Doon and Daul were to receive a piece of the profits in exchange for cooperation, and for not invading. Negotiations resulted in both countries also receiving a certain number of low-tax Royal Licenses to issue themselves, both for adventuring and for trade.
Outside of the Wilds most thought the Shugak’s plan was ridiculous and unworkable. The types of formidable men and women who might be inclined to try their fates within the Sable City were hardly of the kind to queue-up to do so, and to fork over money for the privilege. Apart from that, who were the Shugak to levy terms on human kingdoms? Yet when the offices in Galdeez and Chengdea were opened one year before the Opening, business was brisk from the start. Among those first securing licenses for themselves were Doonish and Daulish nobles, whose honor seemed not to have been offended. Over the course of the next year they were joined by many more people from up and down the Channel, then from the length and breadth of Noroth and Kandala, then from across the seas and oceans. There were Ayzant Dragon Cultists and Martan bowmen, Agintan duelists and Illygard infantry. Dwarves with war-hammers and Halflings with innocent grins and multiple pistols. Oswamban mystics, Karkan wizards. Ashinese samurai and monks from Cho Lung. Some came as ten-person bands who had adventured together for years, others arrived alone and bought only passage to Camp Town where they would band together with others like, or utterly unlike, themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, the great merchant Houses of Miilark did not snap up every merchant license. Though they did make a good try of it.
When the first sun of First Day, Tenth Month, 1296, shone on the valley of Vod’Adia, there was an entirely different sort of army assembled on the north end of the valley floor in the rickety buildings and muddy streets of Camp Town. Many of the high Shugak counselors were absent, for it had occurred to some that if the veil for some reason did not become permeable as was expected, there was going to be trouble.
But the fog did thin, the gates did Open, and for the next month entrances went off like intricate, gnome-fashioned clockwork. Once again fortunes were made and lives were lost, and as always, the fabulous success of the few outweighed the fate of the many who failed. Vod’Adia Closed on its mystical schedule, and Camp Town and the ancient valley in the wilderness emptied out for another century.
Until 1395 of the Norothian Calendar. This year.
*
Tilda stared at Dugan in the starlight. “Vod’Adia?” she repeated, and Dugan’s silhouette nodded once.
“Vod’Adia?” she said again. Her brain was stuck on the idea.
“I take it you’ve heard of the place?”
Tilda waved an arm north.
“It is all anyone is talking about in every tavern from here to the Cold Seas! Of course I know the stories…that was the brilliant plan? The reason Deskata and his men deserted the Legion? To go get killed in Blackstone?”
“There is a bit more to it than that,” Dugan said, taking a step forward and holding out a hand with a small bundle wrapped in a cloth napkin. “Here. This is the last of the food. Few bites of salt pork and cheese, no more.”
“I am not hungry,” Tilda said.
“You should eat something.”
Tilda did so, almost mechanically, still gaping at Dugan between the few bites of dry food. She could hardly keep the fact that she had just said goodbye to Captain Block of Miilark for the last time in her head, as it was bouncing around with dozens of questions.
“Don’t you have to buy a license to go into that place? An obscenely expensive license?”
Dugan snorted. “You remember I told you John and the boys stole some gems and jewelry off me?”
Tilda started. “How much were they worth?”
“Enough,” Dugan said. “I don’t have any family, and a legionnaire lives without a lot of expenses. The stuff they took amounts to all I have earned or acquired in my whole life.”
“You must have done pretty well.”
“I managed.”
Tilda slowly shook her head. Dugan was still here, and she doubted it was out of any concern for her personally. She had thought he was going to kill her just a few hours back, stab her where she lay before the locked door back into the Underway. Tilda had actually been more stunned by the fact that Dugan had run off without killing her than she had been by getting bashed off a wall, yet again. Dugan could not have gotten out of Orstaf through Trellane’s secret passages without Captain Block dealing with the Baron, but Block was gone. Irreparably. And it did not matter in Daul that Dugan was a renegade Codian legionnaire, here he could go where he would. Yet he had waited hours for Tilda to climb down the chasm, and back up again.
Tilda tightened her hands on Block’s kitbag, thinking of the money within.
“You think you will have to buy entrance into Vod’Adia yourself. To catch Deskata there.”
“That would be pointless,” he said. “If he and the boys get to Chengdea and buy a license, my money is gone. I don’t know what route they will take to that place, but that is where they have to go. I have to be there before they arrive. Cutting under the mountains should have saved me enough days to do so, if I travel fast from here on out.”
“Then why are you still standing here?”
“Because there are still five of them as far as I know, and they are not going to want to see me.” Dugan’s head bowed as he lowered his eyes to the ground. “Three against five was better odds, but two is a minimum. Especially if one of those is a Miilarkian Guilder.”
That raised the issue of which Tilda had been aware since realizing that Dugan believed the Guilders had come to kill John Deskata. If Block had decided how to deal with that problem when it inevitably came to a head, the Captain had never said a word to her. Dugan had been miscounting his odds from the start, and now Tilda was going to have to deal with it alone.
“Now,” Dugan said. “This all presupposes that you still mean to go after Deskata yourself. Without…him, to order you around.”
Tilda’s nostrils flared and her head jerked slightly.
“Do you think I would stop now, with the Captain lying dead in a hole? That I would dishonor him like that? He chose me to be here, and here I am, still.”
Dugan shrugged. “How the hell do I know how you people operate?”
Tilda glared. “I am going on.”
“Good. More the merrier.”
Dugan retrieved two packs from the trees. Tilda could tell by how they hung from his arms that he had re-packed as much of their increasingly scant equipment as had made it out of the palisade. He dropped the lighter one beside the leaning gun, club, daggers, and cloak which remained where Tilda had left them before her climb. He shouldered the heavier pack to his back.
“We should walk and not stop before daybreak. The bugbears might come back here with the dawn.”
Tilda replaced her weapons and pulled her cloak back on, put her buksu in its back sheath and the long gun over a shoulder. Dugan began to lead the way but she stopped him.
“There is one last thing.”
Dugan looked over his shoulder in the dark.
“You slammed me into a rock wall.”
Dugan turned around. “Yes, but you stole my sword first.”
“Back in Trellane’s lands, you bashed my head off a cottage.”
Dugan sighed. “And I apologized for that.”
Tilda kept staring at Dugan in the dark until he shifted his bulky backpack.
“What?” he finally asked irritably. “You want another apology? Fine. I deeply regret all injury, bodily or emotional, that may have resulted from…”
“You did not tell Captain Block about Vod’Adia,” Tilda interrupted. “You know that if he didn’t think he needed you anymore, he may just as soon have cut your throat. Or told me to do it.”
Dugan was quiet, and Tilda took a step closer to him so that even in the faint light they could almost see each other’s eyes.
“I can use your help,” Tilda said. “But I do not need it. If you ever la
y hands on me again, I will kill you.”
Dugan remained silent for a few moments before speaking.
“Do you feel better now?”
“No, I don’t.”
Tilda moved her tired legs south, leading the way into the darkness under the trees.
Chapter Fourteen
It took the slow Channel barge three more days to pass the treacherous shoals and bars off the swampy coast of the Vod Wilds before the sails were trimmed and the craft angled back toward land to enter the busy delta of the Red River. Two more days of hard work at the oars for the crew brought the vessel laboriously up the Red, until the famous riverine harbor of what was now the Codian city of Souterm came into view.
Zeb spent most of those days on the deck, staying close to the galley for he was still hungry at all hours. He cobbled together enough of the pidgin tongue known as Channelspeak to strike up a friendly banter with the ship’s cook, and the old Thuban fellow was a good enough sort to toss Zeb a wayward biscuit or briny pickle now and again.
The Far Westerners were generally topside as well. Amatesu stayed close to Zeb, plainly keeping an eye on him, but the woman’s quiet presence bothered him not at all. Zeb had always liked to talk and the shukenja had an interest in improving her spoken Codian. While she told Zeb very little about her native Ashinan, she provided an audience as he prattled on about Wakminau, the Riven Kingdoms, the Norothian Channel, or whatever else came to his mind.
The swordsman Uriako Shikashe was around but he tended to keep himself aloof from Zeb as much as he did the ship’s crew, preferring to spend his time alone and gazing out grimly from the gunwales. The man always wore his ornate, skirted breastplate and both of his swords as though concerned a marlin might leap onto the deck at any moment and have at him. As for the Madame Nesha-tari Hrilamae, she remained as mysterious as ever. There had been no sequel to the odd feeling that had raised Zeb’s hackles the first time he stepped out of his cabin, and he still had yet to see the woman Amatesu called his new employer. The shukenja took a bit of poor-quality vegetables down her way at meal times, inspiring Zeb to formulate a theory that his unseen employer was actually a bunny rabbit.
The slow passage to the port gave Zeb long hours to watch the riverbanks roll by, though the sight was not encouraging. The left bank of the Red was in theory Codian Doon while the right was the Vod Wilds, but there was no “west” or “east” bank for near the coast the river twisted through a tangled morass of bayou, mangrove, and saw-grass buzzing with toads and bugs Zeb could hear even from the deck. The geography was part of the reason pirates had successfully held the city now called Souterm for so long back when the place was known as Murdertown, despite having all the naval powers of the Channel against them.
In short, it was not going to be a good place to dive overboard and swim for freedom.
Zeb still meant to bolt, and he knew how to run. Most men who came of age in the Riven Kingdoms were press-ganged into armies with some regularity, and before a battle that looked to be particularly thorny whole battalions could melt away into the woods. The King of Antersau had once joked that the hawk on his banners should be replaced with a more representative local bird, the Flying Deserter. From the Drannian Highlands to the Lower Ghendea, peasants fortunate enough to actually harvest a field always whistled sharply before sticking pitchforks into haystacks. A Riven Man did not live long if he did not learn when to beat feet at a young age.
Amatesu would not say where they were going, but Zeb had a good idea. An Ashinese warrior who looked like grim death itself, a shukenja with magic powerful enough to repair a ruined arm, and a mysterious Ayzant woman, or possibly bunny, with the royal-sounding name of Nesha-tari Hrilamae. Sailing to Souterm just down river and road from Galdeez, little more than a month before the Fifth Opening of Vod’Adia. The three strangers Zeb now found himself with, one of whom he had yet to even see, were not going to Doon for the coffee.
For the months of siege Zeb had spent in Larbonne, the Ayzant army had been reduced by more than just disease and the resistance of the Dauls. Larbonne was just a couple of weeks downriver from Chengdea, which along with Codian Galdeez were the two border towns through which the hobgoblins and bullywugs of the Vod Wilds allowed entrance into their lands once in a century to those wishing to brave the Sable City. More than a few of the besiegers had slipped out of the lines to try their luck further north, enough so that Ayzant officers regularly spread the bloody stories of what the Daulic forces in Chengdea were doing to any small groups of armed men coming their way from the south. More than a few times mangled bodies in ring mail armor “found on the roads,” were brought back to the lines for display.
With the port of Larbonne closed by the siege for much of the year, adventurers bound for Vod’Adia from abroad had been forced most often to take the route through Codian Souterm and Galdeez, and Zeb had no doubt he was with three of them now. For the moment. But he’d be damned if he was going anywhere near a magic city full of the unholy hosts of the netherworld. He would probably be damned anyway in due time, but not while he could still run like hell was at his heels.
Zeb prattled on to Amatesu but his mind was on Souterm long before the city came into sight. It was there that he intended to make his disappearance, the very first time the opportunity arose.
Around midday of the 27 ^ of Eighth Month the crewman watching for sandbars from the foremast first gave the shout that Souterm was nigh, and a huzzah echoed from the men sweating at the oars. Zeb and Amatesu moved from the slim shade beside the galley to the fore deck, and as the barge cleared the last torturous bend of the river they watched the city of Souterm appear before them.
The place was as grand as Zeb had every reason to expect. Though he had never been this far Down Channel before, Souterm was the sort of place preceded by its reputation. The oldest human city on Noroth had a history as complicated and convoluted as that of whole peoples and nations, and Zeb was faintly surprised by the number of landmarks he knew by his very first sight of them. There were the ancient Ettacean works of black stone, including the featureless stone cylinder standing like an iron rod on the stony spur of an island jutting into the wide harbor. That was now the Wizard Tower within the Circle Compound on Again Island, though no one had set foot within the tower itself for centuries. There were the spindly piers and twisting alleys of the lower west bank that dated from pirate times, backed by the even row houses of Broadsword Ridge between the hulking Castle of the Exlanders and the intricate White Cathedral of List, defining the part of the city seized by crusading knights from the Order of the Albatross. On the east bank of the wide river was a leafy green district of what seemed to be an entirely separate village below the massive and many-turreted palace of Denando the Great, the Agintan King who had extended his kingdom to this side of the Channel for a time.
Zeb pointed these sights and others out to Amatesu, and told her briefly a bit of what he knew about them. The woman nodded and looked interested, though she may have been humoring Zeb. He knew that the oldest and most storied town on Noroth was still far younger than those ancient cities of the Farthest West, but the shukenja was nice enough not to say so.
The men at the oars had struck up a cadence as they pulled into the wide harbor and the man in the foremast crow’s nest called down corrections so the barge’s course did not cross with any of the other numerous vessels plying the red-brown waters, everything from tall ships flying Miilarkian House pennons to little fishing craft from the east bank Pescadero. The barge moved for the west side of the harbor intent on a square fortress rising on a spur of natural rock, moss-covered and with the upper battlements retrofitted to sprout a number of stubby cannon barrels. The place flew a wide flag bearing the Codian emblem of an open brown chevron on a blue field representing the Book-from-the-Water, or the Code of Lake Beo. Zeb supposed that the old gray fort did as a customs house. He wondered how the band to which he was for the moment attached intended to clear Imperial customs, then noticed that
the oarsmen had stopped singing.
He looked around. Uriako Shikashe stood nearby kitted out in his full-on regalia, and along with Amatesu both were looking back across the deck to the entrance to the aft cabins. So were the men at the oarlocks bolted to the gunwales. High above them the man in the crow’s nest had ceased barking. For the moment the barge was drifting under light sail.
Nesha-tari Hrilamae stood in the hatchway. Zeb supposed it was her, as she was the one person on this boat he had yet to see, though in truth he could still not see her very well even now.
The woman with the noble Zantish appellation “Hri-,” meaning “daughter of,” on her surname was ensconced in a voluminous cloak of sandy beige that looked golden under the warm noonday sun, topped by a peaked hood deep enough to shadow her face. There really could have been about anything within the bulky garment, but as she strode across the deck there was a roll to Madame Nesha-tari’s hips and the smart clacking of boot heels that could not have been mistaken for anything other than female. She moved with what a man from Wakminau would call the marsik ik tsoo-tsoo, which loosely translated into Codian as a fetching hitch in her giddy-up.
Amatesu bowed as the woman reached the prow, while Shikashe only gave a nod. Zeb did not manage either, he only stood and blinked.
“ Canharati,” Nesha-tari said to Zeb, her voice at once clipped, yet with a husky sort of inflection that lingered. It took Zeb a moment to put aside Codian, and Minauan Danoric, and to finally find the part of his brain where he left his Zantish lying around. Canharati meant good afternoon.
“ Canharati, Mahadaci,” Zeb managed, and performed what was probably the deepest bow of his life, not so much from respect as from the fact he was trying to get a peek up into the shadows of Nesha-tari’s deep hood. He got no more than a glance of chin and though it had never really struck him before, a chin could actually be rather lovely.
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