The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  Tobo babbled in delight, informing everyone how wonderful the experience was, look here, look there, the vast expanse of the chamber stretches out below us like the plain itself.…

  We passed through a hole in the ceiling and into the colder air of the real plain. It was dusk out there, the sky still crimson over the western horizon but already deep indigo directly ahead. The stars of the Noose shone palely in front of us. As we descended toward the surface, I found nerve enough to glance back. The fortress stood silhouetted against the northern sky, on its outside in worse shape now than when we had arrived. All our clutter, everything dropped during our ascension or that we had had no time to grab, now flew along right behind us.

  For a while I watched eagerly for the standard to join the flock. My hopes were disappointed. It did not appear.

  In retrospect I cannot see why I should have hoped otherwise.

  Now Tobo pretended he was a bird. By experimenting he discovered that he could use his arms to direct his flight, to rise and fall somewhat, to speed up and slow down slightly. He never shut up for a instant, loving every moment, continuously admonishing the rest of us to enjoy the adventure, because none of us would ever have the chance to experience anything like this again.

  “Wisdom from the mouths of infants,” Doj announced. Then he threw up.

  They were both right.

  95

  Our flight ended where the rest of the band was camped at the last circle before the southwest road reached our destination Shadowgate. Flying definitely offered the advantage of speed. We outflew the white crow, arriving less than two hours after our toes departed solid stone. That Shivetya fellow was a handy friend to have.

  I tried to see what lay beyond the edge of the plain but it was just too dark. There might have been one or two small points of light out there. It was hard to tell.

  We descended feetfirst, evidently immune to shadows. I had sensed several of those pacing us but they had shown no inclination to get too close. Which left me admiring Shivetya’s power even more, for those things were little more than bundles of hatred and hunger to kill.

  We passed through the top of the shielding protecting our brethren without compromising it. The whole band watched our arrival in disbelief. Tobo managed to direct himself toward his mother and accomplished a somersault before he touched down. I did not exactly get down and hug the stone surface but I was glad the ordeal was over. The Singh brothers rushed around looking for family. So did Doj, who ignored Sahra and went directly to Gota. Gota was not in good spirits and possibly was in ill health. I could not tell much more about anyone in the feeble light available from a changeable moon. Gota did not offer any complaint or criticism.

  Swan stuck with me.

  As soon as he convinced himself that it was safe to open his eyes, Riverwalker began bustling around being a busybody, devoutly determined to make sure everyone and everything conformed to whatever rules he happened to recall at the moment. I frowned, shook my head, but did not interfere. We all need our rituals to help us get by.

  “Sahra,” I asked, “how are they?” I meant those we had brought out of the caverns, because I had a suspicion that Gota’s state meant nothing good and I did not want to hear what I feared it did mean.

  Sahra could not feel friendly. She blamed me because she had discovered her baby strolling through the sky. Never mind that he had come down safely and could not stop raving about the experience.

  What a fall from a great height might do to a body never occurred to him. But it certainly did to Sahra.

  “No change in the Captured. One-Eye went into a funk when he heard about Goblin and hasn’t spoken since. Mother isn’t sure if it’s emotional withdrawal or he had another stroke. What worries her is the possibility that he doesn’t want to live anymore.”

  “Who would he fight with?” I did not mean to belittle, though it came out sounding that way.

  Sahra showed me an instant of pique but did not reveal her thoughts. “Mother can be a handful.”

  “Probably what got them together in the first place.” I made no mention of the fact that I feared Gota would not be with us much longer. The Troll had to be around eighty. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  “He’s asleep. It can wait.”

  “In the morning, then. Are we still in touch with Murgen?”

  The light was good enough to reveal Sahra’s anger. Perhaps she was right. I had not had my feet on the ground two minutes and already I wanted to use her husband. But she managed the emotion. We had worked together for a long time now, early on with her usually being the stronger one, only occasionally with me taking the lead role. We always managed without sharp words. We always managed because we knew we had somewhere to go and we had to collaborate to get there. These days I took charge most of the time but she could do so when it was appropriate.

  Only she was just about where she wanted to get to now, was she not? She had Murgen out of the ground. She would not need to go on with her role once he was up and around. Unless he was not the man she wanted him to be. In which case she would have to contrive a new Sahra all over again.

  I am sure that had her on edge more than ever. Neither she nor Murgen were the people they had been. None of us were. There were going to be some difficulties adjusting, possibly some major difficulties.

  I anticipated big problems with Lady and the Captain.

  Sahra said, “I’ve done my best to keep the mist projector working but I haven’t been able to make contact since we left that fortress. He doesn’t seem to be willing to leave his body anymore. And I can’t get that to wake up more than it already is.” So she was also afraid that the rescue might have been a mistake, that we might have hurt Murgen instead of saving him. Upbeat, hopefully, she said, “Maybe Tobo can help.”

  I wondered what had become of the tough, focused, dedicated Sahra who had been Minh Subredil. I tried to reassure this Sahra. “Murgen will be fine.” Shivetya had given me the knowledge we needed to reanimate the Captured. “But we have to get him off the plain before we can wake him all the way up. Same for the others.”

  Riverwalker returned from his tour. “The demon food is going fast here, Sleepy. There’s enough to get us off the plain and have a couple meals more but then we’re on our own. We either eat the dog and the horses or we scrounge up something locally fast.”

  “Ah, well. We knew that going in. We’re better off than we expected to be. Did anybody think to steal anything valuable while we were there?”

  That comment got me blank looks. Then I realized that it was possible no one else had noticed the treasures I had discovered while chasing Tobo into the deeps of the earth. The boy would have said something if he had seen anything. He could not shut up.

  Swan told me, “It’ll be harvest time when we get there.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “I just know.”

  So he might. “Everybody listen up. Get all the rest you can tonight. I want to get up and move out early tomorrow. And nobody knows what we’ll run into at the end of the road.”

  Somebody grumbled something about if I wanted him to sleep, why did I not shut up and let him get to work?

  I could not keep my eyes open myself, although it had not been that long since I had wakened by Shivetya’s throne. In fact, my mind seemed to be shutting down. I said, “Forget everything else. I’m going to take my own advice. Where’s a place I can wrap my blanket around me and lie down before I collapse?”

  The only open space was back at the tail end of the Company. All my flying companions except Tobo had to migrate back there. I had planned to eat before I slept but exhaustion overwhelmed me before I swallowed my third bite of demon’s food. My final reflection concerned whether God could overlook one of the Faithful accepting a gift from one of the Damned.

  An interesting exercise. God knows all. Therefore, God knew what Shivetya was doing and allowed him to do it. Therefore, it must be God’s will that we benefit from the demon’s generosi
ty. It would be a sin to defy God’s will.

  96

  I dreamed strange dreams.

  Of course I did. Was not Shivetya in my mind? Was I not in the haunted place of glittering stone?

  Stone remembered. And stone wanted me to know.

  I was in another place, then, in a time not my own. I was Shivetya as the demon experienced the world, everywhere at once, a pale imitation of God. I could be everywhere at once because by staring at the floor surrounding my throne, I connected with my realm as a whole. We became one knowledge, the singer and the song.

  Men were moving across my face, a large band. I knew time differently from mortals but I understood that it had been ages since this had happened last. Mortals did not cross me anymore. Not often. Never in numbers like this.

  There was enough Sleepy there for me to recognize Shivetya’s memory of the coming of the Captured, before they stumbled into Soulcatcher’s trap. Why would the demon want me to see this? I knew this story. Murgen had shared it with me several times, to make sure it got recorded in the Annals just the way he wanted.

  There was no solid feeling of a personality surrounding me, yet I felt a mild pressure to abandon curiosity, to turn outward from questions, to cease being a viewpoint, to let the flower unfold. I should have paid more attention to Uncle Doj. The ability to abandon the self would have been a useful talent at a time like this.

  Time was different for the demon, definitely. But he tried to accommodate the ephemeral mortal, to get to the point, to provide the information he thought I would find useful.

  I watched the whole adventure, including the great and desperate escape that had devoured Bucket and had allowed Willow the chance to remain in the story as a pawn of wickedness. And I did not understand immediately because at first I observed only the finer details of a story already known in outline.

  I was not completely stupid. I caught on. The question had occurred to me before but had not been critical. Now I just needed to reclaim enough self to recall that I had asked it.

  The question was, what had become of the one member of that expedition for whom there was still no account? The incredibly dangerous apprentice shapeshifter Lisa Deale Bowalk, trapped in the form of a black leopard, had been carried onto the plain in a cage, as had the prisoners Longshadow and Howler. She had vanished during the excitement. Murgen never discovered what had become of her. That he mentioned.

  I learned the truth. According to Shivetya.

  Not every trivial detail became entirely clear. Shivetya had trouble focusing that tightly in time. But it seemed that Bowalk’s cage had gotten damaged in the panicky rush to escape by brothers of the Company unfortunate enough not to be included amongst the Captured.

  Panic mothers panic. The great, wicked cat caught the fever. Her violence was sufficient to complete the demolition of her cage. She ripped her way out, injuring herself in the process. She fled on three legs, carrying her left front paw elevated, allowing it to touch stone only when absolutely necessary. She whined horribly when she did. Nevertheless, she covered ground fast. She traveled nearly thirty miles before nightfall—but had chosen a direction at random and apparently did not recognize that she was not headed toward home until it was too late to change her mind.

  She chose a road and ran. And in the night one small, clever shadow caught up, just short of the end of that road. It did what untamed shadows always do. It attacked. I found the result difficult to believe. The shadow hurt the panther but did not kill her. She fought it and won. And stumbled onward. And before a more powerful shadow could overtake and finish her, she staggered through a derelict Shadowgate and became invisible to Shivetya. Which meant that she was last seen alive entering a world neither our own nor the Land of Unknown Shadows. I hoped that that crippled gate had finished her, or that it had injured her beyond recovery, because she was possessed of a hatred as dark as that which impelled the shadows, but hers was a hatred much more narrowly directed. And the Company was its object.

  The fragment of Sleepy-self never entirely subsumed into the Shivetya overview wondered what the Captain would think when he learned that Bowalk had reached Khatovar by accident when it was supposed to be impossible for the Company to get there by intent.

  The Sleepy-self did not see why this news was important enough for Shivetya to have hijacked my dreams, but significant it must be.

  Significant, too, must be the Nef, the dreamwalkers, that Murgen had named the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.

  I became more Shivetya, pulling away from the point experience of tracking the shapechanger. I became more one with the demon while the demon became more one with the plain, more purely a manifestation of the will of the great engine. I enjoyed flickers of memories of golden ages of peace, prosperity and enlightenment that had reached across silent stone to many worlds. I witnessed the passage of a hundred conquerers. I saw portions of the most ancient wars now recalled in the Gunni and Deceiver religions, and even in my own, for being Shivetya and embracing all times at the same time, I could not help but see that the war in Heaven, which was supposed to have occurred soon after God created the earth and the sky, and which ended with the Adversary being cast down into a pit, could be an echo of the same divine struggle other religions remembered according to their own predilections.

  Before the war of the gods, there was the plain. And before the plain, there was the Nef. The plain, the great machine, eventually imagined Shivetya as its Steadfast Guardian and servant. In turn, the demon imagined the Washene, the Washane and the Washone in the likeness of the Nef. These dreamwalking ghosts of the builders were Shivetya’s gods. They existed independently of his mind but not of his existence. They would perish if he perished. And they had had no desire to be called into being in the first instance.

  Bizarre. I was caught amongst the personifications of aspects of religion in which I could not believe. Here were facts my faith forbid me to accept. Acceptance would damn me forever.

  Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable.

  But perhaps that was not necessary. Truth and reality seemed to be protean on the plain. There were too many different stories about Kina, Shivetya and the fortress in the middle. Maybe every story was true at least part of the time.

  There was an intellectual exercise of a sacerdotal magnitude. What if my beliefs were completely valid—but only part of the time and only where I was located myself? What then? How could that be? What could that mean?

  It meant unpleasant times in the afterlife if I persisted in relaxing my vigilance against heresies. It might be difficult for a woman to achieve Paradise but it would be no trouble at all for her to win a place in al-Shiel.

  97

  “That must have been one kick-ass nightmare,” Willow Swan told me, kneeling beside me, having just shaken my shoulder to waken me. “Not only were you snoring, you were grunting and squeaking and carrying on a conversation with yourself in three different languages.”

  “I’m a woman of many talents. Everybody says so.” I shook my head groggily. “What time is it? It’s still dark.”

  “Another talent emerges. I can’t get anything past the old girl.”

  I grumbled, “The priests and the holy books tell us that God created man in His own image but I’ve read a lot of holy books—including those of the idolators—and not once have I found any other evidence that He had a sense of humor, let alone is the kind of person who would try to make jokes before the sun even came up. You’re a sick man, Willow Swan. What’s going on?”

  “Last night you said we’d have to start early. So Sahra thought you meant we should be ready to go as soon as there’s light enough to see. So we can get off the plain with plenty of daylight to spa
re.”

  “Sahra is a wise woman. Wake me up when she’s ready to go.”

  “I think right now would be a good time to get up, then.”

  I raised my hands. It was just light enough to see them. “Gather ’round, people.” Once a reasonable crowd had done so I explained that each of us who had stayed behind in the fortress had been given knowledge that would help us in times to come. “Shivetya seems very interested in our success. He tried to give us what he believed would be useful tools. But he’s very slow and has his own demonic perspectives and doesn’t know how to explain anything clearly. So it’s extremely likely that there is a lot we know that we won’t know we know until something makes us think of it. Be patient with us. We’ll probably be a little strange for a while. I’m having trouble getting used to the reeducated me and I live here. New knowledge pops up every time I turn around. Right now, though, I just want to get off this plain. Our resources are still limited. We have to establish ourselves as fast as we can.”

  Those faces I could discern revealed fear of the future. Somewhere the dog whined. Iqbal’s baby whimpered momentarily as Suruvhija shifted her from one nipple to the other. In my consideration, that child ought to have been weaned by now but I knew I had no justification for my opinion. None of my babies have been born yet. And it is getting a little late to bring them in.

  People waited for me to tell them something informative. The more thoughtful now wondered what new troubles awaited us since we had actually made it this far. Swan could be right. It could be harvest season in the Land of Unknown Shadows. And it could also be the season for scalping foreigners.

  I was troubled myself but had been faced with the unknown so often that I had calluses on that breed of fear. I knew perfectly well it would do me no good to fuss and worry when I had no idea what lay ahead. But worry I would, anyway. Even when knowledge contracted while I slept assured me that we would not encounter disasters once we shifted off the plain.