Sandstorm

figure was Melda. They had found the circus.

“Shan! Cynda!” the woman cried. “What have you done to these animals? You know better than to ride a beast so hard!”

The sisters were riding double on the strongest pony remaining of the three stolen from the abbey’s stables. The one trailing them on a lead blew out not long before, and, in the light of torches brought up by roustabouts, Cynda saw that the little roan’s eyes rolled. Later, she would have to find a way to tell gentle Melda about the dappled mare put down with a broken leg halfway through their mad dash across the plain. She needed someone to know they showed that pony honor and respect. Only harshest necessity drove the sisters to push these animals so far beyond their limits.

Shan rested, her hands on her knees, breathing almost as hard as the ponies. The hand that brought her water was Mattias Farseer’s.

The old man waited for her to drink, then said, “What is it?”

Mattias was as skilled with the twins’ fingertalk as the women themselves. She began to tell him.

Cynda interrupted with a quick gesture. All the circus folk knew the sisters’ sign for quiet because it was a gesture borrowed from Corvus. There were cheers and laughter coming from the tent, and the ponies breathed like bellows. The pitch in the torches burned with an audible hiss. The night was not quiet.

Even above those noises, something could be heard back down the road. The way to Argentor from the plain was as broad and smooth as any merchant king’s road in the cities of the North. It ran straight, up a shallow grade. The Spires of Mir threw back echoes from any traffic along the road, and the sounds carried up from the grasslands.

The twins had no need to communicate further. The sound of many heavy hooves, marching fast, cut through the night like a sword.

Chapter Seven

Among the Djen slave races Calim brought through the Airy Gate were the hubryn, who mingled with the native humans and became our ancestors. There, too, were the hin, who founded the divers nations of the halflings. And Calim also brought the horned yikaria, who feed their children blood.

— Akabar ibn Hrellam, Empires of the Shining Sands, vol. II

Ninlilah Adh Arhapan, Musar of El Pajabbar, sent no scouts and attempted no secrecy. During the long run across the plain, the scent of horses fleeing before them alerted the minotaurs to spies even before they found the carcass of a pony in a dry gully. The beast had been put down with a single, swift strike, bespeaking a level of skill that Ninlilah respected.

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.”