The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

  *

  Tilda dreamed of Miilark, specifically of a white sand beach a few miles up the coast from the capital. The surf played gently at the edge of the land for offshore breakers and standing rocks broke the fury of the Interminable Ocean. Sharp green hills rose behind the strip of sand, mantled by tall palms and date trees full of colorful birds. The birds called to each other with whistles and trills as complex as language, making them sound like they were talking about pleasant things, of no great importance.

  Tilda stood alone in the edge of the water, calves lapped by caressing waves and sand squishing delectably between her toes. She shaded her eyes from the gentle sun and watched the long line of Deskata House ships move out from the harbor mouth to the south under full sails, with long, emerald-green pennons snapping smartly from atop the masts.

  The Wind changed, and the sky turned. The water began to rise and grow cold. Thunder rumbled to the north, from whence in this season the storms came. Tilda tried to move but the sand was now up to her knees. The sea frothed with chop and far from shore the Deskata ships were thrown against each other. Snapping masts and spars sounded like cannon fire. Tilda tried to shout but the water was rising faster than the sand. Saltwater poured into her open mouth as she was shaken by the angry sea. She turned her face up to the sky and with just her eyes above the water, she saw the last green pennons sinking below the waves.

  Someone said her name and Tilda woke with a start. There was a hand on her shoulder and she grabbed the arm as though to save herself from drowning. She gasped in a deep breath and opened her eyes to see Dugan right in front of her, his face more grim than concerned.

  “Easy,” he said. “It was a dream.”

  Tilda had a moment of hope that he meant everything that had happened last night had been a dream. She was lying sideways on a hard wooden bench and for an instant thought maybe she had dozed under the pavilion in the Jobian compound. But no. She was indoors, in the ramshackle common room of an inn judging by the tables and stools scattered about. The sharp sunlight of early morning was shining in the open door and windows. It had all been real, the legionnaires and the severed fingers, one with a green ring still on it, flipping through the air. The wizard, and the Duchess of Chengdea sprawled on the ground.

  “Where is Claudja?” Tilda asked, letting go of Dugan’s arm and turning sideways on the hard bench. She pushed herself up to a seat and her back was flat against the wall. She could not remember what had happened to her bow or her pack.

  “She is fine,” Dugan said. “The Jobians took her back to their temple.”

  Tilda had shaken off her pack before she and Dugan ran out of the compound, she remembered that now. She looked around and saw her bow, a full quiver of arrows, and her buksu lying on the nearest table.

  “She was hurt,” Tilda said, for she had seen blood on the Duchess’s pale face.

  “They can patch her up. That’s what clerics do. Tilda, you and I need to talk.”

  Tilda pushed herself to her feet and Dugan moved back a step to give her room, hesitating to offer a hand. He had a purple bruise over his left eye where Tilda had clubbed him. The large room was empty with most of the stools upside-down on the tables and the plank bar, though the filthy floor had not been swept. Voices were speaking outside, some human and others with the guttural growls of hobgoblins. None of them sounded happy.

  “Where…how did we get here?” Tilda asked as she stepped forward to gather up her things, despite a heavy feeling in her legs. An echo of a dream. Something on a beach.

  “The same Jobians,” Dugan said. “They dragged us in here to get us out of the street, but we are not hurt bad enough to need a temple. Except maybe for that guy.”

  Dugan jerked a thumb toward the bar lining the back wall and Tilda started, for at a glance she had failed to notice the man sitting atop it among the inverted stools. He was a scruffy fellow with dirt caked in his bushy black hair, wearing a jerkin of ring mail so scratched up it was equal parts dull gray metal and flaking black paint. Though he was broad across the shoulders he looked to have lost a fight with someone much bigger. There were streaks of dried blood down both sides of his nose and a band of black and purple bruises that looked like an ugly kerchief around his neck. His blue eyes presently had the most hang-dog look Tilda had ever seen in her life not on the face of an actual dog, but he gamely raised a glass mug of beer in greeting and tried to smile. He managed only a pained wince and gave a choked, plaintive squeak.

  “Who is that?” Tilda asked Dugan.

  “I don’t know, Zebulon something. There were some other people here earlier. Matilda, stop. Listen to me.”

  Tilda had slung her bow and taken an uneven step toward the front door with her buksu in her hand, but Dugan’s tone turned her around. His eyes bore into hers.

  “You stopped me from killing that legionnaire.” Dugan nodded at her club. “I’ve got two welts on my head, your size.”

  Tilda felt her stomach drop, as though off a ledge. “Where is he?”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He got away. Tilda, talk to me. Did you or did you not come here to kill John Deskata?”

  Tilda turned to face Dugan. When he was alive, Captain Block had been adamant that they speak no word of their mission to anyone on Noroth, and that had gone double once Dugan had joined them. Tilda had adhered to the dwarf’s precedent for more than a month now since his death, but she was thoroughly fed up with the whole mess.

  “No. I did not come here to kill anybody.”

  Dugan stared at her. From the bar, the man Zebulon watched the two of them. He took a long drink though it plainly hurt his throat.

  Tilda waited, but Dugan said nothing and remained still apart from a tic moving along his jaw. She turned and made it two more steps across the room before he said her name again and she turned with a snarl.

  “What? What is it?”

  “There is no good way to say this,” Dugan said. “I am John Deskata.”

  Tilda rolled her eyes and turned to make her third attempt for the door, thinking she should not have hit Dugan in the head so hard. Or else she should have hit him much harder.

  Then Dugan said that it was the truth. He was born Jonathan Malohan Deskata, son of Umiwao Deskata, grandson of Malohi and Wahmahi Ney’ha Deskata, descendent of Oigen Dezkha’tavych, who had been second mate of the vessel Nyystrashima out of Varanch Port, when that ship was cast out of the sea and grounded in the Miilark Islands on the Fourteenth day of Twelfth Month, in the 1188th year of the Norothian Calendar.

  He said all of it in Miilarkian. Not in the Trade Tongue, but in the older and more formal language of the Great Houses.

  Tilda had frozen in mid-step. She very carefully put both feet on the dirty plank floor. She had never crossed a frozen stream, but if she had she would have placed her feet in just the same way. Slowly and gently, lest the ground break apart and fall away beneath her.

  She turned back around, one degree at a time.

  “Tizalk heh ne,” he said, the man who had been Dugan a few seconds ago, and was now someone else.

  “You are sorry?” Tilda repeated, still speaking Codian though it may have been for spite.

  “I thought the two of you had been sent to kill me. I thought someone at home had decided that my exile was not enough.”

  Even in Codian, his voice was different. The flat accent was gone. John Deskata spoke the language of the Empire like a foreigner.

  “John Deskata has green eyes!” Tilda cried, pointing a finger at the two brown ones regarding her evenly. The man sighed. He put a hand in a trouser pocket and drew out the length of plain cord that had been doubled-looped around his wrist back in Orstaf, and later around his neck to carry the strung beads of his Vod’Adia license. Now there was a great silver ring hanging from it, with a gleaming emerald set within. Even from across the room the fellow Zebulon raised his dark eyebrows at the sight of it.

  “Do y
ou know when I was born?” the man asked.

  “I know when John Deskata was born,” Tilda snapped. He sighed.

  “Fine. John Deskata was born in ‘61, during the last great House War in Miilark, after House Manawi had assassinated most of the Deskata bloodline.”

  Tilda had learned the history of all the Houses in her school years, but she had always known the stories of the Deskata as theirs was the House to which her own people had been attached for a century. She took up the story.

  “The capital was too dangerous for his mother, so she took to a ship and stayed there while Umiwao fought in the city. When Jonathan was born at sea he was given the second name Malohan, for his ancestor, who had been a great mariner in his day. More than that, the baby had emerald eyes as green as the banners of his House. Just like his ancestor, and which no Deskata had been born with for two generations. It was a good omen.”

  “Except that it wasn’t true,” the man claiming to be Jonathan Malohan Deskata said. He held up the ring on the cord. “My mother had this enchanted before I was born, she never told us where. Like all magical rings in tales, it sizes itself to fit whoever wears it. Even on the wrist of an infant. Apart from that, it has the least-formidable charm of which you’ve ever heard. Turns the eyes green. Not really useful, except as propaganda.”

  Tilda kept staring at the man’s dull brown eyes, but he made no other move.

  “Put it on,” she said.

  He looked at the ring and frowned.

  “I wore this every day of my life, until I was exiled. No one had worn it since until the Sarge, that’s the man you stopped me from killing, stole it from me.”

  “Very convenient,” Tilda snapped at him, trying to force a sarcastic note that came out as caustic. “Your story is rabbit-brained enough even without the magical jewelry. John Deskata could have taught you his own history along with his language, so why in the world would I believe a word of…”

  The man undid the knot in the cord and slid the ring into his palm. He sighed and closed his eyes, then slipped the bright jewel on the ring finger of his right hand.

  When he opened his eyes they were piercing and green. Tilda shivered when they looked at her. For the first time he was not a handsome man with unremarkable eyes, but instead his face was somehow complete.

  He took the ring off after only a moment, and ran it back onto the cord.

  “Block didn’t know?” Tilda asked quietly. “He said, he said he had met John Deskata.”

  “We did meet, but I was ten. And I had green eyes. Block didn’t know me by sight now, though I certainly recognized him.“ The man exhaled and shook his head. “No one knew about the ring but my parents. No one.”

  “Not even Rhianne?”

  John Deskata’s head snapped up at his Law Sister’s name. “You know Rhianne?” he asked, and from the way he said his sister’s name, if Tilda had believed nothing else she would have known then who stood before her.

  “Wait,” Tilda held out both her hands, forgetting that she still held her buksu in one. She lowered that arm back to her side. “If you are who you say, and you thought we were here to kill you, why in the hells did you join with us?”

  John looked at the ring sitting in the palm of his hand. “Because though I have come to hate this thing, it is all I have left of home. Of a different life. I wanted it back. The only way I could go after it, the only way to get out of Orstaf and across Daul and into the Wilds, was with your help.”

  “You thought we would kill the man wearing that ring for you?”

  “I didn’t know he was wearing it. I thought I would take it back from him, and then tell the two of you the truth…” John sighed. “Then I suppose I thought Block and I would have it out in the end, on equal terms.”

  Tilda stared, which she had been doing for so long now that her eyes felt dry. That was better than having them well up, which she felt they could just about do.

  “And once the Captain was dead?” she asked. “Why didn’t you leave then? Or better yet, kill me and take the money to get you through Daul? You did not need a Miilarkian on this side of the mountains.”

  “No, I didn’t,” John said.

  Tilda clenched her jaw. “You thought about it.”

  John looked away and gave a small shrug. “It took you a long time to climb in and out of that chasm, Tilda.”

  “So why not?”

  He still did not meet her eyes.

  “Because I felt sorry for you, after Block was dead. I know what it is like to lose everything.”

  Tilda let out a hard bark of laughter, surprising herself as much as she did John who snapped his dull eyes back to hers.

  “You felt sorry for me? Really? That’s right hospitable of you, Mr. Deskata, but you’ve still got plenty to feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Tilda, why are you here? What does my father want from me?”

  “Not a thing,” Tilda said, holding her arms out wide, then starting to gesture with the tip of her club, pointing it at John for emphasis.

  “Your father, Umiwao Deskata, is dead. Your brother, Benami. Dead. Both by shipwreck. Your sister Suzan married into House Paganai seven, eight years ago now. There is no one of the Deskata blood left to head the House, and so our enemies, chief among them the Lokendah, want to see it disbanded. And they will.”

  Now John was staring with wide eyes. “Rhianne…?” he asked.

  “Your Law Sister is not of the blood. She acts as head of the House right now, but that will not survive a challenge at the next Assembly of House Lords. Not if the Lokendahs can muster enough support, which they will. All have much to gain if Deskata is disbanded, and the assets divided.”

  John snarled and nearly sputtered, his voice for the first time taking on the grandiosity Tilda had sometimes heard from Islanders of the nobility.

  “Our people will never stand for that! The might of a House is not the blood of its rulers, but the hearts of its people.”

  “And to whom will those hearts rally? To Rhianne? Many blamed her for your exile, Jonathan, and for sullying the Deskata name. She was tolerated while Umiwao lived, but without him she can not count on the loyalty of the merchants and the Guild. Not by herself.”

  “Rhianne sent Block here to get me,” John said, as the last piece fell into place in his head.

  Tilda took a long breath, and switched to the language of the Islands to speak formally.

  “Jonathan, your Exile is rescinded by the acting Head of your House. You are Deskata again, and you are needed at home.”

  Tilda’s knuckles went white on her club, and her left tightened into a fist so hard she could feel the four crescents of her nails in her palm. She switched back to Codian, and her voice was bitter.

  “Or, at least, you were needed. It is too late now.”

  “What?” John said in a whisper. Tilda shook her head and her mouth worked before her voice came out. She had a need to spit.

  “The Lokendah must have realized Captain Block left the Islands, and guessed where he may have gone. The Deskata question was to be settled at the New Year’s Assembly, but the Lokendah have used their sway to force matters. A special session has been called for Midwinter, in a bit more than forty days.”

  “Wait,” John held up a hand. “How can you…”

  “Lolanhi told me, the merchant woman in Chengdea. She saw my colors and felt sorry for me too, as she had heard the news from home and knew my House was ending.”

  John stared at Tilda and took a jerky step forward.

  “I have to go…” he said, and Tilda let out another laugh that sounded ugly even to her.

  “Go home? For what? We are a month or more from any ocean, John. Two or three more to sail home. The House of Deskata is going to be chopped into pieces by scholarly little men with ledgers and quills, and there is not a thing you can do to stop it.”

  John nearly swayed on his feet and Tilda strode up to him to jab a finger in his face.

  “But just so you kno
w, if you had told Block who you were on the day we met, we could have crossed Orstaf and Tull to reach the ocean long before now. We would have been home in good time, well before Midwinter. The Captain would be alive, and you would be preparing to argue your case to the Assembly. Or else to lead your House in war. But you, you wanted a ring back.”

  Tilda snatched the ring out of John’s open hand by the cord and held it up in front of his face.

  “Enjoy it,” she said, and dropped it back into his hand.

  John was silent, and immobile. Tilda turned away from him and took several shuddering steps. On the bar the man called Zebulon was looking at her with his brows lowered and blue eyes soft, an expression that would have been sympathetic if the fellow was not such a scruffy, wincing mess.

  Voices had been coming through the doorway all along, and now a woman strode in from outside. Tilda blinked at her for she was plainly a Far Westerner even farther from home than was Tilda herself, wearing a shabby coat and patched trousers. Her shaggy mass of black hair looked singed and her face was streaked with ash. She looked around at Tilda and the others, and when he saw her Zebulon hopped off the bar, spread his arms, and made a croaking noise that sounded happy.

  “Good morning,” the woman said in Codian, and Tilda automatically nodded back. The Westerner crossed to Zebulon, who moved his arms as if he was not sure whether he should hug her or not.

  It was the Far Western woman who put her hands on Zebulon, bringing both to his throat as though to choke him. Tilda raised her eyebrows but Zebulon just gave as much of a smile as he could manage through his wince, and closed his eyes. The woman closed hers as well and lifted her face toward the ceiling. Tilda noted the outline of some sort of weapon on the woman’s forearm under the frayed right sleeve of her coat.

  A soft glow shimmered the air from the woman’s hands on the man’s neck, and when she withdrew them the ugly purple bruises faded from sight. Tilda knew she must have been shukenja, the equivalent of clerics in the Far Western lands.

  Zebulon took a deep breath and felt his own neck, then gave the woman a crooked smile.

  “That is so much better, thank the gods. Or, the spirits, or whoever. Thank you, Amatesu.”

  The woman nodded shortly. “Nesha-tari needs her translator. Now.”

  Zebulon’s smile faltered.

  “She’s alive?”

  “She is. This way.”

  Amatesu turned for the door, but before following her Zebulon looked from Tilda to John Deskata, who had sat down heavily on a stool and was leaning against the table, eyes distant and looking at nothing. Zebulon settled on Tilda.

  “I did not follow all of that, but I reckon a ‘good luck’ is in order. Good luck.”

  Tilda nodded at him, and he smiled without the pained look, though with his patchy beard and bush of hair his face still had a wolfish aspect that was not wholly soothing.

  Amatesu had stopped before the door, and now she looked from Tilda to Deskata.

  “You two were with the noblewoman from Daul, yes?”

  Tilda looked over so fast her hair snapped over a shoulder, the sad braid barely hanging together and looking a bit mangy.

  “With Claudja?”

  “I did not get a name, but if that is the Duchess, then yes. You may have an interest in what is said as well.”

  “Wait,” Tilda said, glancing back at John Deskata but the man gave no sign he was presently aware of anything around him. “I was told the Duchess was taken to the temple, by the Jobians.”

  Amatesu frowned. “No. She has been taken into the Sable City by the Legion men. The Jobians wish for the Shugak to go after them.”

  Amatesu went outside and Zebulon followed, though he took a last look back at Tilda. When they were gone Tilda spun on John, who looked up at her only dully.

  “Yeah, I lied about that, too. We needed to talk before you went running off.”

  Tilda’s lips pulled back but it was a struggle for her to unclench her teeth before she hissed.

  “The House of Deskata is better off disbanded than with a man like you at the helm. At least the House will end with its honor intact.”

  John looked away, and Tilda turned her back on him to hurry after the others.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven