Sandstorm (29 page)

“That man you all talk about, Azad,” said Ariella. “He led an uprising in Calimport?”

“Azad the Free is not a man to lead an uprising,” said Corvus. “He simply led an escape. Before that, I have learned that for a ten-year period in the middle of this century, from the time the great djinni and efreeti nobles Calim and Memnon disappeared until twenty years ago, a human slave named Azad stalked the arenas of Calimport and Manshaka as no other gladiator in history has. He used a double-headed flail, he won over a thousand matches, and he ended his career when he was taken into the household of his owner, Marod el Arhapan.”

“The man the WeavePasha says is my father,” said Cephas.

“Oh, he is your father, Cephas,” said Corvus. “At least, it is his blood that runs through your veins, and that suffices as a definition of fatherhood for many. The records I consulted in Saradush, and earlier, in Airspur, suggest it. Then Elder Lin confirmed it when she examined your
szuldar
lines. You are a scion of the el Arhapan line, one of the oldest windsouled lineages on the planet.”

“Then Cephas’s mother was earthsouled,” said Ariella. “An unlikely match from what I have heard of the ruling classes of Calimport.”

“An impossible match, yes,” said Corvus. “And now we come to the key that turns the lock of our friend’s past. Who was the mother of Cephas Earthsouled?”

Cephas asked, “The pasha of games has no wife?”

“By all accounts, Marod el Arhapan is a remarkably focused man. His passion is the arenas his family rebuilt after the departure of Calim. He has enormous political power, but rarely uses it unless he is made to by his vizar, the djinni Shahrokh. Otherwise, he is content to be the master of games. The only times he leaves his floating palace or the arenas are when he travels to the training camps he maintains in the deep desert. He is known to have married just one woman and to have fathered just one child. They both disappeared from Calimien society decades ago.”

“When Azad led his freedmen north?” asked Cephas. “Bringing me with them? What of this gamemaster’s wife?”

“His wife—your mother, Cephas—died in the Year of the Malachite Shadows, twenty years ago. Not long after giving birth to an earthsouled boy.”

“Which the el Arhapans could not countenance,” Mattias interjected. “Why did they allow Marod to marry an earthsouled woman in the first place?”

Cephas, not Corvus, answered. “Because they did not know,” he said. “She wore a Second Soul.”

Corvus nodded. “Marod could not have known.”

“Why did she keep it a secret?” asked Ariella. “She had to have known the child might reveal her.”

“The answer to the first question is rooted in Southern genasi society. Even before the return of the djinni lords, the el Arhapan windsouled were involved with the earliest incarnations of the Firestorm Cabal. In the South, the sect is even more radicalized than in Akanûl. They preach division of the various souls, yes, but with the renewal of the war between Memnon and Calimport, the different chapter houses proposed ranks. The genasi
must
be divided by their forms, because one form is naturally superior to the others. Which form is held supreme depends on where a given chapter house was located. In Memnon and Teshburl, they teach that the firesouled are foremost. In Manshaka and Calimport—”

“The windsouled,” said Cephas, studying the backs of his silver hands. “That is two. What of storm and water? What of the earth?”

“As with anything else in the Emirates, the interference of the Plane Below compels. Air and fire hold sway because the djinni followers of Calim and the efreeti followers of Memnon hold enormous power over the genasi and any others living in the Skyfire lands. Of all the aspects of the genasi, earthsouled are ranked the lowest. At least, that is what the ruling windsouled and firesouled say. It’s one of the few things they agree on.”

“Are we slaves there?” asked Cephas.

“Yes, some earthsouled live as slaves. This is what Elder Lin believes to be your mother’s story. The matrilineal
szuldar
she traced on you belong to an obscure family of earthsouled who have been held in slavery in Calimport
for generations. They are not even recorded by the Firestormers in Akanûl, or by the High Heralds. Marod el Arhapan married a woman who did not escape slavery into the desert or onto the sea, then,” said Corvus. “She found a Second Soul, and sought escape through it.”

Cephas stared at the kenku. “What was my mother’s name?”

“I do not know. Not really. As the pasha’s wife, she was known as Valandra el Arhapan, without reference to her own family name. That’s not unusual when the windsouled nobility marry someone from a low-ranking family, and she would have used a false name in any case. The Argentori have abandoned the naming conventions of the Emirates, but Lin said the most common name among earthsouled of your lineage is el Shelsper.”

“Valandra el Shelsper,” said Cephas. “Marod el Arhapan. Do you know, I never spent any time at all imagining my parents? My daydreams were all versions of the stories in Azad’s book, with me taking the hero’s part. But if there are any stories in that book about parents and children, he never read them.”

“I know a little more, yet,” said Corvus, quietly. “I know the end of your mother’s story.”

They all watched the fire, though there was little light in it. Even its heat was faltering since Corvus had ceased to tend it.

Cephas said, “Tell it.”

Corvus said, “A tenday after you were born, Valandra el Arhapan’s name was struck from the genealogies of every Cabal chapter house. And, though I did not connect them at first, the name Valandra inh Yikaria was entered into another set of records.”

“ ‘Inh’?” asked Ariella. “I do not know that article. ‘El’ is of the family and ‘yi’ is of the place. ‘Adh’ is the slave of.”

“It is rarely used,” said Corvus. “And when it is, it is considered an insult. It means ‘sister of.’ ”

“Valandra, the sister of Yikaria?” asked Cephas. The word was so familiar …

“ ‘Sister of
the
Yikaria,’ I believe,” said Corvus. “As to who they are, you know them. Or have seen them. You fought them. It is the name El Pajabbar use for their own people.”

“What?” asked Cephas. “My mother’s name was listed with those of minotaurs?”

“No, Cephas,” Corvus replied. “She was listed with slaves bound for the arenas.”

“Oh, Cephas,” said Ariella.

“The day after you were born, your mother was turned into the pits below the Djen Arena. She was issued a pail and a cotton shift, and her face was branded with the Calimien slave mark. She survived there for ten days, until her name appeared on the card of gladiators and threw the wagering into disarray, because she was unknown and had drawn a famous opponent.

“She was handed a spear and driven onto the sand, and, before eighteen thousand spectators, she met the greatest gladiator of the era, and she died, Cephas. She died as the last opponent faced by Azad adh Arhapan.”

The prey moved about less than they had earlier, but the vibrations of their steps and sighs and endless prattle still carried along the stone strands. All the scouts felt it, and joined their minds together, then their minds with stone. They agreed. The prey was
stuck
, their position was
fixed
, and the fighters would come from the north.

Web and rock, thought the scouts, web and rock.

The demon sent its awareness through the stone strands, obliterating the personalities of all the plaguechanged aranea joined with it. The demon ignored the chaos this engendered in the ranks of his worshipers. The barely discernible individual personalities of the spiderfolk did not concern it, as long as their fighting prowess was unaffected.

The demon moved south over the plain, testing the limits of its leash. It had briefly imagined it was testing the limits of its freedom, but as soon as the concept came to its mind, the torment returned. The human woman was watching closely.

The demon did not consider the possibility of escape. It could not be said to be wise, but the demon
was
canny, and it knew any such attempt would find its physical body destroyed and its wretched soul sent spinning into the blackest pit in the universe. It had crawled out of that pit once already, and would not risk being cast down into it again.

The sorceress would never free it. She would not even reward it, as the demon doubted she possessed the depravity of imagination necessary to conceive something it would find rewarding. Except that she held the leash, the woman was a poor stand-in for the wizard who imprisoned it in the temple more than a century past. She was not even a pale shadow of the Qysars she claimed as ancestors.

The demon realized the woman might sense this direction in its thoughts, so shied away from them, fearing her psychic lash. But the lash did not fall.

A message coalesced out of the vibrations in the stoneweb. The shamans were joined in their awareness. They were the caste of aranea who believed the demon to be a god, and who had reshaped their warped and forgotten people when the land around them desiccated from nightmarish swamp
to chthonic badland. The shamans pooled their thoughts from points scattered widely across the plain, where their naked bodies stretched across the ground, attuned to the tiniest trembles in the earth. They collectively decided on an action, then communicated their will to the vast, immobile eggmothers, who plucked the stoneweb and directed the hunters and scouts and fighters.

The demon felt a warning tug on its leash and turned its attention back to the wailing shamans.

The prey was stuck in the far southern reaches of the web, they told it. The scouts have fixed the particular junction of strands, and the fighters approach. Do they wait for its majestic and terrible coming?

The demon listened, waiting to see if the sorceress would offer direction. Nothing came, and it judged the distance to its prey to be such that it could drag its enormous body there in a moment or two—no farther than a human could walk in a day, certainly.

Send in the fighters, the demon told the shamans. The one that survived receiving the message passed it on.

A bolt of liquid stone shot out of the dark, enveloping Cephas’s head and shoulders and making it impossible for him to breathe. He dimly heard shouts and the rasp of steel clearing leather, then the screams of a wyvern intent on destruction.

A tremendous blow fell, shattering the net covering his face. He blinked rock from his eyes and looked up to see Mattias standing astride him, one of his canes held in both hands like a club.

“Keep your head down,” said the ranger. “We don’t know what they are, but these webs they cast are hard to clear off.”

He twisted his canes together, and the thin gold line of the bowstring shone in the dark. “Surprised the bastard didn’t have them disable it permanently,” Mattias muttered, then said, “Ariella was on watch at our right flank, beyond the balanced rock.”

Before they bedded down, after Corvus promised to explain the WeavePasha’s plot at first light, Cephas had made a long, careful check of his equipment. He turned the double flail over and over, wondering about its age and powers. About its
provenance
, and about the great value it held for Azad the Free. Corvus saw him and said, “I have no way of knowing, Cephas. He used a flail on the sands. Whether it was this one in particular …”

The kenku had not finished the thought, and now that Cephas heard the sounds of fighting out on the plain, he found that it did not matter. For now—for tonight, at least—the flail was just a tool he would use to help Ariella.

Mattias’s climbing of the rock was a hard thing to watch, but for all his awkwardness, the ranger made the top of the balanced tor quickly. The strength in his arms must be enormous, thought Cephas, as he trotted around the stone. As he went, he shouted over his shoulder. “Where are the others?”

A flaming arrow flew away from the rock. An explosion followed out in the dark, and inhuman screams of pain rose up.

“You will see Corvus and Shan only if you’re in trouble!” Mattias called. “Trill is on the wing. She’s in a testy mood.”