Bleak Seasons

by Glen Cook

They wanted to conquer. They knew they had to conquer because their master Shadowspinner would not tolerate anything less. He has a particular lack of understanding when it comes to failure. His followers are established solidly inside the city. Mild stubbornness will give them success.

  But they are on the run.

  Something has grabbed hold of them and convinced them that it is not possible for even their souls to survive if they stay inside Dejagore.

  39

  The southerners seem to have just closed their eyes and shoved their heads into a beehive, don’t they? What? Why so reluctant? Come see. This is amusing. Everywhere you look the southerners are falling back. Some —

  40

  “You all right, Murgen?” I shook my head. I felt like a kid who had spun around about twenty times, intentionally trying to make himself dizzy before jumping into some silly competition.

  I was in an alley. Runt boy Goblin was beside me, looking extremely concerned. “I’m fine,” I told him.

  Then I fell to my knees, stuck my hands out to grab the alley walls so I would not spin around anymore. I insisted, “I’m all right.”

  “Of course you are. Candles. Keep an eye on this dork. He tries to take over, get deaf. He’s got too tender a heart.”

  I tried not to let my ego become engaged. Maybe I was too tender, too much a sucker. The world sure isn’t kind to the man who tries to be gentle and thoughtful.

  Its spin slowed down till I no longer had to hold on. A scuffle broke out behind us. Someone cursed in a nasal, liquid tongue. Somebody else growled, “This asshole is fast!”

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” I yelled. “Let the man alone! Let him come up here.”

  Candles didn’t knock me over the head or contradict me. The short, wide Nyueng Bao guy who had shown me to Ky Dam’s hideout marched up to me. The fingers of his right hand rubbed his right cheek. He seemed utterly astonished that somebody had laid a hand on him. His ego suffered again when he spoke in Nyueng Bao and I said, “Sorry, old-timer. No speakee. Gonna got to be Taglian or Groghor with me.” In Groghor, which my maternal grandmother spoke because Grandpa captured her from those people, I asked, “What’s happening?” I knew maybe twenty words in Groghor, but that was twenty more than anyone else within seven thousand miles.

  “The Speaker sends me to lead you to where the invader is most vulnerable. We have watched closely and know.”

  “Thank you. We appreciate it. Lead on.” Shifting languages, I observed, “Marvellous how these guys suddenly talk the lingo when they want something.” Candles grunted.

  Goblin, who had sneaked forward for a look around, returned just in time to offer me directions to the same weak point the Nyueng Bao had in mind. The squat man seemed a little surprised we could find our butts with our hands, maybe even a touch disgruntled.

  “You got a name, short and wide?” I asked. “If you don’t have one you prefer I guarantee you these guys will hang one on you and I promise you won’t like it.”

  “Hear hear,” Goblin agreed, chuckling.

  “I am Doj. All Nyueng Bao call me Uncle Doj.”

  “All right, Uncle. You going up there with us? Or did you just come over to direct traffic?” Already Goblin was whispering instructions to the guys creeping up behind us. No doubt he had left a few soft spells of sleepiness or confusion amongst the southerners as he was scouting.

  Little discussion was needed. We would drive into their soft spot, kill anything that moved, split them in half, butcher anybody who didn’t run away, then we would back away before Mogaba began feeling too confident.

  “I will accompany you although that stretches the Speaker’s instructions to extremes. You Bone Warriors surprise us continually. I wish to watch you at your work.”

  I never considered killing people to be my profession but did not care to argue. “You speak Taglian very well, Uncle.”

  He smiled. “I am forgetful, though, Stone Soldier. I may not remember a word after tonight.” Unless the Speaker jogged his memory, I supposed.

  Uncle Doj did a great deal more than watch us hack and stab southerners. He turned into a one-man cyclone flailing around with a lightning sword. He was as sudden as the lightning but as graceful as a dancer. Each time he moved another Shadowlander fell.

  “Damn,” I told Goblin a while later. “Remind me not to get into a quarrel with that character.”

  “I’ll remind you to bring a crossbow and let him have it in the back from thirty feet is what I’ll do. After I put a deafness and a stupidity spell on him to even things up a little.”

  “Don’t be surprised if it’s me distracting you someday when One-Eye sneaks up and offers you a cactus suppository.”

  “Speaking of the runt. Tell me. Who’s being conspicuously absent without leave lately?”

  I sent messages to the various units suggesting that we had done our part to relieve Mogaba’s troops. We should all go back to our part of town, patch ourselves up, take naps, like that. I told the Nyueng Bao elder, “Uncle Doj, please inform the Speaker that the Black Company extends its gratitude and friendship. Tell him he is free to call upon that at any time. We will extend ourselves as much as possible.”

  The short, wide man bowed far enough that his movement had to mean something. I bowed back, almost as deeply. That must have been the right move because he smiled slightly, bowed shallowly for himself, hustled off.

  “Runs like a duck,” Candles observed.

  “I’m glad that duck was on our side, though.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I’m glad that duck... Argh!” Candles had me by the throat.

  “Somebody help me shut him up.”

  That was just the start of what became a wild night of blowing off tensions. I got no chance to participate myself but I heard it was a banner night for the Jaicuri whores.

  41

  “Where the hell have you been?” I snarled at One-Eye. “The Company just fought through its nastiest episode in, oh, just days, and you were obviously absent every stinking second.” Not that his presence would have made any difference.

  One-Eye grinned. My displeasure did not bother him a bit. He had outlived or outstubborned a parade of snotnoses like me. “Shit, Kid, I had to get my Shadowmaster sticker back, didn’t I? I’ve got a lot of work in that thing... What’s the matter?”

  “Huh?” For a moment I saw a little black louse scuttling across a grey landscape from a height unattainable anywhere in Dejagore, even atop the citadel, where Old Crew guys were not welcome anymore. “Never mind, runt. I’d like to kick your ass but it wouldn’t do any good now. So you were out there. What became of Widowmaker and Lifetaker?” While I was arranging a quieter life for our leader those two vanished without a trace.

  I wondered how Mogaba would write all this if he was keeping the Annals.

  “One-Eye?”

  “What?” Now he sounded irritated.

  “You want to answer me? What happened to Widowmaker and Lifetaker?”

  “You know something, Kid? I don’t have the faintest freaking idea. And I don’t care. I only had one thing on my mind. I wanted my spear back so I could use it next time that sucker ain’t looking. Then I had to worry about dodging a gang of raggedyass Shadowlanders who tried to jump me. They went away somewhere. All right?”

  And none of us could fathom that. Because they vanished just when the Shadowlander confidence was rockiest. Shadowspinner had his tail between his legs and his boys could have been broken.

  I grumbled, “If that was the Old Man and Lady they would’ve kept coming till they broke the whole show wide open. Wouldn’t they?”

  I glared at an albino crow perched not twenty feet away. Its head was cocked. It stared at me with malign intelligence.

  There were a lot of crows tonight.

  Other agendas were being pursued. I was just one pawn caught up in tides of intrigue. But if we were careful the Company need not get swept away.

  Mogaba and the Nar and their Taglian
troops stayed busy for days. Maybe the Shadowmasters decided to make Mogaba pay for his failure to fulfill his end of the implicit bargain.

  Which was just one more example of the way people down here go bugfuck when they are involved with the Black Company.

  It could make a guy nervous if he thought about everybody within a thousand miles seeming to wish he’d never been born.

  My guys enjoyed Mogaba’s situation. And he could not squawk about their attitudes. We gave him exactly what he asked. We saved his ass and set him up so all he had to do was chase a few Shadowlanders out of town.

  I had to see him almost every day at staff meetings. Again and again we showed ourselves to the soldiers, pretending to be brothers marching shoulder to shoulder against our evil foe.

  Not once was anybody fooled except maybe Mogaba.

  I never took it personal. I took a stance I believed the Annalists of the past would approve, just picturing Mogaba as not one of us.

  We are the Black Company. We have no friends. All others are the enemy, or at best not to be trusted. That relationship with the world does not require hatred or any other emotion. It requires wariness.

  Perhaps our refusal to remonstrate, or even to acknowledge Mogaba’s treachery, was the final straw, or perhaps the back-breaker was his awareness that even his Nar compatriots now believed the real Captain might still live. Whatever, the ultimate and perfect warrior drifted across a boundary from beyond which he could not return. And we did not discover the truth until we had paid in treasures of pain.

  It took ten days for Dejagore to return to normal if normal was our state before the great attack. Both sides had suffered terribly. I believed Shadowspinner would now just lick his wounds and let us get hungry for a while.

  42

  “Got something for you, Kid.” I started awake. “What...?” What happened? I don’t drift off that way.

  One-Eye had a big shit-eating grin on but it evaporated when he looked at me closer. He darted in, grabbed my chin, turned my head right and left. “You just have one of your spells?”

  “Spells?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Not exactly. I just had their word for the fact that I went spooky sometimes.

  “You’ve got a kind of psychic shimmer. Maybe I caught you just in time.”

  He and Goblin kept talking about doing experiments to find out what is happening but there never seemed to be time to actually do anything. “What do you have?”

  “The work parties broke into the old catacombs this morning.”

  “Longo told me.”

  “Everybody’s charging around in there, all excited.”

  “I can imagine. Find any treasure yet?”

  One-Eye looked put-upon. For such a blackhearted toad he can manage a truly impressive show of self-righteous injury.

  “I take it not.”

  “We found some books. A whole pile. All sealed up neat and everything. Looks like they’ve been there since the Shadowmasters first came.”

  “Makes sense since they always burned the books and the priests. You find any priests lurking down there?”

  “Not hardly. Look, I got to get back.” Before somebody grabbed a treasure out from under him, no doubt. “I got a couple guys lugging them books up for you.”

  “Gods forfend you should have lifted anything yourself.”

  “You got a serious attitude problem, Kid. I’m an old man.” One-Eye did a fade. He has that knack when he is about to find himself in an indefensible position.

  A city seldom is buttoned up so tight that no news gets in from outside. Sometimes it seems almost mystical but the word does come through. In Dejagore rumor seldom brought in anything Mogaba wanted to hear.

  I was studying the discovered books, so intrigued I was letting duties slide. They were written in Jaicuri but the written form thereof is almost identical to written Taglian.

  Goblin stepped in. “You doing all right? No more dizziness?”

  “No. You guys worry too much.”

  “No, we don’t. Look, some new rumors are going around. There’s supposedly a relief column headed our way. Blade, of all people, is in charge.”

  “Blade? He isn’t... He’s never run anything bigger than a reduced company. Before we ever got here. Fighting guerrilla style against amateurs.”

  “I don’t make them up, I just report them. He did do well.”

  “So did Willow Swan and Cordy Mather. But that was accident and luck and Shadowlander stupidity more than anything those three actually did. Why on earth is he commanding an army?”

  “He’s supposedly Lady’s second in command. Not much doubt anymore that she survived. She’s also pissed off. And putting together a new army.”

  “Bet Mogaba’s jumping for joy. Running around hollering, ‘We’re saved! We’re saved!’”

  “You might say he’s jumping.”

  Over the following few days we heard a thousand wild stories. If a tenth were true some really bizarre changes were underway out there in the world.

  “You heard the latest?” Goblin asked me one night when I took a rare break from the books to examine that outer world from the wall. “Lady ain’t Lady after all. She’s the incarnation of some goddess named Kina. A real badass, too, apparently.”

  “She would be. Thai Dei. You know Kina, don’t you? Tell us about her.” Thai Dei wasn’t allowed into our warrens but he always turned up whenever I came up for air.

  He forgot all three words of Taglian he had admitted to knowing. The name of that goddess scrubbed his brain clean.

  I said, “That’s what happens when you mention Kina to any of these people. I can’t even get our prisoners to talk about her. You would think she belonged to the Black Company.”

  “Must be a real charmer,” Bucket opined.

  “Oh, she is. She is. There’s one.” I meant a shooting star. We were keeping count. Also of enemy watchfires. The southerners had scattered in small unit encampments around the plain recently. I guess they were afraid we might sneak away.

  “You know something about her, then?” Goblin asked.

  “From those books you guys found.” The men were bitter. The books and some sealed jars filled with grain were the only treasures they unearthed. The Gunni were the majority religion in Jaicur and the Gunni do not bury their dead. They burn them. The minority Vehdna do bury their dead but do not include any grave goods. Where their dead are bound they have no need of luggage. In paradise everything is provided. In hell, too. “One was a compilation of Gunni myths, in variants from all over. The guy who recorded them was a religious scholar. His book wasn’t meant to get out where it might confuse ordinary people.”

  “I’m confused and there ain’t nothing ordinary about me,” Bucket observed.

  “So what’s the scoop, Murgen? How come they won’t tell us about this bitch? Whoa! Did you see that one? It exploded.”

  “All right,” I told them. “The Gunni religion is the most common one around here.”

  “I think we know that, Murgen,” Goblin said.

  “Just making the point. Most people down here believe in Kina. Even if they’re not Gunni, they believe. Here’s the story. The Gunni have Lords of Light and Lords of Darkness. They’ve been doing their lording since the beginning of time.”

  “Sounds like standard stuff.”

  “It is. Only the value systems are different from what we knew back home. The balance between darkness and light is more dynamic here, and isn’t weighted the same emotionally as our struggle between good and evil. Moreover, Kina is a sort of self-elevated outside agency of decay and corruption that attacks both darkness and light. She was created by the Lords of Light to help defeat a horde of really nasty demons they couldn’t handle any other way. She helped by eating the demons. Naturally, she got fat. And apparently wanted dessert because she tried to eat everybody else, too.”

  “She was stronger than the gods who created her?”

  “Guys, I didn’t mak
e this stuff up. Don’t ask me to rationalize it. Goblin, you’ve been everywhere. You ever seen a religion that can’t be picked to shreds by any nonbeliever with brains enough to tie his own bootlaces?”

  Goblin shrugged. “You’re as cynical as Croaker was.”

  “Yeah? Good for me. Anyway, there’s a lot of typically murky mythological stuff about mothers and fathers and vicious, hideous, probably incestuous carryings-on amongst the other gods while Kina kept getting stronger. She was real sneaky. That’s one of her attributes. Deceit. But then her main creator, or father, tricked her and put a sleep spell on her. She’s still snoring away somewhere but she can touch our world through her dreams.

  “She’s got her worshippers. All Gunni deities do. Big, little, good, bad, indifferent, they all have their temples and priesthoods. I can’t find out much about Kina’s followers. They’re called Deceivers. The soldiers won’t talk about them. They flat refuse, like naming Kina might actually waken her. Which, I gather, is the holy mission of her worshippers.”

  “Too weird for me,” Bucket grumbled. Goblin said, “That explains why Lady scares the shit out of everybody whenever she dresses up. If they really think she’s turned into this goddess.”

  “I figure we should find out everything we can about this Kina.”

  “Crack plan, Murgen. How? If nobody will talk?” Yeah. Even the boldest Taglians threatened to get the vapors if I pressed. It was obvious that they were not just terrified of this goddess. They were scared of me, too.

  One-Eye brought heartening news. “This stuff about the relief force is gold, boss. Every night now Spinner is sneaking troops out through the hills like he don’t think we can see them go if it’s dark.”

  “Could he be giving up the siege?”

  “The troops are all headed north. Home ain’t north.”

  I did not offer another alternative. One-Eye would not have come if he was not sure.

  Of course, One-Eye being sure never meant that One-Eye was right. He was One-Eye.

  I thanked him, sent him to do a small chore, found Goblin and asked him what he thought. The little wizard seemed surprised I would bother. “Did One-Eye stutter or something?”