The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

  *

  Tilda stared at Dugan in the starlight. “Vod’Adia?” she repeated, and Dugan’s silhouette nodded once.

  “Vod’Adia?” she said again. Her brain was stuck on the idea.

  “I take it you’ve heard of the place?”

  Tilda waved an arm north.

  “It is all anyone is talking about in every tavern from here to the Cold Seas! Of course I know the stories…that was the brilliant plan? The reason Deskata and his men deserted the Legion? To go get killed in Blackstone?”

  “There is a bit more to it than that,” Dugan said, taking a step forward and holding out a hand with a small bundle wrapped in a cloth napkin. “Here. This is the last of the food. Few bites of salt pork and cheese, no more.”

  “I am not hungry,” Tilda said.

  “You should eat something.”

  Tilda did so, almost mechanically, still gaping at Dugan between the few bites of dry food. She could hardly keep the fact that she had just said goodbye to Captain Block of Miilark for the last time in her head, as it was bouncing around with dozens of questions.

  “Don’t you have to buy a license to go into that place? An obscenely expensive license?”

  Dugan snorted. “You remember I told you John and the boys stole some gems and jewelry off me?”

  Tilda started. “How much were they worth?”

  “Enough,” Dugan said. “I don’t have any family, and a legionnaire lives without a lot of expenses. The stuff they took amounts to all I have earned or acquired in my whole life.”

  “You must have done pretty well.”

  “I managed.”

  Tilda slowly shook her head. Dugan was still here, and she doubted it was out of any concern for her personally. She had thought he was going to kill her just a few hours back, stab her where she lay before the locked door back into the Underway. Tilda had actually been more stunned by the fact that Dugan had run off without killing her than she had been by getting bashed off a wall, yet again. Dugan could not have gotten out of Orstaf through Trellane’s secret passages without Captain Block dealing with the Baron, but Block was gone. Irreparably. And it did not matter in Daul that Dugan was a renegade Codian legionnaire, here he could go where he would. Yet he had waited hours for Tilda to climb down the chasm, and back up again.

  Tilda tightened her hands on Block’s kitbag, thinking of the money within.

  “You think you will have to buy entrance into Vod’Adia yourself. To catch Deskata there.”

  “That would be pointless,” he said. “If he and the boys get to Chengdea and buy a license, my money is gone. I don’t know what route they will take to that place, but that is where they have to go. I have to be there before they arrive. Cutting under the mountains should have saved me enough days to do so, if I travel fast from here on out.”

  “Then why are you still standing here?”

  “Because there are still five of them as far as I know, and they are not going to want to see me.” Dugan’s head bowed as he lowered his eyes to the ground. “Three against five was better odds, but two is a minimum. Especially if one of those is a Miilarkian Guilder.”

  That raised the issue of which Tilda had been aware since realizing that Dugan believed the Guilders had come to kill John Deskata. If Block had decided how to deal with that problem when it inevitably came to a head, the Captain had never said a word to her. Dugan had been miscounting his odds from the start, and now Tilda was going to have to deal with it alone.

  “Now,” Dugan said. “This all presupposes that you still mean to go after Deskata yourself. Without…him, to order you around.”

  Tilda’s nostrils flared and her head jerked slightly.

  “Do you think I would stop now, with the Captain lying dead in a hole? That I would dishonor him like that? He chose me to be here, and here I am, still.”

  Dugan shrugged. “How the hell do I know how you people operate?”

  Tilda glared. “I am going on.”

  “Good. More the merrier.”

  Dugan retrieved two packs from the trees. Tilda could tell by how they hung from his arms that he had re-packed as much of their increasingly scant equipment as had made it out of the palisade. He dropped the lighter one beside the leaning gun, club, daggers, and cloak which remained where Tilda had left them before her climb. He shouldered the heavier pack to his back.

  “We should walk and not stop before daybreak. The bugbears might come back here with the dawn.”

  Tilda replaced her weapons and pulled her cloak back on, put her buksu in its back sheath and the long gun over a shoulder. Dugan began to lead the way but she stopped him.

  “There is one last thing.”

  Dugan looked over his shoulder in the dark.

  “You slammed me into a rock wall.”

  Dugan turned around. “Yes, but you stole my sword first.”

  “Back in Trellane’s lands, you bashed my head off a cottage.”

  Dugan sighed. “And I apologized for that.”

  Tilda kept staring at Dugan in the dark until he shifted his bulky backpack.

  “What?” he finally asked irritably. “You want another apology? Fine. I deeply regret all injury, bodily or emotional, that may have resulted from…”

  “You did not tell Captain Block about Vod’Adia,” Tilda interrupted. “You know that if he didn’t think he needed you anymore, he may just as soon have cut your throat. Or told me to do it.”

  Dugan was quiet, and Tilda took a step closer to him so that even in the faint light they could almost see each other’s eyes.

  “I can use your help,” Tilda said. “But I do not need it. If you ever lay hands on me again, I will kill you.”

  Dugan remained silent for a few moments before speaking.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Tilda moved her tired legs south, leading the way into the darkness under the trees.

  Chapter Fourteen