The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (9 page)

They followed the jag of the river upstream for another day and a half, staying on the east bank though it would not have been much trouble to cross. The channel of the river was scoured-out very wide and it surely would have run booming in the spring with snowmelt pouring down from the mountains. In autumn however there was only a sluggish stream in the middle of the channel, sky-gray water where honking ducks circled and sleek beavers eyed the passersby from their wooden forts. Across the river the lower ground among the hills and ridges was heavily wooded, and more than once small clusters of rooftops and puffing chimneys were sighted. The buildings were all of stone, with tall, peaked roofs and long eaves.

The trio could have crossed at a hundred paces but Dugan said it was a bad idea. He said all the high ground and the villages enclosed by the long bend of the Winding were the domains of the Codian Baron Mediwether de Trellane. The Trellane family had ruled here since long before the Code came to Orstaf. They were the descendants of nobles from Daul, the kingdom beyond the mountains, which had held sway over much of southern Orstaf and the course of the Winding until a century ago. The Trellanes had accepted the Code and thus become Codian nobles, but Dugan said they still ran their barony as they saw fit, and it was widely known that they did not take kindly to “strangers” from the rest of the Empire wandering their lands.

Indeed, the trio more than once saw watch towers on the hills across the river, or had their passage marked by parties of armored horsemen on the west bank.

The party camped one night beside the river, and there was little talking among them as Tilda and Dugan had wordlessly divided the regular evening chores several nights back. The renegade saw to the horses while Tilda started a fire to warm the thinning rations for dinner, and Captain Block did little if anything. The dwarf had become more scowling and taciturn than ever since Dugan had joined them, and he shut down any conversation over the fire with an icy glare.

Tilda’s aches and bruises had receded to the point where she felt up to doing her regular Guild calisthenics upon arising at dawn, which Dugan watched while pretending to do other things. Tilda ignored him and finished her exercises, assuring herself that she performed them only because they warmed her up on the increasingly cold mornings.

After another half-day of travel the Girding Mountains were all the more imposing, forming a gray-and-green wall of jagged peaks across the southern horizon, topped by a permanent white snowline. The true slopes of the mountains were still at least a day away, but a jumble of piney foothills spread out before them. The three travelers reached the spot where the Winding emerged from the hills and began its long northern jag around the Trellanes’ narrow barony, and the Miilarkians stopped their horses to survey the scene. Tilda was surprised to find that while the ocean remained hundreds and hundreds of miles away, the place reminded her a bit of home.

Her parents’ shop on Chrysanthemum Quay sat just above working docks, and most every morning of Tilda’s first twenty years of life had begun with the sounds of stevedores floating up to her second-story window. Men laughing and joking, mocking old friends or singing a dockside ditty. Tilda had learned a number of words from those songs which it had not, strictly speaking, been proper for a young girl to know. They were words she would never repeat with her mother in earshot, but they always made her father giggle.

Here on the bend of the Winding was a different kind of port, but one that was still familiar. There were no deep ocean cutters nor many-masted tall ships of the kind to be seen in Miilark of course, for on the Winding cargoes were carried on shallow-draft barges. Long docks extended from a stone quay on the Trellanes’ side of the bend, just short of a wide, wooden bridge with stout arches built on stone piles in the stream. Two guards stood on the near end of the bridge, while across at the docks several river craft were moored. Brawny men crawled about the boats as they shifted bulk goods with the aid of rope-and-tackle cranes that looked vaguely like gallows. Various cargoes were moved both from the barges to waiting wagons, and back the other way. A good stone road stretched west from the quay past a few stone and timber buildings, one a barracks with an orange and yellow flag hanging limp on a tall pole in the front yard. Only a few miles further down the road Tilda could see the gray shape of what looked to be a sizable town.

The Miilarkians looked over the scene from their horses, while Dugan stood between them.

“
That is Trellaneville,” he said, pointing at the town. “The portage road hits the river again just a couple miles further on, cutting across the whole long bend. Saves days moving upstream or down, even while the river is high enough to float the whole way.”

“
I am guessing the Trellanes charge to use the portage?” Tilda asked. Dugan smirked.

“
Of course. It’s a turnpike. The baron sees coin on everything moving through, either upstream to La Trabon or down to the Runne, Lake Beo, and the rest of the Empire. He kicks some money up to his Earl, thence to the Duke, thence to the Emperor, and so nobody bothers the Trellanes on their own land.”

“
Is this where the Lepokahan has come?” Captain Block growled, and Dugan shrugged.

“
I doubt it.”

Tilda and the dwarf both looked down at the renegade, who met their glances without concern.

“
I said I know where the boys are
going
, but not exactly what route they are taking there. They left when they did for a reason. With Duke Gratchik calling all his men and the two closest Legions together to put a beating on Nyham, the countryside emptied out. There are a few different mountain passes they could have used to get to Daul.”

“
They are going to Daul?” Tilda asked, and the Captain looked over at her from his pony as if she were hopelessly dense.

“
You thought renegade legionnaires would stay in the Empire?”

“
I did not really think about it,” she said.

“
You may want to start thinking at some point, girl.”

Tilda lowered her eyes from Block’s cold glare, and saw Dugan give her a brief look of sympathy before he made it go away.

“
Look, the point is, it is too late for us to try and use a regular pass. By now the Legions stationed there will know there were renegades from the 34
^th
with Baron Nyham. They will be on the lookout, specifically, for men exactly like
me
, trying to get out from Under the Code. Get the picture?”

“
We are not both stupid,” Block said, and Tilda pressed her teeth together so hard that it made her jaw hurt.

Dugan looked at the dwarf sourly, and folded his arms. “You know what?” he said. “I was going to explain things for you, but as you are such a clever little man I am sure you will figure it all out along the way.”

With that the renegade legionnaire turned and strode off at his long stride for the near end of the bridge over the river, where the two uniformed soldiers were waiting in chain mail and tall, conical helmets. The Miilarkians looked with some surprise after Dugan before flicking their reins. The two horses moved forward and followed behind the renegade from habit.

The guards wore cloth tabards over their armor, orange with yellow griffin standards emblazoned proudly on the chests. The design matched what must have been the Trellane family banner on the barracks flag beyond the bridge. Both men had long swords on their hips and their shields were of normal footman’s size rather than the tall tower shields of the Legions. Each held a spear which they crossed as Dugan approached. He halted and gave a short bow while the Miilarkians reined up behind him.

“
Greetings, travelers,” one of the guards said in Codian, though his accent was not typical of the rest of Orstaf. “Please state your reason for seeking entry to the domains of the Baron Trellane.”

Dugan threw an arm back at the dwarf, and started speaking with a thick Orstavian accent that better matched his present appearance.

“
Behold,
tsers
, the Captain known as Block, of the Miilarkian Islands,” Dugan boomed like a herald. “Esteemed servitor of the mighty Trade House of the Deskatas. This Captain has private words for the ears only of your baron, and must speak in person to his Lordship right away.”

Chapter Six

South of the Trellane barony in Imperial Orstaf, and beyond the southern peaks of the Great Girding Mountains lie the realms of Old Daul, the Kingdom of the River Nan.

From north to south along the western border of Daul with the grim and tangled wilderness known as the Vod Wilds, lie the highland province of Heftiga, the fertile forest valleys of ancient Chengdea, and finally the sultry delta of Nanshea. It is there that the great river empties into the Noroth Channel separating the continent from the hard-scrabble coast of Kandala to the south. There on the Nan’s open mouth is the city the Daulmen have long called Larbonne, though its foundations date from a time long before Daul, or the Empire of the Code, or any other country had its name on a map. Once upon a time that city was
Ribin
, one of the great Channel ports of the ancient Ettaceans, the very first among the Norothian races of Men to make of themselves a nation.

The Ettaceans were long gone of course, and by the look of things in the city of Larbonne, the Dauls might not be long in following their forebears beyond the veil of history.

The war between Daul and Ayzantium, the River Kingdom’s less-than-neighborly neighbor to the southeast had lasted for nearly three decades, raging or simmering from season to season and year to year. What had been constant was the slow grinding down of Daulic power, from the loss of her knightly host on the Icheroon to the siege and fall of Roseille, Larbonne’s sister port to the east. That had been followed by the Zantish occupation of the Chirabis peninsula between the two ports.

Now in the twenty-eighth year of the war, the Ayzants had come to the last sliver of Daul’s coastline, and invested her last great port. Through spring and summer they had seized the docks and much of the lower city, trapping the remnant of the Daulic garrison in the sprawling castle complex atop three hills. There, towers and curtain walls of beige sandstone rose atop older Ettacean works of gray granite that had stood witness to a multitude of battles, defenses, and occasional massacres, ever since men first decided that this was a good place to live, and other men thought they were right.

Yet all was not well among the invaders either. Governance in Ayzantium rested on a tripartite divide of Royalist Kingsmen, Dragon Cultists, and the Fire Priests of Red Ayon, and the army was likewise a tenuous merger of differing interests and authorities. Further, three decades of war and foreign occupation had dissipated the blood of Ayzantium’s sons, and so a large portion of the host besieging Larbonne was not Zantish at all, but were rather mercenaries drawn in most part from the petty and squabbling Riven Kingdoms. One such unit, chartered from Kanalborg, was an outfit called Rierden’s Axes. It had a paper strength of almost a regiment, though after six months in Larbonne it surely fielded less men than that. Colonel Rierden had not been reporting his losses to his Ayzant masters, in the hope that at the conclusion of the campaign he and his survivors would be overpaid.

Such subterfuge was possible as the Axes had been broken up and parceled out in platoons for months, scattered around gaps in the siege lines in small groups, some of which had not seen an officer of their own above Leftenant rank in weeks. One such band had found itself stationed for the last ten days near the far northern end of the lines, where the Ayzants’ slapdash fortifications anchored on the river before wrapping east around the land-side of the city to reach the water again at the scorched remains of the dockyards to the south. On a flat-topped ridge separated by a sharp and deep ravine from the taller central hills where the defenders hunkered in their beige stone works stood the shell of an old Daulic manor house, into which an Ayzant artillery unit had been trying to emplace a battery for a week. As recently as a season ago the manor had been surrounded by gardens and rows of ornamental spruce that were all gone now, leaving the ground torn and gaping, Such trunks and limbs as were not hauled off by the Ayzants for fuel now formed a spiky log-and-abatis barricade atop the edge of the ravine, facing the castle walls high above.

A squad of sixteen Axes held the salient where the barricade met an old stone wall that ran off in the wrong direction to be of any use to the besiegers. Some Ayzant officer had ordered them not to tear down the wall and shift the stones, though no one knew why. Camp for the axmen was a cluster of tent-halves and lean-tos erected in the hollowed-out bowl where once a surely magnificent tree had grown. The craterous hole was deep and close enough behind the barricade that the occasional plunging arrow or bolt from the Dauls across the way had only killed one man and wounded two over the last ten days. By way of return fire, Rierden’s Axes had shouted a great deal of profanity in Kanalborg Common.

Shortly after dawn on the Seventeenth Day of Eighth Month, narrow sunlight plunged the ravine into shadow even as it made the Daulic wall across and above shine with a warm golden hue. A man with dirt deep under his fingernails and in his bushy black hair crawled out from under a torn tent-half in the bottom of the hole, looking like a sleepy mole groping out of its burrow. He negotiated the small pile of equipment before the shelter, consisting of ring-mail armor with the links sown onto a long leather jerkin crusted with old sweat, a helmet of Ayzant origins with the spike broken off, hobnail boots, a crossbow with a worn stock, and of course a battleaxe. The man stood up slowly to grunt and stretch in a patched, colorless tunic with threadbare sleeves, and faded-blue cloth trousers that threatened to slide to his knees as his suspenders were undone beneath the tunic. He yawned deeply, and probably would have belched if he’d had anything significant to eat or drink lately.