floor, with its variation and unexpected threats thrown against the combatants to thrill the bettors in the stands, demanded a fighting style that was almost as much flash as it was edge.
So Cephas knew what a show was. But he had never seen one such as the halflings silently acted out in his cell.
The women were clearly capable fighters. They had the wariness of eye and the grace of movement that the best Cephas ever faced possessed, and they handled their keen weapons with easy familiarity.
But they were also storytellers.
The short-haired halfling rolled her shoulders and bounced across the floor. She untied her short sword’s sheath from her belt and twisted the scabbard through the air, rolling it across the backs of her hands in a move that exactly mimicked the attack of a flail. She gave Cephas a haughty look, threw her shoulders back again, and stretched to her full height before putting her back to the wall opposite Cephas and sliding down to a seated position that mirrored his own.
“I get it,” he said. “You’re me.”
The other woman gave him a curt nod but again indicated that he should be silent. She was making a performance of her own. If the two women were different in stature, Cephas would not have guessed it. Yet the long-haired sister now seemed taller, bulkier, slower. This time, the loosened scabbard was not a fast-spinning flail, but some huge and heavy weapon, wielded with such ease, Cephas realized, because the halfling woman was meant to be some warrior even stronger than he was himself.
The shorter-haired woman suddenly leaped to her feet, then leaped again in an arc that suggested a much greater distance than what she could truly achieve in the cramped space. Cephas felt the cell rock on its suspending chain, and he hoped no one outside would be curious about what caused the motion.
That first leap was familiar to Cephas. It was a diminished version of the flying attack he had made against the omlarcat the day before. Had these women been in the audience?
Then the other halfling-clearly not meant to be a cat but still some gigantic man spinning a polearm or greathammer-struck her sister a solid blow in the chest, knocking the woman to the floor. The hammer danced, and the woman holding it rushed to capitalize on the heavy strike she had just landed. Rise and fall, rise and fall, the hammer blows came down in such quick succession that Cephas could barely follow the moves. The halfling woman meant to be him avoided the strikes by twisting and turning on her back.
Cephas started to speak, but the women anticipated his interruption. Simultaneously, they glared at him, even while they kept up the moves and feints of what made for a fierce gladiatorial game.
His survival in the show-battle they were acting appeared in doubt. The short-haired sister simply stopped fighting, and, in an action conveying surrender, kneeled before her sister. The hammer rose again, but instead of striking a final time, the longer-haired woman gave her sister a friendly chuck on the shoulder. At this signal, the woman portraying him stood, then made a lightning-fast swing with her weapon directly at her sister’s head.
The woman watched, raising no defense, and the flail swung wide. Now it was the short-haired woman who gave her sister a playful cuff. Both women spread their hands, dropped their weapons, and embraced each other.
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
It was not the only lie she told them.
Shaneerah sometimes thought fear was her oldest friend, or her oldest
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;
