The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle)

by M. Edward; mimulux McNally

  “That innkeeper has no soul,” Towsan muttered. Pagette shrugged.

  “But he has stacks and stacks of silver. Many are the men who will make that trade.”

  “Arrange a meeting, Pagette,” Cyril said. “Let us say, in three hours.”

  The man bowed deeply, still smiling, and was quickly out the door and gone. Cyril made no move to leave the room right away so Towsan waited beside him.

  “I should bring Claudja,” the Duke said. “She has a good eye for people.”

  “She always did, your Grace.”

  Cyril looked at his oldest vassal and opened his mouth as though to apologize, which would have been a mortification for Towsan. Instead the Duke only reached out and squeezed the knight’s narrow shoulder with a strong hand. Towsan lowered his eyes.

  Cyril looked out the open door at the sky above the courtyard walls, somber blues and purples starting to play across the undersides of clouds.

  “Sunset,” Cyril said. “I know where she will be. Would you like to come, Gideon?”

  “Not tonight, your Grace.”

  Cyril nodded, and clapped Towsan’s shoulder. The Duke turned and left, and after a moment the old knight reached up to the hanging lantern and flicked open the tiny door. He licked a thumb and finger and snuffed out the light, then stood alone in the darkening room until his face was set and expressionless, before striding out himself.

  Cyril went back into the main citadel but moved widely around the throne room through side passages typically only used by servants. He passed several of the familiar household staff who stepped aside and nodded rather than bowed. The Duke had never been comfortable with a great deal of formality when no one else was around.

  He wound through a closed kitchen and at one point had to take a staircase up to the ducal apartments, and then another one back down. He was bound for a detached courtyard on the same level as the main upper yard, but which was accessible only from above.

  As Cyril stepped back outside he was chilled by a northern breeze he had not felt in the enclosed courtyard within the citadel. This yard was far smaller, just a wide L-shaped walkway jutting from the northeast corner above a sheer cliff, which made defensive works redundant. Instead there was only a low stone wall enclosing an area of paving stones interrupted by regular squares of bare dirt, a few sprouting saplings but most of which were beds that would wait until spring before flowering.

  The view was among the best in the castle above the city, for none of Chengdea itself could actually be seen. From here the citadel seemed to float in the sky high above checkerboard farm fields stretching east and the Black River flowing in from the north, with the tangled murk of the Vod Wilds to the west safely across the wide water. The spot was particularly beautiful at sunset but Cyril scarcely noticed the gorgeous sky, for his daughter was sitting on a stone bench and to him she was the most beautiful thing in the world. He had a case to make.

  Claudja Perforce, Duchess of Chengdea, had inherited her mother’s looks along with her title. Her features were fine, actually exquisite, with a delicate nose and mouth that only seemed a trifle small for the largeness of her steel gray eyes. She had Jasmine’s pale skin, wholly without blemish, but from Cyril and the Balabushevych’s once of Orstaf she had dark, slashing eyebrows and a mass of brown hair tumbling about narrow shoulders for her frame was slight. She was dressed as she had been for three months all in the black of mourning, plain dress, coat, and a scarf. She sat on the edge of the bench with her spine as straight as a ramrod, and before her was a square gap in the pavement from which no flowers would ever grow again, for it was the grassy mound of a grave. The name on the stone marker said only Sir Lucas but it was inscribed beneath the carved coat of arms of the Towsan family. The Knight-Baron’s holdings were on Chengdea’s eastern edge, and it was there that the Towsans had rested for five hundred years. It was there that someday Sir Gideon’s bones would lie, and later those of his elder two sons. But the old knight had acceded to the Duchess Claudja’s gentle wish that the youngest of the family would lie here, on the spot where Lucas had proposed marriage, and Claudja had accepted.

  Seeing her, Claudja’s father felt like an intruder. Her small size did not add to Cyril’s grudging awareness that his only child was a young woman now of twenty-four years, and that the things weighing on her were grown-up matters. Not the kinds of things that a father’s hug could ever banish. He could still tell her now that everything would be fine but since Jasmine’s death neither of them could believe that as they might have, once. Now with Lucas gone, the fine young man who Claudja had looked at from the beginning in the same way Jasmine had come to look at Cyril in time, the father feared that their daughter might never come to feel that way again.

  Claudja had heard the door and she turned to look up at her father. The light of dusk was gentle on her face. She smiled faintly with her mouth but not her eyes, and there was no joy in it. Cyril walked toward her slowly, setting his heavy feet softly for every scuff seemed an interruption of his daughter’s private grief. Claudja rose and with a last look back turned away from the cold headstone. She met Cyril halfway and her dry eyes narrowed as she looked at his face.

  “Some news?” she asked.

  “Pagette,” Cyril said, and found he had to clear his throat.

  Claudja lifted her chin, for her father was much taller.

  “Has he found someone?” she snapped, suddenly all business.

  “Perhaps,” Cyril said without enthusiasm. “There is a Miilarkian taking passage shortly. A young woman Guilder.”

  “Wahine Guild awarhe?” Claudja said, for she spoke the Trade Tongue with full fluency as befitted the female head of a noble Daulic household. Cyril’s command of that language was spotty, though he had gotten her drift.

  “That is what Pagette thinks.”

  Claudja looked somewhere into the breeze and she blinked once or twice though her gaze remained steely. Her mother had looked just the same when she was thinking, and it had never taken either of them very long to get where their mind was going.

  “That’s perfect,” Claudja said. “When may I meet her?”

  “We may head down into the city at any time.”

  Claudja nodded crisply and turned for the stairs back up to the apartments. Cyril looked and then called after her, and she turned.

  “Claudja, I…I still do not like this plan. There are other ways to reach the Codians. There are others who could be sent.”

  Cyril’s daughter looked over her shoulder at him, then turned and marched back. In the dying light there was a sudden coldness in her eyes that Cyril had never seen in her mother’s, though he recognized it all the same. He had seen it often enough in the hard gaze of his own father, the first Duke of Chengdea, Perforce.

  “There is no time to establish relations and exchange ambassadors,” Claudja said. “The Codians must know that we are serious, and they must know it immediately.” She lifted her chin again. “So long as I am Duchess of Chengdea no more of our men shall die for the incompetence of that man.”

  The vehemence with which Claudja spoke the last two words as always gave Cyril a start, for since Lucas Towsan had died following the orders of Hughes III, King of Daul, Claudja had referred to their rightful liege in no other way.

  Cyril nodded. Claudja turned away only a moment before her look would have amounted to staring her father down, then strode deliberately back inside. It was another moment before Cyril followed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After speaking through a human translator to a fat bullywug on the docks Tilda bought a pass to board whatever craft into the Wilds was next available, paying an extra ten silvers for the privilege. In return she was given a short, flute-like stick with irregularly cut air holes and told to come back at first light though there well might be nothing available for a day or two. Or three. Half a tenday, tops. The additional delay was well down Tilda’s list of concerns. She secured the flute in the belt with her money and took the horse
s back into the city to the first heavily trafficked corner. In half an hour Tilda had sold both at a profit that covered the pass though she had to take payment in Daulic coins that were much more cumbersome than Miilarkian notes.

  The only inn Tilda had seen in the city not full to overflowing was the Stars and Stones adjacent to the Shugak dock, and when she entered the common room she divined why. There were not many people at the tables or the bar but those present consisted of a bewildering array of adventuring types, all armed to the teeth and many still wearing dented breast plates and chain sleeves even as they ate dinner. There was a tall woman so pale she was almost albino, all in dark blue leather and with a mace set atop her table next to a gloved hand lazily swishing a glass of wine. In one corner was a pair of dark Oswambans, a twin brother and sister, wearing warm woolen clothes but with lion skins over their shoulders and matching spears with long steel tips bound around with bright feathers leaning against the wall. The furnishings and appointments of the inn were all of the highest quality and the place was obviously catering only to those who could afford to pay more than any commoner or refugee.

  Dugan was at the bar talking to the only two women in the place who did not look like they were bound for Vod’Adia. Not unless prostitutes were assailing the Sable City this year.

  Tilda went to the far end of the bar and dealt with the grinning barkeep. A single room and an evening meal were one and one-half silver pieces, several times what would have been fair. Tilda got a small measure of vengeance by paying in thirty coppers, ridding her of most of her least valuable Daulic coins.

  Tilda stowed her gear and locked her room upstairs, and after some consideration she returned to the common room in her Guild cloak over her vest and daggers and with her buksu club still slung across her back. Her meal was waiting on the end of the bar, catfish and mead. Dugan was alone now for his companions had moved to a trio of well-heeled young noblemen who had come in, slumming. He shrugged at Tilda and she ignored him, taking her board and glass to a corner table beside the fireplace. The fish was good, basted with a creamy sauce tasting only faintly of leeks, but the mead was not sweet enough to Tilda’s palette.

  A familiar man entered the room, not from the door to the street but from a side hall past the kitchen. It was the counterman from the jewelry store though he now wore a long, plain coat and a wide-brimmed hat. He nodded to Dugan at the bar but walked across the room to Tilda’s table, Dugan looking after him with an eyebrow raised over a tankard of ale.

  “A bol aloha,” the man said in the Trade Tongue, flashing his gold tooth and producing his hands from his pockets for a little gesture, still a welter of shining rings. He switched to Codian. “We did not exchange names, though mine is Pagette.”

  Tilda looked at him and said nothing. His smile faltered.

  “All right then, Miss. If you might have a moment, I hoped you could spare it for a brief talk with…a certain important party. A man who has much to say to you, which I am sure you will find of interest.”

  Tilda made no move though her right wrist was resting on the edge of the table, just on the knob of the dagger sheathed in her sleeve. If she pressed down while pulling her arm back she could tug the blade free and catch the pommel before it fell. Something about Pagette bugged Tilda but she spoke to him.

  “You are going to have to be far more specific than that.”

  “Oh. Well. Allow me to say there is a nobleman, in this very inn just down that hall there, who wishes to render you a proposition that if accepted will be to your considerable financial advantage.”

  Tilda cut her eyes briefly toward the prostitutes snuggling the boisterous young nobles at the bar.

  “Mr. Pagette. If you are saying what I believe you to be, you had best walk out of this room right now.”

  The man looked in that direction and his eyes widened.

  “Oh, gods Miss, no, I mean I would never…” he sighed and waved both hands apologetically, then started over.

  “A high noble of this city wishes an escort…a guardian, for two people traveling to the Camp Town at Vod’Adia. As you are going there already if you are but willing to look after these others along the way, they can pay you handsomely. And if you are so willing you can all go on your way at first light, with no more delay. They have an arrangement with the Shugak.”

  Tilda continued to regard the man coolly, then she stood up so fast that he took a jerky step back. She drained the last of her mead, which was a mistake. While Tilda thought she was doing rather well so far, the large swallow forced her immediately to stifle a belch, producing a squeak between her pressed lips that was in no way impressive. Nor ladylike. Pagette had the good grace to ignore it completely. He took a step to the side and gestured back toward the hall from which he had entered.

  “You first,” Tilda said, and after a moment’s thought she took her buksu from her back and held the club loosely at her right side. Dugan had been watching from the bar and now he stood up as well.

  Pagette nodded and walked back for the hall, passing Dugan on the way. The former legionnaire looked at Tilda but she did not meet his eyes as she honestly had no idea what she wanted him to do. She walked past without giving Dugan any sign, but he followed her. Tilda was slightly disappointed in herself that his presence made her feel a bit better.

  The hall was short and lit only by the light from the common room. Pagette knocked on and opened a door halfway along, out of which spilled flickering fire light. He motioned for Tilda to enter, and she waved him in first with her club.

  The room was a study of a sort, or perhaps the inn owner’s office. Rugs on the floor and whitewashed walls, bookshelves full of scroll tubes and plush chairs beside a brick fireplace. There was a desk that had been shifted to the center of the room as a table and dining room chairs had been brought in and set two on a side.

  The two chairs across the desk were occupied by a middle-aged man with a barrel chest and a lovely young woman the size of a girl. The man stood as Tilda entered. The pair did not look much alike in the face, but the brown shade of their hair in the firelight was identical and made Tilda think they must be father and daughter. A second man stood behind them, a gaunt old fellow with his arms crossed and the pommel of a sword visible on his left hip as his cloak was drawn back on that side. All three wore plain garments; cloaks, tunics, and trousers of only moderate material yet much cleaner than would have been clothes which someone actually wore every day.

  Pagette had stepped in to one side and he spoke formally.

  “Miss, may I present his Grace, the Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, city and province.”

  Tilda blinked but tried to give no more sign of surprise than that.

  “Bol aloha, Miss…?” the Duke said.

  “Matilda Lanai.”

  The Duke’s daughter raised an eyebrow as though recognizing that Tilda’s last name simply meant “porch,” in Miilarkian. She probably thought Tilda was giving a fake name, but sadly, no.

  The Duke asked Pagette to watch the door, and Dugan let the man squeeze by him back out into the hall. When he shut the door Dugan shot the bolt without asking. The older man was giving the buksu in Tilda’s hand a hard look, and after thinking a moment she slowly held it back to Dugan. He took it, dropped the head in the leather cup of the sheath on Tilda’s back, and snapped the strap across its neck between her shoulders. The old man did not relax appreciably.

  The Duke gestured at a chair and retook his own after Tilda sat down, perching on the edge of her seat. There was another chair beside her but Dugan remained standing behind Tilda and crossed his arms, making himself the mirror image of the old knightly-looking fellow behind the two nobles. There was a wine bottle and glasses on a silver tray atop the desk but when Cyril held a hand out towards them Tilda shook her head once. She waited until he began to speak, then interrupted.

  “Pagette says you want someone escorted to Camp Town, your Grace. Who would that be?”

  Cyril frowned and squinted, c
oncentrating to follow Tilda’s words in the Trade Tongue. His daughter spoke it fluently.

  “Are all the women of Miilark so swiftly to business? Not a word of polite small talk?”

  Tilda looked at her. “I have had a long day. Forgiveness…your Grace?”

  The Duchess nodded. She gave her name as Claudja, and was quickly to business herself.

  “It is I who must go to Camp Town, in the company of this knight, his Lordship Sir Gideon Towsan. Commander of my father’s guard.”

  Towsan gave no sign he had been mentioned. He and Dugan were busy sizing each other up.

  “So go,” Tilda said. “What do you need me for?”

  The young Duchess was about Tilda’s own age or perhaps just older. She gave a slight smirk.

  “Owing to circumstances with which you need not be concerned, Sir Towsan and I shall not travel openly with guards, but in a clandestine fashion I am sure a woman taught in the Guildhalls of the Islands can appreciate. If we are attached to another group, even to a small one, we will attract still less notice.”

  Tilda glanced at the knight. “He might pass for an old soldier if he scuffs himself up a bit. But you, your Grace, do not look like an adventurer bound for Vod’Adia.”

  Claudja raised a dark eyebrow. “The same might be said of you, Matilda Lanai, without the cloak and weapons. But some adventurers do take servants with them as far as the Camp Town, and I can pass myself as one of those. Scuffed up a bit.”

  Scuffed up a lot, Tilda thought, for the Duchess had the looks of a porcelain doll from the Celestial Empire of Cho Lung in the Farthest West. Tilda looked back to the Duke, still squinting to follow the conversation, but he seemed content to let his daughter speak for herself. Tilda crossed her arms and leaned back a bit, buksu clunking against the back of her chair.

  “Just how much trouble are you expecting between here and Camp Town?”

  “None,” Claudja said. “Though only fools and drunkards discount trouble altogether. Your simple presence, Miss Lanai, and the reputation of those of your ilk should in all likelihood be of more importance than actual protection. In return, there is a reserved Shugak craft that may be underway as early as the morning. No need to wait for another to return from a run. And, of course, you will be fairly compensated.”