Free Sandstorm by Christopher Rowe

youngerfiresouled smirked at this weakness, but the silver woman hanging a few inches above the floor gave a slight shake of her head at his misreading. This human ruler would not be drawn out by the petty games of her fellows.
    “I have interrupted our discussions, child, to receive a message of great import to all of us,” the WeavePasha said, and though the firesouled magician bristled, he dared not protest, because the WeavePasha had earned his powers over a very long time.
    The wizard passed a hand before the parchment and what was written there disappeared, the ink of the letters flowing in a liquid stream down the page, into a shallow bowl of jade set below.
    “My spy has found the lost heir of Calimport.”

    In his wagon, Corvus watched the last word fade from the page that was simultaneously bound in his journey book and in a workbook of the WeavePasha of Almraiven.
    Then he turned to another page. Taking up his quill again, he penned a very similar message, meant for a very different reader.

Knowledge of the sword is useless
without knowledge of the world
.
    —“The First Trader’s Unsalable Wares”
The Founding Stories of Calimshan
    A T DAWN , C EPHAS STOOD ON THE DRIVER’S BOARD OF a wagon, watching Corvus and a heavyset woman called Wagonmistress Melda scratch converging lines in the dirt with silver rods. Mattias waited next to the ringmaster’s wagon and explained the ritual.
    “See how the road they draw recedes into the distance where all the lines come together? That’s a draftsman’s trick, and the wise know there’s as much magic in it as in any of Corvus’s toys and chants.”
    Cephas nodded. Jazeerijah possessed little in the way of art, beyond the decorative flourishes worked into the deadlier armaments and most effective pieces of armor. He glanced down at the satchels stowed below the driver’s board, gifts from Tobin. They held the flail and piecemeal scale he’d brought with him out of captivity.
    “Now Melda is pouring trails of residuum from their sketched road on the ground before her team. They always take the lead.” The woman retreated from the network of lines Corvus muttered over, walking backward and letting a stream of glittering dust flow from a leather pouch in her hands. When she reached a pair of oxen, placidly chewing their cud in the traces of a wagon plainer than most of the others, she straightened and pulled the drawstring of the pouch tight.
    “What she’s got in her pouch there might be worth as much as what you’re so anxious to keep hidden away beneath Corvus’s bench,” said Mattias. He no longer watched the ritual, looking at Cephas. “Nobody here is going to take those pretties from you, Cephas.”
    Cephas, flustered, focused on Corvus. At first, nothing happened as the kenku finished whatever magic he was working. But then the weeds in front of Melda’s team of oxen flattened. More than that, twin paths spread out before the imperturbable beasts, parallel to each other and just broad enough for the oxen to easily walk along. Boulders shifted and frost-heaved ground smoothed itself, as a new road led away from the more mundane track they camped beside.
    The trade road led north and south. The ritual-wrought trail led west, away from the sunrise across a highland plain still cloaked in night.

    The wagon train moved slowly, even with the benefit of the trail magically breaking before them. Corvus explained, “It just smoothes out the rough bits so we’re less likely to break a wheel or, worse, lose one of the oxen or horses to a broken leg. I don’t know the trick of grading real roads with spellwork.”
    “It seems a great work to me,” Cephas said.
    Corvus laughed. “Not so great. And temporary. This path closes behind us just as it opens before us. In fact, whoever is in the last wagon might be bushwhacking if they’ve fallen behind.”
    Cephas thought that unlikely. The atmosphere among the members of the circus was as far removed from