The Sable City, Book I of the Norothian Cycle

The Sable City, Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Phinneas Phoarty was not certain what he had expected to find upon entering Vod’Adia, but it was not what he got.

After winding through back alleys for a long while the group had reached the Shugak gate where a long line of adventurers was queued up in groups of up to ten, waiting their turns to enter Vod’Adia on ten minute intervals. The city had been Open by then for around two hours. The Sarge led the way to the front of the line holding his ruined hand in a mass of bloody bandages to his chest and waving the Shugak totem stick with its rows of beads and bones in the other. He was in tremendous pain and at best only semi-coherent, but the grim hobgoblins at the palisade gate examined the stick and waved the group through between two others with toothy leers and guttural chuckles. They cared very little if a suicidal band of half-dead humans wished to enter the Sable City, so long as they had paid in full for the privilege.

The other adventurers eyed the group and muttered as they were jumped into the line, but no one stepped forward to ask as to the condition of the limp young woman slung over the legionnaire Ty’s shoulder. The humans did not impress Phin as being any more gallant than the Magdetchoi.

The Sarge and Rickard led the way at a stagger down a straight road of black stones extending through a green field of short grass. The two leaned on each other as the Sarge was hunched over his hand while Rickard had a tourniquet above his knee, though the leg of his torn trousers and the thick sock in a marching sandal were already bright red. The big man Ty was the only one of the three legionnaires who was still hale, and so he carried the woman who had yet to make so much as a murmur. She was slung over Ty’s shoulder and her head and arms swung limply in time with his pace. Phin walked in the rear carrying the only tower shield the legionnaires had managed to take with them when Shugak reinforcements and armored Jobians wielding maces had driven everyone away from the inferno of the Dead Possum Inn.

Phin stared past the others as they moved along the road, now able to make out some details of peaked roofs and thick, square towers above the loom of the city wall. The edges of all were still smoothed by the lingering, gray-white mist. The whole city was all dreadfully more substantial than it had seemed yesterday, and though the legionnaires were hardly setting a brisk pace toward it Phin began to fall behind.

This was sheer madness, some sensible part of Phin’s brain assured him. He was entering Vod’Adia not with a strong party but with three battered legionnaires who were kept upright mainly by pain and fear. Horayachus and his minions were dead, as were two of the legionnaires, and in his mind's eye Phin could still see Gery’s blood jetting into the air after the Centurion called Deskata slashed open his neck. Phin had intended to cast a Sleep spell on the man but when the woman in a black half cloak had appeared and felled him with a club, Phin had released his spell at her rather than risk a wild discharge that might have caught the Sarge or another legionnaire with whom he was supposed to be allied. He was in no way confident that he had done the right thing, but did not feel as though he had.

These legionnaires, besides being renegades from the Empire, were kidnappers. They were taking their prisoner to Ayzantu City to turn her over to the Priests of Ayon, the fiery god known as the Burning Man, the Stormking, the Oathbreaker, and most simply as Destruction. That was what Horayachus had said when he turned her over to the Sarge. That and something about the book.

Despite his bad state the Sarge was still clinging to the leather satchel over his shoulder, containing the large folio he had made Phin read from before hiring him. Though he had perused no more than a few words Phin knew the work had something to do with magical movement of a transcendental kind, or more simply put, with teleportation magic of the kind that allowed people and objects to move instantly from place to place. The legionnaires plainly expected to use the book to take them from Vod’Adia to Ayzantu City, and Phin had a fair idea of just who they expected to work that magic.