Sandstorm

Cephas.”

The noise of the crowd was lost to the blowing of the canyon wind, and the last of the sun’s rays receded above Cephas as he fell. He kicked clear of the canvas, of Jazeerijah, and of his whole old life.

He fell. Free.

Chapter Four

You are wise to realize you must trust me.

You are wise to find this terrifying.

-“The Marid’s Bargain”, The Founding Stories of Calimshan

And he rose up, on giant wings.

Cephas had heard the cries of wyverns on the night wind before. He’d even once seen the silhouette of a flight of the dragonlike predators against clouds lit up by Selune’s glow. But he had certainly never found himself sprawled across one’s back as it soared through the sky.

The goliath was there with him, seated in a leather saddle encircling the wyvern’s sinuous torso. He shouted, but not at Cephas. “Trill!” he said. “Oh, what a bit of timing that was. Mattias will be proud!”

Cephas had a vague impression of ground rushing by far below at tremendous speed. He could not see much beyond the goliath’s broad back and the rise and fall of gigantic, batlike wings. I wonder if that’s not for the best, he thought.

The goliath closed a hand around Cephas’s belt and hauled him around. Cephas found himself astride the beast, in front of his recent opponent.

“Look here, Cephas,” said the goliath. “Your flight from captivity is a flight, indeed. Trill plucked us from the air as if she were taking a brace of fat game birds! But without the killing and the rending. That would be no good, eh?”

Cephas pieced together the disjointed flashes that made up his recollection of the last few moments. The fall was interrupted when a shadow closed over him, and then a huge claw closed around him, rolled skyward, and tossed him clear, before a gentle landing behind the goliath on the wyvern’s back.

He gathered enough wits to answer the goliath’s question. “Yes, I’m glad we weren’t killed or … rent. I wish you had given me a bit more of a warning about what was going to happen, friend.…”

“Tobin!” said the goliath, and the wyvern answered this lusty declaration with a high, ululating call that explained her own name. “I am Tobin Tok Tor, clanned now to Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders, but born of stone in the Dragonsword Mountains, half a world from here. I am happy to know you, Cephas, and would have told you the canvas would fall and that Trill was on the wing, had I known these things for the telling.”

Cephas had a clearer view of the world around him now that he was upright. The mountains and canyon were black below them, but the stars were coming out, and at this height the sun was still just visible, low in the west. The wyvern carried them sunward, angling her flight down with the gradual slope of the mountains.

“You did not know that the canvas would fall?” asked Cephas, aloud. To himself, he thought, Don’t look down, don’t look down, over and over. But he managed to keep his voice calm, and asked further, “What was the original plan?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tobin. “Did Shan and Cynda say there was a plan? For their way of saying, I mean?”

Shan, Cynda, Tobin, Trill. Cephas memorized the names. “They said, rather, they told me that I would meet you, and that we would fight, but only as a dumb show for the crowd. That my escape would follow on that.”

“Yes!” said Tobin. “I suppose that is a plan. Though really not much of one if you think about it.”

“You came to the mote, convinced the freedmen to let you fight a match, and went out onto the canvas, knowing it was all a ruse to help me escape. But you did not know how it was to work?”

Tobin thumped Cephas on the back, as if congratulating the smaller man for some great revelation. “Yes!” he said again, and again, the wyvern echoed him. “That is how these things usually go. The twins and Mattias, they write these things out, you know? We huddle with Corvus and scratch pictures in the ground and count out the beats of songs.”

“I don’t understand,” said Cephas, and added to himself, Any of this!

Tobin said, “I mean like the time in Nathlekh City when we had to learn all those verses of ‘The Lonely Hunt.’

“ ‘Don’t look back

Just draw your blade’

and Shan pushes the crate into the alley so that it hits the wagon bed on ‘blade’ and

‘Down dark track

The kill is made’

and that’s the cue for Corvus, of course, darkness and killing, but he was just to mimic the watch’s alert whistles and stir up some of his shadows, and

‘Don’t shout out yet

Just follow the cries’

and Mattias looses a flaming arrow and ‘whoosh’ the crates go up before the coster guards have even turned around. See, I can remember all those things; it’s just not my way of doing. Though I do like that song very much.”

Cephas decided it likely he would see Shan and Cynda soon, and also meet this Mattias, who was somehow connected to the wyvern, and also a Corvus, who Tobin had said had a way with killing. He decided that even if it were the mute halflings explaining, he would better understand them than he did this cheerful goliath.

Cephas asked, “What is your way of doing, friend, if it is not to plan and sing, or- forgive me-to fight?”

“Oh, you do not have to ask for forgiveness, Cephas. I know I am not a true warrior-that is why I left the mountains, partly. And as for the planning, well, the others know that improvisation is the center of my art.”

Improvisation was something that Shaneerah had taught Cephas to avoid.

“And what is your art, friend Tobin?”

Cephas felt the goliath straighten in the saddle before he answered. “I,” said the giant, with enormous dignity, “am a clown.”

They were the last of the circus to leave the mote, but Corvus and Mattias returned to the wagons long before the others by means of the kenku’s rituals.

Corvus was not surprised to find the facade of his private wagon lowered on its chains so that it formed a platform facing away from the camp’s central bonfire. If the roustabouts had not followed his orders to lower the false wall, he and Mattias would still be on the mote, facing the Memnonar gladiator woman with their magical disguises fading around them.

“ ‘More peace than you deserve,’ ” Corvus said, adding just a touch of melodrama to his imitation of Mattias. The kenku hopped off the platform and extended his arm to his friend. “Always a moral, isn’t there?”

The ranger waved him off, parting the sorcerous joins that made a greatbow of his canes and already scanning the sky. “Better always than never,” said Mattias. “Trill will want feeding when she gets here-especially if she carries both of them the whole way down the canyon.”

Corvus waited for Mattias to leave before performing his habitual check of the magical circle inscribed on the platform. Given enough time, Corvus could transport himself to this circle from anywhere in the world. He had even read of ways to travel to and from circles inscribed in other worlds altogether, but his growing ambitions and elaborate schemes had not yet taken him beyond the mortal realm.