The Sable City by M. Edward McNally
*
Block played it all over in his mind as he sat in the Guild’s file room, three floors below that from which Tilda Lanai and Kuanu had taken their long plunges more than a year ago, one by accident and one by choice. Kuanu had been fine as well, bobbing to the surface of the Cove and shrieking to all Nine Gods that it stank down there. As Block understood it, all had soon been forgiven between the two apprentices.
But what Kuanu had seen before he made his choice, the old dwarf watching from the side had seen as well as both stared into the dark eyes of one Tilda Lanai. Kuanu had risked his life by leaping, but staying would have been no different. At that moment, in those eyes, the Full Blooded Islander and the Corner Stone of House Deskata had both seen that if the big man stood his ground, at least one of the apprentice Guilders would have left that room dead. Only which one was the question, and Kuanu had decided that he did not want to learn the answer.
His was not one of the final four names Block had considered.
The dwarf had spent two hundred years getting to know the people of Miilark, and they were not a field of study to become ploughed out, to dry up and blow away on the Wind of which they always spoke. Block supposed, by now, that as he had lived in the Islands longer than any man or woman alive, he was himself as Miilarkian as anyone despite having lived several human lifetimes before ever coming to the Islands. Block wore no beard as dwarves did in all other places, for neither did the Miilarkians. Full Bloods grew no facial hair, and the Ship People had taken to shaving theirs off generations ago. Like all Islanders, men and women both, Block wore his hair long to the waist and when going abroad he tied it all back in an intricate braid. Tradition said this was done so that if a Miilarkian drowned, their body could be dragged back from the sea. The touch of the braid would tell them apart from a stranger.
Two hundred years seemed forever to a human, but to a dwarf it was not near so long as that. Yet that was the span of time in which the people of an obscure cluster of scattershot islands in the midst of an ocean many called Interminable had moved beyond a primitive tribal life of feuds and superstition to become the primary carriers of the seaborne trade linking four distant continents. It may have been the most remarkable thing in human history, and while the Corner Stone had seen it all from the beginning, it would have taken him another two centuries to even start to explain just how it had happened.
Around the four shores of the Ocean, one of which Block had been born on and to where he would shortly be returning, the denizens had as little idea. They knew the Miilarkians as a warm and hospitable people, fair traders, and of course they had those wonderful ships. But anyone could build ships. The Islanders were, it was believed by those from elsewhere, just the right people at the right time. If the merchant game came down to the three iron-clad rules of location, location, location, then it was as simple as blind luck that the Miilark Islands lay between four continents. At various times of the year the changes of wind and current shifted the shipping channels, those rivers of the sea, in a manner conducive to traveling in turn to all four distant points, with the Islands as a convenient center. It was as simple, most thought, as that. The Miilarkians were middlemen for all others. That was their gift, and after two hundred years that seemed to be the way it had always been, and the end of it. For the lives of Men are short.
Dwarves live longer, if they are able, and Block had proven able so far. He had been there for all of it, even the early days, and the aches of his evenings and the scars on his body did not let him forget how hard it had all been. He knew that the friendly Miilarkian trader to be found today in any port city worth the name was the end of a long story, not the whole of it. Not even half, to tell the truth.
To an extent, the foreigners were right. Miilarkians as a people were warm, and friendly, and yes, fair in their dealings. But fairness, as any Miilarkian will tell you, cuts both ways. Of course it means that right is returned. Honor and justice, fairness demands it. But equally, it means that a wrong left unanswered is not just disagreeable, or unfortunate. It is immoral. For a Miilarkian, a true Miilarkian, to be fair is to be willing to be ruthless. A balance has no scruples. It is true, or it is worthless.
Captain Block knew that the House he had served for two centuries was in mortal jeopardy, and he knew that the dictates of inflexible honor had played their part in bringing the Deskatas to this place. The brink was before them, like a yawning doorway four stories above nothing but solid ground. House Deskata was the part of the Miilarkian story of which Block had become a part, and if their story ended now he supposed his did as well. A cornerstone with nothing built on it is just a rock in a field.
“I do grow melancholic, in my dotage,” Block muttered to the empty room. The oil in the lamp was almost spent, a small flame only left to flicker.
Block had no choice but to set out on Rhianne Deskata’s sad errand, for a man had to jump at the chance he could live with, no matter the risk or the odds. And now he had made the one choice that he did have. Matilda Lanai, she of the sickening fall and the miraculous, silt-spitting, quaking resurrection. It might be a sign at that. The Island girl wasn’t stupid. She knew how to work. And she had it inside her to be ruthless. Block had seen it plain as day.
Perhaps it was the jeweler’s eye of the hoary race of dwarves, or perhaps it was as simple as one true Miilarkian knowing another. The touch of the braid, that told friend from stranger, at the last.
Chapter Two