If only the same could be said for Cephas.
“Cephas!” He did not recognize the voice at first. “Push him toward me!”
Oh no, thought Cephas. Behind the old minotaur, Marashan struggled with the glaive she’d pulled from the grip of the foe Cephas had already bested. She set its base against a flagstone prop, like a hunter setting a spear to receive a boar’s charge.
But a glaive is not a spear, and the soldier engaging Cephas was no dumb animal.
The minotaur did not even turn from Cephas, feinting forward. The thrusting axehead forced Cephas to duck back while the ironshod butt end of the great weapon swung around behind the minotaur, knocking the glaive from Marashan’s fingers with ease. The minotaur’s reflexes were among the sharpest Cephas had ever seen.
Still using both ends of his greataxe, still engaging foes before and behind, the fighter reversed the arc of his swing. Melda’s voice came to mind. “Oxen don’t need eyes in the backs of their heads,” she’d said, responding to some jibe of Tobin’s. “They can see almost all the way around ’em with just the two they got.”
Cephas whipped both flailheads up and in, parrying the swing of the axe, then driving it back. He instantly saw his mistake. The force of Cephas’s strike powered a pivoted blow against Marashan. Defenseless, the girl watched the blunt iron coming. Then, even faster than the axe’s strike, she vanished.
She had fallen to the ground, like the minotaur who came so close to ending her life. Cephas felt a surge of tectonic energy boil up from the ground, its flavor familiar from the times he attempted to match its effects over the long morning. Flek stood above his sprawling sister, his foot planted in the spot from which he’d chosen to launch his attack.
Except it wasn’t an attack, Cephas thought, rushing to capitalize on the minotaur’s fall. That’s not what Flek intended, and neither was its effect. Flek sent a pulse through the earth to literally undermine her, and Marashan fell clear of the bull warrior’s blow. But that force, that shaped strike, Cephas understood, could be used in combat.
Not now, Cephas thought, not when I need only strength and skill to finish this fight. The old minotaur spun and rolled on the ground, trying to the last to win clear of the lethal flail, but Cephas’s anger burned as hot as the tent around them. This creature had meant to kill Marashan as a distraction.
Taking in the whole of the ground meant for performance and now hosting battle, Cephas saw that the clown troupe had made the rent with Trill, though their efforts were hampered by the wyvern’s struggling back to consciousness under Mattias’s continued ministrations. The ranger’s canes were tucked through the back of his belt, and he hobbled along with one hand on Whitey’s shoulder while the other still splashed healing ointment over his companion’s wounds.
In the center of the tent, the twins continued to fight-the odds evened as one of their foes collapsed onto his knees, making a useless attempt to stop the bloom of blood fountaining from his throat. The wounds that caused that fountain had struck simultaneously, with a chirurgeon’s knowledge of anatomy and a gem cutter’s precision.
A closer look told him the twins were being pressed. These minotaurs were vicious and brutal, but they coupled those traits with ruthless discipline-a rare and deadly combination, and Cephas hoped that these two were the last of them as he went to aid the twins.
He spotted another-there was at least one more minotaur to fight. The largest he’d yet seen trotted into the far entrance, an archway of flame. She snorted and stamped, and even if her size had not suggested it, her superior arms and armor, and her bearing, marked her as the leader of these mysterious attackers.
She saw Cephas.
Corvus willed himself to ignore the sounds from outside his wagon. The burning of the tent roared as loud as any fires he’d ever set himself, and he heard death in it. He heard death in the screams of the Argentori genasi and in the hoarse directions Melda screamed at her husband’s kin. Corvus knew what death sounded like, and he would not listen.
Whitey had pulled him from the ring with a terrified look, then buried it beneath decades of showmanship to keep the audience away from whatever was coming as long as possible. Out in the night, it took Shan a single gesture-a hooking sweep of her hand with first and fourth fingers extended-to tell Corvus what doom had found them.
He would need details later-and he would have them, no matter what methods had to be used to glean them-but for the moment his course was set. He’d uncovered the cache of weapons hidden beneath the water barrels and handed them out. He heard Trill on the wing and the eldritch twang of Mattias’s bowstring. Shan and Cynda were exhausted but remained upright, and a pair of Arvoreeni adepts on their feet could swing the course of a full military engagement.
He could not imagine why the Calimien would loose El Pajabbar on him at this point in the game, but he knew his people would make it a decision the minotaurs’ masters in Calimport would regret.
In his wagon, Corvus passed over his pen and ink and did not even consider drawing out his book. Instead, he took a large conch shell into his clawlike hands.
The WeavePasha’s secrecy would be endangered if he used the speaking horn, but secrecy was already compromised, and the human’s wizardly pretenses at protocol be damned.
Corvus whistled a note through the ancient conch shell and felt it warm in his hands. As soon as the oceanic whisper issuing from its depths faded, replaced by the sounds of gentle conversation and cutlery clinking against expensive plateware, Corvus knew the audible link to the WeavePasha’s earring was established.
“Acham el Jhotos!” he shouted, positive that whoever was dining with the wizard would hear his voice, and that the WeavePasha himself would be clapping a hand to an ear and screaming blood. “Your plans are found out! Your foes descend! Your agent demands aid!”
A scream sounded from above. Trill? thought Cephas, but no, this was a man’s scream-a man’s dying scream.
Above, Candle tried to approach her brother, who had lost a desperate battle to stay clear of the flames and watched his death burning its way up his legs.
Cephas swore, looking for some way to climb, but all the ropes had burned away and every wall was now fully engulfed. The interior of the tent was brighter and hotter than any day he had ever known. He could only watch Candle, blisters rising through her greasepaint, swing back and forth, trying to gain enough momentum to reach her brother. The man’s screams ceased, his body curling in on itself.
The only sounds discernible above the fire were screams-screams from Candle, swinging and hopeless; screams from Flek, dragging his sister clear; screams of fury from the pair of minotaur warriors facing the tiring sisters. There were also the screams of the huge minotaur woman, seeking a path through sheets of burning canvas that fell from every direction.
The woman could not get closer. None in the tent could see a way clear of the small hells each found himself in, clear of the few patches of earth free of fire.
Earth …
“Shan! Cynda!” Cephas shouted. “To me! You have to find a way to me!”
Cephas began a different sort of defense than any he’d ever had to weave, swinging the flail to knock floating embers away, and ducking clear of gouts of fire. He made his way to Flek and Marashan, finding her unconscious and the young man dazed.
“We cannot get out!” shouted Cephas. “We have to go down!”
Flek, vastly more experienced with the powers of the earth than Cephas, saw the gladiator’s plan and nodded.
The twins bounded through the flames, leaving frustrated roars in their wake. Flek took his sister up in his arms as Shan spun her sister around, patting out the wisps of smoke that threatened to make a torch of Cynda’s heavy ponytail.