M McNally - The Sable City

As hour followed hour of slow pursuit through the long grass, Tilda said not a single word. Block, intent of his observations, either did not notice or did not care. By the time enough hours had passed for the sun to approach the distant horizon, it became obvious their quarry had veered toward a jumbled bunch of low hills looming like a castle above the grass, all topped with dense trees. The wall of mountains to the south was still several days distant, but Tilda knew from the Captain’s maps that the foothills at their feet extended out onto the plains for miles in places, and that a river called the Winding lived up to its name as it snaked its way among them. The small cluster of hills now before them seemed a sentinel from that country, like a cavalry vedette thrown out well ahead of an advancing army.

Block’s gruff voice was no less so after hours of silence.

“Our fellow is heading straight for the hills, and he must be exhausted. It is likely he would rest as soon as he reached cover. Look sharp.”

“I have been,” Tilda said.

The dwarf turned in his saddle just enough to glare back over a shoulder.

“No, actually you have been looking sulky.”

Tilda stared at the ground so as not to glare back at her Captain.

“I have not,” she said in a small voice.

“Of course you have. Your big bottom lip is jutting out to shade your chin. Luck of the flip, girl. Take your complaints to the Ninth God.”

Tilda mumbled something, but when Block snapped “What?” she said something different.

“Were the fingers worn off of the coin you tossed, Captain?”

“What?” Block snapped again. Tilda looked up at him this time, his hard eyes wide under the V of his heavy brows. In theory a Guild apprentice should always have kept her eyes downcast toward a House Man of Block’s station, but the disparity in their height had always made that difficult. Not that it bothered Tilda at the moment.

“I ask if the coin you tossed was worn plain. Did both sides look to be back-handed, thumbs down?”

The Captain blinked, and one end of the hard line of his mouth twitched. Now nearing evening, a dark shadow was already on the cheeks that the old dwarf had shaved this and every morning for hundreds of years.

“I did not look to see,” he said, and Tilda said nothing.

Muddy prints up the bank of a sluggish, shallow stream at the base of the first hillock told even Tilda which way their quarry had gone. The prints were uneven as though the man had stumbled, and Tilda thought that surely he must have been at the end of his rope. A full day and more of flight, on the heels of a battle. She thought that passing from the open fields to the sheltering shade of the trees must certainly have been a relief and a temptation for him and she looked around carefully, almost expecting to find a bundled shape on the ground at the base of each trunk. The horses sensed their riders’ moods and moved as if they had toes to tip on, hoof-falls muffled on the carpet of old needles and leaves. The trees were mostly pines, seeds washed down from the mountains eons ago and caught up in the rocks of the hills. Here and there an ancient oak arose taller among them, like a stately lord above prickly supplicants. Tilda and Block kept their eyes on the ground, but found only signs that their man had kept moving.

They crested one rise, and descending the far side Tilda blinked to discover that in the midst of the encircling hills the trees were regularly spaced, shaggy-barked, and planted in even rows. They bore fruit shaped like pears but with white skins, and the branches hung heavy with them. As the riders passed down and among them, Tilda saw that the orchard was not maintained. A lot of fruit lay on the ground already going to rot and the air had a sickly-sweet smell.

The shadows between the hills and the encroaching gloom of evening shivered Tilda all the more, and made it harder than ever to see any signs of passage. The Miilarkians were obliged to dismount again, and it took several minutes for the Captain to reacquire the trail. Tilda stood by holding the reins, wondering at the silence. In Miilark, dusk brought a cacophony of birdcalls from the trees, settling or waking, like a changing of shop shifts. But here there was nothing. She thought that if they found no one here they would soon have to make camp, and she hoped Block would at least push on a bit farther before doing so.

Block found some askew needles, and as Tilda boosted him back to the pony’s saddle, she spoke just to break the silence.

“Captain, may I speak?”

The gloom made it impossible to read Block’s face even as he turned to look down at her.

“So polite? You must be near mutiny. Say on.”

Tilda sighed and remained standing between the horses. “I am bound, Captain, to follow your orders with no explanation required. If you wish to pursue a single man instead of an army, then that is what we shall do. You need not explain, nor put the decision to rigged chance.”

“I told you,” Block growled. “I did not know then, and still do not know now, whether the coin was worn and the toss moot.”

“And I of course believe you without question.”

“This is without question?”

Tilda moved around her horse, patting the mare’s nose, to mount from the other side. She kept speaking, but now looked away rather than at the dwarf’s dimming silhouette.

“Captain, we landed two months ago on a vast continent peopled by millions. Eight years behind a man who had left even his own name back in the Islands, and whose looks we can only guess at after so much time.”

“I shall know him by his eyes,” Block said more quietly. “They are as green as the emerald pennants of the Great House of Deskata.”

Tilda nodded as she pulled herself into the saddle, for she knew the stories of her own House. Her long black braid swung forward over her shoulder.

“I mean only to say, Captain, that though we came to this place nearly rudderless, as it were, you have since guided us to within a day or two of the man, one among millions, who we seek. It is a most remarkable thing.”

They sat facing each other on the side-by-side horses, and though Tilda could not see Block’s face clearly, she supposed his dwarven eyes could still perceive hers.

“Do you have a point, girl? Or do you just whistle at the Wind?”

Tilda took a breath. “I mean to say that I follow you, Captain Block, as it is my duty. But even were it not, I would follow your whim or hunch with perfect confidence. I have learned to rely on them as I would on the tides.”

Tilda felt immediately awkward, and expected no response from the dwarf other than, perhaps, an order to shut up. Batten her hatch and shove off. She in no way expected what she got.

Block leaned forward and seized the end of the braid lying over Tilda’s shoulder. He jerked her sideways, nearly pulling her off her horse for she as yet had only one foot in a stirrup. Silver flashed before Tilda’s eyes in the fading light, a dagger in the Captain’s hand, and she quailed to the pit of her stomach, feeling what an Island poet had once called “the bird in the rib cage.”

He is going to cut off my hair.

Tilda thought it quicker than the actual words could be formed or needed to be, for she understood as did all Miilarkians who wore the braid that to have it severed was the ultimate sign of shame and rejection. The final formal act of negation preceding banishment from the Islands and their society. It was the last thing that would have been done to the man they were seeking now, on the day he was exiled and put to sea.

But the Captain did not cut, he stabbed, and not at Tilda but above her bent body. Warm fluid that was certainly, sickeningly, blood splashed her back.