Sandstorm (39 page)

Shan was a warrior and a scout. She had learned those skills from the finest teachers in the world.

And she was an aerialist. She had learned that skill from her sister.

“Where is Shahrokh?” roared Marod. “Where are any of the damned djinn?”

When his aide did not answer, the master of games turned to find that the man was gone. Fled with all the rest, he thought. How could this have happened? What could cause an entire estate to fall, and how could the djinn disappear at the same time?

Little matter. He would learn who was behind the destruction of his beautiful arena soon enough, and then they would pay. He was already thinking of ways to continue the Games. The Sabam could be repurposed for more traditional combats, perhaps, or, even better, he could relocate to Manshaka while the djinn rebuilt here.

For now, his best course of action was to retreat into the hidden tunnel that led to the stables and wait out the immediate crisis. He twisted a particular ruby setting in his ornate chair, and rotated the entire seat, revealing a downward-sloping passage.

As soon as he set foot in it, he saw that it was not empty. He would have sworn that no one knew of this passage except himself, Shahrokh, and the earthsouled who dug it and who were killed when they finished their labors.

But there was a halfling slave he did not recognize, just finishing a task he must have been at for some time. The passage between the pasha of games and the halfling was coated with an oily, smoking substance that ate away at the stone.

“Yeah, you don’t want to come down this way,” said the halfling. “These walls is fixing to collapse.”

The pasha gathered his windsoul, preparing to launch through the air at the man, but the halfling had spoken true. The brickwork walls began to crumble, and the ceiling slumped.

Seeing no way through, the pasha stepped back from the hidden entry and shouted in rage. “Who are you?”

The halfling shrugged, and before Marod’s escape route was completely closed to him, he heard the reply from beyond the falling rubble. “We don’t use names.”

The manor crashed to earth.

Sensing Ariella’s exhaustion, when he saw a clear spot through the dust clouds below, Cephas relaxed his grip and dropped a distance perhaps three times his height. He tucked and rolled when he landed, coming back to his feet with flail held ready, probing the shifting mass of rubble that marked the location of the Djen Arena with his earthsouled senses.

Ariella landed beside him, sword drawn, and stood so that they were back-to-back. “After the fall,” she observed. “Quiet? Not what I expected.”

There were calls and cries in the far distance, but in the immediate area, the only noises came from the clatter of stones and the hiss of sand as the rubble settled. One entire side of the Djen Arena was gone, flattened by the mass of the el Arhapan estate. The interconnected structures built atop the elemental foundation had fared much the same. The parts of the estate that struck first were reduced to nothing, while some walls and even windows retained their integrity, even if they were set askew. The presence of the floating stonework in the rubble led to less devastation in the el Arhapan buildings than might otherwise have been expected.

“No sounds,” he said. “There was time for most of the crowd to escape below then, and I trust that if Corvus lives, we’ll know soon enough. We should try to find the others.”

On the north side of the grounds, they discovered an area of rubble-free sand. The collapsed walls beneath
the gamemaster’s box formed an impenetrable barrier on one side of the clearing, and the badlands of ripped-open flooring and rubble encircled its other sides.

Marod el Arhapan lounged in a veranda chair at the center of the sandy space.

The man watched them approach. For a moment Cephas wondered if perhaps his father did not recognize him in his earthsouled manifestation, but he was merely waiting for them to close within conversational distance.

“Your work, of course,” said the pasha. “I suppose I should have guessed, but I trusted Shahrokh to sniff out any plot you’ve been put up to by the WeavePasha or your mother’s degenerate kin or whoever supplied you with the means to offer me this setback. What have you done with the djinn, by the way? Some repelling magic item? They’ll not be happy.”

Ariella stepped forward and said, “I would prevent Cephas from patricide, Calimien, but there would be no shame in my blade finding your heart. Have a civil tongue. We only want to find the adepts and the goliath, and then we’ll leave you to lord over what’s left of your domain.”

Cephas put a hand on Ariella’s shoulder. “I don’t know why your protectors have abandoned you now, Marod el Arhapan,” he said to the man before him. To Ariella, he said, “And no patricide is possible. I would have to be his son. He would have to be my father.”

The pasha snorted. “It seems that the only thing we share besides our blood,
Cephas
, is the wish that we shared not even that much. But if you doubt my patrimony, you are a fool. Even wearing your mother’s cursed secret, it’s clear you are an el Arhapan.”

Cephas studied the man. “That is the second time you have said that, about the secret of my mother’s earthsoul. And yet you said hers was a newly elevated noble family.
Your marriage was a cause for controversy, you said. An earthsouled noble making a secret of her earthsoul seems—”

“Seems like a story concocted by a vizar who seldom troubles himself with the finer points of genasi society, yes. I would have pointed out the inconsistencies to him, except that, frankly, I did not care. You would have discovered the truth soon enough. Your mother was a scheming earthsouled slave who somehow learned to manifest windsoul and managed to disguise herself long enough to cost me much trouble and treasure.”

Cephas narrowed his eyes. There was still something wrong with Corvus’s version of his mother’s life story. “What do you mean, treasure?”

The pasha spit. “The escapees. They had to be replaced, all of them. Another flaw in your philosophers’ arguments, Akanûlan. If you free a slave, you simply create the need for another slave to take its place.”

Cephas said, “My mother—”

“Your mother was a liar and a whore. I thought her treatment of the slaves eccentric, but I didn’t learn of her activities with the Janessar until after you were born. I didn’t know how much I was freeing myself when I set her before Azad.”

A tremendous crash sounded nearby, and the three genasi ducked as a sizable chunk of wall flew over their heads. A new cloud of dust rolled out of the rubble, and a pair of coughing figures stumbled into the clearing. Caked in dust and wearing pants sewn together from a dozen slaves’ tunics, Tobin could almost have been back in the circus. As for Corvus, his feathers looked as if they had turned white, until he made a shivering motion that shook most of the dust free.

“Here’s another man who would kill you for me, Father,” said Cephas.

Corvus looked at the genasi as if he were studying a tableau he was not quite convinced warranted inclusion in a circus performance. “If you like,” he said at last. “I owe you far more than that. It isn’t necessary, though. If the djinn suffer him to live, the life they leave him will be more punishment than anything we’ll mete out.”

There was another flurry of motion, and then Shan was among them. She carried a miserable form in her arms. Cynda, eyes shut and holding a bloody short sword in a curiously loose grip that left its tip dragging the sand, seemed aware of nothing but her sister’s strong arms, which she sought to burrow deeper into when the companions cried out.

Cephas watched Shan turn and shield Cynda from even the gentle ministrations offered by Tobin. No one would ever again have difficulty telling the women apart, unless whatever terrible tortures scarred Cynda were also visited on Shan. He realized he would do anything to prevent that from happening.

Marod el Arhapan stood and looked from the twins to Cephas. He rolled his shoulders and spread his arms wide.

Cephas dropped his flail to the sand and spoke to Corvus. “I do not think you know what punishments I am capable of meting out, Ringmaster.”

Corvus did not try to stop him.

They met on the sands of an arena, but their fight was not an entertainment. As he rushed toward the windsouled man who only resembled him on the outside, Cephas knew that what was about to happen was brutal, ugly, terrifying.

Marod el Arhapan was a connoisseur of fighting, not a fighter himself.

When Cephas took his life with a single wrench, it was not an entertainment. It was a punishment, one long overdue.

The WeavePasha considered the extraordinary mess in his scrying chamber. He considered again whether to allow his granddaughter to supervise her apprentices in cleaning it, but again decided it was too dangerous.

No, there was nothing to be done but to survey the damage caused by the kenku’s escape, and salvage what he could.

“That’s odd,” said the WeavePasha. Speaking of Corvus Nightfeather, he could have sworn he had given the kenku the particular volume of centaur verse at his feet several decades past. In fact, there was something peculiar about all of the rubbish tumbled in the center of the chamber.

It was mostly books, and they weren’t as damaged as they should have been after the conflagration. They were all very rare books; so rare that they weren’t even all to be found in his own library.

The familiar vibration of an activating portal came to his arcane senses. The old man whispered a few words and drew the knife that was always at his belt. He could sense who this unexpected, and most unwelcome, visitor was.

Shahrokh’s preparations were impressive, the WeavePasha supposed, for a djinni.

Ninlilah felt the dressing at the jagged end of her left horn. It was dry, and she decided she would have to wait only another few days before she could dispense with it. She had little to do out here but wait, after all.

She had already practiced enough since her injury that she was comfortable with her axe again. The odd change in her balance that followed the fight in the Spires of Mir
had required a change in some of her techniques, and this training camp was the ideal place to develop those. It would have gone easier if some of the gladiators had stayed to practice with her, but they had elected to leave with all the other slaves when she descended on the camp’s overseers out of the desert night.