The Sable City
Page 52
*
As the last night before the Opening of Vod’Adia neared its second watch, the celebrations in the streets and inns became more desperately boisterous. Some men fought in taverns as though they wanted to receive crippling wounds. A brawl cleared out the ground floor of a place called the Dead Possum and kept a former Circle Wizard awake in a bunkroom above.
Phinneas Phoarty gave up on sleep and sat on the edge of his bunk, one of the six in this room, which adjoined another. Both had been paid for by the adventuring party which Phin had been a part of for some forty hours.
From the bunk Phin could see out of a window facing south which was really just an irregular square cut in a log wall daubed with mud, no shutters nor of course glass. When the breeze parted the canvas curtains Phin could dimly see across the valley to the towering wall of unnatural fog filling the southern end. The fog looked faintly orange as it reflected the light of the innumerable fires, lamps, and torches burning in Camp Town, giving it a hellish cast. Phin shivered at the thought that the place would be Open in only a few hours, and the dread in his stomach was only worsened by the fact that he had no idea when he would be going in himself. Though he would be going in.
The party of adventurers which Phin had joined was nearly as strange as that with which he had come to Camp Town. They had hired him in expectation of entering the Sable City and they had paid for his license which was then attached to their own: Nine strings of beads and tiny totems with one blank length of finger bone, all attached by hooks to a short, carved baton. The leader of the band was named Horayachus. He was a tall, swarthy man with a scarred face who had yet to speak a word in Phin’s hearing. Horayachus had the license, and while the man called the “Sarge” had told Phin it was good for entry into Vod’Adia any time after the Opening, there was plainly something else supposed to happen first, something for which everyone was waiting.
Phin had not been told what that was, nor much of anything really. He had spent his first days in Camp Town after Nesha-tari’s departure allowed him to think clearly loitering in inns that were operating as hiring halls, where adventurers not yet attached to a full party sized each other up and talked things through. Phin had billed himself as a freelance mage and obliquely implied he had Imperial training, but as the majority of parties in Camp Town were already arranged, his pickings were slim. Most of the groups Phin talked to seemed hopelessly inept and displayed only a tenuous appreciation for the dangers of the Sable City. The people who did seem to know what they were doing gave Phin but short shrift, and after two days he was starting to realize that being choosy was not a real option for him.
That was when the five legionnaires had approached him. Someone had told them Phin might be a Circle Wizard and at first he had thought they were going to arrest him, clap him in irons and ship him back to Souterm. That might not have been the worst fate possible. But the legionnaires had only wanted to know if Phin could read the incantation script of Tull, and in order for him to prove it their sergeant produced a large tome bound in dark leather that smelled faintly of smoke, with a broken metal latch. The Sarge flipped it open and Phin saw that it was a sort of work with which he was familiar: A commentary in Old Tullish on an even older document, with yellowed parchment sheets bound among the more recent pages. Phin did not recognize the language on the old sheets though they were scribbled in the Kantan alphabet, but he read aloud a few lines of the old Tullish. Something about a “second nodal space” and “transcendental migration.”
The Sarge flipped shut the heavy book, and Phin was hired. Phin accepted the offer as while he was sure this bunch of Legion men were deserters of some kind, he supposed that description now applied to him as well.
He met the rest of the party at the Dead Possum, though as there were five of them already Phin was not exactly sure who was going into Vod’Adia and who was not. As Phin understood it parties of ten were the maximum allowed by the Shugak. The five people at the inn were a daunting bunch, led by the taciturn Horayachus along with three likewise dark men and one woman, all equipped with full suits of black plate mail bordered in fiery red, and huge two-handed swords. None of them said much of anything to Phin, nor to the five legionnaires for that matter, and among themselves they spoke only Zantish. Phin recognized the language from having heard it between Nesha-tari and Zebulon, but he did not understand a word.
Horayachus and his minions stayed sequestered in the adjoining bunkroom most days, only emerging to fetch food. The legionnaires were out more often with only one or two of them keeping to the inn. Phin knew his fellow Codians by name by now, though not very much about them. Most were Beoan or Tullish, except for the Sarge who was from Gweiyer, and according to the marks on their tower shields all had come from the 34th Foot.
The Sarge and Rickard were still in their bunks as the noise from downstairs started to build again in the Dead Possum’s bar. Both grumbled and swore as they turned over. Phin gazed past them out the window, wiping damp palms on his blanket and trying to calculate just how in the hells he had wound up here. He wondered vaguely how Zeb, Amatesu, and the others were doing.
Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs from below and there was a now familiar jingle of legionnaire armor in the hall. Rickard and the Sarge were sitting on the edges of their bunks by the time their fellow man Ty pushed open the door and stuck his plume-helmeted head into the room.
“Sarge, you’ll never guess who just walked in downstairs.”
In the light from the hall the Sarge’s bearded face split into a grin. His beard was not Legionnaire regulation and neither was the enormous emerald ring he always wore, the gemstone matching his distinctive green eyes. He was a convivial sort of fellow but there was something ugly and dangerous about his smile at this moment.
He hammered on the adjoining wall with a fist, then he and Rickard rose and hurried into their own clothes and armor. The door between the bunkrooms opened and one of Horayachus’s grim minions filled the doorway.
“Tell your boss his girl is here,” the Sarge said, hopping as he pulled on a boot.
The minion had no eyebrows as his entire head was shaved clean. The skin where eyebrows would have been lifted, and he shut the door.
The Sarge and Rickard were strapping on breast plates. Ty stood in the doorway fingering the pommel of the heavy short sword on his hip and glancing back toward the stairs.
“What is going on?” Phin finally decided to ask.
“Nothing you need be concerned about, Wizard.” The Sarge belted his own sword around his waist. “Though it looks as if we may be getting into Vod’Adia on time after all.”
Ty chuckled and clashed a gauntleted hand against his tower shield. Soft chanting began in the next bunkroom, and red light played across the floorboards from the crack under the door.