Sandstorm: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Christopher Rowe

  “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.”

  “The righteous among them,” Corvus said. “What about the unrighteous?”

  Cephas shrugged. “They were left in the pens, I suppose—if there were any still alive at the end of that day’s games. It is the righteous who prevail.”

  Corvus took a long look at Cephas, then called out into the hum of the camp. “Tobin!” he said. “Find Shan and have her bring me the copy of the Book of Founding Stories she and her sister bought in Innarlith.”

  The goliath, who had taken to wearing a silk shirt died yellow and red and festooned with dozens of bright flowers, smiled and waved. “The Book of Founding Stories,” he said. “Yes, Corvus.”

  “Tobin,” called Corvus, interrupting the goliath’s long strides across the camp. “The copy they bought at Innarlith. Make sure you tell Shan that in particular.”

  “Innarlith, right!” the goliath replied.

  A moment later, Shan slid onto the bench between Corvus and Cephas, dropping down from the roof of the wagon behind them. She handed a worn leather-bound book to the kenku and waited, obviously curious.

  “You’ve seen one much like this, Cephas?” asked Corvus.

  The sight of the volume overwhelmed Cephas with memories of Jazeerijah; of Azad’s telling him he would never see the book again, never hear another of its stories. He spoke in a hushed tone. “This book was made on the order of Kamar yn Saban el Djenispool, the great human leader of all Calimshan in the … old days. It has the whole of the world in it.”

  Cephas reached his hand out and Corvus let him take the volume. He studied the cover, tooled with a single character, tracing its slashes and curves with the tip of one finger. “But this is supposed to be silver, with a blue stone set in this place here.”

  Corvus held out his hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, Cephas returned the book.

  “Yes, well, Azad yi Calimport read from a different copy of the same book,” Corvus explained. “He was right that his book, like Shan’s and Cynda’s, was made by the scribes and binders of the Djenispool dynasty. That’s the mark there, which lost its silver foil long before it made its way to the Innarlith bookstalls, or our friends would have paid quite a bit more for it than they did. The books were made a long time ago, as humans count things.”

  Corvus opened the book and turned the heavy parchment leaves. He stopped at a page that did not bear the lines of flowing script that covered most of the others, instead featuring a colorful drawing of a bold warrior brandishing a tulwar. The man stood with his back to the viewer in an endless landscape of red dunes, facing a giant with black horns and eyes of fire.

  “See the red ink the engravers used for the sand? How bright it is? The Calimien print shops didn’t learn that trick of the Shou until well after the start of the Ninth Imperial Age. And in fact, these books weren’t made until the Year of the Broken Blade, about, oh, two hundred and twenty years ago. Kamar yn Saban commissioned their printing in celebration of his twenty-fifth year on the Caleph’s throne. I’ve seen the pasha’s written order, actually, though the precious-minded antiquarian who owned it at the time wouldn’t let me touch it. The order called for one copy for every household in Calimshan. An impossible task, because in those days, the cities of the Shining Sea held millions of people. Still, the effort they made was enormous. There are almost no other books left from that time because almost none were printed—the Caleph’s book used all the ink and parchment available between Baldur’s Gate and the Shaar.

  “It is a complicated thing, Cephas. The Caleph said he wanted every child in Calimshan to know the truth of the past. But when he said ‘every child,’ he meant one in perhaps twenty, because then, as now, most of the people in Calimshan were slaves. And then, as now, slaves weren’t counted. Especially not their children. As for what he meant by ‘truth,’ well, what do any of us mean by that?

  “But tens of thousands of these books were made, and distributed without expectation of payment in every city of what we now call the Skyfire Emirates. I think it was the finest single act any leader of those tortured lands has ever undertaken.”

  Cephas was studying the illustration; Shan took the book from Corvus and held it where he could see it more clearly. Cephas asked, “This is meant to be Daud yn Daud? Facing the Cinderlord?”

  Shan nodded, and Cephas said, “Only a fool would use a sword like that. It’s no wonder he lost.” Shan nodded again.

  Cephas indicated that she should close the book. “And this mark here means Djenispool?”

  Corvus said, “It is one way of writing a D, which is the first letter in the word ‘Djenispool.’ ”

  “There is more than one mark for the same letter?”

  “There are a thousand kinds of beings who use writing on this world and those that border it, and they’re divided into untold nations and tribes. They use dozens of scripts to render hundreds of languages. Different marks for D and S, for all the sounds.”

  Cephas stared at Corvus, feeling as much tension as he ever did in combat. He said, “Show me.”

  And over the next days, rolling across the Tethyrian highlands, Corvus began to do just that.

  The Omlarandin Mountains disappeared over the eastern horizon, and the world emptied of any features but grass, thistle, and the occasional lone tree. A day after the circus crossed the gravel track of the Pass Ride, Corvus sent scouts out from the wagon train.

  Shan and Cynda disappeared into the prairie, while Mattias and Trill disappeared into the sky.

  Cephas asked Tobin about the twins, and the big man told him not to worry. “Those women, they come and go, Shan more than Cynda. They are like you—they learned to make an act of what they knew already. They do Corvus’s special work most times.”

  For his part, Cephas kept a heavy schedule, being tutored by Corvus with his books as they traveled and by Tobin in the strongman’s art while they camped at night. Mattias and Corvus still worried that he was too careless about taking short trips across the bare ground, but the heavy rope-soled sandals Cynda found for him muted the siren call of the plain.

  That evening beside the bonfire at the center of camp, Cephas found himself struggling to remember what it had been like to inhabit his cramped cell every day. He had no problem recalling the arena. He returned to attempting to make his arms and shoulders tremble while lifting a feather-light load.

  Mattias sat on his haunches nearby, Trill’s dozing head at one hand and a wooden bucket of water at the other. He dipped a stiff-bristled brush in the bucket, then pulled the wyvern’s upper lip back with his other hand. Trill had made short work of the half-dozen tom turkeys the wagon train scared up during the day. Feathers and gore were stuck between her long, sharp teeth. She let out an occasional low rumble as Mattias scrubbed away at the deadly set of fangs, but never stirred enough to open an eyelid.

  “We’ll see the Spires first thing tomorrow,” Mattias said.

  The ranger peered into his bucket and stirred it a bit before deciding it was still clean enough for another tooth or two.

  “I haven’t traveled the Suretmarch in thirty years,” he said. “But the situation has not changed in all that time. For someone who says the best chance of heaven is a life lived beneath the notice of the gods, Corvus, you’ve managed to
steer a narrow course between people who will take stern exception to that view should we fall into their hands.”

  Corvus stood and picked up Mattias’s pail, walked to the edge of the firelight, and poured it out. The ranger gathered his canes and started to rise to refill it, but Corvus motioned him down. Whitey came and took the bucket and disappeared in the direction of the casks that held the communal water supply.

  “A course between these godly people, though,” Corvus said, sitting back down. “As was my intention. Other than crossing two roads and seeing a single barley field gone fallow for three or four years, we haven’t seen a single sign of intelligent life in days.”

  “That’s because you spend all day with Cephas!” said Tobin. The goliath punctuated this by drawing a tin bugle from the pocket of his voluminous polka-dotted pants and sounding a long, discordant note.

  Trill perked up, ready for fight or flight, but when she saw that Mattias was laughing, she settled back down.

  “Funny,” Cephas said. He wasn’t offended. Tobin needed to practice making jokes so he could get better at it.

  “This course wasn’t a hard one,” said Melda. “But the brothers at Barakmordin are close.”

  “And the queens of Tethyr has pointed those holy fools down Ithal Pass at the Banites like a spear for a hundred years,” said Mattias. “Knights of the Platinum Dragon, Tormite soldier priests, and the Crying God’s martyrs, all vying to outdo one another in zealotry and mounting three sorties of heavy cavalry down the Pass Ride every single day. How we managed to cross at a time they wouldn’t spot us is beyond me.”

  “Time and place,” said Melda.

  “As it happens,” said Corvus, “the records I examined in Saradush make me believe that the earthsouled we’re visiting in the Spires are themselves a holy order of sorts. Or they were the last time anyone bothered to record them in the annals of the Shining Helm Herald.”

  The Calishites of Jazeerijah had kept no cults—Corvus claimed this was a product of their enslaved backgrounds, though he did not explain why so few in the circus were worshipful sorts. But the only reading primer to be found among the haphazard collection of volumes the troop carried with them was a slim child’s book of the gods that Mattias had produced without explanation.

  In his slow journey through the book so far, Cephas had learned who Bane and Bahamut the Platinum Dragon were, and if Torm and Ilmater were allied, that gave him a general sense of what their followers must be like. He hoped the earthsouled leaned more toward the teachings of the folk Mattias termed “zealots” than they did the faith of the Black God.

  “They don’t worship a god, precisely,” Corvus said. “Grumbar the Earthlord is my guess. Or, if these folks are of a poetic turn of mind, the King of the Land Below the Roots. He’s an elemental lord, which is supposed to be something different than a god. Don’t ask me to explain the difference, though, because I’ve never found a satisfactory explanation, and not for want of trying.”

  Tobin stood, and Cephas wondered what sort of apprentice humor they would be subjected to next.

  “He watches and guards,” said Tobin, and the whole company quieted and turned to look at the goliath. Even Trill opened her eyes and raised her great head, cocking it sideways as if she heard a faraway call for help from a companion long lost.

  “He keeps the treasures of the earth’s crust secret and holds them in trust for the landwalkers. He bears burdens and does not complain. He pronounces and is not questioned. Air blows away, water flows away, fire burns away, Earth stays. He abides. He endures.”

  Tobin leaned down and took up a handful of dust, then let it fall through his blunt, inelegant fingers. Cephas became conscious that he was hearing quiet. The ground beneath him had ceased its ceaseless song.

  The goliath finished awkwardly. “I—I swear this on stone,” he said, and darted back among the wagons.

  Whitey the Clown was standing on the other side of the fire, Mattias’s pail of fresh water between his arms. His mouth opened wide as he watched his apprentice go.

  He peered at Corvus. “Was that a prayer?”

  Corvus still gazed off toward the wagons but shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “More like a hymn.”

  Mattias reached out and scratched beneath Trill’s chin. “Something memorized by someone born into a faith that preached unquestionable stability,” he said, “and unending resistance to change. Imagine growing up in a faith like that when the center of your art, when what’s in your heart, is improvisation.”

  Cephas listened for the song of the earth.

  The djinni Shahrokh had no need for the pillows and cushions scattered about his inner sanctum, of course, any more than he had any need for a title. But the windsouled genasi, whom Shahrokh and the other djinn of Calimport viewed as something like children, had built their society in mimicry of the human culture they had replaced. Since that human society was an echo—however imperfect—of the glorious culture of the Noble Djinni Calim and his followers, Shahrokh permitted the slaves of the windsouled to appoint his apartments with supposed luxuries such as pillows, and permitted the windsouled themselves to call him the vizar of vizars, adviser and factor to Pasha Marod el Arhapan, the genasi who held sway at the head of the city’s fractious leading council.

  The only time he even noticed the numberless pillows was on occasions such as these, when he let the currents of air that formed the bottom half of his body flow at their full strength in a cyclone of elemental power. This meant cushions flew everywhere.

  It also meant Vizar Shahrokh was angry.

  Slaves of a dozen races, their windsouled masters, a few genasi expressing less politically sound elements, and even a few lesser djinn, rushed out of the vizar’s path as he flew through the arched hallways of the el Arhapan manor.

  The palace was a marvel in a city full of architectural marvels. It was not the only castle that floated high above the ruins that made up much of the old human city, but it was the only one that moved according to its master’s will instead of remaining fixed at whatever point its builders had chosen when the final enchantments were laid like cornerstones.

  The palace could not go anywhere—even in a city as chaotic and ever-changing as Calimport that would be too much. Still, the power and influence of the el Arhapans was sufficient to allow them to fly their home endlessly back and forth between the two terrestrial structures that had sparked their ascendancy among the windsouled in the first place—the Djen Arenas.

  Shahrokh had known the current pasha of games all the brief fifty years of the genasi noble’s life, and he firmly believed that Marod would never have directed his floating home anywhere besides the arenas, even if he had the power. Yes, the windsouled were something like children in the eyes of the djinn, and children needed their toys.

  Sweeping into the great central courtyard, Shahrokh spared a glance downward. The flagstones that made up the courtyard’s surface were clearer than any glass the craftsmen of this wretched world could dream of producing. Like much of the material that went into building Calimport—Upper Calimport, the Calimport that mattered—these blocks of crystalline air were brought from the djinn’s home in the Elemental Chaos. The stones were quarried from the cliffs of Khamsin and transported to the mortal world under the very noses of the cursed efreet and their firesouled vassals, during the glorious days of Calim’s Second Reign earlier in the century.

  The thought of his lost lord renewed Shahrokh’s ire. Too much was at stake to permit Marod’s meddling. His view through the courtyard floor told the djinni that the sultan had moved the palace to its westerly moorage, above the Arena Sabam where the chariot races were held. This meant he would find the windsouled noble in the stables.

  With their lesser powers, the genasi had developed an elaborate protocol for flying between buildings of the upper city, and for their rare trips to the earthbound realm of the slaves below. Had he been in less of a rage, Shahrokh might have taken the time to travel along
those Saban pathways, marked in the air by floating coils of golden rope. As it was, he simply flew up and over the tiled roofs and doors of the palace, then dived into the crowded tumult of mud-brick stables that ringed the Arena Sabam.

  Any beast that Marod’s saddlers could fit with a harness might be found in this warren between the savage races they were forced to run, pulling war chariots manned by slave gladiators of the appropriate size.

  In a stable filled with elephants, Shahrokh found the master of games deep in conversation with a dull-eyed ogre gladiator. An especially foolish observer might have pointed out that the incongruous pair each resembled Shahrokh in a different way. The djinni had no legs but went about on an ever-present, ever-circling column of air. But if he had been born with such useless limbs, Shahrokh’s would have needed to be as long and heavily muscled as the ogre’s to explain his great height, and to match the obvious strength in his bare torso and arms. But where the ogre’s skin was a pallid green, Shahrokh’s was the same silver tone as the windsouled slavelord’s. Pasha and vizar also shared the same smooth scalp, shaved except for long black queues gathered in sapphire clasps. The windsouled also aped the djinni manner of dress. Except for its size, Marod’s intricately patterned crimson vest was a close match to the one Shahrokh wore.

  If the pasha sensed the vizar’s mood, then he ignored it. He greeted the djinni with a smile. “Shahrokh!” he said. “Have you met this ogre? Calls itself Cruddup or something like that—it’s the best beast handler among the slaves we bought over the winter—”

  The djinni waved a contemptuous hand. The air in the huge ogre’s lungs rushed out, the atmosphere around the creature’s head flowing away. The giant charioteer collapsed and died in the span of three heartbeats.

  Pasha Marod took a single step backward to avoid the ogre’s flailing limbs. There was a look of mild distaste on his handsome features. “You owe me fifteen bicentas,” he said.