Cephas put a hand on Ariella’s shoulder. “I don’t know why your protectors have abandoned you now, Marod el Arhapan,” he said to the man before him. To Ariella, he said, “And no patricide is possible. I would have to be his son. He would have to be my father.”
The pasha snorted. “It seems that the only thing we share besides our blood, Cephas, is the wish that we shared not even that much. But if you doubt my patrimony, you are a fool. Even wearing your mother’s cursed secret, it’s clear you are an el Arhapan.”
Cephas studied the man. “That is the second time you have said that, about the secret of my mother’s earthsoul. And yet you said hers was a newly elevated noble family. Your marriage was a cause for controversy, you said. An earthsouled noble making a secret of her earthsoul seems-”
“Seems like a story concocted by a vizar who seldom troubles himself with the finer points of genasi society, yes. I would have pointed out the inconsistencies to him, except that, frankly, I did not care. You would have discovered the truth soon enough. Your mother was a scheming earthsouled slave who somehow learned to manifest windsoul and managed to disguise herself long enough to cost me much trouble and treasure.”
Cephas narrowed his eyes. There was still something wrong with Corvus’s version of his mother’s life story. “What do you mean, treasure?”
The pasha spit. “The escapees. They had to be replaced, all of them. Another flaw in your philosophers’ arguments, Akanulan. If you free a slave, you simply create the need for another slave to take its place.”
Cephas said, “My mother-”
“Your mother was a liar and a whore. I thought her treatment of the slaves eccentric, but I didn’t learn of her activities with the Janessar until after you were born. I didn’t know how much I was freeing myself when I set her before Azad.”
A tremendous crash sounded nearby, and the three genasi ducked as a sizable chunk of wall flew over their heads. A new cloud of dust rolled out of the rubble, and a pair of coughing figures stumbled into the clearing. Caked in dust and wearing pants sewn together from a dozen slaves’ tunics, Tobin could almost have been back in the circus. As for Corvus, his feathers looked as if they had turned white, until he made a shivering motion that shook most of the dust free.
“Here’s another man who would kill you for me, Father,” said Cephas.
Corvus looked at the genasi as if he were studying a tableau he was not quite convinced warranted inclusion in a circus performance. “If you like,” he said at last. “I owe you far more than that. It isn’t necessary, though. If the djinn suffer him to live, the life they leave him will be more punishment than anything we’ll mete out.”
There was another flurry of motion, and then Shan was among them. She carried a miserable form in her arms. Cynda, eyes shut and holding a bloody short sword in a curiously loose grip that left its tip dragging the sand, seemed aware of nothing but her sister’s strong arms, which she sought to burrow deeper into when the companions cried out.
Cephas watched Shan turn and shield Cynda from even the gentle ministrations offered by Tobin. No one would ever again have difficulty telling the women apart, unless whatever terrible tortures scarred Cynda were also visited on Shan. He realized he would do anything to prevent that from happening.
Marod el Arhapan stood and looked from the twins to Cephas. He rolled his shoulders and spread his arms wide.
Cephas dropped his flail to the sand and spoke to Corvus. “I do not think you know what punishments I am capable of meting out, Ringmaster.”
Corvus did not try to stop him.
They met on the sands of an arena, but their fight was not an entertainment. As he rushed toward the windsouled man who only resembled him on the outside, Cephas knew that what was about to happen was brutal, ugly, terrifying.
Marod el Arhapan was a connoisseur of fighting, not a fighter himself.
When Cephas took his life with a single wrench, it was not an entertainment. It was a punishment, one long overdue.
The WeavePasha considered the extraordinary mess in his scrying chamber. He considered again whether to allow his granddaughter to supervise her apprentices in cleaning it, but again decided it was too dangerous.
No, there was nothing to be done but to survey the damage caused by the kenku’s escape, and salvage what he could.
“That’s odd,” said the WeavePasha. Speaking of Corvus Nightfeather, he could have sworn he had given the kenku the particular volume of centaur verse at his feet several decades past. In fact, there was something peculiar about all of the rubbish tumbled in the center of the chamber.
It was mostly books, and they weren’t as damaged as they should have been after the conflagration. They were all very rare books; so rare that they weren’t even all to be found in his own library.
The familiar vibration of an activating portal came to his arcane senses. The old man whispered a few words and drew the knife that was always at his belt. He could sense who this unexpected, and most unwelcome, visitor was.
Shahrokh’s preparations were impressive, the WeavePasha supposed, for a djinni.
Ninlilah felt the dressing at the jagged end of her left horn. It was dry, and she decided she would have to wait only another few days before she could dispense with it. She had little to do out here but wait, after all.
She had already practiced enough since her injury that she was comfortable with her axe again. The odd change in her balance that followed the fight in the Spires of Mir had required a change in some of her techniques, and this training camp was the ideal place to develop those. It would have gone easier if some of the gladiators had stayed to practice with her, but they had elected to leave with all the other slaves when she descended on the camp’s overseers out of the desert night.
There was another deep agent of the Janessar like herself in the camp. He had been furious that she had broken cover, but there was little the man could do besides lead the compound’s slaves north when she told him her plans.
Eventually, Marod el Arhapan would travel here to check on his stable. And then the man whose black will she had enacted for so long, even to the point of letting dear Valandra die, would die himself.
She’d seen Cephas through the flames-after all these years, Valandra’s son. And no sooner had she found him than he was lost forever.
She did not know what she would do after she killed el Arhapan. It largely depended on whether he was accompanied by a djinni when he came through the portal. In that case, she would most likely die, too. If he came alone, or was accompanied only by windsouled, then she would survive.
The Janessar might be sympathetic because of her reasons, some of them, but they would not allow her to work with them again. She supposed she might try to make it into Calimport and convince the other yikaria to leave the Emirates once and for all.
The circle of fine white sand she’d poured as a warning signal around the chamber stirred. Air was blowing inward.
At last, el Arhapan was coming. She shouldered her axe.
And she saw people she had never thought to see again. The goliath-the strongest fighter she had ever faced-was the most instantly recognizable. She did not see a deadly archer among them, but she had barely spotted the archer in the Spires of Mir, either. This was no good; there were too many.
And then there he was. He spoke to her.
“Put down your axe, ’Lilah,” said Cephas.
Epilogue
And he shall come from a great house of pain
with hair of spun gold and eyes of the sea.