The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle)

by M. Edward; mimulux McNally

  The Sable City

  Book I of the Norothian Cycle

  By M. Edward McNally

  - For everyone who still loves to read, starting with my Mom and Dad. Pass it on.

  Note: For maps, glossary, short histories, etc. please visit http://sablecity.wordpress.com/ or http://www.facebook.com/thesablecity

  Cover art by mimulux. See galleries at mimulux darkfolio http://bit.ly/d3WtgD Blog: www.art-by-mimulux.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/the.art.of.mimulux

  Chapter One

  Everyone in the Islands called the old dwarf Captain Block, though that was not his name.

  Even within his own House most assumed that “Block” was a reference to the Captain’s lineage. The Mountain Folk of faraway Noroth were known for their squat statures, broad shoulders, and barrel chests, and Block was typical of his ancestral people in at least that much. It was understandable that many of the slim Islanders believed his name came from the simple fact that compared to themselves, the Captain was virtually a cube.

  Most humans had short memories. Some chose to learn from the past. There were still a few within Deskata House who remembered that Block’s name was not a fond jibe owing to his build, but was instead derived from the proud title he had been given two centuries ago. Before there were true Trade Houses in the Islands of Miilark, the First Father of the Deskatas had given the dwarf the name Kaman Kregebanan: The Corner Stone.

  One who still knew this was Rhianne Khemina Deskata, Law Daughter of the House, who by the Fifth Month of 1395 was the only acknowledged member left of the First Father’s line. Thus it was that when the young woman concocted a plan by which the House might be saved, she brought it to the Corner Stone and asked the old dwarf for his help.

  Rhianne had asked as if she were only making a suggestion, but there was no question that Captain Block would take up the task. He had served the Deskatas since the House was a Hut, as the saying went, and their fortunes had been his own for longer than any human lifetime. Though what Rhianne intended was both desperate and ridiculous, Block would not deny a Deskata. No matter if she were of the Blood, or of the Law.

  The only choice the Captain had to make was who he would take with him.

  The experienced agents which the House still had in the Miilarkian capital would be busy just holding together what was left. None of them could be spared for a jaunt of many months duration to the Norothian mainland for something that was in all likelihood a fool’s errand. Apart from that, if an active Deskata servitor of great profile disappeared, House Lokendah and their other enemies would surely seek to learn where he or she had gone, and what they were about.

  Captain Block was available because he had been semi-retired for decades, overseeing admissions to the Guild affiliated with Deskata House and conducting a bit of the training there himself only when the mood struck him. Dwarves were known the world over for their so-called “Jeweler’s Eyes,” their ability to judge the quality of an ore, metal, or stone at a glance and to see past either shine or grime to the true worth underneath. Block had long since found he possessed something of the same affinity when it came to humans, and even during the Deskatas’ quickening decline they were still producing good Guilders. In the world of Great House rivalry, that counted for much. House Fathers no longer fought honor duels, nor did they conduct resource raids against their neighbors. The great magnates had people for that, and those people were the Guilders.

  Rhianne had suggested that Block select a promising Guild apprentice to accompany him on his task, one person only as the departure of a whole band with the renowned Captain would surely be noticed. There was also the matter of money. Rhianne had none to spare, so Block would be going out-of-pocket for this expedition. This pained the old dwarf greatly, despite his having accrued a sizable fortune of his own over the years. While Block would not stand to be called stingy, he did feel that the fewer followers he would be feeding and lodging on his journey, the better.

  When the idea of taking an apprentice Guilder was raised, Block had immediately thought of one name and one particular incident. He had then put both aside and spent the next day at the Guild on Silt Cove, talking to instructors and watching some of the apprentices. Only late in the night with the Guild quiet around him and the sultry heat of midsummer finally seeping out of the place, did the Captain take an oil lantern to a teak-paneled room in the middle of the complex. He entered a large chamber full of shelved and filed parchments, the whole place smelling like a great humidor.

  Little more than two hundred years ago only the shaman priests of the Islands had known the secrets of scratching squiggly markings on mud tablets. Since then the Miilarkians had taken to the written word as they had to so much else that came brand new to them on an ill-fated ship out of Varanch, with wild abandon and success. The Great Houses could not have become the world’s largest trading entities without generating a lot of paperwork, and the habit had seeped even into the surreptitious Guilds.

  For the three years each apprentice was enrolled, or at least until they washed out, quit, or inadvertently died, each was weighed and measured at monthly intervals across all fields of training. Ranked, reshuffled, recorded, remarked. Numbers were tallied and posted in the mess, so it was an easy matter for all to see where they stood at any given time among their classmates. Thus it was known who among them were the chasers and the chased, the flagging and the faded. Those on the way up, and those on the way out. All monthly rankings were meticulously logged and kept in files, and as he explored the records of the last few years, Block saw that name again. Or perhaps he was already looking for it.

  Lanai, Matilda. About as common a surname in the Islands as were the deep lanai porches fronting most every house in the city. She was a third-year and a bit old to be one. Compulsory education in the Islands lasted until around fifteen, and those with greater aspirations usually took a year after that to either work or to play, depending on their means. Most were around seventeen before they made application to a Guild, or more likely to another more public form of House-sponsored training. Matilda Lanai had not entered the Guild until she was twenty, which made Block vaguely curious.

  Some rummaging brought Block and his glass lantern to a rack of orderly wicker cabinets, wherein were stored the catgut-bound parchment sheets containing notations from Guild entrance interviews. He removed the book covering the year 1392, by the Norothian Calendar, which was also identified by a second number stamped on the leather cover as 204, or the years since the wreck of the Nyystrashima had first brought the outside world to Miilark.

  Block sat in a comfortable chair and hung the lantern from a shelf above his head. He flipped through the parchment sheets, old hands and thick fingers still nimble, until finding that belonging to Lanai. Block winced as he saw the compact, square quill marks in which her name was written at the top of her page. The Captain himself had conducted her interview, though he had no inkling of a memory of having done so.

  He supposed it was understandable, for he had probably sat thirty-odd interviews that one week in ’04, and approved of maybe ten candidates. Block’s scant notes from the day did not do much to jog his memory. After regular schooling, Lanai had worked in her father’s shop for most of five years, a perfumery on Chrysanthemum Quay. The half page of writing did not say as much, but surely the Lanai family shop was associated with the House Deskata sphere of influence. It would have been noteworthy, not to mention suspicious, for someone affiliated however loosely with another House to apply to this Guild. To be without any association at all was not something most Miilarkians comfortably considered.

  That was about the total of Lanai, Matild
a’s recorded biography. Her compulsory school numbers were given as good, and there was a note appended from some clerk that her self-reporting had been verified. The single paragraph on the page concluded with three fragmentary sentences in Block’s own hand, at which their writer now noisily sighed.

  Not stupid. Smells good. I approve.

  “Thorough as ever, old man,” Block growled, then coughed in the still, heavy air.

  The Captain had approved, he had written it down right there. There were other aspects to the admissions process, other quarters heard from, and in the thirty-plus years Captain Block had been engaged at the Guild there had been candidates of whom he had not approved (yet not specifically denied) who had gone on to be admitted. The dwarf could not now recall any of those who had lasted the full three years. But there had not been a single applicant on whose short entrance interview sheet the dwarf had written the two words “I approve,” who had not been allowed into the Guild. The jeweler’s eye of Captain Block was respected. If he saw something, others took notice.

  He just wished he could remember what the devil it had been with Matilda Lanai. Her father’s perfumery or no, she could not have smelled that good.

  Whatever he had seen three years ago, Block reckoned he had seen it or something like it again, high in the summer of the previous year during the incident which had come to mind when taking one and only one apprentice to Noroth was suggested. But Block was not ready to think about that yet. That was just an impression as well, and the orderly mind considered more. He replaced the interview files in their wicker nests and returned to the table in the center of the room. There, after a day spent speaking to the Guild instructors, he had already unrolled the full three-year files of four apprentices. Matilda Lanai was among them, but not on top.

  After a glance around the room he knew full well to be empty, the dwarf grunted and climbed onto a strong chair to hang the lantern with the light shining down on the spread parchments. Block settled to a seat on the chair with a huff, and placed his big, knobby fists on the table. He ran his eyes over columns of numbers, figures showing how four individuals stood on a variety of measures among a class now of thirty-seven, which had started three years ago as sixty-five.

  Matilda Lanai was not tops at anything. Not one solitary thing. Block told himself he was looking at all four candidates equally, but found he was comparing the other three to her. Second in foot stealth and Third in long-arms. Second again in Iaijutsu, which was high considering only a Sixth in centering. Block had been looking for a First, possibly several, and his disappointment at not seeing one right away faded as he looked more closely and realized that Matilda Lanai, across the board, had no number lower than an Eighth, in locks.

  Block’s dark eyes narrowed under his heavy brows. Without really thinking about it, the dwarf pushed the other three files aside on the table and unrolled a more detailed review of Lanai’s monthly rankings over her whole stay at the Guild.

  She had been in the upper quarter in most scores from the very first monthly measures, nearly three years ago now when the class was at its full size. But there, gaping like a hole, was a Fifty-ninth in locks. Rank incompetence, and even worse as women tended to be better picklocks than men. Something about patience and delayed gratification. But as he ran a thumb along just that one row of numbers, Block saw thirty-three months of increasing proficiency. Fast at first, a plateau, then slow-but-steady improvement. The old dwarf knew what that meant. He knew that the rising numbers told of late nights after long and exhausting days, when aching muscles cried for rest but instead got only hours of crouching at keyhole-height up in what the apprentices called the Knob Room. Eyes closed or at least unfocused because all that mattered were ears listening for faint scratches and slides, and nimble fingers trying to feel subtle differences through the unforgiving medium of two short pieces of bent, steel wire.

  She had got herself up to an Eight. With graduation just three months hence Block might have made a wager that Matilda Lanai, even if she still was not of the First rank in anything, stood a chance of being top five in them all. But of course, she was not going to be here to graduate with her class, for with a short nod Block admitted to himself that the eighth-best picklock among the class of ’07 was his girl. He further acknowledged that he had known it already, for more than a day.

  *

  The summer of a year ago had been sweltering in the Islands. Miilark was always hot in Fourth Month as the seasonal trade winds and currents come from the south at that time of year, bringing warmth from the distant equatorial shores of Oswamba. But last year had been particularly bad, bad enough so that dock rats seeking noontime shade had infested the dank basement of the Guild. Someone had the inspired idea to move a third-year class training with bows and handguns down there, though that in turn meant a change of venue for a second-year grappling class. The grapplers were moved up to the top floor of an old warehouse joined to defunct apartment buildings as a single complex, together constituting the Guild on Silt Cove.

  The top floor of the warehouse was open space and while the pinewood floor was solid, it creaked and groaned in a manner seemingly designed to test an apprentice Guilder’s ability to move silently. The space had sliding cargo doors at the dock and street sides, though the heavy winches at both were long gone. With both sets of doors open a salty cross-breeze off the water was sucked through toward the Ghost Mountain looming above the Miilarkian capital, making it by far the coolest place in the complex on a hot summer’s day. Thus it was to there that the second-years had moved after leaving the basement to the rats and the shooters, and it was also the place to which Captain Block had repaired after eating his customary free lunch in the mess.

  The exertions of the apprentices made fair after-supper theatre, for their instructor had paired them off boys-against-girls. That was always a tricky proposition for full-contact wrestling, though in theory they were working mostly on throws. A dozen pairs in cloth leggings and sleeveless tunics lunged, grappled, and chucked each other about the space on thin thrush mats that did not do much to cushion solid impacts. The floor was not the only thing that groaned and squawked.

  Matilda Lanai was among them, though at the time Block knew her vaguely by face but not name. Of about typical height for a young Miilarkian woman, she was however paired against a fellow Block recognized and even knew by name as Kuanu, a full-blooded Islander with a creamed-coffee complexion and a mass of black hair to his waist. While of only moderate size for a water buffalo, Kuanu was an excessively large human. Block had known enough Island men of the type to suspect that later in life the big fellow ran the risk of turning astonishingly fat, but at nineteen years of age he was a chiseled mountain of a man. Stolid in nature, but capable of accidental bursts of breathtaking power.

  That hot day last Fourth Month, Matilda Lanai had found herself on the business end of just such a burst.

  Block’s attention had been elsewhere, but everyone in the room heard Kuanu cry “Tilda!” in sudden alarm. The dwarf turned and saw the big man frozen with one knee on the mat and his arms fully extended, watching wide-eyed as the bare feet of his sparring partner kicked the air. This did nothing to prevent her sailing out head-first through an open cargo door, and dropping out of sight. Four stories up.

  Block was on the other side of the room, and well past his sprinting days. As he crossed to the cargo door the dwarf had time to think at least she went out on the water-side, but then he also had time to wonder just how far the timber cart path extended out around the base of the building to hang pier-like over the water. Pretty far, he reckoned.

  As everyone converged the one apprentice who had been next to the open doorway gaped, then cheered. She alone had seen Tilda clear the wooden edge of the pier forty feet below by the narrowest of margins. One more inch, as the girl laughingly told the crowd later, and Tilda would have lost nose, nipples, and kneecaps.

  In the moment however, the angle kept anyone from seeing Lanai actually go int
o the water another ten or fifteen feet below the pier, and though she had been in a dive there was always a chance that would just bury her in silt with only her feet sticking out. An apprentice had drowned that way not two years before, and he had only gone in off the dock.

  There was a cacophony of questions and answers at the crowded doorway as Block finally arrived and shouldered his way to the front. The pine floor squeaked as a few apprentices turned to run for the stairwells. Then someone shouted “Look!” and pointed, and all eyes turned to see a pair of hands appear on the edge of the timber path. A drowned rat the size of Tilda Lanai hauled herself topside from a quick climb up a pier post.

  Her classmates cheered, but the young woman with the sodden mop of black hair plastered to her face and shoulders did not look up. Nor did she flop gasping onto her back, as Block expected. Instead, she paused on all fours for only a moment. Then she was up, and running, along the warehouse and around the corner toward the nearest door giving back inside. She left a trail of wet footprints slapped across the hard wood her nose had missed by a hairsbreadth.

  The apprentices blinked after her, then looked around at each other. Their eyes finally settled on Kuanu, who had stood up straight but not yet taken a step closer to the doorway out of which he had pitched his classmate.

  “She’s all right?” the big Islander finally stammered at everyone, but one young man with Varanchian-blonde hair answered.

  “You are going to find out in about two minutes.”

  The apprentices edged away from the cargo door, and no one said anything above a murmur to their nearest fellows. The class instructor blotted his forehead with an embroidered silk handkerchief and shrugged helplessly at Block, relieved at least to not be filling out paperwork explaining the splattering of an apprentice down on the cart path. Block, more curious than anything, only watched with one salt-and-pepper eyebrow high on his ruddy forehead.