Against that day, though, Corvus crafted his personal circle with great care, describing its area with inlaid jet and setting the symbols of power as mosaics of onyx, black pearls, and silver. Every wagon in the circus train held its own secret treasures, but there was no greater concentration of wealth and power among the circus folk’s traveling homes than this circle.
That is how an outsider would have judged things. For Corvus, the tools and materials on the workbench he went to inside the wagon were far more valuable, and while their power was subtle, it was vast. The bench was laden with carefully arranged pots of glue, a lump of wax bristling with needles, and a number of keen knives. A framework of wooden dowels held a sheaf of vellum, which, midway through the process of binding, contained a half-dozen signatures.
Others in the circus considered their ringmaster’s habit of mending old books a hobby, but Corvus thought of the work as more than that. Hobbies were a layman’s way of killing time, and Corvus was no layman at killing anything.
Shan and Cynda moved as fast as they could while maintaining a hunter’s silence, pacing each other through the dry washes and boulder fields of the canyon floor. The sisters made it off the mote just as Corvus’s plot played out. The bridges fell with the canvas, but neither of the women believed the bandits and their goblin allies would be trapped above the canyon for long. The Calishite leader’s screams, incoherent with rage, made it clear that armed scouts would spread out, though the chance of any of them tracking the twins, much less overtaking them, was small. Mattias Farseer had schooled them well in the ways of wilderness travel, and if by some chance they did encounter trouble, well, they had been deadly fighters even before they joined the circus.
Cynda possessed the sharper sense of hearing. The long-haired twin stopped in front of her sister and raised a cautioning hand, but Shan saw that she smiled. She waited for the explanation she knew Cynda would offer.
When the reason came, it was just a finger pointed to the air, and a hand cupped around an ear. A moment later, Shan heard it, too-singing, from the sky.
The women gazed up at a familiar shadow passing swiftly beneath the stars. Trill flew low, carrying passengers making no effort at silence.
Cynda’s grin grew wider, but Shan shook her head. She shared her sister’s deep affection for the goliath, but she wasn’t as quick to forgive his lapses of discipline.
Shan reached back and felt the contents of her pack again, seeking reassurance of their success. The book had proved easy to retrieve. Corvus would be pleased.
From the air, the roadside camp of Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders appeared as a constellation of flickering orange stars drawing the shape of an eye on the plain below. A half-dozen campfires spread out in an irregular oval, encircling a larger central bonfire.
As Trill descended, Cephas saw that there were peculiar wagons parked around the various fires. They were roughly the same size as the wagons merchants sometimes brought to Jazeerijah, but, instead of being open to the sky or covered in canvas, these were constructed so that walls and roofs enclosed their beds. They reminded Cephas of his cell.
“Look,” said Tobin, pointing to one fire at the edge of the camp. “There is Mattias, ready with your supper, Trill!”
The wyvern’s answering call carried no hint of threat. In fact, she sounded happy.
Cephas heard shouts of welcome rise up from around the various campfires. The people at this circus were used to a wyvern swooping low over their camp by night.
The man standing beside the fire where they landed did not call out a greeting, at least not any that Cephas detected. But the wyvern seemed to respond to some unheard voice as she dipped one wing to allow Cephas and Tobin to slide off her back. In a single leap she bounded across the space lit by the fire, and the old man raised one hand to scratch the scaly frills around her eyes. Cephas could hear that the man was speaking aloud now. “That’s my girl,” he said.
Two carcasses-mountain goats by their size-lay dressed and cleaned on the wooden surface of a table. At an invisible signal from the man, Trill lifted one up in her huge jaws and threw her neck back, her head bobbing in time to the sound of cracking bones and satisfied smacks.
Without warning, Cephas’s vision grew indistinct, filling up with the flickering oranges and yellows of the fire, but fading to black at the edges. The flames danced in time to the rhythm that hijacked Cephas’s awareness. Dimly, he understood that the beating sound was not that of Trill devouring her meal, but the hypnotic pulse he’d first heard the day before. The earth is making music again, he thought.
It was like the sound that came when he was at the ragged edge in the arena, when his heartbeat filled his ears with the sound of blood rushing through his veins. And it was also the sound of the earth beneath his feet, the sound of rock and soil and sand. The sound of the earth was one and the same as the sound of Cephas’s heart.
When he was able to open his eyes, the light was steadier. The feel of the air was not that of the open night, and the planked ceiling made Cephas think for a moment that he was back in his suspended cell.
But he’d never had an oil lamp in his cell, of course, and he lay on a cot, not on the bare floor. He started to sit up, but his vision swam and he leaned back.
“I won’t say you’ve been ill-used. You were a slave, and that goes without saying.”
Cephas did not recognize the smooth voice, and could not guess what the sounds that accompanied it meant-the clink of metal on stone or ceramic; the pouring of water.
“But I must say, the extraordinary lengths Azad went to to deny you your heritage are cruel, even by the degenerate standards of your homeland.”
A figure walked into his field of vision. Grinta the Pike’s descriptions of the world’s peoples were short on any details that didn’t concern fighting, but he remembered that crow-headed men were called kenkus. He even remembered what Grinta said the best tactic to use against them was.
To run.
“You’ve spent enough time with Tobin that you’ll have learned my name, and that of our concern-and a good deal else, I imagine. But to see to the formalities, I am Corvus Nightfeather, and you are resting on my bed, in my wagon, in the fellowship of the road that we call Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders. Welcome, Cephas.”
Nothing in Cephas’s experience taught him how to respond to that word, “welcome.” But he’d heard it in stories, and he knew generally what it meant. He knew that it sometimes concealed unseen dangers. But the response was the same even then. “A thousand blessings on this house,” he said.
The kenku solved the mystery of the earlier sounds by extending an ebony, three-fingered hand holding a steaming mug. He laughed as he did so.
“Excellent. Mattias said the slavers kept up the tradition of reading from the Founding Stories. It’s good that you listened. Yes, that’s very good.”
Cephas accepted the cup-it was warm to the touch-and sniffed its contents. The color and scent of whatever brew it contained were unlike anything he’d ever had on Jazeerijah.
“It’s a tincture of dried leaves in hot water,” said Corvus. “And you’ve already had that much of it and more, so don’t worry that we’re trying to poison you. You probably notice that you feel a bit calmer than you should under such strange circumstances-we gave it to you to settle you down when you fell into your reverie outside.”
“The music …” said Cephas, realizing that he could still hear the steady beat but that it was distant, muted.
“Music, yes, that’s what you said it sounded like. That you actually
“ ‘Heritage,’ ” said Cephas. “Is that the same as ‘lineage’? As in the story about the fisherman and the stern woman of the sea?”
Corvus laughed again. “ ‘Stern woman,’ ” he said, and Cephas heard his own voice in the repetition, a perfect rendering. “I’d forgotten old Kamar’s puritan streak. Unusual in despots, really, at least in his day. But yes, in the version of the tale he had his scribes include in the book Azad read from, Umberlee is called the stern woman. I hope you won’t be too scandalized if you ever make it to a seaport and hear her own priests call her the Bitch
