The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

  *

  It took half an hour but Tilda and the Duchess eventually settled on forty-four gold pieces, which just about put Tilda up for the day even after her payment to Dugan. She took half in advance and as the old knight Sir Towsan produced Miilarkian notes from a bank in Bouree to give payment, Tilda was able to change much of her coinage for more easily managed paper. Pagette and the nobles left the inn from a back door at the end of the hall while Tilda and Dugan returned to the common room where a few customers still lingered.

  “What in the world was all that about?” Dugan asked. “I caught no words apart from duke this and duchess that. Jobe, and Vod’Adia.”

  Tilda stopped walking. For a moment she had plain forgotten that she and Dugan were not actually traveling together anymore. She bit her lip, stopped biting it, and turned around to face him.

  “That girl and the old knight want a traveling companion as far as Camp Town, and to a Jobian temple there. They just hired me.”

  Dugan looked unconvinced. “Just you, eh? Could have sworn a thumb was jerked at me a time or two.”

  “The Duchess asked what the smell in the room was.”

  Dugan cracked a smile, something he had not done much since the far side of the Girdings, before the knight Procost, and Block. His beard had come in now which was a look Tilda had never found particularly attractive growing up in Miilark where all the local men were clean-shaven. Dugan’s did not look so bad however, and he was still handsome when he smiled. Not that one glass of bitter mead and two of wine was enough to allow his looks to influence Tilda. Not quite.

  “So when you show up alone to meet them,” Dugan said. “They are not going to wonder where I am?”

  Tilda did not answer, so Dugan went on.

  “The two of us have worked well enough together, Tilda. We have gotten this far.”

  “We did not all get this far.”

  Dugan’s mouth lost its trace of mirth. “Believe it or not, I am sorry for that. Truly. But I mean you and me, Tilda. All the way through Daul, and we just handled that meeting well enough.”

  “I thought you and Sir Towsan were going to stare each other dead. You really don’t like knights very much, do you?”

  Dugan glanced at the floor, no doubt thinking for a moment of Sir Procost of the Roaring Boar Order, as was Tilda.

  “I do not much care for nobles,” Dugan admitted. “Call it a hazard of being a foot soldier.”

  Tilda’s eyes were narrow. “Do you still mean to catch John Deskata and the others in Camp Town? Even though your money is not an issue?”

  Instead of answering Dugan rolled back the right sleeve of his rough Orstavian tunic, where he still had a plain bit of cord looped around his wrist like a bracelet. He had now run the cord through an air hole of a short flute identical to the one Tilda had been given as a receipt for her passage with the Shugak. He shook it briskly, and from inside the hollow stick he produced a string of beads on a wire hook, multi-colored and of different substances, with tiny runes inscribed.

  “This is what a license to enter Vod’Adia looks like, in case you were wondering,” Dugan said. “I could not go in alone with just this, but if I join with a party of adventurers it gets fastened to some other Shugak stick. That is what the man in the tree-tower says, anyway.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  “Fifty-three. I know, you would have done better. This one is only valid starting eight days after Vod’Adia Opens, though I am told I can pay for an ‘upgrade’ in Camp Town to use it sooner. I reckon they tie an extra bead on to it if I join a party entering the city before that.”

  Dugan looked at Tilda evenly in the eyes.

  “What I am telling you, Tilda, is that I have other plans. I am going into Vod‘Adia. I don’t give a good damn about John and the others either way. Not anymore. They stole from me, but you have now made that good.” Dugan shrugged. “As it turns out, I’ve blown the whole stack already, so it really matters little at this point.”

  “So you do not mean to even look for them?” Tilda pressed. Dugan sighed.

  “Not for myself. But if you want support when you go looking…you can have it.”

  Tilda’s eyes were down to slits.

  “Why?”

  “Because I feel like I owe you something. I feel like I owe Block something.”

  Tilda studied Dugan’s face just as she did when she was haggling with someone, looking for any tic or tell to let her know if she was north or south of what would be the final price. She believed Dugan but she was self-aware enough to know that she wanted to believe him.

  “We meet the others at first light,” she said. “On the Shugak dock.”

  Dugan nodded. “And once we get to Camp Town?”

  Tilda let out a breath through her nose. “What is the expression in Tull? We will burn that bridge when we come to it?”

  Dugan smiled. “That, is not that expression.”

  Tilda looked at the short flute still in Dugan’s hand, just like the one she had bought as proof of payment for passage on a Shugak raft.

  “We should not need these now, should we?” she said.

  “I don’t suppose we will.”

  “May I?”

  Tilda held out a hand, and with a shrug Dugan unthreaded the carved whistle and dropped it into her palm. She dug her own out of a cloak pocket, looked around at the inn patrons at tables and the bar, and held both aloft.

  “Has anyone not yet purchased a raft pass from the Shugak?” Tilda called, trying the room first in the Trade Tongue. Several people looked over, and Dugan chuckled.

  “You are a credit to the Islands.”

  “Leave no coin behind,” said Tilda. She slapped a smile on her face and bounded into a smooth stride for the table of the Oswamban twins, who had looked up at the first sound of the Trade Tongue.