The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) Read Online Free PDF Page A

edge of his lands, only half a day distant from here.”
    Actually, we thought nothing of the sort, Tilda thought now. She said something different.
    “ You think a battle has already been fought?”
    Block nodded toward the charger. “That wound on the arse is long, from a big blade. Spear or a pole-arm. But the holes on the ribs are high, and the rags jammed in them poke out and up. Arrows shot from distance, on their downward path.”
    Tilda felt cold, and not just from the drear air. The man they had come here to find - all the way to Noroth and to Codia and to Orstaf - had marched with Nyham. If there had been a battle, he had been in it.
    “ Should we not hurry on, Captain?” she said. “I mean, he could…we have to find out what happened.”
    “ We know what happened,” Block growled. “The baron got whipped. A footman jumped on a knight’s horse and rode it back to here. That beast was not going any further today, and the man would not wait. The fellow went to ground and kept moving. And look here.”
    Block turned and stomped to the southwest edge of the clearing no longer minding the marks on the ground, so neither did Tilda as she followed. At the edge of the tall grass Block pointed at a last shoeprint on the soft mossy ground, then out into the grass.
    “ Broken stalk, bent stalk, another bent further along, in a dead line southwest. Southwest . Not back north, toward Nyham’s lands. Not the direction a fleeing peasant or manor man would have gone to get home.”
    Of Nyham’s seven-hundred men, two hundred had been such locals. The other five-hundred, only one of whom Tilda and her Captain were interested in, were recent legionnaires of the Codian Empire. They were deserters from the 34 th Foot, hired by the baron to visit vengeance upon his Duke, apparently without success.
    “ One of the renegades,” Tilda said, and Block nodded.
    “ I don’t know where the man thinks he is going now, but he is in a hurry to get there. Can’t be more than eight hours ahead.”
    “ So what?” Tilda said, and Block raised a dark eyebrow touched with gray at her.
    “ I mean, in that case…I mean it seems to me…”
    “ Spit it out, girl.”
    Tilda took a breath, and realized her heart was pounding. The last three months of her life seemed to be crashing into this moment from behind.
    “ Captain, we need to be on that battlefield, now. If, if our man is dead, we need to know it. And if he is captured we have to get there before he is hung for desertion, or for bearing arms against the Duke, or whatever. Right now, sir. Lol hique .”
    Block was again staring to the southwest, in the direction that the last mark of a legionnaire’s marching sandal pointed.
    “ Or maybe he escaped the battle. Made a run for it.”
    Tilda did not like where that was going. “Then our best chance of learning where he might have run would also be at the battlefield, no? With any captured legionnaires, who themselves may be strung-up before much longer.”
    Block did not seem to be listening. He was still staring off across the burry tops of the tall grass as the stalks waved gently in the chill breeze.
    “ Unless this is our man,” he said.
    Behind him, for just a moment, Tilda dropped her jaw and glared disbelief at Block’s wide back. She reined in her face before stammering one question in two languages.
    “ I’m tizalk …sorry… spahalo what?”
    “ Five-hundred-to-one odds against it, I know,” Block said, still staring away. “Bit long to wager much. But the pay-off…”
    Tilda wanted either to jump up and down, or else kick her esteemed and honorable Captain in his wide hindquarters. She managed to do neither. Just.
    “ Forgive me, Captain, but I think at the Island Stakes they call that a misag uyak . A Fool’s Bet.”
    “ Not if the race is rigged.”
    Now Tilda could only stare. It was not her place to question the Captain, and even if it had been, she had no idea of what she could possibly say to