The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

It all happened so fast that Phin’s life had not even had time to flash in front of his eyes. He was still a toddler playing on the shore of Loch Hwloor with his sisters, when his head exploded and he saw only cobblestones rushing up to greet him. He wondered for a moment if his head was still attached to the rest of him or if it was tumbling through the air on its own. Then there was a meaty sound of impact and he wondered no more for a goodly while.

  Phin awoke in agony, little pleased to find that he still seemed to be alive. His jaw and head throbbed and his body was curled up with weights pressing him down. He tried to move his limbs more to see if they were still there than with any thought of rising.

  Muffled voices were faintly audible and the whole world shook jarringly, knocking Phin’s shoulder and aching head against hard wood. A particularly rough blow made him groan and he realized there was a leather strap across his mouth, and rough cloth against his face. Phin was reasonably sure he had not in fact been decapitated, but the sense that his head was in a burlap sack was not reassuring.

  The bumping became worse for a few moments before it thankfully stopped. There was a babble of voices and the weights started to come off of Phin bit by bit. He found at least he could breath better but then lost the ability as hands seized his shoulders and hauled him up. He fell forward in darkness with his head swimming, then crashed to damp ground. Not a stone street, but what felt like short, wet grass. His hands were bound tightly in front of him.

  “Phinneas Phoarty,” a voice said. “Give us a groan if you have your wits about you.”

  Phin was on all fours with a leather strap in his mouth and a burlap sack that smelled faintly of cheese over his head. It took little effort to produce the requested sound.

  “He is conscious,” the voice said. There was something vaguely familiar about it but Phin’s present circumstances were not conducive to concentration. Other voices spoke but Phin could not follow the words as they were not in Codian, Tholish, nor of course in the Old Tullish language of instruction at Abverwar. Someone put a hand on Phin’s shoulder and he flinched.

  “Phinneas,” the first voice said. “I am going to uncover your face. It is very important that you make no move that could be mistaken for the beginning of a spell. Understand?”

  With his head throbbing Phin doubted he could manage a spell even if he wanted to do so. Besides that all he had memorized were some low-grade scrying dweomers. He nodded his head and the sack was removed with a shake and a jerk.

  Phin blinked in gray light, the sky above a jumble of dark clouds that looked ready to resume raining at any time. He was in a grassy field beside the raised surface of the Imperial Post Road, somewhere in the countryside by the look of it. He was next to a cart or wheelbarrow out of which he had obviously just been hauled, and a goblin stood in front of him with its needle-teeth bared in a grin. Phin looked into the creature’s gleaming bronze eyes and recognized it as the same one that he had paid a couple coppers to carry his bags and row him across the harbor to the Circle Wizard compound on Again Island, on the day more than five months ago when he had first arrived in Souterm.

  “Th-Thideways?” Phin managed against the strap across his mouth.

  “Edgewise,” the goblin muttered, tossing aside the sack it had pulled from Phin’s head. It pushed the knobby pads of two long fingers against the side of Phin’s skull and he recoiled, more from the rubbery texture than from pain.

  “It is not so bad,” Edgewise said to someone behind Phin. “Just a bruised jaw and a goose egg on the temple. He’ll be fine.”

  “Shall I tend his wounds?” a female voice asked from behind Phin, speaking Codian with an accent he could not place. He made no move to turn around. There had been four people in the courtyard when Phin had activated the staff and for all he knew they were all standing back there, including the big fellow with the shining white sword. Phin maintained a baleful stare at the goblin as it shook its head.

  “Not necessary,” it answered the woman, kneeling in the wet grass so that its eyes were on a level with Phin’s. It smiled even wider, showing more and more teeth.

  “Mr. Phoarty,” Edgewise said in something closer to the simpering tone it had used months ago. “Please accept my sincerest apologies for your rough treatment, and for your removal from Souterm.”

  Phin sputtered into his gag and heard a quick snikt! behind him, like a sword coming smoothly out of its scabbard. He had a pretty good idea of just what sword and scabbard had produced the sound, and he felt a chill. He also shut up.

  “For the love of…” Edgewise’s bronze eyes flicked up over Phin’s shoulder. “Can you not put a leash on him or something?”

  “Don’t look at me,” another voice said behind Phin, this one belonging to a man with a flatter accent, vaguely Exlandic. “I can’t even talk to him. Just to her.”

  This started a flurry of conversation, at least three voices in as many languages. Phin waited as he had no other options until at last the goblin waved for silence and pasted the leer back on its rubbery face.

  “As I was saying, I am sorry. My…friend, here, thought that you were attacking us. He only acted to defend himself against what he thought was a threat.”

  Phin had not even seen a goblin with the four people who had walked past him in the rain, to whom it now seemed he probably should have called out before he had activated the magic of the scrying staff. Phin had not done so only because he had spent a thoroughly miserable night at his station getting soaked to the bone and he did not feel like blathering with any travelers if he could just wave them through. He had in no way expected the staff to blaze into life like a star. That had startled Phin as badly as it had the people in front of him. Not that he had tried to cut off anybody’s head over it.

  Phin continued to glare at Edgewise mostly because there was nothing else he could do. The goblin seemed to take it as an act of hostility.

  “Look, I’ve no quarrel with the Circle Wizards and this was all just an accident. I should not even have come out here but I heard the commotion and did not want it to turn into anything worse. Understand?”

  Phin made an affirmative noise against the gag. He had no idea what the goblin was talking about but he did not want to seem stupid.

  “Excellent,” Edgewise said, and reached behind Phin’s bowed head to undo the leather cord holding the gag. Phin spat the chewed strap on the ground in front of him and when he opened his mouth fully his jaw throbbed even worse. Two teeth felt loose when he pressed his tongue against them, but at least they were all there.

  “Where have you taken me?” Phin said thickly.

  By way of answer Edgewise stood and took a step to one side. Down the road behind the goblin Phin could see the great bulk of Souterm looming in the middle distance, a dense multi-colored sprawl in the gray and green world.

  “We are just a few miles north,” Edgewise said. “You were only out a couple of hours.”

  Phin wanted to feel the side of his head for the view out of his left eye seemed substantially occluded and that side of his face ached. His bound hands made that impossible and as he glanced down at the bindings, Phin blinked. His hands were tied at the wrists with a leather thong, palms flat against each other and with each finger bound in turn to its mate with twine. Even the thumbs. It was quite impossible to make any sort of hand gesture for even the simplest spell.

  “It will be easy enough for you to get back to town,” Edgewise said, extending an arm in a soaked rain coat back toward the city. “I am sure many wagons will be back on the road before long, should you not feel up to walking.”

  Phin turned his eyes back on Edgewise and something else instilled at Abverwar churned in his empty stomach.

  “Why that is a right hospitable thought, you filthy Magdetchoi foulspawn!” he shouted. “When my Circle comes for you, I shall have them go half-easy on your green hide!”

  The goblin’s rubbery brow bunched in a scowl and its metallic eyes hardened.

  “Wizard, do no
t be a fool. I am the only thing keeping you alive.”

  “I will mention that at your trial,” Phin sneered. His heart was racing but his voice was level, and his bruised face had returned to its stony cast of superiority.

  “Goblins have no right to trial in the Empire,” Edgewise said coldly.

  Phin snorted. “What was that? Are you actually fishing for sympathy from me? After assaulting me, kidnapping me, and destroying Circle property? I am supposed to feel bad about your poor, downtrodden people?” Phin’s voice had no accent from Thol left in it but his hard laugh still boomed with an echo of the high mountain country.

  Edgewise’s lips curled back in a snarl.

  “Sir, if I might?” a different voice said from behind Phin. Footsteps approached on the wet grass and a man came into view, not the swordsman who had attacked Phin but the other one who had been pushing the handcart. He was a rough-looking character, stoutly built and wearing a battered black jerkin with rings of mail stitched to it, a scratched helmet, and rough trousers jammed into heavy boots. He squatted and took Phin by the shoulders, helping him to a seat against a cartwheel with his bound hands in his lap. The fellow grinned in a manner Phin assumed was supposed to be friendly but the rough beard and damp sprig of coal-black hair poking from under his helmet gave his face a roguish, almost wolfish quality.

  “Mr. Wizard,” the fellow said, kneeling on his haunches in front of Phin with forearms on knees. His Codian still sounded vaguely Exlandic to Phin‘s ear though the fellow looked nothing like an Exlander.

  “This was all a misunderstanding, but we didn’t mean anything by it. Come now, sir. The fault was all on our side and you need never see any of us ever again. Mr. Edgewise isn’t really with us, he just happened to get caught up in events and in truth he has been more worried for you than anyone.”

  “Is it from you that he is keeping me alive?” Phin demanded, sounding stronger than he felt as the man before him had a rather nasty-looking double-headed axe slung across his broad back.

  The man smiled, still less than comforting. “We are not going to kill you, sir, or we would have done it while you were napping. It just happens that Mr. Edgewise is from your city, and he wants to be sure there is no trouble with you and yours. He is sorry about this, we all are, and there’s no reason in the world for it to be any more unpleasant than it already has been. What say you?”

  “Unbind me.”

  “Aye, I will. Then we can all go on our separate ways, not another harsh thought between us, eh? So long as we’ve your word that the whole matter ends here.”

  “Unbind me.”

  The man glanced away toward the others still standing behind the cart. There was some talk between two people - a gruff-voiced man and a soft-spoken woman - in a foreign tongue. When it concluded the man in front of Phin produced a knife from a boot and carefully cut free each of Phin’s fingers, and then his wrists. It took a little doing as the man’s knife was dull and the blade notched.

  “Please do not do anything sudden, sir,” the man said as he finished. “Our friend with the big pig-sticker is a jumpy sort, as I’m sure you’ve discerned.”

  The man put his knife away, stood and took a step back. Phin moved slowly with his back feeling as sore as his head. He pulled himself to his feet beside the handcart.

  He looked across the cart and met the gaze of the grandly-armored warrior who had nearly taken his head off at the shoulders. The man, plainly a Far Westerner, glared back at him coldly and still held his fearsome blade naked at his side. He spoke sharply.

  “Sir,” said a woman next to the warrior, another Far Westerner but altogether less grand in a shapeless coat and with her long hair so plastered down by the rain she looked drowned.

  “Please do not meet his lordship’s eyes directly, for it is an insult.”

  Phin glanced away from both of them and saw that the goblin Edgewise now stood beside the last of the four people Phin had seen in the courtyard, a figure cloaked and hooded in a voluminous garment not so very different than Phin’s own robes, though of a beige cloth the weather had dampened to a light brown. Lighter gloves and boots poked out from the wide sleeves and low hem. Thus garbed the figure was shapeless, but for some reason Phin had the idea that there was a woman somewhere in there. He stared for a few moments before the man in ring-mail cleared his throat.

  “So what say you, Mr. Wizard? Shall we all away then, each to their own?”

  “I am already missing from my duties,” Phin said. “And I seem to recall that my staff has been destroyed. That will not be overlooked by my superiors.”

  It was an odd thing for Phin to say given that it was in his best interest to get away from this odd bunch as soon as possible. But a thought had abruptly occurred to him, a thought almost as startling as the rest of this strange morning.

  The ring-mailed man and the goblin exchanged a look. “That could be a problem,” Edgewise acknowledged. “Some sort of a cover story…”

  “Would be easily detected by my Circle,” Phin interrupted. “No. If I return like this my superiors will know that something requiring inquiry has occurred. There is nothing they enjoy so much as an investigation.”

  “If you return?” the ring-mail man asked.

  Phin spoke at the goblin as Edgewise seemed to hold some position with the others. It also gave him the opportunity to glance frequently at the woman standing next to the creature. She must be a petite little thing in there…

  “You are all bound for Vod’Adia,” Phin said to Edgewise. The goblin blanched.

  “Gods no, not me! This bunch, well…their affairs are their own.”

  Phin looked at the cloaked woman with her face obscured by her deep hood, and at the Far Westerners. None of them offered anything in return so he turned back to the fellow in the ring-mail, who looked puzzled. Phin addressed him.

  “Foreign warriors and what all, heading north toward Galdeez and the entrance to the Vod Wilds. In the last few months I have seen many groups as odd as this one passing through Souterm and they were all bound, every one of them, for the Sable City.”

  The ring-mailed man looked over at the others, and the goblin chuckled.

  “Considering a bit of desertion from the Circle, are you boy?”

  Phin had not conceived of it precisely that way, and yet there it was. All the nights and mornings he had spent staring at courtyard walls waiting for the drawbridge to open to a view of the road north, which he now found himself standing beside, already miles from Souterm. Phin did not doubt that had he been left to his own devices he would have continued to do nothing but look north each morning, for the next month or year or decade, wanting to leave but not taking one step. But now the first step had been taken for him.

  “My life in Souterm, and in the Circle, is not quite what I had hoped,” Phin said quietly. The goblin snorted through its wide nostrils.

  “Best grow accustomed to disappointment, Phoarty. It is the stuff of life.”

  “What are we talking about?” the man in ring-mail asked no one in particular.

  “I am talking about leaving the Circle,” Phin said, and he felt his heart rise as he said it out loud. The man blinked at him.

  “That doesn’t sound like something a pack of magi lets you do.”

  “It happens,” Phin said truthfully. “Particularly among young Wizards of my station. The Circle does not even bother to look for them very hard for retaining a Wizard who does not want to be there is not worth the effort. But…” Phin looked around to include everyone. “Just so you all know. It is easier for them to find a corpse than a live Wizard who does not want to be found. If I disappear, I am only a deserter who has run off. But if I am a member in good standing who turns up murdered, the Circle’s wrath will be great.”

  “So we’ve been told,” the axe-man glanced at Edgewise. The goblin spoke to Phin.

  “If you want to leave, no one here is going to stop you.”

  “I have no money,” Phin said. In fact
all he had in the world was presently the clothes on his back, a traveling spell book in an inner pocket of his robes, and a tin coffee cup tied to his belt. “I will need coin to get to Galdeez and from thence to the Sable City, and in truth company on the road seems advisable. But I do not care to join whatever enterprise it is that you are all about. Once I reach the camps outside Vod’Adia I will be able to sell my services to a party of adventurers, for I am after-all a trained Circle Wizard.”

  The goblin continued to regard Phin with its bronze eyes narrowed and its smile that was close to a leer. It was obvious Phin had thoroughly misjudged the little creature at their first meeting and he wondered what Edgewise had thought of him in return. Phin decided it had quite probably not been very much.

  “Wait where you are,” Edgewise said, then tugged at the sleeve of the hooded woman standing next to him. The two moved off a slight distance and spoke together. After a last hard look at Phin the warrior in the exotic armor sheathed his sword and walked over to the conference, his female companion going with him. Phin was left alone with the man in ring-mail who was still watching him curiously.

  “Might I ask you something, Mr. Wizard?”

  Phin looked at him steadily. “My name is Phinneas Phoarty. What is yours?”

  The man’s smile curled at one side. “If you’ll forgive me, sir, I believe I will wait to see how this all shakes out. Before we become friendly.”

  Phin leaned against the cart and tried to look more relaxed than he felt. “It will ‘shake out’ just as I have said. The goblin knows this is the safest way to proceed if he wishes to continue living in Souterm unmolested by my Circle.”

  “Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Your Circle. I don’t know much about such things, but as I understand it there are years of training and what-not before a mage, or Wizard if that’s your preferred term, can enter into some magical Order.”

  “That is true,” Phin said, wondering again where this man was from. His rough armor looked Zantish but he was just tan rather than actually swarthy, and ‘mage’ was not a common term in the Codian Empire.

  “Then why do you want to leave your Circle now, after however many years in training?”

  Phin looked south down the Imperial Post Road, back towards the great city looming to the south above which shafts of sun were cutting through the clouds. He could not distinguish the pinnacle of one particular tower on Again Island, but he knew it was there. He sighed.

  “Because getting smashed in the head and kidnapped is the most interesting thing that has happened to me in the last ten years.”

  The goblin and the shrouded woman spoke at length. Phin only caught a few words and understood none of them, but several times the woman shook a finger in the goblin’s face. Finally Edgewise marched over with a deep scowl.

  “They will take you as far as the Camp Town outside of Vod’Adia,” he said. “Feed you on the road, pay the Shugak for your passage there, but that is all. Once in Camp Town you are on your own.”

  “I will handle that when the time comes,” Phin said loftily, though he had no idea what he would do out in the middle of a hobgoblin, bullywug, and adventurer-infested wilderness.

  “First things first, you must lose those robes. You there, axe-boy. See if you have anything less conspicuous that will fit Mr. Phoarty. A cloak or a coat or something.”

  The man nodded at the goblin but before turning to the luggage in the cart he yanked off his right gauntlet and extended the hand at Phin.

  “Zebulon Baj Nif, at your service. Looks like we’ll be hoofing together the next few weeks. Welcome aboard.”

  Phin accepted the offered hand and Zebulon pumped it warmly, though there was still a sort of laughing look in his blue eyes. Behind him the Far Western swordsman was shaking his helmeted head and looking on with an expression of cold disgust that required no translation.

  Chapter Seventeen