Sandstorm (22 page)

Ariella grinned. “Not a bit. Just a courier and sworn witness who drew the short straw back in the guildhall of the Airsteppers. To be honest, this part of the world is considered a barbaric wasteland by most in my homeland.”

To Cephas’s surprise, the two firesouled nodded in agreement with Ariella, though they also took her explanation as their cue to switch off speaking roles again.

“The stewards of Akanûl consider us troublemakers because our activities expose their incompetence. Their spies decided our arguments were convincing too many among the young!”

“These two worked the street corner outside the Cabal’s Motherhouse in the capital, Airspur,” Ariella explained. “People had started avoiding the area. Local merchants complained, mothers worried about their children passing by, that sort of thing.”

“So, to the people in power,” Cephas said, “you were … annoyances?”

“Not simply annoyances,” Lavacre said. “Threats! To their criminal regime!”

“His Grace the WeavePasha seems to think their presence here is of greater importance than you do, Ariella,” Tobin observed.

The way the courier cocked her head to one side reminded Cephas of Corvus. “He does. Finding out why that is the case,” she said, “has been the most interesting challenge of this assignment.”

She looked at Cephas. “Until recently, anyway.”

As soon as it became apparent that Ariella’s firesouled countrymen had come to the palace simply to chide her for taking on a mission for the human WeavePasha, she enacted the strategy she assured Cephas was the most effective when faced with Firestormers—she walked away.

“You two should come along,” she told Tobin and Cephas. “You two,” she said to Flamburnt and Lavacre, “should go … cabal.”

As she spoke, Tobin muttered something deep in the back of his throat. Then he joined them in wandering away from the tents and table. His pursed lips soon began to betray him, and not long after, his enormous, infectious grin split his face.

“What is it, Tobin?” Cephas asked, glad to see the goliath smiling.

“I spoke my clan’s language back there, when Ariella sent those two men away. It is much like Dwarvish, Corvus says.”

Cephas smiled. “What did you say to them?”

Ariella answered, “Come, Cephas, you know what he said. ‘You two should go cabal.’ ”

“Yes!” said Tobin. “Like them with their language for posturing under the language for talking! Although,” he continued, growing serious, “I did not match you exactly, Ariella, because if we have a word for ‘cabal,’ it was never taught to me. I told them they should go enrich the soil of the mushroom beds with bat guano. The word for that sounds very much like cabal.”

Ariella made a choking sound, and Cephas said, “Perhaps they mean much the same thing.”

Tobin shook his head. “It would be a happy coincidence, Cephas, but I am afraid that it is not so. It is a very important task, the fertilizing, for the whole community. What those men do may be very important, but I believe it is important only to them.”

“And to others who share their impoverished notion of what community means,” said Ariella. She peered up at the big man. “You are very wise, Tobin.”

“It is a requirement for clowning.” He nodded, a hint of sadness coloring the words. “Now I must leave you. Mattias asked Cynda and me to meet the people bringing food to Trill. Cynda is to check that they don’t bring too much, and I am to carry the rest.”

“You are kind as well as wise, then,” said Ariella. “Though I suspect Trill would believe you kinder if you let the WeavePasha present her with his whole goat herd. But I’m curious, why doesn’t Mattias go himself?”

Tobin paused. “I think he does not want to risk encountering the WeavePasha again,” he said. “There is old trouble there, I think.”

Ariella nodded in sympathy. “That’s the worst kind. Go in peace, Tobin. Maybe you can properly introduce me to Trill once she’s satisfied her appetite.”

“From what I have seen in my time with the circus,” Cephas said, waving good-bye to Tobin, “that’s the same as saying you don’t want to meet her at all.”

The pair of them followed a graveled path along a brook of deep green water. The current of the stream was curious. It rushed or lingered according to a force unrelated to the gentle slope it ran down.

Ariella watched him study the water. “I believe it’s a sort of instrument—the sound of the water on the rocks makes a song.”

Cephas shook his head in wonder. “I suppose nothing should surprise me in this place,” he said. “The world really is like a storybook.”

“I don’t know, Cephas. Much of the world is not as magical as these gardens. All of this”—she waved at the profusion of plants, all bearing fruits and flowers
in a riot of colors—“the pasha weaves it with his spells. There are too many places where the only things that grow are misery and hopelessness.”

Cephas agreed. “Like Jazeerijah,” he said.

The silver-skinned woman closed her eyes. “I am sorry, Cephas. I am a fool. Of course, you know there are terrible places in the world. You know it better than me.”

Cephas held up his hand, indicating that she should not worry. “No, no, you’re not a fool. It seems a long time ago, now. And misery and … hopelessness?” He looked at her for confirmation that this was the word she had used, and she nodded. “Those are in stories, too, though I’m learning that Azad read only the stories that left no doubts. Or perhaps he changed them in a way that fixed the odds, as on the canvas.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ariella.

“The canvas,” he said. “You know the arenas? The fights and other games? That’s the kind of slave Azad and the freedmen believed they had made of me. A gladiator.”

“They believed it,” said Ariella. “But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t then,” he said. He felt his broad face wrinkle as the idea troubled him. “But the fix, I was saying. The crowds that come to the Games, they come to see the fighting, but also to lay wagers. Which gladiator will be the first to draw blood? Will a beast in the bait-frenzy fight or flee? Who will live and who will die? Those sorts of things.”

They came to a bench and sat. Ariella took his hand, and Cephas reminded himself that the WeavePasha had done the same thing, a companionable gesture during conversation.

“The stable owner, that was Azad, he makes gold off all the bets, whether his fighters win or lose. The gamemaster, and this was also Azad, makes gold from all the bets, too. But Jazeerijah belonged to Azad alone, and he could also
place
bets. And since he chose the combatants, and he controlled the conditions of the game …”

“Then he could fix the outcome,” Ariella said. “He knew how to bet, because he knew in advance who would live and who would die.”

“Who would win and who would lose,” Cephas gently corrected her. “But it amounted to the same thing, usually.”

She gazed at him in a way that made something gather in his chest, not the earth-force but something new, and just as powerful.

“And you always won?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I always
lived
. But there were times I would not fight. There were matches I could force Azad to call because I found some way to cheat death. I learned early on …” He trailed off, thinking. “I don’t remember a time before I knew that Azad would never kill me. He put me in terrible fights, or Shaneerah did, anyway, but he wouldn’t kill me. Beat and starve me, yes,” he said with a laugh, but she did not laugh along with him.

“So, that’s one of the things I knew. I still know it, maybe, one of the only things that doesn’t come from stories. I know how to fight and win, and how to fight and lose. I know thirty-one ways to block the swing of a morning star, and I know that when Talid is drunk, he always pulls the whip back early, so you just have to flinch at the right time and he’ll think he’s struck you. And that Azad the Free will not kill me.”

Ariella took his other hand. Cephas thought if what was in his heart had been the earth-force, he could have set the entire city to rumbling. “And you used those things to survive,” she said. “You fixed the game.”

Cephas said, “Not as well as Azad. There were times … There were times when I was the one holding the morning star, and I had to let it fall.”

Ariella squeezed his hands. “Corvus told me this Jazeerijah was an earthmote. That there was no hope of escape.”

To her surprise, Cephas laughed.

“No hope? Corvus is wrong. There was little in the way of
possibility
, but hope? I can tell you of at least six hundred and forty. If hope had wings, some of them might even have worked.”

Ariella gave him a curious smile. “You always talk like an old story.”

Cephas tried again. “I mean that, if I were windsouled, like you, I could have floated down from Jazeerijah. No trick of Azad’s could have kept me from touching the air the way he kept me from touching the earth. Perhaps I could have learned to fly.”

The silvered
szuldar
lines on Ariella’s face flashed. Her deep blue eyes sparked gold, and Cephas realized he was seeing the reflection of his own glowing pattern in her gaze.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you still can.”

T
HIS IS WHAT
C
ORVUS OWED HUMANS
. H
UMANS INVENTED
cities, and cities cast shadows like no other places in the world.

When he stepped through the portal from Argentor, Corvus had noticed that it did not raise the feathers at the back of his neck. The ritual lacked the particular frisson the WeavePasha lent to his magics.

He’s left this to one of his vizars, thought Corvus, and he was not displeased by the realization. If Acham el Jhotos had turned his attention to some other of his innumerable plots, then he would not be there to greet them. This meant Corvus would not have to play peacemaker while Mattias and el Jhotos circled each other like a pair of Durpari fighting cocks, a fine thing.

And it meant Corvus would be able to slip out into the city without figuring a way to best the old wizard’s personal warding magics, an even finer thing.

Corvus considered whether or not to tell Mattias he was going out scouting, but he rejected the thought when the ranger scowled at his approach. Corvus understood. The deaths of their companions in the circus meant it would take the old man longer than usual to come back around to their usual choppy state of relations. Faith, trust, loyalty—perhaps even that flavor of love that humans called brotherhood—tied Mattias and Corvus together. None of them made Mattias comfortable simply being around his old friend—not all of the time, and certainly not when others of their friends were dead and Mattias had a more than reasonable notion that Corvus’s activities as a spy for hire were partly to blame.

Instead, Corvus told Shan he was going out into the city. As he expected, she expressed a desire to accompany him, and, as usual, he told her no. The halfling sisters could walk unseen from Almraiven to the Sea of Moving Ice, but their gifts were better utilized in wilder settings.

Aside from that, Shan had lately shown an increased
flexibility
in her choices that troubled Mattias with the increased ferocity it lent her. It devastated her sister. Corvus saw no reason to encourage this slow tilt in Shan’s moral compass, not yet at any rate. There was no need to further disturb the emotional waters of their already fractious little family.

And it wasn’t as if the troupe needed a second assassin.

The WeavePasha, Corvus knew, had taken the first tentative steps in a project the old wizard described as societal husbandry. His intention, laid out in a nested set of plans that had timelines running to centuries, was nothing less than the complete restructuring of Almraivenar society.

The governmental and social structures, the ways of doing business and taking pleasure, the institutions of magic, faith, and slavery that supported the city’s way of life,
everything
, the WeavePasha claimed, was anathema to the city he wanted Almraiven to become. Better than most, Corvus knew where the roots of the southern port’s ways and mores lay—in the society the Great Djinni Calim led onto the world nearly eight thousand years before. For all the grandiose claims the old Calishite writers made about their ancient civilization—and grandiose claims were the particular specialty of Calishite scholarship—almost nothing about it was the invention of humans.