Sandstorm

its own position or the strength of its enemy, for both of them fell over the edge-

And twisted and clawed and grabbed at the dangling canvas until they found purchase-the cat by sinking its claws into the frayed edges of the cloth, and Cephas by hanging on to the closest thing to a lifeline he could find-the viciously barbed appendages at the end of one of the cat’s tentacles.

Ignoring the pain, Cephas brought his legs together in the manner he had long ago learned gave him some control when he flew through the air after a trebuchet’s launch. The canvas hung far below the sight of those on the mote, and the cat snarled at its end. The force of their uncontrolled fall caused them to swing inward toward the underside of the mote, and Cephas stretched himself out as long as he could, the undulations of the cat’s tentacle ceasing so that the gladiator was a deadweight at the end of a fantastic pendulum of arena, fighter, and foe.

“Come on, come on!” shouted Cephas as he felt them reaching the end of their arc against the mote. An outcropping rose up in Cephas’s vision, and he angled his legs. Their movement came to a slow, almost lazy stop just as Cephas’s boots brushed the stone. He buckled his powerful legs, and, as their backward swing began, he kicked off with all his might.

This time, he could not ignore the pain in his hands. Cephas’s weight caused the razor-sharp cilia on the end of the tentacles to extend, shredding the calloused flesh of his palms. But he hung on, searching the far wall of the canyon as they swung down, then back up; if Cephas had wondered at the madness of his plan before, only at that last moment did he realize that everything did not depend on his strength or cleverness, or even on his desperate attempt to cajole a beastly opponent to help him in his attempt to escape the Island of the Free. At the final moment, everything depended on simple timing.

On the timing of a cat.

The omlarcat retracted its claws and Cephas’s stomach lurched.

Up, up, and out the combatants flew. They hurtled through space, clearing the canyon’s edge. As they fell together, the cat wrenched its tentacle from Cephas’s grasp and laid a long wound open across his back. Cephas took this as an indication that their temporary alliance had ended.

By comparison, the crash into a stand of thorny bushes felt almost comfortable. Cephas struck his head against a rock and blinked away the doubling in his vision to find the cat springing away into the hills. From where he lay bleeding on the ground, Cephas, bruised and broken in more than one place, heard something he never had in a life spent entirely on the floating world of Jazeerijah.

Cephas forgot his injuries, because of the singing.

A deep, wordless thrumming rose up from below. The ground itself sang to him.

He was still listening, coming to understand what the Calishites had spent two decades keeping from him, when Azad the Free and two guards armed with crossbows appeared above him. The tips of their bolts were smeared with brown paste.

The master of Jazeerijah gestured, and the bolts flew toward Cephas’s chest.

Corvus’s ebony beak pointed up to the blackening sky. The extraordinary escape had taken the combatants to a spot directly above his and Mattias’s heads, where the pair had watched the Calishite leader running with guards even as the young gladiator began his impossible pendulum swing.

“They knew what he was doing,” said the kenku. “The freedmen knew he would try to escape their arena in the sky and were ready for him.”

“It wasn’t hard to predict,” Mattias said.

The kenku cocked his head sideways. “Why?”

Counting, Mattias thought back over his month spent studying the earthmote and its people. “I’ve watched that lad fight sixteen times now,” he said.

“And he’s used combat to launch an escape attempt once before?” asked Corvus.

Mattias shook his head. “No, old friend,” he said. “He’s used combat to launch escape attempts fifteen times before.”

Chapter Two

“Yes, my arms are thin.

It’s my wits I’ll use to best you!”

-“Clever Janna and the Fire Giant”, The Founding Stories of Calimshan, Printed and Bound at Calimport

The Year of the Broken Blade (1260 DR)

Cephas woke in his cell with the stench ofkan’challanah strong in his nostrils. This was the paste the Calishite freedmen bought from the goblin shamans. The tribes used the foul substance, ground from a black fungus that grew in the shady ledges of the canyon, to incapacitate the monsters they brought to serve as their champions on the Canvas Arena.

A sharp pain distracted him from the smell. Grinta the Pike crouched over him, dabbing the pair of shallow bolt wounds in his chest with a stick wrapped in rags. When he tried to move a hand to block her none-too-gentle ministrations, he found that his arms and legs were chained.

Grinta saw he was awake and gave him her ugly, snaggle-tusked grin. “The word our masters use for that excrement means ‘unbreakable chain.’ Seems he trusts iron more than goblin alchemy, though.”

If Cephas had a friend on the earthmote, it was the old orc woman. On the orders of the Calishites, she had taught him much of what he knew about arena fighting. They did not know she had taught him other things as well, such as snatches of the language they used among themselves but forbade their slaves to use. She had even taught him a bit about the wider world off the mote, which, as far as Cephas could remember, he had never seen.

“My husband trusts only two things in this world, drudge,” said another woman’s familiar-and unwelcome- voice, coming from outside Cephas’s cell. “His mind, which forms his will. And my hand, which carries it out. Finish your work there and bring the dirt djinni to our chambers.”

Once, long ago, he had watched Grinta the Pike wield the wicked polearm that named her against a mated pair of dire wolves. The beasts had been starved to madness and baited to fury by a band of elf adventurers seeking to win the earthmote itself in a high-stakes wager with Azad. The wolves had fallen, but Grinta had been torn open from left shoulder to right hip. The scars she still bore across her torso were thick as ropes.

Even then, forced to push her own guts back inside with her own hands, Grinta the Pike had shown no fear.

Only Azad’s wife, Shaneerah, could make Grinta show fear.

“Yes, my lady,” said the old orc woman, and dug a dirty fingernail into one of Cephas’s wounds. He gasped in pain instead of voicing the taunt he wanted to throw at Shaneerah. “I’ll patch him up and strap him into his sandals straightaway.”

The Calishite woman, called the Queen of the Rock by slaves and freedmen alike, tossed a brass key onto the planked floor of Cephas’s peculiar cell on leaving, her shadow departing the low grate that formed its only egress.

Grinta slapped Cephas across the mouth with the back of her hand. “Fool!” she said. “Azad keeps that woman’s rage in check when it comes to you, gods know why, but he’ll not stay her hand against me. I came just close enough to besting her on the canvas when she trained me up to know that I could never match her, even in the old days.”

Grinta used the key to open the shackles at Cephas’s wrists and ankles. Rubbing the dark marks left on his gold skin by the iron, Cephas said, “I wouldn’t let that happen. Azad knows I would refuse to fight if he harmed you. And if he did harm you, he knows I’m as skilled as Shaneerah.”

Cephas’s cell was barely large enough for the two of them, so Grinta had to scoot backward to slide open the grate. One of the mysterious and extraordinary measures the freedmen took to ensure Cephas never touched bare earth was the design of the cell, the only home he’d ever known. A wooden box slightly less than his height in each