The Sable City

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  Tilda thought she might have kept up with Dugan over open ground, but the man’s build was far better suited than was hers to plowing through a crowd. She fell behind as they ran the five blocks to the Dead Possum, stumbling when jostled and having to fight her way through the crush.

  She saw the top of the willow tree over an even thicker crowd as she approached the intersection, and people gathered around a burning inn on a corner. Tilda had no doubt this was the place she was looking for and she wormed into the press, elbowing her way and crawling when she stumbled to the ground. People roared like they were watching a sporting match, and steel clanged on steel over their cries.

  Tilda slithered into the open between the spread legs of a large hobgoblin. Dugan almost stomped on her head as he spun past, driven by a legionnaire leading with a tower shield and throwing wild stabs over the top.

  “Dugan!” she shouted, scrambling up, and to her right someone yelled, “What?” Tilda looked that way and saw what had to be John Deskata, for his eyes blazed like twin emeralds though apart from them his bearded face was plain, and presently marred by an angry sneer. He was balding. Another legionnaire was struggling to rise but the green-eyed man snatched away the injured one’s sword so that he held one in either hand. The fire consuming the inn glinted in the massive green ring on his finger. He yelled and ran at Dugan.

  Tilda shouted the name of the head of her House, but he did not slow. She scrambled up and ran after him. Before he had closed the distance Dugan let the legionnaire with the tower shield back him against the tree, then launched his shoulder so hard into the shield that it banged back into the man’s face and sent him down. The crowd cheered.

  Dugan saw the man with two swords charging, watched him come, and at the last moment put a toe under the tower shield at his feet and flipped it upright. Dugan slipped to the side as the charging man plowed into the chest-high shield, and crashed into the tree trunk with a double bang. Dugan raised a sword as Tilda’s quarry slid to the ground. Tilda tackled him.

  Hitting the stout renegade in his heavy leather armor, which she had given him as a gift come to think of it, felt little different than tackling the tree would have. Dugan woofed and stumbled but Tilda’s shoulder rebounded off his flank and she went sliding on her back over rough tree roots.

  Tilda kick-jumped to her feet and freed her buksu club from her hip, turned toward Dugan and threw out a hand. She shouted for him to stop but he yelled “Duck!” and Tilda did so automatically, as the word was in Miilarkian. She had no time to wonder where Dugan had picked it up for John Deskata had just tried to cut her head off from behind, burying a short sword in the tree trunk. Dugan rushed him and the two twirled away exchanging snarls and avoiding stabs. Tilda yelled at them both, in Codian and Miilarkian, shouting the names Dugan and Deskata, but they ignored her. She raised her club and tried to get into position behind Dugan, hoping that if she knocked him cold John Deskata might realize she was on his side, which she supposed she had to be. The two men were turning too fast, Tilda got too close, and Deskata lashed out at her. She had to parry his sword off the side of her club before she took it in the throat, and Dugan took advantage to swipe at his enemy’s weapon hand. The man howled and his sword flipped away in the air, along with two fingers. One still wore the great emerald ring of the House of Deskata.

  “Tilda!” Dugan shouted in her face, and she clubbed him across the temple. His brown eyes fluttered and he fell to a knee. Tilda cracked him over the back of the head.

  Dugan went face down and lay still. The other man was on his back, cursing the gods and clutching his ruined hand to his chest while blood spattered his legionnaire breast plate. Tilda took a step toward him, turning pale herself, and swooned.

  Not the blood, she thought, I am not so delicate as that. But her club fell from her hand and she stumbled to the side, blinking slowly as her eyelids felt heavier than her head.

  She was on one knee, looking across the clearing where in front of the crowd lay the Duchess of Chengdea, flat on the ground like a dead thing. A tall man stood over her, premature streaks of gray in his brown moustache and chin beard. His eyes were locked on Tilda’s and a bit of powder or dust was falling from the fingers of his outstretched hand. The world went soft and dark, and Tilda toppled to the ground as if it were the feather bed she had shared with her sisters growing up, in the attic room of her father's house on Chrysanthemum Quay.

  The Dead Possum inn gave up the ghost. The roof crashed in and flames climbed high into the night sky. A blast of fire and heat shook the willow tree and forced the crowd further back, but it did not interrupt their cheers.

  Chapter Twenty-Six