Sandstorm (18 page)

In his wagon, Corvus passed over his pen and ink and did not even consider drawing out his book. Instead, he took a large conch shell into his clawlike hands.

The WeavePasha’s secrecy would be endangered if he used the speaking horn, but secrecy was already compromised, and the human’s wizardly pretenses at protocol be damned.

Corvus whistled a note through the ancient conch shell and felt it warm in his hands. As soon as the oceanic whisper issuing from its depths faded, replaced by the sounds of gentle conversation and cutlery clinking against expensive plateware, Corvus knew the audible link to the WeavePasha’s earring was established.

“Acham el Jhotos!” he shouted, positive that whoever was dining with the wizard would hear his voice, and that
the WeavePasha himself would be clapping a hand to an ear and screaming blood. “Your plans are found out! Your foes descend! Your agent demands aid!”

A scream sounded from above. Trill? thought Cephas, but no, this was a man’s scream—a man’s dying scream.

Above, Candle tried to approach her brother, who had lost a desperate battle to stay clear of the flames and watched his death burning its way up his legs.

Cephas swore, looking for some way to climb, but all the ropes had burned away and every wall was now fully engulfed. The interior of the tent was brighter and hotter than any day he had ever known. He could only watch Candle, blisters rising through her greasepaint, swing back and forth, trying to gain enough momentum to reach her brother. The man’s screams ceased, his body curling in on itself.

The only sounds discernible above the fire were screams—screams from Candle, swinging and hopeless; screams from Flek, dragging his sister clear; screams of fury from the pair of minotaur warriors facing the tiring sisters. There were also the screams of the huge minotaur woman, seeking a path through sheets of burning canvas that fell from every direction.

The woman could not get closer. None in the tent could see a way clear of the small hells each found himself in, clear of the few patches of earth free of fire.

Earth …

“Shan! Cynda!” Cephas shouted. “To me! You have to find a way to me!”

Cephas began a different sort of defense than any he’d ever had to weave, swinging the flail to knock floating
embers away, and ducking clear of gouts of fire. He made his way to Flek and Marashan, finding her unconscious and the young man dazed.

“We cannot get out!” shouted Cephas. “We have to go
down
!”

Flek, vastly more experienced with the powers of the earth than Cephas, saw the gladiator’s plan and nodded.

The twins bounded through the flames, leaving frustrated roars in their wake. Flek took his sister up in his arms as Shan spun her sister around, patting out the wisps of smoke that threatened to make a torch of Cynda’s heavy ponytail.

“Cephas!” Flek shouted. “You must do this! I used all that was in me to buckle the ground beneath Marashan. But it’s soft here now! Dig a cavern, Cephas, some small space that will hold us all. Leave no more room than is needed for air to breathe. Shape it!”

With a tremendous roar, the ceiling gave way. Candle did not struggle as she fell.

Cephas thought of the only small space he could, the place he knew better than any other, the only home he could remember. He set his foot, and the ground below fell away, making a rocky replica of his cell on Jazeerijah.

The twins leaped in, then reached up and pulled Cephas down after them. Flek dropped his sister into Cephas’s arms. He said, “Someone has to remain above to close it in, you see.”

After an instant of fire, there was earth, and Cephas went down beneath it.

T
HE WORST OF IT, BY FAR, OCCURRED WHEN
S
HAN CLOSED
her hands around Marashan’s mouth and nose.

The girl had fought her way back to consciousness at the sounds of her brother’s terrible last cries. Marashan gathered earth-force, and Cephas shouted above the screams.

“No! He does this for you!”

Marashan’s breath cut off and she trembled for a moment, then became still. Before Cephas could speak, a small, calloused hand found his and moved his fingers against the genasi girl’s neck, where he felt a thin pulse. Shan knew he thought her capable of killing the girl, and wished to ease his mind.

It was that moment, not the long night of waiting that followed, that Cephas kept returning to as he watched the Argentori bury their dead. He supposed it was because that was the only moment during the long and terrible night of
waiting when they were moving,
acting
. Otherwise, they had not spoken and barely stirred except to draw shallow breaths.

On Jazeerijah, the dead were thrown over the side for scavengers to find, but more than one of the Founding Stories took the tomb cities of the desert for their setting. He knew what a grave was.

Maybe Elder Lin sensed his worry that this dirt cell would become their grave when she detected their life-forces in the smoldering canvas ruins. She had caused the ground her son shielded them beneath to explode outward. Even aware that the remains at her feet were those of Flek, she took the time to look all four of them in the eye, speaking to the twins and Cephas as gently as to her own daughter, saying, “You are alive.” It was not an exclamation of relief. It was a reminder.

She issued other reminders as she opened the cracks in the center spires of the village, six in all. These would hold the remains of those earthsouled who died by fire or blade. “The Old Mother birthed these souls,” she said, “and now the Old Mother gathers them back up. They died in violence, but they lived in peace, so their sleep shall be untroubled. The earth abides.”

All the villagers, and many of the circus folk, were gathered at the spires. The genasi answered their elder with an echo. “The earth abides,” and some among the circus troupe whispered other imprecations and blessings. The circus would bury its own dead in the afternoon.

In addition to Candasa—the clown Candle—four others of Whitey’s family had died the previous night. The man Candasa tried so hard to save had been Kip, the youngest of them all. Cephas did not believe he had ever spoken to the boy.

Micha and Green Beth, two other clowns, died when they tried to roll the burning roof back onto its scrollworks.
One more of Whitey’s family lay in a cool cave offered by Elder Lin, swaddled in soft bandages and driving a hard bargain with the Lord of the Dead. This was his wife, Melda, who took a minotaur’s axe and rushed into the burning fall of the southernmost canvas wall when it settled over the stone kraal where her oxen were stabled. She led every team free before she collapsed.

Now the troupe waited on word of Tobin and Mattias, who had disappeared into the spires before dawn. Trill was tied down, her efforts to take flight pathetic but dangerous to any who came near, so the goliath volunteered to accompany the old man in her stead.

From the fire, the efforts of Cephas and the twins, and his arrows, Mattias counted eleven dead minotaurs. Down on the road, where Trill descended on the attackers like an angel of death, the roustabouts found the corpses of twelve more, along with the lances and javelins they had used to poison the wyvern.

“Twenty-five,” Corvus told his old friend. “El Pajabbar always number twenty-five.”

Mattias nodded, signaled Tobin, and faded away, silent on his canes.

Escorted by Elder Lin, Cephas and the twins arrived at the wagons as they were leaving.

“I should go with them,” Cephas said.

“They should not go,” said the Elder.

Corvus shook his head, though it was unclear to which of them he was responding. “All the decisions are being made elsewhere,” he said, as if to himself. “That has to change.”

Sword in hand, Ariella Kulmina appeared in the air above the lowered facade of a circus wagon. Smoke rose in
the near distance, turning the first rays of dawn a red that bathed the spires around her in a light the color of blood.

No living thing stirred.

The silver-skinned woman floated to the ground, holding her blade in a high guard position, and sent out her awareness, wary of enemies concealed by magic.

The enemy that found her did not strike from concealment.

Unbelievably fast, an earthsouled fighter in the regalia of a gladiator sprang from between two wagons, spinning an enormous double-headed flail as easily as a child wielding a sling. The swordmage had been told the genasi of the village were pacifists, but she had stepped through the WeavePasha’s teleportation portal with defenses raised nonetheless.

A lucky thing that was, or the spiked heads of the flail would have struck her down instantly. Instead, she breathed a syllable and brought her long sword down in a parrying arc. One flail head bounced off the eldritch shield raised at her command, and her sword struck the other with enough force to send it swinging wide.

The gladiator took her actions in stride, springing back lightly and setting his weapon to swinging in a figure-eight pattern that would be impossible to penetrate with just a sword.

Ariella had more than her sword to give battle with.

Mimicking the gladiator, she backed away from close contact. But with another arcane word and a flick of her wrist, a crackling line of energy extended from her weapon’s tip like a whip. She swept this extension of her will in an arc beneath the earthsouled’s defenses, surprising him. The line wrapped around the man’s ankles and, using both hands and all her strength, she raised her sword high above her head.

The earthsouled man’s feet flew out beneath him, and he landed flat on his back, while the eldritch whip bound his legs tightly together. Approaching warily, Ariella saw there was no fear in the man’s face. Instead, she saw only exhaustion and grief. And she swore she heard something from inside him—something that reminded her of the wind.

The man was staring up at her. He made no move to raise his weapon. “You are not a minotaur,” he said.

Ariella pursed her lips in confusion, but answered him. “And you are not a pacifist.”