The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  “And you aren’t prepared to defend it?”

  “I anticipated Croaker’s effort. Only a fool would ignore those heights. But I didn’t anticipate the firebombs he’s using.”

  Those were the finest product of One-Eye’s weapons shops back in Taglios, transported here at great cost in treasure and labor, which now looked worthwhile. It was hard to hold your ground in the face of those bombs.

  The Captain and his staff were headed for Blade’s division. Something was up. I streaked that way.

  Blade came outside the wall of his soldiers, faced the Captain across a hundred yards of rocky ground. Our men were posted outside bowshot, relaxed but alert, awaiting developments. They were only slightly less baffled than the traitor’s soldiers, who were drawn up as if for review now, not for combat.

  Blade and Croaker met midway between. They exchanged a few words. Silly me, I expected the Old Man to settle the feud he had been prosecuting so vigorously for so long. Instead, he threw his arms around Blade and started laughing.

  It had been a long time for the Captain. His laughter had a definite mad edge.

  They started jumping up and down, holding on to one another.

  Then Blade spun away. He bellowed at his soldiers, “Stack your weapons and surrender. Or you’ll be exterminated.”

  I was so dense that only now, as Blade’s soldiers began obeying orders, as they had been taught, did I recognize the swindle.

  Blade’s defection had been staged. Croaker’s years-long mad pursuit of him had been cosmetic—except where he had used Blade to rid himself of obnoxious religious fanatics.

  Nothing like having your enemies do your dirty work for you.

  More, Blade had worked hard to make the Shadowmaster unpopular with his subjects. Whole territories had surrendered without even token resistance.

  And now Blade had delivered a quarter of the Shadowmaster’s finest troops.

  Nowhere in the Annals was there a con to match this con. And this one Croaker created for himself. He would laugh up his sleeve for a long time, knowing Mogaba could not have imagined him capable of such an unprecedented move. Mogaba did not think Croaker capable of taking a deep breath without consulting the Annals.

  25

  I left Smoke. Nobody was anywhere near the wagon except Mother Gota and Thai Dei. I joined them. They said nothing. I ate without speaking myself, drank a lot of water, climbed back into the wagon and took a long nap. I dreamed. The dreams were not pleasant. Soulcatcher was there and she seemed to be having a wonderful time. Messing with us, no doubt, because that is where she found her fun.

  I woke up and ate again, barely aware that I was devouring some of Mother Gota’s worst cuisine. I swilled water as though this was my first chance in weeks. I was vaguely aware that Thai Dei seemed troubled whenever he looked at me. I tried to figure that out but I could not concentrate.

  It was late. The camp itself was quiet. The soldiers were still forward. Night sentries prowled watchfully, warned that there were Stranglers in the enemy camp. They gossiped softly as they paused to warm their hands by the fires. Farther back, some survivors from among the camp followers gathered their pitiful belongings and stole away before they got rounded up and herded forward again.

  Vicious fighting continued on the heights. Mogaba intended to contest every foot of ground.

  Not all the camp followers had been able to get away. Fires on Lady’s flank once again began to mask our camp with smoke. Did the Captain have some new devilment in mind?

  I asked him when he turned up a while later. “I hope they think so up there,” he said. He could not stop grinning. “For the rest of his life I want Mogaba looking over his shoulder, jumping at shadows, thinking there’s another trap about to open under his feet. Maybe there’ll be one sometime.” He laughed again.

  All the senior officers began gathering at a fire laid like a Gunni festival bonfire. Politically neutral priests of all faiths performed rites of thanksgiving. Even Lady came in, accompanied by her officers and admirers. She looked like a demigoddess, more real than any Taglian deity but the dreaded Kina. In the modern era only Kina seemed interested in mundane affairs.

  But she had a personal interest.

  Hard to tell who among the crowd was most boggled. Blade settled beside the Old Man. He could not stop grinning. He could not stop babbling at his old buddy Swan. Pity Cordy Mather was back home with the Woman. He would have gotten a kick out of this, too.

  I had not seen Blade for years. Back then he had been a taciturn cynic. Nothing like this. And One-Eye had not had time to get a still running yet.

  Blade bellowed at Croaker. Croaker bellowed right back. Swan told me, “Don’t mind them two. They haven’t gotten over the hand-holding stage yet.”

  “I guess there must have been a lot of strain while the con was running.”

  The Old Man heard Swan but ignored him. “Tomorrow it’s good old-fashioned hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle. The last thing Mogaba will expect from me. Prince, you get first go. Have your men show us how good they are.”

  I took a long drink of water, wishing One-Eye had managed to get something made for tonight. But that would not have gone over. None of the Taglian religions tolerated beer, nor did Lady or the Prince, who did not want drunken soldiers screwing things up. But what they did not see they could not condemn. So I might just suggest to One-Eye that he get a move on.

  I asked, “You’re actually going to tell us what’s going on?”

  A lax humor entered the Captain’s eyes. “Nope.” He leaned close, whispered, “Don’t let this get out. I don’t want anybody easing up. But they’re not sending shadows out to spy.” He pointed as a fireball headed up the pass. We had not seen much of Lady’s big magic here yet.

  “How come?”

  “They’re saving them.” He grinned again. This grin took in everyone around us. He spoke to the assembly. “I think you all know what you’re expected to do next. Get some rest.”

  How did everybody know what they were expected to do next? The little he had told anyone had been extremely vague.

  Croaker looked at Lady. She seemed at the point of collapse. This was tiring work but her exhaustion went beyond what you would expect.

  Some hard guy, my Captain. Sometimes his feelings were obvious. He hurt for the woman he loved. “Swan. Hang around. I want to talk to you.”

  I was politely invited to move my unwelcome ass along and get some rest of my own.

  26

  I wanted to sleep. I was tired despite having done so little that was physical. But when I retired to One-Eye’s wagon I lay there tossing and turning. Outside Mother Gota was engaged in an endless litany of complaint. Evidently I was only a minor character in her cast of troubles. Uncle Doj was a star. Hong Tray was a star. Sahra was a star for having gone along with Hong Tray. Or for having gotten Hong Tray on her side. Witches, both of them. Thai Dei did not say much more than usual. He might have wanted to enter a fact or two but his mother never gave him the chance.

  Same old same old where Mother Gota was concerned. Most of the time I did not hear her anymore. I wondered if she could be insulted into silence.

  She did get me thinking about the woman I loved.

  I turned and tossed and wrestled with the pain. I thought it might be getting a little less potent. And, of course, I had to worry about that. Was it right? Was it a betrayal of Sarie?

  I reminded myself that I am a grown man used to a hard life and should not be getting caught up in this sort of obsessing, however great a treasure Sahra had been.

  I did drift off into that state where you are not entirely asleep but you are not awake, either. Where you can rewrite your dreams as you go along.

  Suddenly I was back in the past, whipped through time by a gust of laughter and a mocking voice that asked me where I had been. I was not expecting this after all this time but it did not take me off guard, either. I was experienced at this sort of thing now.

  Not surpr
ised, I was not lost or disoriented. I had walked with the ghost enough to have developed some resilience. I tried to take hold just as I would have had I been out with Smoke.

  The aura of amusement surrounding me gave way to startlement. I did a sort of transdimensional fast spin—and right there caught a glimpse of the prime suspect, Soulcatcher, kneeling over some array of sorcerous objects near a fire somewhere in the gorsy approaches to Charandaprash. My turn to be amused. Even if I was not in control I now knew who was manipulating me.

  Now, how could I put another move on her and find out why?

  The laughter of crows enveloped me. Like it did not matter if I knew who was doing what.

  That sounded like Soulcatcher, the way she was described in Croaker’s Annals. A force for chaos, seldom giving one rat’s ass what happened as long as something did.

  I tried to recall where those Annals were right now. Another look at Soulcatcher might be worthwhile. Or maybe even a long heart-to-heart with the Old Man. He knew Soulcatcher better than anyone alive, her sister included. I do not believe Lady had a clue about her sister’s thinking anymore. Maybe she did not care.

  Maybe I was seeing things that were not there. What did I know about what Lady was thinking, really? I had not exchanged a hundred words with her in the past three years. Before that our exchanges were limited to information destined for the Annals.

  The laughter of crows became the laughter of Soulcatcher. A voice said, “I do not think I want to play today after all.”

  A great invisible hand grabbed me and threw me into a windy darkness. I spun like a thrown walnut even though I was nothing but a dream.

  I tried controlling it same as I would have had I been walking with the ghost. Once again I was able to take a measure of control. The sensation of spinning went away. As it faded a feeling of place and time returned, along with an ability to see.

  It was not good seeing. It was fuzzing and short range, like Hagop talked about his vision getting as he got older. But I was in a jungle. Was it familiar? It was a jungle. I have seen a few and they are all pretty much the same if you cannot see more than twenty feet clearly. Bugs out the wazoo. Muted, the screeching of a thousand birds. A couple of those were inside my circle of vision. I noted that they seemed to see me just fine. I was the reason for all the excitement.

  I rotated quickly. Jungle for sure. But not short on water. A nasty black pool lay only inches from where my heels would have rested had I had any heels.

  Monkeys scampered along a branch overhead, rattled by the screeching of the birds but, apparently, unable to see me. At least not at that range. One came swinging past a foot from my point of view. She saw me. She was so startled she lost her grip, shrieked in surprise, fell into the black pool, where she started hollering in terror.

  The crocodile almost got her. Almost. She got out of the water an instant before the jaws snapped. Nothing like some big teeth moving fast to motivate you.

  The crocodile’s effort, however, betrayed it to the crocodile hunters who materialized an instant later, casting barbed spears.

  Life is cruel.

  Those crocodile hunters were unusually nervous. They wondered why the birds were going crazy. They wondered why the monkeys had gone berserk, why one had fallen into the black pool. Understanding them was no problem. They spoke Nyueng Bao as though it was their native tongue. Which it was.

  I was somewhere in the delta.

  Faintly, faintly, behind the raucous birds I could sense the amusement of crows.

  I had no sense of direction.

  There was no Smoke to take me home.

  I was not just dreaming. I had control but did not know what to do with it.… Up. Up was always good with Smoke. The higher you went the more the earth looked like an incredibly detailed map. Then you needed only find a landmark you knew. I went up.

  I was in the nastiest, most untamed part of the delta. The whole world was black water, bugs and densely packed trees. That was very nearly my idea of hell.

  I had to go way up above where the buzzards soar to see anything else. In the meantime psychic chills twisted the imaginary me; fear gnawed hard and deep. Rising with me was a momentary certainty that I would never find any landmark.

  The sun was a landmark. If you had eyes to see it.

  I could not see much very well. Not even the birds that shield away.

  So I could not find a landmark the logical way. Well, there was a different green over that way.

  The different green proved to be empty rice paddies. I zigged this way, zagged that, found a village, found the path that ran out of the village and followed it. I moved at wild speeds. Still, I knew, it was going to take me a long time to get back to where I started.

  Damned Soulcatcher!

  I heard the voices of mocking crows.

  I saw a village that looked familiar.

  Some would say all Nyueng Bao hamlets look alike. They do, pretty much, from what I have seen. But their temples vary radically according to the wealth and status and age of the town. I had seen this temple before, weeks ago when I was searching for Goblin. I had, in fact, glimpsed a girl who looked so much like Sahra that I wanted to cry when I left Smoke’s world.

  I paused there, drifted around, watched the villagers about their early morning business. Everything seemed typical of a Nyueng Bao hamlet, from all I had heard. Even though it was the middle of winter there was work to do. People were getting set to do it.

  It was a very prosperous town. Very old, too, probably. The temple was large and looked like it had been there for ages. A pair of mighty two-headed elephants formed pillars to either side of a door as tall as three Nyueng Bao men. The two-headed elephant represented the god of luck among the Gunni. I recall One-Eye saying luck took that form because it was powerful and two-faced.

  Oh. That must be the girl I had seen before. The ringer for Sarie. She came out of the temple looking exhausted, sad. Could this be the same woman? The earlier one had looked like a slightly younger version of Sarie. This one looked like an older one, after having gained ten pounds and several years. She had that incredible face but both her hips and breasts were slightly heavier than Sahra’s had been and she was ill-kempt, something Sarie never was, even in the worst of times. This woman was dirty, ragged, in despair.

  But she did look so much like Sarie that I wanted to go to her and take her pain away, whatever it might be.

  I drifted closer, almost enjoying my own self-pitying pain, wondering why the woman wore white when almost all Nyueng Bao except priests dressed in black. Except on special occasions.

  I could ask Thai Dei when I got back. If I ever found the way.

  I was so near the woman I could have taken her into my arms and kissed her had I been in flesh. I wanted to, she resembled Sarie so much in her face.

  Had Sarie had cousins? I know she had uncles because at least one died during the siege of Dejagore. She might have had aunts who stayed behind, too. The party of pilgrims had included only a fraction of the delta population.

  The woman in white looked square where my eyes would have been. Her eyes widened. Her skin went pale. She let out a shriek, then collapsed. Several old men in colored robes rushed out of the temple. They began trying to bring the woman around, gabbling at one another too fast for me to follow. She regained her composure as they helped her to her feet. “I thought I saw a ghost,” she said in response to insistent questions. “It must be the fasting.”

  Fasting? It did not look like she had been missing many meals to me.

  So she had sensed my presence, eh? Worth remembering. But I had a battle to get back to. I was no use to anyone down here, all but lost. I found the road out of town, followed it in a direction I believed would eventually bring me to Taglios. From Taglios it would be an easy course to chart south.

  27

  I did not have to make the trip the hard way. Not long after I found the river my whole universe began to rock. After its third unnatural shaking I began to f
eel pain. Twice more and I went into darkness, passed through, and came up to awareness inside One-Eye’s wagon. The little shit was holding me up by the shirt and slapping me while he growled something about waking my ass up.

  I was sitting up beside Smoke when I opened my eyes. I was soaked with sweat. I was shaking.

  One-Eye demanded, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I’m not sure. Soulcatcher, I think. It was sort of like when I used to fall through time to Dejagore. Only I kind of squirted like a sugarmelon seed, right off to somewhere in the delta. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t control it. In a way it was like walking with the ghost. But I couldn’t see very far…” I realized I was babbling, in Taglian yet. I managed to bite down on it.

  “We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got work to do.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “You want to talk, go see Croaker. Or do whatever else you want. But get out of the way. I’m not kidding about the work.”

  Angry, I clambered out of the wagon. It was daytime out there, just as it had been in the swamp. There was a lot of smoke. There was plenty of noise from the front, where the situation seemed to be static. There was not much chance the Old Man would take time out to hear about my misadventure. It did not affect what was happening right now.

  I went over to the campfire. It had gone out. In fact, it had gone cold.

  Where were Thai Dei and his mother? Where was Uncle Doj?

  Not here.

  I found water and drank, wondering how long it would be before the water supply became as critical as the food. I napped. Eventually One-Eye completed his business. He came out and sat beside me. “Now tell me about it.”

  I told him.

  “You might have learned something important this time, Kid.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll let you know after I talk to Croaker.”

  28

  I was an afrit buzzing behind Mogaba’s shoulder. He and his captains were rattled.