The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

Tilda retrieved the mare and pony from the main path, and frowned when she found that the dagger Block had jammed into the ground to loop the reins had been one of hers. She wiped it well clean before replacing it in a hidden sheath under a saddlebag.

  They let the horses get a good drink at the clearing, then Tilda boosted the dwarf to his saddle and swung into her own. She followed behind as Block pointed the snorting pony into the long grass. The white charger stepped back into the clearing behind them but went no further, and looking back over her shoulder at the proud animal standing forlorn under the tree, Tilda felt a pang. She assured herself that even on the lonely paths of southern Orstaf someone would come by before long, and a horse of that quality would never be left behind by anyone whose main concern was not for speed.

  The Captain said that as they were after a man on foot who had less than a half-day head start they might overtake him before nightfall. Early the next day at the worst. If the fellow’s trail continued generally southwest they would still be in position to angle back to the battlefield without losing too much time, should it prove necessary.

  Tilda said nothing in reply.

  As it developed, the Miilarkians could not of course take full advantage of being mounted to close the distance between themselves and their new quarry. The tall steppe grass gave the country of Orstaf a gently rolling appearance, but down at dirt-level it was a different story. Stones cluttered the plains, and there were dry runoff channels from the snowmelt season everywhere, not to mention gopher burrows and snake holes. To ride at speed cross-country would have been to invite a broken ankle for a horse. That was the point of the numberless paths in the first place.

  In the second place, tracking a lone man through the stuff proved difficult as it tended to grant passage with only a rustle and some picturesque swaying. Block often gripped his saddle horn as his pony picked its way along, holding himself flat against the horse’s dun flank with his sharp eyes looking level across the top of the grass for a single broken stalk, or even a bent one. Even for the jeweler’s eyes of a dwarf, it was remarkable he spied a sign as often as he did.

  Despite that, as the gray disk of the sun traversed the dreary sky above, several were the times Block raised a hand to halt. Tilda dismounted first, shrugging out of the blanket she had draped around her shoulders while riding. She helped the dwarf to the ground despite knowing he could get down himself if he wanted, then held the horses’ reins while her Captain crawled through the brush until finding a damp bit of low ground with a print, a scuff on a rock, or some other sign that Tilda could scarcely see even when he pointed it out to her. She then boosted the dwarf back into the saddle, remounted her mare and rewrapped her blanket, and on they went as the sun crawled away to the west, toward the lush Island home thousands of miles away from this chill and cheerless place.

  As hour followed hour of slow pursuit through the long grass, Tilda said not a single word. Block, intent of his observations, either did not notice or did not care. By the time enough hours had passed for the sun to approach the distant horizon, it became obvious their quarry had veered toward a jumbled bunch of low hills looming like a castle above the grass, all topped with dense trees. The wall of mountains to the south was still several days distant, but Tilda knew from the Captain’s maps that the foothills at their feet extended out onto the plains for miles in places, and that a river called the Winding lived up to its name as it snaked its way among them. The small cluster of hills now before them seemed a sentinel from that country, like a cavalry vedette thrown out well ahead of an advancing army.

  Block’s gruff voice was no less so after hours of silence.

  “Our fellow is heading straight for the hills, and he must be exhausted. It is likely he would rest as soon as he reached cover. Look sharp.”

  “I have been,” Tilda said.

  The dwarf turned in his saddle just enough to glare back over a shoulder.

  “No, actually you have been looking sulky.”

  Tilda stared at the ground so as not to glare back at her Captain.

  “I have not,” she said in a small voice.

  “Of course you have. Your big bottom lip is jutting out to shade your chin. Luck of the flip, girl. Take your complaints to the Ninth God.”

  Tilda mumbled something, but when Block snapped “What?” she said something different.

  “Were the fingers worn off of the coin you tossed, Captain?”

  “What?” Block snapped again. Tilda looked up at him this time, his hard eyes wide under the V of his heavy brows. In theory a Guild apprentice should always have kept her eyes downcast toward a House Man of Block’s station, but the disparity in their height had always made that difficult. Not that it bothered Tilda at the moment.

  “I ask if the coin you tossed was worn plain. Did both sides look to be back-handed, thumbs down?”

  The Captain blinked, and one end of the hard line of his mouth twitched. Now nearing evening, a dark shadow was already on the cheeks that the old dwarf had shaved this and every morning for hundreds of years.

  “I did not look to see,” he said, and Tilda said nothing.

  Muddy prints up the bank of a sluggish, shallow stream at the base of the first hillock told even Tilda which way their quarry had gone. The prints were uneven as though the man had stumbled, and Tilda thought that surely he must have been at the end of his rope. A full day and more of flight, on the heels of a battle. She thought that passing from the open fields to the sheltering shade of the trees must certainly have been a relief and a temptation for him and she looked around carefully, almost expecting to find a bundled shape on the ground at the base of each trunk. The horses sensed their riders’ moods and moved as if they had toes to tip on, hoof-falls muffled on the carpet of old needles and leaves. The trees were mostly pines, seeds washed down from the mountains eons ago and caught up in the rocks of the hills. Here and there an ancient oak arose taller among them, like a stately lord above prickly supplicants. Tilda and Block kept their eyes on the ground, but found only signs that their man had kept moving.

  They crested one rise, and descending the far side Tilda blinked to discover that in the midst of the encircling hills the trees were regularly spaced, shaggy-barked, and planted in even rows. They bore fruit shaped like pears but with white skins, and the branches hung heavy with them. As the riders passed down and among them, Tilda saw that the orchard was not maintained. A lot of fruit lay on the ground already going to rot and the air had a sickly-sweet smell.

  The shadows between the hills and the encroaching gloom of evening shivered Tilda all the more, and made it harder than ever to see any signs of passage. The Miilarkians were obliged to dismount again, and it took several minutes for the Captain to reacquire the trail. Tilda stood by holding the reins, wondering at the silence. In Miilark, dusk brought a cacophony of birdcalls from the trees, settling or waking, like a changing of shop shifts. But here there was nothing. She thought that if they found no one here they would soon have to make camp, and she hoped Block would at least push on a bit farther before doing so.

  Block found some askew needles, and as Tilda boosted him back to the pony’s saddle, she spoke just to break the silence.

  “Captain, may I speak?”

  The gloom made it impossible to read Block’s face even as he turned to look down at her.

  “So polite? You must be near mutiny. Say on.”

  Tilda sighed and remained standing between the horses. “I am bound, Captain, to follow your orders with no explanation required. If you wish to pursue a single man instead of an army, then that is what we shall do. You need not explain, nor put the decision to rigged chance.”

  “I told you,” Block growled. “I did not know then, and still do not know now, whether the coin was worn and the toss moot.”

  “And I of course believe you without question.”

  “This is without question?”

  Tilda moved around her horse, patting the mare’s nose, to mount from t
he other side. She kept speaking, but now looked away rather than at the dwarf’s dimming silhouette.

  “Captain, we landed two months ago on a vast continent peopled by millions. Eight years behind a man who had left even his own name back in the Islands, and whose looks we can only guess at after so much time.”

  “I shall know him by his eyes,” Block said more quietly. “They are as green as the emerald pennants of the Great House of Deskata.”

  Tilda nodded as she pulled herself into the saddle, for she knew the stories of her own House. Her long black braid swung forward over her shoulder.

  “I mean only to say, Captain, that though we came to this place nearly rudderless, as it were, you have since guided us to within a day or two of the man, one among millions, who we seek. It is a most remarkable thing.”

  They sat facing each other on the side-by-side horses, and though Tilda could not see Block’s face clearly, she supposed his dwarven eyes could still perceive hers.

  “Do you have a point, girl? Or do you just whistle at the Wind?”

  Tilda took a breath. “I mean to say that I follow you, Captain Block, as it is my duty. But even were it not, I would follow your whim or hunch with perfect confidence. I have learned to rely on them as I would on the tides.”

  Tilda felt immediately awkward, and expected no response from the dwarf other than, perhaps, an order to shut up. Batten her hatch and shove off. She in no way expected what she got.

  Block leaned forward and seized the end of the braid lying over Tilda’s shoulder. He jerked her sideways, nearly pulling her off her horse for she as yet had only one foot in a stirrup. Silver flashed before Tilda’s eyes in the fading light, a dagger in the Captain’s hand, and she quailed to the pit of her stomach, feeling what an Island poet had once called “the bird in the rib cage.”

  He is going to cut off my hair.

  Tilda thought it quicker than the actual words could be formed or needed to be, for she understood as did all Miilarkians who wore the braid that to have it severed was the ultimate sign of shame and rejection. The final formal act of negation preceding banishment from the Islands and their society. It was the last thing that would have been done to the man they were seeking now, on the day he was exiled and put to sea.

  But the Captain did not cut, he stabbed, and not at Tilda but above her bent body. Warm fluid that was certainly, sickeningly, blood splashed her back.

  Guilders were trained not to scream no matter what happened, not giving away one’s position being critical to much of their work. It was not much of a comfort to Tilda that the sound that came out of her was more of a squeal than a scream, but it was in any case covered by wild whinnies from the mare and pony as both horses bolted.

  Something hit the Captain but Tilda did not see it as the pony shot off between trees like a gray arrow, while the mare barreled away down the length of a row. Tilda’s right foot was in a stirrup but not the left, and she nearly toppled off the side before her knee wedged against the saddle. The reins flapped loose but she got a handful of mane, though her scrambling only succeeded in banging her heel against the mare’s belly. That did little to calm the horse down. Tilda pulled against her wedged knee, straining legs and hips, until a fumbling hand found the saddle horn and with a grunt she managed to haul herself up to a closer approximation of the manner in which one typically rode a horse.

  The mare broke from the orchard and raced up the grassy lee of a hill, less oppressive and with better light. She began to slow down, whinnying now as a call for her pony, but just as Tilda made a grab for the reins the horse screamed and drove back into a gallop.

  She can smell blood, Tilda realized, for she could smell it herself, soaking the dark cloak now clinging to her shoulders. She reached for the collar thinking to pull the garment off over her head and looked back for a moment past the mare’s bouncing tail. Her hand froze as something else broke from the tree line and zipped into the gloaming light of dusk.

  Shadows and Tilda’s bouncing vision made it hard to distinguish detail, but what she saw was too much. Something like a mosquito, but the size of a house cat. Pumping wings with red feathers, more like a bird than an insect, though they sprouted out of the creature’s back while four limbs hung under it. It had beady yellow eyes that fastened on Tilda’s, set above a hollow snout like a foot-long stake.

  Tilda turned and lay flat on her belly against the mare’s back, hissed “Run!” at the horse’s ears, and held on tight for a life that suddenly seemed desperately dear.

  She looked back to see the beastly thing closing the distance, and a second one emerging from the trees behind it.

  The mare clambered halfway up the hill before entering more trees, swerving madly as these grew wild and disordered, nearly shaking Tilda off her back. Tilda did not like where this was going and made another reach for the reins, but they were completely loose now, twisted and flapping out by the bridle. She leaned further, one hand clutching the saddle horn, but that only brought the bloody stink of her flapping cloak closer to the mare’s nose. The horse tossed her head as she ran and finally, inevitably, bucked. Already leaning forward, Tilda took to the air.

  Flash of memory, too short and specific to be Tilda’s entire life before her eyes, but vivid all the same. Running full-tilt down the length of a platform in the cellar of the Guild house, throwing herself off one end into air thick with the smell of sweat and the mildewed stink of seawater. Block’s voice booming in the damp, subterranean space.

  “Roll with the fall! Do you want to hear bone snap like tinder?”

  Tilda did not want to hear that, not then and not now. Her outstretched hand hit a branch and she did not lock her arm, only let it slide over roughly even as she kicked both legs backward and up. She was half-way through a turn when her breast and then hip smacked into the thick, unyielding bough, and though her desperate momentum carried her over the top, it still hurt about as much as any physical blow she had ever taken. Her hooked left knee caught, the arm wrapped by reflex, and Tilda hung suspended for a shuddering moment, bruised but unbroken, eyes screwed shut and teeth clenched so as not to bite through her tongue.

  The sound of the running mare faded, and was replaced by flapping. Tilda’s eyes snapped wide open.

  One of the beasties was on a bee-line right for her, close enough now that she could see the yellow claws on four mammalian legs hanging under it, and the unsettling absence of a face as the thing’s whole head was shaped like a cone, terminating in the sharp, hollow proboscis that pointed right at her.

  Tilda’s club, sword, and gun were riding away on the horse. She strained toward a dagger in her boot but seized only the hem of her Guild cloak, caught around the hilt. The thing flew at her like a ponderous bird and there was no more time to think, only to move. Tilda hissed as she rolled her bruised body over the top of the bough, and as the creature hove in she lunged toward it, swinging her damp cloak by the hem like a fisherman casting a net. The inner lining of emerald green flashed, Tilda bagged the creature with an angry whistling through its snout, and her hooked knee came loose as her momentum carried her clean off the tree limb. Not knowing just how far off the ground she was, nor when to begin a tumble, Tilda instead tucked her chin to her chest, wrapped both arms around the struggling thing in her cloak, and shifted so that she hit the ground with the bundle between her right shoulder and the forest floor.

  The impact jarred Tilda from head to toes, sending shooting pains around bruised ribs and down both arms. It was much, much worse for the thing in her cloak, which did in fact snap like tinder.

  Tilda flopped to her back and lay in a heap, mouth open, eyes shut, cloak soaking through. She let out a ragged breath that tasted like bile in the back of her throat, and concentrated on neither passing out nor retching.

  More flapping broke her concentration, but now fear kept her conscious and her last meal, an unfortunate choice of words, stayed down where it was. Darting eyes found the movement that was the second creatur
e hovering among the hanging boughs. Tilda lay perfectly still but the thing was already drifting on beating wings in her direction, sharp snout swinging this way and that until it snapped to point at Tilda on the ground. Red wings beat harder and it came at her fast.

  Tilda tried to move but found that she scarcely could, having more or less pinned herself by her twisted cloak. Her feet scrambled across the soft carpet of the forest floor kicking needles everywhere, and both hands scrabbled though she could get them neither to the dagger in her boot nor the one at the small of her back. The thing was already around the nearest tree and diving at her, shaft level as a lance to stab her, all four claws extended to dig in and hold on as it fed.

  All training aside Tilda did begin to scream, but it caught in her throat as someone vaulted over her prone struggles to stand facing the diving thing. Captain! Tilda thought at first, but the man was a full-sized human. Muscled calves bound across with cords to the knees, sandal lacings over cloth leggings, landed at what was presently Tilda’s eye-level. The man swung a length of branch like a Miilarkian boy, or girl for that matter, playing stick-ball between the passing carts and wagons on a street of the capital city. He connected for what surely would have been a good hit.

  The flapping thing made a flute-like hooting through its snout as it tumbled through the air and bashed off the nearest tree trunk. It fell twitching to the ground and the man made another bound, coming down on it squarely with all his weight on both feet. Feet in the thick-soled, round-toed marching sandals of a Legionnaire of the Empire of All Lands Under the Code. There was a crunch of bone, and the man quickly spread his feet apart as the ruined creature between them began to ooze.

  Tilda lay as though paralyzed and the man was stock-still as well, makeshift club before him in a two-handed grip, head tilted as he listened intently. Tilda did not need to be told to hush, and made no sound anyway. Besides the sandals laced up his calves, the fellow wore a rough cloth tunic, belted at the waist and falling skirt-like down to his knees. The rough garment had no sleeves, but he had a blanket wrapped around his broad chest, fashioned like a Doonish serape. His back was still to Tilda and she could not see his face, but his hair was dark as the gloomy shadows and cropped very short, which made sense. Legionnaires cut their hair almost to the scalp, but the men of the 34th had been under arrest and then renegade for a month. Discipline, not to say grooming standards, had certainly been eroding.

  “I don’t hear any more of them. No god loves a stirge.”

  The man’s voice was startling in the silence. It was deep as befit his physique, and had the flat Beoan accent all legionnaires tended to acquire in time, no matter from what part of the sprawling Empire they originally hailed.

  “Loves a what?” Tilda asked from the ground in her smallest voice.

  “Stirges.” The man poked his club at the wreckage at his feet. “Blighted, blood-sucking trouble they are. A flock will drain a horse or beeve dry in an hour. Less for a man.”

  The man turned to face Tilda, and her eyes flicked to the fat blade of the legionnaire short sword thrust naked through his belt on his left hip.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, reaching Tilda in a stride and kneeling close enough for her to perceive his features in the gathering gloom. Her spirits were divided by what she saw.

  First, the fellow was quite handsome, which was a good thing in and of itself. Legion regulations tolerated no facial hair but this fellow had a beard and mustache coming in along with the hair on his head, still short but black and thick. It framed rather than hid what were good features. Strong jaw, high cheeks, and a brow that was a bit on the thick side, giving neat dark eyebrows a slightly forward-thrusting look of intensity. His deep-set eyes in the plunging shadows looked to be a murky shade of brown however, which, while not unpleasant, were certainly not emerald green.

  But really, odds of 500-to-1 against had been far too long to bet.

  “I think I need to burn my cloak,” Tilda said, and indeed the man’s nose wrinkled as he got a whiff of the gore from Tilda’s garment.

  “You fell on one?” he asked with a note of amusement, obviously having missed Tilda’s haphazard acrobatics. “Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”

  Tilda accepted the offered hand and felt the rough calluses of practice with weapons. Her hands were much the same, though she still had her gloves on. She let the man help her up and gave a shudder and a groan as the bloody mess of the first stirge slid out of her cloak and plopped to the ground. She had almost straightened fully when her long braid swished loose over her shoulder in what was rapidly becoming only moon and starlight. Tilda felt the man’s hand tighten on hers and then suddenly release, and she pitched forward off-balance to fall headlong back to the ground as he danced several steps away. He cast aside his branch, gripped the hilt of his sword, and snarled.

  “You are a Miilarkian!”

  Tilda, with the wind knocked out of her, groaned neutrally.

  “What in the hells are you doing out here? And alone?” The man barked with the voice of command, surely as he would have were he still a soldier of the Legions. Before Tilda could muster enough breath to answer the fellow said, “Or are you alone at all?” He drew his sword cleanly while taking several more steps away to put his back against a tree trunk.

  Horses approached at a trot and swiftly appeared, dark shapes that were the Captain on his pony, leading the mare. Both animals hung their heads in a manner distinctly sheepish for horses, but the dwarf’s hood snapped about as his shadowed eyes raked the surroundings. His gaze passed over Tilda with nary a pause, then locked on the legionnaire. Block was out of the saddle quick as thought, advancing on the man and striking a spark from a flint in one hand. The oil-soaked head of a torch bloomed and the Captain thrust it toward the legionnaire’s face. The man scowled and squinted in the sudden light, teeth and sword bared, but Block stared only at his eyes.

  Brown.

  “Damn your eyes,” the dwarf growled, sounding both angry and suddenly tired. The man only stared back, blinking, and Block shifted the torch so the light fell on Tilda.

  “Are you alive?”

  Climbing back to her feet, Tilda felt like she had fallen off the Ghost Mountain, bouncing the whole way down.

  “Mostly.”

  The torch swung back to the gaping legionnaire. He had recognized Tilda for what she was by her braid, but seemed utterly dumbfounded by a likewise braided, beardless dwarf. Tilda could scarcely blame him, for the Captain was one of a kind.

  “Soldier,” Block barked. “What was your company of the 34th Legion?”

  The staring man answered by rote.

  “Second Century.”

  That was at least something. Tilda felt a flutter of hope in her chest, which at this point only made her ribs ache worse.

  “We seek your commanding Centurion,” Block said, his voice suddenly quiet. “The man called John Lepokahan.”

  The word gave Tilda a twinge, for le po ka han was a biting oath in the old language of the Islands. It was also the name that luck, or else some subtle magic inherent to the Captain, had led them to discover that their quarry had assumed when he enrolled in the Codian Legions, six years ago now.

  The renegade just went on staring. The mare and her pony had been moving toward Tilda, but they stopped short as if even they were anxious to hear the man’s answer. The crackle of Block’s burning brand was the only sound in a moment that lingered on toward painful.

  “Soldier…”

  “Lepokahan was not his real name,” the bedraggled deserter of the Legions said softly. “He said it was John Deskata, before he was exiled from Miilark.”

  Chapter Four