Shadow Games

by Glen Cook

  He grunted. The same went for us.

  We got out onto the field. In moments I had messengers flying everywhere, most of them trying to dig my armed laborers out of the city. We were going to need every sword.

  Mogaba had sent the cavalry off to scout and harass already. Good man, Mogaba.

  The crows seemed to be having a great time watching the show take shape.

  The Shadowmaster out there was in no hurry. He got his men out of the hills and into formation despite my cavalry, then had his horsemen chase mine off. Otto and Hagop might have whipped them, but I’d sent instructions not to try. They just came back, leading the enemy, pelting him with arrows from their saddle bows. I wanted them to rest their animals before the main event. We did not have enough remounts to carry a proper cavalry campaign.

  I detailed a few men to assemble the former prisoners as they showed and send them off to get in the way of anybody who sallied from the camp. With weapons captured yesterday and during the night more than half were now armed. They were not trained and were not skilled, but they were determined.

  I sent word for Cletus and his brothers to move the artillery over where he could give us support and could bombard the encampment gate.

  I looked across at the new army. “Mogaba. Any ideas?” At a guess there were fifteen thousand of them. They looked at least as competent as those we’d met at the Ghoja ford. Limited, but not amateurs.

  “No.”

  “Don’t look like they’re in a hurry to get at it.”

  “Would you be?”

  “Not if I had a Shadowmaster. And had hopes we’d come to them. Anybody else got any ideas?”

  Goblin shook his head. One-Eye said, “The Shadowmasters are the key. You take them out or you don’t got a chance.”

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Messenger. Come here.” I had one idea. I sent him to draft one of the Nar and have him head into town, round up a thousand armed prisoners, and go to the city’s west gate. When the fighting started he was to hit the camp from behind.

  It was something.

  Lady said, “One-Eye is right.” I think it pained her to have to say that. “And the one to concentrate on is the healthy one. This is a time for illusion.” She outlined an idea.

  Ten minutes later I ordered the cavalry forward, to nip at the enemy and try to draw their cavalry out, to see what the Shadowmaster would or would not do himself.

  I really wished I could count on the prisoners to hold off the men in that camp.

  In the half hour it took the Shadowmaster to lose patience with being harassed, One-Eye and Goblin put together the grand illusion of their careers.

  They began by re-creating the ghost of the Company they had used in that forest up north, where we captured the bandits, I think both for sentimental reasons and because it was easier to do something they had done before. They brought them out in front of the army, behind me and Lady and the standard. Then I ordered the elephants brought forward and spread them on a broad front, each supported by ten of our best and most bloodthirsty soldiers. It looked like we had a horde of the beasts because their numbers had been tripled by illusion. I assumed the Shadowmaster would see through the illusions. But so what? His men would not, and it was them I wanted to panic. By the time they knew the truth it would be too late.

  Cross your fingers, Croaker.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Ready,” Lady said.

  The cavalry withdrew, and just in time. The Shadowmaster had begun to express his ire. I gripped Lady’s hand a moment. We leaned together and whispered those three words that everybody gets embarrassed saying in public. Silly old fart me, I felt weird saying them to an audience of one. Elegies for youth lost, when I could say them to anyone and mean it with all my heart and soul for an hour.

  “All right, Murgen. Let’s do it.” Lady and I raised our flaming swords. The legions began to chant, “Taglios! Taglios!” And my phantom brigade began its advance.

  Showmanship. All those elephants would have scared the crap out of me if I’d been over on the other side.

  Where the hell did I ever get the idea a general was supposed to lead from the front? Fewer than a thousand of us going to whip up on fifteen thousand of them?

  Arrows came to greet us. They did no harm to the illusions. They slid off the real elephants. They bounced off Murgen, Goblin, One-Eye, Lady, and me because we were sheltered by protective spells. Hopefully, our opponents would be unsettled by our invulnerability.

  I signalled for an increase in speed. The enemy front began to shudder in anticipation of the impact of all those elephants. Formations started to dissolve.

  About time for the Shadowmaster to do something.

  I slowed down. The elephants rumbled past, trumpeting, gaining speed, and in a moment all swerving to rush straight at the Shadowmaster.

  A hell of an investment just to take out one guy.

  He realized the object of the assault while the elephants were still a hundred yards from him. They were going to converge and trample right over him.

  He cut loose with every spell he had ready. For ten seconds it seemed like the skies were collapsing and the earth being racked. Elephants and parts of elephants flew around like children’s toys.

  The whole enemy front was in disarray now. I heard the signals ordering the cavalry forward again, ordering the infantry to advance.

  The surviving elephants rolled over the spot where the Shadowmaster floated.

  A trunk seized him and tossed him thirty feet into the air, flailing and tumbling. He fell between massive grey flanks, screamed, flew upward again, possibly under his own power. A flock of arrows darted at him as the soldiers following the elephants used him for target practice. Some got through to him. He kept spinning off spells like a fireworks show, but they seemed purely reflex.

  I laughed and closed in. We had the bastard and all his children. My record as a general was going to stay unblemished.

  Murgen was there when the Shadowmaster flipped into the sky for the third time. He skewered the sonofabitch with his lance when he came down.

  The Shadowmaster screamed. Gods, did he scream. He flailed around like a bug impaled on a needle. His weight carried him down the shaft of the lance till he hung up on the crosspiece that supports the standard.

  Murgen struggled to keep the lance upright and get out of the press. Our boys were his worst enemies. Everybody with a bow kept sniping away at the Shadowmaster.

  I spurred my mount forward, got beside Murgen and helped him carry our trophy away.

  That bastard wasn’t spinning off any spells now.

  The advancing legions roared their Taglios chant twice as loud.

  Otto and Hagop smashed into the confusion in front of Mogaba’s legion. There wasn’t quite as much confusion as I’d hoped. The enemy soldiers had realized they’d been snookered, though they had not yet gotten into formation again.

  They absorbed the elephant charge and the cavalry charge both, taking heavy casualties, but they seemed to have given up the idea of running. Hagop and Otto pulled away before the legions arrived, but the elephants continued to be mixed in with the foe. Just as well. They were beyond control. They had been pricked by enough darts and spearheads and swords to go mad with pain. They no longer cared who they stomped.

  I yelled at Murgen, “Let’s get this over on that mound where everybody can see that we got him.” One of the mounds that dot the plain was about a hundred yards away.

  We struggled through the oncoming infantry, climbed the mound, faced the fighting. It took both of us to keep the standard upright, what with all the kicking and screaming and carrying on the Shadowmaster was doing.

  It was a good move tactically, carrying him up there. His boys could see they’d lost their big weapon at a time when they were getting their asses kicked already, and mine could see they didn’t have to worry about him anymore. They went to work figuring on getting it over with in time for lunch break. Hagop and Ott
o took the bit in their mouth and circled around the enemy right to get at them from behind.

  I cursed them. I did not want them so far away. But the thing was beyond control now.

  Strategically, our move was not the best. The boys in the encampment got a whiff of onrushing disaster and decided they’d damned well better do something.

  Out they came in a mob, their own gimp Shadowmaster floating in front, slipping and sliding around drunkenly but getting off a couple of killer spells that rattled the armed prisoners.

  Cletus and his brothers opened fire from the wall and pounded Shadowmaster number two around, cut him a little, and got him so pissed he stopped everything and turned on them with a spell that blew them and all their engines right off the wall. Then he led his mob on out, looking to cause the rest of us just as much grief.

  His bunch never did get into a formation, and neither did the prisoners, really, so that turned into a sort of barroom brawl with swords real quick.

  The boys at the west gate slid out and hit the camp from behind and got over the wall easily. They went to work on the wounded and camp guards and whoever else got in their way, but their success did not affect the bigger show. The men from the camp just kept after the rest of us.

  I had to do something.

  “Let’s get this thing planted somehow,” I told Murgen. I looked out across the chaos before I dismounted. I could not see Lady anywhere. My heart crawled into my throat.

  The earth of that mound was soft and moist. Grunting and straining, the two of us were able to force the butt of the lance in deep enough that it would stand by itself, rocking whenever the Shadowmaster had a wriggling, screaming fit.

  The attack from the flank made progress against the prisoners. Some of the fainthearted ran for the nearest city gate, joining fellows who had not bothered to come out. Ochiba tried to extend and rotate part of his line to face the onslaught, with limited success. Sindawe’s less disciplined outfit had begun to disintegrate in their eagerness to hasten the demise of the enemies they faced. They were unaware of the threat from the right. Only Mogaba had maintained discipline and unit integrity. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have flip-flopped his legion with Ochiba’s before we started this. Out where he was now he wasn’t much use. Killing off the entire enemy right wing, sure, but not keeping everything else from falling apart.

  I had a bad feeling it was going sour.

  “I don’t know what to do, Murgen.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do now, Croaker. Except cross your fingers and play it out.”

  Fireworks spewed over in Ochiba’s area. For a while they were so ferocious I thought they might halt the coming collapse there. Goblin and One-Eye were on the job. But the crippled Shadowmaster managed to quiet them down.

  What could I throw at him? What could I do? Nothing. I didn’t have anything else to send in.

  I did not want to watch.

  A solitary crow settled onto the writhing Shadowmaster impaled on the standard lance. It looked at him, at me, at the fighting, and made a sound like an amused chuckle. Then it began pecking at the Shadowmaster’s mask, trying to get at his eyes.

  I ignored the bird.

  Men began to scurry past. They were from Sindawe’s legion, mostly prisoners who had been enrolled the past few days. I yelled at them and cursed them and called them cowards and ordered them to turn around and form up. Mostly, they did.

  Hagop and Otto attacked the men facing Ochiba, probably hoping to ease the pressure so he could go ahead and deal with the threat from the camp. But the attack from behind impelled the enemy forward. While Otto and Hagop’s bunch were having a great time the men they were butchering cracked Ochiba’s line and ran into the armed prisoners from the side.

  Ochiba’s legion tried to hold, even so, but they looked like they were in bad trouble. Sindawe’s men thought they were about to run and decided to beat them in a footrace. Or something. They collapsed.

  Mogaba had begun rotating his axis of attack to support Sindawe from the flank. But when he finished there was nothing to support.

  In moments his legion was the only island of order in a sea of chaos. The enemy were no more organized than my people were. The thing was a grand mess, the world’s largest brawl.

  More of my people ran for the city gates. Some just ran. I stood there under the standard, cussing and yelling and waving my sword and shedding a couple of quarts of tears. And, gods help me, some of the fools heard and listened and started trying to form up with the men I’d organized already, facing around, pushing back into it in tight little detachments.

  Guts. From the beginning they had told me those Taglians had guts.

  More and more, me and Murgen built us a human wall around the standard. More and more, the enemy concentrated on Mogaba, whose legion refused to break. The Shadowmasters’ men heaped their dead around him. He did not see us, it seemed. Despite all resistance he moved toward the city.

  I guess Murgen and I got three thousand men together before fate decided it was time to take another bite.

  A big mob of the enemy rushed us. I assumed my pose, with my sword up, beside the standard. I did not have much show left me. If Goblin and One-Eye were alive at all they were too busy covering their own asses.

  It looked like we would drive them off easily. Our line was locked together solidly. They were just a howling mob.

  Then the arrow came out of nowhere and hit me square in the chest and knocked me right off my horse.

  Chapter Forty-one: LADY

  It wasn’t always best to be old and wise in the ways of battlefields, Lady thought. She saw what was coming, clearly, long before anybody else did. Briefly, after Murgen skewered the Shadowmaster, she had hopes it would turn, but the advent of the troops from the encampment caused a shift in momentum that could not be reversed.

  Croaker should not have attacked. He should have waited as long as it took, made them come to him, not been so concerned about the Shadowmasters. If he had allowed the new army from the south to come forward and get in the way of the men from the encampment, he could have then hurled his elephants in without risk to his right. But it was too late to weep about might-have-beens. It was time to try rooting out a miracle.

  One Shadowmaster was out and the other was crippled. If only she had a tenth, even a hundredth, of the power she had lost. If only she’d had time to nurture and channel the little bit that had begun coming back to her.

  If only. If only. All life was if only.

  Where was that damned imp of One-Eye’s? It could turn this around. There was nobody on the other side to keep it from going through those men like a scythe, at least for long enough.

  But Frogface was nowhere to be seen. One-Eye and Goblin were working as a team, doing their little bit to stem the tide. Frogface was not with them. They seemed too busy to be curious about that.

  The imp’s absence was too important to be accident or oversight. Why? at this critical juncture?

  No time. No time to brood about it and slither down through all the shadows and try to find the meaning of the imp’s presences and absences, which had been bothering her so long. Only time to realize, with certainty, that the creature had been planted upon One-Eye and wasn’t his to command at all.

  By whom?

  Not the Shadowmasters. The Shadowmasters would have used the imp directly. Not Shifter. He’d had no need. Not the Howler. He would have gotten his revenge.

  What else was loose in the world?

  A crow flapped past. It cawed in a way that made her think it was laughing.

  Croaker and his crows. He had been muttering about crows for a year. And then they had started turning up around him any time anything big happened.

  She glanced at the mound where Croaker and Murgen had set the standard. Croaker had a pair of crows perched on his shoulders. A flock circled above him. He made a dramatic figure there in his Widowmaker disguise, with the doombirds wheeling around him, waving his fiery sword,
trying to rally his crumbling legions.

  While the mind pursued one clatch of enemies the body dealt with another. She wielded her weapons with a dancer’s grace and the deadliness of a demigoddess. At first there had been an exhilaration, realizing she was approaching a state she had not achieved in ages, except by the path of its tantric cousin, last night. And then she went over into the perfect calm, the mystic separation of Self and flesh that actually melded into a greater, more illuminated and deadly whole.

  There was no fear in that state, nor any other emotion. It was like being in the deepest meditation, where the Self wandered a field of glimmering insights, yet the flesh performed its deadly tasks with a precision and perfection that left the dead mounded about her and her terrible mount.

  The enemy wrestled with one another to stay away from her. Her allies fought to get into the safety of the vacuum surrounding her. Though the right wing had begun to collapse, one stubborn rock formed.

  The Self reflected on memories of illuminations won during the night from a pair of bodies, sweating, straining together, on her absolute amazement during and after. Her life had been one of absolute self-control. Yet time and again the flesh had gone beyond any hope of control. At her age.

  And she looked at Croaker again, now harried by his enemies.

  And the shadow crept into the killing perfection and showed her why she had denied herself for so long.

  She thought of loss.

  And loss mattered.

  Mattering intruded upon the Self, distracting it. It wanted to take control of the flesh, to force things to transpire according to its desires.

  She started forcing her way toward Croaker, the knot of men around her moving with her. But the enemy could sense that she was no longer the terrible thing she had been, that she was now vulnerable. They pressed in. One by one, her companions fell.

  Then she saw the arrow strike Croaker and drop him at the foot of the standard. She shrieked and spurred her mount over friend and foe alike.

  Her pain, and her rage, only carried her into a mass of enemies who attacked from every direction. She cut some, but others dragged her off her rearing steed and harried the beast away. She fought with skill and desperation against poorly trained opponents, but the ineptness of her enemies was not enough. She heaped bodies, but they drove her down to her knees...