The Sable City tnc-1

by M. Edward McNally

  “Are you all right?” Kuanu peeped in a voice far too small for his frame.

  By way of answer, Tilda moved her tongue around her teeth, and spit black silt onto the floor at her feet.

  Kuanu looked at the silt, then back at Tilda, then around at his classmates. None of the others met his eyes for very long. They now stood farther away from Kuanu than was Tilda, for the young Guilders-in-training had been drifting away steadily since she appeared, with nary a squeak from the floor.

  The big Islander nodded once, twice, then straightened to his full lofty height. He gave Tilda a short bow. Kuanu turned, took two long strides into a dead run, and launched himself out through the open door with a great whoop, arcing majestically out over the pier and falling feet first into the water below.

  *

  Block played it all over in his mind as he sat in the Guild’s file room, three floors below that from which Tilda Lanai and Kuanu had taken their long plunges more than a year ago, one by accident and one by choice. Kuanu had been fine as well, bobbing to the surface of the Cove and shrieking to all Nine Gods that it stank down there. As Block understood it, all had soon been forgiven between the two apprentices.

  But what Kuanu had seen before he made his choice, the old dwarf watching from the side had seen as well as both stared into the dark eyes of one Tilda Lanai. Kuanu had risked his life by leaping, but staying would have been no different. At that moment, in those eyes, the Full Blooded Islander and the Corner Stone of House Deskata had both seen that if the big man stood his ground, at least one of the apprentice Guilders would have left that room dead. Only which one was the question, and Kuanu had decided that he did not want to learn the answer.

  His was not one of the final four names Block had considered.

  The dwarf had spent two hundred years getting to know the people of Miilark, and they were not a field of study to become ploughed out, to dry up and blow away on the Wind of which they always spoke. Block supposed, by now, that as he had lived in the Islands longer than any man or woman alive, he was himself as Miilarkian as anyone despite having lived several human lifetimes before ever coming to the Islands. Block wore no beard as dwarves did in all other places, for neither did the Miilarkians. Full Bloods grew no facial hair, and the Ship People had taken to shaving theirs off generations ago. Like all Islanders, men and women both, Block wore his hair long to the waist and when going abroad he tied it all back in an intricate braid. Tradition said this was done so that if a Miilarkian drowned, their body could be dragged back from the sea. The touch of the braid would tell them apart from a stranger.

  Two hundred years seemed forever to a human, but to a dwarf it was not near so long as that. Yet that was the span of time in which the people of an obscure cluster of scattershot islands in the midst of an ocean many called Interminable had moved beyond a primitive tribal life of feuds and superstition to become the primary carriers of the seaborne trade linking four distant continents. It may have been the most remarkable thing in human history, and while the Corner Stone had seen it all from the beginning, it would have taken him another two centuries to even start to explain just how it had happened.

  Around the four shores of the Ocean, one of which Block had been born on and to where he would shortly be returning, the denizens had as little idea. They knew the Miilarkians as a warm and hospitable people, fair traders, and of course they had those wonderful ships. But anyone could build ships. The Islanders were, it was believed by those from elsewhere, just the right people at the right time. If the merchant game came down to the three iron-clad rules of location, location, location, then it was as simple as blind luck that the Miilark Islands lay between four continents. At various times of the year the changes of wind and current shifted the shipping channels, those rivers of the sea, in a manner conducive to traveling in turn to all four distant points, with the Islands as a convenient center. It was as simple, most thought, as that. The Miilarkians were middlemen for all others. That was their gift, and after two hundred years that seemed to be the way it had always been, and the end of it. For the lives of Men are short.

  Dwarves live longer, if they are able, and Block had proven able so far. He had been there for all of it, even the early days, and the aches of his evenings and the scars on his body did not let him forget how hard it had all been. He knew that the friendly Miilarkian trader to be found today in any port city worth the name was the end of a long story, not the whole of it. Not even half, to tell the truth.

  To an extent, the foreigners were right. Miilarkians as a people were warm, and friendly, and yes, fair in their dealings. But fairness, as any Miilarkian will tell you, cuts both ways. Of course it means that right is returned. Honor and justice, fairness demands it. But equally, it means that a wrong left unanswered is not just disagreeable, or unfortunate. It is immoral. For a Miilarkian, a true Miilarkian, to be fair is to be willing to be ruthless. A balance has no scruples. It is true, or it is worthless.

  Captain Block knew that the House he had served for two centuries was in mortal jeopardy, and he knew that the dictates of inflexible honor had played their part in bringing the Deskatas to this place. The brink was before them, like a yawning doorway four stories above nothing but solid ground. House Deskata was the part of the Miilarkian story of which Block had become a part, and if their story ended now he supposed his did as well. A cornerstone with nothing built on it is just a rock in a field.

  “I do grow melancholic, in my dotage,” Block muttered to the empty room. The oil in the lamp was almost spent, a small flame only left to flicker.

  Block had no choice but to set out on Rhianne Deskata’s sad errand, for a man had to jump at the chance he could live with, no matter the risk or the odds. And now he had made the one choice that he did have. Matilda Lanai, she of the sickening fall and the miraculous, silt-spitting, quaking resurrection. It might be a sign at that. The Island girl wasn’t stupid. She knew how to work. And she had it inside her to be ruthless. Block had seen it plain as day.

  Perhaps it was the jeweler’s eye of the hoary race of dwarves, or perhaps it was as simple as one true Miilarkian knowing another. The touch of the braid, that told friend from stranger, at the last.

  Chapter Two

  Eighth Month is the middle of autumn, and it often brings storms to Miilark as the prevailing Winds blow from the north and northwest. The days are clouded and they reflect a somber time, for as the Islands mark the year according to the Norothian Calendar the month is beholden to the Eighth of the Nine Gods of the Norothian Ennead. Grim Ayon, the Destroyer, is also called the Storm King and the Oath-Breaker among other things, and He is no one’s particular favorite in the Islands.

  But Matilda Lanai was not in Miilark. She was standing not by a sea of saltwater, but in the midst of one made of elbow-high grass. And despite wearing riding boots, woolen knee pants under wide cloth trousers, neck shirt, sweater, vest, jerkin, and a night-black half cloak with a hood, she was for the first time in her life, cold. Not extra-blanket-for-the-bed cold, not one-more-cup-of-tea cold, just cold. Tilda was learning that here, far beyond either the sight or smell of the ocean, autumn was a different animal.

  It was not, however, the animal foremost in her mind at the moment.

  While from horizon to horizon the steppe seemed one vast sea of dirty blonde grass with only sparse copses of scraggly trees doing for islands, it was in fact crisscrossed by ancient hoof-worn paths, numberless and impossible to map in their multitude and complexity. You had to be standing on one and looking straight down it to even know it was there. Tilda presently was, and so was the horse. They were looking at each other.

  The horse was not of a kind with the rangy calicoes typical to the Codian province of Orstaf, with their prancing hooves, tossing manes, and a sprightly gait that Tilda’s hindquarters had become sorely familiar with over the last three weeks. Rather, the animal standing athwart the path a stone’s throw in front of her was a towering white charger. The horse looked as
though it should have a knight on its back in full armor, despite being at this moment unsaddled and wearing no tack nor harness apart from a single strap of some kind back by its haunches. It stood as still as a boulder, facing Tilda at a quarter turn so that only one baleful eye watched her slow, careful approach. She hoped its focus was on the one spot of bright color in the otherwise cloud-gray and faded-blonde landscape: The bright red apple she held forward in one gloved hand.

  “ Bol aloha, ma ut po’tsa gros,” Tilda said in her sweetest voice. She saw the horse’s ears twitch and had the ridiculous thought that the animal probably did not speak the Trade Tongue. She switched to Codian, which had been her main language of study back in school, and her primary mode of communication for the last two months on Noroth.

  “Hello there, you big handsome fellow. My, but you’re a pretty critter, aren’t you? How the lady mares must swoon when you prance by, no?”

  Careful footfalls had brought Tilda to within a few yards of the horse, which abruptly chuffed out a hard breath from its nostrils before lowering them closer to the packed-dirt ground. Tilda faltered and stopped creeping.

  “Prance is the wrong word, I’m sure. You no doubt strut, in only the most masculine fashion.”

  Tilda fought the urge to flash a smile, for she knew that if you grinned at monkeys, they took umbrage. She was unsure if the same was true of horses, but was not about to walk all the way back to ask the Captain. She settled on a tight-lipped grin and tried not to blink so much, which of course made her blink more.

  “Now, all I want is to give you this juicy apple here, so there is no need for one of us to take a bite out of the other, honim da?”

  Thinking that leather gloves had not been the way to go, as she edged nearer Tilda slowly brought her hands together and with small movements of unconscious nimbleness pulled both gloves off, one finger at a time, without dropping the apple. She stuck the gloves in her belt and held the apple further forward, all while still babbling like a brook running with honey.

  “You see the short fellow, yonder? A bit wider than the pony he is on? That is my boss, you see. Sort of the head of my herd. He is a very important man, he was on the boat, you know. And anyway I would rather not look like a complete idiot in front of him if it can be helped. So if you could forgo kicking my head off my shoulders, or trampling me into the turf, I would consider it both a favor and a service.”

  The horse raised its head, and its nostrils twitched.

  “That’s right, everybody loves an apple. Back home they are yellow but these are good, too. A little tart for me, but I am not complaining. Truly.”

  Tilda was close enough to be struck by just how big the horse really was. She would need a step ladder or a running start to get on its back, not that she had any intention of doing so. The beast raised its massive head and looked directly at her, though with only one eye as it still held the right side of its body away at a quarter turn. Tilda took a breath and stretched forward, smiling her closed-mouth smile that was more of a wince, and putting the apple right under the horse’s nose.

  “Also, I am going to need all of those fingers back.”

  The horse craned its neck forward a last bit, and plucked the apple out of Tilda’s hand with the merest flick of a raspy tongue. She exhaled.

  “Thank you, Nine Gods. And the Wind and the Sea and the Stars besides.”

  The horse crunched the apple, and Tilda risked raising her empty hand to scratch its forelock with her close-cut nails. She leaned to her left, and at last looked down the horse’s right flank which it had thus far held away from her. Her wince became sharper, and her dark brown eyes softened.

  “And here I thought I was having a rough trip.”

  The single strap back at the haunches was holding a makeshift compress of sorts in place, obviously against a long wound. There were also two holes high on the horse’s ribs, plugged with large wads of blood-soaked cloth. The horse looked to have been washed somewhere before it was bandaged, for there was only a little caked blood trickled into the white hair below each wound.

  The apple swallowed, the horse leaned its head heavily against Tilda‘s side. It gave a snort, and she scratched it between the ears.

  Tilda turned her head to look back at the main trail she and the Captain had been following, from where they had seen the horse out on a branching path. To Tilda’s surprise the mare and pony were now alone, heads bowed as Block had dismounted and probably wrapped their reins around a dagger he’d jammed into the ground. Given the dwarf’s height and that of the tall grass all around, Tilda had no idea where he had gone after that.

  “Captain?” she called, once quietly then again louder, for the horse beside her no longer seemed uneasy. Only exhausted.

  “Off your starboard prow,” the gravelly voice of the old dwarf came from the grass ahead and to the right. He had gotten completely around Tilda without her ever noticing, but she had been focused rather intently on willing the big charger not to kill her. She had also totally forgotten how cold she was, but now she wanted to put her gloves back on.

  Captain Block appeared on the side path back behind the horse, dressed identically to Tilda in warm, bulky garments and a far shorter half cloak that likewise fell to a triangular point in the front and back, with the unused sleeves hanging for now on the inside. His long salt-and-pepper braid emerged from a hole poked in the back of a knit watch cap, while Tilda’s jet black braid was coiled in the deep hood of her cloak.

  “There is a pool a bow-shot back by that single tree,” Block pointed. “The shoddy horse doctoring was done there. Come hence.”

  With that, the dwarf was back into the grass with only the top of his black cap visible, moving off like a distant orca whale on the sea.

  Tilda patted the horse again and edged around its unwounded side, though she did stop to look over its back more closely at the bandaging on its right haunch. She then hurried after the Captain, slipping her gloves back on along the way. The horse turned to watch her go.

  She followed the Captain’s course through the grass to the indicated tree, a tall lone pine inexplicable enough to have been planted here long ago as some sort of marker. Probably marking the watering hole, Tilda surmised, for the low boughs did indeed spread above a shallow pool of clear water in a little damp clearing that stretched only a few paces from side to side.

  Block had stopped at the edge of the clearing and he raised a hand for Tilda to do likewise. Both looked around at the ground, Tilda over the dwarf’s broad shoulder. At the pool’s edge were scattered bloodied rags, and nearby was a pile of equipment with a great saddle of rich brown leather most notable.

  “Check the packs,” Block said. “Don’t trod the tracks.” He probably had not intended for that to rhyme, for in three months of traveling together Tilda had not once noted any poetical bent to the stooped old dwarf. He moved off to walk the perimeter of the clearing while Tilda made her way over to the equipment pile, mindful of both hoof and foot prints plainly visible on the damp ground.

  Tilda had been combing through an awful lot of cast-off debris for the last three days. That was the length of time during which she and the Captain had been on this particular leg of their journey, moving due south from the manor village of a minor Codian noble called the Baron Nyham. The baron was not presently in residence there, as two days before the Miilarkians arrived he had gone south at the head of an armed band of some seven-hundred men. All were bound for the town of the Duke above Nyham with whom, as the local expression went, the baron had serious beef. Something about money, or a perceived insult, or somebody’s sister. The tavern talk had been unclear.

  Whatever the cause, the motley assortment of men Nyham had gathered to redress his grievance upon his rightful lord had proven on the march to be an ill-disciplined set. Their route had been easy for the Miilarkians to follow, as while it kept to a typically thin path in the Orstavian grass their passage had trod it into a wider way littered with refuse that someone had thoug
ht would be a good idea to bring along when the march began, only to drop miles and even days later. There had been cookware, bedrolls, blankets, spare shoes, extra packs and clothes, and every time Captain Block had spied any of this garbage alongside the trail he had ordered Tilda off her mare to look it over. Block would canter on ahead with both horses, leaving Tilda to jog until she caught up. Every time. This exercise served no purpose that Tilda could divine other than to keep the Captain mildly amused, which was why she had not reported the discovery of one silver coin, a Codian Swan, in the bottom of a pack. The coin was in her pocket and Tilda periodically held it in a closed hand when the Captain was trying her. She liked the weight of it in her fist.

  Tilda took a bit more time to inventory the saddle and other left-behinds in the clearing, including the torn half of a very prettily-embroidered horse blanket with a pattern of sparrows in flight along the border. She had finished and was looking at the ground by the time Block made one circuit of the clearing and asked her a question. His earlier words had all been in Codian, but this was in Trade: Shto zinat? What do you know?

  “The fresh prints are the charger and one person, a man by the size. They are atop a great mess of tracks from a day or two ago. The reins and rigging are all here, stripped and dropped, and the saddle is for fighting, not riding.”