The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (61 page)

That was literally true, as was the fact Nesha-tari had told Balan she would leave only when she was ready. But Danavod had not asked Balan directly what was said.

Danavod gave a dismissive toss of her great head, and with another flurry of bows Balan left the courtyard by another long hall. He stepped well along it before allowing himself a broad smile.

The Great Dragon was afraid, and the fear of such a powerful being was intoxicating to the Devil Lord. The cyclical Openings of the Sable City had proven to be a great boon to the coffers of Danavod’s Shugak, and thus to her own hoard. Her agreement with Balan and his ilk had been of benefit to both sides, but it was ultimately of more value to the Dragon. There were plenty of ways for the devils to stake claims on the souls of those departing this world, and from many other worlds beyond this one. There were always more worlds, though there remained but one Hell.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The party slew more than a dozen demons in the tower before they reached the top and found a trapdoor out to the flat roof. Actually, Shikashe and Deskata had done most of the slaying, while Tilda, Zeb, and Heggenauer handled the leftovers.

Tilda herself had picked off two, one clawed thing with a beak on the third floor, then on the fifth her arrows had found the heart of a four-legged, dog-like creature with a disturbingly human head, though it had barked plenty. The party cleared each floor before ascending to the next and while the others were busy Tilda had managed to slip a jeweled collar off one of the slain creatures and secret it in a pouch. She was not quite sure why she had done so, but for a moment some Miilarkian part of her had taken over. She had determined that whatever else happened, she should at least give herself some chance to profit monetarily from this whole awful mess.

Since the fight with the bearded devils the day before, Tilda had felt a coldness growing in her stomach as gray and cloudy as the sky above the Sable City. Before that encounter she had told herself that the legionnaires who had abducted Claudja had a good chance of staying alive in Vod’Adia, so long as they stayed on the streets during daylight hours and found safe havens at night. But the attack in the open had given the lie to Tilda’s hopes. While her own party had dispatched the half-dozen devils without much trouble, they had a samurai with fearsome magic swords, a Dragon Cultist throwing lightning, and a Jobian cleric to bless weapons so that they told against the beasts. Claudja was the prisoner of three legionnaires with no magic, and a Wizard who Zeb had insisted was not a bad fellow, but who was also far from an archmage.

Claudja’s odds were that of a
misag uyak
as they called it at the Island Stakes in Miilark. The Fool’s Bet. The Duchess was almost certainly dead already.

Tilda was aware that the likelihood of Claudja’s demise should not have weighed on her nearly as much as it did. She had only known the Duchess for a matter of weeks, and though they had talked at length over the long days on the bullywug Gorpal’s slow-moving raft, they were really little more than acquaintances. Furthermore, Tilda had plenty of reason to believe that the determined little Duchess had paid Gorpal’s crew to cut the throats of six Daulmen while they slept. An efficient decision, but hardly endearing.

Yet Tilda had chosen to come into this dark city in order to help the Duchess if she could, and when Brother Heggenauer had asked her why she had said it was because Claudja was a friend. She had meant it too, but now Tilda had the feeling that she should not have trusted her own judgment. She had entered the city because it was her own choice to make, not John Deskata’s, not Captain Block’s, not the great House back in Miilark. The reason the Captain had brought Tilda to this continent was surely moot unless John pulled off a miracle and somehow used the Wizard, probably dead by now as well, and a book, probably lost, to send him magically back to the Islands. Tilda had not entered Vod’Adia for that slim chance. She had made a choice to do something of her own choosing, rather than doing what was expected of her. It was the second time in her life she had done such a thing. The first had been when she left her father’s shop on Chrysanthemum Quay, and applied for entry into the Deskata Guild.

From her vantage point now, neither choice looked to have been a good bet.

Tilda’s literal vantage point at the moment was in fact quite impressive. The climb to the top of the tower had been worth the fighting, for from seven stories above Vod’Adia’s black streets the city was laid out before the party like a map. The rain above had stopped and while the dome of mist seemed close enough to touch from the tower roof, the view all around was unobstructed. To the north the streets the party had traveled for days could be traced almost all the way back to Vod’Adia’s gate, while to the west the black wall they had been skirting since yesterday was revealed as enclosing a district of sprawling houses large as mansions in their own walled yards, with paths and open plazas filling the spaces between. Looking ahead to the south the party could see that they did not need to enter that district at all.

Beyond the wall enclosing the south end of the mansion district, an enormous palace complex sat atop a slight rise surrounded by ugly open ground of bare dirt, hacked tree trunks, and arching footbridges spanning ditches that once had been streams winding among leafy trees. The palace itself was both enormous and of an odd arrangement, with nine round towers evenly spaced to form a circle, each connected to a central keep by long galleries of three or four stories in height. Each gallery was wide enough to contain their own courtyards, rows of battlements, and columned porticos. Even though the whole structure was made of Vod’Adia’s characteristic black rock it all seemed somehow more decorative and ornamental than it was designed for defense, or for any other practical purpose.

John Deskata, Uriako Shikashe, and Amatesu were hunkered down on the southern side of the tower roof to study the distant palace, with the shukenja translating between the ex-legionnaire and the
ronin
samurai. Somewhere between the third and sixth floor Deskata and Shikashe had become pals as the two of them did battle shoulder-to-shoulder, and even now Shikashe clapped John on the back and chuckled at something the bearded Miilarkian man had said.

The gesture made Tilda frown. She turned away from the trio at the south edge of the roof and saw Heggenauer was watching them as well, seated cross-legged by the trapdoor into the tower lest anything stick its head up from below. The Jobian was cleaning the gory head of his mace with a cloth, removing demon blood from the peaceful designs etched thereon, but he was doing it absently as he looked at the Far Westerners. His handsome face was deeply thoughtful, and if it made him look less bold at the moment, that was not at all bad. He had been looking that way since Amatesu had told her story the night before.

“
Are you all right, Brother Heggenauer?” Tilda asked.

Heggenauer nodded before he glanced at Tilda, then gave a wistful smile.

“
Thinking, I am afraid. An unseemly pursuit for a man of Exland.”

Tilda smiled a little despite her mood. “What are you thinking, if I may ask?”

Heggenauer looked at the clean head of his mace, and put his right hand through the leather thong at the base of the handle to let it hang close at hand. His shield lay on the roof next to him and he touched the arched line of Jobe’s holy symbol.

“
I am thinking that I went from my father’s house directly to the service of a good knight, and thence to the Builder’s House, without very much time between.”

He looked across the roof at the samurai and the shukenja.

“
I am thinking that the world is a more complicated place than I have thus far been led to believe.”

“
Does that make it better, or worse?” Tilda asked, and Heggenauer narrowed his clear eyes.

“
It makes it harder,” he said.

Tilda felt like putting a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. But she didn’t. She walked past the pensive priest.

The roof of the tower was rimmed by battlements but they were only decorative, rising no higher than a knee. Deskata and the Westerners were kneeling well back from the southern edge but Tilda saw that on the east side, Zebulon was actually standing with one foot up on the short wall, leaning on his arms crossed atop his raised knee. Tilda stepped heavily as she approached, lest she startle him into pitching headlong over the edge. Somehow that seemed like something Zeb might be capable of doing. Tilda stopped a good two steps back.

“
Have you no sensible fear of heights?” she asked.

Zeb looked at her over his shoulder and grinned. The tower had been dusty inside and the gray powder was caked in his scruffy beard and as much of his bushy black hair as escaped irregularly from under the rim of his battered Ayzant helmet. He looked like a crazy old man on the edge of the roof, but Tilda smiled back at him.

“
Miss Matilda,” he said, sounding theatrically offended. “Do you not know that I hail from the mighty fortress city of Wakminau? Standing sentinel atop the cliffs of the Minau Hills, where they loom to their greatest height above the Bifurcation? A man can’t walk outside in Wakminau if he is worried about taking a fall. Honestly, on the morning after a feast day, the rivers below are clogged with bobbing drunks.”

Tilda looked past Zeb over the winding streets and the endless blocks of black stone, with the featureless gray sky looming above. They had all seen some movement down there, small clusters of adventurers creeping along, but the distance was too great to discern details.

“
Is the view any better in Wakminau?”

Zeb screwed one eye shut at Tilda and craned the other open wide, sending a gray-flecked eyebrow halfway up his forehead. Tilda heard herself laugh and though it sounded strange in the stillness high above the city, it felt good.

“
Tilda, my adorable ignoramus,” Zeb sighed. “How can a worldly woman of Miilark not know that the Bifurcation, seen from the cliffs, is the most beautiful spot in the world?”

“
Better than the Capital of the Islands?” Tilda asked. “Seen from the Avenue of the Magnates?”

Zeb snorted. “And what does one see from there? Warehouses, and great heaping stacks of money?
Pishaw
, if I may say so.”

Zeb stood upright, and gestured out over Vod’Adia as he spoke.

“
From the top of the
Wak,
to your left you would see the mighty Dranner at its widest, the great river at a lazy blue rest after frothing down from the Dwarf Mountains of Tor, and churning whitely across the Midyiss forests and the hard Hisine plains. Boats there would be upon it, the square-sailed barges of Turria and Molok with their stripes of orange-and-yellow, and brown-and-black. So too are there the sleek pleasure craft of the Bowganese, slim as canoes and with the triangles of their white sails dotting the water.”

Tilda opened her mouth to speak, but Zeb pivoted to his right and went on.

“
Straight across the Dranner’s end lays green Bowgan itself, the old Elf city of cottages and shady glades with the two lines of perfect oaks spiraling up Thancil Hill to the
Miresh Tane Cladath
, that is the Castle of the Trees. Below that olden place you would see the Dranner as it divides into the Riddle and Ghendal
against the hard headlands climbing up to the jagged mountains called the Dragon’s Teeth. There stand the stout docks and the dun-colored waterfront of ancient Antersau, the Gateway to the Channel, where time and again men stood and held with their backs to the river whenever the Great Red Dragon sent his legions pouring over the southern mountains. So too it was from Antersau, some do say, where came the man who with spear and sword slew the Great Wyrm in the year 945, thanks be to all the gods of everyone, huzzah!”

Zeb raised a fist as though it held a tankard, and gave Tilda a wink.

“
That’s when everybody in the bar downs their drink, and buys another.”

“
Such a hero wasn’t from Wakminau?” Tilda asked, playfully.

“
Well, obviously he would have been, but Wakminau wasn’t around for another three-hundred years or so. Not until Old Illygard sent peacekeepers into the Rivens, to quell the tumultuous lands on behalf of the Grand Council. But that, dear Island girl, is a longer and sadder story.”

Deskata and the others were getting to their feet, knocking dust from their armor and clothing and preparing to head back down after having plotted a route toward the palace at the heart of Vod’Adia. Tilda had slipped out of her present circumstances for a moment, but they were coming back to her. She stayed away a moment longer.

“
I would like you to tell me the whole story sometime.”

Zeb had hoisted his axe back to one shoulder, his crossbow on the other. He gave Tilda another smile, the kind that would have made his face look wolfish were it not for the absence of danger in his light blue eyes.

“
Then so I shall,” Zeb said as though he were making a vow, which he immediately ruined by frowning and tilting his head. “Provided of course we are not grotesquely butchered sometime later today.”

“
Or tomorrow.”

“
Or the day after that. You are catching on.”

They turned to meet the others by the trapdoor, but Tilda faltered a step as her eyes swept over the city stretching north. She said Zeb’s name and he stopped as well, then followed her over to the north side of the roof.