The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

  *

  “How much do you know?” the renegade asked, setting a brisk pace across the plains away from the rising sun. They had intersected a path running close enough to the right direction for both horses to follow the fellow single file at an easy gait. The Captain rode behind him, and Tilda sat high enough on the mare bringing up the rear to still see the fellow walking ahead.

  “About what?” Block snapped, still in a growl.

  “About the ol’ Three-Four,” the renegade from the 34th Foot Legion said over his shoulder. “About how we wound up down here in the first place.”

  “We know that your outfit was put under arrest as a body some months ago. After committing an atrocity in La Trabon.”

  The man did not look back, but his voice changed.

  “That’s what they’re calling it, eh? An atrocity. Mighty dressed-up word for just burning down a building.”

  “For burning down the fabled Round Hall,” Tilda said, speaking unbidden and drawing a look back from the Captain. Though the clearer skies and brighter sun was warming this day more than the last, Tilda’s mood was bad owing to the jolt that the mare’s every step sent through her aching ribs. She continued speaking without permission.

  “The ancient home of the Orstavian Kings, a wonder of art and architecture from the time of…”

  “Look, I admit, it was a pretty building,” the renegade said. “However, the shaman separatists that holed-up in the place did not give us much choice. It was either smoke them out or else storm in with spear and sword.”

  “Immaterial,” Block snapped. “The result was that your whole Legion was put in camp arrest until some five Centuries decided to break Law by walking out. They joined Baron Nyham’s harebrained vendetta, and here you are now. We care for none of this.”

  The renegade’s gaze rose somewhere above the horizon ahead, possibly at a cloud.

  “You know, I used to think that word was ‘hair-brained,’ like you had hair where your brains should be. I guess, though, that it is ‘hare.’ Brain like a rabbit, though rabbits never seemed that dumb to me. What man wouldn’t live like that, if he could?”

  Tilda tilted her head to one side, but Block only scowled.

  “What happened to the Lepokahan, for we know that he and his whole command were among the men gone renegade.”

  “Oh, we were indeed. Marched out of camp arrest in a cloud of righteous indignity, which lasted only until we agreed to go mercenary for a petty noble’s pettier cause. With only a couple officers and a few bad sergeants, it did not take us long to become a rabble.”

  Though the man’s tone remained light, his last words sounded forced and he stopped speaking for several paces afterward. Even the Captain gave him the moment and allowed him to continue only of his own accord.

  “Anyway, it was not long before some of the seedier boys started looking around for a sweeter deal, your stalwart Centurion among them. He and a little band hatched a plan to get themselves out of the service altogether, with a bit of a nest egg besides. I was one of the fellows talking about it early on, but when push came to pull came to shove, I decided it was just too rabbit-brained an idea. My comrades, however, chose not to depart without a bit of seed money. Money in the form of some trinkets and baubles I had acquired…let us say here and there, over the years. Some gems and jewelry put aside for my retirement, you understand.”

  “They robbed you,” Tilda called. “Then deserted from the desertion.”

  The renegade looked back and winked at her.

  “Nicely put.”

  “When was this?” Block demanded.

  “Two days before the battle. Most of four gone now.”

  “Why did you not go after them at the time?”

  The man sighed. “There are five of them, and one of me. Even had I caught up I didn’t much think they’d be in a mood to just hand me back my stuff. I had no better choice than to stay with what was left of the Three-Four, which I did right up until the Duke’s army smashed our ragtag ensemble. He had a couple of loyal Legions with him by the way. It was not as though we got rolled by household troops. I got out of there by the skin of my teeth, and then I had to start walking in some direction or another.”

  The man stopped walking now and turned around. Block and Tilda pulled their horses to a halt and the man looked up at the frowning dwarf.

  “I started after the Centurion and his band because I know where they are going, and because it is the only thing left for me to do. Now, Chance has put me here with you, Cap’n. Somebody who wants the same man as I do.”

  Tilda knew that it was not the Ninth God, Chance, that had brought them to this place when sense and reason dictated that they should have followed the path of Nyham’s rabble south from the watering hole toward the battle. Instead they were here because of the Captain’s inexplicable intuition. It struck Tilda now that had the two of them gone south, they would have been utterly lost. Surviving prisoners of the 34th Legion may have been able to tell them that the 2nd Century’s commanding Centurion had run-off. But if what this man said was true, no one else would have known to where the double deserters had gone.

  Only by following the lone line of footprints had Tilda and her Captain come to meet this particular renegade, who knew what they needed to know. It had been such a near thing as to take Tilda’s breath away, and the stare she now gave her Captain’s broad back had not a little awe in it. The old dwarf claimed to have no truck with sorcery nor witchcraft. He did not even particularly like priests, not even those of Miisina, Our Lady of Coin, who was the adopted goddess of the Islands. But there was something to the Captain at moments that seemed to Tilda to verge on the mystical. Whether it was something innate to the dwarven race or to Captain Block of Miilark in particular, she could not say.

  “Where has he gone?”

  Block’s voice was quiet as he asked the critical question, and Tilda wondered if the renegade understood as she did that a softening of the Captain’s tone betokened more ill than did a growl or a yell. The man returned the dwarf’s steady look.

  “I have been ruminating a bit since last night, and I have decided not to tell you.”

  Perhaps it was Tilda’s imagination, but it seemed even her horse caught a breath. The renegade held up a hand.

  “I can see where that might…make you want to kill me, but hear me out. First, I know just enough of you people - Miilarkian Guilders I mean, not beardless dwarves - to know that you don’t share your business with outsiders. I know you want the Centurion and I know you are not about to tell me the why nor the wherefore. So why should I alone spill my guts?”

  “Good choice of words,” Block said with killing softness.

  “That’s the other thing. I tell all, and I am baggage. Not a reason in the world for you to lug me along. Look, Cap‘n, we want the same man. I want my fiscal restitution, which need not effect you at all. I’ll take what’s mine, you do what you feel, and it’s fare-thee-well all around. We can help each other so far as that goes, then go our own ways. Clean and easy, like a midsummer morn.”

  Block was glaring so fiercely at the renegade that the man actually spared Tilda a look and gave her what she supposed was his most winning smile.

  “Or, I could make you tell me,” Block said, and the renegade sighed.

  “Maybe. I’m not gainsaying your manhood, little man, I am just saying that once blades are drawn an awful lot can happen. You two would have to take me down without killing me, and without me giving back a poke that at a minimum slows one of you down on the road ahead. Then it would be a bit of torture, I suppose, but I am guessing you know that is hardly reliable. I’d tell you something, sure, but what if I lied out of sheer, dog-dumb peevishness? You couldn’t safely kill me nor leave me behind without learning if I’d sent you in the right direction. So now you’re saddled with either an ornery prisoner or a man damaged to the point he’s no threat, which would probably mean unable to move under my own power at all.”

&n
bsp; The casual manner in which the renegade discussed his own possible maiming and demise struck Tilda as crass, but it did not seem artificial. Block’s face remained blank, his dark eyes hard.

  “So that is my pitch, Guilder. We go on as we are, hearty and hale, and run our mutual quarry to ground. Either that or else we turn on each other here and now with a lot of fuss and ruckus, and in the end at least one of us is having a far worse day than we are at this moment. So what say you?”

  The Captain stared. “I say we should have had this out in the hills, before you’d had a night to ruminate.”

  The man gave a smirk. “Like they say on the Beoshore, the eye looking back sees best.”

  To Tilda the silence which followed seemed complete, for while the Orstavian grass moved with a constant rustling swish of blade-on-blade, it was a background noise that she no longer heard unless she listened for it.

  The dwarf looked at the man for a long time before giving the merest nod of assent.

  “Lead on,” he said, but the smiling renegade first came closer with his hands held out at his sides, away from the short sword at his hip.

  “One first matter last,” he said, taking even steps toward Block’s pony. “The other thing I know about Miilarkians is that a man had best hold on to his…hat, let us say, whenever he makes a deal with one of them.”

  He approached until the Captain’s pony snorted at him, then stopped and raised his left hand, palm up. He extended his right hand to Block, and Tilda noticed that the man wore some sort of plain cord, thick like a boot lace, double looped and tied around his right wrist. It hardly seemed ornamental, and reminded her more than anything of the bits of string her father would sometimes tie around a finger to remind himself of something he must not forget.

  “I have also heard, Good Guilder, that if an Islander shall swear by the honor of his House, then it is an oath to which he must and shall adhere.”

  Block looked at the man’s rough and not-very-clean hand with a frown.

  “Your point?” he asked, and the renegade’s smirk returned.

  “I’ll take your word, Cap‘n, that by the honor of the House which you serve, I need fear no trickery. Nor no knife in the night. I ask only for peace between us, at least until we’ve found the man we are both after. Shake on it.”

  Block’s heavy features were set, but he pulled the black kid-leather glove off his right hand and rumbled that by the House of Deskata, it was so. The Captain leaned forward and the two shook, sword-callused hand in sword-callused hand. Then to Tilda’s surprise, the renegade stepped around the pony and came at her with his hand still extended.

  “You too, girl. You’re as much a Guilder as this one.”

  Tilda glanced at her Captain, but he was still facing forward and was busy wiping his hand on his pony’s neck before replacing his glove. She looked down at the man in front of her, his brown eyes lingering on hers for perhaps the first time since the woods last night. In fact, she knew perfectly well that it was. Tilda pulled off her right glove, repeated the oath, and they shook. Her hand had held a hilt often enough, but was not yet hardened by it. His felt like rough wood.

  “Lead on,” Block said again, and this time the renegade gave a little salute, shifted the saddlebags on his shoulders, and stepped smartly back to the head of the line.

  “One more thing,” Tilda called.

  Block shot her an irritable look, but the renegade turned back around with his eyebrows raised.

  “What is your name?”

  One side of the man’s mouth twitched and there was a flash of his white teeth. Not a bad-looking fellow even apart from the stubble of beard and hair, still so short that they looked faintly gray in the morning light. His muddy eyes only did not suit him.

  “Forgiveness, Milady, wherefore ever are my manners? I am called Dugan. Of Correnca, on Gweiyer. Used to be Legionnaire-Sergeant Dugan, but I expect we can dispense with that. And you would be?”

  Matilda Lanai of Miilark pushed back her shoulders, though it still hurt a bit, and most likely gave her lips a little purse without really meaning to do so.

  “My name,” she said, “is none of your business.”

  And so on they went.

  *