He smiled vaguely at her, and as he did so, their eyes met. The potions of the Pasha of Apothecaries were still at work. Her eyes were slow to track his movements, and she seemed barely to recognize him.
He paused. Her reaction was quite interesting, because she shouldn’t be tracking the movement of anyone taller than she was. And, of course, she shouldn’t recognize him even a little.
It was the last thought he ever had.
To conserve the brief moments of flight Ariella could manage while burdened with him, Cephas made a strange and strenuous climb. With the swordmage clinging to his back, he used the regularly spaced joins in the elemental foundation of the el Arhapan estate as finger and toe holds, and as the manor fell downward, he made a great effort to keep to its pace, climbing as fast as he could and so descending toward the arena at a slower rate than the structure.
Ariella had found him soon after he crashed through the foundation stone. As he fell, the strap that secured his right shoulder guard had caught, swinging him hard against the shifting underside of the estate. One end of the floating artificial island was disproportionately heavier, and when the house began to fall, it first listed sharply, until it was at right angles to its former position.
“The lesser foundation stones must have enough lifting force to slow the fall!” Ariella shouted. “We’ll have to time this carefully to avoid being crushed when it hits the arena!”
Cephas was grimly satisfied with what he saw below. Household guards of the genasi had fought their way to defensive positions at the exits and were organizing a doomed escape into the cavernous spaces below the stands. This left the vastly more numerous slaves to their own devices, but those devices proved the better. The exodus of the slaves through the many holes blasted in the sands of the arena was much better managed than the mad scrums at the exits, or the general free-for-all in the air above the arena where windsouled attempted flights over distances far outside the range of their powers. Cephas hoped the slaves would all escape without injury, though he understood this was a slight possibility.
The nobleborn, though, could be damned.
Seeing one world crash down into another, seeing thousands of people fleeing and fighting for their lives, seeing chaos and tumult unlike anything she had ever known, Shan pared her plan back to its barest essentials.
Find Cynda.
The gamemaster’s tented area was an island of relative calm in the chaos at the far end of the arena. She judged it the best place to begin.
Five hundred paces of hell separated Shan from her immediate goal. She glanced skyward and, making an estimate of how much time she had to cross, considered her options.
She grazed the hilt of her parrying dagger with the thumb and forefinger of her left finger. She might be able to cut her way across.
Cynda. It was Cynda she sought.
Shan drew the dagger and slid it through the straps that held the cuirass of her leather armor tight. She bent, used the dagger’s edge to part the laces of her high boots, and stepped out of them.
She ran, and as she came to the outer edge of the panicked mob diving into the warren beneath the arena, she sprang, extending her hands and finding purchase on the shoulders of a man methodically pushing other slaves into the closest pit. She somersaulted through the air, her feet briefly grazing the upraised shield of a household guard who had abandoned her post in the stands.
Shan was a warrior and a scout. She had learned those skills from the finest teachers in the world.
And she was an aerialist. She had learned that skill from her sister.
“Where is Shahrokh?” roared Marod. “Where are any of the damned djinn?”
When his aide did not answer, the master of games turned to find that the man was gone. Fled with all the rest, he thought. How could this have happened? What could cause an entire estate to fall, and how could the djinn disappear at the same time?
Little matter. He would learn who was behind the destruction of his beautiful arena soon enough, and then they would pay. He was already thinking of ways to continue the Games. The Sabam could be repurposed for more traditional combats, perhaps, or, even better, he could relocate to Manshaka while the djinn rebuilt here.
For now, his best course of action was to retreat into the hidden tunnel that led to the stables and wait out the immediate crisis. He twisted a particular ruby setting in his ornate chair, and rotated the entire seat, revealing a downward-sloping passage.
As soon as he set foot in it, he saw that it was not empty. He would have sworn that no one knew of this passage except himself, Shahrokh, and the earthsouled who dug it and who were killed when they finished their labors.
But there was a halfling slave he did not recognize, just finishing a task he must have been at for some time. The passage between the pasha of games and the halfling was coated with an oily, smoking substance that ate away at the stone.
“Yeah, you don’t want to come down this way,” said the halfling. “These walls is fixing to collapse.”
The pasha gathered his windsoul, preparing to launch through the air at the man, but the halfling had spoken true. The brickwork walls began to crumble, and the ceiling slumped.
Seeing no way through, the pasha stepped back from the hidden entry and shouted in rage. “Who are you?”
The halfling shrugged, and before Marod’s escape route was completely closed to him, he heard the reply from beyond the falling rubble. “We don’t use names.”
The manor crashed to earth.
Sensing Ariella’s exhaustion, when he saw a clear spot through the dust clouds below, Cephas relaxed his grip and dropped a distance perhaps three times his height. He tucked and rolled when he landed, coming back to his feet with flail held ready, probing the shifting mass of rubble that marked the location of the Djen Arena with his earthsouled senses.
Ariella landed beside him, sword drawn, and stood so that they were back-to-back. “After the fall,” she observed. “Quiet? Not what I expected.”
There were calls and cries in the far distance, but in the immediate area, the only noises came from the clatter of stones and the hiss of sand as the rubble settled. One entire side of the Djen Arena was gone, flattened by the mass of the el Arhapan estate. The interconnected structures built atop the elemental foundation had fared much the same. The parts of the estate that struck first were reduced to nothing, while some walls and even windows retained their integrity, even if they were set askew. The presence of the floating stonework in the rubble led to less devastation in the el Arhapan buildings than might otherwise have been expected.
“No sounds,” he said. “There was time for most of the crowd to escape below then, and I trust that if Corvus lives, we’ll know soon enough. We should try to find the others.”
On the north side of the grounds, they discovered an area of rubble-free sand. The collapsed walls beneath the gamemaster’s box formed an impenetrable barrier on one side of the clearing, and the badlands of ripped-open flooring and rubble encircled its other sides.
Marod el Arhapan lounged in a veranda chair at the center of the sandy space.
The man watched them approach. For a moment Cephas wondered if perhaps his father did not recognize him in his earthsouled manifestation, but he was merely waiting for them to close within conversational distance.
“Your work, of course,” said the pasha. “I suppose I should have guessed, but I trusted Shahrokh to sniff out any plot you’ve been put up to by the WeavePasha or your mother’s degenerate kin or whoever supplied you with the means to offer me this setback. What have you done with the djinn, by the way? Some repelling magic item? They’ll not be happy.”
Ariella stepped forward and said, “I would prevent Cephas from patricide, Calimien, but there would be no shame in my blade finding your heart. Have a civil tongue. We only want to find the adepts and the goliath, and then we’ll leave you to lord over what’s left of your domain.”