The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (62 page)

In that direction, some distance behind them now, Tilda could see the district of tall buildings like temples or government halls, a part of the city they had moved widely around rather than setting foot on the streets covered with a slimy green sheen. Tilda could not see the intersection that had stopped them from the top of the tower, but she could make out a long open area between the grandest of the buildings. It was movement from there that had caught her eye, even from the distance. Looking closer she could see that there was indeed a great deal of movement going on down there.

“
Tilda,” John called from the trapdoor.

“
Come here,” she answered.

The others did, standing in a line beside her and Zeb. They did not have to be told what to look at, for a great mass of figures was marching in formation through the open area. Even the gray light of the sky above flashed on blades and armor, and from across the distance Tilda thought she could faintly hear the rumble of iron-shod boots.

“
Hob-o-gob-o-lin
,” Uriako Shikashe said, close enough to the correct pronunciation that everyone understood him.

“
I thought the Shugak told Nesha-tari they never entered this place,” John said.

“
They did,” Zeb nodded. “That’s why they paid us to come in for them.”

“
They appear to have changed their minds,” Amatesu said.

The six party members exchanged uncertain looks, for no one knew quite what to make of a large force of hobgoblins moving into the city behind them, heading their way. They did however hurry on their way back down the tower.

*

Once Phin had been choked unconscious, a bearded devil in white robes threw the limp wizard over a shoulder as if the tall man weighed nothing. Another hoisted Claudja the same way, though she at least was left awake.

The green-haired demoness in the skin-tight leather armor remained behind with four devils, while the two bearing the prisoners set off at a fast run to the south. They passed first through the plaza where Rickard and the Sarge’s bodies lay hewn to the ground.

“
I told you so,” Claudja whispered as her captor bounded past the sergeant, lying with his neck slashed open and his sightless eyes staring up at the sky. It only made her feel better for a moment.

The next few hours were of bouncing chaos as the devils ran down streets, scrambled over walls, and generally progressed as if utterly unaware that each jarring step drove a shoulder into Claudja’s belly. Her knees and chin banged against the creature’s chest and back, both of which felt like solid bone beneath a layer of skin thinner even than its robes. Claudja’s head was swimming within minutes and she could not see anything but cobblestones streaking by anyway. She thought she blacked out a time or two, but it could have been far more.

She was numb and addle-headed by the time the motion seemed to have stopped, and though she heard hissing voices close by the words were strange. Then she was bashing around again in darkness, her wrists still bound and now bleeding into her hands as the leather cord had been biting into her skin for days. The limp swinging of her arms was opening cuts. Claudja tried to move her hands to ease the pain and they brushed along a stone wall, then what seemed to be a curtain, then more wall. Then the devil was mounting stairs and its shoulder drove so hard and fast into Claudja’s stomach that she could not catch a breath between impacts. She tried to beat or kick against the thing but her arms and legs were feeble. She passed out again.

She was awakened by a knock on a door, and the soft, polite rhythm of the taps made her think of home. Claudja usually awoke early in the castle at Chengdea, but if she did sleep late a servant would always rouse her with just that sort of innocuous knocking, for there were always duties to which the Duchess must attend. She had a duty now, though of course she was not at home, nor in her own bed. But she was in a bed.

Claudja jerked awake with a gasp, and as she opened her eyes a soft light rose in the room. It came from an ornate metal brazier suspended from the ceiling, in which a warm glow arose from four round stones rather than candles or lamps. Claudja had seen such lavish things before, for she had been within the Royal apartments at the Daul King’s palace in Bouree.

She saw that she was in a bedroom fit for a royal now as well, lying on top of a heavy coverlet in a four-post bed with soft white curtains tied up on the cross beams. Claudja was clothed save for her coat and shoes, and as she sat up she saw them, the coat hanging from a hook on the back of a heavy door with an arching top. Her boots were on the floor next to an embroidered circular rug beneath a small round table and a matching set of light, graceful chairs with padded seats. The walls of the room were paneled in richly-stained wood of a faint orange hue, and tapestries hung on two of them, geometric designs rather than images.

The knocking came from the door again, so polite that Claudja had to resist saying “
Antre
,” purely from habit. She realized she was holding herself up on her arms and blinked in surprise as that meant her hands were not tied. She held her hands up in front of her face, though that made her flop onto her back again.

Her wrists were untied, but now each was wrapped individually with soft cotton bandages, damp from some sort of ointment and with flecks of blood showing through. The sight of them made Claudja aware that her wrists stung, which led to the awareness that her chin and knees felt bruised, her back and ribs ached, and she was tremendously thirsty and hungry.

More knocking, then voices.

Claudja got unsteadily off the bed, leaving a dusty gray outline on the covers. She looked around the room for a weapon but there was only an empty wardrobe with open doors, a curtained window, and a rather lovely paper screen with bright honeybees painted on it, trundling among flowers. The screen separated the rest of the room from a stone tub and a commode, both made of the same familiar black stone as was the rest of Vod’Adia.

The Duchess scurried to her boots and picked one up in either hand, then backed into the corner behind the tub, almost knocking over a rack of soft towels.

When the tapping came again, she called “Who is it?” at the door, and wondered what the point of that had been. She was sure she would not have liked the answer had she gotten one.

Three hard knocks shook the door in its frame, making Claudia jerk three times. There was a pause, and when another hard strike echoed around the room the Duchess shouted “Come in, then!” She crouched behind the tub, peeking around the screen with a boot raised to throw though it felt absolutely ridiculous.

The door opened and Claudja cringed as two little diabolic figures with sharp spikes on their backs floated in on bat wings, carrying a silver tray as big as they were between them. Their red eyes fastened on Claudja and she hauled back her arm to pitch her boot if they came closer, but they stopped above the table. They set down the tray, bowed in unison while hovering in the air, then beat wings out the door. A long arm in a white sleeve pulled it shut from the hall, and a lock clicked loudly.

Claudja stared, and only slowly crept to the table. There was a glass carafe of water and one of red wine, and a silver lid with a handle that fit into a round slot in the middle of the tray. Claudja reached out slowly and lifted the lid, raising her boot again in case something sprang at her from underneath it.

It was food, and it stayed where it was. Not great food, but a variety of the sort of preserved rations that adventurers undoubtedly brought into the city. Salted pork, dried figs, hard-tack biscuits. It had been heated and it looked and smelled far better than the garbage the dead legionnaires had been able to buy near the gate with their meager funds.

Claudja was near starving, and she justified herself by deciding that if her devilish captors wanted her dead, poisoning her would be about the least efficient way for them to go about it. She sat at the table and ate and drank, more like a gobbling duck than a well-bred Duchess, ignoring the silver cutlery and darting her eyes all the while toward the door.

The Duchess decided the wine was certainly a bad idea, but then tasted it and found it good. She drank all that as well, certainly too fast. The moment Claudja set down her empty glass, the polite tapping sounded again from the door, startling her into falling off her chair.

She scrambled up and grabbed the knife off the tray, then less certainly took the fork as well. She held both as weapons though they seemed even more ridiculous than had the boots, and backed into her corner behind the tub before calling for entry.

The door opened and this time a whole line of little spiny devils floated in, each pair with a steaming wooden bucket between them. The dozen devils looked at her and paused in the air, then slowly moved closer to the tub, all of them in unison.

Claudja squeaked and ran out from behind the tub, tried to vault the bed but did not fully clear its width and tumbled off the far side. Water splashed and she peeked over the dusty coverlet to watch wide-eyed as the two lines of devils filled the tub with steaming, clear water, passing full buckets forward and empty buckets back. They all bowed again in the air, hovering on wings that were moving nowhere near enough to actually be keeping them aloft, and then they began to withdraw.

“
Wait,” Claudja stood up before the last had gone. “Where is the man I was brought here with?”

Her only answer was the closing door, and the snap of the lock.

Claudja moved over near the tub, which she had to admit looked wonderful. There was a brick of soap on the towel rack, and suddenly the dust and grime covering every inch of her seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Every muscle was sore and aching. She supposed it was entirely possible the devils just wanted her clean before they cooked and ate her, but a lady of the Duchess’s standing should not after all appear at dinner in her present state.

Claudja undressed, left the silverware within reach on the towel rack, and slipped into the warm water with a groan she could not conceal. She was still just lying there a few minutes later, head thrown back and eyes closed, when the door opened and two of the little devils darted into the room. One snatched the dusty cover off the bed while the other grabbed Claudja’s pile of clothes, and the two were gone so fast that the door was shut and locked before Claudja shouted and threw the fork after them.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The party did not find a barracks building of a familiar kind in which to spend their third night in Vod’Adia, for by then they were in a very different place within the Sable City.

They had followed the route through the streets that Deskata and the Westerners had plotted from the roof of tower, heading to the right for one long block at the next intersection, then left until they were beyond the wall around the noble district. They then zigzagged several blocks south and west until emerging shortly before dark on the edge of the vast open area surrounding the great palace with its nine towers, standing on a leveled hill in the middle of the sprawling city.

In Zeb’s humble opinion, the place looked ever-so-much more terrifying from the ground. From a height and a distance the towers and long galleries had a wheel-spoke symmetry, but from the ground the whole place was a looming black pile of crenellated battlements and shuttered windows, behind which Zeb was not alone in thinking he saw the occasional moving light.

The plan however was not to go into the place, and Zeb was happy for that much. The party could not be sure they had beaten the legionnaires, Phin, and the Duchess to the middle of the city, but if they had not than the game was probably over already. They carefully explored a three-story house on a corner facing the open expanse of bare ground on the palace’s north side, and occupied the place once it proved empty. There was a sort of short tower on the roof that would have been called a widow’s perch in a port town, from which they could watch the ends of four separate roads giving into the area, counting the one they had come in on themselves. In all likelihood the legionnaires would come from the north along one of them, if they made it this far.

If a day or two went by without sighting their quarry, something would surely have to change for if nothing else the party would be out of food and water by then. Zeb did not want to think that far into the future when every day in Vod’Adia had become a violent trial, and the fact that no one else brought it up told him that the others felt the same.

The group ate their rations cold in the evening, for any smoke from a fire would surely have been seen from the palace. Amatesu went up to the widow’s perch to keep watch as the daylight faded, lying under a blanket to remain concealed. The others slept in the interior rooms of the house where candles could safely be lit, or kept watch from the open windows on the third floor, sitting in rooms they left dark.

Zeb sat a half-shift in a corner room with John Deskata after nightfall, the world outside once again completely black. John nevertheless sat on the floor before an open window, staring at the dark pile of the palace where an occasional light now indisputably winked in a window. Zeb tried to strike up a conversation a few times as he had yet to exchange three words with the man in as many days. He was met with total silence. John went away after his half-shift, and Zeb crossed his fingers in the dark.

“
Zeb?” Tilda whispered a short time later from the doorway, and he smiled.