M McNally - The Sable City

As everyone converged the one apprentice who had been next to the open doorway gaped, then cheered. She alone had seen Tilda clear the wooden edge of the pier forty feet below by the narrowest of margins. One more inch, as the girl laughingly told the crowd later, and Tilda would have lost nose, nipples, and kneecaps.

In the moment however, the angle kept anyone from seeing Lanai actually go into the water another ten or fifteen feet below the pier, and though she had been in a dive there was always a chance that would just bury her in silt with only her feet sticking out. An apprentice had drowned that way not two years before, and he had only gone in off the dock.

There was a cacophony of questions and answers at the crowded doorway as Block finally arrived and shouldered his way to the front. The pine floor squeaked as a few apprentices turned to run for the stairwells. Then someone shouted “Look!” and pointed, and all eyes turned to see a pair of hands appear on the edge of the timber path. A drowned rat the size of Tilda Lanai hauled herself topside from a quick climb up a pier post.

Her classmates cheered, but the young woman with the sodden mop of black hair plastered to her face and shoulders did not look up. Nor did she flop gasping onto her back, as Block expected. Instead, she paused on all fours for only a moment. Then she was up, and running, along the warehouse and around the corner toward the nearest door giving back inside. She left a trail of wet footprints slapped across the hard wood her nose had missed by a hairsbreadth.

The apprentices blinked after her, then looked around at each other. Their eyes finally settled on Kuanu, who had stood up straight but not yet taken a step closer to the doorway out of which he had pitched his classmate.

“She’s all right?” the big Islander finally stammered at everyone, but one young man with Varanchian-blonde hair answered.

“You are going to find out in about two minutes.”

The apprentices edged away from the cargo door, and no one said anything above a murmur to their nearest fellows. The class instructor blotted his forehead with an embroidered silk handkerchief and shrugged helplessly at Block, relieved at least to not be filling out paperwork explaining the splattering of an apprentice down on the cart path. Block, more curious than anything, only watched with one salt-and-pepper eyebrow high on his ruddy forehead.

They all heard Tilda on the stairs while she was still two floors down, for bare feet or not it sounded like she was riding up them on a horse. Kuanu swallowed and faced the door. It crashed open, and the sodden young woman came in like a storm cloud rolling down the sharp coral slopes of the Ghost Mountain.

Matilda Lanai was of the mixed-stock known in the Islands as “Ship People.” Lighter in complexion than a Full Blood but with features typical of an Islander, with a rounded chin, broad mouth, and flashing eyes of a brown so deep they occasionally looked black. They looked that way now as she skidded to a halt, swiped her clinging hair out of her face and over her shoulder, and locked her narrowed eyes on Kuanu’s wide-open ones. Tilda’s chest heaved and she stood with her feet apart, silent except for her breath and the drops of water pattering the floorboards. She held her hands loose at her sides, arms toned by boundless youth and a hard year of Guild training. She did not ball her hands into fists, as the fingers of a good Guilder were too valuable to risk in a punch. It would be the knife of an elbow or the hammer of a knee if it came to that, as it looked like it probably would.

“Are you all right?” Kuanu peeped in a voice far too small for his frame.

By way of answer, Tilda moved her tongue around her teeth, and spit black silt onto the floor at her feet.

Kuanu looked at the silt, then back at Tilda, then around at his classmates. None of the others met his eyes for very long. They now stood farther away from Kuanu than was Tilda, for the young Guilders-in-training had been drifting away steadily since she appeared, with nary a squeak from the floor.

The big Islander nodded once, twice, then straightened to his full lofty height. He gave Tilda a short bow. Kuanu turned, took two long strides into a dead run, and launched himself out through the open door with a great whoop, arcing majestically out over the pier and falling feet first into the water below.

*

Block played it all over in his mind as he sat in the Guild’s file room, three floors below that from which Tilda Lanai and Kuanu had taken their long plunges more than a year ago, one by accident and one by choice. Kuanu had been fine as well, bobbing to the surface of the Cove and shrieking to all Nine Gods that it stank down there. As Block understood it, all had soon been forgiven between the two apprentices.

But what Kuanu had seen before he made his choice, the old dwarf watching from the side had seen as well as both stared into the dark eyes of one Tilda Lanai. Kuanu had risked his life by leaping, but staying would have been no different. At that moment, in those eyes, the Full Blooded Islander and the Corner Stone of House Deskata had both seen that if the big man stood his ground, at least one of the apprentice Guilders would have left that room dead. Only which one was the question, and Kuanu had decided that he did not want to learn the answer.

His was not one of the final four names Block had considered.

The dwarf had spent two hundred years getting to know the people of Miilark, and they were not a field of study to become ploughed out, to dry up and blow away on the Wind of which they always spoke. Block supposed, by now, that as he had lived in the Islands longer than any man or woman alive, he was himself as Miilarkian as anyone despite having lived several human lifetimes before ever coming to the Islands. Block wore no beard as dwarves did in all other places, for neither did the Miilarkians. Full Bloods grew no facial hair, and the Ship People had taken to shaving theirs off generations ago. Like all Islanders, men and women both, Block wore his hair long to the waist and when going abroad he tied it all back in an intricate braid. Tradition said this was done so that if a Miilarkian drowned, their body could be dragged back from the sea. The touch of the braid would tell them apart from a stranger.

Two hundred years seemed forever to a human, but to a dwarf it was not near so long as that. Yet that was the span of time in which the people of an obscure cluster of scattershot islands in the midst of an ocean many called Interminable had moved beyond a primitive tribal life of feuds and superstition to become the primary carriers of the seaborne trade linking four distant continents. It may have been the most remarkable thing in human history, and while the Corner Stone had seen it all from the beginning, it would have taken him another two centuries to even start to explain just how it had happened.

Around the four shores of the Ocean, one of which Block had been born on and to where he would shortly be returning, the denizens had as little idea. They knew the Miilarkians as a warm and hospitable people, fair traders, and of course they had those wonderful ships. But anyone could build ships. The Islanders were, it was believed by those from elsewhere, just the right people at the right time. If the merchant game came down to the three iron-clad rules of location, location, location, then it was as simple as blind luck that the Miilark Islands lay between four continents. At various times of the year the changes of wind and current shifted the shipping channels, those rivers of the sea, in a manner conducive to traveling in turn to all four distant points, with the Islands as a convenient center. It was as simple, most thought, as that. The Miilarkians were middlemen for all others. That was their gift, and after two hundred years that seemed to be the way it had always been, and the end of it. For the lives of Men are short.