Sandstorm

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.

“He will be only a moment,” he said, speaking the common trade tongue with a Northern accent. “Then we will leave you in more peace than you deserve.”

Shaneerah considered her chances of landing a blow against the chanting dwarf before the bowman could draw and release, but she dismissed the idea even as the chanting stopped.

“So you don’t speak a half-dozen dialects of the Elemental tongue like your fellow, eh?” she asked the bowman.

The old man didn’t answer, instead just indicating that she should step to the side so the bondsman, sword again in hand, could step past her and lean against the wall beside him.

“He doesn’t even speak Dwarvish,” the bondsman said, then made a clicking noise that could not have come from tongue and teeth.

Behind her in the chamber, then from the recesses across the canyon, and in the other stations around the curve of the mote, Shaneerah heard the familiar sound of the cables releasing. She had never heard all of them released at once.

Shadows swirled around the dwarves, and they were gone.

It was a day full of madness, so perhaps Azad had simply lost his mind and ordered the canvas to fall away, expecting Cephas to fight this secret ally in midair.

The goliath lurched forward and grasped Cephas and the mattock. Unmindful of the plunge they were starting, he said, “I think you would have figured out a way to use the hammer. You are a wonderful fighter,