The two and a half weeks following the death of Captain Block were a blur for Tilda.
From the chasm and the sacked fort, two wagon wheel ruts led due south through pinewoods and hills. She and Dugan stumbled down the ruts through the dark until morning brought an overcast sky and a cold, lingering mist. Exhausted and hungry, Tilda kept stumbling even in the daylight until Dugan finally called a halt whereupon she lay on the ground with her head on a pack and slept. He woke her in the middle afternoon and they kept walking without a bite to eat and hardly a word between them.
They left the hills the next day, emerging onto steppe that looked much the same as had Orstaf save that the grass on the south side of the mountains was not so long for the great peaks held most of the rain to the north. The highlands on the Daulic side were the province of Heftiga, home to tall, sandy-haired people of Leutian descent rather than the Kantan Orstavians. Yet the first village Tilda and Dugan reached in Daul had the same ad hoc look as had those across the mountains.
They ate too much at an inn, bought provisions for the road and replaced lost bedrolls and blankets at a sundry store. The small village was on a stream feeding into the Sibyl River. It had two stables and Tilda crossed the dirt road between them repeatedly, bartering them against each other until settling an excellent price for two horses, one from each stable. She did not bother to name the new mounts.
Heftiga stretched all along the northern border of Daul, but the steppe did not extend far from north to south. After only a few days in the saddle and nights spent under the sky, the yellow steppe plunged down to deeply green grasslands cut by the Sibyl and the other tributaries of the great River Nan, upon which the Kingdom of Daul had arisen. Dugan had taken to studying Block’s maps in the evenings and he informed Tilda that he had decided on a route straight overland to the provincial capital of Chengdea, rather than a wider one down the Sibyl or over to the Black. He had reasons but Tilda did not really listen to them. She did not listen to much and during the days she looked most often into the green middle distance, staring at nothing.
Tilda was surprised by how much Block’s death had affected her. She felt as though she had left something with the Captain at the bottom of the chasm, something more than a sword and a single piece of gold. The strangest thing about it was that she and the dwarf had never been close. Three years ago it had been Captain Block who had conducted Tilda’s final interview before she was permitted to join the Guild, but since then she had only seen the dwarf around the place a handful of times, watching an exercise and barking at the struggles of the apprentices. He had barked at Tilda on occasion but not by name, and in fact not in any way that implied he had the faintest memory of her interview. That had probably been for the best for all Tilda could remember of it herself was that she had been a stammering idiot, intimidated to the point of being struck dumb by speaking to the legendary Kaman Kregebanan of Deskata House.
For legend Block was, and the Corner Stone from the beginning. The dwarf had been on the boat, the Nyystrishima, shipwrecked in Miilark more than two centuries ago when the Islands were wild and the tribes half-savage. Everything that Miilark now was, everything that made up Tilda’s whole world, Block had been there to see from the beginning. And now he was gone.
There would be no House Deskata without Captain Block, and without the Deskatas the House Lords may never have brought peace to the clans and factions, united the Miilarkians, and led them out into the wider world. Tilda supposed every House said that of their own founders but in the Deskatas’ case it happened to be true. They had been one of the first chieftain lines to put aside the old tribal blood feuds and ageless vendettas that had kept the Islanders divided for centuries, and they had begun to do so by accepting as one of their own a foreigner. And a dwarven foreigner at that.
The blood in Tilda’s veins, her branch of the Lanais, had been affiliated with the Deskatas for more than a hundred years, through her father and his mother and her father. Block had served the House in person for a century longer than that. The dwarf’s name was legend, and had been long before Tilda was even born.
And now he was gone.
The Deskatas were in crisis, perhaps the worst they had known since before the boat. The one man Rhianne Deskata had chosen to send forth seeking their salvation had of course been the Kaman Kregebanan, who else could it possibly have been? The only surprise was that the one apprentice Guilder he had chosen to accompany him was very much a nobody. Some girl named Tilda Lanai from Chrysanthemum Quay whose family had been affiliated with Deskata House for three generations…three generations of shopkeepers.
No one at the Guild nor in Miilark for that matter had known just where Block and Tilda were going, and what they hoped to accomplish. But even had everyone in the Islands known about it, none could have been more surprised than was Tilda herself. And now she was never even going to get to ask the dwarf why he had chosen her when surely he could have taken anyone in the Deskatas’ service that he had wished. She could never ask, because he was gone.
Dugan led the way as they rode, but Tilda knew she was more alone than she had ever been in her life. She felt a cold numbness more than a warm grief, and while she recognized that her sorrow was as much for herself as it was for Block, that only made her feel a bit guilty, and even worse.
The grassland near the river was dotted with walled towns and stone villages, but Dugan’s route of travel led them around most of them down back roads or at times across the countryside. His intent was to reach Chengdea with all speed and to that end he avoided all contact with the local Dauls that might slow them down, even for a regular meal at an inn. Yet even as they moved across the river country and despite Tilda’s pensive mood, the present condition of the Nan River Kingdom made itself known in the furtive looks of travelers on the roads, who put hands on weapons while the strangers rode past.
Tilda was aware that Daul was at war with Ayzantium, for they had been so longer than she had been alive. As waterborne trade was the business of Miilark, Tilda knew further that the Ayzants had captured one of Daul’s Channel ports early on, and had held the other one under siege for most of this year. Most of southern Daul was under foreign occupation, or else in the hottest midst of the war. Little wonder that even in the far north of the country the locals wore a troubled look and such Royal soldiers as Tilda and Dugan saw were staying close to the towns. There were not many such soldiers, and they were a mix of old men in faded uniforms and young boys whose helmets were too big.
Tilda and Dugan were technically in the province of Chengdea as soon as they left the steppe lands, though the ancient boundaries between the constituent parts of the Nan River Kingdom were lost in the roll of years. The countryside began to change before they had ferried across a wider length of the bending Sibyl, for dense forest stretched west and north back towards a spur of the mountains. As they moved further into Chengdea toward the ruling Duke’s city of the same name, the towns and villages they passed along the edge of forest and prairie had a different demeanor. This country had been an obscure Ettacean colony long ago, and the style of the houses and buildings was somehow primitive even now. The walls were thick and the domed roofs low, while the lumber trimming second stories was gray as though petrified, and shellacked with some sort of glaze. Most chimneys were made not of brick, but of stacked irregular stones with blackened daub in the crevices. Yet for that they had a homey sort of look that could only come from generations of continuous occupation and care. The language of the villages was all Daulic, though faces and complexions were a living legacy of peoples and realms that had passed out of history long ago.
More importantly for Tilda and Dugan, the Chengdean soldiery was sharp. The riders were stopped several times by patrols, mainly of footmen with pikes and crossbows. No papers nor passes were requested but the travelers were not allowed to proceed until Tilda, speaking the Trade Tongue, had assured the man in charge that she was a Miilarkian bound for the city of Chengdea on business. She finally asked Dugan why she was being stopped so often and was informed that Zants did not look so very different than mixed-blood Islanders, with black hair and dark skin being typical of both. Tilda traveled with her hood down so that her braid showed after that.
After seventeen days, making the date Eighth Day of Ninth Month, the city of Chengdea came into view while it was still a long ways off, rising on modest hills above the east bank of another tributary of the Nan, the Black River which the old Dauls called the Nwarre. The hills and town climbed from south to north, with the land-side gates and river docks all located at the south end. On the north a sprawling castle complex stood on the highest hills, flying the Duke‘s banner of a golden flower on a green field. Dugan led the way toward the south side along paved roads crisscrossing churned fields of black earth, all lying fallow this late in the season. The city and hills was entirely ringed by massive walls, and as Dugan and Tilda approached a towering gatehouse they saw that while the great doors were open there was a crowd of people being kept outside.
They were refugees from downriver, where the siege continued in Larbonne and the Ayzant army was sending foraging parties out further into the countryside every day. Some had stout wagons and tents filled nearby fields, but some were wholly destitute. Entire families with sunken cheeks and split shoes huddled in clusters by the sides of the roads. Chengdean soldiers and robed clerics moved among them, distributing food and giving what aid they could, yet the sight was still shocking to Tilda.
Dugan seemed not to notice. He rode straight for the gate swerving around people standing listless in the road, and dismounted before a line of soldiers who barred his path.
It was a simple matter for Tilda and Dugan to gain entrance into the city once Tilda had shown the guards that they had plenty of money.
They had to walk their horses down the cobbled streets for the reason people were stuck outside the walls was that the city was already full to bursting. Some of Chengdea still retained the old Ettacean character of narrow lanes and twisting alleys, but even the wide boulevards of later Daulic renovations were congested with people who might be able to afford a bed for a night somewhere but not a room during the day. They overflowed the common rooms of inns and eateries, sat about on curbs, leaned against walls, or just walked the streets like they were looking for something they had little hope of finding. Dugan pushed past farmers and merchants and artisans like he knew where he was going, offering none of them more than a mumbled pardon.
Tilda had not been quite so lost in thought during the journey that she had failed to notice every step nearer Chengdea had made Dugan more single-minded about getting there ahead of John Deskata and his band. Every day of riding had started a little earlier than the last, and ended later after dark. By the time they reached the city Dugan even looked different, with his beard now a belligerent bristle and dark bags under his eyes as though he had not been sleeping much over the short nights. Tilda had not felt like talking and so the man’s silence had been all right with her, though hours had gone by on the road during which he had not looked back over his shoulder one time, making Tilda think that he had forgotten she was there at all. And that might be all right, too.
Dugan was heading for the waterfront, somewhere along which the Shugak would be taking passengers across the river and into the swamps and backwaters of the Vod Wilds, and thence to the Sable City. Tilda knew Dugan meant to intercept Deskata and the others here, and as he had said, get back what they had taken from him. She had no doubt he was expecting a fight, even at the bad odds of two against five. What troubled Tilda as they approached the shops and warehouses of the riverside was that it might well turn out to be one against six.
Dugan called out to three burly figures in breast plates and conical helms, longbows and great swords on their backs as they sashayed along a sidewalk. He asked in Codian where the Shugak were doing business. The three long-bearded warriors looked at Dugan and Tilda skeptically, but directed them to a particular dock two blocks further north. They said you could not miss it.
The area of the docks was as crowded as the rest of the city, with warehouses operating as flophouses and people lingering about everywhere with dull eyes and worried brows. When Tilda followed Dugan around the indicated corner however, she saw that no one was loitering on a half block lined with boarded-up buildings, ending at one of the oddest constructions she had ever seen.
It was a three-story tower that looked something like a tree, individual trunks of white and gray swamp oaks bound together in a circle to make one great, false trunk. Instead of branches arms like cargo cranes emerged from the top and splayed out in every direction, some reaching clear to the ground while others contacted neighboring buildings. Flying buttresses designed by the maddest of Magdetchoi architects, if there was any design at all.
“That is distinctive,” Dugan said. He held his horse’s reins out toward Tilda and dropped them as he resumed walking with his long stride, saying only “Wait here.”
Tilda grabbed the reins before the horse got any ideas. “Where are you going?” she called after Dugan, and he answered without turning around.
“I need to talk to someone. Make sure our boys have not been here yet.”
There was a gap in the front of the tree-trunk tower and torchlight flickering from within. While Dugan strode straight at it Tilda looked more carefully at the odd construction and saw with a start that things were looking back at her. Among the crazy crane arms draped with netting instead of foliage there were plank platforms and small cupolas. Many of them were occupied by forest-green creatures, smaller than dwarves, that blended with the netting so well details were hard to perceive. Tilda saw spherical bodies, big yellow-white eyes, and here and there the dull metal glint of an arrow head or a short blade.
Tilda looked back down at the street and saw that Dugan had stopped short of the tower, not looking up at it but rather sideways at one of the buildings on the empty half block, one of only two storefronts with an open door. He turned and crossed to a window, then stood staring.
There was no sign of any hostility from the things in the tree, so Tilda slowly led both horses forward and over to Dugan, glancing up at the little creatures all the way. She supposed they must be bullywugs, the small, amphibious Magdetchoi race that along with hobgoblin tribes constituted the “Shugak” of the Vod Wilds. Moving closer she could see they did indeed look like frogs, with spindly arms and bent legs on round bodies with no necks joining torsos to heads. They had wide mouths and their bright eyes were top-mounted, with slit pupils that followed Tilda as she stepped uncertainly over toward Dugan. They had knives and bows, but none held at the ready. Rather, their weapons were sheathed and hung from the straps and harnesses that were all they wore for clothing. One raised a webbed hand and waved, and Tilda dully waved back.
She hurried the last few steps over to Dugan, pulling the horses along. He stood staring into a window covered with an intricate cross-hatch of narrow wooden slats so that the objects on shelves within could be seen but not touched. The display window was full of jewelry, and Tilda had a bad feeling.
“Yours?” Tilda said, though she really did not have to ask. Dugan just went on staring at a amethyst pendant on a fine silver chain.
When he spoke, he said only one word. It was a Codian expletive generally not put down in the more decent sorts of writing.
*
Dugan did most of the talking inside, as the Chengdean counterman spoke serviceable Codian. The shop was one of two fences on the block in which the Shugak employed humans who bought up jewelry, weapons, supplies, and anything else from groups desperate to raise enough cash to pay the bullywugs for transport into the Wilds and to buy permits to enter Vod’Adia itself. Business looked to have been good for the shop was stocked to the rafters with all manner of items, and the counterman was richly decked out in an embroidered waistcoat with the frills of a silk shirt at collar and wrists. He had at least one ring on every finger, a gold tooth, and his dark, longish hair was slicked back with something that smelled faintly of musk. Two hulking hobgoblins framed the front door, large creatures built similar to bugbears though a bit smaller and with shorter limbs. Rather than fur they had rubbery-looking hides of mottled oranges and reds, and the two in the store wore splint mail and helmets with curving animal horns on the sides. They narrowed their small, piggy eyes at Dugan and Tilda and fingered the morning stars resting on their broad shoulders.
The counterman remembered the group who had sold the necklace in the window well enough, though only one of the fellows had come inside while the other four waited on the street. All five had worn the steel-and-chain armor of Codian legionnaires, though the plumes had been taken off of their helmets and those with tower shields carried them with cloths draped over the bosses and devices. They exchanged the necklace and two matching silver bracelets which the man produced from under the counter, for forty-two pieces of gold and six silvers. Passage for five into the Wilds via Shugak raft was going for about thirty gold, as of three days ago.
“The man who came into the store,” Tilda asked. “Did you notice if he had green eyes?”
The counterman grinned. “Indeed I did, rather striking they were. They matched a great emerald in a ring he was wearing. Made him an offer on the ring, a good one, but he refused to part with it. Said it had sentimental value.”
When John Deskata had been born, his eyes had been as green as the emerald pennons of Deskata House. People had said it was a good omen.
“What about a permit for Vod’Adia?” Dugan asked. “Did they buy one here?”
The counterman shook his head. “I don’t sell those, nor arrange transport. The wugs on the docks handle the rafts but if you want to buy a license, as they call it, you have to deal with the hobs in that ‘tree’ out there.” The man sighed and looked out his front window at the ramshackle construction. “When that thing goes, I hope to hell it falls the other bloody way.”
“Is that where the men went?” Tilda asked.
“Not that I saw, and I doubt they could afford a license here. They are selling at around fifty gold a head, and there is no way that bunch had a quarter-thousand gold among them.”
“But they were buying passage to Vod’Adia,” Dugan said, not really as a question.
“To the Camp Town around it, at any rate. Lots of sell-swords do that and hope to merge or hire-on with other likeminded sorts once they are there. A group of five, they might have to split up before entering. Now, if your man had been willing to sell me that ring of his…”
The counterman sighed and looked wistfully at his bejeweled fingers.
Tilda followed Dugan back outside, passing between the hobgoblins that gave them another glare. The horses waited at a hitching post but Dugan walked past them before he stopped. For the first time he did not seem to know what to do with himself, and he plopped to a seat on the curb.
Tilda stood behind him. “Apart from the necklace and bracelets, how much more of your belongings do the legionnaires still have?”
Dugan sighed. “The necklace was the main piece, the rest is mostly trinkets. Loose stones and some earrings. Probably not another twenty gold, all told. Considering the time the sons of bitches made getting here, they may have hawked those already for river passage. They did not beat us here on foot, that is for certain.”
Dugan’s shoulders were hunched. Tilda looked at his back and took advantage of his mood to allow herself a moment to think. This might not be all bad, for her. If Dugan was unwilling to go on after Deskata and company now that his money was lost, and if she could go ahead and find them herself, the eventual confrontation would be far simpler. Of course that meant Tilda would be going alone into the Wilds and the hazards of Camp Town, but she resolved not to think about that for the moment. Right now the issue was Dugan.
Tilda had taken to wearing Captain Block’s kitbag by the strap over a shoulder on her right side, as she did not have a sword there anymore. She slid the bag to her belly and opened the top, and nimble fingers rifled through the contents. She counted out enough Miilarkian bank notes to trade for at least sixty gold pieces, which was almost a third of those remaining. The notes made a sizable sheaf she bound around with a length of twine. She stepped around Dugan into the street and dropped the pile at his feet. He stared at it before looking up at her.
“That is enough to cover your loss,” Tilda said. “Consider it payment for getting…me…this far.”
Dugan looked back at the pile, then narrowed his eyes at Tilda.
“How do you know the ring isn’t mine, too?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the store. “The one the man would have paid at least two-fifty for?”
“That was a House Ring,” Tilda said. “The emerald is worn by every blood Deskata. It was not yours and it is worth a great deal more than a quarter-thousand gold. It belongs to the man wearing it.”
“Well, what if he lost it to me in a dice game some while back? John was a terrible sort for the gambling. His third favorite vice after whiskey and whores.”
Tilda shrugged. “Then the Ninth God used you ill, and it’s not my problem.”
Tilda stepped back to the horses, feeling a tremulous emptiness in her stomach. She was really going to do this, go on alone through swamp and murk toward the most deadly place on the continent of Noroth, and a shabby town presently populated by the most dangerous people in the world. John Deskata and his men would be five needles not in a haystack, but in a stack of needles. Yet the only other option would be to go home, alone, having failed. To tell Rhianne Deskata that the Corner Stone of the House was dead, and with him their last hope.
“I am selling the horses,” Tilda said, relieved that her voice did not quaver despite her feelings. “You can take your packs and bedding as you wish, but the rest is mine.”
“Wait,” Dugan said, as Tilda began to unfasten the saddle bags from the tired horse the man had been riding. She stopped and looked back. Dugan still sat on the curb with the stack of notes between his feet, scowling at her.
“You are going on? Alone? What’s the point, girl? Say you get to Camp Town even before Vod’Adia Opens, and you actually find the boys. Before some cash-strapped adventurer cuts your throat for pocket money, I mean. John is not going to be any happier to see a Miilarkian than he would have been to see me. And believe me, even without his four fellows…the man is a worthless piece of excrement in a lot of ways, but he is good at what he does with a blade. You couldn’t take him by himself, let alone outnumbered.”
Taking him was never the point, but Tilda bristled at more than that.
“I am a Miilarkian Guilder,” she said, and Dugan threw back his head and laughed. Some of the bullywugs in the weird structure at the end of the block croaked in return.
“You’re a child,” he said. “Now Cap’n Block, that crusty old pirate, he might have had a shot. But John will cut you up for bait, and no fooling.”
Tilda thrust out her jaw and planted her hands on her hips.
“Do you think I am daft? Skill with a blade counts for little if someone you don’t see puts a slug in the back of your head.”
Dugan snorted. “Ah, the honor of the Islanders.”
“It has gotten us this far,” Tilda said, trepidation for her future washing away on a hot spurt of anger. Something dark had been simmering in Tilda’s silence since she had climbed out of the chasm in which Captain Block lay. She could taste it now in the back of her throat like bile, but had nowhere to go with it.
Tilda turned to the horses, and undid the last buckle holding Dugan’s saddle bags. He stood and she heaved the bags at him harder than was necessary, but he caught them easily and draped them familiarly over one shoulder. He held the bound bank notes in one hand and ran a thumb hard with calluses over the edge, counting.
“There is enough here for one ticket to Vod’Adia,” he said, almost but not quite like he was not even talking to Tilda. “And for a license to enter the city, besides. Still with five or ten gold left over. Probably ought to buy a helmet if I‘m going in there…”
“I do not want you to come with me,” Tilda said slowly, enunciating every word so there was no lack of clarity though she knew she was saying them for herself as much as for Dugan.
“I am not talking about you anymore,” Dugan said, holding his money in one open hand to feel the weight of it. Tilda had noticed at an early age that cash always felt heavier than just the paper and ink of which it was made.
“You will do what you want, or what you feel you must,” Dugan said. “As for me…it looks as though I am a man without a country now. A soldier without an army.” He met Tilda’s eyes, and winked. “Seems like Vod’Adia is the place to be for a man like that, in this season.”
He stuffed the notes into a trouser pocket.
“Today is Eighth of Ninth. Blackstone is due to Open in three weeks and I imagine it takes most of that to raft there. If you want your shot at John, I would suggest you take the next boat out. I’ll see you on it, most likely. Otherwise, fare thee well, my Island girl.”
With that Dugan stood to attention and struck his chest with a balled fist, in the manner of a legionnaire’s salute. He turned on his heel and marched for the gap in the front of the tree-like tower. Some of the bullywugs in the branches were still croaking, and Dugan snapped “Ribbit!” as he passed beneath them. They fell into a sulky silence.
Tilda watched Dugan step into the bound-log tower and heard him boom a hearty “Good evening, Gentlemen. Hobgoblins.” She turned away to the horses and snatched their reins free of the hitching post. She stood there in the street for a moment with the tired horses looking at her. The counterman from the store was leaning in his doorway, smoking a pipe and watching her with no particular expression on his face.
Tilda spoke one word under her breath, a Miilarkian expletive generally not put down in the more decent sorts of writing. She turned and jerked on the horses’ reins, leading them toward the docks beyond the tower.