Sandstorm

“The stable owner, that was Azad, he makes gold off all the bets, whether his fighters win or lose. The gamemaster, and this was also Azad, makes gold from all the bets, too. But Jazeerijah belonged to Azad alone, and he could also place bets. And since he chose the combatants, and he controlled the conditions of the game …”

“Then he could fix the outcome,” Ariella said. “He knew how to bet, because he knew in advance who would live and who would die.”

“Who would win and who would lose,” Cephas gently corrected her. “But it amounted to the same thing, usually.”

She gazed at him in a way that made something gather in his chest, not the earth-force but something new, and just as powerful.

“And you always won?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I always lived. But there were times I would not fight. There were matches I could force Azad to call because I found some way to cheat death. I learned early on …” He trailed off, thinking. “I don’t remember a time before I knew that Azad would never kill me. He put me in terrible fights, or Shaneerah did, anyway, but he wouldn’t kill me. Beat and starve me, yes,” he said with a laugh, but she did not laugh along with him.

“So, that’s one of the things I knew. I still know it, maybe, one of the only things that doesn’t come from stories. I know how to fight and win, and how to fight and lose. I know thirty-one ways to block the swing of a morning star, and I know that when Talid is drunk, he always pulls the whip back early, so you just have to flinch at the right time and he’ll think he’s struck you. And that Azad the Free will not kill me.”

Ariella took his other hand. Cephas thought if what was in his heart had been the earth-force, he could have set the entire city to rumbling. “And you used those things to survive,” she said. “You fixed the game.”

Cephas said, “Not as well as Azad. There were times … There were times when I was the one holding the morning star, and I had to let it fall.”

Ariella squeezed his hands. “Corvus told me this Jazeerijah was an earthmote. That there was no hope of escape.”

To her surprise, Cephas laughed.

“No hope? Corvus is wrong. There was little in the way of possibility, but hope? I can tell you of at least six hundred and forty. If hope had wings, some of them might even have worked.”

Ariella gave him a curious smile. “You always talk like an old story.”

Cephas tried again. “I mean that, if I were windsouled, like you, I could have floated down from Jazeerijah. No trick of Azad’s could have kept me from touching the air the way he kept me from touching the earth. Perhaps I could have learned to fly.”

The silvered szuldar lines on Ariella’s face flashed. Her deep blue eyes sparked gold, and Cephas realized he was seeing the reflection of his own glowing pattern in her gaze.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you still can.”

Chapter Ten

If this room is all you have seen of the world,

how did you measure its width?

-“The Mapmaker’s Slave”, The Founding Stories of Calimshan

This is what Corvus owed humans. Humans invented cities, and cities cast shadows like no other places in the world.

When he stepped through the portal from Argentor, Corvus had noticed that it did not raise the feathers at the back of his neck. The ritual lacked the particular frisson the WeavePasha lent to his magics.

He’s left this to one of his vizars, thought Corvus, and he was not displeased by the realization. If Acham el Jhotos had turned his attention to some other of his innumerable plots, then he would not be there to greet them. This meant Corvus would not have to play peacemaker while Mattias and el Jhotos circled each other like a pair of Durpari fighting cocks, a fine thing.

And it meant Corvus would be able to slip out into the city without figuring a way to best the old wizard’s personal warding magics, an even finer thing.

Corvus considered whether or not to tell Mattias he was going out scouting, but he rejected the thought when the ranger scowled at his approach. Corvus understood. The deaths of their companions in the circus meant it would take the old man longer than usual to come back around to their usual choppy state of relations. Faith, trust, loyalty-perhaps even that flavor of love that humans called brotherhood-tied Mattias and Corvus together. None of them made Mattias comfortable simply being around his old friend-not all of the time, and certainly not when others of their friends were dead and Mattias had a more than reasonable notion that Corvus’s activities as a spy for hire were partly to blame.

Instead, Corvus told Shan he was going out into the city. As he expected, she expressed a desire to accompany him, and, as usual, he told her no. The halfling sisters could walk unseen from Almraiven to the Sea of Moving Ice, but their gifts were better utilized in wilder settings.

Aside from that, Shan had lately shown an increased flexibility in her choices that troubled Mattias with the increased ferocity it lent her. It devastated her sister. Corvus saw no reason to encourage this slow tilt in Shan’s moral compass, not yet at any rate. There was no need to further disturb the emotional waters of their already fractious little family.

And it wasn’t as if the troupe needed a second assassin.

The WeavePasha, Corvus knew, had taken the first tentative steps in a project the old wizard described as societal husbandry. His intention, laid out in a nested set of plans that had timelines running to centuries, was nothing less than the complete restructuring of Almraivenar society.

The governmental and social structures, the ways of doing business and taking pleasure, the institutions of magic, faith, and slavery that supported the city’s way of life, everything, the WeavePasha claimed, was anathema to the city he wanted Almraiven to become. Better than most, Corvus knew where the roots of the southern port’s ways and mores lay-in the society the Great Djinni Calim led onto the world nearly eight thousand years before. For all the grandiose claims the old Calishite writers made about their ancient civilization-and grandiose claims were the particular specialty of Calishite scholarship-almost nothing about it was the invention of humans.

The Almraiven of the WeavePasha’s imagination, though, the shining exemplar of human achievement that was the end of the wizard’s grand ambitions, and which, on more than one occasion Corvus had assured him was an absolute impossibility, was an Almraiven free of djinni influence.

The aspect of Almraivenar life that most closely resembled life in the genasi Emirates of the deeper desert, and which was most unlike the other greatest human cities, was the simple fact of slavery.

Corvus understood that slaves toiled and died in every city of the Realms, but few of those cities, indeed, were places where the practice was deemed legal, much less acceptable, as was the case in Almraiven. Even rarer were those places that celebrated the practice, as was the case in Calimport and its client cities, and in far Memnon and the other places where the efreet and the southern firesouled held sway.

Slavery was an undeniable fact of life in the City of Spells, and should the WeavePasha’s plans ever bear fruit, at some distant and unlikely point, it was the fact of life that would have the greatest impact on the city in its changing.

Slaves fed the city and clothed it. Slaves fished its waters and cleaned its streets and, in an aspect that mystified visitors from elsewhere, slaves even guarded the city as the backbone of its militia. Slaves even filled out the lowest ranks of the city watch.