“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.
“I would like you to tell me the whole story sometime.”
Zeb had hoisted his axe back to one shoulder, his crossbow on the other. He gave Tilda another smile, the kind that would have made his face look wolfish were it not for the absence of danger in his light blue eyes.
“Then so I shall,” Zeb said as though he were making a vow, which he immediately ruined by frowning and tilting his head. “Provided of course we are not grotesquely butchered sometime later today.”
“Or tomorrow.”
“Or the day after that. You are catching on.”
They turned to meet the others by the trapdoor, but Tilda faltered a step as her eyes swept over the city stretching north. She said Zeb’s name and he stopped as well, then followed her over to the north side of the roof.
In that direction, some distance behind them now, Tilda could see the district of tall buildings like temples or government halls, a part of the city they had moved widely around rather than setting foot on the streets covered with a slimy green sheen. Tilda could not see the intersection that had stopped them from the top of the tower, but she could make out a long open area between the grandest of the buildings. It was movement from there that had caught her eye, even from the distance. Looking closer she could see that there was indeed a great deal of movement going on down there.
“Tilda,” John called from the trapdoor.
“Come here,” she answered.
The others did, standing in a line beside her and Zeb. They did not have to be told what to look at, for a great mass of figures was marching in formation through the open area. Even the gray light of the sky above flashed on blades and armor, and from across the distance Tilda thought she could faintly hear the rumble of iron-shod boots.
“ Hob-o-gob-o-lin,” Uriako Shikashe said, close enough to the correct pronunciation that everyone understood him.
“I thought the Shugak told Nesha-tari they never entered this place,” John said.
“They did,” Zeb nodded. “That’s why they paid us to come in for them.”
“They appear to have changed their minds,” Amatesu said.
The six party members exchanged uncertain looks, for no one knew quite what to make of a large force of hobgoblins moving into the city behind them, heading their way. They did however hurry on their way back down the tower.
*
Once Phin had been choked unconscious, a bearded devil in white robes threw the limp wizard over a shoulder as if the tall man weighed nothing. Another hoisted Claudja the same way, though she at least was left awake.
The green-haired demoness in the skin-tight leather armor remained behind with four devils, while the two bearing the prisoners set off at a fast run to the south. They passed first through the plaza where Rickard and the Sarge’s bodies lay hewn to the ground.
“I told you so,” Claudja whispered as her captor bounded past the sergeant, lying with his neck slashed open and his sightless eyes staring up at the sky. It only made her feel better for a moment.
The next few hours were of bouncing chaos as the devils ran down streets, scrambled over walls, and generally progressed as if utterly unaware that each jarring step drove a shoulder into Claudja’s belly. Her knees and chin banged against the creature’s chest and back, both of which felt like solid bone beneath a layer of skin thinner even than its robes. Claudja’s head was swimming within minutes and she could not see anything but cobblestones streaking by anyway. She thought she blacked out a time or two, but it could have been far more.
She was numb and addle-headed by the time the motion seemed to have stopped, and though she heard hissing voices close by the words were strange. Then she was bashing around again in darkness, her wrists still bound and now bleeding into her hands as the leather cord had been biting into her skin for days. The limp swinging of her arms was opening cuts. Claudja tried to move her hands to ease the pain and they brushed along a stone wall, then what seemed to be a curtain, then more wall. Then the devil was mounting stairs and its shoulder drove so hard and fast into Claudja’s stomach that she could not catch a breath between impacts. She tried to beat or kick against the thing but her arms and legs were feeble. She passed out again.