The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (6 page)

“
Are you all right?” he asked, reaching Tilda in a stride and kneeling close enough for her to perceive his features in the gathering gloom. Her spirits were divided by what she saw.

First, the fellow was quite handsome, which was a good thing in and of itself. Legion regulations tolerated no facial hair but this fellow had a beard and mustache coming in along with the hair on his head, still short but black and thick. It framed rather than hid what were good features. Strong jaw, high cheeks, and a brow that was a bit on the thick side, giving neat dark eyebrows a slightly forward-thrusting look of intensity. His deep-set eyes in the plunging shadows looked to be a murky shade of brown however, which, while not unpleasant, were certainly not emerald green.

But really, odds of 500-to-1 against had been far too long to bet.

“
I think I need to burn my cloak,” Tilda said, and indeed the man’s nose wrinkled as he got a whiff of the gore from Tilda’s garment.

“
You fell on one?” he asked with a note of amusement, obviously having missed Tilda’s haphazard acrobatics. “Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”

Tilda accepted the offered hand and felt the rough calluses of practice with weapons. Her hands were much the same, though she still had her gloves on. She let the man help her up and gave a shudder and a groan as the bloody mess of the first stirge slid out of her cloak and plopped to the ground. She had almost straightened fully when her long braid swished loose over her shoulder in what was rapidly becoming only moon and starlight. Tilda felt the man’s hand tighten on hers and then suddenly release, and she pitched forward off-balance to fall headlong back to the ground as he danced several steps away. He cast aside his branch, gripped the hilt of his sword, and snarled.

“
You are a Miilarkian!”

Tilda, with the wind knocked out of her, groaned neutrally.

“
What in the hells are you doing out here? And alone?” The man barked with the voice of command, surely as he would have were he still a soldier of the Legions. Before Tilda could muster enough breath to answer the fellow said, “Or are you alone at all?” He drew his sword cleanly while taking several more steps away to put his back against a tree trunk.

Horses approached at a trot and swiftly appeared, dark shapes that were the Captain on his pony, leading the mare. Both animals hung their heads in a manner distinctly sheepish for horses, but the dwarf’s hood snapped about as his shadowed eyes raked the surroundings. His gaze passed over Tilda with nary a pause, then locked on the legionnaire. Block was out of the saddle quick as thought, advancing on the man and striking a spark from a flint in one hand. The oil-soaked head of a torch bloomed and the Captain thrust it toward the legionnaire’s face. The man scowled and squinted in the sudden light, teeth and sword bared, but Block stared only at his eyes.

Brown.

“
Damn your eyes,” the dwarf growled, sounding both angry and suddenly tired. The man only stared back, blinking, and Block shifted the torch so the light fell on Tilda.

“
Are you alive?”

Climbing back to her feet, Tilda felt like she had fallen off the Ghost Mountain, bouncing the whole way down.

“
Mostly.”

The torch swung back to the gaping legionnaire. He had recognized Tilda for what she was by her braid, but seemed utterly dumbfounded by a likewise braided, beardless dwarf. Tilda could scarcely blame him, for the Captain was one of a kind.

“
Soldier,” Block barked. “What was your company of the 34
^th
Legion?”

The staring man answered by rote.

“
Second Century.”

That was at least something. Tilda felt a flutter of hope in her chest, which at this point only made her ribs ache worse.

“
We seek your commanding Centurion,” Block said, his voice suddenly quiet. “The man called John Lepokahan.”

The word gave Tilda a twinge, for
le po ka han
was a biting oath in the old language of the Islands. It was also the name that luck, or else some subtle magic inherent to the Captain, had led them to discover that their quarry had assumed when he enrolled in the Codian Legions, six years ago now.

The renegade just went on staring. The mare and her pony had been moving toward Tilda, but they stopped short as if even they were anxious to hear the man’s answer. The crackle of Block’s burning brand was the only sound in a moment that lingered on toward painful.

“
Soldier…”

“
Lepokahan was not his real name,” the bedraggled deserter of the Legions said softly. “He said it was John Deskata, before he was exiled from Miilark.”

Chapter Four

It was unthinkable to stop and talk at any length in the midst of a stirge infestation, much less to set up camp nearby. Yet with night settled about the forested hills and out on the steppe, blundering far through the darkness was hardly an option.

The ex-legionnaire retrieved a pair of saddlebags from nearby and slung them across his shoulders, then led the way westerly while creeping widely around the infested orchard. Tilda followed close behind his dark silhouette leading both horses from the ground, while Block rode the pony. She made an unvoiced vow to herself that the next time she was in an otherwise healthy orchard left to spoil, with overripe fruit hanging neglected and no sound of birds, she would not just take a moment to wonder why it was so, but just get gone out of there right away.

The trudge through the trees was tricky in the dark, and every misstep and stumble sent a throbbing ache around Tilda’s midsection. But soon it was over. The two-horse column descended one last hillock and emerged again onto the grassy steppe, blonde stalks looking silvery in the waning moonlight. The renegade marched west with a long stride for perhaps a quarter mile, and just as Tilda was deciding to remount her horse, he stopped and about-faced. Though there was not enough light to make out his expression, his posture was now relaxed. He put both hands on his hips, which did keep one close to the sword at his side.

“
When stirges come down from the mountains, they hunt in a narrow corridor back to their main nest. They won’t find us out here.”

“
Where is Lepokahan?” Block growled in a manner that made the word sound less like an assumed name and more like the oath that it was.

“
I told you,” the renegade said. “Gone. Him and a few others cut out two days before the fight with Duke Gratchik. Deserted from the desertion, if you will. But I know where they are going, and I am going after them myself. You, gentle Islanders, are welcome to tag along.”

The dwarf leaned forward in his saddle to add something colorful, but the renegade held up a hand.

“
Your further satisfaction will have to wait until morning, Guv. I am plain done-in, and the two of you cannot be much better off. Particularly not your girl, there.”

Tilda turned to look toward the Captain, but stopped halfway and closed her eyes as a stitch flared in her neck. The renegade took the set of saddlebags off his shoulders and started tramping a narrow flat spot in the long grass. Block spoke at Tilda.

“
You will stand the first shift, as ward.”

The renegade sighed, stacking his bags as a pillow and unfastening his sword belt.

“
The stirges won’t come out here. I promise.”

“
She will not be warding against those.”

The man snorted, unwrapped the blanket from around his chest and shook it out.

“
I am not going to run off, nor do anything else untoward,” he said, dropping out of moonlit sight as he sprawled on the ground. “If it weren’t for you two galloping about those stirges would have sucked me dry in my sleep. I suppose there’s worse ways to go, but I’ll take life just the same.”

After a last rustle in the grass the renegade settled into silence with a grunt of finality. Block remained glaring at the spot for a time before allowing Tilda to help him off his pony, with a wince he did not see. The Captain settled his own bedroll a short distance away from the renegade and left Tilda to see to the horses.

After doing so Tilda walked her turn at guard more than stood it, bone-tired but knowing that her bruised muscles were going to tighten as soon as she stopped moving. The dwarf’s internal hour glass woke him in the small hours before dawn, and he relieved Tilda to crawl into her own bedroll and drop instantly into a sleep not untroubled by dreams. Dreams of mosquitoes big as oxen.

She awoke with dust motes hovering about the grass stalks in front of her nose, started to stretch, and caught her breath. Tilda had a moment of sheer terror, thinking she was paralyzed, but realized that it was not a matter of being unable to move. It was just that her body really did not want to do so.

Tilda’s knees were nearly touching her chest for in her sleep she had constricted, actually shriveled like fruit gone bad. Her shoulders throbbed, one knee felt wrenched, and worse than either was a band of purple pain that beat across her torso and belly in time with her heart.

Matilda Lanai had loved adventure stories as a girl, the old ones from tribal times that clan elders had once told around campfires and that Islanders still shared in taverns and family rooms. She did not recall any of the bold heroes of those tales waking up to a morning quite like this. She uncoiled slowly and with several shuddering spasms, and crawled out of her bedroll. She got to all fours, took as deep a breath as she could manage, and stood with a motion that from a distance might have looked smooth. Unless one could see the trembling hands and mouth locked in a grimace.

“
Did you break a rib?”

The renegade’s voice came from behind Tilda and she spun, which almost made her swoon. She planted her feet to face the man standing a few paces away in the waist-high grass, powerful arms folded before his off-white Legion tunic smeared with reddish rust stains at shoulders and flanks where a steel breastplate would ride and fasten. He was eating what looked for all the world in the narrow sunlight of dawn to be an orange, a thing Tilda had not seen in months.

“
I broke nothing,” Tilda said, then snapped her eyes around. The two horses were still asleep where they stood hobbled nearby.

“
Where is Captain Block?”

“
Block, is it? I can see that. Suits him.”

Tilda knew where Block’s name came from, but she let it pass. “Where is he?”

The man popped a wedge of orange into his mouth and shrugged as he sucked juice from his fingers.

“
He’s around.”

“
Where?” Tilda demanded. Her hands were loose at her sides. Her
buksu
and several daggers lay beside her bedroll, though she still had one of the latter in either boot. The renegade rolled his disappointing brown eyes.

“
Fine, so much for being polite. He’s having a squat in the grass over yonder. Do you need to wipe for him, or can he manage that himself?”

Tilda could not help but have her eyes follow the bright fruit as the legionnaire tugged loose another section with his teeth, which she saw were nicely white. Not nearly enough of that on this continent.

“
Where did you get that?” she asked, and the man nodded toward where he had slept.

“
Saddlebags, off the charger. Nibbles for nobles. All sorts of little dainties in there.” He sucked two sticky fingers, and gave a slight scowl. “I take it you two found the horse?”

“
Yes.”

“
How was he?”

“
Well enough.”

The renegade nodded his short-haired head. “That horse saved my life, you know. Got me out of the fight.”

Tilda narrowed her eyes. “I take it the battle did not go well?”

He gave a smirk. “It went wonderfully, for the Duke. Those of us on the idiot baron’s side of the field took all of a thumping.”

Grass parted in the direction the renegade had indicated, and the top of the Captain’s raised hood approached like a black shark fin in the grass. Tilda frowned, thinking of her own filthy, bloody Guild cloak which she had dropped in the grass a good distance away from both the horses and her own bedding.

The dwarf arrived and stood on tip-toes to look at Tilda and the legionnaire over the burry tops of the grass. Finishing his orange, the man tossed the rind toward the horses and moved toward his equipment.

“
The gang’s all here,” he said. “Let’s get on the move.”

“
We will speak first,” the Captain barked in a tone Tilda could not have denied, but the man was already draping the blanket around his shoulders to cover his Legion tunic.

“
I’ll tell my story walking, Cap‘n.” The man slung the plush leather saddlebags across his back. “Do you want to catch your man, or no?”

Tilda waited until Block gave her a curt nod, then tried not to think about her aching body as she rushed around readying for a return to the trail.

*

“
How much do you know?” the renegade asked, setting a brisk pace across the plains away from the rising sun. They had intersected a path running close enough to the right direction for both horses to follow the fellow single file at an easy gait. The Captain rode behind him, and Tilda sat high enough on the mare bringing up the rear to still see the fellow walking ahead.