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.
Chapter Fourteen
It took the slow Channel barge three more days to pass the treacherous shoals and bars off the swampy coast of the Vod Wilds before the sails were trimmed and the craft angled back toward land to enter the busy delta of the Red River. Two more days of hard work at the oars for the crew brought the vessel laboriously up the Red, until the famous riverine harbor of what was now the Codian city of Souterm came into view.
Zeb spent most of those days on the deck, staying close to the galley for he was still hungry at all hours. He cobbled together enough of the pidgin tongue known as Channelspeak to strike up a friendly banter with the ship’s cook, and the old Thuban fellow was a good enough sort to toss Zeb a wayward biscuit or briny pickle now and again.
The Far Westerners were generally topside as well. Amatesu stayed close to Zeb, plainly keeping an eye on him, but the woman’s quiet presence bothered him not at all. Zeb had always liked to talk and the shukenja had an interest in improving her spoken Codian. While she told Zeb very little about her native Ashinan, she provided an audience as he prattled on about Wakminau, the Riven Kingdoms, the Norothian Channel, or whatever else came to his mind.
The swordsman Uriako Shikashe was around but he tended to keep himself aloof from Zeb as much as he did the ship’s crew, preferring to spend his time alone and gazing out grimly from the gunwales. The man always wore his ornate, skirted breastplate and both of his swords as though concerned a marlin might leap onto the deck at any moment and have at him. As for the Madame Nesha-tari Hrilamae, she remained as mysterious as ever. There had been no sequel to the odd feeling that had raised Zeb’s hackles the first time he stepped out of his cabin, and he still had yet to see the woman Amatesu called his new employer. The shukenja took a bit of poor- quality vegetables down her way at meal times, inspiring Zeb to formulate a theory that his unseen employer was actually a bunny rabbit.
The slow passage to the port gave Zeb long hours to watch the riverbanks roll by, though the sight was not encouraging. The left bank of the Red was in theory Codian Doon while the right was the Vod Wilds, but there was no “west” or “east” bank for near the coast the river twisted through a tangled morass of bayou, mangrove, and saw-grass buzzing with toads and bugs Zeb could hear even from the deck. The geography was part of the reason pirates had successfully held the city now called Souterm for so long back when the place was known as Murdertown, despite having all the naval powers of the Channel against them.
In short, it was not going to be a good place to dive overboard and swim for freedom.
Zeb still meant to bolt, and he knew how to run. Most men who came of age in the Riven Kingdoms were press-ganged into armies with some regularity, and before a battle that looked to be particularly thorny whole battalions could melt away into the woods. The King of Antersau had once joked that the hawk on his banners should be replaced with a more representative local bird, the Flying Deserter. From the Drannian Highlands to the Lower Ghendea, peasants fortunate enough to actually harvest a field always whistled sharply before sticking pitchforks into haystacks. A Riven Man did not live long if he did not learn when to beat feet at a young age.
Amatesu would not say where they were going, but Zeb had a good idea. An Ashinese warrior who looked like grim death itself, a shukenja with magic powerful enough to repair a ruined arm, and a mysterious Ayzant woman, or possibly bunny, with the royal-sounding name of Nesha-tari Hrilamae. Sailing to Souterm just down river and road from Galdeez, little more than a month before the Fifth Opening of Vod’Adia. The three strangers Zeb now found himself with, one of whom he had yet to even see, were not going to Doon for the coffee.
For the months of siege Zeb had spent in Larbonne, the Ayzant army had been reduced by more than just disease and the resistance of the Dauls. Larbonne was just a couple of weeks downriver from Chengdea, which along with Codian Galdeez were the two border towns through which the hobgoblins and bullywugs of the Vod Wilds allowed entrance into their lands once in a century to those wishing to brave the Sable City. More than a few of the besiegers had slipped out of the lines to try their luck further north, enough so that Ayzant officers regularly spread the bloody stories of what the Daulic forces in Chengdea were doing to any small groups of armed men coming their way from the south. More than a few times mangled bodies in ring mail armor “found on the roads,” were brought back to the lines for display.
With the port of Larbonne closed by the siege for much of the year, adventurers bound for Vod’Adia from abroad had been forced most often to take the route through Codian Souterm and Galdeez, and Zeb had no doubt he was with three of them now. For the moment. But he’d be damned if he was going anywhere near a magic city full of the unholy hosts of the netherworld. He would probably be damned anyway in due time, but not while he could still run like hell was at his heels.
Zeb prattled on to Amatesu but his mind was on Souterm long before the city came into sight. It was there that he intended to make his disappearance, the very first time the opportunity arose.
Around midday of the 27 ^ of Eighth Month the crewman watching for sandbars from the foremast first gave the shout that Souterm was nigh, and a huzzah echoed from the men sweating at the oars. Zeb and Amatesu moved from the slim shade beside the galley to the fore deck, and as the barge cleared the last torturous bend of the river they watched the city of Souterm appear before them.
The place was as grand as Zeb had every reason to expect. Though he had never been this far Down Channel before, Souterm was the sort of place preceded by its reputation. The oldest human city on Noroth had a history as complicated and convoluted as that of whole peoples and nations, and Zeb was faintly surprised by the number of landmarks he knew by his very first sight of them. There were the ancient Ettacean works of black stone, including the featureless stone cylinder standing like an iron rod on the stony spur of an island jutting into the wide harbor. That was now the Wizard Tower within the Circle Compound on Again Island, though no one had set foot within the tower itself for centuries. There were the spindly piers and twisting alleys of the lower west bank that dated from pirate times, backed by the even row houses of Broadsword Ridge between the hulking
