The Sable City Page 2

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  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 gasped, 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 into 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.

  They all heard Tilda on the stairs while she was still two floors down, for bare feet or not it sounded like she was riding up them on a horse. Kuanu swallowed and faced the door. It crashed open, and the sodden young woman came in like a storm cloud rolling down the sharp coral slopes of the Ghost Mountain.

  Matilda Lanai was of the mixed-stock known in the Islands as “Ship People.” Lighter in complexion than a Full Blood but with features typical of an Islander, with a rounded chin, broad mouth, and flashing eyes of a brown so deep they occasionally looked black. They looked that way now as she skidded to a halt, swiped her clinging hair out of her face and over her shoulder, and locked her narrowed eyes on Kuanu’s wide-open ones. Tilda’s chest heaved and she stood with her feet apart, silent except for her breath and the drops of water pattering the floorboards. She held her hands loose at her sides, arms toned by boundless youth and a hard year of Guild training. She did not ball her hands into fists, as the fingers of a good Guilder were too valuable to risk in a punch. It would be the knife of an elbow or the hammer of a knee if it came to that, as it looked like it probably would.

  “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.