Sandstorm

by Christopher Rowe

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 Selûne’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 Mattias’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 Faerûn. 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.…”

  Caught up in the narration, Cephas moved his leg perhaps a heartbeat later than he was meant to.

  “But wait,” said Corvus. “What was that? Did any of you sense movement?”

  Marashan’s voice called out from the crowd. “Are you blind? It’s Cephas! He’s lying right there under those bricks!”

  Corvus laughed along with the rest of the crowd, and Cephas took that to mean he would not be given his scripted cue. With considerable effort, he lifted the paving stone lying across his chest and flung it across the ring.

  The kenku’s voice rolled like the drums. “Honored Argentori!” he cried. “Behold! The Wind That Blinds! The Tempest That Scours! Marvel at the feats of the strongest man alive … The Sandstorm!”

  Melda had been married to Whitey the Clown for ten years even before the two of them signed on with Corvus Nightfeather. And she still couldn’t tell which of her many brothers-in-law was which when they wore their makeup. She had no idea who came rushing up to her outside the tent, pointing back to the wagons.

  But she knew the clowning life well enough to know what was part of the act and what was not. She recognized genuine panic and weighted that against her respect for her husband’s family traditions.

  She laid her hand on the clown’s shoulder and said, “Tell me what’s going on or I will tie a knot with your legs that doesn’t require any tricks with big britches.”

  When he spoke, she identified the voice as that of the second-eldest brother, Blue, a man not inclined to excitability. “Horses,” he said, “riding up from the pass, fast.”

  Melda cursed beneath her breath and thought. She said, “Mattias should be back at his pet’s nest. Find him, and then tell Whitey to wipe off the face paint and get into his fancy togs, because I’m betting he’ll be stepping in for Corvus.” She watched Blue go, looked around long enough to find one of the mallets the roustabouts used to drive the tent stakes, and then strode toward the road, damning the locals’ odd philosophy as she went.

  “Any right-thinking village,” she said, “would have a militia.”

  When the figure loomed up out of the dark, a hammer coming off its shoulder, Shan let a silver-tipped dart drop from the sheath in her sleeve into her right hand. A heartbeat before she loosed it, her sister reached up from behind and knocked her toss wide.

  Unquestioning of Cynda’s judgment, Shan knew they had found a friendly face at last. When she brought the blowing pony they rode to a trembling stop, she even saw who. The hammer was a workman’s mallet, and the figure was Melda. They had found the circus.

  “Shan! Cynda!” the woman cried. “What have you done to these animals? You know better than to ride a beast so hard!”

  The sisters were riding double on the strongest pony remaining of the three stolen from the abbey’s stables. The one trailing them on a lead blew out not long before, and, in the light of torches brought up by roustabouts, Cynda saw that the little roan’s eyes rolled. Later, she would have to find a way to tell gentle Melda about the dappled mare put down with a broken leg halfway through their mad dash across the plain. She needed someone to know they showed that pony honor and respect. Only harshest necessity drove the sisters to push these animals so far beyond their limits.

  Shan rested, her hands on her knees, breathing almost as hard as the ponies. The hand that brought her water was Mattias Farseer’s.

  The old man waited for her to drink, then said, “What is it?”

  Mattias was as skilled with the twins
’ fingertalk as the women themselves. She began to tell him.

  Cynda interrupted with a quick gesture. All the circus folk knew the sisters’ sign for quiet because it was a gesture borrowed from Corvus. There were cheers and laughter coming from the tent, and the ponies breathed like bellows. The pitch in the torches burned with an audible hiss. The night was not quiet.

  Even above those noises, something could be heard back down the road. The way to Argentor from the plain was as broad and smooth as any merchant king’s road in the cities of the North. It ran straight, up a shallow grade. The Spires of Mir threw back echoes from any traffic along the road, and the sounds carried up from the grasslands.

  The twins had no need to communicate further. The sound of many heavy hooves, marching fast, cut through the night like a sword.

  Among the Djen slave races Calim brought through the Airy Gate were the hubryn, who mingled with the native humans and became our ancestors. There, too, were the hin, who founded the divers nations of the halflings. And Calim also brought the horned yikaria, who feed their children blood.

  —Akabar ibn Hrellam

  Empires of the Shining Sands, vol. ii

  NINLILAH ADH ARHAPAN, MUSAR OF EL PAJABBAR, SENT no scouts and attempted no secrecy. During the long run across the plain, the scent of horses fleeing before them alerted the minotaurs to spies even before they found the carcass of a pony in a dry gully. The beast had been put down with a single, swift strike, bespeaking a level of skill that Ninlilah respected.

  The spies—two or more halflings by their footprints—did not hide the body, and neither did they make any effort to conceal signs of their flight through the prairie grasses. They traded stealth for speed, rejecting the skulking ways their kind typically embraced.

  This was something else Ninlilah respected.

  El Pajabbar would be met by foes warned of their coming. Whether those foes would be prepared was another question. The master of games said “earthsouled,” which could mean strength to rival the minotaurs’ own, but he also said “peace loving,” a phrase the genasi used for cowardice.

  It did not matter. The heir of the master of games was somewhere among these spires of stone. The people who hid him from her would fight or not, and so they would die or not.

  He is found, Ninlilah thought to herself again. Again, she stifled the primal bray she was moved to sound. Marod yn Marod is found.

  A strange scent flared her nostrils, and Ninlilah raised one mailed fist. Behind her, the two lines of warriors clattered to a stop, cursing and bellowing.

  She ignored their petty insubordination, seeking among the hulking silhouettes for the downward-pointing horns of a particular male. Seeing that one of her fighters already turned his muzzle up to the air, she knew her impulse to stop and investigate the alien smell was wise.

  Wrinkling his broad, red nose, the bullock came to stand by Ninlilah. “Sultana—” he said, then staggered, spitting blood and teeth when she struck him across the muzzle.

  “You are to call me Musar!” she roared, and brought her chain-draped hoof down on the warrior’s dewclaw.

  He did not cry out in pain. He valued his life too much for that. Instead, the young minotaur ducked his head in ritual submission and said, “A thousand pardons would not excuse my offense.”

  Ninlilah snorted, because it was clear from his tone that the bullock was not sure what offense he had given. “You are too free with your words,” she told him. “The yikaria have no herd rank, by the vizar’s order.”

  The bullock kept his head down. “This is known,” he said. “But so far from Calimport, so far from the djinn’s hearing …”

  Ninlilah resisted the urge to strike the fool again. “There is no place outside the vizar’s hearing,” she said. “Marod el Arhapan may have sent us here without Shahrokh’s knowledge, but I assure you the djinni knows all by now. His spies among the Banites would have informed him even if the pasha’s ritualists did not hurry to him as soon as they closed the gate behind us. Have care. Now, use the gifts the Forgotten God gave you.”

  The male raised his head, sniffing again. All of the minotaurs could track and hunt by scent, but as was the case with many of the red-faced clans, his sense of smell was preternatural.

  “It is like the drakes the windsouled sometimes use in the arena,” he said. “And something else. Like a hunting bird, a raptor.”

  Ninlilah wondered what manner of creature these earthsouled might be using to guard the heir.

  An image of the boy came to her mind. Stout and fierce, he had just begun to walk when Azad adh Arhapan stole him away and made an oathbreaker of her. But before that, before he was stolen, his unsure steps always brought him to her side, wherever she was.

  The bullock took a cautious step backward. Ninlilah realized she was sounding a warning, so low that only another yikaria would hear it—another yikaria, or any predator so foolish as to threaten a calf.

  “Get back in line,” she told him. “Tell the others to poison the spars of their javelins and guard against fliers.”

  The bullock nodded. “And I will guard my tongue,” he said, retreating.

  She tossed her head, the vicious upswept horns of a yikarian woman stabbing the night like spears. Yes, guard your tongue, she thought, and mind the words you use. Ninlilah adh Arhapan—Ninlilah, slave of the el Arhapans—was not a sultana but a sergeant, because this was no herd of yikaria, but a platoon of minotaurs.

  Just as the lost heir of the Arhapans, Marod yn Marod was the son who bore the father’s name. Never mind the teasing name by which the house slaves called him, giving him another mother after his blessed Valandra died. He was Marod yn Marod; not Marod yn Ninlilah.

  Cephas had them. Marashan and the young genasi seated in a roiling knot around her, and the younger children scattered among the crowd; all watched Cephas with their eyes wide, amazed by his displays of prodigious strength. Elder Lin and the other adults wore broad smiles, and Flek leaned forward so far he must have been close to tumbling out of his seat, an expression on his face that managed to combine deep suspicion with careful study.

  “Find the fellow who thinks he can best you as soon as you can,” Tobin told him at one of their lessons. “And mark him, so the clowns will know who to pull out when you need the volunteer.” When Cephas asked if the script ran any differently if the fellow who thought he could best the strongman was, instead, a woman, the goliath was mystified. “I have known women who are stronger than me, Cephas,” he said, “but none of them ever needed to show it off for an audience. It will be a fellow.”

  Cephas was glad it was a fellow he knew, as he sensed Flek would take the act with good humor. Even more, he was glad the clowns and the roustabouts were clearly enjoying the show. He had spent his life in performances, though he never knew it until the last few days. The thrill it gave him tonight was new, untethered from the possibility of death.

  The act proceeded as planned. Cephas lifted boulders and bent bars, tossed barrels full of nails from one end of the tent to the other, and even, once they were fastened into the special canvas chairs backed with stout handles, juggled Elder Lin and two other women of the village.

  The juggling worried him. He had not yet mastered the steady rhythms of the art, and he found that he did best when he watched one of the clowns who coached him, mirroring his tosses and catches. Corvus had hit on the trick of having Whitey stand behind the audience and juggle batons, giving Cephas a model to follow.

  It worked well, though Cephas was confused when it was Tobin, not Whitey, who acted as his unseen prompter. The confusion grew when Whitey did make an appearance, but not in his clowning gear.

  “A great display of skill,” said Whitey from the ringmaster’s place. “But not of strength, for surely the women of Argentor can never be said to be burdens. Why, my heart is lightened just watching these ladies float through the air. Applaud your elders, Argentor!”

  The tone and color of Whitey’s patter differed from Corvus�
��s ominous pronouncements and raucous cries. Where could the kenku be? Cephas wondered.

  But only briefly, because now it was time to bring up the proof of goods, as Tobin called it. The clowns elicited laughter with tricks and pratfalls, the aerialists earned their cheers with feats most would never dare, and Mattias and Trill … Well, Mattias and Trill were a frightening old man and a vicious predator recreating one of the deadliest episodes in history. The audience trusted the other performers on instinct.

  “See,” Tobin told him, “a strongman does something that they think one of them could do, or that any of them could fake.”

  And so the finale.

  Tobin, or Tuber rather, made an elaborate farce of picking a volunteer from the crowd. Candle moved through the stands with enormous steps, wallowing her way among the old and young alike, rejecting every able-bodied young man Tuber picked with derisive toots of her horn or gouts of colored ribbon shot from a crossbow made of balloons.

  Eventually, Candle offered herself as the opponent in the finale’s contest of strength. Tuber reacted by setting himself against her instead of letting Cephas take the spotlight again. A few quick pratfalls and failed lifts led to the two clowns’ attempt to raise a platform off the ground while they stood on it. Finally, Tuber lifted Candle over his head and threw her into the audience.

  This last bit was an innovation, an addition to the act that made Tobin uncomfortable. “I am a clown now,” he had said. “Yes,” Whitey told him, “and you’re the strongest clown in the world. You think we’re not going to use that? Nine Hells, you think I wouldn’t throw my sister across the tent if I could?”

  So, the intercession of the clowns ended with Candle in a graceless, spinning flight that was nevertheless perfectly timed and executed. She landed precisely where she wanted to—in Flek’s lap.

  “You there!” Whitey shouted. “Unhand that clown!”

  Flek realized he was to be the lucky volunteer. “All right, Cephas,” he said, rising to his feet and setting Candle down on hers, “I will test my strength against yours.” The good-natured roar of approval from the crowd was accompanied by several less-than-delicate whistles and shrill wishes of good luck from the girls sitting with Marashan. She quieted her friends with sharp elbows and rolling eyes.