The genasi of Argentor did not mistake the eruption of noise and violence around them as part of the circus performance for even a moment. The whipping guy wires and shattered smoke pots Trill bore down to the sawdust would not have allowed any such mistake to stand for long, in any case. But the genasi proved coolheaded in dangerous circumstances.
For a moment, Cephus stared in shock. He started moving only when Flek stepped in front of him and handed the flail back.
“Listen!” he shouted, both to Cephas and the crowd, “There is fighting outside!”
The tent became a tumult of motion and noise. Only after Whitey and Tobin rushed to Trill’s side did Cephas notice that she was not saddled, and that Mattias was nowhere to be seen. When Candle whipped off her wig, stuck a dagger between her teeth, and began a swift handover-hand climb up one of the hanging lines, he saw that a roustabout struggled to gain freedom from a tangle caused by Trill’s crash, and that the man was directly beneath a section of the roof that had caught fire.
A high ululating call sounded, and Cephas wondered if it was a war cry from whatever forces attacked the circus outside. But no, it was Elder Lin, signaling the Argentori to withdraw using a cut opened in the tent behind the stands, where Melda stood waving them through.
When the war cries did come, they were not high.
Low and loud, the bellows at the far end of the tent might have been voiced by demons. The fires spreading across the ceiling and the back wall of the tent made Cephas wonder if he had stumbled into the Abyss. Then he saw Mattias, struggling through falling sailcloth, fighting to drag himself across the sawdust toward Trill, his canes a blur in the smoke.
Figures moved behind him, giving chase, but the old man ignored them. Protectors covered him-Shan and Cynda had returned, and the acrobatics they displayed shamed any performance they might have made for the villagers. Spinning and leaping, ducking and diving, the sisters’ blades rang through the noise of fire and battle and panic.
At last, Cephas caught sight of what attacked them. Taller than he, as tall as Tobin even, armored and stamping, huge warriors pursued the sisters, making ferocious swings with enormous axes. They were bestial and furious, with the heads of cattle and gleaming horns. They were figures out of a nightmare.
Out of his nightmare.
He is small. Even though his arms and legs, and any part of him he can see in this dim place, are no different than in the waking world, through all the countless nights of this dream, Cephas comes into it knowing he is small. If nothing else, the towering doors and the great distance he has to climb down from his bed prove that.
His size, though, is not his only inadequacy. There is more wrong with his body than just that.
His feet are bare on the cold, blue floor. That’s another part of it-that’s something else hateful about him. His feet are on the floor.
And he is ugly. He knows that even more surely than he knows he is small. He does not look at his arms and legs again.
There is a sound outside the open door. It is laughter, and that terrifies him. He will have to run, or they will come and laugh at him. He will have to find her so she can hide him.
He rushes to a different door. Walking is … difficult. It must be practiced in secrecy, because it is shameful.
The laughter sounds again, and he runs until a shadow falls over him. He panics but knows not to cry, because that is the worst of his weaknesses. But then he cries, anyway, because the shadow is hers, and she sweeps him up in her unimaginably huge arms. She is so strong, surely she can protect him. She is so wise; surely she can find him a hiding place.
She sings with her strange voice, and the words are senseless because she sings in a slave’s language. Then she says words he does understand. “Stay close to us,” she says. “We will always be around you.”
He knows this is as true as everything else in the dream. He knows that her horns are sharp, but that they will never be turned against him.
But he knows, too, that she always carries him back.…
“Help us, Cephas!” someone cried, snapping him out of his paralysis. He ducked, just in time to avoid a flaming rope that whipped down across the center ring. The voice belonged to Blue, appearing with two of his brothers, all of them made up as clowns and bearing heavy footman’s crossbows empty of quarrels.
Mattias crawled over Trill’s body, which still sprawled motionless under the burning big top and was still, ridiculously, blue. He moved with deliberation, pouring drafts of a clear liquid from a clay jug, dousing each of her wounds. The three minotaurs who chased him into the tent slowed their advance, hampered by the detritus of the collapsing ropeworks and the tumbled blocks of his props, but even more by the martial dance of the twins.
Cephas had imagined they would be a deadly team, but he saw that his imagination was incapable of predicting the threat the women presented together. They did not fight as a team, or as a pair. They fought as a single warrior, one with four lightning-fast hands who could separate and combine, attack, and defend in a way that did not resemble any style Cephas had ever seen. They were beating the three minotaurs. Males, thought Cephas, noting their turned-down horns. But how do I know that?
A pair charging in from the right would flank the women, though. Cephas stepped into the minotaurs’ path, sweeping the flail out before him.
“How do we reload these?” Blue shouted as Cephas engaged the roaring minotaurs. He and his brothers held up the empty crossbows, or at least he and one of his brothers did. The third clown, grunting, made a game attempt at throwing his crossbow at one of Cephas’s opponents.
“That’s what you wanted my help with?” Cephas cried, unbelieving. “How did you load them in the first place?” One of the minotaurs bore a greataxe like those wielded by the beasts fighting the twins, but the other wielded a glaive, and Cephas shifted his defenses toward the second foe. “Anyone who uses a polearm is a brute,” Shaneerah always said. “The brutes who think they’re clever use glaives.”
Blue and the other clown must have been satisfied with the result of their brother’s experiment, because a pair of crossbows arced into the shifting triangle Cephas made with the minotaurs. The glaive-wielder was distracted by the makeshift missiles, and Cephas found a lapse in the fighter’s bristling defenses. His distal flailhead wrapped around the glaive’s shaft, gaining momentum before it whipped up and under the creature’s muzzle. Blood sprayed, and the beastly man fell.
“Corvus handed them out before he disappeared into his wagon,” Blue called. “We all shot at the same one, as he said, but he didn’t tell us what to do after that.”
Movement out of the corner of his eye told Cephas that Trill had gained her feet, which would surely end this fight. But no, she wasn’t standing; she was being lifted. “Strongest clown in the world,” Cephas observed. More loudly, he said, “Go help Tobin and your brother get Trill out of the tent before it collapses!”
He did not have time to see if the trio followed his directions, because the axeman launched a redoubled assault. The greataxe this bullheaded warrior spun was notched in several places on its cutting edge and pitted with age. The minotaur made an advantage of these imperfections, anticipating the snags and skips the chains of Cephas’s flail made when he tried to trap the axehead. White hairs in the mostly midnight black of the warrior’s broad face added to Cephas’s impression of a grizzled veteran. There would be no lapses of attention from this one.