the Captain had brought Tilda to this continent was surely moot unless John pulled off a miracle and somehow used the Wizard, probably dead by now as well, and a book, probably lost, to send him magically back to the Islands. Tilda had not entered Vod’Adia for that slim chance. She had made a choice to do something of her own choosing, rather than doing what was expected of her. It was the second time in her life she had done such a thing. The first had been when she left her father’s shop on Chrysanthemum Quay, and applied for entry into the Deskata Guild.
From her vantage point now, neither choice looked to have been a good bet.
Tilda’s literal vantage point at the moment was in fact quite impressive. The climb to the top of the tower had been worth the fighting, for from seven stories above Vod’Adia’s black streets the city was laid out before the party like a map. The rain above had stopped and while the dome of mist seemed close enough to touch from the tower roof, the view all around was unobstructed. To the north the streets the party had traveled for days could be traced almost all the way back to Vod’Adia’s gate, while to the west the black wall they had been skirting since yesterday was revealed as enclosing a district of sprawling houses large as mansions in their own walled yards, with paths and open plazas filling the spaces between. Looking ahead to the south the party could see that they did not need to enter that district at all.
Beyond the wall enclosing the south end of the mansion district, an enormous palace complex sat atop a slight rise surrounded by ugly open ground of bare dirt, hacked tree trunks, and arching footbridges spanning ditches that once had been streams winding among leafy trees. The palace itself was both enormous and of an odd arrangement, with nine round towers evenly spaced to form a circle, each connected to a central keep by long galleries of three or four stories in height. Each gallery was wide enough to contain their own courtyards, rows of battlements, and columned porticos. Even though the whole structure was made of Vod’Adia’s characteristic black rock it all seemed somehow more decorative and ornamental than it was designed for defense, or for any other practical purpose.
John Deskata, Uriako Shikashe, and Amatesu were hunkered down on the southern side of the tower roof to study the distant palace, with the shukenja translating between the ex-legionnaire and the ronin samurai. Somewhere between the third and sixth floor Deskata and Shikashe had become pals as the two of them did battle shoulder-to-shoulder, and even now Shikashe clapped John on the back and chuckled at something the bearded Miilarkian man had said.
The gesture made Tilda frown. She turned away from the trio at the south edge of the roof and saw Heggenauer was watching them as well, seated cross-legged by the trapdoor into the tower lest anything stick its head up from below. The Jobian was cleaning the gory head of his mace with a cloth, removing demon blood from the peaceful designs etched thereon, but he was doing it absently as he looked at the Far Westerners. His handsome face was deeply thoughtful, and if it made him look less bold at the moment, that was not at all bad. He had been looking that way since Amatesu had told her story the night before.
“Are you all right, Brother Heggenauer?” Tilda asked.
Heggenauer nodded before he glanced at Tilda, then gave a wistful smile.
“Thinking, I am afraid. An unseemly pursuit for a man of Exland.”
Tilda smiled a little despite her mood. “What are you thinking, if I may ask?”
Heggenauer looked at the clean head of his mace, and put his right hand through the leather thong at the base of the handle to let it hang close at hand. His shield lay on the roof next to him and he touched the arched line of Jobe’s holy symbol.
“I am thinking that I went from my father’s house directly to the service of a good knight, and thence to the Builder’s House, without very much time between.”
He looked across the roof at the samurai and the shukenja.
“I am thinking that the world is a more complicated place than I have thus far been led to believe.”
“Does that make it better, or worse?” Tilda asked, and Heggenauer narrowed his clear eyes.
“It makes it harder,” he said.
Tilda felt like putting a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. But she didn’t. She walked past the pensive priest.
The roof of the tower was rimmed by battlements but they were only decorative, rising no higher than a knee. Deskata and the Westerners were kneeling well back from the southern edge but Tilda saw that on the east side, Zebulon was actually standing with one foot up on the short wall, leaning on his arms crossed atop his raised knee. Tilda stepped heavily as she approached, lest she startle him into pitching headlong over the edge. Somehow that seemed like something Zeb might be capable of doing. Tilda stopped a good two steps back.
“Have you no sensible fear of heights?” she asked.
Zeb looked at her over his shoulder and grinned. The tower had been dusty inside and the gray powder was caked in his scruffy beard and as much of his bushy black hair as escaped irregularly from under the rim of his battered Ayzant helmet. He looked like a crazy old man on the edge of the roof, but Tilda smiled back at him.
“Miss Matilda,” he said, sounding theatrically offended. “Do you not know that I hail from the mighty fortress city of Wakminau? Standing sentinel atop the cliffs of the Minau Hills, where they loom to their greatest height above the Bifurcation? A man can’t walk outside in Wakminau if he is worried about taking a fall. Honestly, on the morning after a feast day, the rivers below are clogged with bobbing drunks.”
Tilda looked past Zeb over the winding streets and the endless blocks of black stone, with the featureless gray sky looming above. They had all seen some movement down there, small clusters of adventurers creeping along, but the distance was too great to discern details.
“Is the view any better in Wakminau?”
Zeb screwed one eye shut at Tilda and craned the other open wide, sending a gray-flecked eyebrow halfway up his forehead. Tilda heard herself laugh and though it sounded strange in the stillness high above the city, it felt good.
“Tilda, my adorable ignoramus,” Zeb sighed. “How can a worldly woman of Miilark not know that the Bifurcation, seen from the cliffs, is the most beautiful spot in the world?”
“Better than the Capital of the Islands?” Tilda asked. “Seen from the Avenue of the Magnates?”
Zeb snorted. “And what does one see from there? Warehouses, and great heaping stacks of money? Pishaw, if I may say so.”
Zeb stood upright, and gestured out over Vod’Adia as he spoke.
“From the top of the Wak, to your left you would see the mighty Dranner at its widest, the great river at a lazy blue rest after frothing down from the Dwarf Mountains of Tor, and churning whitely across the Midyiss forests and the hard Hisine plains. Boats there would be upon it, the square-sailed barges of Turria and Molok with their stripes of orange-and-yellow, and brown-and-black. So too are there the sleek pleasure craft of the Bowganese, slim as canoes and with the triangles of their white sails dotting the water.”
Tilda opened her mouth to speak, but Zeb pivoted to his right and went on.
“Straight across the Dranner’s end lays green Bowgan itself, the old Elf city of cottages and shady glades with the two lines of perfect oaks spiraling up Thancil Hill to the Miresh Tane Cladath, that is the Castle of the Trees. Below that olden place you would see the Dranner as it divides into the Riddle and Ghendal against the hard headlands climbing up to the jagged mountains called the Dragon’s Teeth. There stand the stout docks and the dun-colored waterfront of ancient Antersau, the Gateway to the Channel, where time and again men stood and held with their backs to the river whenever the Great Red Dragon sent his legions pouring over the southern mountains. So too it was from Antersau, some do say, where came the man who with spear and sword slew the Great Wyrm in the year 945, thanks be to all the gods of everyone, huzzah!”
Zeb raised a fist as though it held a tankard, and gave Tilda a wink.
“That’s when everybody in the bar downs their drink, and buys another.”
“Such a hero wasn’t from Wakminau?” Tilda asked, playfully.
“Well, obviously he would have been, but Wakminau wasn’t around for another three-hundred years or so. Not until Old Illygard sent peacekeepers into the Rivens, to quell the tumultuous lands on behalf of the Grand Council. But that, dear Island girl, is a longer and sadder story.”
Deskata and the others were getting to their feet, knocking dust from their armor and clothing and preparing to head back down after having plotted a route toward the palace at the heart of Vod’Adia. Tilda had slipped out of her present circumstances for a moment, but they were coming back to her. She stayed away a moment longer.
