Sandstorm (16 page)

The spies—two or more halflings by their footprints—did not hide the body, and neither did they make any effort to conceal signs of their flight through the prairie grasses. They traded stealth for speed, rejecting the skulking ways their kind typically embraced.

This was something else Ninlilah respected.

El Pajabbar would be met by foes warned of their coming. Whether those foes would be
prepared
was another question. The master of games said “earthsouled,”
which could mean strength to rival the minotaurs’ own, but he also said “peace loving,” a phrase the genasi used for cowardice.

It did not matter. The heir of the master of games was somewhere among these spires of stone. The people who hid him from her would fight or not, and so they would die or not.

He is found, Ninlilah thought to herself again. Again, she stifled the primal bray she was moved to sound. Marod yn Marod is
found
.

A strange scent flared her nostrils, and Ninlilah raised one mailed fist. Behind her, the two lines of warriors clattered to a stop, cursing and bellowing.

She ignored their petty insubordination, seeking among the hulking silhouettes for the downward-pointing horns of a particular male. Seeing that one of her fighters already turned his muzzle up to the air, she knew her impulse to stop and investigate the alien smell was wise.

Wrinkling his broad, red nose, the bullock came to stand by Ninlilah. “Sultana—” he said, then staggered, spitting blood and teeth when she struck him across the muzzle.

“You are to call me
Musar
!” she roared, and brought her chain-draped hoof down on the warrior’s dewclaw.

He did not cry out in pain. He valued his life too much for that. Instead, the young minotaur ducked his head in ritual submission and said, “A thousand pardons would not excuse my offense.”

Ninlilah snorted, because it was clear from his tone that the bullock was not sure what offense he had given. “You are too free with your words,” she told him. “The yikaria have no herd rank, by the vizar’s order.”

The bullock kept his head down. “This is known,” he said. “But so far from Calimport, so far from the djinn’s hearing …”

Ninlilah resisted the urge to strike the fool again. “There is no place outside the vizar’s hearing,” she said. “Marod el Arhapan may have sent us here without Shahrokh’s knowledge, but I assure you the djinni knows all by now. His spies among the Banites would have informed him even if the pasha’s ritualists did not hurry to him as soon as they closed the gate behind us. Have care. Now, use the gifts the Forgotten God gave you.”

The male raised his head, sniffing again. All of the minotaurs could track and hunt by scent, but as was the case with many of the red-faced clans, his sense of smell was preternatural.

“It is like the drakes the windsouled sometimes use in the arena,” he said. “And something else. Like a hunting bird, a raptor.”

Ninlilah wondered what manner of creature these earthsouled might be using to guard the heir.

An image of the boy came to her mind. Stout and fierce, he had just begun to walk when Azad adh Arhapan stole him away and made an oathbreaker of her. But before that, before he was stolen, his unsure steps always brought him to her side, wherever she was.

The bullock took a cautious step backward. Ninlilah realized she was sounding a warning, so low that only another yikaria would hear it—another yikaria, or any predator so foolish as to threaten a calf.

“Get back in line,” she told him. “Tell the others to poison the spars of their javelins and guard against fliers.”

The bullock nodded. “And I will guard my tongue,” he said, retreating.

She tossed her head, the vicious upswept horns of a yikarian woman stabbing the night like spears. Yes, guard your tongue, she thought, and mind the words you use. Ninlilah adh Arhapan—Ninlilah, slave of the el
Arhapans—was not a sultana but a sergeant, because this was no herd of yikaria, but a platoon of minotaurs.

Just as the lost heir of the Arhapans, Marod yn Marod was the son who bore the father’s name. Never mind the teasing name by which the house slaves called him, giving him another mother after his blessed Valandra died. He was Marod yn Marod; not Marod yn Ninlilah.

Cephas had them. Marashan and the young genasi seated in a roiling knot around her, and the younger children scattered among the crowd; all watched Cephas with their eyes wide, amazed by his displays of prodigious strength. Elder Lin and the other adults wore broad smiles, and Flek leaned forward so far he must have been close to tumbling out of his seat, an expression on his face that managed to combine deep suspicion with careful study.

“Find the fellow who thinks he can best you as soon as you can,” Tobin told him at one of their lessons. “And mark him, so the clowns will know who to pull out when you need the volunteer.” When Cephas asked if the script ran any differently if the fellow who thought he could best the strongman was, instead, a woman, the goliath was mystified. “I have known women who are stronger than me, Cephas,” he said, “but none of them ever needed to show it off for an audience. It will be a fellow.”

Cephas was glad it was a fellow he knew, as he sensed Flek would take the act with good humor. Even more, he was glad the clowns and the roustabouts were clearly enjoying the show. He had spent his life in performances, though he never knew it until the last few days. The thrill it gave him tonight was new, untethered from the possibility of death.

The act proceeded as planned. Cephas lifted boulders and bent bars, tossed barrels full of nails from one end of the tent to the other, and even, once they were fastened into the special canvas chairs backed with stout handles, juggled Elder Lin and two other women of the village.

The juggling worried him. He had not yet mastered the steady rhythms of the art, and he found that he did best when he watched one of the clowns who coached him, mirroring his tosses and catches. Corvus had hit on the trick of having Whitey stand behind the audience and juggle batons, giving Cephas a model to follow.

It worked well, though Cephas was confused when it was Tobin, not Whitey, who acted as his unseen prompter. The confusion grew when Whitey
did
make an appearance, but not in his clowning gear.

“A great display of skill,” said Whitey from the ringmaster’s place. “But not of strength, for surely the women of Argentor can never be said to be burdens. Why, my heart is lightened just watching these ladies float through the air. Applaud your elders, Argentor!”

The tone and color of Whitey’s patter differed from Corvus’s ominous pronouncements and raucous cries. Where could the kenku be? Cephas wondered.

But only briefly, because now it was time to bring up the proof of goods, as Tobin called it. The clowns elicited laughter with tricks and pratfalls, the aerialists earned their cheers with feats most would never dare, and Mattias and Trill … Well, Mattias and Trill were a frightening old man and a vicious predator recreating one of the deadliest episodes in history. The audience trusted the other performers on instinct.

“See,” Tobin told him, “a strongman does something that they think one of them could do, or that any of them could fake.”

And so the finale.

Tobin, or Tuber rather, made an elaborate farce of picking a volunteer from the crowd. Candle moved through the stands with enormous steps, wallowing her way among the old and young alike, rejecting every able-bodied young man Tuber picked with derisive toots of her horn or gouts of colored ribbon shot from a crossbow made of balloons.

Eventually, Candle offered
herself
as the opponent in the finale’s contest of strength. Tuber reacted by setting himself against her instead of letting Cephas take the spotlight again. A few quick pratfalls and failed lifts led to the two clowns’ attempt to raise a platform off the ground while they stood on it. Finally, Tuber lifted Candle over his head and threw her into the audience.

This last bit was an innovation, an addition to the act that made Tobin uncomfortable. “I am a
clown
now,” he had said. “Yes,” Whitey told him, “and you’re the strongest clown in the world. You think we’re not going to use that? Nine Hells, you think
I
wouldn’t throw my sister across the tent if I could?”

So, the intercession of the clowns ended with Candle in a graceless, spinning flight that was nevertheless perfectly timed and executed. She landed precisely where she wanted to—in Flek’s lap.

“You there!” Whitey shouted. “Unhand that clown!”

Flek realized he was to be the lucky volunteer. “All right, Cephas,” he said, rising to his feet and setting Candle down on hers, “I will test my strength against yours.” The good-natured roar of approval from the crowd was accompanied by several less-than-delicate whistles and shrill wishes of good luck from the girls sitting with Marashan. She quieted her friends with sharp elbows and rolling eyes.

Cephas grinned and held out his hand, welcoming the other young man to the ring. Cephas was a warrior, trained
in harsh conditions all his life. He was not the equal of Tobin in raw strength, but it was a close thing. None in the audience could doubt he was possessed of enormous musculature after a single glance. He was stronger than Flek.

For all that, Cephas had been impressed with the young earthsouled man’s grit and wiry strength when Flek taught him the earthshock, the gathering and release of power that every member of this audience mastered at a far younger age than Cephas. He owed Flek.

“Any man can lift and throw,” Cephas shouted, “but only those who have the greatest strength, and who have
mastered
that strength, can wield the double flail!”

With that, he flipped over one of the hollow boulders, revealing the weapon stand that it hid from view. He retrieved Azad the Free’s prize and made a few flashy passes with the chains, spinning the spiked heads and releasing just enough of his tectonic energy to throw spirals of dust into the air.

When the miniature sandstorms died away, he offered the weapon to Flek, who eyed the flail suspiciously. The young man only took it after more than one nervous glance in the general direction of his mother. When its weight rested in his hands, he raised his eyebrows.

Flek called over his shoulder to his fellow villagers. “You know, it really is quite heav—”

He did not finish the sentence, because at that moment, the unmoving form of Trill, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, dropped through the canvas ceiling into the center ring.

The genasi of Argentor did not mistake the eruption of noise and violence around them as part of the circus
performance for even a moment. The whipping guy wires and shattered smoke pots Trill bore down to the sawdust would not have allowed any such mistake to stand for long, in any case. But the genasi proved coolheaded in dangerous circumstances.

For a moment, Cephus stared in shock. He started moving only when Flek stepped in front of him and handed the flail back.

“Listen!” he shouted, both to Cephas and the crowd, “There is fighting outside!”

The tent became a tumult of motion and noise. Only after Whitey and Tobin rushed to Trill’s side did Cephas notice that she was not saddled, and that Mattias was nowhere to be seen. When Candle whipped off her wig, stuck a dagger between her teeth, and began a swift handover-hand climb up one of the hanging lines, he saw that a roustabout struggled to gain freedom from a tangle caused by Trill’s crash, and that the man was directly beneath a section of the roof that had caught fire.

A high ululating call sounded, and Cephas wondered if it was a war cry from whatever forces attacked the circus outside. But no, it was Elder Lin, signaling the Argentori to withdraw using a cut opened in the tent behind the stands, where Melda stood waving them through.

When the war cries did come, they were not high.

Low and loud, the bellows at the far end of the tent might have been voiced by demons. The fires spreading across the ceiling and the back wall of the tent made Cephas wonder if he had stumbled into the Abyss. Then he saw Mattias, struggling through falling sailcloth, fighting to drag himself across the sawdust toward Trill, his canes a blur in the smoke.