The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (4 page)

“
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
^th
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.