“But as I said, we were in the West, and they all knew what would happen, even if the twins were up on their wire. Well, weren’t they surprised when they switched out the swords in the middle of the fight! Oh, I laughed!”
The goliath held the double flail in one huge hand and the suspect mattock in the other, the hammer’s head resting in his left palm.
For once, the man didn’t say a word before gently tossing the mattock to Cephas. Instinctively, Cephas reached up and caught it. Instantly, he was borne back down by its incredible weight.
It was not a prop, then.
When Shaneerah realized the younger dwarf was not drawing in his little book, but was instead chanting something written in its pages, she thought for an instant that she could stop whatever plot was underway. She believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the dwarf could cut her down sword to sword, but if he was casting some sort of spell, he was distracted.
The span of time from realization, to decision, to action, was less than the time it would take her to say Azad’s name, and her sword cleared its sheath almost as soon as the dwarf’s first syllable reached her ears.
She was not nearly as fast as Legate Arnskull.
The old man, his eyes not rheumy at all, but as clear and blue as an autumn sky, stood leaning against the wall of the hewn cavern. The dwarf’s deliberate raising of his twin silver canes matched Shaneerah’s desperate grasp for her sword, but then he bested her in the way he twisted their handles together, the silver flowing away to reveal rich, ancient wood curved back on itself into the form of a greatbow. The dwarf had no need to string the bow, because a glowing thread joined the two ends of the magical weapon. The dwarf held an arrow, tipped with glinting silver and fletched with scarlet feathers, and he spoke to her while he seated it against his golden bowstring.
“He will be only a moment,” he said, speaking the common trade tongue with a Northern accent. “Then we will leave you in more peace than you deserve.”
Shaneerah considered her chances of landing a blow against the chanting dwarf before the bowman could draw and release, but she dismissed the idea even as the chanting stopped.
“So you don’t speak a half-dozen dialects of the Elemental tongue like your fellow, eh?” she asked the bowman.
The old man didn’t answer, instead just indicating that she should step to the side so the bondsman, sword again in hand, could step past her and lean against the wall beside him.
“He doesn’t even speak Dwarvish,” the bondsman said, then made a clicking noise that could not have come from tongue and teeth.
Behind her in the chamber, then from the recesses across the canyon, and in the other stations around the curve of the mote, Shaneerah heard the familiar sound of the cables releasing. She had never heard all of them released at once.
Shadows swirled around the dwarves, and they were gone.
It was a day full of madness, so perhaps Azad had simply lost his mind and ordered the canvas to fall away, expecting Cephas to fight this secret ally in midair.
The goliath lurched forward and grasped Cephas and the mattock. Unmindful of the plunge they were starting, he said, “I think you would have figured out a way to use the hammer. You are a wonderful fighter, Cephas.”
The noise of the crowd was lost to the blowing of the canyon wind, and the last of the sun’s rays receded above Cephas as he fell. He kicked clear of the canvas, of Jazeerijah, and of his whole old life.
He fell. Free.
Chapter Four
You are wise to realize you must trust me.
You are wise to find this terrifying.
And he rose up, on giant wings.
Cephas had heard the cries of wyverns on the night wind before. He’d even once seen the silhouette of a flight of the dragonlike predators against clouds lit up by Selune’s glow. But he had certainly never found himself sprawled across one’s back as it soared through the sky.
The goliath was there with him, seated in a leather saddle encircling the wyvern’s sinuous torso. He shouted, but not at Cephas. “Trill!” he said. “Oh, what a bit of timing that was. Mattias will be proud!”
Cephas had a vague impression of ground rushing by far below at tremendous speed. He could not see much beyond the goliath’s broad back and the rise and fall of gigantic, batlike wings. I wonder if that’s not for the best, he thought.
The goliath closed a hand around Cephas’s belt and hauled him around. Cephas found himself astride the beast, in front of his recent opponent.
“Look here, Cephas,” said the goliath. “Your flight from captivity is a flight, indeed. Trill plucked us from the air as if she were taking a brace of fat game birds! But without the killing and the rending. That would be no good, eh?”
Cephas pieced together the disjointed flashes that made up his recollection of the last few moments. The fall was interrupted when a shadow closed over him, and then a huge claw closed around him, rolled skyward, and tossed him clear, before a gentle landing behind the goliath on the wyvern’s back.
He gathered enough wits to answer the goliath’s question. “Yes, I’m glad we weren’t killed or … rent. I wish you had given me a bit more of a warning about what was going to happen, friend.…”
“Tobin!” said the goliath, and the wyvern answered this lusty declaration with a high, ululating call that explained her own name. “I am Tobin Tok Tor, clanned now to Nightfeather’s Circus of Wonders, but born of stone in the Dragonsword Mountains, half a world from here. I am happy to know you, Cephas, and would have told you the canvas would fall and that Trill was on the wing, had I known these things for the telling.”
Cephas had a clearer view of the world around him now that he was upright. The mountains and canyon were black below them, but the stars were coming out, and at this height the sun was still just visible, low in the west. The wyvern carried them sunward, angling her flight down with the gradual slope of the mountains.
“You did not know that the canvas would fall?” asked Cephas, aloud. To himself, he thought, Don’t look down, don’t look down, over and over. But he managed to keep his voice calm, and asked further, “What was the original plan?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tobin. “Did Shan and Cynda say there was a plan? For their way of saying, I mean?”
Shan, Cynda, Tobin, Trill. Cephas memorized the names. “They said, rather, they told me that I would meet you, and that we would fight, but only as a dumb show for the crowd. That my escape would follow on that.”
“Yes!” said Tobin. “I suppose that is a plan. Though really not much of one if you think about it.”
“You came to the mote, convinced the freedmen to let you fight a match, and went out onto the canvas, knowing it was all a ruse to help me escape. But you did not know how it was to work?”
Tobin thumped Cephas on the back, as if congratulating the smaller man for some great revelation. “Yes!” he said again, and again, the wyvern echoed him. “That is how these things usually go. The twins and Mattias, they write these things out, you know? We huddle with Corvus and scratch pictures in the ground and count out the beats of songs.”
“I don’t understand,” said Cephas, and added to himself, Any of this!
Tobin said, “I mean like the time in Nathlekh City when we had to learn all those verses of ‘The Lonely Hunt.’
“ ‘Don’t look back
Just draw your blade’
and Shan pushes the crate into the alley so that it hits the wagon bed on ‘blade’ and
‘Down dark track
The kill is made’