and that’s the cue for Corvus, of course, darkness and killing, but he was just to mimic the watch’s alert whistles and stir up some of his shadows, and
‘Don’t shout out yet
Just follow the cries’
and Mattias looses a flaming arrow and ‘whoosh’ the crates go up before the coster guards have even turned around. See, I can remember all those things; it’s just not my way of doing. Though I do like that song very much.”
Cephas decided it likely he would see Shan and Cynda soon, and also meet this Mattias, who was somehow connected to the wyvern, and also a Corvus, who Tobin had said had a way with killing. He decided that even if it were the mute halflings explaining, he would better understand them than he did this cheerful goliath.
Cephas asked, “What is your way of doing, friend, if it is not to plan and sing, or-forgive me-to fight?”
“Oh, you do not have to ask for forgiveness, Cephas. I know I am not a true warrior-that is why I left the mountains, partly. And as for the planning, well, the others know that improvisation is the center of my art.”
Improvisation was something that Shaneerah had taught Cephas to avoid.
“And what is your art, friend Tobin?”
Cephas felt the goliath straighten in the saddle before he answered. “I,” said the giant, with enormous dignity, “am a clown.”
They were the last of the circus to leave the mote, but Corvus and Mattias returned to the wagons long before the others by means of the kenku’s rituals.
Corvus was not surprised to find the facade of his private wagon lowered on its chains so that it formed a platform facing away from the camp’s central bonfire. If the roustabouts had not followed his orders to lower the false wall, he and Mattias would still be on the mote, facing the Memnonar gladiator woman with their magical disguises fading around them.
“ ‘More peace than you deserve,’ ” Corvus said, adding just a touch of melodrama to his imitation of Mattias. The kenku hopped off the platform and extended his arm to his friend. “Always a moral, isn’t there?”
The ranger waved him off, parting the sorcerous joins that made a greatbow of his canes and already scanning the sky. “Better always than never,” said Mattias. “Trill will want feeding when she gets here-especially if she carries both of them the whole way down the canyon.”
Corvus waited for Mattias to leave before performing his habitual check of the magical circle inscribed on the platform. Given enough time, Corvus could transport himself to this circle from anywhere in the world. He had even read of ways to travel to and from circles inscribed in other worlds altogether, but his growing ambitions and elaborate schemes had not yet taken him beyond the mortal realm.
Against that day, though, Corvus crafted his personal circle with great care, describing its area with inlaid jet and setting the symbols of power as mosaics of onyx, black pearls, and silver. Every wagon in the circus train held its own secret treasures, but there was no greater concentration of wealth and power among the circus folk’s traveling homes than this circle.
That is how an outsider would have judged things. For Corvus, the tools and materials on the workbench he went to inside the wagon were far more valuable, and while their power was subtle, it was vast. The bench was laden with carefully arranged pots of glue, a lump of wax bristling with needles, and a number of keen knives. A framework of wooden dowels held a sheaf of vellum, which, midway through the process of binding, contained a half-dozen signatures.
Others in the circus considered their ringmaster’s habit of mending old books a hobby, but Corvus thought of the work as more than that. Hobbies were a layman’s way of killing time, and Corvus was no layman at killing anything.
Shan and Cynda moved as fast as they could while maintaining a hunter’s silence, pacing each other through the dry washes and boulder fields of the canyon floor. The sisters made it off the mote just as Corvus’s plot played out. The bridges fell with the canvas, but neither of the women believed the bandits and their goblin allies would be trapped above the canyon for long. The Calishite leader’s screams, incoherent with rage, made it clear that armed scouts would spread out, though the chance of any of them tracking the twins, much less overtaking them, was small. Mattias Farseer had schooled them well in the ways of wilderness travel, and if by some chance they did encounter trouble, well, they had been deadly fighters even before they joined the circus.
Cynda possessed the sharper sense of hearing. The long-haired twin stopped in front of her sister and raised a cautioning hand, but Shan saw that she smiled. She waited for the explanation she knew Cynda would offer.
When the reason came, it was just a finger pointed to the air, and a hand cupped around an ear. A moment later, Shan heard it, too-singing, from the sky.
The women gazed up at a familiar shadow passing swiftly beneath the stars. Trill flew low, carrying passengers making no effort at silence.
Cynda’s grin grew wider, but Shan shook her head. She shared her sister’s deep affection for the goliath, but she wasn’t as quick to forgive his lapses of discipline.
Shan reached back and felt the contents of her pack again, seeking reassurance of their success. The book had proved easy to retrieve. Corvus would be pleased.
From the air, the roadside camp of Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders appeared as a constellation of flickering orange stars drawing the shape of an eye on the plain below. A half-dozen campfires spread out in an irregular oval, encircling a larger central bonfire.
As Trill descended, Cephas saw that there were peculiar wagons parked around the various fires. They were roughly the same size as the wagons merchants sometimes brought to Jazeerijah, but, instead of being open to the sky or covered in canvas, these were constructed so that walls and roofs enclosed their beds. They reminded Cephas of his cell.
“Look,” said Tobin, pointing to one fire at the edge of the camp. “There is Mattias, ready with your supper, Trill!”
The wyvern’s answering call carried no hint of threat. In fact, she sounded happy.
Cephas heard shouts of welcome rise up from around the various campfires. The people at this circus were used to a wyvern swooping low over their camp by night.
The man standing beside the fire where they landed did not call out a greeting, at least not any that Cephas detected. But the wyvern seemed to respond to some unheard voice as she dipped one wing to allow Cephas and Tobin to slide off her back. In a single leap she bounded across the space lit by the fire, and the old man raised one hand to scratch the scaly frills around her eyes. Cephas could hear that the man was speaking aloud now. “That’s my girl,” he said.
Two carcasses-mountain goats by their size-lay dressed and cleaned on the wooden surface of a table. At an invisible signal from the man, Trill lifted one up in her huge jaws and threw her neck back, her head bobbing in time to the sound of cracking bones and satisfied smacks.
Without warning, Cephas’s vision grew indistinct, filling up with the flickering oranges and yellows of the fire, but fading to black at the edges. The flames danced in time to the rhythm that hijacked Cephas’s awareness. Dimly, he understood that the beating sound was not that of Trill devouring her meal, but the hypnotic pulse he’d first heard the day before. The earth is making music again, he thought.
It was like the sound that came when he was at the ragged edge in the arena, when his heartbeat filled his ears with the sound of blood rushing through his veins. And it was also the sound of the earth beneath his feet, the sound of rock and soil and sand. The sound of the earth was one and the same as the sound of Cephas’s heart.
When he was able to open his eyes, the light was steadier. The feel of the air was not that of the open night, and the planked ceiling made Cephas think for a moment that he was back in his suspended cell.