Sandstorm

by Christopher Rowe

  “Marod,” said the djinni, leaning down to look the windsouled in the eye, “what have you done?”

  The master of games turned on his heel. “Nothing to jostle the strands in your delicate web, Shahrokh. The boy’s not even in Almraiven yet. Nowhere close, in fact. Our spy is taking him to a village of earthsouled in the Spires of Mir first, though I cannot for the life of me understand why. But it’s far outside the Almraivenar’s sphere of influence and he’ll have no reason to suspect my hand in anything. I sent El Pajabbar—they were supposed to be the personal guard of the pasha’s eldest son under the human caliphs, anyway. See? Symmetry. Like their horns.”

  Shahrokh settled down, closer to the ground, directing the currents of his lower body to flow so that he studied the pasha’s face eye to eye, from an even height. The windsouled did not flinch from his gaze, even when the djinni held the stare far longer than most genasi could have withstood.

  At last, the djinni nodded. “I concede that I am impressed, Pasha. The idea is brutal, but not immediately dangerous to our goals.”

  It might even work, Shahrokh thought.

  Long leagues south and east of the circus’s camp, other bonfires lit the cloudless night. In a shallow dell outside the fortified abbey and village of Akkabal, a ring of fires burned in stone bowls, spitting and popping when the acolytes tending them threw in handfuls of foul-smelling herbs.

  One side of the dell was a natural wall of the local bedrock, an outcropping of which had been crudely hacked into a throne bearing the semblance of a huge hand. A thin man, hooded and masked, occupied the throne, flanked by a pair of underpriests.

  The three priests of Bane watched the large circle of glyphs that covered most of the floor in the natural amphitheater. Three dozen crossbowmen were positioned on the lip of the dell, evenly interspersed among the acolytes at the watchfires.

  One of the underpriests, a woman born in the Ithal Pass and a student of the night sky, took another look up through the flickering red light and black smoke of the fires.

  “Late!” she said.

  Her colleague, standing on the other side of their superior, spat. “If they were late the last time you checked the stars, Sister Arrovar, further observation will not find the circumstances changed.”

  He spoke in the barbarous accents of the cold North, and this only heightened his pretension in being the only one of the three Dreadmasters to trek out from the abbey dressed in full ceremonial garb.

  Motionless on the rocky throne, the Vigilant Talon Arianus idly watched the bickering of his two underlings. He encouraged their rivalry as a way of keeping their daggers from his own back, and as a distraction from the daily banalities involved in maintaining the détente between his master’s armed manor and the forces arrayed against them across the contested border in Tethyr. Any distraction from reading another chiding diplomatic communiqué from the Duke of Suretmarch was welcome, even one as mysterious as this unprecedented use of the abbey’s largest teleportation circle by allies unaffiliated with the Church of Bane. But his instructions from his superiors in Mintar were clear.

  More sensitive to the arcane energies involved in teleportation than either of the underpriests, Arianus sensed eldritch keys seeking the locks of the symbols of the circle, even while the two of them continued to hiss and curse each other. The magic held an elemental tang, quite unlike the unholy energies that usually activated the gate. He wistfully imagined a life that would allow him the time to study such phenomena—and a surge of anger boiled out of his black heart. The pair of idiots flanking him distracted him from even a cursory examination with their pointless games. He cleared his throat.

  The underpriests quieted. The woman’s breath grew shallow, and the man actually staggered in fear.

  Somewhat gratified by the reaction, Arianus directed their attention to the center of the circle, where a hazy image appeared. Even though the nature of the ritual bent any light streaming through the portal in odd ways that washed out colors and softened details, it was clear that the circle at the other side of the magical connection was drawn in a far more richly appointed space than this stark dell.

  The Vigilant Talon remembered the words that appeared in his mind the previous night, the message laced with just enough pain that he would know how important his master deemed it. “An old debt comes due. The djinnspawn holding Calim’s marker sends those of the horns through Foxx’s gate at tomorrow’s ninth bell. A scroll follows.”

  That scroll, delivered at highsun by a messenger who had ridden two horses to death in his haste to deliver it, rested in the Talon’s sleeve. He knew who El Pajabbar were by reputation, but was grateful nonetheless for the carefully worded warnings the message contained. Until the last few moments, he had considered sharing those warnings with his underpriests.

  The first heavily armored figures began leaping through the portal. An unnecessary flourish, as the linked gates allowed those one hundred and thirty leagues to be crossed with a simple step. But the Calimien were nothing if not excessive.

  The Dark Brother at his left hand sputtered. “We allow prancing beasts to profane our Black Lord’s holy ground now, Talon?”

  More and more bullheaded warriors came through the gate, bellowing and brandishing their halberds, singing some brutish marching song and lining up under the direction of the largest minotaur of all, a female whose horns were ground to razor points and whose flaring nostrils were pierced with heavy gold rings.

  Arianus decided then that of the two, he disliked Sister Arrovar marginally less. “It does seem a bit excessive,” he said to the Dark Brother. “That woman there must be their sergeant—their musar—why don’t you go ask her to be more respectful?”

  The underpriest bowed to Arianus, spared a sneer for his rival, and marched stiffly across the dell. As he approached the minotaurs, the last of their number emerged through the portal, and Arianus felt the odd magics that held it open at its other end die away.

  The musar caught sight of the underpriest and strode forward as if to greet him. But the woman lowered her head and charged when the man raised his hand, calling, “See here!” With a roar, she pressed her gauntleted fists into the rocky soil, and, using the coiled strength of all four of her limbs, she sprang at the dark priest.

  The man’s black lacquered ring mail was heavy and costly, but there was more of the ornamentor’s art in its making than the armorer’s. The minotaur’s horn slid through the expensive lacquer and cheap steel, and on farther, piercing padded undershirt, then fat and muscle and bone, then steel and lacquer again, as she drove her horn completely through the priest of Bane.

  The musar rose to her full height, roaring, with the lifeless corpse swinging from her gilded rack and blood streaming down her face. With a contemptuous toss of her enormous head, she threw the priest’s body across the dell, where it landed with a crunch.

  Arianus watched the display impassively. At his side, he could feel Sister Arrovar gathering her divine powers, mustering defenses that were formidable, but which he knew would be inadequate if he let things progress any further.

  “El Pajabbar,” he said, putting out a hand to halt her preparations. “The horned ones. Enforcers of the Caleph’s Court, and as deadly a group of fighters as ever stalked the South.”

  Sister Arrovar ceased her gathering of magic, but did not release the energies she had already brought to the surface of her mind. She said, “It is said they treat every ground as a battleground and will not march across it without first spilling blood,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the Vigilant Talon. “I read that somewhere just recently.”

  Whatever words passed between the surviving Banite priests and the monstrous leader of the minotaurs were impossible to hear from the lip of the dell. The only other sounds that remained were the crackling watchfires in their stone bowls and the occasional creak of leather against steel when one of the temple guards shifted his weight. Even the sounds of the few night-thriving insects active thi
s early in the year died away with the waves of sorcery that rolled out of the natural depression.

  The minotaur bellowed at her troops, and they gathered in a semblance of order. She did not pause for parting words with the Banites, instead trotting away from the priests, past her followers, and up the shallow western slope of the dell. The other two dozen minotaurs fell in behind their leader, disappearing into the night.

  The robed acolytes doused the watchfires, clearing the space, and the remaining priests made no delay in leaving. The tentative song of the insects in the tall grasses above the dell returned. On the westward slope of the dell, where the grass was trampled by the departed minotaurs, there was movement.

  A screen woven of weeds and dusted with soil slowly pulled back. First Shan, then Cynda, took long, careful looks at their surroundings.

  Cynda’s face bore a grimace, and her sister saw that her left arm hung at a painful angle. In the moonless night, the subtleties of their fingertalk would be unreadable, but it was clear that one of the five-hundred-pound brutes had trod on Cynda’s shoulder as it jogged out of the dell. Shan moved to put her hands against her sister’s shoulder so she could wrench the arm back into place, but Cynda stopped her, pressing a finger to her lips.

  It would have to wait. They could not risk the sound of the shoulder popping back into its socket.

  There would have been no accompanying gasp of pain to guard against. Even if she’d had a voice to cry out with, Cynda’s discipline was better than that.

  Shan placed four fingers on the back of her sister’s bare hand and drummed, creating the familiar beat of a horse at full gallop. They would need to find fast mounts to get ahead of the minotaurs, and use all their trailcraft to find the swiftest route. No road led into the Spires of Mir from the Banite holdings, so the halflings and the minotaurs would be racing across unbroken ground.

  Cynda made a careful sweep of their impromptu blind. They would leave no sign they had been there. She moved as quickly as she dared, because the only advantage they possessed was that they, unlike the minotaurs, knew that a race was being run. They knew they must be the first to reach Argentor, the only place the minotaurs could be bound.

  Peace is never a simple choice.

  —“Helpful Janna Seeks a Husband”

  The Founding Stories of Calimshan

  NOW RELEASE!” SHOUTED FLEK.

  At the young earthsouled man’s signal, Cephas let go of the energy that rolled in his gut like the fear of falling. He thought of it as a snatch of melody, notes from the unending song of the earth that he gathered inside himself. As Flek and the other genasi of Argentor had taught him, he directed the pulse of force down through the sole of his foot, timing its flow so that it rushed back into the earth just as he brought his foot down in a crashing stomp.

  The force flowed through the ground around him like ripples from a stone thrown in water. The earth shook, and the section of rocky wall next to Cephas vibrated as it was undermined by the ground crumbling beneath it. The outcropping seemed about to settle back into immobility, but then a cascade of pulverized stone invisible beneath the surface—Cephas could feel the fine differences of density in the ground he’d struck—flowed deeper, seeking solidity. The section of granite teetered and crashed outward, raining a cloud of dust.

  Flek and his two sisters rushed over to Cephas, delighted with his display of skill.

  “Look,” said Flek, examining the opening Cephas widened in the base of the granite spire. “That’s a good doorway. You found the internal fissures instinctively. You are a quick study, Cephas.”

  Marashan, the younger girl, stuck her head in the shallow cave they had spent the morning excavating, stepping between Cephas and her brother to do so and treading on her sister’s foot as she went. “I told Mother this spire was perfect for a dwelling,” she said. “If we’re careful with our strikes, we can expose some crystal deposits and let light stream through. This will make you a fine home, Cephas!”

  Cephas did not respond. The girl had assumed he intended to stay in the village from the moment she first saw him when the circus rolled into Argentor. Luckily, her sister spoke, and he did not have to explain yet again that he had no plans to leave the circus.

  “If exposing the crystal requires you to be careful, Marashan, then we can save ourselves some time if we fetch sacks to collect the dust you’ll make of them first,” said Sonnett. Cephas had yet to determine if the middle child was small for her age or if Marashan was large for hers, and he found telling the sisters apart difficult unless one of them spoke. Good thing, he thought, Marashan rarely stops speaking.

  “At least if I’m here we’ll actually get down to work instead of spending all day planning the work,” Marashan said. The network of golden energy lines across her ruddy face flared.

  “Peace!” said Flek, and passed his open hand before his chest in a sloping arc that curved outward, ending with his palm facing down, parallel with the ground. This was the first word all the genasi of Argentor said when the circus arrived, and it was the word they used most. Sign and syllable, they called their pairing of motion and word, and they used it as a greeting, in departure, as a gentle exclamation, and sometimes, as imprecation. It was only an explicit request when Marashan was present, because other than her endless self-narrated adventures, there was little in village life to disturb the peace.

  “A rare people,” Corvus had said to Cephas before he launched into an extended talk with Elder Lin, leader of the village and mother to Cephas’s new friends.

  Cephas could not help but think of the three as children, even though he had never known the company of children, and Flek, according to Elder Lin’s guess at Cephas’s age, was older than he. Cephas had answered Elder Lin’s questions and let her examine the gold lines on his skin while Corvus watched.

  It was the particular patterns of Cephas’s szuldar that Elder Lin had spent the most time studying. “It will take your eyes a long time to learn, Cephas, but while the lines are unique to every genasi, of all expressions, not just earthsouled, there are strong family resemblances told by them. And the pattern even stays true across expressions, among those of our people who choose to shift their selves.”

  Cephas began to ask the Elder what this meant, but Corvus had interrupted. “Later, later, if you please, lady. The boy has much to learn already, yes?”

  Elder Lin had agreed, and she and Corvus finished making the circus’s arrangements with the village. In return for a day’s rest and the right to refill their water casks from Argentor’s hidden wells, the circus would raise the tent and put on a full performance for the genasi the next night. That deal struck, she had turned Cephas loose with her waiting offspring and closeted herself with Corvus.

  More agreements had needed reaching than just the scheduling of a show, Cephas assumed.

  The first thing he learned from the other earthsouled was that he would never be able to block out the sound of the earthsong. “Why would you want to?” Marashan had asked, incredulous. Their way of living with the constant music—and they stressed it was a way of life—was to welcome it. They suggested he open himself to it, to listen, and more.

  “Sing with it,” said Sonnett, unself-conscious as she took Cephas’s hand, not noticing his darkening cheeks. “Not aloud, necessarily—”

  “Please don’t encourage her to sing!” shouted Marashan.

  “But you may, if you wish. Either way, listen to our Old Mother, feel her stony roots echoed in her song, and find the notes you can harmonize. These are the chimes that are keys, the points where the ley lines of the spinning globe intersect with the szuldar lines of our restless selves, and letting them sound together is how we release the tectonic forces the szuldar keep fettered. It is how we quiet ourselves, and know peace.”

  Marashan tugged at his other hand. “And it’s how we blast holes in stuff. Come on, let’s show him!”

  Flek rolled his eyes and indicated that Cephas should follow his youngest sister
, and soon they were clambering through the loose rubble that marked the western border of the village, beneath the towering spires of rock the genasi called the Sarenstar, the place of deadly teeth. Cephas picked out the common-tongue translation amid Marashan’s chatter, right after she had advised him that everything her sister told him was a word-for-word recitation of one of their mother’s lessons and that she hoped he wasn’t impressed. At last he held up his hands in an effort to slow the tide of the girl’s talk.

  “What? What is that?” Marashan asked, aping the move. “Is that a gladiatorial stance? Are you going to show me some moves?” Elder Lin had been troubled to learn of Cephas’s upbringing and recent past; Sonnett mortified; Flek cautiously interested. Marashan was wildly enthusiastic.

  “No,” said Cephas. “I just have a question about the name you used there, for the spires. The circus folk call those the Spires of Mir, and that is how they are marked on Corvus’s maps. I—I can write that out for you if you like. I have my stylus.”

  Flek looked confused, but he shook his head and quieted his sister. “No need. We know the name. The word we use, ‘Sarenstar,’ isn’t any older than the word ‘Mir.’ When the trees turned, it seemed a better name than the other to carry on from our grandsires. The humans of Calimshan called this the place of sharp teeth because of the fell monsters they believed to dwell in the deepest woods—the ssri Tel’Quessir, great dragons, even older things.”

  Cephas said, “Mattias Farseer told me that this was once a forest, and that there is still a great stretch of woods farther south called the Mir. I know nothing of dragons, though, or of the other monsters you named, ssri …?”

  “Ssri Tel’Quessir,” said Sonnett. “It is what the dark elves call themselves. I hope you never have to learn anything of the drow, Cephas. They are a great challenge to peace.”

  The siblings made the sweeping, open-palmed gesture as one when Sonnett spoke, and Cephas made a clumsy attempt to copy them, eliciting a giggle from Marashan. He thought anything but peaceful thoughts, remembering Grinta’s advice regarding drow: fire, light, open ground.