The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (66 page)

“
Oh. That is…Dugan,” Tilda said. She looked around, but the man in question was not in sight at the moment.

“
His first name is John?” Claudja blinked. “All that time on the Shugak raft, and I never knew that.”

“
No, it is, but…his name…his name isn’t Dugan. He is not who I thought he was.”

“
Where is John Deskata?” Nesha-tari asked from where she sat in a chair against the wall, showing little interest in the food. Tilda still heard her words as they were spoken, in Zantish, and it was a very strange feeling to be able to understand them.

“
Is he not in there?” Heggenauer asked from further down the table, pointing at a closed door.

“
That’s Amatesu,” Zeb said, then gave up on talking to Uriako Shikashe and knocked on the only other closed door.

“
John,” he called. “The girls all want to wash your back.”

Tilda lowered her eyes and smiled, and Claudja noticed. The Duchess raised an eyebrow at her and gave Zeb a more appraising look than she had when Tilda had introduced them. Zeb Baj Nif looked scarcely less scruffy than he had before washing.

When there was no answer Zeb knocked harder, then pushed open the door.

“
Empty,” he said, and Tilda felt a sudden disquiet.

Shikashe must have felt the same thing, for the samurai stood and barked Amatesu’s name at the one door that remained closed. The shukenja opened it and stepped out, looking embarrassed. Her long black hair hung straight to her waist, shining and clean, more lustrous and gorgeous than Tilda would have thought possible of the typically tangled mess.

“
There were herbs and soaps,” Amatesu said, sounding more guilty than she had when talking about her past as a ninja. “I did not mean to, I meant only…”

“
Is John in there with you?” Zebulon asked. Amatesu raised her eyes from the floor and frowned.

“
What? Of course not.”

Tilda jumped up from the table, knocking over her chair. She called John Deskata’s name and rushed around to look in the other side rooms, but the man was nowhere to be found.

*

A short time after the Duchess Claudja had appeared in his doorway, there was a knock on Phin’s door. He stopped pacing and glared at the portal. The knock repeated.

“
Enter,” he barked.

The door opened and a small devil with spikes all along its spine floated in, the same kind as those that had been coming and going all day. Phin could not tell them apart, and had no idea if he had seen this particular one before.

“
Mr. Phoarty,” the devil said. “Please come with me.”

Phin stared. “You can talk? I have been asking questions all day!”

“
We did not have anything to say earlier.”

“
Where is the Duchess Claudja?” Phin demanded for the hundredth time.

“
Downstairs, with the others. Please come this way.”

“
What others?” Phin asked, as he was fairly sure the Sarge and the legionnaires had all been killed.

The devil gave no answer but only floated out through the door, then down the hall to the left.

Phin rushed to the doorway but stopped and peeked out. The spiny devil was floating away down the long passage to the left, but to the right a bearded devil in white robes stood athwart the hall, its red eyes boring into Phin’s.

“
The Duchess was taken in that direction,” Phin shouted, but the devil floating away did not alter its pace.

“
There is more than one way downstairs, Mr. Phoarty.”

Phin looked at the bearded devil, and the creature flexed its scaly fingers on the shaft of the pole arm it held across its body. Phin recalled two such fingers being jammed into his mouth at his capture. He turned and followed the spiny devil, hurrying to catch up as the thing bobbed through the air.

“
How do you know my name?” Phin asked when he was behind the creature. The spikes on its back ran all the way down its serpentine tail. They looked something like porcupine quills, though they were thicker and set in a single, even row.

“
The others have spoken your name, and we have heard them. We have heard much of what they have said since entering the city.”

“
Who are the people of whom you speak, devil?”

“
My name is Poltus. They are the people who entered this place in pursuit of your band. Two Far Westerners, two Miilarkians. A priest and a soldier and a Lamia.”

Phin blinked and stumbled a step on the thick carpet at the mention of Far Westerners. Poltus floated on and Phin caught up once again.

“
What is a Lamia?” he asked.

Poltus glanced over its shoulder.

“
You would have to ask her.”

After walking far enough that Phin thought they must surely be at the end of the long gallery as he had seen it from his window, close to the central tower where the wings of the palace met, Poltus passed through an open doorway. The devil plucked a candle from a wall mount and guided Phin down a dark circular stair, the space so tight that Phin’s shoulders brushed the walls, and he had to hunch over so as not to hit his head. The confines made it hard to judge how far they had descended, and the stair ended at a single door with no other way forward. Poltus unlocked the portal with a key Phin had not seen the devil carrying, and the creature certainly had no pockets where it might have been. The door swung open to a lighted chamber, and the devil blew out the candle as it entered. Phin crept out after Poltus, and stopped dead as soon as he looked around.

They were within the central tower of the palace, a cavernous space of black stone fully illuminated from on high. Just below the distant conical ceiling, a ball of yellow light floated like a miniature sun, though one that could be looked at directly. Phin stood on a stone catwalk that ringed the whole space some twenty feet above the floor. Looking across it he could see several sets of descending stairs, regularly spaced and each forming a horseshoe-shape that flanked enormous double-doors on the ground level. These were surely the main entrances to each branching wing of the palace, for the doors up on the catwalk were all plain and serviceable, like the one Phin had just passed through. The large doors on the ground were intricately carved, with shining metal work for hinges and handles.

Phin could not see the central space of the tower until he shuffled forward to look down from the catwalk, and when he did so he felt his heart sink. The round floor descended in consecutive rings, each forming a single step that ran all the way around the whole chamber. There were about ten such steps, then a flat circle of floor, and then ten more steps rising in turn as in the center of the vast space were circular rings of stone set one atop the other, decreasing in diameter as they rose. The topmost was about twenty feet across, forming a dais upon which were mounted two tall pillars, not straight, but bowed in the middle and with the pointed tips bending toward each other like a pair of horns or tusks. They appeared to be made entirely of metal. Platinum, if Phin was any judge.

“
Oh…crap,” Phin muttered. “This is the Node, isn’t it?”

Poltus looked at him, and gave a small smile displaying teeth that looked like they were filed to points.

“
I gather you have read the book already. Good.”

Poltus’s wings moved a little and the devil floated down to the level of the main floor. Phin stayed where he was on the catwalk, leaning on his hands on the black balustrade. The little devil turned to look back up at him.

“
Come, Mr. Phoarty. Someone who needs to speak with you will be along shortly.”

Phin stared, at the devil, at the Node, at the great featureless walls of the tower, and at the false sun floating high above. The silence in the place was eerie and though brightly lit all seemed pregnant with unseen menace. The devil waited, bobbing gently in the still air, and Phin slowly took the nearest horseshoe stair to the floor. He approached Poltus in front of one of the nine sets of wooden portals leading to the gallery wings. The designs on the heavy doors were so intricate they looked like formulae.

“
You…you’ve read the book, too?” Phin asked.

“
As much of it as I could.”

“
Well, did you get enough to know that I can not do anything here?”

The devil frowned, and Phin jerked as the double doors behind him split in the middle. One swung open.

A grinning figure with green and blonde hair stepped out, wearing a deeply red gown. Phin took her as a woman for all of a second before noticing the wings, and the glassy red eyes. And the fangs. She stepped to the side, and a man came out behind her. Phin blinked at the filthy fellow, as he carried the familiar tower shield of the Legions.

He was unknown to Phin though he wore a legionnaire breastplate as well, and had an Imperial short sword on his hip. His helmet was an old battered thing of leather and iron. His dark hair and short beard were unkempt and matted with the gray dust of Vod’Adia’s streets, and his brown eyes were shadowed and sunken from lack of sleep. Phin did recognize the leather satchel hanging from a strap over the man’s shoulder, for he had been wearing it himself that way for the previous two days. Judging by the weight hanging in it, it still contained the Sarge’s book.

“
Phinneas Phoarty?” the man asked, his voice soft but with a sharp edge on his words. There was something familiar about him.

“
Y-yes?” Phin said, for there seemed little point in denying it, and he had the sense he did not want to make this man angry.

The man looked at him, then out at the Node. Poltus slipped innocuously out through the door, and the winged woman winked at Phin before she followed the spiny devil, pulling the door shut behind them.

“
This is the Node,” the man said. He brought one hand to the satchel. “And this is the book.”

He turned to Phin. “And you are the Wizard.”

“
I know you,” Phin said, staring. “You were at the Dead Possum. You cut the Sarge’s fingers off.”

“
Yes I was. Yes I did.”

“
What do you want from me?” Phin asked.

The man raised a hand and Phin flinched, but the fellow only set it on Phin’s shoulder. Phin was the taller of the two but the man the Sarge had called Centurion Deskata was built like a bull.

“
I just want to go home, Phinneas.”

The Node and the book and the Wizard. This man wanted the same thing as the other legionnaires. Phin started to feel queasy.

“
I can’t help you,” he said.

The man looked Phin in the eye, and for Phin it was like meeting the gaze of a dangerous animal.

“
You may wish to reconsider,” Deskata said. He grabbed a handful of Phin’s robes and dragged the wizard down the stone stairs toward the center of the chamber.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“
Balan, Balan, Balan!” Nesha-tari shouted, and the Devil Lord winked into being at the head of the table.

“
Damn,” Balan muttered. “Forgot about that.”

Zeb grabbed his axe from where it leaned against a wall as his crossbow took too long to load to be useful at the moment. Tilda however snatched up her bow and drew a bead on Balan, while Heggenauer raised his shield and mace. Balan smirked at all three of them.

“
You don’t really think any of that would work, do you?” Balan asked, but he lost his smile as a
snikt!
sounded behind him and Uriako Shikashe extended the white blade of the Breath of Winter, holding the tip of the curving sword just off Balan’s neck above his right shoulder.

“
Huh,” Balan said, glancing sideways. “Yes, that might do it.”

“
Balan, what have you done with John Deskata?” Nesha-tari demanded.

“
Not a thing, Madame. He decided to leave completely of his own accord.”

“
Where has he gone?” Tilda asked, still with her bow fully drawn back, the string hooked on her archer’s glove and her straight left arm trembling slightly.

“
Not far,” Balan said.

“
Enough dissembling,” Nesha-tari snapped, marching around the table and coming to stand quite near the devil. Tilda relaxed the pull on her bowstring before her arm gave, and Zeb knelt behind the table to load his crossbow as innocuously as possible.

Nesha-tari’s blue eyes flashed as she glared at the devil, standing near enough now to touch him but only raising one hand to jab a finger at his face. Zeb knew the woman was powerful, but the sight of her confronting the horned, hoofed, red-eyed Devil Lord with her hands empty of weapons, or lightning for that matter, was truly impressive. She growled as she spoke to Balan.

“
You will tell the truth to me now, as your kind must. What is it you think to do here?”

Balan stared into Nesha-tari’s eyes, and a wistful smile played about his dark gray lips.

“
There is no need for such a coarse tone, Madame. Nor indeed for you to involve yourself here at all.”

Balan looked at Nesha-tari with a solemn expression on his diabolic features, and spoke with complete sincerity.

“
There is no reason what I do here need be of any concern to you, nor to your Blue Master, Akroya the Great.”