The bugbears did no more cavorting. Those that had climbed down into the palisade gathered around the dead one Tilda had shot in the mouth, roared at the sky and beat their great fists against their broad chests. When they climbed back up the same way they had come down two carried the dead one between them. Tilda watched from the pine woods across the chasm and would not have thought such an ascent possible until noticing that the bugbears used their large, hairy feet just like a second pair of hands.
The sun went down a few hours later and the night was illuminated by the panoply of stars and a waxing moon. The sky had looked too crowded to Tilda ever since she had left the great capital city of Miilark. She left the trees and stared down into the dark chasm. Dugan watched her from nearby. She turned and moved toward him, leaned her gun against a tree and removed her pack. She left her cloak, several daggers, and her club, though she shifted her sword to her back. She put a candle in her boot.
“There is no point, Tilda,” Dugan said. She didn’t look at him but moved back to the chasm’s edge and lowered her legs over the side, boot-tips probing for purchase.
The climb in the dark was bad, but not the worst Tilda had made. She had ascended the Ghost Mountain as part of her Guild training and the coral edges of that familiar peak were like knives in places. She had finished that climb with bleeding hands and feet for her gloves and boots had been shredded. Here, there were loose stones and soft-packed dirt she had to avoid, but the fact that doing so required her full attention and left her no room to think was actually a relief.
Centuries of rain and snowmelt had made the bottom of the crevasse concave rather than sharp, and Block’s body was easy to find once the candle was lit, lying beside the shattered wreckage of the drawbridge. It was bad.
The captain’s kitbag was nearby, the thing Tilda had to have. She opened it and found both pistols were broken, but she left them and the loose parts inside as they might be repairable. The map cases, the coin purses, and most importantly the money belt of Miilarkian banknotes were fine. There was an empty silver wine-flask, dented now, with an embossed gold seal of a Miilarkian ship on either side. Tilda looked at the flask, and toward the body, but ultimately dropped it back into the bag, closed the clasp and slung the strap across her back.
Miilarkians did not bury their dead in the ground, their final rest was at sea. There was a particular two-day long route out from the capital city taken by white funerary barges twice every tenday, past a holy islet where white albatrosses roosted and ashes were scattered on the waters. Tilda had no idea what dwarves did with their dead, but to her Captain Block was as much an Islander as was she. Yet she could not reduce the body to ash, and merely setting a fire that would burn out was unbelievably morbid.
She did the only thing she could think to do, drawing her sword and jamming it into the ground at the Captain’s feet. She went into a coin purse in the kitbag, holding the candle close. She found one of the few gold coins, a bright Codian Sovereign with the Book-from-the-Water design of the Code from the Lake on one side and the young Emperor Albert in profile on the reverse. She closed her hand around the coin, shut her eyes, and spoke in Miilarkian.
“Gracious Miisina, Our Lady of Coin. This I ask. When the snows of the mountains melt and this passage runs in stream, let its waters to river fly, thence to Channel, thence to the great Ocean you have made Ours. Let the soul of this good Islander be borne by the Wind, to its home. This I ask. For this I pay.”
Tilda knelt and placed the coin on the ground. She set a water-smoothed stone atop it. She stood, wondering why she could not cry. She wanted to, but knew the Captain would have shaken his head and growled. Probably told her she was an idiot. There was work to be done, still.
She sniffled. Once. Tilda rubbed her nose on a sleeve and blew out the candle. She turned to make the climb back up.
Dugan was waiting when she neared the top, though the night was surely past its mid-watch by then. He extended an arm when she drew near and after a moment of hesitation she clasped hands and let him pull her up the last few feet. Tilda stood with her aching back bent and her scraped hands on her knees, breathing heavily but not panting.
“Thought you’d be gone,” she said between breaths. Just as on the night they had met, Dugan was mostly a silhouette in the darkness.
“And what would you have done then?”
“Chased you down.”
Tilda straightened, and faced Dugan in the starlight. “Where is he?”
Dugan’s head tilted. “John Deskata, you mean?”
“Good guess.”
He did not answer right away, and then suddenly he did.
*
Once upon a time, before years were even numbered, the first human civilization on the continent of Noroth built a great city they called Vod’Adia. They were known as the Ettaceans, and in their language Vod’Adia meant “Black Stone.” Though none could say in truth what had happened there, for a thousand years the name was a byword in many human tongues for pride, hubris, and calamity. For that same thousand years the site of the city itself was unknown, though it was believed by scholarly types to have been somewhere in the hobgoblin and bullywug infested wasteland still called the Vod Wilds. In the year 999 of the Norothian Calendar, Kanderamath, the Second Witch King of Tull, disappeared in that wilderness searching for the fabled place.
Ninety-nine years later in 1098, the Wilds were overrun by creatures that drove the hobgoblins and bullywugs before them, and themselves spilled out both west into Agintan Doon and east into Chengdea, Nanshea, and other realms that would soon unite for their own defense as the Kingdom of Daul. That union was necessary for survival, for the creatures pouring out of the Wilds knew neither pain nor fatigue, but only hunger. They were the Undead, and the thirty years it took for humans, hobgoblins and bullywugs to exterminate them, sometimes even by fighting side-by-side, were remembered as the Dead War.
Priests, magi, and shamans divined and discovered what had happened. Kanderamath had discovered Vod’Adia in 999, and worked powerful spells that had allowed him for a brief time to enter the city that had been magically sealed for a millennium. The Witch King had never emerged from Blackstone, but somehow his spells had kept working. When ninety-nine years had passed the Closed city had once again Opened, for a time. Just long enough for the occupants of the place, the unholy animate remains of what had once been a thriving population, to pour out into the world they had left long ago and afflict it until bodily destroyed.
Given this understanding, the approach of the year 1197 was viewed with great trepidation in the Vod Wilds and the lands bordering them. The seven decades since the end of the Dead War had seen a budding rivalry develop between Agintan Doon and the young Kingdom of Daul, and hobgoblin and bullywug tribes again skulked in the Wilds, preying on settlements pushed too close to the ragged border of civilization and wasteland.
But in a moment of uncommon clarity humans and nonhumans put aside their differences. The hobs and wugs first made common cause, uniting the tribes under a council called the Shugak. Doon and Daul signed an instrument of (temporary) alliance, and each gathered an army on their wilderness border. To their surprise the young princes and old generals leading the armies were greeted by representatives of the Shugak under flags of truce. The hobgoblins did most of the talking, as the speech of the frogmen hardly seemed like language to most humans. Despite difficulties, negotiations were begun.
As the First Day of Tenth Month, 1197, drew near, the date which all manner of wizards and witch doctors had identified as The Day, a particular valley deep in the heart of the Wilds was ringed by the forces of two human nations, along with the plentiful war-bands of the united Shugak. The humans present were awed for no human eye had looked upon the valley in centuries, and returned to tell of it. The valley was steep enough to be a rift or a wide canyon, with sheer walls of black basalt. The only practicable route in was at the northern end, through a formidable military work of ancient Ettacean construction, with multiple tiers and a switchback road. The northern half of the valley floor was a blasted ruin of foundations and chimneys, fallen walls and broken roads. The southern half was at all times obscured by a whirling mass of dark fog or clouds, as high as the valley walls but no higher, in which the glimpse of a tall tower or a sprawling palace could, perhaps, have been only the trick of an eye.
When dawn broke on First Day, tens of thousands of narrowed eyes (along with the unblinking cupola eyes of the bullywugs) watched as the first rays of sun to strike the impenetrable fogbank made the whole mass shimmer from top to bottom, slowly turning a lighter shade of gray as it began to thin. The fog did not disappear, but it dissipated to a degree that the shapes of black towers, streets, palaces, and walls within were seen to be no trick at all.
For only the third time since the cataclysm, the single set of enormous doors in the outermost city wall of ancient Blackstone, the Sable City, swung silently Open.
And nothing happened.
The arrayed forces stood at arms for the whole day, slings and bows at hand, crossbows cocked, catapults wound, bombards charged with powder. But no mass of zombies shuffled forth, no horde of ghouls scuttled out on long, yellow nails. Not even a solitary wraith drifted out from the wide-open doors. Men, hobs, and wugs exchanged glances and shrugs, but stayed in the lines.
When night and the next day brought no change the lords and leaders met to discuss what to do. Some thought the armies should charge in, or at least send units to scout. Others said that if one Witch King going where no man should have had started all the trouble, best to let no one enter ever again. If the seers and spell-casters were right Vod’Adia would stay Open for one month, and no more. Many were willing to let it Close again for another century without incident, if that was the will of the gods.
The talk went on for a week without decision, or rather without formal decision. But all along the line small groups and parties started to make choices for themselves.
It was the humans mostly, for hobs and wugs are more sensible about certain things. Small bands of men began to slip past the posted guards, or sometimes they were made up of the guards themselves. In sixes and sevens and eights they snuck down from the switchback fortifications and crept across the valley floor, mostly after dark, though when they were seen by day cheering went up from the rim of the valley above. These bold or stupid souls penetrated the veil and thus became the first to pass through Vod’Adia’s gates, going in, in centuries.
They did not all come back out, but those that did brought wonders both to tell and to show. The ancient city, they said, was no kind of a ruin. Houses and shops, taverns and eateries all stood as though the people had just stepped into the next room. Twelve centuries before Vod’Adia had been the centerpiece of the flourishing Ettacean Empire, and the place still looked it. Painted porcelain plates and silver utensils still lay on cherry-wood tables, embroidered gowns of Chirabin silk hung in wardrobes. Where streets met at intersections their names in a long dead alphabet were inscribed on golden plates fastened to buildings. There were silver coins with strange faces, fluted glass vessels, clay jugs with blue bees painted on them. Small statues solemn as idols, rich robes dyed deep purple, clay tablets inscribed with those mysterious letters. Piles of it. Heaps. A whole city’s-worth. Those who went in and came out could prove it, for they brought sacks of the stuff.
Not all who went in of course did come out. Some parties may have turned on each other after a particularly rich find, but in other cases the stories that came out of Vod’Adia were not of riches, but of fell creatures prowling after dark, or even in the eternal twilight of the daytime within the black walls. Monsters, pale men said. Devils. Demons.
Some did not return at all and others were brought out gravely wounded, but that made less of an impression than did the jewelry draping their fellows, the chests of coins and sacks of silver. For the next three weeks the pace of entries accelerated, for many even risked climbing down the cliff walls to get at the place. Nobles, officers, and tribal chieftains led or sent bands into Vod’Adia in their own names, but these were still outnumbered by the common soldiers who broke ranks to go in on their own. As Tenth Month came to an end the camp of the armies had become something resembling a caravan park freighted down with the most unimaginable luxuries. By the last day of the month all those who were to make it out of Vod’Adia had done so, and as the sun went down and the whirling fog thickened, the echo of the city’s Closing doors boomed across the valley and was answered with cheers, from the living. There was a tremendous amount of money to be counted, and no one thought to count the dead.
The armies went home and the riches even the common foot soldiers carried with them were sufficient to skew the national economies of Doon and Daul for decades. The stories swept the continent, crossed the Channel and covered Kandala as well. Had it been a century later Miilarkian vessels would have carried the tales to every corner of the world in a flash. As it was, word only got there more slowly. But as the Norothian Calendar counted up to 1296, there was scarcely a place under the sun where someone was not thinking of the Sable City, and dreaming of what might still lie within.
The Shugak knew this as well as anyone. Though hobgoblins and bullywugs are nothing alike, they are lumped together along with gnolls and orcs as the so-called “Magdetchoi” races and they are viewed with disdain if not outright hatred by most humans. The Magdetchoi are believed to be capable of little more organizational complexity than is required to launch a bandit raid on settled lands, but during the decade of the 1290’s the Shugak Council gave the lie to that prejudice.
Word went out from the Wilds years before the Fourth Opening was due that no foreign armies would be permitted to enter the broken hills, tangled forests, and dense swamplands the hobs and wugs called home. Not this time around. However, for a modest fee independent operators of Men, Folk, or whatever would be licensed in parties of up to ten souls, then guided to Vod’Adia through the treacherous Wilds from either of two locations, the river ports of Galdeez in the Grand Duchy of Doon (which had thrown off Agintan rule in the last century), or Old Chengdea on the Daulic side. Licensing offices were shortly to be opened in both cities, manned by intermediaries paid by the Shugak.
A license could be purchased to enter Vod’Adia for a price determined by how soon after the Opening the party wanted in, and for what tax rate would be levied on anything they brought out. In addition, merchant licenses were to be made available. The last time the city had Opened the army camps had become trading centers where fabulous items were bartered, fortunes were gambled, and a good bottle of wine might fetch a sufficient price to buy a vineyard. The Shugak had learned from this, and in preparation for the Fourth Opening they had already constructed an empty village at the valley’s northern end, rude but sufficient, with inn and store space available for rent. The place was called Camp Town from the start.
Doon and Daul were to receive a piece of the profits in exchange for cooperation, and for not invading. Negotiations resulted in both countries also receiving a certain number of low-tax Royal Licenses to issue themselves, both for adventuring and for trade.
Outside of the Wilds most thought the Shugak’s plan was ridiculous and unworkable. The types of formidable men and women who might be inclined to try their fates within the Sable City were hardly of the kind to queue-up to do so, and to fork over money for the privilege. Apart from that, who were the Shugak to levy terms on human kingdoms? Yet when the offices in Galdeez and Chengdea were opened one year before the Opening, business was brisk from the start. Among those first securing licenses for themselves were Doonish and Daulish nobles, whose honor seemed not to have been offended. Over the course of the next year they were joined by many more people from up and down the Channel, then from the length and breadth of Noroth and Kandala, then from across the seas and oceans. There were Ayzant Dragon Cultists and Martan bowmen, Agintan duelists and Illygard infantry. Dwarves with war-hammers and Halflings with innocent grins and multiple pistols. Oswamban mystics, Karkan wizards. Ashinese samurai and monks from Cho Lung. Some came as ten-person bands who had adventured together for years, others arrived alone and bought only passage to Camp Town where they would band together with others like, or utterly unlike, themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, the great merchant Houses of Miilark did not snap up every merchant license. Though they did make a good try of it.
When the first sun of First Day, Tenth Month, 1296, shone on the valley of Vod’Adia, there was an entirely different sort of army assembled on the north end of the valley floor in the rickety buildings and muddy streets of Camp Town. Many of the high Shugak counselors were absent, for it had occurred to some that if the veil for some reason did not become permeable as was expected, there was going to be trouble.
But the fog did thin, the gates did Open, and for the next month entrances went off like intricate, gnome-fashioned clockwork. Once again fortunes were made and lives were lost, and as always, the fabulous success of the few outweighed the fate of the many who failed. Vod’Adia Closed on its mystical schedule, and Camp Town and the ancient valley in the wilderness emptied out for another century.
Until 1395 of the Norothian Calendar. This year.
*
Tilda stared at Dugan in the starlight. “Vod’Adia?” she repeated, and Dugan’s silhouette nodded once.
“Vod’Adia?” she said again. Her brain was stuck on the idea.
“I take it you’ve heard of the place?”
Tilda waved an arm north.
“It is all anyone is talking about in every tavern from here to the Cold Seas! Of course I know the stories…that was the brilliant plan? The reason Deskata and his men deserted the Legion? To go get killed in Blackstone?”
“There is a bit more to it than that,” Dugan said, taking a step forward and holding out a hand with a small bundle wrapped in a cloth napkin. “Here. This is the last of the food. Few bites of salt pork and cheese, no more.”
“I am not hungry,” Tilda said.
“You should eat something.”
Tilda did so, almost mechanically, still gaping at Dugan between the few bites of dry food. She could hardly keep the fact that she had just said goodbye to Captain Block of Miilark for the last time in her head, as it was bouncing around with dozens of questions.
“Don’t you have to buy a license to go into that place? An obscenely expensive license?”
Dugan snorted. “You remember I told you John and the boys stole some gems and jewelry off me?”
Tilda started. “How much were they worth?”
“Enough,” Dugan said. “I don’t have any family, and a legionnaire lives without a lot of expenses. The stuff they took amounts to all I have earned or acquired in my whole life.”
“You must have done pretty well.”
“I managed.”
Tilda slowly shook her head. Dugan was still here, and she doubted it was out of any concern for her personally. She had thought he was going to kill her just a few hours back, stab her where she lay before the locked door back into the Underway. Tilda had actually been more stunned by the fact that Dugan had run off without killing her than she had been by getting bashed off a wall, yet again. Dugan could not have gotten out of Orstaf through Trellane’s secret passages without Captain Block dealing with the Baron, but Block was gone. Irreparably. And it did not matter in Daul that Dugan was a renegade Codian legionnaire, here he could go where he would. Yet he had waited hours for Tilda to climb down the chasm, and back up again.
Tilda tightened her hands on Block’s kitbag, thinking of the money within.
“You think you will have to buy entrance into Vod’Adia yourself. To catch Deskata there.”
“That would be pointless,” he said. “If he and the boys get to Chengdea and buy a license, my money is gone. I don’t know what route they will take to that place, but that is where they have to go. I have to be there before they arrive. Cutting under the mountains should have saved me enough days to do so, if I travel fast from here on out.”
“Then why are you still standing here?”
“Because there are still five of them as far as I know, and they are not going to want to see me.” Dugan’s head bowed as he lowered his eyes to the ground. “Three against five was better odds, but two is a minimum. Especially if one of those is a Miilarkian Guilder.”
That raised the issue of which Tilda had been aware since realizing that Dugan believed the Guilders had come to kill John Deskata. If Block had decided how to deal with that problem when it inevitably came to a head, the Captain had never said a word to her. Dugan had been miscounting his odds from the start, and now Tilda was going to have to deal with it alone.
“Now,” Dugan said. “This all presupposes that you still mean to go after Deskata yourself. Without…him, to order you around.”
Tilda’s nostrils flared and her head jerked slightly.
“Do you think I would stop now, with the Captain lying dead in a hole? That I would dishonor him like that? He chose me to be here, and here I am, still.”
Dugan shrugged. “How the hell do I know how you people operate?”
Tilda glared. “I am going on.”
“Good. More the merrier.”
Dugan retrieved two packs from the trees. Tilda could tell by how they hung from his arms that he had re-packed as much of their increasingly scant equipment as had made it out of the palisade. He dropped the lighter one beside the leaning gun, club, daggers, and cloak which remained where Tilda had left them before her climb. He shouldered the heavier pack to his back.
“We should walk and not stop before daybreak. The bugbears might come back here with the dawn.”
Tilda replaced her weapons and pulled her cloak back on, put her buksu in its back sheath and the long gun over a shoulder. Dugan began to lead the way but she stopped him.
“There is one last thing.”
Dugan looked over his shoulder in the dark.
“You slammed me into a rock wall.”
Dugan turned around. “Yes, but you stole my sword first.”
“Back in Trellane’s lands, you bashed my head off a cottage.”
Dugan sighed. “And I apologized for that.”
Tilda kept staring at Dugan in the dark until he shifted his bulky backpack.
“What?” he finally asked irritably. “You want another apology? Fine. I deeply regret all injury, bodily or emotional, that may have resulted from…”
“You did not tell Captain Block about Vod’Adia,” Tilda interrupted. “You know that if he didn’t think he needed you anymore, he may just as soon have cut your throat. Or told me to do it.”
Dugan was quiet, and Tilda took a step closer to him so that even in the faint light they could almost see each other’s eyes.
“I can use your help,” Tilda said. “But I do not need it. If you ever lay hands on me again, I will kill you.”
Dugan remained silent for a few moments before speaking.
“Do you feel better now?”
“No, I don’t.”
Tilda moved her tired legs south, leading the way into the darkness under the trees.