The Sable City tnc-1

by M. Edward McNally

  “Back inside!” John Deskata bellowed, as he had just appeared in the back doorway of the house, and now disappeared just as fast. Tilda backpedaled and threw her dagger as the hulking demon drew back for another push. The blade flung true, but bounced off the monster’s pink, piggy snout, getting no more than an irate snort.

  Tilda turned and ran for the door, heard the crack of a shot from above, and the ping of a lead ball off the stones at her feet. She looked up as she ran and saw a demoness perched on the edge of the roof, all in black leather and with wide bat-wings spread out behind her against the gray sky. She was holding a smoking pistol and cackling. Then Tilda was back inside with Amatesu right behind her. John slammed the back door just as there was a crash of tumbling stones from the fence.

  “This is a problem,” John said.

  “You think?” Tilda sputtered at him. She drove a dagger into the frame of the door and stomped on it with her heel, but if the stone wall had not held back the demon the back door was not going to do much better.

  “Upstairs!” John yelled, hammering his sword on his shield and running back into the next room, where Heggenauer and Zeb were holding a doorway with mace and axe. Uriako Shikashe stood behind them and ready to relieve either. Claudja and Phin, both looking pale and with their eyes wide, rushed up the stairs with Nesha-tari walking behind them.

  Boards splintered in the middle of the back door and the silver spearhead jabbed into the room, poking wildly about. Shikashe ran in and brought his katana down on the shaft behind the head, but the spear was all of one shining piece and the weapons rang as they hit each other, staggering back the surprised samurai. The spear was quickly withdrawn and the giant pig-ape bellowed, managing to spray more spit in through the gap in the door.

  “What the hell?” Zeb yelled as he ran in from the next room. Blood was running down his face from a slash on his scalp.

  “Stop saying that!” Heggenauer shouted, backing through the door with John Deskata, their shields locked together and ringing with thrown hand axes.

  “Upstairs!” John yelled again and Tilda went next, with Zeb right behind her. She ran into a room where Claudja and Phin huddled against a wall while Nesha-tari frowned out the back window.

  “What about the front stairs?” Claudja asked her, and Tilda ran that way. She reached the stairs just as a snarling hobgoblin was pounding up them and jerked her buksu from her back. She clubbed the thing’s helmet three times before it fell back down the stairs, bowling over several of its howling fellows.

  Zeb ran in behind her, panting and wincing.

  “Are you all right?” Tilda asked.

  “This? Just a head wound. I fell down the stairs a while back.”

  The rest of the party filed in, stumbling and knocking weapons against the wall. Deskata slammed the hall door to the back of the house behind them and Shikashe took Tilda’s place at the head of the stairs. Squealing and snarling erupted from below. There was a pained scream from a deep-throated hobgoblin, followed by banging and bashing as the remaining hobgoblins cleared out of the house. A satisfied snort came from below.

  “Back door again?” Claudja asked.

  “There is a demoness with a pistol down there,” Amatesu said quietly, leaning against a wall. Her voice was slightly strange and as Tilda glanced at her she saw the shukenja was holding her limp right arm by the elbow. Heggenauer pushed his way toward her.

  “Are you shot?” he asked, and Amatesu nodded.

  “I think it has broken both bones. And I cannot heal another wound today.”

  Heggenauer put his shield aside and let his gory mace hang from his wrist as he pulled off his gauntlets.

  “Allow me, sister,” he said. Tilda had forgotten for a moment that the man was a cleric as well.

  John was frowning in deep thought, his eyes on the stairs up which the snorts of the big pig demon still sounded. He looked at Nesha-tari, then at Zeb.

  “Does she have enough juice to blow up that thing?”

  Zeb stared at him. “Juice?”

  John waved his hand holding a bloody sword.

  “Magic, spells, whatever. Can she knock that thing down, at least long enough for us to kill it or run away?”

  Zeb asked Nesha-tari, who looked back at him and shook her head.

  White light flared from Heggenauer’s hands, each clasped tenderly against Amatesu’s forearm. The shukenja sighed and gave a pretty smile, and nodded thanks at the cleric.

  A horn sounded from outside, several long blasts, and everyone tensed. Claudja peered out a front window between the shutters.

  “The hobgoblins have fallen back to the bridge, but they are not charging.”

  “That is a signal horn,” John said. “They are calling for reinforcements.” He looked around at the others. “We can’t hole-up in here. We rush the demons now, or we are trapped.”

  The party looked at each other, tired, worn, and beaten down, with no one showing much confidence. The Circle Wizard, Phin, cleared his throat. He still clutched the heavy satchel and now he slowly withdrew a thick book from inside.

  “There are teleport spells inscribed within this,” he said quietly. “I may be able to cast one.”

  John’s fierce eyes snapped to him. “You said they don’t work through the veil around the city.”

  “They don’t,” Phin said, and he looked around with an expression Tilda wanted to read as confident, but really was not even very hopeful. “They might, however, work inside the city.”

  The others stared at him.

  “Maybe,” he said again.

  *

  The Shugak had driven the merchants away from the front gate of Vod’Adia when Black Danavod ordered her Magdetchoi in to pursue the Wizard. The bullywug shaman Kerek, the Mistress’s most special favorite, thought the merchants had set up again further down the main street, but he did not much care. He had deployed his hobs and wugs around the entrance plaza to ward all the streets from behind barricades. While the adventuring parties still entering the place were allowed to pass through, all those seeking exit were to be stopped and thoroughly examined. Those were his orders from Danavod.

  Kerek himself took up residence in a smoke tent set up in front of a building which a band of Shanatarian priests had cleaned for use as a hospital. The clerics had been shooed out of the plaza with the other humans and such, and Kerek used some extra cloth bandages they had left behind to keep his braziers burning, puffing foul smoke about the plaza. He was within the lodge, cross-legged and meditating among the fires as he awaited any new word from his Mistress, when alarm croaks and hobgoblin shouts roused him. He uncoiled his legs and hopped out of the tent flap just in time to see two running men in armor disappear into the mist-shrouded passage through the towering black gatehouse.

  “What was that?” he croaked, and a chorus of answers came from roofs. Nine people had appeared in the middle of the plaza as though by magic, then raced out of the gate before any of Kerek’s slack-jawed minions had managed to do anything but point at them.

  Danavod was not going to be pleased.

  “Chase!” Kerek croaked.

  *

  Phin was more surprised than anyone, for he had hardly committed the plaza to memory when he had passed through it four days ago with Claudja and the unlamented legionnaires. He knew he would have a better chance of teleporting into the small house where he had spent the first night in the city, but that place was still far from the gate. Even worse, given the building’s size and the fact that he would be teleporting a full nine people, Phin was sure that he would have put someone into a wall, with results he did not want to consider.

  So the party gambled, and he tried for the plaza. He hit it spot on, and though the others had stared at him in amazement for a moment before everyone was up and running, Phin knew the credit was not really due himself. He had wrapped his hand around the golden jewel atop the wand within his right sleeve as he read the spell, and he had felt the surge of the Witch King’s powe
r when the world around him began to fade.

  The party emerged from the gatehouse and their feet rang loudly as they raced across the iron drawbridge. Then they were off it and out of the mist at a step, people shouting in surprise as after four days in a gray-and-black world they emerged into a different one with impossibly green grass, and a brilliant blue sky high above them.

  They ran on a hundred yards or so before warning horns started to blow ahead of them in the Shugak towers fronting Camp Town, and Deskata shouted for everyone to halt.

  “Do it again, Phoarty!” he yelled, and everyone who had drawn weapons snapped them back into sheaths and scabbards. Phin dropped to a cross-legged seat on the ground and opened the book on his lap. He opened to where a finger marked a page that was now blank, and hurriedly flipped ahead to the next teleport spell. The others joined hands in a circle around him, except for Claudja who knelt behind Phin, one hand linked to Tilda’s and the other sliding into the collar of Phin’s robes to rest on his bare shoulder.

  Phin found the next teleport spell and started to read aloud, the rhythmic words of old Tullish flaring blue on the page as he spoke them, moving one finger along the lines. With his other hand, still within his right sleeve, he again clasped the golden gem atop the wand of the long dead Witch King, and felt the warm surge of its power.

  The words on the page faded even as Phin read them, and he listened only to the sound of his own voice, not to the horns nor the sharp croaking noises, nor to the people telling him to hurry. Phin’s mind fell away from itself and he thought of long months of longer nights and early mornings, boredom and uselessness. The grass and the sky disappeared and there was another stomach-churning jolt, though actually not as bad as the first one. Phin knew the place he was going to this time, only too well.

  In an instant Phin was sitting on hard stone in an ugly barren courtyard with mismatched walls, next to a dirt-filled fountain out of which sprouted weeds and the hacked stump of a dead tree. Phin’s friends were all around him, if he could call them that, and he thought that now he probably could as that had been some serious magic he had just performed, without killing any of them.

  Two horses whinnied and Zeb yelled, “Whoa!” A wagon with a very startled-looking driver stopped just short of the party, the man on the board staring at them with his mouth hanging open.

  “Souterm?” Claudja asked, her hand still on Phin’s shoulder, holding on tight.

  “Welcome to the Empire, your Grace.” Phin said, and then Claudja was hugging him, weeping and laughing at the same time. Everyone else started doing the same.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  A gray-robed Circle Wizard had run away from the area of Souterm’s North Gate as soon as the party appeared, and any number of travelers stood staring at them in amazement. The group did not linger. Phin Phoarty led the way south along side streets and back alleys all the way to the docks just short of the Miilarkian Quarter at the foot of Broadsword Ridge’s southern end. The party had vaguely agreed that was the best place for everyone. On the way the ragged, dusty band stared around in wonder, for a living city full of colorful storefronts and signs, trees rustling in the breeze, and people of all descriptions laughing and talking and strolling along seemed the strangest place imaginable.

  The party took rooms in an inn before evening started to fill the place, and plans for a meal were put aside as people collapsed in the comfortable quarters. Most slept through the rest of the day, and the night as well.

  Tilda awoke feeling very strange, and it was a moment before she realized it was because she was lying on a bed for the first time in weeks. She sat up and saw the shallow light of morning shining in through the wooden blinds. One other bunk in the room was occupied by the small shape of the Duchess Claudja, while the other two were empty. Amatesu’s was neatly made, Nesha-tari’s was a tangle of sheets and covers.

  Tilda let Claudja sleep for the Duchess had told her she intended to approach the officials of the Codian Empire today, as well as the reason. The noblewoman from Daulic Chengdea would need her rest. Tilda washed up in a room at the end of the hall and looked at her face for a long time in a mirror above the basin. She could not decide whether or not she looked older but the plains of her face seemed sharper than she remembered, and the cheeks more hollow. Home cooking in Miilark could repair that, at least on the surface.

  The thought of food sent Tilda rapidly downstairs to the common room of the inn. Nights on the docks went long but the mornings started slow. Uriako Shikashe sat alone at the bar and Tilda hardly recognized him until he nodded at her, for he seemed much smaller without his full o-yori armor. His swords remained as ever on his hips.

  Zeb and Amatesu sat at a table by a paned window fronting the porch, and both smiled at Tilda as she approached. She glanced past them at the masts bobbing in the harbor, the warehouses and the blue water. If it was not Miilark, yet, it at least looked a bit like home.

  Tilda settled into a chair and Zeb pointed at the mug on the table in front of him. The rich aroma of imported Xoshan coffee rose on the steam, as no self-respecting Soutermese drank the local Doonish brew.

  “Oh, gods yes,” Tilda said, and Zeb raised a finger at the barman.

  “You look well, Matilda,” Amatesu said.

  “My friends just call me Tilda.” Tilda reached out impulsively and hugged the shukenja, who tensed for a moment but then patted her on the back.

  “Even this miscreant looks almost presentable,” Tilda said, smiling at Zeb. He had shaved down to a heavy goatee and a light mustache, which together made him look like a fellow who could not quite make up his mind. He smiled back, and he looked more himself.

  “So what has you three up so early?” Tilda asked, looking eagerly toward the bar for her coffee.

  “We’ve been on the docks,” Zeb jerked a thumb. “Found Madame Nesha-tari an Ayzant boat, bound up Channel.”

  Tilda blinked. “When does it leave?”

  “Today. She is already aboard.”

  “What?” Tilda was surprised to feel something like a loss at the thought that a member of the party was leaving the others so soon. She scarcely knew these people at all, it was true, yet after the last several days she felt close to each of them. Even the Zantish sorceress, Dragon Cultist, man-eating-monster.

  “She says goodbye to everyone,” Zeb said, and Amatesu frowned at him as she stirred her own coffee.

  “Madame Nesha-tari did not say this.”

  Zeb sighed. “Well, it would have been nicer if she had, correct?”

  “Doesn’t she still owe you all a great deal of money?” Tilda asked. She attributed the return of her Miilarkian interests to her proximity to the sea.

  Amatesu looked unconcerned but Zeb sagged back in his chair and groaned at the ceiling.

  “We had this out on the docks. The Madame feels we were paid, as the Shugak set aside big chests of money for us. Of course, the little blighters will kill us if we go back to collect, but the Madame seemed to feel that was our problem.”

  Zeb rocked forward in his chair and looked miserably at Tilda.

  “I was a rich man, Tilda. For about thirty seconds. The hobs opened a chest with two hundred and fifty gleaming pieces of gold in it, with my name on them! Not literally, of course, but you know what I mean? I just stared at it, and nodded okay. If I knew I was never going to see it again, I at least would have touched it. Actually, I would have stripped to my skivvies and rolled around in the pile, tossing coins in the air and singing tra-la-la!”

  “That would have impressed the hobgoblins, I am sure,” Amatesu said solemnly, and Tilda laughed at them both.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Tilda asked, holding out a hand to include Shikashe at the bar, who was now tucking into a plate heaped with enough fish to stock a small pond. The sight made Tilda even hungrier.

  Zeb and Amatesu just looked at each other.

  “No idea,” Zeb said, and Amatesu gave a small shrug.

  “Something alw
ays comes along.”

  “Aren’t you part of some military unit in Larbonne?” Tilda asked Zeb, who smirked.

  “Sure, a mercenary outfit that sold me to a lion-monster and these two crazy Westerners. I don’t think they will miss me.”

  “What about you…Tilda?” Amatesu asked. Tilda smiled at her, though she felt a qualm at the question.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I should talk to John.”

  Zeb jerked his thumb at the window again. “On the porch.”

  “What?” Tilda blinked, and looked outside. John Deskata was sitting alone at a table at the end of the wide, covered porch, facing the street with his back to the window.

  “He came with us to the docks,” Amatesu said. Zeb cleared his throat and his smile faltered.

  “I think he found a Miilarkian ship.”

  A serving boy was almost at the table with Tilda’s coffee, but when he set it in front of her she excused herself from Amatesu and Zeb, and walked outside.

  She did not step loudly, but John looked over his shoulder as she came. She passed him and turned to stand across the table. He had an inkpot and quill, and a few lines written on a parchment square. He did not meet Tilda’s eyes, but she saw that his were brown again. His tower shield, covered by a cloth, leaned against the porch railing with his small pack bundled against it.

  “You found a ship?” she asked.

  “Yes. Fast cutter of House Tagalai.”

  “How fast?”

  “Not fast enough. If we make good time I will still be late by two weeks.”

  John had still not looked up at her, so Tilda sat down across from him.

  “How much do they want for passage?”

  “They are short a hand. I’ll work my way across.”

  Tilda blinked. “What about me?”

  John gave a sigh instead of an answer. Tilda reached across the table and snatched the parchment, rattling the inkwell. John made a grab for it, but stopped himself and let her take it.