Sandstorm by Christopher Rowe Read Free Book Online Page A

they were starting, he said, “I think you would have figured out a way to use the hammer. You are a wonderful fighter, Cephas.”
    The noise of the crowd was lost to the blowing of the canyon wind, and the last of the sun’s rays receded above Cephas as he fell. He kicked clear of the canvas, of Jazeerijah, and of his whole old life.
    He fell. Free.

You are wise to realize you must trust me.
You are wise to find this terrifying
.
    —“The Marid’s Bargain”
The Founding Stories of Calimshan
    A ND HE ROSE UP, ON GIANT WINGS .
    Cephas had heard the cries of wyverns on the night wind before. He’d even once seen the silhouette of a flight of the dragonlike predators against clouds lit up by Selûne’s glow. But he had certainly never found himself sprawled across one’s back as it soared through the sky.
    The goliath was there with him, seated in a leather saddle encircling the wyvern’s sinuous torso. He shouted, but not at Cephas. “Trill!” he said. “Oh, what a bit of timing that was. Mattias will be proud!”
    Cephas had a vague impression of ground rushing by far below at tremendous speed. He could not see much beyond the goliath’s broad back and the rise and fall of gigantic, batlike wings. I wonder if that’s not for the best, he thought.
    The goliath closed a hand around Cephas’s belt and hauled him around. Cephas found himself astride the beast, in front of his recent opponent.
    “Look here, Cephas,” said the goliath. “Your flight from captivity is a flight, indeed. Trill plucked us from the air as if she were taking a brace of fat game birds! But without the killing and the rending. That would be no good, eh?”
    Cephas pieced together the disjointed flashes that made up his recollection of the last few moments. The fall was interrupted when a shadow closed over him, and then a huge claw closed
around
him, rolled skyward, and tossed him clear, before a gentle landing behind the goliath on the wyvern’s back.
    He gathered enough wits to answer the goliath’s question. “Yes, I’m glad we weren’t killed or … rent. I wish you had given me a bit more of a warning about what was going to happen, friend.…”
    “Tobin!” said the goliath, and the wyvern answered this lusty declaration with a high, ululating call that explained her own name. “I am Tobin Tok Tor, clanned now to Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders, but born of stone in the Dragonsword Mountains, half a world from here. I am happy to know you, Cephas, and would have told you the canvas would fall and that Trill was on the wing, had I known these things for the telling.”
    Cephas had a clearer view of the world around him now that he was upright. The mountains and canyon were black below them, but the stars were coming out, and at this height the sun was still just visible, low in the west. The wyvern carried them sunward, angling her flight down with the gradual slope of the mountains.
    “You did not know that the canvas would fall?” asked Cephas, aloud. To himself, he thought, Don’t look down, don’t look down, over and over. But he managedto keep his voice calm, and asked further, “What was the original plan?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Tobin. “Did Shan and Cynda say there was a plan? For their way of saying, I mean?”
    Shan, Cynda, Tobin, Trill. Cephas memorized the names. “They said, rather, they
told
me that I would meet you, and that we would fight, but only as a dumb show for the crowd. That my escape would follow on that.”
    “Yes!” said Tobin. “I suppose that
is
a plan. Though really not much of one if you think about it.”
    “You came to the mote, convinced the freedmen to let you fight a match, and went out onto the canvas, knowing it was all a ruse to help me escape. But you did not know how it was to work?”
    Tobin thumped Cephas on the back, as if congratulating the smaller man for some great revelation. “Yes!” he said again, and again, the wyvern echoed him. “That is how