The Sable City tnc-1 Read online

  “Mounted for a lance?”

  “Yes. It has ties for saddlebags but there are none here, though there is loose gear that came this far in them. Tack hammer, extra buckles and stirrups. Nothing someone would need once they went to foot. But first he tore up the pretty kit to scrub and bind up the horse. The other half of this blanket is on its haunches now. There are round rust marks like it was worn under barding.”

  Tilda glanced over toward the white horse, which had lost interest in her and moved off to stand closer to the mare and pony.

  “What else about the footprints?”

  Tilda frowned at her Captain, his heavy dwarven features expectant and his thick, dark eyebrows together. She looked down at the nearest clear mark for a moment, then put her own foot down beside it. Her riding boots had a pointed toe to slip easily into and out of stirrups.

  “Rounded toes, from a shoe or sandal.” Tilda looked back up at the Captain. “The man who rode the horse here was not the knight to whom it belonged.”

  Block gave a soft grunt of grudging approval, which Tilda had learned was the extreme upper limit to his expressions of praise. The nicest thing he had said to Tilda in three months was that she might have a bit of brain in her head. Along with the rocks and shiny bits of ribbon.

  “We were wrong,” Block said, throwing Tilda completely.

  “ Tizalk?”

  Captain Block rumbled a low growl in his cavernous chest and glared off to the south, down the way they had been going these last three days toward the faint smudge of distant mountains on the horizon.

  “We thought to overtake the slow marchers well before they reached Duke Gratchik’s town. Before any battle might be fought. But we did not consider that the Duke might hit Nyham first, at the edge of his lands, only half a day distant from here.”

  Actually, we thought nothing of the sort, Tilda thought now. She said something different.

  “You think a battle has already been fought?”

  Block nodded toward the charger. “That wound on the arse is long, from a big blade. Spear or a pole-arm. But the holes on the ribs are high, and the rags jammed in them poke out and up. Arrows shot from distance, on their downward path.”

  Tilda felt cold, and not just from the drear air. The man they had come here to find – all the way to Noroth and to Codia and to Orstaf – had marched with Nyham. If there had been a battle, he had been in it.

  “Should we not hurry on, Captain?” she said. “I mean, he could…we have to find out what happened.”

  “We know what happened,” Block growled. “The baron got whipped. A footman jumped on a knight’s horse and rode it back to here. That beast was not going any further today, and the man would not wait. The fellow went to ground and kept moving. And look here.”

  Block turned and stomped to the southwest edge of the clearing no longer minding the marks on the ground, so neither did Tilda as she followed. At the edge of the tall grass Block pointed at a last shoeprint on the soft mossy ground, then out into the grass.

  “Broken stalk, bent stalk, another bent further along, in a dead line southwest. Southwest. Not back north, toward Nyham’s lands. Not the direction a fleeing peasant or manor man would have gone to get home.”

  Of Nyham’s seven-hundred men, two hundred had been such locals. The other five-hundred, only one of whom Tilda and her Captain were interested in, were recent legionnaires of the Codian Empire. They were deserters from the 34 ^ Foot, hired by the baron to visit vengeance upon his Duke, apparently without success.

  “One of the renegades,” Tilda said, and Block nodded.

  “I don’t know where the man thinks he is going now, but he is in a hurry to get there. Can’t be more than eight hours ahead.”

  “So what?” Tilda said, and Block raised a dark eyebrow touched with gray at her.

  “I mean, in that case…I mean it seems to me…”

  “Spit it out, girl.”

  Tilda took a breath, and realized her heart was pounding. The last three months of her life seemed to be crashing into this moment from behind.

  “Captain, we need to be on that battlefield, now. If, if our man is dead, we need to know it. And if he is captured we have to get there before he is hung for desertion, or for bearing arms against the Duke, or whatever. Right now, sir. Lol hique.”

  Block was again staring to the southwest, in the direction that the last mark of a legionnaire’s marching sandal pointed.

  “Or maybe he escaped the battle. Made a run for it.”

  Tilda did not like where that was going. “Then our best chance of learning where he might have run would also be at the battlefield, no? With any captured legionnaires, who themselves may be strung-up before much longer.”

  Block did not seem to be listening. He was still staring off across the burry tops of the tall grass as the stalks waved gently in the chill breeze.

  “Unless this is our man,” he said.

  Behind him, for just a moment, Tilda dropped her jaw and glared disbelief at Block’s wide back. She reined in her face before stammering one question in two languages.

  “I’m tizalk…sorry… spahalo what?”

  “Five-hundred-to-one odds against it, I know,” Block said, still staring away. “Bit long to wager much. But the pay-off…”

  Tilda wanted either to jump up and down, or else kick her esteemed and honorable Captain in his wide hindquarters. She managed to do neither. Just.

  “Forgive me, Captain, but I think at the Island Stakes they call that a misag uyak. A Fool’s Bet.”

  “Not if the race is rigged.”

  Now Tilda could only stare. It was not her place to question the Captain, and even if it had been, she had no idea of what she could possibly say to that.

  Block hitched back his black half-cloak, reaching inside to pluck something from a pouch at his belt. He extended an arm and opened his palm. Tilda saw a coppery gleam, and inwardly groaned.

  The Empire of the Code minted as its smallest denomination copper pennies modeled on those of the old Kingdom of Tull, now an Imperial province for some hundred-fifty years. Popularly called “thumbs,” each side showed a fist with the thumb extended. Lucky side up, you could see the folded fingers against the palm. Unlucky thumbs-down showed the back of the hand.

  Block balanced the coin on his own bent thumb. “Your call?”

  “Lucky side to the battlefield.” Tilda said quickly, then muttered under her breath. “Nothing else makes sense.”

  She thought of something only after the dwarf flicked the coin up to flip smoothly through the air, a dancing glint of decision. Tilda recalled that the old Tullish coins, like many things from what had once been called the Witch Kingdom, were made in the fashion of a lesson. Given time and circulation from hand to hand, a bit of sliding across bar-tops and bartering tables, and the soft metal started to wear. The first thing to go was the fine detail of the folded fingers, and after that it was impossible to tell one side of the coin from the other.

  Good luck wears off, the Tulls had said. Bad luck lasts forever.

  Chapter Three

  Tilda retrieved the mare and pony from the main path, and frowned when she found that the dagger Block had jammed into the ground to loop the reins had been one of hers. She wiped it well clean before replacing it in a hidden sheath under a saddlebag.

  They let the horses get a good drink at the clearing, then Tilda boosted the dwarf to his saddle and swung into her own. She followed behind as Block pointed the snorting pony into the long grass. The white charger stepped back into the clearing behind them but went no further, and looking back over her shoulder at the proud animal standing forlorn under the tree, Tilda felt a pang. She assured herself that even on the lonely paths of southern Orstaf someone would come by before long, and a horse of that quality would never be left behind by anyone whose main concern was not for speed.

  The Captain said that as they were after a man on foot who had less than a half-day head start they might overtake
him before nightfall. Early the next day at the worst. If the fellow’s trail continued generally southwest they would still be in position to angle back to the battlefield without losing too much time, should it prove necessary.

  Tilda said nothing in reply.

  As it developed, the Miilarkians could not of course take full advantage of being mounted to close the distance between themselves and their new quarry. The tall steppe grass gave the country of Orstaf a gently rolling appearance, but down at dirt-level it was a different story. Stones cluttered the plains, and there were dry runoff channels from the snowmelt season everywhere, not to mention gopher burrows and snake holes. To ride at speed cross-country would have been to invite a broken ankle for a horse. That was the point of the numberless paths in the first place.

  In the second place, tracking a lone man through the stuff proved difficult as it tended to grant passage with only a rustle and some picturesque swaying. Block often gripped his saddle horn as his pony picked its way along, holding himself flat against the horse’s dun flank with his sharp eyes looking level across the top of the grass for a single broken stalk, or even a bent one. Even for the jeweler’s eyes of a dwarf, it was remarkable he spied a sign as often as he did.

  Despite that, as the gray disk of the sun traversed the dreary sky above, several were the times Block raised a hand to halt. Tilda dismounted first, shrugging out of the blanket she had draped around her shoulders while riding. She helped the dwarf to the ground despite knowing he could get down himself if he wanted, then held the horses’ reins while her Captain crawled through the brush until finding a damp bit of low ground with a print, a scuff on a rock, or some other sign that Tilda could scarcely see even when he pointed it out to her. She then boosted the dwarf back into the saddle, remounted her mare and rewrapped her blanket, and on they went as the sun crawled away to the west, toward the lush Island home thousands of miles away from this chill and cheerless place.

  As hour followed hour of slow pursuit through the long grass, Tilda said not a single word. Block, intent of his observations, either did not notice or did not care. By the time enough hours had passed for the sun to approach the distant horizon, it became obvious their quarry had veered toward a jumbled bunch of low hills looming like a castle above the grass, all topped with dense trees. The wall of mountains to the south was still several days distant, but Tilda knew from the Captain’s maps that the foothills at their feet extended out onto the plains for miles in places, and that a river called the Winding lived up to its name as it snaked its way among them. The small cluster of hills now before them seemed a sentinel from that country, like a cavalry vedette thrown out well ahead of an advancing army.

  Block’s gruff voice was no less so after hours of silence.

  “Our fellow is heading straight for the hills, and he must be exhausted. It is likely he would rest as soon as he reached cover. Look sharp.”

  “I have been,” Tilda said.

  The dwarf turned in his saddle just enough to glare back over a shoulder.

  “No, actually you have been looking sulky.”

  Tilda stared at the ground so as not to glare back at her Captain.

  “I have not,” she said in a small voice.

  “Of course you have. Your big bottom lip is jutting out to shade your chin. Luck of the flip, girl. Take your complaints to the Ninth God.”

  Tilda mumbled something, but when Block snapped “What?” she said something different.

  “Were the fingers worn off of the coin you tossed, Captain?”

  “What?” Block snapped again. Tilda looked up at him this time, his hard eyes wide under the V of his heavy brows. In theory a Guild apprentice should always have kept her eyes downcast toward a House Man of Block’s station, but the disparity in their height had always made that difficult. Not that it bothered Tilda at the moment.

  “I ask if the coin you tossed was worn plain. Did both sides look to be back-handed, thumbs down?”

  The Captain blinked, and one end of the hard line of his mouth twitched. Now nearing evening, a dark shadow was already on the cheeks that the old dwarf had shaved this and every morning for hundreds of years.

  “I did not look to see,” he said, and Tilda said nothing.

  Muddy prints up the bank of a sluggish, shallow stream at the base of the first hillock told even Tilda which way their quarry had gone. The prints were uneven as though the man had stumbled, and Tilda thought that surely he must have been at the end of his rope. A full day and more of flight, on the heels of a battle. She thought that passing from the open fields to the sheltering shade of the trees must certainly have been a relief and a temptation for him and she looked around carefully, almost expecting to find a bundled shape on the ground at the base of each trunk. The horses sensed their riders’ moods and moved as if they had toes to tip on, hoof-falls muffled on the carpet of old needles and leaves. The trees were mostly pines, seeds washed down from the mountains eons ago and caught up in the rocks of the hills. Here and there an ancient oak arose taller among them, like a stately lord above prickly supplicants. Tilda and Block kept their eyes on the ground, but found only signs that their man had kept moving.

  They crested one rise, and descending the far side Tilda blinked to discover that in the midst of the encircling hills the trees were regularly spaced, shaggy-barked, and planted in even rows. They bore fruit shaped like pears but with white skins, and the branches hung heavy with them. As the riders passed down and among them, Tilda saw that the orchard was not maintained. A lot of fruit lay on the ground already going to rot and the air had a sickly-sweet smell.

  The shadows between the hills and the encroaching gloom of evening shivered Tilda all the more, and made it harder than ever to see any signs of passage. The Miilarkians were obliged to dismount again, and it took several minutes for the Captain to reacquire the trail. Tilda stood by holding the reins, wondering at the silence. In Miilark, dusk brought a cacophony of birdcalls from the trees, settling or waking, like a changing of shop shifts. But here there was nothing. She thought that if they found no one here they would soon have to make camp, and she hoped Block would at least push on a bit farther before doing so.

  Block found some askew needles, and as Tilda boosted him back to the pony’s saddle, she spoke just to break the silence.

  “Captain, may I speak?”

  The gloom made it impossible to read Block’s face even as he turned to look down at her.

  “So polite? You must be near mutiny. Say on.”

  Tilda sighed and remained standing between the horses. “I am bound, Captain, to follow your orders with no explanation required. If you wish to pursue a single man instead of an army, then that is what we shall do. You need not explain, nor put the decision to rigged chance.”

  “I told you,” Block growled. “I did not know then, and still do not know now, whether the coin was worn and the toss moot.”

  “And I of course believe you without question.”

  “This is without question?”

  Tilda moved around her horse, patting the mare’s nose, to mount from the other side. She kept speaking, but now looked away rather than at the dwarf’s dimming silhouette.

  “Captain, we landed two months ago on a vast continent peopled by millions. Eight years behind a man who had left even his own name back in the Islands, and whose looks we can only guess at after so much time.”

  “I shall know him by his eyes,” Block said more quietly. “They are as green as the emerald pennants of the Great House of Deskata.”

  Tilda nodded as she pulled herself into the saddle, for she knew the stories of her own House. Her long black braid swung forward over her shoulder.

  “I mean only to say, Captain, that though we came to this place nearly rudderless, as it were, you have since guided us to within a day or two of the man, one among millions, who we seek. It is a most remarkable thing.”

  They sat facing each other on the side-by-side horses, and though Tilda could
not see Block’s face clearly, she supposed his dwarven eyes could still perceive hers.

  “Do you have a point, girl? Or do you just whistle at the Wind?”

  Tilda took a breath. “I mean to say that I follow you, Captain Block, as it is my duty. But even were it not, I would follow your whim or hunch with perfect confidence. I have learned to rely on them as I would on the tides.”

  Tilda felt immediately awkward, and expected no response from the dwarf other than, perhaps, an order to shut up. Batten her hatch and shove off. She in no way expected what she got.

  Block leaned forward and seized the end of the braid lying over Tilda’s shoulder. He jerked her sideways, nearly pulling her off her horse for she as yet had only one foot in a stirrup. Silver flashed before Tilda’s eyes in the fading light, a dagger in the Captain’s hand, and she quailed to the pit of her stomach, feeling what an Island poet had once called “the bird in the rib cage.”

  He is going to cut off my hair.

  Tilda thought it quicker than the actual words could be formed or needed to be, for she understood as did all Miilarkians who wore the braid that to have it severed was the ultimate sign of shame and rejection. The final formal act of negation preceding banishment from the Islands and their society. It was the last thing that would have been done to the man they were seeking now, on the day he was exiled and put to sea.

  But the Captain did not cut, he stabbed, and not at Tilda but above her bent body. Warm fluid that was certainly, sickeningly, blood splashed her back.

  Guilders were trained not to scream no matter what happened, not giving away one’s position being critical to much of their work. It was not much of a comfort to Tilda that the sound that came out of her was more of a squeal than a scream, but it was in any case covered by wild whinnies from the mare and pony as both horses bolted.

  Something hit the Captain but Tilda did not see it as the pony shot off between trees like a gray arrow, while the mare barreled away down the length of a row. Tilda’s right foot was in a stirrup but not the left, and she nearly toppled off the side before her knee wedged against the saddle. The reins flapped loose but she got a handful of mane, though her scrambling only succeeded in banging her heel against the mare’s belly. That did little to calm the horse down. Tilda pulled against her wedged knee, straining legs and hips, until a fumbling hand found the saddle horn and with a grunt she managed to haul herself up to a closer approximation of the manner in which one typically rode a horse.