The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (5 page)

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.

The mare broke from the orchard and raced up the grassy lee of a hill, less oppressive and with better light. She began to slow down, whinnying now as a call for her pony, but just as Tilda made a grab for the reins the horse screamed and drove back into a gallop.

She can smell blood
, Tilda realized, for she could smell it herself, soaking the dark cloak now clinging to her shoulders. She reached for the collar thinking to pull the garment off over her head and looked back for a moment past the mare’s bouncing tail. Her hand froze as something else broke from the tree line and zipped into the gloaming light of dusk.

Shadows and Tilda’s bouncing vision made it hard to distinguish detail, but what she saw was too much. Something like a mosquito, but the size of a house cat. Pumping wings with red feathers, more like a bird than an insect, though they sprouted out of the creature’s back while four limbs hung under it. It had beady yellow eyes that fastened on Tilda’s, set above a hollow snout like a foot-long stake.

Tilda turned and lay flat on her belly against the mare’s back, hissed “Run!” at the horse’s ears, and held on tight for a life that suddenly seemed desperately dear.

She looked back to see the beastly thing closing the distance, and a second one emerging from the trees behind it.

The mare clambered halfway up the hill before entering more trees, swerving madly as these grew wild and disordered, nearly shaking Tilda off her back. Tilda did not like where this was going and made another reach for the reins, but they were completely loose now, twisted and flapping out by the bridle. She leaned further, one hand clutching the saddle horn, but that only brought the bloody stink of her flapping cloak closer to the mare’s nose. The horse tossed her head as she ran and finally, inevitably, bucked. Already leaning forward, Tilda took to the air.

Flash of memory, too short and specific to be Tilda’s entire life before her eyes, but vivid all the same. Running full-tilt down the length of a platform in the cellar of the Guild house, throwing herself off one end into air thick with the smell of sweat and the mildewed stink of seawater. Block’s voice booming in the damp, subterranean space.

“
Roll with the fall! Do you want to hear bone snap like tinder?”

Tilda did not want to hear that, not then and not now. Her outstretched hand hit a branch and she did not lock her arm, only let it slide over roughly even as she kicked both legs backward and up. She was half-way through a turn when her breast and then hip smacked into the thick, unyielding bough, and though her desperate momentum carried her over the top, it still hurt about as much as any physical blow she had ever taken. Her hooked left knee caught, the arm wrapped by reflex, and Tilda hung suspended for a shuddering moment, bruised but unbroken, eyes screwed shut and teeth clenched so as not to bite through her tongue.

The sound of the running mare faded, and was replaced by flapping. Tilda’s eyes snapped wide open.

One of the beasties was on a bee-line right for her, close enough now that she could see the yellow claws on four mammalian legs hanging under it, and the unsettling absence of a face as the thing’s whole head was shaped like a cone, terminating in the sharp, hollow proboscis that pointed right at her.

Tilda’s club, sword, and gun were riding away on the horse. She strained toward a dagger in her boot but seized only the hem of her Guild cloak, caught around the hilt. The thing flew at her like a ponderous bird and there was no more time to think, only to move. Tilda hissed as she rolled her bruised body over the top of the bough, and as the creature hove in she lunged toward it, swinging her damp cloak by the hem like a fisherman casting a net. The inner lining of emerald green flashed, Tilda bagged the creature with an angry whistling through its snout, and her hooked knee came loose as her momentum carried her clean off the tree limb. Not knowing just how far off the ground she was, nor when to begin a tumble, Tilda instead tucked her chin to her chest, wrapped both arms around the struggling thing in her cloak, and shifted so that she hit the ground with the bundle between her right shoulder and the forest floor.

The impact jarred Tilda from head to toes, sending shooting pains around bruised ribs and down both arms. It was much, much worse for the thing in her cloak, which did in fact snap like tinder.

Tilda flopped to her back and lay in a heap, mouth open, eyes shut, cloak soaking through. She let out a ragged breath that tasted like bile in the back of her throat, and concentrated on neither passing out nor retching.

More flapping broke her concentration, but now fear kept her conscious and her last meal, an unfortunate choice of words, stayed down where it was. Darting eyes found the movement that was the second creature hovering among the hanging boughs. Tilda lay perfectly still but the thing was already drifting on beating wings in her direction, sharp snout swinging this way and that until it snapped to point at Tilda on the ground. Red wings beat harder and it came at her fast.

Tilda tried to move but found that she scarcely could, having more or less pinned herself by her twisted cloak. Her feet scrambled across the soft carpet of the forest floor kicking needles everywhere, and both hands scrabbled though she could get them neither to the dagger in her boot nor the one at the small of her back. The thing was already around the nearest tree and diving at her, shaft level as a lance to stab her, all four claws extended to dig in and hold on as it fed.

All training aside Tilda did begin to scream, but it caught in her throat as someone vaulted over her prone struggles to stand facing the diving thing.
Captain!
Tilda thought at first, but the man was a full-sized human. Muscled calves bound across with cords to the knees, sandal lacings over cloth leggings, landed at what was presently Tilda’s eye-level. The man swung a length of branch like a Miilarkian boy, or girl for that matter, playing stick-ball between the passing carts and wagons on a street of the capital city. He connected for what surely would have been a good hit.

The flapping thing made a flute-like hooting through its snout as it tumbled through the air and bashed off the nearest tree trunk. It fell twitching to the ground and the man made another bound, coming down on it squarely with all his weight on both feet. Feet in the thick-soled, round-toed marching sandals of a Legionnaire of the Empire of All Lands Under the Code. There was a crunch of bone, and the man quickly spread his feet apart as the ruined creature between them began to ooze.

Tilda lay as though paralyzed and the man was stock-still as well, makeshift club before him in a two-handed grip, head tilted as he listened intently. Tilda did not need to be told to hush, and made no sound anyway. Besides the sandals laced up his calves, the fellow wore a rough cloth tunic, belted at the waist and falling skirt-like down to his knees. The rough garment had no sleeves, but he had a blanket wrapped around his broad chest, fashioned like a Doonish
serape
. His back was still to Tilda and she could not see his face, but his hair was dark as the gloomy shadows and cropped very short, which made sense. Legionnaires cut their hair almost to the scalp, but the men of the 34
^th
had been under arrest and then renegade for a month. Discipline, not to say grooming standards, had certainly been eroding.

“
I don’t hear any more of them. No god loves a stirge.”

The man’s voice was startling in the silence. It was deep as befit his physique, and had the flat Beoan accent all legionnaires tended to acquire in time, no matter from what part of the sprawling Empire they originally hailed.

“
Loves a what?” Tilda asked from the ground in her smallest voice.

“
Stirges.” The man poked his club at the wreckage at his feet. “Blighted, blood-sucking trouble they are. A flock will drain a horse or beeve dry in an hour. Less for a man.”

The man turned to face Tilda, and her eyes flicked to the fat blade of the legionnaire short sword thrust naked through his belt on his left hip.