Sandstorm (15 page)

A green-gloved hand reached between him and Tobin, angled up, and gave the goliath’s bright red nose a good twist.

“Ouch!” said Tobin. “Why did you twist my nose, Candle?”

Whitey’s sister, who was paired with Tobin for the night’s performance, was named Candasa, but while in her face paint she answered only to Candle. She mimed fastening a button in front of her lips.

Awareness lit up Tobin’s eyes. “Yes!” he said. “I am sorry, Cephas, but I forgot—I am not Tobin now, but Tuber the Clown. I do not speak!”

He said this loud enough that the genasi in the stands closest shushed him. Trill had quieted out in the main ring and Mattias’s voice could be heard.

“May your body rot and your scales crumble!” Mattias shouted, his voice shaking in a vibrato as he pitched it much higher than his usual baritone. “May your fangs grow dull and your wings wither! Iryklathagra! I will dine on your flesh and make a mantle of your wretched hide! Tonight, you die!”

As he said the last word, Mattias thrust the staff forward. Cephas did not think any in the audience noticed that the old man was sometimes using the staff to lean on. A spectral skull, glowing green but with eye sockets of bottomless black, grew from the staff’s end like a bubble from a child’s clay soap pipe. With a popping noise, the skull floated free of the staff, still growing. It shook and vibrated in time to the music that rose from the players marching out beneath it, all of them dressed in more sedate versions of Mattias’s imperial finery and wearing green skull masks themselves.

The skull opened its mouth and joined the musicians’ song:

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.

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.

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.

N
INLILAH ADH
A
RHAPAN
, M
USAR OF
E
L
P
AJABBAR, 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.