Sandstorm (38 page)

Cephas floated above his father’s house, unpleasantly aware of the scattering of djinn hovering somewhere beyond. They had streamed past him as he flew, as disinterested in him as one might be in a fly.

He did not know why the djinn had withdrawn, and he watched for their return; however, for the moment, he
counted it as luck to be unhindered as he studied the courtyards and verandas below. The manor was enormous, and its design included many interior chambers open to the sky. He flew on the windsoul, so his flight must be brief. He went as high as he dared, risking a fall to the manor or even farther if he did not go back down soon.

Ah, he thought, seeing the manor below him. Of course. To a denizen of the elemental plane, something that combined aspects of both earth and wind was necessarily impure. The flagstones lining all the courtyards were perfectly clear. Only the floor of a single round room had something in its character to distinguish it from the rest.

With the last moment of flight granted him by the wind-force, Cephas floated above the foundation stone. He felt his body begin to fall, and he wondered if earth combined with wind had a song of its own.

Then he felt the earth-force gathering inside. It spread through his limbs, and all along his
szuldar
, as the change came over him and his earthsoul manifested.

When he had made the shelter beneath the burning tent in Argentor, Flek told him to shape a space inside himself, a shape he knew well. The shape had been the only home he had ever known—his cell on Jazeerijah. It had barely been large enough to hold him and his friends.

Such a small place would never be sufficient to contain the force he felt inside him. The cell had been his home, but any home he would ever make now must be large enough to contain more than just him and a few others—Ariella and Tobin, Melda and Whitey and all their kin, his long-lost cousins of Argentor, the twins. Grinta the Pike needed space. He must have room, too, for Mattias and Trill, even though they would occupy it in memory. Their memories loomed so large.

Maybe even space for Corvus; he did not yet know.

Cephas opened his eyes against the wind. He extended his arms and legs, pointing himself down toward the foundation stone. He dived through the air, like an aerialist. He gathered his strength, like a strongman.

He clenched his fists, striking for home.

O
N ANOTHER NIGHT, THE BIZARRE INCIDENT THAT SAW
a herd of minotaurs finally chasing a goliath into the pits would be the most memorable part of the Games. This would not be the case tonight Marod realized, when a horrified silence fell over the south stands. Nor would the day be remembered because of a fight between twin Arvoreeni adepts.

The silence was replaced by screams, and wholesale panic descended on the arena as eighteen thousand people stormed the exits. The gamemaster’s box was set beneath a billowing tent, so he had to lean out to see why the crowds ran.

His house was not falling as fast as a stone cup cast onto the field might, but its speed was increasing.

From her waiting room in the north wall of the arena, Shan heard the panic and made a quick check of the door between her and the sands. She did not know what disaster was befalling the genasi, but it would doubtless affect her plans. Besting the door’s lock would take no time.

On the opposite side of the arena, the Spiritbreaker’s assistant did not answer when he asked her to report what she saw outside. The disloyal woman stuck her head out the spyhole and didn’t even take the time to draw it back in before she engaged the magic in a ring he hadn’t even known she wore. She faded from view.

He frowned and crossed to the door, which opened at a command. The arena was a scene out of a nightmare. The air was full of windsouled flying for the roofline—so many of them that he witnessed a dozen brutal collisions at a glance. Thousands of human and halfling slaves, along with minotaur guards and genasi, either possessed of a lesser soul or already exhausted by a failed effort at flight, packed the dozen exits cut into the stands, climbing and crawling and mindlessly killing in their panic. He saw a yikaria warrior climb up a watersouled nobleman’s back and disappear out an entrance by striding across the heads and shoulders of the packed mob.

A shift in the crowd was occurring. An enterprising pair of earthsouled women had smashed through the decking beneath the sands and beckoned other slaves through the gap they’d made down into the pits.

A sudden parting in the crowd of flying windsouled revealed the source of the mayhem. The Spiritbreaker did not at first recognize the structure making a ponderous descent toward the western grandstand, but the rain of
furniture, potted trees, artwork, and tiles that fell from it was so voluminous and, even from his vantage point, bespoke such wealth that he knew it had to be the manor house of one of the great families crashing into the Djen Arena. Then he realized it had to be the el Arhapan mansion where he himself lived, and, oddly, the thought that came to mind then was that he was pleased he kept his books in cases that closed and locked.

Given the size of the estate and the rate it was falling, the destruction would be enormous, and it might take several tendays for the slaves to dig out his rooms near the center of the complex.

He turned, and there was the halfling woman, still holding her short sword and dagger. He made a brief mental review of his various options, and decided that, regrettably, there was no way to escape with her in tow—a pity, but he had learned a great deal from their time together.

He smiled vaguely at her, and as he did so, their eyes met. The potions of the Pasha of Apothecaries were still at work. Her eyes were slow to track his movements, and she seemed barely to recognize him.

He paused. Her reaction was quite interesting, because she shouldn’t be tracking the movement of anyone taller than she was. And, of course, she shouldn’t recognize him even a little.

It was the last thought he ever had.

To conserve the brief moments of flight Ariella could manage while burdened with him, Cephas made a strange and strenuous climb. With the swordmage clinging to his back, he used the regularly spaced joins in the elemental foundation of the el Arhapan estate as
finger and toe holds, and as the manor fell downward, he made a great effort to keep to its pace, climbing as fast as he could and so descending toward the arena at a slower rate than the structure.

Ariella had found him soon after he crashed through the foundation stone. As he fell, the strap that secured his right shoulder guard had caught, swinging him hard against the shifting underside of the estate. One end of the floating artificial island was disproportionately heavier, and when the house began to fall, it first listed sharply, until it was at right angles to its former position.

“The lesser foundation stones must have enough lifting force to slow the fall!” Ariella shouted. “We’ll have to time this carefully to avoid being crushed when it hits the arena!”

Cephas was grimly satisfied with what he saw below. Household guards of the genasi had fought their way to defensive positions at the exits and were organizing a doomed escape into the cavernous spaces below the stands. This left the vastly more numerous slaves to their own devices, but those devices proved the better. The exodus of the slaves through the many holes blasted in the sands of the arena was much better managed than the mad scrums at the exits, or the general free-for-all in the air above the arena where windsouled attempted flights over distances far outside the range of their powers. Cephas hoped the slaves would all escape without injury, though he understood this was a slight possibility.

The nobleborn, though, could be damned.

Seeing one world crash down into another, seeing thousands of people fleeing and fighting for their lives, seeing
chaos and tumult unlike anything she had ever known, Shan pared her plan back to its barest essentials.

Find Cynda.

The gamemaster’s tented area was an island of relative calm in the chaos at the far end of the arena. She judged it the best place to begin.

Five hundred paces of hell separated Shan from her immediate goal. She glanced skyward and, making an estimate of how much time she had to cross, considered her options.

She grazed the hilt of her parrying dagger with the thumb and forefinger of her left finger. She might be able to cut her way across.

Cynda. It was
Cynda
she sought.

Shan drew the dagger and slid it through the straps that held the cuirass of her leather armor tight. She bent, used the dagger’s edge to part the laces of her high boots, and stepped out of them.

She ran, and as she came to the outer edge of the panicked mob diving into the warren beneath the arena, she sprang, extending her hands and finding purchase on the shoulders of a man methodically pushing other slaves into the closest pit. She somersaulted through the air, her feet briefly grazing the upraised shield of a household guard who had abandoned her post in the stands.