The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

Eighth Month is the middle of autumn, and it often brings storms to Miilark as the prevailing Winds blow from the north and northwest. The days are clouded and they reflect a somber time, for as the Islands mark the year according to the Norothian Calendar the month is beholden to the Eighth of the Nine Gods of the Norothian Ennead. Grim Ayon, the Destroyer, is also called the Storm King and the Oath-Breaker among other things, and He is no one’s particular favorite in the Islands.

  But Matilda Lanai was not in Miilark. She was standing not by a sea of saltwater, but in the midst of one made of elbow-high grass. And despite wearing riding boots, woolen knee pants under wide cloth trousers, neck shirt, sweater, vest, jerkin, and a night-black half cloak with a hood, she was for the first time in her life, cold. Not extra-blanket-for-the-bed cold, not one-more-cup-of-tea cold, just cold. Tilda was learning that here, far beyond either the sight or smell of the ocean, autumn was a different animal.

  It was not, however, the animal foremost in her mind at the moment.

  While from horizon to horizon the steppe seemed one vast sea of dirty blonde grass with only sparse copses of scraggly trees doing for islands, it was in fact crisscrossed by ancient hoof-worn paths, numberless and impossible to map in their multitude and complexity. You had to be standing on one and looking straight down it to even know it was there. Tilda presently was, and so was the horse. They were looking at each other.

  The horse was not of a kind with the rangy calicoes typical to the Codian province of Orstaf, with their prancing hooves, tossing manes, and a sprightly gait that Tilda’s hindquarters had become sorely familiar with over the last three weeks. Rather, the animal standing athwart the path a stone’s throw in front of her was a towering white charger. The horse looked as though it should have a knight on its back in full armor, despite being at this moment unsaddled and wearing no tack nor harness apart from a single strap of some kind back by its haunches. It stood as still as a boulder, facing Tilda at a quarter turn so that only one baleful eye watched her slow, careful approach. She hoped its focus was on the one spot of bright color in the otherwise cloud-gray and faded-blonde landscape: The bright red apple she held forward in one gloved hand.

  “Bol aloha, ma ut po’tsa gros,” Tilda said in her sweetest voice. She saw the horse’s ears twitch and had the ridiculous thought that the animal probably did not speak the Trade Tongue. She switched to Codian, which had been her main language of study back in school, and her primary mode of communication for the last two months on Noroth.

  “Hello there, you big handsome fellow. My, but you’re a pretty critter, aren’t you? How the lady mares must swoon when you prance by, no?”

  Careful footfalls had brought Tilda to within a few yards of the horse, which abruptly chuffed out a hard breath from its nostrils before lowering them closer to the packed-dirt ground. Tilda faltered and stopped creeping.

  “Prance is the wrong word, I’m sure. You no doubt strut, in only the most masculine fashion.”

  Tilda fought the urge to flash a smile, for she knew that if you grinned at monkeys, they took umbrage. She was unsure if the same was true of horses, but was not about to walk all the way back to ask the Captain. She settled on a tight-lipped grin and tried not to blink so much, which of course made her blink more.

  “Now, all I want is to give you this juicy apple here, so there is no need for one of us to take a bite out of the other, honim da?”

  Thinking that leather gloves had not been the way to go, as she edged nearer Tilda slowly brought her hands together and with small movements of unconscious nimbleness pulled both gloves off, one finger at a time, without dropping the apple. She stuck the gloves in her belt and held the apple further forward, all while still babbling like a brook running with honey.

  “You see the short fellow, yonder? A bit wider than the pony he is on? That is my boss, you see. Sort of the head of my herd. He is a very important man, he was on the boat, you know. And anyway I would rather not look like a complete idiot in front of him if it can be helped. So if you could forgo kicking my head off my shoulders, or trampling me into the turf, I would consider it both a favor and a service.”

  The horse raised its head, and its nostrils twitched.

  “That’s right, everybody loves an apple. Back home they are yellow but these are good, too. A little tart for me, but I am not complaining. Truly.”

  Tilda was close enough to be struck by just how big the horse really was. She would need a step ladder or a running start to get on its back, not that she had any intention of doing so. The beast raised its massive head and looked directly at her, though with only one eye as it still held the right side of its body away at a quarter turn. Tilda took a breath and stretched forward, smiling her closed-mouth smile that was more of a wince, and putting the apple right under the horse’s nose.

  “Also, I am going to need all of those fingers back.”

  The horse craned its neck forward a last bit, and plucked the apple out of Tilda’s hand with the merest flick of a raspy tongue. She exhaled.

  “Thank you, Nine Gods. And the Wind and the Sea and the Stars besides.”

  The horse crunched the apple, and Tilda risked raising her empty hand to scratch its forelock with her close-cut nails. She leaned to her left, and at last looked down the horse’s right flank which it had thus far held away from her. Her wince became sharper, and her dark brown eyes softened.

  “And here I thought I was having a rough trip.”

  The single strap back at the haunches was holding a makeshift compress of sorts in place, obviously against a long wound. There were also two holes high on the horse’s ribs, plugged with large wads of blood-soaked cloth. The horse looked to have been washed somewhere before it was bandaged, for there was only a little caked blood trickled into the white hair below each wound.

  The apple swallowed, the horse leaned its head heavily against Tilda‘s side. It gave a snort, and she scratched it between the ears.

  Tilda turned her head to look back at the main trail she and the Captain had been following, from where they had seen the horse out on a branching path. To Tilda’s surprise the mare and pony were now alone, heads bowed as Block had dismounted and probably wrapped their reins around a dagger he’d jammed into the ground. Given the dwarf’s height and that of the tall grass all around, Tilda had no idea where he had gone after that.

  “Captain?” she called, once quietly then again louder, for the horse beside her no longer seemed uneasy. Only exhausted.

  “Off your starboard prow,” the gravelly voice of the old dwarf came from the grass ahead and to the right. He had gotten completely around Tilda without her ever noticing, but she had been focused rather intently on willing the big charger not to kill her. She had also totally forgotten how cold she was, but now she wanted to put her gloves back on.

  Captain Block appeared on the side path back behind the horse, dressed identically to Tilda in warm, bulky garments and a far shorter half cloak that likewise fell to a triangular point in the front and back, with the unused sleeves hanging for now on the inside. His long salt-and-pepper braid emerged from a hole poked in the back of a knit watch cap, while Tilda’s jet black braid was coiled in the deep hood of her cloak.

  “There is a pool a bow-shot back by that single tree,” Block pointed. “The shoddy horse doctoring was done there. Come hence.”

  With that, the dwarf was back into the grass with only the top of his black cap visible, moving off like a distant orca whale on the sea.

  Tilda patted the horse again and edged around its unwounded side, though she did stop to look over its back more closely at the bandaging on its right haunch. She then hurried after the Captain, slipping her gloves back on along the way. The horse turned to watch her go.

  She followed the Captain’s course through the grass to the indicated tree, a tall lone pine inexplicable enough to have been planted here long ago as some sort of marker. Probably marking the watering hole, Tilda surmised, for the low boughs did indeed spr
ead above a shallow pool of clear water in a little damp clearing that stretched only a few paces from side to side.

  Block had stopped at the edge of the clearing and he raised a hand for Tilda to do likewise. Both looked around at the ground, Tilda over the dwarf’s broad shoulder. At the pool’s edge were scattered bloodied rags, and nearby was a pile of equipment with a great saddle of rich brown leather most notable.

  “Check the packs,” Block said. “Don’t trod the tracks.” He probably had not intended for that to rhyme, for in three months of traveling together Tilda had not once noted any poetical bent to the stooped old dwarf. He moved off to walk the perimeter of the clearing while Tilda made her way over to the equipment pile, mindful of both hoof and foot prints plainly visible on the damp ground.

  Tilda had been combing through an awful lot of cast-off debris for the last three days. That was the length of time during which she and the Captain had been on this particular leg of their journey, moving due south from the manor village of a minor Codian noble called the Baron Nyham. The baron was not presently in residence there, as two days before the Miilarkians arrived he had gone south at the head of an armed band of some seven-hundred men. All were bound for the town of the Duke above Nyham with whom, as the local expression went, the baron had serious beef. Something about money, or a perceived insult, or somebody’s sister. The tavern talk had been unclear.

  Whatever the cause, the motley assortment of men Nyham had gathered to redress his grievance upon his rightful lord had proven on the march to be an ill-disciplined set. Their route had been easy for the Miilarkians to follow, as while it kept to a typically thin path in the Orstavian grass their passage had trod it into a wider way littered with refuse that someone had thought would be a good idea to bring along when the march began, only to drop miles and even days later. There had been cookware, bedrolls, blankets, spare shoes, extra packs and clothes, and every time Captain Block had spied any of this garbage alongside the trail he had ordered Tilda off her mare to look it over. Block would canter on ahead with both horses, leaving Tilda to jog until she caught up. Every time. This exercise served no purpose that Tilda could divine other than to keep the Captain mildly amused, which was why she had not reported the discovery of one silver coin, a Codian Swan, in the bottom of a pack. The coin was in her pocket and Tilda periodically held it in a closed hand when the Captain was trying her. She liked the weight of it in her fist.

  Tilda took a bit more time to inventory the saddle and other left-behinds in the clearing, including the torn half of a very prettily-embroidered horse blanket with a pattern of sparrows in flight along the border. She had finished and was looking at the ground by the time Block made one circuit of the clearing and asked her a question. His earlier words had all been in Codian, but this was in Trade: Shto zinat? What do you know?

  “The fresh prints are the charger and one person, a man by the size. They are atop a great mess of tracks from a day or two ago. The reins and rigging are all here, stripped and dropped, and the saddle is for fighting, not riding.”

  “Mounted for a lance?”

  “Yes. It has ties for saddlebags but there are none here, though there is loose gear that came this far in them. Tack hammer, extra buckles and stirrups. Nothing someone would need once they went to foot. But first he tore up the pretty kit to scrub and bind up the horse. The other half of this blanket is on its haunches now. There are round rust marks like it was worn under barding.”

  Tilda glanced over toward the white horse, which had lost interest in her and moved off to stand closer to the mare and pony.

  “What else about the footprints?”

  Tilda frowned at her Captain, his heavy dwarven features expectant and his thick, dark eyebrows together. She looked down at the nearest clear mark for a moment, then put her own foot down beside it. Her riding boots had a pointed toe to slip easily into and out of stirrups.

  “Rounded toes, from a shoe or sandal.” Tilda looked back up at the Captain. “The man who rode the horse here was not the knight to whom it belonged.”

  Block gave a soft grunt of grudging approval, which Tilda had learned was the extreme upper limit to his expressions of praise. The nicest thing he had said to Tilda in three months was that she might have a bit of brain in her head. Along with the rocks and shiny bits of ribbon.

  “We were wrong,” Block said, throwing Tilda completely.

  “Tizalk?”

  Captain Block rumbled a low growl in his cavernous chest and glared off to the south, down the way they had been going these last three days toward the faint smudge of distant mountains on the horizon.

  “We thought to overtake the slow marchers well before they reached Duke Gratchik’s town. Before any battle might be fought. But we did not consider that the Duke might hit Nyham first, at the edge of his lands, only half a day distant from here.”

  Actually, we thought nothing of the sort, Tilda thought now. She said something different.

  “You think a battle has already been fought?”

  Block nodded toward the charger. “That wound on the arse is long, from a big blade. Spear or a pole-arm. But the holes on the ribs are high, and the rags jammed in them poke out and up. Arrows shot from distance, on their downward path.”

  Tilda felt cold, and not just from the drear air. The man they had come here to find - all the way to Noroth and to Codia and to Orstaf - had marched with Nyham. If there had been a battle, he had been in it.

  “Should we not hurry on, Captain?” she said. “I mean, he could…we have to find out what happened.”

  “We know what happened,” Block growled. “The baron got whipped. A footman jumped on a knight’s horse and rode it back to here. That beast was not going any further today, and the man would not wait. The fellow went to ground and kept moving. And look here.”

  Block turned and stomped to the southwest edge of the clearing no longer minding the marks on the ground, so neither did Tilda as she followed. At the edge of the tall grass Block pointed at a last shoeprint on the soft mossy ground, then out into the grass.

  “Broken stalk, bent stalk, another bent further along, in a dead line southwest. Southwest. Not back north, toward Nyham’s lands. Not the direction a fleeing peasant or manor man would have gone to get home.”

  Of Nyham’s seven-hundred men, two hundred had been such locals. The other five-hundred, only one of whom Tilda and her Captain were interested in, were recent legionnaires of the Codian Empire. They were deserters from the 34th Foot, hired by the baron to visit vengeance upon his Duke, apparently without success.

  “One of the renegades,” Tilda said, and Block nodded.

  “I don’t know where the man thinks he is going now, but he is in a hurry to get there. Can’t be more than eight hours ahead.”

  “So what?” Tilda said, and Block raised a dark eyebrow touched with gray at her.

  “I mean, in that case…I mean it seems to me…”

  “Spit it out, girl.”

  Tilda took a breath, and realized her heart was pounding. The last three months of her life seemed to be crashing into this moment from behind.

  “Captain, we need to be on that battlefield, now. If, if our man is dead, we need to know it. And if he is captured we have to get there before he is hung for desertion, or for bearing arms against the Duke, or whatever. Right now, sir. Lol hique.”

  Block was again staring to the southwest, in the direction that the last mark of a legionnaire’s marching sandal pointed.

  “Or maybe he escaped the battle. Made a run for it.”

  Tilda did not like where that was going. “Then our best chance of learning where he might have run would also be at the battlefield, no? With any captured legionnaires, who themselves may be strung-up before much longer.”

  Block did not seem to be listening. He was still staring off across the burry tops of the tall grass as the stalks waved gently in the chill breeze.

  “Unless this is our man,” he said.

&n
bsp; Behind him, for just a moment, Tilda dropped her jaw and glared disbelief at Block’s wide back. She reined in her face before stammering one question in two languages.

  “I’m tizalk…sorry…spahalo what?”

  “Five-hundred-to-one odds against it, I know,” Block said, still staring away. “Bit long to wager much. But the pay-off…”

  Tilda wanted either to jump up and down, or else kick her esteemed and honorable Captain in his wide hindquarters. She managed to do neither. Just.

  “Forgive me, Captain, but I think at the Island Stakes they call that a misag uyak. A Fool’s Bet.”

  “Not if the race is rigged.”

  Now Tilda could only stare. It was not her place to question the Captain, and even if it had been, she had no idea of what she could possibly say to that.

  Block hitched back his black half-cloak, reaching inside to pluck something from a pouch at his belt. He extended an arm and opened his palm. Tilda saw a coppery gleam, and inwardly groaned.

  The Empire of the Code minted as its smallest denomination copper pennies modeled on those of the old Kingdom of Tull, now an Imperial province for some hundred-fifty years. Popularly called “thumbs,” each side showed a fist with the thumb extended. Lucky side up, you could see the folded fingers against the palm. Unlucky thumbs-down showed the back of the hand.

  Block balanced the coin on his own bent thumb. “Your call?”

  “Lucky side to the battlefield.” Tilda said quickly, then muttered under her breath. “Nothing else makes sense.”

  She thought of something only after the dwarf flicked the coin up to flip smoothly through the air, a dancing glint of decision. Tilda recalled that the old Tullish coins, like many things from what had once been called the Witch Kingdom, were made in the fashion of a lesson. Given time and circulation from hand to hand, a bit of sliding across bar-tops and bartering tables, and the soft metal started to wear. The first thing to go was the fine detail of the folded fingers, and after that it was impossible to tell one side of the coin from the other.

  Good luck wears off, the Tulls had said. Bad luck lasts forever.

  Chapter Three