Sandstorm

Cephas was glad it was a fellow he knew, as he sensed Flek would take the act with good humor. Even more, he was glad the clowns and the roustabouts were clearly enjoying the show. He had spent his life in performances, though he never knew it until the last few days. The thrill it gave him tonight was new, untethered from the possibility of death.

The act proceeded as planned. Cephas lifted boulders and bent bars, tossed barrels full of nails from one end of the tent to the other, and even, once they were fastened into the special canvas chairs backed with stout handles, juggled Elder Lin and two other women of the village.

The juggling worried him. He had not yet mastered the steady rhythms of the art, and he found that he did best when he watched one of the clowns who coached him, mirroring his tosses and catches. Corvus had hit on the trick of having Whitey stand behind the audience and juggle batons, giving Cephas a model to follow.

It worked well, though Cephas was confused when it was Tobin, not Whitey, who acted as his unseen prompter. The confusion grew when Whitey did make an appearance, but not in his clowning gear.

“A great display of skill,” said Whitey from the ringmaster’s place. “But not of strength, for surely the women of Argentor can never be said to be burdens. Why, my heart is lightened just watching these ladies float through the air. Applaud your elders, Argentor!”

The tone and color of Whitey’s patter differed from Corvus’s ominous pronouncements and raucous cries. Where could the kenku be? Cephas wondered.

But only briefly, because now it was time to bring up the proof of goods, as Tobin called it. The clowns elicited laughter with tricks and pratfalls, the aerialists earned their cheers with feats most would never dare, and Mattias and Trill … Well, Mattias and Trill were a frightening old man and a vicious predator recreating one of the deadliest episodes in history. The audience trusted the other performers on instinct.

“See,” Tobin told him, “a strongman does something that they think one of them could do, or that any of them could fake.”

And so the finale.

Tobin, or Tuber rather, made an elaborate farce of picking a volunteer from the crowd. Candle moved through the stands with enormous steps, wallowing her way among the old and young alike, rejecting every able-bodied young man Tuber picked with derisive toots of her horn or gouts of colored ribbon shot from a crossbow made of balloons.

Eventually, Candle offered herself as the opponent in the finale’s contest of strength. Tuber reacted by setting himself against her instead of letting Cephas take the spotlight again. A few quick pratfalls and failed lifts led to the two clowns’ attempt to raise a platform off the ground while they stood on it. Finally, Tuber lifted Candle over his head and threw her into the audience.

This last bit was an innovation, an addition to the act that made Tobin uncomfortable. “I am a clown now,” he had said. “Yes,” Whitey told him, “and you’re the strongest clown in the world. You think we’re not going to use that? Nine Hells, you think I wouldn’t throw my sister across the tent if I could?”

So, the intercession of the clowns ended with Candle in a graceless, spinning flight that was nevertheless perfectly timed and executed. She landed precisely where she wanted to-in Flek’s lap.

“You there!” Whitey shouted. “Unhand that clown!”

Flek realized he was to be the lucky volunteer. “All right, Cephas,” he said, rising to his feet and setting Candle down on hers, “I will test my strength against yours.” The good-natured roar of approval from the crowd was accompanied by several less-than-delicate whistles and shrill wishes of good luck from the girls sitting with Marashan. She quieted her friends with sharp elbows and rolling eyes.

Cephas grinned and held out his hand, welcoming the other young man to the ring. Cephas was a warrior, trained in harsh conditions all his life. He was not the equal of Tobin in raw strength, but it was a close thing. None in the audience could doubt he was possessed of enormous musculature after a single glance. He was stronger than Flek.

For all that, Cephas had been impressed with the young earthsouled man’s grit and wiry strength when Flek taught him the earthshock, the gathering and release of power that every member of this audience mastered at a far younger age than Cephas. He owed Flek.

“Any man can lift and throw,” Cephas shouted, “but only those who have the greatest strength, and who have mastered that strength, can wield the double flail!”

With that, he flipped over one of the hollow boulders, revealing the weapon stand that it hid from view. He retrieved Azad the Free’s prize and made a few flashy passes with the chains, spinning the spiked heads and releasing just enough of his tectonic energy to throw spirals of dust into the air.

When the miniature sandstorms died away, he offered the weapon to Flek, who eyed the flail suspiciously. The young man only took it after more than one nervous glance in the general direction of his mother. When its weight rested in his hands, he raised his eyebrows.

Flek called over his shoulder to his fellow villagers. “You know, it really is quite heav-”

He did not finish the sentence, because at that moment, the unmoving form of Trill, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, dropped through the canvas ceiling into the center ring.

The genasi of Argentor did not mistake the eruption of noise and violence around them as part of the circus performance for even a moment. The whipping guy wires and shattered smoke pots Trill bore down to the sawdust would not have allowed any such mistake to stand for long, in any case. But the genasi proved coolheaded in dangerous circumstances.

For a moment, Cephus stared in shock. He started moving only when Flek stepped in front of him and handed the flail back.

“Listen!” he shouted, both to Cephas and the crowd, “There is fighting outside!”

The tent became a tumult of motion and noise. Only after Whitey and Tobin rushed to Trill’s side did Cephas notice that she was not saddled, and that Mattias was nowhere to be seen. When Candle whipped off her wig, stuck a dagger between her teeth, and began a swift handover-hand climb up one of the hanging lines, he saw that a roustabout struggled to gain freedom from a tangle caused by Trill’s crash, and that the man was directly beneath a section of the roof that had caught fire.

A high ululating call sounded, and Cephas wondered if it was a war cry from whatever forces attacked the circus outside. But no, it was Elder Lin, signaling the Argentori to withdraw using a cut opened in the tent behind the stands, where Melda stood waving them through.

When the war cries did come, they were not high.

Low and loud, the bellows at the far end of the tent might have been voiced by demons. The fires spreading across the ceiling and the back wall of the tent made Cephas wonder if he had stumbled into the Abyss. Then he saw Mattias, struggling through falling sailcloth, fighting to drag himself across the sawdust toward Trill, his canes a blur in the smoke.

Figures moved behind him, giving chase, but the old man ignored them. Protectors covered him-Shan and Cynda had returned, and the acrobatics they displayed shamed any performance they might have made for the villagers. Spinning and leaping, ducking and diving, the sisters’ blades rang through the noise of fire and battle and panic.

At last, Cephas caught sight of what attacked them. Taller than he, as tall as Tobin even, armored and stamping, huge warriors pursued the sisters, making ferocious swings with enormous axes. They were bestial and furious, with the heads of cattle and gleaming horns. They were figures out of a nightmare.

Out of his nightmare.

He is small. Even though his arms and legs, and any part of him he can see in this dim place, are no different than in the waking world, through all the countless nights of this dream, Cephas comes into it knowing he is small. If nothing else, the towering doors and the great distance he has to climb down from his bed prove that.

His size, though, is not his only inadequacy. There is more wrong with his body than just that.

His feet are bare on the cold, blue floor. That’s another part of it-that’s something else hateful