The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (16 page)

Phin was far more excited with his first assignment than was warranted, though he had not appreciated that at the time. It was a long journey from Abverwar to the distant Channel coast, and Phin extended the trip by first returning to Thol and the village of Llache on the shore of Loch Hwloor. He saw his family for the first time in ten years and they welcomed him as best they could, but it quickly became awkward. The siblings close to his own age were now young men and women, several with families of their own, and yet to Phin they were just as he remembered. He was a complete stranger to them. The little boy who had left at eleven years of age had returned as a tall, gaunt man with premature white streaks in his sandy brown hair and goatee. His eyes seemed always to squint, and they were sunk far back into his skull. His hands were pale and the long fingers were tattooed with Tullish designs in blue ink around the knuckles. They were never still, but flitted about like white spiders. There was no trace of the Tholish highlands in Phin’s voice, only a rasp that was often a whisper unless it was a snap or a sneer.

Phin had planned to stay a tenday, but he left after four.

The long voyage from Claypool took him south down the western shore of Noroth, past Tull and the coastal edge of the Girding Mountains, then down the golden coast of Doon and finally into the Western Strait, the narrowest part of the Noroth Channel separating that continent from Kandala to the south. Two days oaring up the wide Red River delta brought Phin to the location of his first assignment in the Circle, the place that had promised such excitement months ago. It was the city known to the Codians as Souterm, being the southern terminus of the Imperial Post Road, but it had not been known as such for long. Along with the whole province of Doon, the city had only been Land Under the Code since 1355 N.C., a mere forty years. The history of the city was far longer than that. Indeed it was virtually as long as history itself, for in the obscure time before the Norothian Calendar began the place had been
Ettacea
, the first human city on Noroth worth a name. Many overlords had held sway there over the subsequent fourteen centuries, and they had given the city almost as many names. For a time it was Esplendez, northern capital of the Agintan Kingdom across the Strait, and for a shorter while it had been the base of the Channel Pirates, who called it Murdertown. But to the locals whose roots were as tangled as the story of the city herself, she was and always had been
Ladamia
, “The Lady,” and she was not an “it” at all.

By the Nineteenth Day of Eighth Month, 1395, Phin had been in Souterm for five months and he had come to hate the sight of her.

It was not her fault, really. Souterm was as beautiful as billed, preserving in stone and iron an historical legacy unprecedented elsewhere on Noroth. There were still Ettacean works of towering black rock in parts of the city, wide boulevards and ornate fountains of Agintan design in others. Above the western docks with their twisting alleyways and obscure taverns reminiscent of pirate times rose Broadsword Ridge, former home of the Knights of the Albatross Order and still covered with perfectly squared districts of row houses between a great Exlandic-style castle at the south end and the White Cathedral of List on the north. Rich merchant homes lined the bluffs above the Red River and Codian warships bobbed at anchor where the river met the harbor. Great sandstone granaries stood sentinel on the west side of the waterfront, while across the harbor the spindly docks and tree-lined streets of the Pescadero made the place look like the fishing village which it still was despite being enclosed within the great city walls. And though it had long been decrepit, the hulking summer palace of Denando the Great still dominated the eastern skyline. With every dawn its fabled fifty towers dappled the surrounding streets with shadow and sun.

Perhaps the only place in Souterm where daylight did not illuminate some exotic wonder was the one place Phin had found himself each and every morning for five months. The North Gate through which what was now the Imperial Post Road entered the city had been rebuilt at mid century by the last, and worst, Grand Duke of independent Doon.

Duke Persedo’s gate was a monstrous mass of mismatched stone pulled from ancient foundations and streets all around, heaped up into a double wall of frowning battlements surrounding a barren courtyard with menacing arrow slits and murder holes facing both outwards and in. The doors of the inner gate were gone now, opening the space to the city streets where shops and inns awaited travelers, but nothing had been built within the enclosed square. The locals dreaded the place for it was there that Persedo had conducted public executions, including the hanging in 1349 of the beloved matron called “Grandma” Giones. That event had led to riot in the city, the Duke’s own execution shortly thereafter, and indirectly to the Codification of both the city and province within six years.

In the center of the courtyard square was the large circular basin of a defunct Agintan fountain, filled with dirt that sprouted unsightly weeds and the dead stump of what had once been the Hanging Tree. It was hardly an appropriate image to greet visitors to the grand city entering on the Post Road, but it was important to the locals that the area be left as it was, and the Codians had acceded. The customs house and guard barracks were in a tidy timber compound just outside the city wall and beyond the moat. Within the courtyard itself the authority of the Empire of All Lands Under the Code resided in one person only and for the last five months, from midnight until dawn, that person was the newest and lowliest member of the Codian Circle of Wizardry in Souterm. Phinneas Phoarty, originally of Thol.

As the sun illuminated the mismatched black, gray, and beige stones of the courtyard walls it also revealed Phin perched gargoyle-like on the dry basin’s edge, enveloped in the billowing gray robes of an Abverwar Wizard. Beside him was a staff issued from the armory in the Circle compound on Again Island. It was a heavy cedar pole inscribed with sigils from its iron butt-spike to the clear crystal globe that topped it, held between two carved hands. It lay on the ground in the basin next to Phin as whenever he tried to prop it up standing against the edge it threatened to roll to one side or the other, and the globe looked very fragile. Phin had no idea if the thing actually worked but he was sure that the armorer would not be happy if it was returned with a shattered bulb.

Under the Code, or at least under the expansion necessitated by the Codification of Tull in 1249, the Circle of Wizardry had the responsibility for monitoring all non-Church magic within the Empire. That looked a lot easier on parchment than it did in practice. Phin’s part in this monitoring consisted of using a simple scrying dweomer, theoretically boosted by the staff, on all travelers leaving Souterm via the North Gate during his shift. In the event magic was detected Phin was to give a verbal warning and make a note of it in the large, leathery tome he daily hauled here along with the staff. That was it. Just a warning and a note. Monitoring.

What pushed Phin’s duties beyond the realm of the ridiculous and fully into the absurd was the fact that during the course of his assigned shift, from midnight until sunup, the North Gate of Souterm was closed.

Not that egress was impossible. There was a small gap in the great wooden portal that shut up the north end of the tunnel through the outer wall of the Gate, the portal in fact being the raised drawbridge. The gap was sealed with a padlocked iron grill, but in theory someone with a burning desire to vacate the city at a godless hour could shout for the attention of a legionnaire guard patrolling the wall high above, and possibly convince the fellow to go find his sergeant and the key. That fetched, the lock could be undone and passage granted out to the stone landing on which the drawbridge rested when lowered. From there a nimble person could scramble down in the dark to the reedy edge of the brackish moat, and providing they had a good arm they could throw rocks across it to hit the ferryman’s hut on the other side. Once awakened, that goodly old fellow would then pole his raft across the moat, fetch the fare, and deposit the traveler on the north side ready to proceed on foot, as there was no method to get a horse across with the bridge up.

Needless to say there were few such travelers willing to undergo that rigmarole most nights. In fact after five months Phin was still waiting for his first. A few people had entered the city late by that method, but Phin was only responsible for those
leaving
Souterm, not for those coming in after hours. There was another junior mage, albeit less junior than Phin, who oversaw those entries from a comfortable post on the porch of the Legion barracks across the moat.

After the first night on duty Phin had thought it odd that the one Wizard across the way could not have overseen both entries and exits. After a week it seemed pointless to bother posting even one person here. After five months it seemed sheer lunacy, but also a fair summation of how the Wizard Circle of Souterm did everything.

A wagon rolled into the courtyard from the city streets, drawn slowly by a pair of oxen with what looked to be a father letting his young daughter drive from the board in front of a bed full of kegs. The pretty dark-haired girl pulled the reigns and chirruped the oxen to a snorting halt to wait for the drawbridge to be lowered in a few minutes. The girl noticed Phin on his perch a stone-throw away and beamed at him, clearly pleased with her own abilities as a teamster. His baleful stare from the depths of his hood went unchanged, and she stopped smiling and joined her father in pointedly ignoring the sour-looking Wizard.

Technically Phin’s shift had ended with the sunrise, but his relief had been growing increasingly late each morning. With a sigh for his numb hindquarters Phin uncoiled from his cross-legged perch and shook his long legs out of the folds of his garment carefully before standing up, for stepping on his own robe and sprawling headlong would not have been in accord with the dignity of the Circle. He picked up the staff lying in the weedy basin and set the spike on the cobblestone ground. Phin was tall but the crystal globe was higher than his own head until he inclined it toward the wagon, spoke a few words in the lilting dialect of Old Tullish, and wiggled his fingers purely for effect.

The father and daughter were both looking at him now with their eyebrows identically raised, but of course nothing happened. The beer or ale or whatever was in the kegs was clearly not magically active, and more the pity. Phin did not feel like sitting down again and so he leaned on the staff as though he were a man much older, and stared off into the middle distance at no one and nothing.

Two more fellows arrived early for the Gate opening. Phin’s shadowed eyes narrowed and he would have frowned had remaining expressionless not been a part of the unofficial curriculum at Abverwar. Despite leading a thin brown mule the younger of the two newcomers looked like nothing so much as a knight, being tall and broad of shoulder with a calf-length blue traveling cloak meticulously draped to one side of a shining silver breast plate. The man wore trousers and boots for the road rather than leg greaves, and with his hood thrown back fair hair of middling length shone in the rising sun.

It was the blonde hair that made Phin want to frown, for that and the steel breast plate marked the fellow as the very picture of an Exlander. That province still for some reason called itself
The First Kingdom
, despite having been Codian for a hundred-seventy-odd years. Longer than Tull, or Thol for that matter. Phin’s native country had in fact been an independent kingdom for another thirty years after Exland’s Codification, but the Thols didn’t go around calling their country
The Last Kingdom
. That would be idiotic. But try telling it to an Exlander, as the expression went.

Long before the Code arose in Beoshore the kingdoms of Exland and Thol had fought a war or two. Or three. Phin however assured himself that whatever resulting prejudice had been acquired in his youth had been removed from him at Abverwar, where all new prejudices had been painstakingly instilled.

The Exlander and his rat of a mule accompanied a balding man in the same sort of blue calf-length cloak, though the older man’s chest was protected only by a belly paunch, not a breastplate. He walked with a plain staff for pace rather than support, as the years that had taken the hair from his crown and put the salt in an otherwise pepper beard had not yet bent him. Phin saw the sigil of the Bridge stitched in silver on the chest of his blue tunic, and sighed. Builder Priest.

The pair rounded the beer wagon and both gave the father and daughter small bows that were returned with a nod and a wave. Words were exchanged and the girl quite possibly blushed at the handsome knight. It was hard for Phin to tell from his distance, but she certainly tittered. The knight looked around the courtyard and saw Phin leaning on his staff. He tapped the priest on the shoulder. The wizard willed them to stay where they were, but they came over with their pack-bearing mule.

“
Greetings, Circle Mage,” the priest said with a raised hand but nothing like the bow he had shown the civilians. He had the swarthy look of the local Doonish living under the warm Channel sun. Phin was as pale as a corpse. Up close the priest’s escort was even more annoyingly handsome, with a clean-shaven, lordly jaw, wide forehead over sky blue eyes, and strong features that looked like a bust of some ancient king done by some fawning sculptor who had left off all the imperfections.

“
Father,” Phin muttered, and added “Egg-lander,” toward the Exlander. If either man noticed they let it go. The priest eyed Phin’s staff.