The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (42 page)

The Sarge flipped shut the heavy book, and Phin was hired. Phin accepted the offer as while he was sure this bunch of Legion men were deserters of some kind, he supposed that description now applied to him as well.

He met the rest of the party at the Dead Possum, though as there were five of them already Phin was not exactly sure who was going into Vod’Adia and who was not. As Phin understood it parties of ten were the maximum allowed by the Shugak. The five people at the inn were a daunting bunch, led by the taciturn Horayachus along with three likewise dark men and one woman, all equipped with full suits of black plate mail bordered in fiery red, and huge two-handed swords. None of them said much of anything to Phin, nor to the five legionnaires for that matter, and among themselves they spoke only Zantish. Phin recognized the language from having heard it between Nesha-tari and Zebulon, but he did not understand a word.

Horayachus and his minions stayed sequestered in the adjoining bunkroom most days, only emerging to fetch food. The legionnaires were out more often with only one or two of them keeping to the inn. Phin knew his fellow Codians by name by now, though not very much about them. Most were Beoan or Tullish, except for the Sarge who was from Gweiyer, and according to the marks on their tower shields all had come from the 34
^th
Foot.

The Sarge and Rickard were still in their bunks as the noise from downstairs started to build again in the Dead Possum’s bar. Both grumbled and swore as they turned over. Phin gazed past them out the window, wiping damp palms on his blanket and trying to calculate just how in the hells he had wound up here. He wondered vaguely how Zeb, Amatesu, and the others were doing.

Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs from below and there was a now familiar jingle of legionnaire armor in the hall. Rickard and the Sarge were sitting on the edges of their bunks by the time their fellow man Ty pushed open the door and stuck his plume-helmeted head into the room.

“
Sarge, you’ll never guess who just walked in downstairs.”

In the light from the hall the Sarge’s bearded face split into a grin. His beard was not Legionnaire regulation and neither was the enormous emerald ring he always wore, the gemstone matching his distinctive green eyes. He was a convivial sort of fellow but there was something ugly and dangerous about his smile at this moment.

He hammered on the adjoining wall with a fist, then he and Rickard rose and hurried into their own clothes and armor. The door between the bunkrooms opened and one of Horayachus’s grim minions filled the doorway.

“
Tell your boss his girl is here,” the Sarge said, hopping as he pulled on a boot.

The minion had no eyebrows as his entire head was shaved clean. The skin where eyebrows would have been lifted, and he shut the door.

The Sarge and Rickard were strapping on breast plates. Ty stood in the doorway fingering the pommel of the heavy short sword on his hip and glancing back toward the stairs.

“
What is going on?” Phin finally decided to ask.

“
Nothing you need be concerned about, Wizard.” The Sarge belted his own sword around his waist. “Though it looks as if we may be getting into Vod’Adia on time after all.”

Ty chuckled and clashed a gauntleted hand against his tower shield. Soft chanting began in the next bunkroom, and red light played across the floorboards from the crack under the door.

*

Nesha-tari’s people had been given space in a Shugak barracks, but she spent her days and nights up in a watch tower out of which a stern blue glare had cleared the hobgoblin guards. By the last night before the Opening of Vod’Adia she was lying on her side and curled into a ball next to the trapdoor leading below, knees to her chest and eyes screwed shut. Every inhalation brought the stench of humanity into her nostrils and made her shudder as her stomach growled.

She heard the slap of bullywug feet approaching at a hop on the ground below, and recognized Kerek by his jingling adornments. Nesha-tari’s eyes snapped open like two blue lamps in the night. She scrambled to the edge of the tower to look down.

“
You found him?” she hissed, but Kerek heard her plainly.

“
He has finally activated a spell. A call unto his god. Your people are getting ready.”

Nesha-tari was ready. She put a hand on the railing and pounced over it, landing on the ground four stories below on her toes and fingertips.

*

Tilda and Dugan stood up as a middle-aged Jobian woman approached in a long blue dress and a leather apron. The Builder’s device was stitched on the apron and her hair was wrapped in cloth in the style of an Orstavian
bushka
. She was of a matronly demeanor, and smiled warmly.

“
The Builder’s blessing be upon you. I am Sister Paveline. I am told you seek some folk who may have sought our aid?”

“
Yes, Sister,” Dugan answered and Tilda allowed him to speak, figuring he was more familiar with Codian priests and their customs.

“
It would have been as many as five men, but maybe less. All Codians, Beoan or Gwethellen, from their twenties to one balding fellow about forty. They may have seemed like Legion men in their manners, though they were probably not in uniform.”

Sister Paveline raised a brown eyebrow with a grey streak.

“
Veterans?”

“
Ah, no Ma’am. They are renegade.”

The priestess frowned sharply.

“
Their leader would have had green eyes, Sister,” Tilda said. “Very striking.”

Sister Paveline looked surprised, but she shook her head.

“
I am sorry, but the only men we have seen here who looked like legionnaires, were actual legionnaires. There was a green-eyed fellow and two others, but they were in full uniform. Nor did they seek our aid, nor succor.”

“
Wait,” Dugan held up a hand. “The Empire has soldiers stationed here?”

“
I did not think so, but these men were on a mission.” Paveline looked between Dugan and Tilda. “The two of you arrived here with the pair from Daul, yes?”

“
Yes,” Tilda said. “Why?”

“
Well, the Legion men were here specifically to greet anyone from Daul seeking refuge in the Empire. Given the cost and danger of traversing the Wilds we hardly expected anyone like that to show up here, and no one had. Until tonight.”

Tilda stared, and a bead of cold sweat trickled down her spine to the small of her back under her layered clothing and armor. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. She did not know quite what it was, but she was sure of it.

“
Where did Claudja and Towsan go?” she asked.

“
Those are your friends from Daul? I understand Brother Heggenauer was taking them to meet the legionnaires at their inn, south of here.”

“
What inn?” Dugan asked calmly. Sister Paveline winced.

“
It is called the Dead Possum. Five blocks down at an intersection with a willow tree in the center. You can’t miss it as the sign is very…graphic.”

Tilda was still for one second. Then she dropped her pack and saddlebags and was running flat out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Heggenauer, the Duchess Claudja, and her knight protector Sir Towsan were led through the Dead Possum’s bawdy common room by two legionnaires while the third had gone upstairs to fetch his commanding officer. Heggenauer felt a pang for the debauchery on display was hardly suitable for a woman of the Duchess’s high station, but on being informed by Father Corallo that there were Codian Legionnaires in Camp Town awaiting the arrival of anyone from Daul, the Duchess had insisted on being taken to them immediately rather than having them summoned to the Builder’s House. Sir Towsan had not been pleased, but the noblewoman who no amount of rude outfitting could make look common had been adamant.

They were led down a hall away from the noise and smell and ushered into a narrow room where the light from a lantern illuminated towers of spent ale kegs lining the walls. Towsan looked about dubiously and turned to eye the legionnaires with his arms folded across his chest.

“
Sorry ’bout this,” one of them said. “The Sarge will find a better place for a talk.”

Heggenauer looked between the two soldiers. Their armor and weapons were spotless but the clothes underneath deeply soiled. Their chinstraps crossed faces badly needing shaves, and one of their helmets was not even Legion issue. Heggenauer looked at that man’s tower shield, noting the identifying numerals under the Book-from-the-Water standard.

“
Where is the 34
^th
Foot now stationed, soldier?”

“
Orstaf, sir.”

“
You are a long way from there.”

“
Detached special duty, sir.”

The man’s answers were smartly given but Heggenauer still did not like his looks. Before he could ask anything else boots clopped in the hall and the door was opened by another bearded Legion man wearing the plain helmet of a sergeant-of-the-line, and boots instead of marching sandals. He carried no tower shield and looked over all those in the room with shining green eyes, smiling broadly and snapping a salute.

“
Good evening, or very early morning,” he chirped in the cadence of a native Gweiyerman. “Sorry about the digs…”

The Duchess squeezed around Heggenauer and Towsan.

“
We were told there is a Codian official here awaiting us,” she said, then gave the sergeant a haughty looking-over. “Would you be him?”

“
Indeed no, your Highness. He awaits just across the rear yard. Fetching wine and what not to the empty stable there. It is clean, and altogether nicer. Won’t you step this way?”

The sergeant backed into the hall and stepped to the right. The Duchess and her knight exchanged a look before the old man led the way with her close behind. Heggenauer moved to follow them but when Claudja was through the doorway the two legionnaires still in the room leaned their shields across it.

“
We have it from here, Brother,” one said. “Best go back to your temple.”

“
Legion business, sir,” said the other. “No need for you to be involved.”

“
Involved in what?” Heggenauer demanded.

The Duchess shrieked, and Heggenauer snatched up his mace by its wrist cord even faster than the Legion men drew their swords.

*

Zeb ran awkwardly and with his helmet bouncing on his head for they had left the Shugak palisade so fast he had not had time to cinch-up his armor. He had barely gotten his boots on.

Amatesu noticed him struggling and dropped back, leaving Shikashe a quarter block ahead and Nesha-tari out in front even farther. The shukenja ran alongside Zeb and managed to pull the straps of his ring mail jerkin tight on the fly. He handed her his crossbow and buckled his chin strap, crashed to the ground and rolled once, but stumbled up and kept running.

Amatesu handed the crossbow back and before she sprinted ahead Zeb managed to shout between gasps.

“
Will you tell me where we are going now?”

Amatesu looked back at him.

“
We are going to kill a priest.”

Zeb hitched a step and Amatesu began to pull away.

“
What? Wait! Why?”

“
He is not a nice priest,” Amatesu called over her shoulder.

They ran for several blocks, managing the crowd as all the men in the street seemed to have stopped what they were doing when Nesha-tari ran by. They were standing still and staring silently in the direction she had gone even as Amatesu and Zeb passed them.

They reached an intersection, Zeb trundling up last as Shikashe, Nesha-tari, and Amatesu stood in a row under a willow tree, facing an inn. There was a colorful but revolting sign painted on the front of an opossum squashed flat by a wagon wheel.

Zeb put the head of his crossbow on the ground and wriggled a foot into the stirrup. He had already cranked it but now placed a bolt in the groove atop the shaft. He stood up straight and began to gasp a question, but stopped as Nesha-tari threw her cloak back off of her shoulders.

She was magnificent. Zeb was well aware that she was some sort of dangerous monster, but in that moment he could not have cared any less. Her body in loose trousers and shirt was plainly ridiculous, both supple and strong. Her face was sharp and beautiful in a corona of tumbling red hair, and her blue eyes blazed.

Nesha-tari pulled her gloves off with her perfect white teeth on the leather fingers and it was the most fascinating process Zeb had ever seen. She said something Zeb did not hear, and when she turned her eyes on him he nearly swooned. Then she snarled and slapped the vacant look off his face.

Zeb yelled and grabbed his nose, which was bleeding across the bridge.

“
You split open my nose!” Zeb said accusingly, and as the sharp sting of it cleared his head for a moment he understood Nesha-tari as she repeated herself with a growl.

“
Tell Shikashe he is with me, through the front door. You and Amatesu go ‘round the back. Kill anyone coming out who looks like a Zant.”

Zeb translated into Codian automatically and Amatesu did so into Ashinese even as he spoke. On the last few words Amatesu stopped speaking and gave Nesha-tari an alarmed look, but the woman was already rolling like a storm for the Dead Possum’s porch and the open front door. Uriako Shikashe strode at her side and drew both of his swords.