Sandstorm (27 page)

“I’m beginning to wonder if I should ever take it off around you!” she shouted, and then, despite the circumstances, when she saw his crestfallen expression, she laughed.

Many hours later, bells rang three times in the WeavePasha’s darkened inner chamber, indicating that his high vizar sought permission to enter.

He waved a hand and the woman, eldest of his grandchildren, materialized before him. She looked exhausted, and her boots and cloak were coated with dust. Before she spoke, he pointed at the decanter and crystal goblets on a nearby rosewood table. The vizar’s thanks were in her sigh, and she trudged across the room to pour a glass.

After she drained the wine in a single draft, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Mattias Farseer,” she said, “is a devil. And Corvus Nightfeather does not exist. At least, my mages can find no trace of him on this or any other plane of existence.”

The WeavePasha chuckled. “Mattias is a human man. One of tremendous talents and extraordinary dedication, perhaps, but I have begun to wonder if it isn’t unshakable fidelity that defines humanity. Or at least its heroes.”

The woman across from him had heard the WeavePasha say such things every day of her life, and she was approaching her one hundredth winter. “Your dedication to the city is unshakable, Grandfather,” she said. “His dedication is to a wild animal and a handful of criminals. It is you who are the hero.”

The WeavePasha heard the note of fanaticism in her voice and sighed, knowing he’d planted it there. He trusted she would grow out of it. They always did—all but him.

“Did he kill anyone?” he asked, and stood, deciding that he, too, wanted a drink.

“The ranger? No.” She hesitated. “Though in truth, he could have.” A different note came into her voice, and the WeavePasha refilled her glass before pouring a half measure of ruby wine into his own. “In truth, Grandfather,” she said, “he could have killed
me
. The charms you sent
with us dampened the enchantments of the bow, at least temporarily, but even after it was nothing but a length of heartwood casting mundane arrows … The
reach
of the thing. The
speed
he shot with. And he was prepared for the disenchantment. When the aetheric string failed, he pulled a length of gut from his beard—his beard!—and was shooting again instantly. That is a mighty bow you made, Grandfather.”

The WeavePasha inclined his head. “And yet,” he said, “when my magics were drained from it and its wielder faced the mightiest of my descendants, he still escaped.”

His granddaughter took a seat on a footstool, her shoulders slumping. “Yes. He and the halfling that rode behind him on the wyvern’s back. The genasi she carried dropped away in the scrubland along the coast, perhaps half a day’s ride west by horseback. I have sent out a company of the city guard, but …”

“But they will find nothing,” he said, gently finishing her sentence. “Because the windsouled will enter the Plain of Stone Spiders long before our horsemen arrive, and our commanders know they are forbidden to enter those lands.”

“Not that they would, anyway,” said his granddaughter. “Not that anyone sane would.”

“So you believe there will be deaths after all, eh?” he asked.

The woman shifted uncomfortably. “If they are fools enough to cross the old course of the River Quag, yes. But, my lord …”

“Ah,” he said. “We come to Corvus.”

“There were no deaths among those of us who flew in pursuit of the wyvern.” She saw his darkening features and rushed on. “And none of those who sought the kenku were harmed, either. But the summoners among them
believed their spectral hounds had his scent near the docks and called up a chain of runespiral demons.”

“Within the city walls?” he demanded, anger in his voice. “The kin I set to guard
against
such things unleash them in my city?”

“In a district of empty warehouses, WeavePasha, in the Street of Stolen Stones. They judged the risk acceptable, and they never lost their grip on the leashes. The demons all converged on the same ruin, and … they all died, Grandfather. Six of them.”

The WeavePasha considered another glass of wine but decided against it. “A creditable effort,” he said dryly, “for a man you believe not to exist.”

She spread her hands. “I offer no apologies with these explanations, Grandfather. My daughter stands ready to relieve me as your high vizar.”

“Your
daughter
?” he asked. “You think I don’t feel old enough already?” He waved her closer and embraced her. “You performed well under circumstances I would have found challenging myself. The kenku threw the dice well-knowing what faces they would show when their tumbling stopped. He threw them on a table he believes I will not play at.”

“You believe them all to be gathering on the plain,” said the vizar. “You would go out and face them there yourself? I know you will send no others to that place.”

The WeavePasha sighed. “No, Granddaughter. I will not leave the city, as the kenku anticipated. Probably not ever again, unless the fleet your uncles build finds its ways to the waters we have dreamed of. No, Corvus Nightfeather has escaped, and he has taken a tool with him we might have used to keep the djinn occupied and away from our walls for quite some time. It might even have destroyed a few of the haughty bastards.”

The woman thought about this. “Grandfather,” she asked, “is this a tool that can be used against us? If your assassin takes the el Arhapan heir to Calimport, will he not one day be the leader of our enemies? From what you told me of the boy, he is far more formidable than his father.”

The WeavePasha nodded. “He is. And the djinn might even allow him freer rein in ruling his own people than they give that fool Marod. But I have spoken to Cephas, and while I do not know his fate, I sense that is a man who will always seek the righteous path. At least when he can see it.”

The vizar frowned. “And yet the possibility remains. He embodies a potential threat, either as a tool of the djinn or as someone who would dare to judge you unrighteous.”

“Enough!” cried the WeavePasha. “Are the threats to Almraiven we are sure of so inconsequential that you feel free to pursue one that exists at the far end of a causal chain even I can’t track?”

“Respect, Pasha,” she said. “We guard against many ‘potential’ threats.”

The WeavePasha pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Potential is something you can measure. What you’re talking about is paranoia, which can expand beyond all reason and which I will suffer in none of my kin.”

The woman stiffened, then bowed. “As you say, WeavePasha.”

The old man sighed again. He had not slept in so long. “They seek to cross the Plain of Stone Spiders, Granddaughter, a journey only armies and elementals have survived in more than ninety years. Measure that potentiality, and be at ease. I go to seek some myself, in my bedchamber, if one of you hasn’t turned it into an alchemy laboratory since the last time I saw it.”

His vizar smiled. “It remains as you left it, Grandfather. Do you remember the way?”

He raised his hand, waving her back to her seat. “Stay. Finish that bottle. It’s a new vintage from the Turmish vineyards called Wyvern’s Tears. It has to all be drunk once it’s opened or the acidity becomes unbearable.”

After he left her alone in his inner chamber, the WeavePasha’s granddaughter sat for a long time, drinking and thinking, weighing potentialities and trying to remember if her grandfather had ever before been bested in the seat of his power. She thought about her father, missing for decades since an attempt to infiltrate the City of Brass, the extra-planar capital of the hated efreet. She thought of her fierce daughter, and of her myopic son, and of her one hundred cousins, and of all the other humans in this last human city of a land once home to millions of humans—this city she was literally bound to protect.

“I am sorry, Grandfather,” she whispered. “The potential has weight.”

Her nephews and their leashed demons came to mind. There were some leashes her family had held for a very long time, indeed.

The demon leaned against its bonds, pouring all of its terrible strength into the effort of breaking them. Black rivulets of sorcery spilled from its many eyes, their fetid ducts the source of a never-ending flow of power that splashed on the rotting stone. The demon lifted several
of its enormous spiked feet, finding new positions in the slurry of waste magic and crumbled rock that formed the floor of its temple prison.

Otherwise, it did not move. It
leaned
. With its bloated nightmare body, yes, but also with its maelstrom of dark magic and its blasphemously ancient will.

And its hate.

The hate is what
kept
it leaning. The hate is what drove it to forever test this boundary, what fed the rituals of its bizarre worshipers on the plain above the temple, what had kept it pouring unimaginable strength and power against its leash, from this immobile position, for one hundred and twenty-two years.

“Spider That Waits.”

At first, the demon thought it was more chattering from the warped creatures that attended it. The spiderfolk were still more or less mortal, and mortal languages all sounded alike to it.

An image appeared in the demon’s consciousness. It was the visage of a human woman, calmly studying it. She held a twist of leather in her hand, and when it saw that, the demon howled.

“Qysara!” it hissed. “Perhaps the shame I felt when you first banished me was misplaced if you have survived until now.”

The woman shook her head, and the demon noticed something. A quiver along the jawline, was it? Or an imperfect shade in the spectrum of the shields guarding her sanity? It was a weakness, whatever it was—something to sniff out; something to exploit.

“Qysara Shoon the Fifth is dead, Zanessu, and has been these twelve hundred years. I am her descendant and namesake, Munaa yr Oma. It is I who hold your leash now.”

The demon giggled, a sound like slow bubbles bursting through some hellish marsh. “The leash was
lost,”
it said. “I
returned
after the thousand years of exile your ancestor laid on me.”

“Yes!” said the human. “And you spun your webs again for a time. But my grandfather spent decades rebuilding our family armories, hiding behind secret names and acting from the shadows, as our family was forced to for much of the time you rotted in the Abyss, fiend. Then, when the gods walked the earth …”

“When the personifications of hubris you mortals call gods fell to Earth a century ago, a man came with the leash and imprisoned me here. I remember. El Jhotos …” The demon cast a dweomer of black bile at the woman’s will, but it was seared away to nothing before it could fall.

“And now,” it continued, as if it had not tried to annihilate the woman’s soul, “Here you are. Plotting against your liege? Seeking power from a source he does not control? In search of allies?”

Enormous, unending waves of pain wracked the demon. It collapsed in a heap, its legs curling over the filthy sac of its body while it screamed. When the pain faded, the demon sought the woman’s visage again. It saw that it had made a mistake. If there was weakness in this mortal before, it was gone now.