wide.
Cephas dropped his flail to the sand and spoke to Corvus. “I do not think you know what punishments I am capable of meting out, Ringmaster.”
Corvus did not try to stop him.
They met on the sands of an arena, but their fight was not an entertainment. As he rushed toward the windsouled man who only resembled him on the outside, Cephas knew that what was about to happen was brutal, ugly, terrifying.
Marod el Arhapan was a connoisseur of fighting, not a fighter himself.
When Cephas took his life with a single wrench, it was not an entertainment. It was a punishment, one long overdue.
The WeavePasha considered the extraordinary mess in his scrying chamber. He considered again whether to allow his granddaughter to supervise her apprentices in cleaning it, but again decided it was too dangerous.
No, there was nothing to be done but to survey the damage caused by the kenku’s escape, and salvage what he could.
“That’s odd,” said the WeavePasha. Speaking of Corvus Nightfeather, he could have sworn he had given the kenku the particular volume of centaur verse at his feet several decades past. In fact, there was something peculiar about all of the rubbish tumbled in the center of the chamber.
It was mostly books, and they weren’t as damaged as they should have been after the conflagration. They were all very rare books; so rare that they weren’t even all to be found in his own library.
The familiar vibration of an activating portal came to his arcane senses. The old man whispered a few words and drew the knife that was always at his belt. He could sense who this unexpected, and most unwelcome, visitor was.
Shahrokh’s preparations were impressive, the WeavePasha supposed, for a djinni.
Ninlilah felt the dressing at the jagged end of her left horn. It was dry, and she decided she would have to wait only another few days before she could dispense with it. She had little to do out here but wait, after all.
She had already practiced enough since her injury that she was comfortable with her axe again. The odd change in her balance that followed the fight in the Spires of Mir had required a change in some of her techniques, and this training camp was the ideal place to develop those. It would have gone easier if some of the gladiators had stayed to practice with her, but they had elected to leave with all the other slaves when she descended on the camp’s overseers out of the desert night.
There was another deep agent of the Janessar like herself in the camp. He had been furious that she had broken cover, but there was little the man could do besides lead the compound’s slaves north when she told him her plans.
Eventually, Marod el Arhapan would travel here to check on his stable. And then the man whose black will she had enacted for so long, even to the point of letting dear Valandra die, would die himself.
She’d seen Cephas through the flames-after all these years, Valandra’s son. And no sooner had she found him than he was lost forever.
She did not know what she would do after she killed el Arhapan. It largely depended on whether he was accompanied by a djinni when he came through the portal. In that case, she would most likely die, too. If he came alone, or was accompanied only by windsouled, then she would survive.
The Janessar might be sympathetic because of her reasons, some of them, but they would not allow her to work with them again. She supposed she might try to make it into Calimport and convince the other yikaria to leave the Emirates once and for all.
The circle of fine white sand she’d poured as a warning signal around the chamber stirred. Air was blowing inward.
At last, el Arhapan was coming. She shouldered her axe.
And she saw people she had never thought to see again. The goliath-the strongest fighter she had ever faced-was the most instantly recognizable. She did not see a deadly archer among them, but she had barely spotted the archer in the Spires of Mir, either. This was no good; there were too many.
And then there he was. He spoke to her.
“Put down your axe, ’Lilah,” said Cephas.
Epilogue
And he shall come from a great house of pain
with hair of spun gold and eyes of the sea.
He shall break the bonds that hold him,
light the end of Oppression’s Road for many,
and free the tortured peoples
from the evil grip of bondage.
For all that a clown twice his height made for an odd spectacle, it was even odder that Talid felt, for some reason, that he should recognize the man.
The three clowns behind the goliath, though, the ones with crossbows, Talid was sure he had never seen them.
As was his habit when guarding the upland bridge, he waved them through without a word, along with the kenku that followed, and the pair of halfling women wearing terrifying terra-cotta masks-one scowling, one smiling.
Cephas flew through the air over the canvas, tumbling. He wore a loose cloak over his armor so that his silver skin was not obvious, but he cast this off as he dived.
When he struck the arena floor, he struck as earthsouled. The crowd was small, but it roared.
Grinta the Pike was standing along one side of the canvas, leaning back against an extended bridge and keeping a pair of human men at a distance with her namesake weapon. If she was surprised to see him, she made no sign.
Instead, she made a quick pass with the pike, and the two mercenaries found themselves disarmed. They looked back and forth between the orc and Cephas with confusion and fear.
“Come on,” Grinta said to them, climbing onto the bridge as it retracted. “I have a feeling we’re about to see a better show than the one we were putting on.”
“Come out, Azad,” said Cephas. “Come out onto the canvas.”
He searched the stands and saw more people there. All the slaves and freedmen of Jazeerijah filed in, joining the handful of dozing goblins already present.
Azad answered from the gamemaster’s box, his response hesitant but still amplified enough to ring out across the canyon.
“Is that why you came back here, Cephas? You want me to fight you?”
The crowd buzzed at that, and Cephas caught the barest hint of the old bloodlust.
“No,” he shouted, answering Azad but speaking to all. “I have learned who you once were, Azad. I know that I bear the arms and armor you once wore, and that you were a mighty gladiator. But those days are long gone. I want something else. I want you to tell a story.”
Azad shook his head. “You took my book, Cephas. I don’t tell stories anymore.”
“This is a story that was never written down,” Cephas said, turning to address the crowd. “The story of the
