*
Zeb and the Westerners were awakened sometime before dawn by soft knocking on the door of the long bunkroom they had taken in the dockside inn. Zeb answered the door in his skivvies and was told by the night deskman that Nesha-tari Hrilamae was waiting for them outside. The fellow looked disappointed that Zeb did not tip him, but of course the Minauan did not have a coin to his name. Zeb perhaps could have used that fact to justify, at least to himself, what he was still doing here. Lunch, then dinner, then a good night’s sleep had been his self-justification yesterday. Now with Nesha-tari again close by, Zeb forgot for the moment that he needed a reason to stay.
Amatesu helped Shikashe back into the myriad straps and ties of his complicated armor, a process that took even longer than it had to remove the whole works the night before. The three then made their way downstairs through the dark inn and found their hooded employer waiting out on the street where a drizzle rippled puddles on the cobblestones. Nesha-tari had a goblin with her and the little cherry-colored creature had a wheelbarrow, but it left as soon as the others appeared. Their baggage went in the barrow under an oiled tarp, and Zeb did not have to be told he would be the one to wheel it.
Nesha-tari said nothing but led her band north up the waterfront, walking ahead with Shikashe just behind her, Amatesu staying close to Zeb and the barrow. Zeb watched Nesha-tari walk, and his thoughts were simple.
He noticed their surroundings only dully as the group passed by tall granaries, then a sheltered cove of the harbor where Codian warships sat at anchor. They turned east at the head of the cove, passing in front of a blocky, ancient fortress of black stone, renovated and flying the Codian flag from four towers. Beyond the fort a grand boulevard ran north, so wide that a series of miniature parks with low stone walls filled the center lanes, trimmed grass and shady trees from which birds were just beginning to sing. Nesha-tari turned up the boulevard and walked up the right-hand side of the street in front of gaily painted row houses with flower boxes under tall windows, plated with high-quality glass.
The rain picked up, dripping onto Zeb’s nose from the edge of his helmet. Amatesu lifted the cloth covering in the barrow and put her patched, high-collared jacket beneath it with the bags, leaving her in a long shirt of coarse cloth. The shukenja then managed to distract Zeb from ogling Nesha-tari as she turned her face up to the rain, which arched her back a bit, and ran her hands back through her long, black hair, ringing out strands and actually cleaning it for the first time in what must have been ages. She did so while stepping nimbly among the cobbles more smoothly than Zeb was managing with the wood-wheeled barrow.
“Amatesu, may I ask you something?”
Amatesu glanced at Zeb, and the slight, unconscious smile that had begun to play at the corners of her mouth disappeared, returning her face to its typical look of solemnity. She wrung her hair a final time and let it plaster loosely against her face and over one shoulder.
“A unseemly concern with one’s appearance is…unseemly. I bathe to be clean, and to be healthy, but not so that I might be…”
“Pretty?” Zeb asked. Amatesu kept looking forward.
“As you wish,” Zeb said. “But whether you are pretty or not is not really up to you. I mean, I suppose we could get you a long wax nose. Maybe with some warts.”
Amatesu quickened her pace to move a few steps ahead of the barrow, but she did not go so fast that Zeb failed to catch the brief return of her smile.
The blocks the group passed as they moved up the grand boulevard alternated between quite nice houses and prosperous cafes and stores. Many structures had flat roofs with long stone gutters expelling spouts of water over the flagstone sidewalks and out onto the brick street, splashing quite a bit. The group moved more to the center of the road, passing along the tiny parks with their knee-high walls. Zeb saw that several had cisterns, open basins of clean water, and all had wooden benches under the old trees.
“This is a nice town,” he said, but Amatesu still walked on ahead of him and did not comment.
Zeb’s gaze had returned to Nesha-tari’s aft by the time the group drew near the city wall, where stables and inns lined a roundabout in front of a tall, ugly gatehouse of mismatched stones. It was nearly dawn now with the sky a lightening shade of gray, but while a few loaded wagons stood waiting the teamsters remained sheltered on porches as the rain grew stronger. Nesha-tari slowed her stride and looked around as she walked, allowing Zeb and the Westerners to catch up. More than a few of the fellows loitering on the porches stared at Nesha-tari, and Zeb was surprised to feel a twinge of antipathy toward them.
As Nesha-tari walked for the gatehouse through which a wide stone corridor without a gate gave into a courtyard, one figure left a porch. A bandy-legged goblin with large, jade-green feet emerging from beneath a battered raincoat approached Nesha-tari, wearing a wide-brimmed hat pressed down on its head hard enough that its ears jutted out sideways. Shikashe gave the creature a glare but as it looked up Zeb recognized it by its bronze-colored eyes as the same one Nesha-tari had followed away yesterday. It met her before the tunnel through the gatehouse and handed over a slim leather packet, then looked at the Far Westerners and Zeb in turn. Its rubbery lips split in a grin, giving its face an oddly knowing expression.
“Good luck,” the goblin said in Codian. “You’ll be needing it.”
Nesha-tari stowed the satchel and passed into the dark tunnel through the gatehouse, Shikashe and Amatesu now close behind her with Zeb and the wheelbarrow bringing up the rear. They were out of the rain for several paces and Zeb could have used a stop to dry his face, as he could not let go of either arm of the barrow without upsetting it. But Nesha-tari was again moving rapidly, already stepping out of the tunnel through dripping water with the others close behind.
They stepped out into an open courtyard enclosed by the ugly walls, with a second exit gate still shut up across the way. The only adornment in the unpleasant place was an old basin in the center with weeds growing around a dead tree stump. Nesha-tari was still walking but Zeb stopped as a voice spoke behind him. He looked back, thinking maybe the goblin was following them and had called out. The speaker was not a goblin, nor was he speaking in Codian.
A tall man stood bundled in gray robes, leaning against the gatehouse wall beside the tunnel the others had just exited, sheltered from the rain by a stone overhang. His hood was raised and he held a heavy wooden staff tilted forward, with a clear glass globe on the top. His free hand was extended, and his long, pale fingers wiggled in the air as he finished his utterance.
The globe flared with a white light that dazzled Zeb’s eyes and the start it gave him sent him stumbling forward, overturning the barrow. He managed, somehow or another, to actually leverage himself over the top of it in a flailing summersault that deposited him hard on his back among spilling luggage.
The samurai Uriako Shikashe had a much more fluid reaction. He vaulted over Zeb and the barrow while drawing the longer of his two swords, its blade flashing bright white as though reflecting the light from the mage’s staff. Shikashe took the glass globe off its hardwood mount with a two-handed stroke and no more effort than it would have taken to cut the head off a flower. The still-shining sphere flipped through the air and Shikashe’s backstroke was returning for the mage’s head when both Amatesu and Nesha-tari shouted at him.
Shikashe altered his swing, drawing back the blade even as he lunged forward with outstretched arms, clubbing the mage across the face with both gauntleted hands on the hilt of his sword. The man spun like a top and collapsed in a heap just as the tumbling globe struck the ground and shattered, the white light extinguishing as if it had only been a flash of lightning.
“That is going to be a problem,” Zeb said from among the spilled baggage.
Rain struck the naked blade of Uriako Shikashe’s sword, and fell to the pavement as drops of ice.
Chapter Sixteen
The Sable City Page 31