Sandstorm (12 page)

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.

With another wave of his hand, Shahrokh caused a rain of gold coins to fall into the filthy straw of the pen next to them. “Dig it out of the dung, then. It will give you something to do while I shovel the pile you’ve heaped on our efforts.”

A look of understanding crossed the pasha’s face. “You’ve heard that the WeavePasha has my son!” he said. “Exciting, isn’t it? I’d almost forgotten about the boy.”

“The message you intercepted,” said Shahrokh, “was from an agent who is far from trustworthy. That the spy
says
he’s located your lost heir is too little to act on, especially since we are at such a crucial juncture.”

The pasha shrugged. “Too little for
you
to act on, perhaps.”

A faint sound of thunder rolled through the stable, quieting the elephants.

“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 this 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.