The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (37 page)

“
I am more interested in trade.”

*

Lolanhi could have bartered much harder for her shop was doing very well buying up excess weapons and armor from adventurers needing to raise hard cash for the Shugak. But Tilda got the sense the older woman felt a bit bad for her for some reason. In the end Tilda gave up the long gun, Block’s broken pistols, and her riding boots. She got back two capped quivers each holding thirty yellow-fletched arrows, and a short Kantan horse bow along with a pair of archers gloves, the left with a stiff pad to the inner bend of her elbow and the shorter right glove with a draw-hook sewn into a finger. The re-curved bow was of the same sort of composite design that the Miilarkians had stolen and been manufacturing in the Islands for decades, though this one was authentic. Plain but sturdy. The string hummed like an instrument when Tilda plucked it.

Lolanhi threw in a heavily-padded but battered leather jerkin, which Tilda judged would fit Dugan. The trade done, Lolanhi heated some tea on a brazier of coals, and the two women talked a bit while they sipped. Lolanhi asked gentle questions and when it became obvious Tilda had heard no word from the Islands in months, she broke the bad news to her. Tilda paled and the tea cup almost slipped from her hand.

She was sitting out on the cold stone of the curb a half hour later when light began to touch the eastern sky. Dugan came strolling along from the direction of the Stars and Stones, saw Tilda and crossed the street to her. Tilda gave no sign she noticed him, even as he stood right in front of her. He poked the folded leather jerkin on the curb next to her with the flat toe of his marching sandal, strapped on over heavy wool socks.

“
That looks too big for you,” he said.

“
It is yours.”

Dugan knelt and picked the armor up, holding it out at arms’ length. The thick hide of the old jerkin was scored and hacked all over, so much so that it seemed likely to have been stripped off a dead man at some point. Possibly more than once.

“
Thank you,” Dugan managed, but not by much. He set down his saddlebags and pulled the armor on, drawing up the laces that ran from the hem below his groin up to his throat. It fit well enough across his back and shoulders.

“
You got this in there?” Dugan nodded his chin at Lolanhi’s door, which the woman had opened a few minutes ago while sending a long, sad look Tilda’s way. Pagette had opened up across the street about the same time, but the man gave no sign that he recognized nor even noticed Tilda.

“
Yes.”

“
They have any helmets?”

“
Yes.”

Dugan waited a moment.

“
Are you angry at me about something?”

“
No.”

Dugan waited, then shrugged. He went into the store.

Tilda kept staring off at nothing, cold to the bone but hardly feeling it. She had no idea what she should do now and was suddenly too tired to even think about it.

After a time two more people appeared at the end of the block and it took Tilda a moment to recognize them as the Duchess Claudja Perforce and the Knight Sir Towsan. The knight was now clean-shaven, making his face look more emaciated than simply gaunt beneath a heavy leather skullcap. He wore a long coat of chain mail with steel greaves over knee-high boots and sleeves of the same kind, articulated at his elbows. All his armor was dirty, though not rusted nor scratched. His sword was on his hip and he carried a shield strapped to his left arm, round wood with an iron boss and a hoop around the rim. The shield was unmarked by any device or heraldry.

The Duchess did look like a serving girl, or perhaps even a young boy, in rough trousers, bulky sweater with a turtle’s neck, and a knee-length coat. A peaked leather cap rode at a somewhat jaunty angle atop brown locks that had been harshly shorn off, giving even her pretty face its present boyish look. The thought of the loss of so much lovely hair gave Tilda a sympathetic pang.

The pair carried backpacks and both had darkened their faces with dirt. When the Duchess was near enough Tilda almost smiled, for the dirt was evenly applied on both sides of the noblewoman‘s face.

Dugan had ambled out of Lolanhi’s shop wearing a metal helm with a short, conical crown and hanging cheek guards. It was a common helmet of Daulic foot soldiers and not altogether different than those worn by Codian legionnaires. Tilda stood up and Dugan stepped off the curb beside her.

“
I officially have no money. Again.” he said, but Tilda made no response as the nobles arrived. Everyone looked at each other and tried not to bow from habit.

“
Your Grace,” Tilda finally said quietly, speaking in Codian as that was the last language she had just been speaking with Dugan. The Duchess responded effortlessly in the same.

“
That should probably be the last time you say that,” she said of her title, and Tilda nodded.

“
Something you would prefer?”

“
How about ‘Timmy’?” Dugan offered. He got back a cold look that told Tilda all she needed to know about the Duchess’s feelings concerning her present appearance.

“
Claudja will do. And Gideon.”

Sir Towsan nodded though he did not look very pleased to be handing his first name over to the use of commoners.

“
This one is Dugan,” Tilda said, and Claudja raised a fine eyebrow at him.

“
A Gweiyerman?”

Dugan smirked, “Right you are, Claudja. In Correnca was I borned and breaded.”

Towsan said something in Daulic, not exactly hostile but neither pleased. Claudja nodded.

“
Yes, we should. The Shugak raft awaits us below the pier.”

Towsan started for the dockside and Claudja followed a step behind, shifting the pack on her back. Tilda expected the Duchess had never carried anything on her back in her life, and quite probably but little in her hands. Dugan took a step after them, then turned and looked back as Tilda had not moved yet.

“
You coming?”

Tilda said nothing. John Deskata was ahead of her, somewhere. Either in Camp Town or on his own way there. She and Block had come thousands of miles to find him and for just a moment, Tilda almost felt glad that Block was not alive to know that finding the man no longer mattered, for home had not waited on them. They were too late. They had failed. And it would cost the House of Deskata everything.

“
Tilda?” Dugan said, and she looked at him. “Do you still want to do this?”

Tilda shifted the straps of her own pack on her shoulders. She was so used to them now that she hardly felt them.

“
What I want has nothing to do with it,” Tilda said, and walked past the man after Claudja and Towsan.

*

The Shugak raft was not an impressive craft to a Miilarkian eye. It consisted of two large squares of timber several strides across, rough planks laid across logs all bound together with ropes twisted from vines. An awful lot of loose ends trailed in the water. The two sections were generally tied together to form a rectangular raft, but they could be detached to maneuver in tight channels. The one in the rear had a mound of provision crates and kegs of potable water in the center under tarps, for two weeks of feeding had been part of the ticket price.

The front raft had a sheet of ash-covered iron sitting atop stones in the middle, which seemed like a terrible idea for cooking. It also had the one piece of furniture on either raft, an old lounge piled in thrush mats with only tufts of the original upholstery surviving. The legs were nailed down at the front end of the raft, making the seat a sort of captain’s chair. There was a pink, ladies’ parasol nailed to an arm, which the captain opened every time he sat there though it was too small to offer much shade.

The captain, and the six or seven members of his crew, were bullywugs. The captain introduced himself to his passengers with a gravelly croak and a lip-smacking blow that puffed out his throat, producing a sound like “Gghhoooorrr! Plalp!” Claudja said its name was Gorpal. The bullywug was fat to the point of being spherical though colored a rather lovely shade of sapphire blue on limbs and back, lightening to a somewhat sickly greenish pallor on the belly and face, which had no discernible neck between them. The bottom half of Gorpal’s head was all wide, frog-like mouth, just a bumpy ridge for a nose, and the cupolas atop his head had long, black, vertical slits for pupils in otherwise milky-yellow eyes. It was hard to tell when the bullywug blinked, for both its sets of eyelids were transparent.

The exact number of wugs constituting Gorpal’s crew was hard to count, for at least half of them were splashing in the water around the rafts at any given moment. On the first stage of the trip, crossing the Black River, all the wugs except Gorpal swam alongside kicking their legs wildly and pulling or pushing through the current while the big rafts swung in majestic circles. All four human passengers sat on the second raft with their backs to the food crates, turning green themselves. Gorpal sprawled in his chair under his pink parasol and croaked commands at a high, wind-piercing pitch, slapping splayed feet against the plank deck.

Once across the river the craft passed onto a swampy backwater region of the Wilds, sluggish bayous and dismal swamps. The raft moved at a less sedate pace than Tilda might have feared for at all times, even on most nights, Gorpal’s crew kept them moving either by paddling in the water or else pushing along from the deck with long poles sharpened at the ends like pikes. Though somewhat jungle-like the shadowy environs bore little resemblance to Miilark, and Tilda did not find them pleasant. The trees were all warped as though twisted in agony, covered in creeping vines that seemed to be trying to strangle them. Saw-grass in damp fields shifted in the breeze and made an unsettling sound like shears through stiff parchment, though it was often drowned out by weird bird calls that somehow sounded accusatory. The raft was often close to the tall banks, and on the first day when Dugan snagged a mottled gray and purple fruit shaped something like a plum from an overhanging bough, Gorpal rushed him with croaks of alarm and a flurry of slapping feet. The wug snatched away the fruit and with a series of pantomimes conveyed the impression that everything,
everything
in the Vod Wilds was poisonous to humans. Then Gorpal ate the fruit.

The wugs actually ate all day, plucking passing fruit or sometimes floating on their backs to devour fish, as it seemed they had some sort of teeth or something else they could chew with far back in their mouths. Most often however they spit out pink tongues several feet in the air anytime a dragonfly or other drowsy insect buzzed by in the chilly air. The first time it happened it startled Tilda so bad she almost produced a dagger, but she became accustomed to the wet snaps and pops in time as they were as constant as the lap of water against the log rafts.

For the first few days the four travelers spoke hardly a word among themselves except for Claudja and Towsan, who talked to each other in Daulic. They all ate together twice daily for in the middle morning and late afternoon the wugs managed to cook the excess fish tossed onto the raft during the day without setting the deck on fire. Hard cheese and harder rolls occasionally appeared from the crates, but the only fruit or vegetables made available were shrunken grapes soaked in wine, which only Dugan could stomach. While eating, Tilda and Claudja would pass a few words in either Codian or the Trade Tongue, but neither said much.

After almost a week on the backwaters, the Duchess seemed to have had enough of it, or else she was becoming bored only talking to Towsan. The old knight had cleared a sheltered slot between crates and under a tarp for the Duchess’s bedroll, while the others slept in theirs against the outside of the provision boxes. One early morning Claudja emerged from her shelter, carefully stepped over Towsan who was still asleep lengthwise across the entrance, and sat down cross-legged next to Tilda who was already seated likewise on the raft’s back edge. The vessel was too primitive for Tilda to really consider this end of it as a stern.

The morning was crisp as they all were now, but the sky was turning blue where it could be seen through the interlocked branches above. Claudja drew in a long breath.

“
Another fair and fine day in the green hell,” she said in Codian. Tilda gave a small smile, and from somewhere came a cooing sort of whistle she had been hearing for days.

“
Do you know what kind of bird is making that sound?” she asked.

“
That? That is not a bird, it is a thief otter. Chatty little brigands.”

“
Thief otter?”

Claudja nodded. “I am surprised you did not see any on the Chengdea docks, the little miscreants are everywhere. They snatch up any food not under lock and key, and use anything else they can drag off to build up their hutches on the riverside. Terrible robbers and burglars. No offense.”

Tilda glanced at the Duchess but Claudja maintained a straight face. She took up a leafless twig that had fallen to the deck and trailed it in the water.

“
Matilda,” she said after watching the ripples for a while. “Are you all well?”

Tilda raised an eyebrow at her and Claudja met her gaze with her own eyes soft, looking genuinely concerned.

“
I only ask because on the night we met at the inn, you seemed in far better spirit.” Claudja looked back at the trailing twig. “I know you are bound for a place of great danger, on what I assume is an important task. I understand if you wish to be left alone to think on your own concerns. I merely thought I should offer a word, or an ear, if you want either.”