Cephas’s cell was barely large enough for the two of them, so Grinta had to scoot backward to slide open the grate. One of the mysterious and extraordinary measures the freedmen took to ensure Cephas never touched bare earth was the design of the cell, the only home he’d ever known. A wooden box slightly less than his height in each of its dimensions, it hung from a hook extending from one of the ancient engines that dotted the mote.
Grinta slid through the entrance and stopped the slow spin their movement had caused in the hanging cell. Indicating that Cephas should stick his feet out first, she answered his boast about the couple who ruled Jazeerijah. “You may match Shaneerah’s skill. May, I say. But she would meet you on the canvas with more than just speed and strength. A fighter must have something-”
“A fighter must have something to fight for-yes, you have told me that a thousand times. Haven’t I answered you?”
Grinta took down a pair of wooden sandals with comically thick soles from a peg beside the grate. She strapped them to Cephas’s feet and said, “Perhaps you have,” she said, “if your answers are your attempts to escape. Have you answered a thousand times?”
The grate, in the middle of one wall and flush with the floor, was so narrow that Cephas had to turn his broad shoulders at an angle to pass through. Balancing on the wooden sandals, he shrugged, and said, “Today made six hundred and forty answers. I owe you some yet.”
The prod she gave him in the back nearly toppled him over. He recovered his balance and walked along the boardwalk the freedmen had laid that described the borders of his life. Except for when he was on the canvas, he was allowed only those places where the boardwalk led-his cell, the kitchens, the training grounds, and the hollow stone outcropping where Shaneerah lived with Azad. It was to this last location that Grinta took him.
As he raised his hand to knock on the wooden door, Grinta signaled him to wait. “The flail you fight with, Cephas, never forget Azad once wielded it in the desert hell these freedmen escaped. They claim he was the finest gladiator in their homeland. It’s not just Shaneerah you’ll face on the day you push him too far.”
Cephas furrowed his brow. “I cannot imagine such a thing,” he said.
“That Azad the Free would fight you?” asked Grinta.
Cephas shook his head. “That Azad the Free would fight anyone at all.”
One of his long-dead instructors had said of Corvus that if the kenku had a heart, it must be sewn down one side and bound in leather covers. Corvus rarely thought of the men, women, and stranger creatures who had educated him in the ways of shadow. Books, though, were rarely far from his thoughts.
As soon as he and Mattias stepped out of the shadowy portal that had taken them from the canyon side to this hidden camp, he drew forth his most prized possession from the otherworldly cache he accessed through his own breast feathers, a volume covered in dark blue scales he called his journey book. It contained rituals, recipes, maps, notes-any form of information that might be scribed down on pages could be read in the thick book, though there were few people in the Realms who could read the alphabets Corvus used most often.
Dark snow had collected on his and Mattias’s clothing as they traveled the shadow ways, but the kenku noticed that the old man did not bother to brush it from his cloak. They were much farther down the mountain at this hidden camp, and the heat of the early afternoon melted and then evaporated the flakes.
The women rushing into Mattias’s arms ignored any dampness as well; even the dampness caused by the tears on the old man’s cheeks. He had not seen any of his companions from Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders for long tendays, least of all those of Corvus’s secret corps of operatives gathered here. Shan and Cynda, twin halflings, supported Mattias’s weight even as they brushed aside his canes to embrace him. The women did not speak in greeting him, since they never spoke at all.
Such could not be said of the third and final figure who had waited for them at the foot of the canyon. If he had kept still, Tobin, the rocky-skinned goliath, might have been mistaken for a pillar of granite. The huge man towered over Mattias in much the same way the ranger towered over the sisters. “Mattias!” he said, his voice booming. “It has been too long since you left the wagons!”
Mattias lifted his hand in greeting but cast his gaze about for another missed companion. He spied a tumbled heap of leather harnesses and brass chainwork on the far side of the smokeless fire. “Where is she?” he asked.
Tobin clapped a heavy hand down on Mattias’s shoulder, and the twins had to scramble to keep themselves upright. “She is looking for food. We left the wagons at sunset last night and have been climbing hard since then. I could have carried enough for her, but Corvus-”
“Corvus instructed you to make haste,” interrupted the kenku, “which I see you have, and to move stealthily, which I continue to delude myself into asking of you, you great lummox.”
The goliath shrugged. “This is rocky ground, Ringmaster,” he said. “The sounds of my passage are natural enough. And the twins make no noise, even when they climb and leap so that it is hard for me to keep up.”
“Yes, well,” said Corvus, “we’re all here now, and there was no sign on the earthmote that any of us have been spotted. We get to go in on our own terms for once.”
Mattias scoffed. “When have you ever done anything not on your own terms?” he asked.
Corvus did not answer, but with one talon began sketching a surprisingly accurate rendition of Jazeerijah in the sand. “Our principal objective is a rescue, or possibly a kidnapping, depending on how things develop.” Drawing in the canyon, he spotted redoubts that housed the chains of the Canvas Arena, and the other four leaned in.
“Some of us will approach by stealth, tonight, and some of us in disguise, tomorrow,” Corvus continued. “Our exits will be less subtle.”
Azad the Free claimed that the shaft of the double flail, currently resting on a stand in his quarters, was carved from the heartwood of a tree an ancient guild of smiths had tended for six hundred years, then cut down and carved until nothing remained but a rod as thick as Cephas’s wrist and as long as a running man’s stride.
Each end of the rod was capped with a boss of blacksmelt fused so perfectly to the wood that Cephas’s calloused fingertips could not feel the joins when he used the weapon in the arena. The metal was black by its nature, and the wood was black by its age, but the chains hanging from the bosses were a sparkling silver. The links appeared too delicate to bear the heavy weight of the barbed spheres at their ends, but when Azad the Free lifted the double-headed flail from its velvet-lined stand, expertly rolling it over the back of his hand in a lazy arc, the strength and balance of the weapon appeared perfect to Cephas’s experienced eye.
Azad never had any guard but his wife, Shaneerah, when he called Cephas to the apartment carved in the stone behind the gamemaster’s box. The Calishite woman stood at her husband’s shoulder, one hand resting on the pommel of the throwing dagger tucked in her belt.
“I called you here because my wife believes I should use this flail to kill you, Cephas. But I thought I would read you a tale, instead.”
Keeping a tradition from the days when his human ancestors still ruled in their desert homeland, Azad sometimes brought the denizens of Jazeerijah together in the arena stands. These were nights when there were no games held for merchants up from the lowlands or tribesmen down from the peaks. There, he would stand in the gamemaster’s box and speak to “his people.” Grinta called this “playing at patriarchy.”
On some nights, he would rant drunkenly at his fellow countrymen, reminding them that the mission of the Island of the Free was to build an army, and that he, the greatest gladiator who ever stalked the sands of Calimport, would lead this army south to retake the ancient city from the djinni scum who had usurped it. Cephas first learned to sleep with his eyes open during these harangues.