Sandstorm (6 page)

They turned to Cephas, eyebrows raised.

“If I fight a giant with a hammer,” he said, “he is my friend. We should make a show, as I did with the cat.”

The long-haired woman gave Cephas a broad grin and stepped over to pat him on the head. Even her sister, who was clearly of a grimmer disposition, smiled briefly.

“But why?” Cephas asked, ignoring their praise.

The smiling sister picked her short sword up from where it lay on the floor. She held it straight up above her head in the manner of a triumphant warrior, then angled the tip back and dragged the point across the rafter above her. The noise was soft, but clear—a steady scratch of metal digging into wood, punctuated by a rhythmic tick every time the point passed through one of the 640 marks Cephas had gouged there with his thumbnail.

As the halfling dragged her sword faster, the ticking sounds came closer and closer together until they made a steady hum; a hum that reminded Cephas of the song he had heard from the ground before Azad’s men struck him down. The woman was erasing all his past attempts to escape.

“If I make a story out of a fight with this giant,” he said, “you will help me escape Jazeerijah?”

Again, the smiling woman nodded.

“When?” he asked.

A roar rose from the arena. The first bouts, mastered by one of Azad’s lieutenants and featuring gangs of goblins fighting against merchants’ guards, had begun as the sun set. The short-haired woman jerked her head toward the noise.

“Tonight?” Cephas asked.

She nodded at him, then at her sister, who responded by gathering up their discarded sheaths and flipping her
sister’s sword off the floor with the toe of her boot. The short-haired woman caught it and the scabbard that followed, then eased the grillwork door open. The cell had been unlocked the entire time.

Before the pair disappeared into the growing darkness, Cephas called out to them, suddenly recognizing the fatal flaw in their plan. “Wait!” he said.

Only the short-haired woman came back to the door.

“The fight,” Cephas said. “The one you played out. It cannot work that way on the canvas.”

The woman raised one eyebrow, waiting.

“Your sister played her role too well,” said Cephas. “There is no one who can swing a real hammer that way. They are too heavy.”

This time, the grimmer sister’s smile was not just a faint echo of her happier kin’s. If anything, the woman was laughing, if silently.

It was the only reply she offered Cephas before she and her sister faded into the night.

Shaneerah could not tell if the elderly dwarf did anything more than narrow his rheumy eyes before each winch and wheel, sometimes muttering through his mustache, but more often just swinging one of his canes impatiently at the swordsman who so unnerved her. Then, the smiling dwarf would say, “The legate has completed his inspection and thanks you—where is the next device?” The trio would make their slow way to the next station, their pace dictated by the legate’s shuffle.

Finally, in a redoubt that looked much the same to her as any other, the younger dwarf spoke. “Yes, this is the very apparatus we were seeking. Most intriguing.”

They had made their way to the last of the winches Azad rigged to support the floor of his arena. Her agitation to see the men off the mote grew with each passing moment, spiking to an almost-unbearable level when she realized the bondsman had, at some point, switched from the dialect of High Alzhedo used in Calimport, to the fiery, sibilant-heavy patois of the firesouled and their efreet; the language of her youth.

Shaneerah taught the gladiators in Azad’s pathetic stable to ignore fear—to master it, to
eliminate
it if at all possible. This, she said, was the way of any true fighter.

It was not the only lie she told them.

Shaneerah sometimes thought fear was her oldest friend, or her oldest
friends
, rather, for she had known countless fears. And Shaneerah realized why the smiling dwarf frightened her.

In a life that had lasted longer than she had any right to expect, this was the first time she had met a fear she could not name.

Cephas immediately found he had been right. The long-haired halfling woman’s imitation of his foe was not accurate; she was slow as pinesap compared to this laughing giant.

As usual, Grinta had come for him, but this time she was even more abrupt than usual.

“What is it?” asked Cephas, fearing that the Calishites had discovered his would-be coconspirators.

Grinta pushed him toward the arena, where Azad already employed his gamemaster’s patter, indicating that the night’s main event was about to begin.

“Lots of strange people about tonight,” said Grinta.
“We all expected unblooded goblins and beardless boys to make up the whole card tonight since you let the Bloody Moon’s prize slip away. And we certainly didn’t expect Azad to put you up for a challenge on a single day’s rest after the beating it gave you. Too many unexpected things; too many folk I’ve never seen. Never even seen the like of.”

They came to the outfitting rooms. “I thought you claimed to have seen every kind of man who walked the realms,” said Cephas.

Grinta nodded. “I’ve seen goliaths, sure,” she said. “Even killed a few. Never saw one in this part of the world, though, and sure as the Hells never saw one fighting under the sponsorship of dwarves. And to top that, with his own hands, Azad brought down both his flail and his armor for you to use, while Shaneerah’s disappeared into the works passages with the dwarves. It almost makes me think she’s making a move against her husband.”

Cephas let the older woman dress and arm him, wondering if all of the unusual events were good or bad for him. “She would never harm Azad,” he said.

The orc spat to one side. “Shaneerah always acts in Azad’s best interests,” she said. “That doesn’t mean she won’t kill him someday.”

Cephas hadn’t had time to ask Grinta what she meant by that before rough hands shoved him into the trebuchet’s sling and he spilled onto the canvas like an offering before this endlessly surprising fighter.

Feints and dodges, slips that turned into thrusts, direct assaults that saw the giant bouncing away before he followed through—every move the goliath made was unexpected—or would have been, if he had not cheerfully announced every action before he took it.

“Now watch here, Cephas,” the giant growled, the words reaching Cephas’s ears
beneath
the noise of the crowd and
Azad’s increasingly frantic announcements. “I am a bigger man than some, so, if I drop to a knee, they don’t expect me to roll through and use the spring of the canvas to come up behind you, do they? Ha! Did you see me? It worked pretty fine, I think!”

Cephas was too busy making his own acrobatic tuck and roll in a desperate bid to avoid the weight of the goliath’s mattock to respond. For the first few moments of the fight, he attempted to engage the man in conversation, but while the goliath clearly welcomed the idea—Cephas had thought for a moment the warrior forgot they were combatants, his greeting was so genuine—Cephas soon needed all his breath to keep up the martial dance the two of them invented move by move.

“I like this canvas floor, did you know? We have much canvas in the wagons, but we use it for our roof and walls at
our
shows!” The goliath, for no reason Cephas could discern beyond the simple fact that he could, took a huge bouncing leap. Then, when he plunged back down onto the sailcloth, he stuck his armored legs straight out before him so that he hit the canvas with the seat of his breeches. When he was thrown back up into the air, the goliath whooped in clear delight.

“Fearless!” called Azad, his voice ringing across the canyon night. “How long has it been since a thinking foe showed no fear before Cephas of Jazeerijah?”

Cephas wanted to shout that it had just been the day before, but the goliath’s tumble turned out to conceal a subtle forward motion that brought his hammer into range.

“I am going to swing this mattock straight at your head, Cephas! They’ll like that!”

And they did. Goblin and human voices were harmonizing in shouts for Cephas’s blood when the stone hammer clipped him above the right ear. Cephas spun
with the blow, amazed that he was still conscious. He wondered whether it was a prop, a practice weapon such as the ones Shaneerah issued them when they trained. That would explain how the giant spun it about like a fencer’s blade.

As if in answer, the goliath said, “I saw the twins do this once up on their wire—they were being Azoun and Yamun Khahan. Do you know that story? Oh, that is a good one.”

The goliath, Cephas was coming to realize, was not his equal as a fighter. Had Cephas ignored the endless stream of talk and set his mind on making a quick end to the fight, it would have been a formidable but conquerable task. What the man excelled at was not fighting but
moving
. Elaborate, outsized movements marked his style, yes, but so did subtleties and barely perceptible motions that were invisible to those in the stands.

An example was this step and sweep move that left Cephas on his back, his own flail tangled around his arm braces.

“See, this Yamun was one king from the East, and Azoun, he was another king from the West, and they were both humans, so that meant there was nothing for them to do but fight. Shan and Cynda make a big show of it, but this time I’m thinking of, we were up North, in country where everybody knows the story. So they spiced it up.”

The goliath flopped down on top of Cephas, driving the air from his lungs and pinning him to the canvas. “The West-man used a steel long sword as all those West-men do in the stories, and the East-man had a curved one. The West-man wins unless you’re telling this story on the other side of the Rift.”

The goliath rolled away, and Cephas reacted to the incoherent shouts from the gamemaster’s box by shoving free, seeking to gain advantage.

“But as I said, we were in the West, and they all knew what would happen, even if the twins were up on their wire. Well, weren’t they surprised when they switched out the swords in the middle of the fight! Oh, I laughed!”

The goliath held the double flail in one huge hand and the suspect mattock in the other, the hammer’s head resting in his left palm.

For once, the man didn’t say a word before gently tossing the mattock to Cephas. Instinctively, Cephas reached up and caught it. Instantly, he was borne back down by its incredible weight.

It was not a prop, then.

When Shaneerah realized the younger dwarf was not drawing in his little book, but was instead chanting something written in its pages, she thought for an instant that she could stop whatever plot was underway. She believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the dwarf could cut her down sword to sword, but if he was casting some sort of spell, he was distracted.

The span of time from realization, to decision, to action, was less than the time it would take her to say Azad’s name, and her sword cleared its sheath almost as soon as the dwarf’s first syllable reached her ears.

She was not nearly as fast as Legate Arnskull.

The old man, his eyes not rheumy at all, but as clear and blue as an autumn sky, stood leaning against the wall of the hewn cavern. The dwarf’s deliberate raising of his twin silver canes matched Shaneerah’s desperate grasp for her sword, but then he bested her in the way he twisted their handles together, the silver flowing away to reveal rich, ancient wood curved back on itself into the form
of a greatbow. The dwarf had no need to string the bow, because a glowing thread joined the two ends of the magical weapon. The dwarf held an arrow, tipped with glinting silver and fletched with scarlet feathers, and he spoke to her while he seated it against his golden bowstring.