The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle)

by M. Edward; mimulux McNally

  “How fairly?” Tilda asked from force of habit, for gaining a day or more would by itself probably be worth what did not sound to be much of a task.

  The Duchess narrowed her gray eyes slightly and the small smirk that had flashed a moment ago crept back to the right corner of her mouth. Tilda did not know who typically conducted the business of buying and selling within a noble Daulic household, but she had the sense that Claudja Perforce did so in hers.

  “You have already bought passage with the Shugak, I am sure,” Claudja said. “That will be unnecessary now, and we will of course return to you the difference.”

  “Obliged, your Grace. But making good a loss is different than making a fair profit.”

  “What would you consider fair, for riding a raft to a place you were going already?”

  “Oh, your Grace, these realms and environs are wholly your own. You should be the one to propose a fair price. From which point, we may begin.”

  Tilda was aware she was beginning to smile as well, just as she had hawking the horses on the city streets earlier today. The three men in the room were now looking between the two women uncertainly.

  “Shall we open the wine?” Claudja offered.

  “Let’s do.”

  *

  It took half an hour but Tilda and the Duchess eventually settled on forty-four gold pieces, which just about put Tilda up for the day even after her payment to Dugan. She took half in advance and as the old knight Sir Towsan produced Miilarkian notes from a bank in Bouree to give payment, Tilda was able to change much of her coinage for more easily managed paper. Pagette and the nobles left the inn from a back door at the end of the hall while Tilda and Dugan returned to the common room where a few customers still lingered.

  “What in the world was all that about?” Dugan asked. “I caught no words apart from duke this and duchess that. Jobe, and Vod’Adia.”

  Tilda stopped walking. For a moment she had plain forgotten that she and Dugan were not actually traveling together anymore. She bit her lip, stopped biting it, and turned around to face him.

  “That girl and the old knight want a traveling companion as far as Camp Town, and to a Jobian temple there. They just hired me.”

  Dugan looked unconvinced. “Just you, eh? Could have sworn a thumb was jerked at me a time or two.”

  “The Duchess asked what the smell in the room was.”

  Dugan cracked a smile, something he had not done much since the far side of the Girdings, before the knight Procost, and Block. His beard had come in now which was a look Tilda had never found particularly attractive growing up in Miilark where all the local men were clean-shaven. Dugan’s did not look so bad however, and he was still handsome when he smiled. Not that one glass of bitter mead and two of wine was enough to allow his looks to influence Tilda. Not quite.

  “So when you show up alone to meet them,” Dugan said. “They are not going to wonder where I am?”

  Tilda did not answer, so Dugan went on.

  “The two of us have worked well enough together, Tilda. We have gotten this far.”

  “We did not all get this far.”

  Dugan’s mouth lost its trace of mirth. “Believe it or not, I am sorry for that. Truly. But I mean you and me, Tilda. All the way through Daul, and we just handled that meeting well enough.”

  “I thought you and Sir Towsan were going to stare each other dead. You really don’t like knights very much, do you?”

  Dugan glanced at the floor, no doubt thinking for a moment of Sir Procost of the Roaring Boar Order, as was Tilda.

  “I do not much care for nobles,” Dugan admitted. “Call it a hazard of being a foot soldier.”

  Tilda’s eyes were narrow. “Do you still mean to catch John Deskata and the others in Camp Town? Even though your money is not an issue?”

  Instead of answering Dugan rolled back the right sleeve of his rough Orstavian tunic, where he still had a plain bit of cord looped around his wrist like a bracelet. He had now run the cord through an air hole of a short flute identical to the one Tilda had been given as a receipt for her passage with the Shugak. He shook it briskly, and from inside the hollow stick he produced a string of beads on a wire hook, multi-colored and of different substances, with tiny runes inscribed.

  “This is what a license to enter Vod’Adia looks like, in case you were wondering,” Dugan said. “I could not go in alone with just this, but if I join with a party of adventurers it gets fastened to some other Shugak stick. That is what the man in the tree-tower says, anyway.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  “Fifty-three. I know, you would have done better. This one is only valid starting eight days after Vod’Adia Opens, though I am told I can pay for an ‘upgrade’ in Camp Town to use it sooner. I reckon they tie an extra bead on to it if I join a party entering the city before that.”

  Dugan looked at Tilda evenly in the eyes.

  “What I am telling you, Tilda, is that I have other plans. I am going into Vod‘Adia. I don’t give a good damn about John and the others either way. Not anymore. They stole from me, but you have now made that good.” Dugan shrugged. “As it turns out, I’ve blown the whole stack already, so it really matters little at this point.”

  “So you do not mean to even look for them?” Tilda pressed. Dugan sighed.

  “Not for myself. But if you want support when you go looking…you can have it.”

  Tilda’s eyes were down to slits.

  “Why?”

  “Because I feel like I owe you something. I feel like I owe Block something.”

  Tilda studied Dugan’s face just as she did when she was haggling with someone, looking for any tic or tell to let her know if she was north or south of what would be the final price. She believed Dugan but she was self-aware enough to know that she wanted to believe him.

  “We meet the others at first light,” she said. “On the Shugak dock.”

  Dugan nodded. “And once we get to Camp Town?”

  Tilda let out a breath through her nose. “What is the expression in Tull? We will burn that bridge when we come to it?”

  Dugan smiled. “That, is not that expression.”

  Tilda looked at the short flute still in Dugan’s hand, just like the one she had bought as proof of payment for passage on a Shugak raft.

  “We should not need these now, should we?” she said.

  “I don’t suppose we will.”

  “May I?”

  Tilda held out a hand, and with a shrug Dugan unthreaded the carved whistle and dropped it into her palm. She dug her own out of a cloak pocket, looked around at the inn patrons at tables and the bar, and held both aloft.

  “Has anyone not yet purchased a raft pass from the Shugak?” Tilda called, trying the room first in the Trade Tongue. Several people looked over, and Dugan chuckled.

  “You are a credit to the Islands.”

  “Leave no coin behind,” said Tilda. She slapped a smile on her face and bounded into a smooth stride for the table of the Oswamban twins, who had looked up at the first sound of the Trade Tongue.

  *

  Pagette walked beneath the spreading arms of the Shugak-built tower well after midnight, sighing at its weird silhouette against the starry sky. He had watched the bullywugs and hobgoblins raising the place three months ago, an abysmal process during which the whole mess had fallen over at least twice and rolling brawls had frequently broken out among the construction crew.

  Behind the tower a tall pier normally used for large river vessels extended empty out over the water. Pagette took a trail down the bank through clumps of reeds and slick rocks to the end of a floating dock bound to the bank with ropes twisted together from the vines of the Vod Wilds. When he put one foot on it the whole structure seemed to move, and Pagette took his bejeweled hands out of his pockets for balance. The boards were narrow for it made little difference to the amphibious bullywugs who operated the rafts that would moor here whether they fell into the water or not. Pagette was g
etting a belly in his middle years but the nimbleness of his misspent youth was not totally lost. He made it to the end of the dock still dry.

  A single bullywug stood waiting on the end, a very small one hardly as high as the man’s waist. Its dark hide looked blue-black in the night, and Pagette mostly saw the creature by the faint phosphorescent glow of its yellow, cupola eyes. Size was not a reliable determinant of age among the frogmen, and this little one did not seem young.

  “Greetings,” Pagette said in Daulic as he stopped and steadied himself on the bobbing boards. The wug chirped neutrally. So much for small talk.

  From a jacket pocket Pagette produced a missive he had just written in Zantish in his shop, then sealed in a water-tight tube made of tin, the two ends of which screwed together in the middle. He held it out toward the wug.

  “You know where to find him?” Pagette asked before handing it over. The wug made a rumble from low in its belly, then a flute-like whistle that billowed out fleshy pouches where its throat would be if it had a neck. Together the two sounds meant that the wug was not an idiot.

  Pagette gave it the scroll tube and the wug deftly used its webbed hands and long fingers ending in round suction pads to place it into a small pouch bound across its torso. The wug wrapped a long trailing strap many times around the pouch, then cinched the harness tight.

  “Swim swiftly,” Pagette said, and the wugs glowing eyes turned on him. It made a series of croaks, ribbits, and slaps of its hands that roughly translated as, What in the green hell would you know about fast swimming, pink thing? Mind your business.

  With that, the wug slipped off the dock and into the dark water with hardly a ripple, leaving Pagette alone.

  He made his way back to land, then up the path to street and pier level. Rather than returning immediately to his shop Pagette stepped out on the pier some little distance, went to the railing, and fished his pipe and a clever little steel-and-wheel lighter from his coat pockets. He smoked, looking up the river to the north, and his eyes eventually drifted to the right, up to the sharp shapes of the Ducal castle high on the hills.

  “Apologies, your Graces,” Pagette said around the stem of his pipe. “The money was just too good. And I, less so.”

  Chapter Twenty

  After more than two weeks walking the long road from Souterm to Galdeez, Phin Phoarty felt better than he had in years.

  The first week, admittedly, had been rough. Phin had awakened every morning with his feet, knees, and hips aching. It took until the noon stop for a quick meal before all the soreness worked through then in the afternoon his legs started to feel tremulous, like a new-born bird’s. The discomfort was exacerbated by sleeping on the ground out of doors, which was something Phin had never done in his life.

  The Imperial Post Road crossed the whole of the Empire from Souterm north through Doon and over the Girding Mountains at the Rhuunish Gap, then through Tull, the western Beoshore, and across the ancient, defunct lands of Gyle and Telina to a port on the Cold Sea called, with typical Codian efficiency but a lack of originality, Norterm. The northern terminus of the Imperial Post Road. All along the Road’s great length tidy “King’s Inns” were erected a good day’s march apart, or half that by coach or horse. The five travelers stopped at one each night but only the woman with the lovely Zantish name of Nesha-tari took a room. Phin, Zebulon, Amatesu and Uriako Shikashe camped for a copper piece in fenced fields across from the inns, which at least all had wells and fire pits. The Far Westerners had two small pup tents but Phin shared a third with Zeb despite the fact that the Minauan man had a tendency to roll over in his sleep and elbow Phin in the throat, or even more alarmingly, to nuzzle the back of Phin’s neck with his nose.

  Nocturnal groping aside, Zebulon was a decent traveling companion full of soldier’s stories and old minstrel tales he related on the march while pushing the baggage cart, never asking Phin to take a turn. In the second week Phin was feeling stronger and offered to take some turns at the barrow on his own. After a tenday of exercise in the clean air Phin started to feel good. He now wore wool trousers and a Doonish shirt and cape the Far Western woman Amatesu had bought at an inn after saying flatly that altering any of Zebulon’s clothes to fit Phin’s long frame was beyond her abilities. As Phin walked along in the easy peasant garb he began to remember that he was still a young man, a fact that he had forgotten over his ten years at Abverwar. He started to lose his stoop and recalled that he was a tall man as well, and that he did not need always to lean on a staff, glaring at people.

  Phin glared at no one now, but he had taken to staring at Nesha-tari who always walked out ahead of the group with Uriako Shikashe closest to her, Zeb and Phin trailed behind with the barrow, and Amatesu walked either with them or with the samurai, depending on how off-color a tavern tale Zeb happened to be telling at any given time. The Far Western woman was friendly enough, the samurai was an aloof ox, but the woman Nesha-tari was a complete mystery. She kept her distance and her own counsel, and when Phin asked Zebulon anything about her she seemed to be the one topic Zeb was not happy to discourse upon at great length. The few times Phin pressed him a little Zeb became a bit surly, and the wizard suspected the Minauan was carrying a torch for her, which was ridiculous. Phin had yet to see any more of the woman than an alabaster wrist between glove and sleeve or a lock of shining blonde hair blown back from under her hood, but he could tell that she was a woman of standing, and quality. Far above the reach of the bawdy axe-man from Wakminau in the Riven Kingdoms.

  As the party drew closer to Red Galdeez and even as Phin felt as physically good as he ever had, the fact that he had still hardly had a look at Nesha-tari began to trouble him. He hoped she was not in some way scarred or misshapen, for that would just be tragic, but he did not think that could be the case. Though she went about covered there was nothing retiring or timid about the way she walked, with a stride that was at once graceful and with great purpose. After Galdeez when they traveled on Shugak roads through the Red Hills on the Vod Wild side of the river, surely then the whole group would have to march closer together. And as there were not going to be any inns in the Wilds they would all be camping in the evenings. Phin started to daydream about it even before Galdeez was in sight.

  Phin rose early in the mornings to meditate on his spells, which he could then cast with a word and a gesture at any time during the day. Since leaving Souterm he had taken to preparing only the one bit of magic that seemed likely to have any utility if there was some trouble on the road, the spell of Sleep. Phin’s meditation was deep as he was away in a part of his own mind that was a realm of symbol and signs, but it was generally quite brief as Sleep was not a complicated spell. Each morning it began to take longer however, and Phin was alarmed to find that even in the mental place that allowed him to wield magic the idea of Nesha-tari was somehow still present. Nothing quite like that had ever happened to Phin before, and it made him think something very strange was going on in his head.

  If Phin had lived a different life he might have thought he was falling in love for the first time. But Phin had lived his own life, and he knew magic when he smelled it.

  The last night before they were to reach Galdeez, Phin waited until Zebulon was asleep and then slowly slipped out of the tent. Amatesu’s cooking fire in the pit had gone to ash, and the night was chilly. Phin stirred the embers until little yellow glimmers winked from the blackened wood, wrapped his bedding blanket around his shoulders and sat cross-legged before the pit staring into the embers until his eyes lost focus and his breathing stilled. In half an hour he blinked, and could see that the last sparks had faded out. He had memorized one Sleep spell, and a stronger than usual version of the divination spell referred to in the verbal shorthand of Abverwar as Know History.

  Phin crept away from the camp before putting on his soft boots and walking across the Post Road for the nearby King’s Inn. He wondered absently why the places were called that for there were no Kings in the Codian Empire, and resolve
d to ask Zebulon tomorrow if he thought of it. That was the trivial sort of information Zeb seemed to have in abundance.

  It was late and the inn kitchen was closed, the common room empty. A man appeared behind a desk from a curtained doorway as Phin’s entry jingled a chime above the front door. The clerk was a young Doonish local in a clean tunic of light blue cloth, the breast embroidered with a simplified version of the Codian Book-from-the-Water design as an upright rectangle in a circle. Phin told the fellow he was a member of the Madame Nesha-tari’s party, and needed her room number. The desk clerk did not know the name but recognized Phin’s description of the woman’s hooded ensemble. He was still loathe to give Phin a room number though he did offer to summon her. Phin said it would keep until morning, and turned to go. He turned around again as the man was passing back through the curtained doorway, muttered a few words and raised his hand to his mouth to blow a bit of fine powder from his fingers.

  The man stopped in the doorway and swayed. Phin stepped around the desk and caught the fellow under the armpits as he began to crumple to the floor, totally limp. Phin dragged him through the curtain into a small office, and hoisted the fellow onto a cot at the far wall. He blew out the lamp on a table.

  Phin returned to the desk, flipped open a ledger by an inkwell to the last marked page and ran his finger down the column of signatures. Madame Nesha-tari’s was there without her title, as was the room number.

  Phin turned to a corkboard on the wall behind the desk on which was drawn a diagram of the one-story inn, two wings lined with rooms running off the central kitchen and commons, with the stables in an outbuilding. Each room on the diagram was numbered and a key hung from a peg in each one that was not presently occupied. The peg for Nesha-tari’s key was empty, and the board told Phin that she had taken the corner room at the north end of the inn, round the back. He looked down the hall toward that wing but walked out the front door and around the building.