus conceded that its oily black color and fanned plume were close enough to fool the inexperienced. Corvus remembered what he’d overheard Tobin tell the genasi while he was taking Shan’s wordless report. “ ‘Circus performers love unsophisticated audiences,’ ” he whispered, and for once he did not bother to use any voice but his own, a clear sign that he was alone.
Like lineage and heritage, sophistication and experience were close enough to the same thing for the purposes Corvus had for the young earthsouled genasi. Or the lad’s lack of them was, at any rate.
As he cut his own pen, so, too, had Corvus ground and formulated his own ink. The glass bottle he stored it in held no special distinction he knew of, beyond being perhaps two thousand years old and a shade of blue Corvus found pleasing; however, the ink’s ingredients would have earned him a small fortune from more than one wizard or ritualcaster—not to mention a life’s sentence or a headsman’s axe from any number of governments, depending on local laws.
He picked up the pen and dipped it into the ink. Opening his prized book to a certain page, he began scribing words that disappeared as soon as they were written.
Exalted Pasha, he wrote, your humble servant makes, herewith, a report on the progress of our shared venture.…
The words, inked in blood and powdered metals, faded. Their meaning did not. Corvus’s pen moved, and his message took flight, launching into the night sky of a shadowy mirror world of magic. Seeking purchase, the words were drawn to a page twin to the one that cast them away.
Drawn to a page far to the south.
The message flew away from the shadow of the circus, where only their writer was distinct among the half-seen forms of his companions. The wagons, in the real world, were circled in the shadow of the Omlarandins; here, the mountains did not cast shadows, but were shadows. Creatures of fell magic lairing in the peaks caught the scent of mortal sorcery, but the message flew too fast for their interest to grow into threats.
South and south, the message flew. Down the long Ithal Pass, where analogues of worldly human churches showed themselves as gigantic black hands radiating the fear and power of their inhabitants, servants of the Black God Bane. The Banites, mortal and immortal alike, let the message pass unmolested.
In the remnants of the Forest of Mir, a dimly lit woodland stretching between spires of stone to its north and a petrified swamp to its south, a three-horned dragon stirred but did not rouse from his century-long sleep for the scant temptations offered by communications between tiny souls who walked on two le
gs.
The Alimir Mountains were higher and sharper than the peaks in the North, concealing alien threats. The message arced downward, gaining in speed as it ended the flight that had taken only the time it took to scratch out the words.
In the last human city of what was once the oldest human nation on the continent, Corvus’s words marched across a sheet of parchment stretched between clamps fashioned of magical fire. As the brief passage revealed itself, the flames emitted an invisible stream of smoke that smelled first of cedar, then of sandalwood.
A tall, powerfully built man stopped speaking when the scent drifted across his richly appointed receiving room. He stood up from the throne where he rested, and with a sweep of his hand, indicated that the three genasi attending him should do likewise.
Two men, with fire dancing about their heads and skins colored gold, and one woman, a silver-skinned beauty who did not merely stand but flew up from her couch, exchanged wary glances as they followed their host. The WeavePasha of Almraiven was not only the leader of his people, but he was also the Caleph Arcane of the oldest guild of wizards in the world. The various objects that crowded his private rooms bore the appearance of works of art, mechanical apparatuses, and decorative plants. The two firesouled men and the windsouled woman knew that every item concealed deadly magic. It was best to follow the WeavePasha’s steps exactly.
The place he led them was not so impressive. The older of the two firesouled, a wizard of no small power, sniffed. “You interrupt our discussions to consult a toy, Acham el Jhotos?”
If the WeavePasha recognized the insult implicit in the man’s use of his given name, he gave no sign. The younger firesouled smirked at this weakness, but the silver woman hanging a few inches above the floor gave a slight shake of her head at his misreading. This human ruler would not be drawn out by the petty games of her fellows.
“I have interrupted our discussions, child, to receive a message of great import to all of us,” the WeavePasha said, and though the firesouled magician bristled, he dared not protest, because the WeavePasha had earned his powers over a very long time.
The wizard passed a hand before the parchment and what was written there disappeared, the ink of the letters flowing in a liquid stream down the page, into a shallow bowl of jade set below.
“My spy has found the lost heir of Calimport.”
In his wagon, Corvus watched the last word fade from the page that was simultaneously bound in his journey book and in a workbook of the WeavePasha of Almraiven.
Then he turned to another page. Taking up his quill again, he penned a very similar message, meant for a very different reader.
Knowledge of the sword is useless
without knowledge of the world.
—“The First Trader’s Unsalable Wares”
The Founding Stories of Calimshan
AT DAWN, CEPHAS STOOD ON THE DRIVER’S BOARD OF a wagon, watching Corvus and a heavyset woman called Wagonmistress Melda scratch converging lines in the dirt with silver rods. Mattias waited next to the ringmaster’s wagon and explained the ritual.
“See how the road they draw recedes into the distance where all the lines come together? That’s a draftsman’s trick, and the wise know there’s as much magic in it as in any of Corvus’s toys and chants.”
Cephas nodded. Jazeerijah possessed little in the way of art, beyond the decorative flourishes worked into the deadlier armaments and most effective pieces of armor. He glanced down at the satchels stowed below the driver’s board, gifts from Tobin. They held the flail and piecemeal scale he’d brought with him out of captivity.
“Now Melda is pouring trails of residuum from their sketched road on the ground before her team. They always take the lead.” The woman retreated from the network of lines Corvus muttered over, walking backward and letting a stream of glittering dust flow from a leather pouch in her hands. When she reached a pair of oxen, placidly chewing their cud in the traces of a wagon plainer than most of the others, she straightened and pulled the drawstring of the pouch tight.
“What she’s got in her pouch there might be worth as much as what you’re so anxious to keep hidden away beneath Corvus’s bench,” said Mattias. He no longer watched the ritual, looking at Cephas. “Nobody here is going to take those pretties from you, Cephas.”
Cephas, flustered, focused on Corvus. At first, nothing happened as the kenku finished whatever magic he was working. But then the weeds in front of Melda’s team of oxen flattened. More than that, twin paths spread out before the imperturbable beasts, parallel to each other and just broad enough for the oxen to easily walk along. Boulders shifted and frost-heaved ground smoothed itself, as a new road led away from the more mundane track they camped beside.
The trade road led north and south. The ritual-wrought trail led west, away from the sunrise across a highland plain still cloaked in night.
The wagon train moved slowly, even with the benefit of the trail magically breaking before them. Corvus explained, “It just smoothes out the rough bits so we’re less likely to break a wheel or, worse, lose one of the oxen or horses to a broken leg. I don’t know the trick of grading real roads with spellwork.”
“It seems a great work to me,” Cephas said.
Corvus laughed. “Not so great. And temporary. This path closes behind us just as it opens before us. In fact, whoever is in the last wagon might be bushwhacking if they’ve fallen behind.”
Cephas thought that unlikely. The atmosphere among the members of the circus was as far removed from the grimness of Shaneerah’s training grounds as he could imagine, but the troop was no less disciplined. Corvus, though he never touched the reins, kept his wagon a uniform distance from the one in front of them, and when the trail swept around a hill or copse more easily avoided than navigated, Cephas could see that the same precision held true all up and down the line. The wagon train moved like a highly skilled team of gladiators tasked to fight a common foe.
The common foe, in this case, was the long distance that lay between them and a place called Argentor, and Corvus’s desire that they make the journey with as much haste and as much secrecy as two such conflicting demands allowed.
The second requirement, secrecy, kept Trill in her wagon. Mattias Farseer’s companion had her own place in the train, a wagon pulled by a double pair of oxen that wore feedbags over their noses stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs, and had blinders on their eyes. Cephas was surprised that the ranger would agree to have the wyvern confined in the wheeled cage he drove, but it soon became apparent that the bars of the wagon were not what they seemed. More than once, when he stood up on the seat of Corvus’s wagon to get a better view of the plain around him, Cephas spotted Trill’s wings spreading out through the bars or, with her tail twitching back and forth behind, extending out from the solid rear wall of the wagon, causing some small amount of trouble for the driver of the team behind.
“It’s illusory,” Corvus said, “and a constant source of grief. You’re right that Mattias wouldn’t allow her to be caged, even if she would consent to it. But there aren’t many people in this wide world who would permit us to transport an unbound wyvern through their lands. Not even the elves back where Mattias and Trill came from.”
“Elves,” said Cephas, thinking of Grinta, his only previous source of information about the lands and peoples of Faerûn. “According to Grinta the orc, they are the apostate get of the Demon Lord Corellon and the Mother of All Squirrels. They cower behind trees and shoot arrows. Swing at their knees.”
Corvus made a choking noise. “That’s … one point of view, to be sure,” he said. “I wish I’d known that the Calishites had such a sage of the free peoples as your Grinta secreted away in that canyon. I would have brought her out along with you.”
The thought of Grinta left behind on Jazeerijah stung. Cephas had noticed that Corvus managed to find a way to deflect the question every time he’d asked so far, but he tried again. “Why did you bring me out?”
And as he ha
d every time before, Corvus found a way to lead Cephas to another subject. “And yet this Grinta never told you about you, about the genasi and all their secrets of earth and fire and water. Yours is a strange race, Cephas, and there are few who could tell their tale with authority. Perhaps none with as much authority as the people we go to perform for next.”
Cephas seized on this new information. “The people in Argentor know about genasi?” he asked.
Corvus said, “My friend, the people in Argentor are genasi. Earthsouled, all of them. A whole village of people just like you.”
Their second night on the plain, Cephas sat atop the wagon, watching the circus pitch camp.
“I should help,” he told Corvus, who puttered back in the recesses of the wagon. “I’ve listened to the earth for days now. I can keep from getting lost in it, I’m sure.”
Corvus stuck his long beak through the beaded curtain that concealed his wagon’s interior. “We’ll make Argentor in three more nights, Cephas. The people there will be able to tell you how to control what you hear. And other things. Things you can do.”
“I understand,” said Cephas. “But look at Tobin and Whitey setting up that cursed stage for me to rest on like the pasha of Manshaka. I do not want to … stand out.”
Corvus came outside. He waved away Cephas’s concerns. “ ‘The pasha of Manshaka,’ you said.” The kenku’s voice was subdued. “What do you know of that place?”
Cephas shook his head. “It is just a place in the stories, some of them. The man who ruled there was as fat as a gelded boar and went about the city on a litter carried by four just men. One of the bearers fell in love with the pasha’s daughter, and she disguised herself as a courtesan so she could smuggle a dagger of stone into the slave pens. He used this to free all the righteous among the gladiators of the Arenas of Blood.”
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