Exiles of tabat, p.1
Exiles of Tabat, page 1
Book Description
Former Gladiator Bella Kanto has been exiled from her beloved city of Tabat, finding herself aboard a hostile ship bound for a frontier town, her only friend a puppy. She’s lost the magic that kept her young and vital, and for the first time is suffering the depredations of age. When she encounters an old lover along the way, she has a chance to escape—but does she really want to take it? And who is the mysterious woman Selene, who keeps appearing to Bella?
Meanwhile, former printer’s apprentice Lucy and her friend Maz, a student from the College of Mages, have been kidnapped from Tabat and are being taken to the Southern Isles in search of ancient magic in a place called the Coral Tower. They fear what will happen when they get there, particularly when their kidnapper realizes he’s wrong about Lucy’s identity.
Dragons, oracular turtles, steam dirigibles, magical artifacts, and more combine in a kaleidoscopic tale that continues the saga of the city of Tabat and its inhabitants.
Return to a beautifully wrought and immersive world where intelligent magical creatures fight for their right to be free in a system that makes use of their work—and sometimes their very bodies—in a city full of revolution and riot, ready for the return of its lost Champion: the reluctant Bella Kanto.
Exiles of Tabat
Book 3 of the Tabat Quartet
Cat Rambo
Exiles of Tabat
Copyright © 2021 Cat Rambo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
* * *
EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-183-7
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-182-0
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-184-4
Hardcover Case Bind ISBN: 978-1-68057-257-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951456
* * *
Cover design by Janet McDonald
Cover artwork images by Shutterstock
Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director
* * *
Published by
WordFire Press, LLC
PO Box 1840
Monument CO 80132
Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
WordFire Press eBook Edition 2021
WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2021
WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2021
Printed in the USA
* * *
Join our WordFire Press Readers Group for
sneak previews, updates, new projects, and giveaways.
Sign up at wordfirepress.com
Contents
Thus Far
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
About the Author
If You Liked …
Other WordFire Press Titles by Cat Rambo
Dedication
For my father, whose exile ended in December 2019.
Thus Far
Tabat is a city inhabited by both Humans and Beasts. The latter group are intelligent magical creatures, such as Centaurs, Dryads, Minotaurs, and the like. The city’s economy is driven by the labor of the enslaved Beasts, as well as by its trade in their body parts, which are used to fuel magical spells and engines, such as the furnaces beneath the city, which burn Dryad logs. Humans have long justified the servitude of Beasts in one way or another, but as the series begins, for the first time, a substantial number of Humans, the political group known as Abolitionists, are arguing that they should be freed.
The boy Teo has been raised in a village of Shapeshifters: beings capable of taking on animal as well as Human form. Especially feared for their abilities, the Shapeshifters must hide their identity from the Humans in order to avoid being exterminated. When Teo’s ability to change his shape does not manifest in adolescence as it should, his parents decide to save his terminally ill sister’s life by dedicating Teo to the Temples of the Moon Gods in return for a cure, thinking he will be safe enough there.
Teo begins the trip southward to the city of Tabat, where the major Temples are located, with the priest Grave. When Grave is attacked and put out of commission by a sting from a Fairy, Teo is sent by himself on a riverboat, under the eye of a Moon Temple lay member, the river pilot Eloquence Seaborn. The Moon Temples, which worship the world’s three moons, are one of two major religious groups in the city, the other being the Trade Gods followed by the upper classes.
Teo arrives in the city of Tabat and escapes his fate of Temple servitude when a fight breaks out at the docks between the ship’s cargo and the man who has come to take that cargo to the College of Mages, Sebastiano Silvercloth. Sebastiano is in an odd position—while he studies at the College and they use him to manipulate their money, they also scorn him for the Merchant ties that allow him to do so.
Adrift in the city of Tabat, Teo goes in search of the single person he knows of,, the Gladiator Bella Kanto. Bella Kanto is a charismatic woman who, for the past 30 years, has been determining the outcome of a ritual that controls the yearly weather of Tabat: the annual fight between a Gladiator representing Spring and a Gladiator representing Winter. Bella has won this battle every year for three decades, ensuring that the city has an extra six weeks of winter every year, and people are growing tired of the pattern.
Charismatic and alluring, Bella’s romances have become notorious and sometimes complicate her life, as when she breaks things off with a relative of the Duke of Tabat (Marta), who is driven by revenge to conspire with forces working against the Gladiator. When a student, Skye, on the brink of graduating falls in love with Bella, Bella yields to temptation and is soon embroiled in scandal. At the same time, she encounters Teo on the street and takes him in as a servant.
A major source of Bella’s fame is the books about her written by her best friend and former lover, Adelina Nittlescent, whose publishing house is funded by the proceeds from the incredibly popular serials about her that Adelina writes for the newssheets known as the penny-wides. Since publishing is considered a disreputable employment, Adelina has kept her ownership and management of the press a secret from most, including her own dictatorial mother, Emiliana.
Emiliana pressures Adelina to run for public office. The city is about to move from being ruled by the Duke of Tabat, a structure established when the city was first settled, to an elected council, in fulfillment of a promise made long ago by the duke’s ancestors. Adelina does her best to duck the responsibility, but finally is pressured into making a speech—and fails in a humiliating way. Wanting to succeed, she is tempted by and succumbs to a magical drug supplied to her by a woman she’s met, a photographer named Jilla Clearsight.
At the same time, she finds herself encountering Sebastiano, whose father has directed him to find a bride and presented him with three candidates: Lilia, Marta, and Adelina. She is torn between the romantic attraction she feels for Sebastiano and that which she feels for Eloquence Seaborn, who has come to her to see if she will publish his book.
Bella is tricked into killing Skye in gladiatorial combat and withdraws from society, even from her favorite cousin, the artist Leonoa Kanto. Leonoa’s paintings have been stirring civil unrest, including riots, due to their abolitionist content, and her own lover Glyndia, while not a Beast, is often mistaken for one due to the curse she is under.
Adelina is unable to comfort Bella; her own life has become increasingly complicated, including taking Eloquence’s sister Obedience in as an apprentice, despite his disapproval. The increasingly independent Obedience renounces the Moon Temples and takes on the name Lucy, but when she inadvertently gives away Adelina’s greatest secret to her mother, Adelina ousts her. Adelina is torn between Eloquence and Sebastiano, going back and forth before finally confessing her attraction to Sebastiano when she finds him talking with a potential rival, the Duke’s huntswoman, Ruhua.
Confused and adrift, Bella is betrayed and drawn into a smuggling scheme of illicit magical supplies that pits her against the strictest laws of Tabat. She is imprisoned, tortured, and sent away from the city before this book begins. She is joined by Teo, although she does not realize it. Transformed into a dog by the Sorcerer Murga, the boy has been given to the Duke of Tabat and breaks free just as Bella’s ship is leaving, leaping aboard it at the last minute, driven to join her.
As the book begins, Bella has been exiled from the city she loves with all her heart, knowing that those she leaves behind face riots, political upheaval, and worst of all, the unknown forces that have been working against her. Teo is condemned to doggish form. And Lucy, after trying to find shelter with her friend Maz, a student at the College of Mages, has been kidnapped.
Chapter 1
Journey of the Stooping Hawk (Bella)
They have killed Bella Kanto; she is dead and gone. What’s left is a husk, hollowed out, nothing inside it but air. If someone pushed at it, she would collapse, this ghost. This facsimile of Bella Kanto.
I walk to the cabin’s porthole and look out over the ocean that surrounds us. Bella Kanto looks out. Would have looked out. If she were not gone.
I am Bella Kanto, but I am not. It’s as though I never knew who I was.
The boat’s creak and sway surrounds me, always, always reminding me that I am somewhere other than Tabat. This tiny vessel is not a city, isn’t anything like it. The same handful of people every day.
Not that I talk to any of them, or they to me.
Ruhua, the Duke’s Huntswoman, wishes to talk, perhaps. She was there at my elbow as we came on board. Hovered near me, watched the sailors bring my boxes aboard.
Perhaps she does not really want to talk. Perhaps she only wants to make sure that I do not jump overboard, that Bella Kanto does not commit suicide even though she is already dead.
I am nothing without my city, without Tabat. It was part of me, it beat in my heart and breathed in my lungs. Now there is wave noise and wood plaint instead of the street bustle, the tumbling of wheels, the calling of vendors. This is nothing like Tabat.
Tabat, which I will never see again.
The thought, which I have tried to ward off, slips through my defenses, hits me like a dagger, like it has every time before. I thought I had gotten away from it. That I could slide my mind sideways and avoid its contemplation, but it comes at unexpected turns, and it is all the more painful when I am unprepared like this.
I miss Tabat. I miss waking in the morning to the mewing of gulls, the whisper and rustle of pines outside my bedroom window, the shrill buzz of the Fairies waiting for me to feed them. They will have forgotten me by now, if Abernia has not summoned someone to put them down, as she was ever threatening to do.
A scratch at the door. If it were a person, I would not answer. But I do. I go to the door and open it just enough for the puppy to slide inside. He snuffles against me, rubbing his head against my shins. Not really a pup, almost full-grown.
Alberic must be angry to have lost this dog. I’d seen him leading it about by the gilt leash that it still trailed when it jumped on board at the last minute. Ruhua confiscated that. She was not happy about the addition, but what could she do, order the ship to turn around for the sake of a mere dog?
The sailors do not mind him, but it is me the dog follows. My door that he slept outside last night since I will not allow him the comfort of my cabin. He wants attention; he wants love. I have nothing to give him, but he follows me still, so I sit now and pet him. I let him rest his head on my knee as I stroke his fuzzy ears. His eyes watch my face with that soulful gaze that only dogs can muster, as though his heart lies open before me, tender and beating.
Bella Kanto deserved such love. I do not.
We sit like that, the dog and I. I have no prescribed regimen for my day. Adelina sent me a box that I think holds books from the press, but I do not like to read. And worse, nowadays it makes my eyes and head hurt as they never have before.
And that is the worst of Bella Kanto being dead. She never felt the aches and twinges of age, never had a cold or sore throat, was always at her peak. I can feel all that age crawling over me, settling into my bones, making my knees ache in the cold mornings, making my back hurt when I have sat too long in one position.
I had grown unaccustomed to making accommodations for my body. Now it demands them as though angered by all those years of neglect.
I threw the little mirror that used to hang on the wall here out the porthole after the first time I looked in it.
Adelina would tell me I am still beautiful, but it’s not Bella Kanto’s beauty but someone else’s. The face of an older, grimmer—so much grimmer—woman with no smile in her eyes.
Not Tabat’s Bella Kanto. Whose Bella Kanto am I now? Not Adelina’s. We will write back and forth, for a few years perhaps, but she will forget me soon enough.
This cabin stinks of melancholy and stale air. It’s where I belong. As good a place as any, at any rate. Bella Kanto doesn’t belong anywhere anymore.
The dog noses my hand because I have stopped petting him. I ignore his little whine. There is no point to petting him, there is no point to anything, because there is no point to being Bella Kanto.
What does Ruhua think of Bella Kanto, I wonder? Before all this, we had met, but I never thought much of her. If anything, I thought she might be a little jealous of me, but I always assumed that in those days. Who would be jealous of me now?
She is the Duke’s Huntswoman, the one who organizes many of his outings. Not a hereditary position but one appointed. Someone he trusts implicitly. So implicitly that he’s willing to lose her services for half a year, so she can do whatever is to be done with me. They say it is exile. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
Maybe I’ll die mysteriously along the way.
The door swings open and a shadow falls across me. Ruhua stands there in the doorway, prim and neat as always. I cannot imagine her disheveled, but her outfit is not elegant or overly fussy, simply trim of line, the cloth immaculate and unwrinkled. It makes me wonder if there is some magic laid upon her wardrobe, but that’s a pricey magic for vanity’s sake.
No, it is simply that she is one of those people who is never taken at a loss.
As I used to be.
Now just her presence sends me into a blank abyss. What does she want? There is always a secret terror in me that she is here only to let me get close to escape before she takes me back to that cell. That would be a cruel thing, and Alberic can be cruel.
I swallow and stare at her.
She says, “Come and walk on deck before dinner. You will grow unhealthy sitting and brooding and breathing your own stink. There will be a storm this evening and no chance for fresh air.”
Is it an order or a request? I am unsure, but I do not want to find out by denying it and having her force the issue.
Her eyes flit behind me. “You can bring the dog,” she says.
Her tone makes me say something I had not planned to. “What is its name?”
