out. Before we become friendly.”
Phin leaned against the cart and tried to look more relaxed than he felt. “It will ‘shake out’ just as I have said. The goblin knows this is the safest way to proceed if he wishes to continue living in Souterm unmolested by my Circle.”
“Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Your Circle. I don’t know much about such things, but as I understand it there are years of training and what-not before a mage, or Wizard if that’s your preferred term, can enter into some magical Order.”
“That is true,” Phin said, wondering again where this man was from. His rough armor looked Zantish but he was just tan rather than actually swarthy, and ‘mage’ was not a common term in the Codian Empire.
“Then why do you want to leave your Circle now, after however many years in training?”
Phin looked south down the Imperial Post Road, back towards the great city looming to the south above which shafts of sun were cutting through the clouds. He could not distinguish the pinnacle of one particular tower on Again Island, but he knew it was there. He sighed.
“Because getting smashed in the head and kidnapped is the most interesting thing that has happened to me in the last ten years.”
The goblin and the shrouded woman spoke at length. Phin only caught a few words and understood none of them, but several times the woman shook a finger in the goblin’s face. Finally Edgewise marched over with a deep scowl.
“They will take you as far as the Camp Town outside of Vod’Adia,” he said. “Feed you on the road, pay the Shugak for your passage there, but that is all. Once in Camp Town you are on your own.”
“I will handle that when the time comes,” Phin said loftily, though he had no idea what he would do out in the middle of a hobgoblin, bullywug, and adventurer-infested wilderness.
“First things first, you must lose those robes. You there, axe-boy. See if you have anything less conspicuous that will fit Mr. Phoarty. A cloak or a coat or something.”
The man nodded at the goblin but before turning to the luggage in the cart he yanked off his right gauntlet and extended the hand at Phin.
“Zebulon Baj Nif, at your service. Looks like we’ll be hoofing together the next few weeks. Welcome aboard.”
Phin accepted the offered hand and Zebulon pumped it warmly, though there was still a sort of laughing look in his blue eyes. Behind him the Far Western swordsman was shaking his helmeted head and looking on with an expression of cold disgust that required no translation.
Chapter Seventeen
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
