The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle)

by M. Edward; mimulux McNally

  Almost done now.

  She opened the case Dugan would now be carrying, unlocking it with a small key that otherwise rode in a pouch of lock picks in her boot cuff. The slim case was the kind usually meant to keep a composite bow and extra strings dry. It looked old and worn on the outside though it was in fact brand new, purchased by Block the day before they had left the Islands. The inside was done in emerald green silk, fine velvet, and soft felt. Tilda removed a carbine-length ackserpa with a barrel shorter than a yard and a long wooden stock carved like a buksu, for it too had been fashioned in Miilark. The firing mechanism was imported from Zoku and consisted of an intricate steel lock with pins for a rear sight and a round cap over the internal wheel. From a compartment within the gun case Tilda took out several short, tin vials of powder and a mix of both lead and iron balls, placing several into the deep pockets on the inside front of her cloak. She opened one vial to charge the barrel and tapped home an iron ball with the tamping iron otherwise affixed beneath. She left a small bit of powder in the vial to prime the pan when necessary, and corked it. She stood, pulled on her gloves, and slipped the tin inside of one against the back of her left hand. She wound the spring-wheel, stood to attention, and shouldered arms.

  Stares from all around. Fitzyear finally broke the silence.

  “Yikes, Miss Matilda. Yikes.”

  Tilda shrugged at the gnome. “The right tool for the right job.”

  With the baggage redistributed the new group marched on. Tilda, Block, and Dugan walked in the middle of the line with Fitz and half of his men in front and the other three behind. Tilda went warily, carbine at rest on the crook of her arm and eyes scanning the surroundings, but she did not really believe this area or moment to be particularly dangerous. That had not been the Captain’s point in ordering Tilda to kit-up. Apart from keeping word of what Dugan had done to Procost from spreading, Tilda also suspected Block may have been sending something of a message to the strange men with whom she was about to spend the next several days, underground in the dark.

  Fitz and Block’s efforts had certainly helped the demeanor of the accompanying soldiers, and the last stage of the march was very different than had been the solemn slog from cottage to camp. Hardly anyone had breathed a word on the first leg, but now the scruffy soldiers who had not been present to see Sir Procost’s demise chatted amiably among themselves in Daulic. They even sang a ditty or two which Tilda guessed were bawdy songs by the chuckling that accompanied them.

  The gnome was still quiet as he led the way up out of the hills and to a narrow goat trail of a path that wrapped the western flank of an authentic mountain with a distinctive peak high above that certainly must have given the place a name, though none of the newcomers asked what it might be. They rounded about a quarter of the mountain’s great girth on the path and emerged on the southern side in early afternoon at the foot of the even more magnificent peak Tilda had looked upon from the balcony the day before. The mountain was heavily forested on its long, lower slopes, but the crags high above were too sharp and steep for either foliage or snow, revealing stone of a distinctive yellowish hue. The tall peak appeared almost like a sandstone intruder from another country, that had shouldered its way in among gray, granite neighbors.

  “Yagnarok,” Fitz said, as the whole group had paused to gaze upwards. The gnome turned to Block. “Do you know the name, cousin?”

  “The Yellow Mountain. In the old Dwarf tongue.”

  “How did they come up with that?” Tilda mumbled, and small smiles from a couple of the soldiers nearby let her know that at least some of them spoke Codian.

  Fitz led the way off the path passing down into the clustering pines over the thick carpet of needles. It was another hour or more until they reached a stony ridge as tall as the trees that extended out from the mountain proper just as if it were the root of a great tree, or even the foot of a stone giant. The impression was heightened by a cleft before the lowering ridge sank fully into the ground, leaving a space between either a branching root, or perhaps a gap between toes.

  Three of Fitz’s men put aside their packs and weapons and together began clearing aside brush mounded in the back of the cleft. It did not take long to realize that the majority of it was artificial; wooden frames and squares bound across by leafy fronds that were quickly hauled out of the way to reveal a stout wooden door with heavy iron hinges and a crossbar, set in the angle of the cleft.

  “Not the original door, of course,” Fitz said. “That was fashioned by the dwarves, and if it still stood in front of us today we’d not see more than the merest crack.”

  The gnome stepped to the door and produced a large iron key from a chain around his neck. He slipped it into a great lock, turned it to the left rather than right, and left it there. He took a step back and two of his men removed the heavy crossbar from its braces. Only then did Fitz turn the key to the right, remove it from the lock and replace it around his neck. While his men hauled open the wooden portal, Fitz addressed the three visitors in a more serious tone than he had used in the morning.

  “There is a little speech I give here, so bear with me if you please. Stay close together, and stay on the path. The way we are going has been safe for a hundred years, but if you wander down a side passage or otherwise leave the route there is no telling what you may find. The whole place used to be dwarven, but that does not mean there is any hidden gold. It means that rooms may be trapped and halls may be designed to lead you in lost circles until you die of thirst. Besides all that, there are plenty of creepy-crawlies that call the deep tunnels home. We will be Under most of three days, with safe rooms along the way to spend the two nights already stocked with food and such so we needn’t carry much. If there are any questions ask them now, for once inside it is best if we talk as little as possible.”

  Three of Fitz’s men were removing metal lanterns from packs and filling them with oil. Tilda looked to the Captain, who was scowling as if his hangover was still lingering. She supposed he had been told more about this “Underway” by the Baron, but he had certainly shared nothing about it with her. Block of course had no duty to do so according to the traditions of the Guilds, nor was it her place as a lowly apprentice to ask any questions. But Tilda was in a thoroughly foul mood. Her forehead was not throbbing anymore though it was tender to the touch, but she had looked at her reflection in a stream earlier and seen the ugly bruise that looked like some monstrous birthmark. She was not thrilled about it.

  “Fitzyear,” Tilda said. “Just what manner of place are you leading us into?”

  Block frowned at her, but the gnome only blinked his big, bright eyes.

  “Oh. Well, many hundreds of years ago, perhaps a thousand, the dwarves of Garak-Tor established an outpost in this mountain. It grew into a city after they found some pretties worth digging up. They abandoned the place once the veins played-out, I would guess in round numbers something like seven hundred years ago.”

  Block snorted and Fitz looked at him, but the dwarf had nothing to add. Tilda knew the Captain was old, old almost beyond human comprehension, and she wondered exactly how long the crusty old dwarf had been around, and how many centuries of history he had seen with his own eyes.

  “So we are going through a city?” she asked Fitz.

  “Not really. We’ll be keeping down under the main passages most of the way. The south gate where we will exit is a grander path, but this end of the Way is more like a secret bolt-hole for some old Dwarf Laird. Yagnarok was never meant as a route through the mountains, it just sort of turned out that way.”

  Tilda had another hundred questions, give or take, but she asked none as Captain Block said her name, only once but very firmly. She closed her mouth and after a last look between the two Miilarkians, the gnome shrugged and turned to face the door.

  “Take a look at the sky if you will, for we’ll not be seeing it again soon.”

  Fitzyear and two of his men entered first, followed by Block. Tilda centered herself
before stepping after the Captain into the dark. While she had never had any particular fear of enclosed spaces, it occurred to her that she had never really had to spend any length of time underground apart from the dank basement of the Guild House in Miilark. Nor did the dark hold any particular fear for Tilda, for as the saying went back home, the moon is for lovers, the stars are for mariners, the black of night is for Guilders. Still, the thought of up to three days spent in the inky blackness underground was disheartening, and Tilda took a deep breath that smelled of pine before following her Captain through the doorway and down a sharp, rough passage with stone ledges smoothed for steps. One of Fitz’s men carried a lantern in the lead as did one of the three fellows who followed Dugan in behind her. The last man stayed above to close but not lock the wooden door. He replaced the camouflage, swept away footprints, and soon there was no outward sign that anyone had passed this way in years.

  Chapter Nine

  Phinneas Phoarty had been born in a village called Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor. When he told people from any other part of the Codian Empire that fact, they looked at him as though he had a speech impediment. So when asked where he was from Phin had taken to saying, “Thol.” If more specificity was requested, he said he was from a cluster of shacks on a little slip of water high in the Tholish mountains and leagues away from anywhere of which anyone had ever heard.

  Not that he was asked very often, as most Codians kept their distance from Circle Wizards.

  When Phin was eleven, a man in a baggy robe of a deep gray with a hood and a long hem falling all the way to the ground had come to Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor. He drove a rickety mule wagon with two young children riding in the open back. The boy and girl sniffled and their eyes were red as though they had been crying.

  The man was feted by the village elders, though without much enthusiasm. The villagers showed the visitor respect not as someone they were proud to have among them, but as someone who had to be acknowledged, at least in public. Included among the elders was Phinneas’s father, not because of age or any reputation, but because he was the sole regular agent of Imperial authority within the village. Though he made his living as a farmer, Phennigan Phoarty had the duty of confirming in writing any kills of creatures on the Imperial Bounty List in the surrounding area, filling out a printed parchment and affixing his seal to a blob of wax at the bottom. The hunters could then receive payment for these forms at the nearest Imperial bank or mint, none of which were very near at all.

  That was why many of Phin’s earliest memories were of strange people bringing even stranger, severed heads to his father’s front door.

  The day after the gray man arrived Phin and the other village children of a like age were taken to speak with him one at a time at the dining room table in the mayor’s house, as it was the only house in Llache that had such a room, and such a table. Three or four others went first and Phin grew bored waiting on the porch, while the parents waited in a cluster one house away at what was the far end of the short street. He was not nervous for his parents had not been nervous that morning. His sister Philia, just turned thirteen, waited with Phin and they spent the morning trying to hit a hitching post in front of the public house across the dirt street with thrown pebbles. Philia was ahead nine to four when she was called inside.

  She was only gone twenty minutes or so and gave Phin a neutral shrug as she emerged. She went skipping on her way back to their parents, who hugged her. Phin was taken inside to the dining room and he was there for more than two hours.

  With his voluminous hood drawn back the gray man did not look nearly so mysterious. He had a sharp black beard just around his mouth with a few gray hairs in it a lighter shade than his robe. He was otherwise bald, despite not being very old. His eyes were dark as charcoal and crinkling crow’s feet at the corners made him look kind. He sat Phin down across the table, and started asking him riddles.

  Phin liked riddles, but he had never heard any like those the gray man asked. When you knew the answer to a riddle it sort of snapped into place in your head, but the gray man’s did not. For most of them Phin thought of several answers that could sort of work, and tried to give the one that seemed to fit best. The gray man never told him if he was right or wrong, nor what the real answers were.

  After half an hour of this the man started asking Phin for sums. His parents had taught him simple plusses and minuses and Phin answered the early questions easily. But the man kept making the numbers bigger, bigger by far than Phin had ever had to count to before, and instead of just adding or subtracting them he asked Phin to multiply and divide them, after telling him once what multiplication and division were. Phin trudged gamely along, and once he got the hang of it he answered quickly. He was pretty sure he got those right.

  The man had a carrying case at the foot of the table and after a while he started to show Phin some drawings, taking them out one at a time. They were done on old yellowed parchment pasted in thin frames, and they were, for lack of a better word to an eleven year old, weird. There were stairs that kept going up from every landing, cubes with sides that seemed to be drawn the wrong way, and silhouettes that looked like different things depending on what part of the drawing Phin looked at. The man asked no questions about them, but after he had shown Phin about two dozen he passed crisp, new parchment and a quill in an inkwell across the table. He asked Phin to draw as many of the images as he could from memory.

  Phin drew the shapes that could not exist perfectly, and the next morning he left Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor in the back of the mule wagon with the two children who had arrived in it. They went through five more villages and picked up one more kid. Then they took the long winding road out of the mountains to the port of Claypool, sailed in a ship to the mouth of the River Geni in Tull and took a barge far upstream. They got a horse drawn coach and left the wooded hills along the river for an endless plain with a gray column of stone in the middle of it, which they could see for days before they got there. It was a city on a great hill, called Abverwar, and it was the place where the Empire of All Lands Under the Code trained Wizards for its Circle.

  Two of the three children who came with Phin were sent back to their families within the first couple of years. Another made it seven, and Phin saw her die when a spell got away from her. Phin was in Abverwar for one whole decade, and left the place a full Wizard of the Codian Circle.

  Phin was far more excited with his first assignment than was warranted, though he had not appreciated that at the time. It was a long journey from Abverwar to the distant Channel coast, and Phin extended the trip by first returning to Thol and the village of Llache on the shore of Loch Hwloor. He saw his family for the first time in ten years and they welcomed him as best they could, but it quickly became awkward. The siblings close to his own age were now young men and women, several with families of their own, and yet to Phin they were just as he remembered. He was a complete stranger to them. The little boy who had left at eleven years of age had returned as a tall, gaunt man with premature white streaks in his sandy brown hair and goatee. His eyes seemed always to squint, and they were sunk far back into his skull. His hands were pale and the long fingers were tattooed with Tullish designs in blue ink around the knuckles. They were never still, but flitted about like white spiders. There was no trace of the Tholish highlands in Phin’s voice, only a rasp that was often a whisper unless it was a snap or a sneer.

  Phin had planned to stay a tenday, but he left after four.

  The long voyage from Claypool took him south down the western shore of Noroth, past Tull and the coastal edge of the Girding Mountains, then down the golden coast of Doon and finally into the Western Strait, the narrowest part of the Noroth Channel separating that continent from Kandala to the south. Two days oaring up the wide Red River delta brought Phin to the location of his first assignment in the Circle, the place that had promised such excitement months ago. It was the city known to the Codians as Souterm, being the southern terminus of the Imperial Post Road, but it
had not been known as such for long. Along with the whole province of Doon, the city had only been Land Under the Code since 1355 N.C., a mere forty years. The history of the city was far longer than that. Indeed it was virtually as long as history itself, for in the obscure time before the Norothian Calendar began the place had been Ettacea, the first human city on Noroth worth a name. Many overlords had held sway there over the subsequent fourteen centuries, and they had given the city almost as many names. For a time it was Esplendez, northern capital of the Agintan Kingdom across the Strait, and for a shorter while it had been the base of the Channel Pirates, who called it Murdertown. But to the locals whose roots were as tangled as the story of the city herself, she was and always had been Ladamia, “The Lady,” and she was not an “it” at all.

  By the Nineteenth Day of Eighth Month, 1395, Phin had been in Souterm for five months and he had come to hate the sight of her.

  It was not her fault, really. Souterm was as beautiful as billed, preserving in stone and iron an historical legacy unprecedented elsewhere on Noroth. There were still Ettacean works of towering black rock in parts of the city, wide boulevards and ornate fountains of Agintan design in others. Above the western docks with their twisting alleyways and obscure taverns reminiscent of pirate times rose Broadsword Ridge, former home of the Knights of the Albatross Order and still covered with perfectly squared districts of row houses between a great Exlandic-style castle at the south end and the White Cathedral of List on the north. Rich merchant homes lined the bluffs above the Red River and Codian warships bobbed at anchor where the river met the harbor. Great sandstone granaries stood sentinel on the west side of the waterfront, while across the harbor the spindly docks and tree-lined streets of the Pescadero made the place look like the fishing village which it still was despite being enclosed within the great city walls. And though it had long been decrepit, the hulking summer palace of Denando the Great still dominated the eastern skyline. With every dawn its fabled fifty towers dappled the surrounding streets with shadow and sun.