The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle)

by M. Edward; mimulux McNally

  Ty and Rickard looked over at their Sarge, who frowned grimly at Claudja.

  “Are you going to suggest we take you home again, Duchess? We’ve been through that once.”

  “No.” Claudja shook her head, though the brush of her dirty hair across the back of her neck made her want to cringe. “You were quite right, Sergeant. My father’s lands are menaced by Ayzantium and at present we have not the means to reward you sufficiently for my safe return.”

  “Then you don’t have much to offer, do you?”

  “But Chengdea was only the starting point of my journey. How much did your friend Horayachus tell you of the purpose for my mission?”

  Their blank looks confirmed for Claudja that the Ayonite had told his hirelings little if anything.

  “You were headed for Galdeez, and the Empire,” the Sarge said flatly.

  “To meet with the Emperor himself, Albert of Beoshore,” Claudia said.

  The legionnaires and Phinneas widened their eyes. Claudja lied in an easy, breezy tone.

  “His August Majesty expects my coming, and I am certain he would be willing to reward those who would help me on my way. Monetarily, of course, and even to the extent of forgiving past transgressions against his Imperial authority.” Claudja looked at each of the legionnaires in turn. “I could have you pardoned for deserting the Legions, and you could return to your homes again.”

  Ty and Rickard exchanged a look, but the Sarge continued to glare at Claudja. He shook his head.

  “I’ve been in the Legions for sixteen years, Duchess. I know more than most that the Emperor’s munificence is not nearly so boundless as it’s made out to be.”

  “But would you not count on it more that you would the words of a dead priest of the Oath-breaker?”

  Ty and Rickard both looked at the Sarge. He met the eyes of his men and when he saw the hope that Claudja’s words had kindled there, his lips pulled back in an ugly sneer.

  “You’re lying,” he growled at her. “You’d say anything to avoid going to Ayzantium. If the Emperor really expected you, there would have been real legionnaires waiting for you in Camp Town. Not us and a bunch of Ayonites.”

  “There probably were,” Claudja said. “I just had the bad fortune of running into you first.”

  The Sarge snorted and shook his head. “Nonsense,” he said, but did not seem able to come up with a specific denial. He changed tactics. “Besides, you’d never put a good word in for us with the imperial authorities. Probably just smile while we were all strung-up from gibbets.”

  “I have not been unduly mistreated in your custody,” Claudia said.

  “No? Well, what about your old knight friend that we gutted like a pig?”

  Claudja jerked as though she had been slapped. Her spirits had tentatively begun to climb as it had seemed her words were having an effect, but now hope plummeted to the pit of her stomach. Had she not been sitting down she may have swooned.

  “You did what?” she asked dully, feeling cold all over.

  “Eviscerated, your Highness,” the Sarge laughed. “What did you think happened to him? The old boy was very determined to protect you. Did you think we had talked him out of it? Horayachus told us not to kill the Jobian, probably to avoid a holy war or something, but that old Daul knight? Him we did in most emphatically.”

  Claudja stared at the man’s sneering face and all her being was flooded in a desire to hurt him, to kill him, to tear out his eyes and cut him into pieces. All her pain and rage at Lukas’s death, now his father was gone, too. Her homeland on the brink of invasion, and herself a prisoner in a demon-infested city. Everything that had once been good in Claudja’s life was being taken from her, and ground into dust.

  “You still willing to beg the Emperor’s mercy on our behalf?” the Sarge grinned.

  “I will see you dead,” Claudja heard her voice say beyond her ability to stop it.

  “That’s about what I figured,” the Sarge said. He turned to Ty and Rickard, who no longer looked hopeful. “I don’t think we’ll be needing a gag. I have a feeling her Highness will keep her mouth shut from here on out.”

  Claudja could stand to look at them no longer. She turned her parched eyes away, met the gaze of Phinneas Phoarty, and saw there only sympathy and feeling. Claudja believed he had not known what had happened to Sir Towsan. He was a good man, or at least not a bad one, here with this human filth by accident. Claudja’s life, her mission, and the fate of her father’s lands were most likely all in his hands now. His pale, long-fingered hands, with the green and blue Tullish tattoos about the knuckles.

  They left their resting place and proceeded in silence down the most southerly street. Everyone’s mind was elsewhere, and so none noticed the white-robed figures creeping along in their wake, peering after them from behind corners, then scrabbling ahead on clawed feet.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Heggenauer swallowed a bite of food and shook his head.

  “They were not demons,” he said. “Those were devils.”

  Tilda and the others looked at him. The party had found another barracks or armory near enough in its lay-out to the one in which they had spent their first night in Vod’Adia that the place seemed almost homey. This one had been as thoroughly looted as had the first, though many of the other buildings in the neighborhood they now found themselves in showed no sign of having yet been disturbed at earlier Openings. Amatesu had again warmed a decent meal over a small fire in the courtyard, and the party had settled around their packs and bedrolls in a second floor gallery to eat, sitting in a circle with a lantern in the middle. Uriako Shikashe ate while standing, free from most of his elaborate armor but with his two swords still at his waist. He watched the dark street outside through arrow slits.

  “There is a difference?” John Deskata asked. His voice was irritated and he had a bandage around his right hand, for the back of it had been scraped bloody on the wiry beard of a devil during the fight. Neither Amatesu nor Heggenauer’s magic had fully healed the stinging wound.

  Heggenauer nodded, and gave a grim frown. “Under the Code, the priests of List have the responsibility to deal with such malevolent beings. But from the little I know, demons are monstrous beasts, twisted and evil but not particularly intelligent. Devils however are in their way even more dangerous. They are cunning, even calculating, and in a strange way, almost civilized.”

  “Civilized?” Tilda asked.

  “That may not be quite the right word, but I mean that they have a sort of society. Ranks and titles. Perhaps even a nobility, of a diabolic sort.”

  “That fellow Balan called himself a Lord.” Zeb said, and from across the room, Nesha-tari hissed at him.

  The Zantish woman, obviously a mage of some type as that was the only sort of person Tilda was aware of who had the ability to chuck lightning bolts about, still kept her own space apart from the rest of the party. While the others sat around the lantern light, Nesha-tari was against a wall and mostly in shadow, reclining on her side atop her bedroll with her head propped up on an elbow, the other arm draped lazily over the swell of her hip. The flickering light reflecting off her blue eyes showed that she was watching the others, but until she hissed at Zeb Tilda had not thought she was actually listening to the conversation, as it was in Codian.

  Nesha-tari held out an arm and beckoned to Zeb with one languid finger. Tilda did not much care for the gesture, but Zeb got to his feet and walked over to the woman. Nesha-tari looked up at him from the floor and spoke in a tone one would use with a child, condescending perhaps, but with a firmness that seemed almost fond. Tilda was a little surprised at herself, for that bothered her as well.

  “Madame Nesha-tari says none of us should speak that name again,” Zeb said. The woman added something else, and Zeb looked back at the others with a frown. “She says that whenever the name of a devil is spoken aloud, it may draw the fiend’s attention.”

  Heggenauer caught Tilda’s eyes across the lantern. Over the last
two days there had been little opportunity for Tilda to say much to the Jobian, though she had told him that Zebulon, Amatesu, and even the grim samurai Uriako Shikashe did not seem to her to be bad people. If she was coming to share the young priest’s assessment that there was something dangerous about Nesha-tari, Tilda had not said as much to Heggenauer for she really had no good reason for it.

  “Zebulon,” Heggenauer turned to him. Zeb clicked his heavy boot heels together.

  “If Madame Nesha-tari is so well versed in the mannerisms of nether-worldly beasts, perhaps she would share some of her knowledge with the rest of us. So that we might protect ourselves.”

  Zeb spoke in Zantish, though Nesha-tari did not look up at him. Her eyes were on Heggenauer and her teeth shone very white as she smiled. She spoke in a tone that could not be read as anything other than haughty, though Zeb smoothed it off before translating.

  “She says we should be careful not to be killed by demons or devils, for those souls that fall to them within Vod’Adia…become their property.”

  Tilda blanched, but Heggenauer only narrowed his eyes at the Zantish woman.

  “She seems to know much of this place, as well.”

  Zeb spoke and Nesha-tari laughed. She swung easily to a seat, elbows on her knees in front of her and a sneer on her face. She spoke at Heggenauer, almost spat words at him, oozing superiority with every smirk and dismissive wave of a hand.

  Zeb frowned and when she was through he cleared his throat and said only, “She knows a lot of things.”

  Heggenauer climbed to his feet with his arms loose. He was unarmored now, but even in cloth leggings and a soft-blue Jobian tunic, the blonde Exlander still looked like a storybook knight with his square chin and powerful build. Still seated, Amatesu looked up at him with her fine eyebrows raised, and Shikashe turned to regard the priest from the window.

  “There are a few things I know as well. About Ayzantium,” Heggenauer said. “I know the old Dragon Lands are now governed by a tri-part cabal, of Ayonites, Royalists, and the Cultists of the dead Red Wyrm.” He looked intently at Nesha-tari. “She is surely no follower of Ayon.”

  “Surely not,” Zeb said without asking her.

  “Does she claim to serve the Ayzantine crown?”

  Zeb looked down, though Nesha-tari was still smirking at Heggenauer. He asked the question in Zantish and she laughed before she answered, if anything with even more disdain dripping from her words. Zeb made another long statement very short.

  “She’s no admirer of the King,” he said.

  Heggenauer looked at Nesha-tari levelly. “Then she is a servant of Red Ged-azi.”

  Nesha-tari’s eyes widened, and her nostrils flared. She bolted to her feet and jabbed a finger in the air at Heggenauer, speaking furiously. Zeb translated rapidly as she did so, with no editing on his part.

  “One such as you, pale godling, shall not speak the name of a Great Dragon of the Sky. Not even one who has been slain.”

  Heggenauer had taken a step back when Nesha-tari rose, closer to his mace and shield resting against a wall. Tilda had sprung to her feet as well, as had Amatesu. John Deskata alone remained seated on the floor, and he was the only one in the room who did not seem to be alarmed by the palpable acrimony that suddenly existed between the priest of Jobe and Nesha-tari. He did however sigh and slide himself backwards against a wall, out of anyone’s line of fire.

  “She admits it then?” Heggenauer demanded. Zeb spoke to Nesha-tari though it sounded like he was trying to calm her down more than ask another question. She kept glaring at Heggenauer with her hands balled into fists at her sides. The Far Westerners now stood together looking from the Exlander to the Zant woman, close enough to step in between them. Tilda was uncertain what she should do, but after feeling her hair stand out on end when Nesha-tari had unleashed a lightning bolt past her to smite a bearded devil, she did not think anything that might lead to the woman hurling another one in the close quarters of this room was a good idea. She moved toward Heggenauer with her hands held up, palms out before her.

  “Brother, please. What does it matter who Nesha-tari serves, so long as we are all on the same side in this place?”

  “That is just the issue,” Heggenauer said. “The Ayzantine Cult is the legacy of those Zants who were in thrall to the Great Red Dragon when he ruled over their lands. They are warlocks and witches, and no less evil than are the priests of the Burning Man.”

  “What is a Great Dragon?” Tilda asked, and Heggenauer looked at her askance. Tilda knew something of them, of course, for it was impossible to learn much about Noroth without encountering the fabled creatures that had been central to much of the continent’s history. But keeping Heggenauer talking rather than having him go on glaring at Nesha-tari seemed the best tack for Tilda to sail. It sounded like Zeb was trying the same thing in reverse across the room.

  “The Greats?” Heggenauer said. “They were the original ten dragons to inhabit Noroth, the oldest and most powerful of their species. Sires and mothers of all the rest. The five of the Land are colored as precious metals, and though they remain aloof from Man they are generally benevolent creatures.”

  “There were fifteen Great Dragons, in the beginning.” Amatesu said, also having moved inconspicuously up on Heggenauer’s side, so that the acolyte had to turn farther away from Nesha-tari to meet the shukenja’s eyes as she spoke.

  “Long ago when the Dragons of the Sky made war with those of the Land, the five Great Dragons of the Waters came to the Farthest West.”

  Heggenauer blinked at her. “I have never heard that before.”

  “It is so. The Five Dragons of the Waters still dwell in the West, though some of those who remained on Noroth have since been slain, or disappeared.”

  “Like the Red one,” Tilda prompted, and Heggenauer gave a short nod.

  “The five Dragons of Sky, three of which still live, are malevolent and evil creatures. At times they have raised conquering armies of Magdetchoi, or even enslaved human tribes and nations. The greatest of their number was the Red, and he ruled the lands that are now Ayzantium for centuries before he was slain. Even now his Cult lives on among the Zants.” Heggenauer looked Tilda evenly in the eyes. “They are a part of the Ayzantine government, and if the Red Priests wished to capture the Duchess Claudja of Chengdea to forward their war against Daul, then the Cult would wish the same.”

  Tilda looked across the room just in time to see Nesha-tari give Zeb a shove to the chest. He backed away with his hands held out at his sides, still speaking rapidly in Zantish in a tone so diffident it was nearly spineless. It seemed to work however, as Nesha-tari put her hands on her hips and snapped a few last words at him. He nodded and bowed, then spoke to the room.

  “Madame Nesha-tari is not in the service of the Cult of Ged…”

  Nesha-tari growled.

  “…of the Great Red Dragon. She does not care a whit for the war with Daul, nor for the bickering human nation of Ayzantium.”

  “Let her say then who her master is!” Heggenauer shouted, and Nesha-tari drew herself up with her sapphire eyes blazing. She shouted back, words sounding like a proclamation, but the only two that Tilda recognized were Dragon, and the name Akroya.

  Now Heggenauer came close to growling. “The Great Blue Dragon. The foulest of the damned Sky Dragons left alive. May they all suffer the fate of Ged-azi and the Winter Wyrm.”

  Nesha-tari may not have understood the Jobian, but she had heard him repeat the name Ged-azi, after clearly telling him not to do so. Her face reddened even through her tan skin, and she spat out words with such ferocity that no translation was required to know they were curses that would have peeled the paint off the walls, had their been any.

  Heggenauer reddened even more and he snatched up his mace from the floor. Tilda took a long step backward without thinking about it, but Shikashe moved in front of the priest, held up a warding hand in front of his face, and spoke in Ashinese. Amatesu quickly translated.

>   “Brother Heggenauer, you are a good man, and his lordship Uriako Shikashe-sama has no wish to fight you. But he will not permit you to menace the Madame Nesha-tari, as she is under his protection. Please, Brother. Stand at peace.”

  Heggenauer looked between the two Far Westerners. “How can you people be in this woman’s service? How much gold does it take to buy your honor?”

  Shikashe shoved Heggenauer hard in the chest, but the priest from Exland was as stoutly built as the samurai and a good deal taller. He grabbed Shikashe’s wrist with his left hand, still holding his mace at his side, and the two butted together like bulls. Amatesu sprang forward and tried to worm between them, shouting please and stop in Codian and probably in Ashinese as well. Tilda felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Blue sparks were snapping between Nesha-tari’s fingers.

  John Deskata put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, so piercing and sharp that everyone winced and looked at him.

  The one-time Centurion of the Codian Legions shook his head and gave everyone in the room a look of profound disgust, the sort of look that a drill sergeant would level on an utterly incompetent band of raw recruits. He had stood up and was buckling on his breastplate, and when it was secure he sheathed his sword at his side and hoisted his tower shield. He spoke as he walked for the door.

  “While you jackasses sort this out, I’ll be on the roof watching for devils, or demons, or dragons creeping up on us. And if any of you harebrained, pigheaded, halfwits are still alive come morning, you might recollect that we have a Duchess to rescue? Anyone? A wizard and a book, the very thought of which almost made a couple hundred wugs and hobgoblins shat themselves? Does any of this ring a bell within any of your thick skulls?”

  Deskata had reached the door, which he jerked open. He turned and glared at everyone from the doorway.

  “Amateurs,” he growled, as though it were the worst oath in any language. He slammed the door though it did not catch, and his heavy footfalls stomped up the stairs to the roof.