Sandstorm (4 page)

“Some of us will approach by stealth, tonight, and some of us in disguise, tomorrow,” Corvus continued. “Our exits will be less subtle.”

Azad the Free claimed that the shaft of the double flail, currently resting on a stand in his quarters, was carved from the heartwood of a tree an ancient guild of smiths had tended for six hundred years, then cut down and carved until nothing remained but a rod as thick as Cephas’s wrist and as long as a running man’s stride.

Each end of the rod was capped with a boss of blacksmelt fused so perfectly to the wood that Cephas’s calloused fingertips could not feel the joins when he used the weapon in the arena. The metal was black by its nature, and the wood was black by its age, but the chains hanging from the bosses were a sparkling silver. The links appeared too delicate to bear the heavy weight of the barbed spheres at their ends, but when Azad the Free lifted the double-headed flail from its velvet-lined stand, expertly rolling it over the back of his hand in a lazy arc, the strength and balance of the weapon appeared perfect to Cephas’s experienced eye.

Azad never had any guard but his wife, Shaneerah, when he called Cephas to the apartment carved in the stone behind the gamemaster’s box. The Calishite woman stood at her husband’s shoulder, one hand resting on the pommel of the throwing dagger tucked in her belt.

“I called you here because my wife believes I should use this flail to kill you, Cephas. But I thought I would read you a tale, instead.”

Keeping a tradition from the days when his human ancestors still ruled in their desert homeland, Azad sometimes brought the denizens of Jazeerijah together in the arena stands. These were nights when there were no games held for merchants up from the lowlands or tribesmen down from the peaks. There, he would stand in the gamemaster’s box and speak to “his people.” Grinta called this “playing at patriarchy.”

On some nights, he would rant drunkenly at his fellow countrymen, reminding them that the mission of the Island of the Free was to build an army, and that he, the greatest gladiator who ever stalked the sands of Calimport, would lead this army south to retake the ancient city from the djinni scum who had usurped it. Cephas first learned to sleep with his eyes open during these harangues.

On certain other nights, Cephas paid very careful attention, indeed. On those nights, when the moon Selûne cast bright-enough light, Azad brought forth something in the presence of which Cephas would never dream of sleeping. Some nights, Azad brought forth a book.

“These are the Founding Stories,” he would say, casually flipping pages as if he were not casting the most potent magic Cephas could imagine. “This collection here.” Azad’s bottle of palm wine would find his lips at this point. “This book was made on the order of Kamar yn Saban el Djenispool, the leader, the great
human
leader of all Calimshan, sometime … I don’t know, sometime back in those old days.”

A book was a sort of box made of leather, and its contents the rustling stuff of dreams. Dreams, Cephas had long ago learned, could be captured with an elixir called ink and locked in prisons called pages. To set them free again, one had to know a sort of magic that the Calishites kept from Cephas, a discipline called reading.

One night long ago, when Cephas was not even half the height he would grow to, around the time of his fiftieth escape attempt, Azad read aloud a story called “The Chain That Set Bashan Reaver Free.” It told of a human slave who learned to slip his iron collar at night, and who discovered that the very chains that bound him could be used as weapons in his desperate quest for freedom. In the tale, the slave Bashan became a desert raider with thirty wives to do his bidding, and a thousand camels.

Then Azad brought out a double-headed flail—
this
double-headed flail—and held it high above his head. “Do you remember this, Brothers?” he asked. “Do you remember the chain I used to wear; the chain I used to set us free?”

Everyone in the stands, even Cephas, awkwardly crouched on his high-soled clogs, had cheered. Cephas, though, had been cheering for Bashan Reaver, not for Azad.

Now the master of games lifted his hand from the weapon and walked over to another wooden stand. This one swiveled so that the object it held was concealed from view until Azad slowly rotated it toward Cephas. It held the
Book of Founding Stories
. For a moment, Cephas thought Azad really was going to read aloud, probably a story meant to teach him a lesson about the futility of escape, but the young man didn’t mind. He had yet to hear a story from the book that he did not learn something valuable from, even if what he learned was not what the story—or its reader—meant to teach.

“Yes, I thought I would read you a story,” said Azad, opening the book. “But which one? Which one could teach the lesson that I mean to impart?” Azad was among the oldest of the Calishites, perhaps even as old as Grinta the Pike, but he was heavily muscled, with the build of a brawler. Still, his thick fingers managed the delicate act of turning pages nimbly.

“And then I realized the time for lessons is past. You have ignored so many, after all. No, now is the time for punishment.”

Cephas tensed, but Shaneerah had not moved from her relaxed stance. In fact, there was a glint of amusement in her eye.

“So now is when I tell you, Cephas,” finished Azad, “that you will never see this book, or hear any of its stories, again.”

F
OR ALL HIS FAULTS, AND HE WAS MORE THAN WILLING TO
admit they were many, the freedman Talid was no fool. He knew what his fellow former slaves thought of him. He knew, too, that the only time he was ever assigned guard duty on the downland bridge was when Azad and Shaneerah judged that there was no threat from that direction. Other than a few hapless wildcat miners scratching in unpromising places, the western mountains were empty.

That suited Talid just fine. He regretted he wouldn’t be able to liberate any whiskey from the kitchens during the night’s matches, but he knew he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of actually watching the downslope trail, either. Talid usually managed to get a great deal of rest on guard duty.

He was not yet fully asleep when the rumbling sound came from behind him, and a wave of cool, moisture-laden
air flowed over the canyon rim. Talid turned just in time to see a boulder that had sat immobile by the trail since the Calishites had arrived, a boulder under which he had been shaded on more than one occasion, fall back to the ground with a heavy thud, as if it had hovered in the air before he turned around.

The bandit quickly forgot any questions about levitating boulders when he spotted the three figures standing before him. Talid had seen dwarves many times, of course. The savage clans on the jungle islands south of Calimport were a favorite source of new talent for the genasi who had owned him. And these mountains were home to their own variety of the squat, muscle-bound little men. Once or twice a year one would show up on the canvas, usually lasting longer than most humans.

But neither the wild-eyed jungle dwarves he’d known in the South nor the quieter ones he’d encountered since Azad had led them north prepared him for the pair that confronted him on the trail. Talid was an expert on arms and armor, so he knew a good word to describe the baroque angles and intricate details, infinitely impractical, of the bejeweled suits of armor these two white-beards wore. That word was “archaic.”

As for the goliath fighter who loomed behind them, his mail shirt and enormous mattock struck Talid as infinitely practical.

The dwarves were a little shorter than Talid, who was not a tall man, but their shoulders were twice the breadth of his. They wore full suits of plate, ridiculous off a military battlefield; certainly no soldier had designed them. The ores that went into their making—unrecognizable to Talid—bore a sheen so high that at first the Calishite thought their golden color reflected the late-afternoon sun. And the jewels!

Cuirass and vambrace, hipguard and gauntlet, every surface that did not bear a spike or serration; all were fitted with a multifaceted ruby, sapphire, or emerald, and with other precious stones Talid didn’t know. They were clear in color, flaming orange, or royal purple, and none of them, no matter their hue, was smaller than the size of Talid’s eyes just then.

But the demeanor the dwarves projected was not martial. Rather, it was haughty, confident, to be sure, and troubled at finding Talid standing there, not because he represented a threat but because he was a bothersome inconvenience. The attitude they wordlessly expressed reminded Talid of nothing so much as the windsouled genasi back in Calimport; he had seen them almost every day of the first five decades of his life, but they almost never saw him at all. Only the memory of that inhuman haughtiness kept him from shaking in fear as the huge warrior reached down and between the dwarves and relieved Talid of his spear.

The dwarf who was not bearing a sword began to speak, but not to Talid, and not in any tongue he was familiar with. This ancient being bent almost double under the weight of the king’s ransom of precious stones woven into his enormous mustache. He leaned on a pair of canes that must have had wood or bone somewhere in their construction, but for all that Talid could tell, were cut straight from a vein of silver.

The armed dwarf, whom Talid judged the younger one, startled the Calishite by speaking in perfectly accented Low Alzhedo, the language the slave classes in the Emirates used among themselves.

“Legate Arnskull offers you a gift, though he must recognize that it is of little value. He offers you your life.”

Talid was a liar and a thief. He was lazy, dishonorable, and, worst of all—in the eyes of the other women and
men who’d followed Azad’s promises across a waterless hell—he was weak. But he was not a fool.

“Please convey my thanks to the legate,” he said. “And please tell me what services I may rush to provide.”

The next time Cephas woke in his cell, the woman leaning over him was not Grinta. He fought the urge to scramble back, to hold his arms in front of his face in a defensive position.

The first time he’d ever seen one of the little people the other slaves called halflings, he’d mistaken the man for a human child and paid for the mistake when the man efficiently hamstrung him. Without a word, the man had then disappeared over the edge of the mote, the only slave to ever successfully escape Azad’s clutches.

This woman—the lines beneath her eyes and the scars on her hands would never let anyone mistake her for a child—held a short sword beneath his chin. She gazed down at him with impenetrable brown eyes. He shifted his gaze left and saw that the woman was also standing beside his cell’s grillwork door.

Before Cephas could decide whether he was dreaming or still seeing double from the blow to the head he’d taken on the cliff, the woman by the door flicked her right ring finger in a clear signal. The one standing above him leaned in, putting enough weight into the blade at his throat that Cephas felt his own blood flowing over his skin for the twentieth time in less than a day.