The Sable City tnc-1

by M. Edward McNally

  The gesture made Tilda frown. She turned away from the trio at the south edge of the roof and saw Heggenauer was watching them as well, seated cross-legged by the trapdoor into the tower lest anything stick its head up from below. The Jobian was cleaning the gory head of his mace with a cloth, removing demon blood from the peaceful designs etched thereon, but he was doing it absently as he looked at the Far Westerners. His handsome face was deeply thoughtful, and if it made him look less bold at the moment, that was not at all bad. He had been looking that way since Amatesu had told her story the night before.

  “Are you all right, Brother Heggenauer?” Tilda asked.

  Heggenauer nodded before he glanced at Tilda, then gave a wistful smile.

  “Thinking, I am afraid. An unseemly pursuit for a man of Exland.”

  Tilda smiled a little despite her mood. “What are you thinking, if I may ask?”

  Heggenauer looked at the clean head of his mace, and put his right hand through the leather thong at the base of the handle to let it hang close at hand. His shield lay on the roof next to him and he touched the arched line of Jobe’s holy symbol.

  “I am thinking that I went from my father’s house directly to the service of a good knight, and thence to the Builder’s House, without very much time between.”

  He looked across the roof at the samurai and the shukenja.

  “I am thinking that the world is a more complicated place than I have thus far been led to believe.”

  “Does that make it better, or worse?” Tilda asked, and Heggenauer narrowed his clear eyes.

  “It makes it harder,” he said.

  Tilda felt like putting a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. But she didn’t. She walked past the pensive priest.

  The roof of the tower was rimmed by battlements but they were only decorative, rising no higher than a knee. Deskata and the Westerners were kneeling well back from the southern edge but Tilda saw that on the east side, Zebulon was actually standing with one foot up on the short wall, leaning on his arms crossed atop his raised knee. Tilda stepped heavily as she approached, lest she startle him into pitching headlong over the edge. Somehow that seemed like something Zeb might be capable of doing. Tilda stopped a good two steps back.

  “Have you no sensible fear of heights?” she asked.

  Zeb looked at her over his shoulder and grinned. The tower had been dusty inside and the gray powder was caked in his scruffy beard and as much of his bushy black hair as escaped irregularly from under the rim of his battered Ayzant helmet. He looked like a crazy old man on the edge of the roof, but Tilda smiled back at him.

  “Miss Matilda,” he said, sounding theatrically offended. “Do you not know that I hail from the mighty fortress city of Wakminau? Standing sentinel atop the cliffs of the Minau Hills, where they loom to their greatest height above the Bifurcation? A man can’t walk outside in Wakminau if he is worried about taking a fall. Honestly, on the morning after a feast day, the rivers below are clogged with bobbing drunks.”

  Tilda looked past Zeb over the winding streets and the endless blocks of black stone, with the featureless gray sky looming above. They had all seen some movement down there, small clusters of adventurers creeping along, but the distance was too great to discern details.

  “Is the view any better in Wakminau?”

  Zeb screwed one eye shut at Tilda and craned the other open wide, sending a gray-flecked eyebrow halfway up his forehead. Tilda heard herself laugh and though it sounded strange in the stillness high above the city, it felt good.

  “Tilda, my adorable ignoramus,” Zeb sighed. “How can a worldly woman of Miilark not know that the Bifurcation, seen from the cliffs, is the most beautiful spot in the world?”

  “Better than the Capital of the Islands?” Tilda asked. “Seen from the Avenue of the Magnates?”

  Zeb snorted. “And what does one see from there? Warehouses, and great heaping stacks of money? Pishaw, if I may say so.”

  Zeb stood upright, and gestured out over Vod’Adia as he spoke.

  “From the top of the Wak, to your left you would see the mighty Dranner at its widest, the great river at a lazy blue rest after frothing down from the Dwarf Mountains of Tor, and churning whitely across the Midyiss forests and the hard Hisine plains. Boats there would be upon it, the square-sailed barges of Turria and Molok with their stripes of orange-and-yellow, and brown-and-black. So too are there the sleek pleasure craft of the Bowganese, slim as canoes and with the triangles of their white sails dotting the water.”

  Tilda opened her mouth to speak, but Zeb pivoted to his right and went on.

  “Straight across the Dranner’s end lays green Bowgan itself, the old Elf city of cottages and shady glades with the two lines of perfect oaks spiraling up Thancil Hill to the Miresh Tane Cladath, that is the Castle of the Trees. Below that olden place you would see the Dranner as it divides into the Riddle and Ghendal against the hard headlands climbing up to the jagged mountains called the Dragon’s Teeth. There stand the stout docks and the dun-colored waterfront of ancient Antersau, the Gateway to the Channel, where time and again men stood and held with their backs to the river whenever the Great Red Dragon sent his legions pouring over the southern mountains. So too it was from Antersau, some do say, where came the man who with spear and sword slew the Great Wyrm in the year 945, thanks be to all the gods of everyone, huzzah!”

  Zeb raised a fist as though it held a tankard, and gave Tilda a wink.

  “That’s when everybody in the bar downs their drink, and buys another.”

  “Such a hero wasn’t from Wakminau?” Tilda asked, playfully.

  “Well, obviously he would have been, but Wakminau wasn’t around for another three-hundred years or so. Not until Old Illygard sent peacekeepers into the Rivens, to quell the tumultuous lands on behalf of the Grand Council. But that, dear Island girl, is a longer and sadder story.”

  Deskata and the others were getting to their feet, knocking dust from their armor and clothing and preparing to head back down after having plotted a route toward the palace at the heart of Vod’Adia. Tilda had slipped out of her present circumstances for a moment, but they were coming back to her. She stayed away a moment longer.

  “I would like you to tell me the whole story sometime.”

  Zeb had hoisted his axe back to one shoulder, his crossbow on the other. He gave Tilda another smile, the kind that would have made his face look wolfish were it not for the absence of danger in his light blue eyes.

  “Then so I shall,” Zeb said as though he were making a vow, which he immediately ruined by frowning and tilting his head. “Provided of course we are not grotesquely butchered sometime later today.”

  “Or tomorrow.”

  “Or the day after that. You are catching on.”

  They turned to meet the others by the trapdoor, but Tilda faltered a step as her eyes swept over the city stretching north. She said Zeb’s name and he stopped as well, then followed her over to the north side of the roof.

  In that direction, some distance behind them now, Tilda could see the district of tall buildings like temples or government halls, a part of the city they had moved widely around rather than setting foot on the streets covered with a slimy green sheen. Tilda could not see the intersection that had stopped them from the top of the tower, but she could make out a long open area between the grandest of the buildings. It was movement from there that had caught her eye, even from the distance. Looking closer she could see that there was indeed a great deal of movement going on down there.

  “Tilda,” John called from the trapdoor.

  “Come here,” she answered.

  The others did, standing in a line beside her and Zeb. They did not have to be told what to look at, for a great mass of figures was marching in formation through the open area. Even the gray light of the sky above flashed on blades and armor, and from across the distance Tilda thought she could faintly hear the rumble of iron-shod boots.

  “ Hob-o-gob-o-lin,”
Uriako Shikashe said, close enough to the correct pronunciation that everyone understood him.

  “I thought the Shugak told Nesha-tari they never entered this place,” John said.

  “They did,” Zeb nodded. “That’s why they paid us to come in for them.”

  “They appear to have changed their minds,” Amatesu said.

  The six party members exchanged uncertain looks, for no one knew quite what to make of a large force of hobgoblins moving into the city behind them, heading their way. They did however hurry on their way back down the tower.

  *

  Once Phin had been choked unconscious, a bearded devil in white robes threw the limp wizard over a shoulder as if the tall man weighed nothing. Another hoisted Claudja the same way, though she at least was left awake.

  The green-haired demoness in the skin-tight leather armor remained behind with four devils, while the two bearing the prisoners set off at a fast run to the south. They passed first through the plaza where Rickard and the Sarge’s bodies lay hewn to the ground.

  “I told you so,” Claudja whispered as her captor bounded past the sergeant, lying with his neck slashed open and his sightless eyes staring up at the sky. It only made her feel better for a moment.

  The next few hours were of bouncing chaos as the devils ran down streets, scrambled over walls, and generally progressed as if utterly unaware that each jarring step drove a shoulder into Claudja’s belly. Her knees and chin banged against the creature’s chest and back, both of which felt like solid bone beneath a layer of skin thinner even than its robes. Claudja’s head was swimming within minutes and she could not see anything but cobblestones streaking by anyway. She thought she blacked out a time or two, but it could have been far more.

  She was numb and addle-headed by the time the motion seemed to have stopped, and though she heard hissing voices close by the words were strange. Then she was bashing around again in darkness, her wrists still bound and now bleeding into her hands as the leather cord had been biting into her skin for days. The limp swinging of her arms was opening cuts. Claudja tried to move her hands to ease the pain and they brushed along a stone wall, then what seemed to be a curtain, then more wall. Then the devil was mounting stairs and its shoulder drove so hard and fast into Claudja’s stomach that she could not catch a breath between impacts. She tried to beat or kick against the thing but her arms and legs were feeble. She passed out again.

  She was awakened by a knock on a door, and the soft, polite rhythm of the taps made her think of home. Claudja usually awoke early in the castle at Chengdea, but if she did sleep late a servant would always rouse her with just that sort of innocuous knocking, for there were always duties to which the Duchess must attend. She had a duty now, though of course she was not at home, nor in her own bed. But she was in a bed.

  Claudja jerked awake with a gasp, and as she opened her eyes a soft light rose in the room. It came from an ornate metal brazier suspended from the ceiling, in which a warm glow arose from four round stones rather than candles or lamps. Claudja had seen such lavish things before, for she had been within the Royal apartments at the Daul King’s palace in Bouree.

  She saw that she was in a bedroom fit for a royal now as well, lying on top of a heavy coverlet in a four-post bed with soft white curtains tied up on the cross beams. Claudja was clothed save for her coat and shoes, and as she sat up she saw them, the coat hanging from a hook on the back of a heavy door with an arching top. Her boots were on the floor next to an embroidered circular rug beneath a small round table and a matching set of light, graceful chairs with padded seats. The walls of the room were paneled in richly-stained wood of a faint orange hue, and tapestries hung on two of them, geometric designs rather than images.

  The knocking came from the door again, so polite that Claudja had to resist saying “ Antre,” purely from habit. She realized she was holding herself up on her arms and blinked in surprise as that meant her hands were not tied. She held her hands up in front of her face, though that made her flop onto her back again.

  Her wrists were untied, but now each was wrapped individually with soft cotton bandages, damp from some sort of ointment and with flecks of blood showing through. The sight of them made Claudja aware that her wrists stung, which led to the awareness that her chin and knees felt bruised, her back and ribs ached, and she was tremendously thirsty and hungry.

  More knocking, then voices.

  Claudja got unsteadily off the bed, leaving a dusty gray outline on the covers. She looked around the room for a weapon but there was only an empty wardrobe with open doors, a curtained window, and a rather lovely paper screen with bright honeybees painted on it, trundling among flowers. The screen separated the rest of the room from a stone tub and a commode, both made of the same familiar black stone as was the rest of Vod’Adia.

  The Duchess scurried to her boots and picked one up in either hand, then backed into the corner behind the tub, almost knocking over a rack of soft towels.

  When the tapping came again, she called “Who is it?” at the door, and wondered what the point of that had been. She was sure she would not have liked the answer had she gotten one.

  Three hard knocks shook the door in its frame, making Claudia jerk three times. There was a pause, and when another hard strike echoed around the room the Duchess shouted “Come in, then!” She crouched behind the tub, peeking around the screen with a boot raised to throw though it felt absolutely ridiculous.

  The door opened and Claudja cringed as two little diabolic figures with sharp spikes on their backs floated in on bat wings, carrying a silver tray as big as they were between them. Their red eyes fastened on Claudja and she hauled back her arm to pitch her boot if they came closer, but they stopped above the table. They set down the tray, bowed in unison while hovering in the air, then beat wings out the door. A long arm in a white sleeve pulled it shut from the hall, and a lock clicked loudly.

  Claudja stared, and only slowly crept to the table. There was a glass carafe of water and one of red wine, and a silver lid with a handle that fit into a round slot in the middle of the tray. Claudja reached out slowly and lifted the lid, raising her boot again in case something sprang at her from underneath it.

  It was food, and it stayed where it was. Not great food, but a variety of the sort of preserved rations that adventurers undoubtedly brought into the city. Salted pork, dried figs, hard-tack biscuits. It had been heated and it looked and smelled far better than the garbage the dead legionnaires had been able to buy near the gate with their meager funds.

  Claudja was near starving, and she justified herself by deciding that if her devilish captors wanted her dead, poisoning her would be about the least efficient way for them to go about it. She sat at the table and ate and drank, more like a gobbling duck than a well-bred Duchess, ignoring the silver cutlery and darting her eyes all the while toward the door.

  The Duchess decided the wine was certainly a bad idea, but then tasted it and found it good. She drank all that as well, certainly too fast. The moment Claudja set down her empty glass, the polite tapping sounded again from the door, startling her into falling off her chair.

  She scrambled up and grabbed the knife off the tray, then less certainly took the fork as well. She held both as weapons though they seemed even more ridiculous than had the boots, and backed into her corner behind the tub before calling for entry.

  The door opened and this time a whole line of little spiny devils floated in, each pair with a steaming wooden bucket between them. The dozen devils looked at her and paused in the air, then slowly moved closer to the tub, all of them in unison.

  Claudja squeaked and ran out from behind the tub, tried to vault the bed but did not fully clear its width and tumbled off the far side. Water splashed and she peeked over the dusty coverlet to watch wide-eyed as the two lines of devils filled the tub with steaming, clear water, passing full buckets forward and empty buckets back. They all bowed again in the air, hovering on wings that were moving nowhere nea
r enough to actually be keeping them aloft, and then they began to withdraw.

  “Wait,” Claudja stood up before the last had gone. “Where is the man I was brought here with?”

  Her only answer was the closing door, and the snap of the lock.

  Claudja moved over near the tub, which she had to admit looked wonderful. There was a brick of soap on the towel rack, and suddenly the dust and grime covering every inch of her seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Every muscle was sore and aching. She supposed it was entirely possible the devils just wanted her clean before they cooked and ate her, but a lady of the Duchess’s standing should not after all appear at dinner in her present state.

  Claudja undressed, left the silverware within reach on the towel rack, and slipped into the warm water with a groan she could not conceal. She was still just lying there a few minutes later, head thrown back and eyes closed, when the door opened and two of the little devils darted into the room. One snatched the dusty cover off the bed while the other grabbed Claudja’s pile of clothes, and the two were gone so fast that the door was shut and locked before Claudja shouted and threw the fork after them.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The party did not find a barracks building of a familiar kind in which to spend their third night in Vod’Adia, for by then they were in a very different place within the Sable City.

  They had followed the route through the streets that Deskata and the Westerners had plotted from the roof of tower, heading to the right for one long block at the next intersection, then left until they were beyond the wall around the noble district. They then zigzagged several blocks south and west until emerging shortly before dark on the edge of the vast open area surrounding the great palace with its nine towers, standing on a leveled hill in the middle of the sprawling city.