The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  That man just had one adventure after another.

  Lady was saying, “There were shadows in there before but Jarwaral says they haven’t been a problem lately. These charts supposedly show us where we can find the shadowweavers—if we want. I want. We’ll take them out before we go after the Deceiver. Ah! Murgen.”

  “She had to spot me,” I muttered to Blade. I looked for the inevitable crows. They were notable for their scarcity. The couple I did see acted like they were blind drunk.

  Lady had employed some spell to diminish the flow of information to her sister.

  “You stand out in a crowd,” Swan told me. “The women always notice you.”

  Lady continued, “Come here. The Captain sent these charts. What do you know about them?”

  “They’re supposed to be reliable.” A hundred percent—unless there had been some heavy renovations in the last few hours.

  “They aren’t very extensive.”

  Bitch and gripe, bitch and gripe. Nobody is ever satisfied. “Want I should go dig the guy up and let you do some kind of necromantic thing on him?”

  She gave me such an ugly look that for a moment I was afraid she would call my bluff. But she did not doubt me, she just was not getting the kind of fear and respect she expected. She relaxed, told me, “Except for the locations of the shadowweaver hideouts and where Singh is holing up there isn’t much here we didn’t know already.”

  Which stuff was what the exercise was all about, woman. “There’s a little more. Longshadow is almost always locked up in this tower here, doing whatever he does instead of giving us grief. Howler has an apartment somewhere around here. He keeps two carpets on a flat place over here and a little-bitty, brand-new one rolled up right beside his bed.”

  Lady gave me a piercing look. How could I know that?

  I told her, “The day he got here Howler started covering his ass in case his partner turned on him someday.”

  “Uhm?” she grunted. “Howler would. Particularly in view of what Longshadow tried to do to his previous associates.” She turned her attention to the charts. But I knew she was not satisfied. She could not be satisfied when somebody else knew anything that she did not.

  She beckoned Isi, Ochiba and Sindawe closer. The Nar generals worked well with her. They did not do so with the Old Man. Croaker could not trust them even though they stuck with the Company against Mogaba. “Should we do this in the daytime or at night?”

  Ochiba, a man I had heard speak maybe five times in that many years, said, “It won’t matter in there.”

  “True. But I prefer by daylight. For the impact on morale.”

  “It’s daytime now,” Swan observed.

  I told Blade, “You can’t get anything past this guy.”

  Lady glanced at Willow. “You want to see how well your Guards can perform in there?”

  “I’d love to. But that isn’t their job.”

  Their job was to look out for the Prince and Princess, neither of whom he or they had been near in recent times.

  Everybody there had that thought at the same time I did. Everybody gave Swan a long look. He reddened.

  “Sindawe, you’re my second choice.” Lady stepped aside so the tall Nar could move closer to the charts. I had kept wriggling forward. Now I could see that there was more than one set. Only one was the one I had prepared. The other, structured differently, may have been put together by Lady’s people based on what her soldiers had found inside Overlook.

  The Nar officer stared for a while. “We ought to rotate fresh troops in before we do anything else.”

  Isi agreed. “The men inside have been there a long time, under a lot of pressure.”

  Lady said, “I’ll approve that.”

  Sindawe said, “We should add numbers for this. Once we start moving there won’t be any point to pretense. Will there?”

  “Probably not. Succeed or fail, going ahead will attract some close scrutiny. And the Captain hasn’t given us the option of not going ahead. Has he, Murgen?”

  I shrugged. “He’ll always defer to the commander on the scene. You know that. As long as you can make a good argument.”

  “We don’t have an option, then. We’ve been stalling in hopes somebody else would come up with a workable solution to the Longshadow dilemma.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The fact that we can’t kill him. You know that, don’t you?”

  I knew that. What I did not know was how they planned to send fresh troops into Overlook.

  Sindawe said, “We ought to pursue every phase of the effort at once. Here, here, toward these shadowweaver hideouts. Here, toward the Deceiver’s holeup. And a general raid against the garrison and servant population, too. So they don’t interfere in our other efforts.”

  “Go for Longshadow, too,” Lady suggested. “You might get lucky.”

  I was missing something. There was a hundred-foot wall over there, not nearly as shiny as it used to be, and absent some of its pretty towers, but not one foot shorter than it ever was. Why were these people not impressed? “You all walk through walls or something?”

  “If that’s convenient,” Lady replied.

  “We’ll crawl,” Sindawe told me.

  Soon enough I discovered something else that I had missed while doing my all-seeing thing in the ghostworld—because I had not been looking.

  57

  They had a tunnel under the wall. Through the foundation, really. But just a wormhole of a thing. A guy my size had to slither on his belly like a snake. I know because I did it.

  Fool.

  Why did I have to do it in the flesh? I could have gone back and ridden Smoke. I could have seen everything with no claustrophobia, no bruised elbows or knees, no pops in the snot box from the heels of the clown in front of me. No weaseling through the farts and fear smells of the hundred little vegetarians snaking along ahead of me, raising the dead with all the clatter of their weaponry.

  Where were the Shadowmaster’s boys? All this racket, they had to be chuckling while they sharpened their swords. They were going to have Tals for their afternoon snack.

  The tunnel had been created in part by a liberal application of Lady’s fireball tools. In places its walls were still hot. It was completely new. All I saw when I got to its nether end was a gang of raggedy-ass Taglians who had been on the inside way too long. They looked like they had had a glimpse of heaven but a bunch of assholes like me were blocking the way.

  I was the last guy in my string. Number one hundred one. When I crawled out of his way number one of the guys being relieved dove into the hole and slithered away.

  Only twenty got to leave for each hundred who came in. The twenty were very enthusiastic. But nobody heard the clatter upstairs.

  Ochiba, Isi and Sindawe began choosing up teams to go thump on Longshadow’s guys. Sindawe always was decent to me, even when he worked for Mogaba. He was willing to change his ways, though. “Would you like to lead an attack group, Standardbearer?”

  “Obviously you have me confused with somebody who thinks he’s a hero.”

  “You could make big points by catching Narayan Singh.”

  “I don’t need big points. Talk to Blade or Swan.”

  Sindawe chuckled. “You won’t see them in here.”

  “Why not?”

  “They aren’t Company. Lady wouldn’t trust them in a tight place.”

  Interesting. She would trust these Nar.

  Croaker did not. Not one hundred percent. Never.

  Sindawe read me plain. He smiled. “This place is tight enough.”

  “Yeah. I still ain’t going to be a hero. I’ll just come along behind and watch so I can write it down right.”

  “Sin,” Isi called. “Got to move. The garrison knows something’s going on.”

  The Shadowlanders were slower than I expected. Sindawe and his pals were faster. About as quickly as it took to think it they led three groups off to the attack, going like they were right at home al
though none of them had been inside Overlook before.

  Overlook inside was no shiny white marvel. Wherever we were, it was way down deep in the ground where it was dirty and damp and unpleasant creatures with two, four or six more legs than me lurked in every shadow. Thai Dei did not like it at all.

  He had needed several hundred-man shifts just to find nerve enough to come inside.

  “Move back,” I growled at the troops waiting to go out. “For now this tunnel only runs one way. Thai Dei, slap that moron up side the head. Then thump that fool sitting in the mouth of the tunnel gawking. Let’s go, people. There’s a war going on in here. We don’t have time for lolligagging.” I was turning into a real top kick. Now if I could get the vocabulary working.

  “Lolligagging” does not exist in Taglian. The word got me a lot of dazed looks. The pithier nouns, verbs and adjectives do exist, mostly, with much of the usual impact. Religious insults work real good, too.

  “You,” I said to a head being birthed by the tunnel, “pass the word back that we’re engaged. We need people in here as fast as we can get them.”

  Sindawe reappeared. He was the commanding officer for this deathdance. He was amused by my barking. But he was politic. He was a big general only where the Taglian troops were concerned. The day might come when I was his boss inside the Company. He told me, “There’s still the attack on Longshadow to launch. You could spearhead that one.”

  I recalled the black spear One-Eye made specially for sticking Shadowmasters. Be a handy tool if I was to do something dumb like go after Longshadow. “I’ll let somebody else have that honor. I don’t want to hog everything.”

  Tell the truth, the place had me spooked. The smell of damp stone, vermin and old fear, combined with the cold and bad light, recalled too strongly all my nightmares about old men trapped forever in caverns where never-seen spiders spun webs and cocoons of ice.

  Coming inside Overlook had been a dumb idea. I suspected that when I made the decision to visit, but I did not listen to the little voice of fear because all those guys like Blade and Swan were hanging around grumbling about how the boys from headquarters never risk their cute and precious butts when the blood and shit start flying.

  It was the usual stuff. I started the same sort of crying about an hour after I took the oath. I just did not want to be the guy the troops thought had spent his last thirty years with his head up his butt.

  My message reached the other end of the tunnel. People started arriving at double speed.

  I had no idea if Longshadow and Howler realized we had a way into Overlook. They did not act like they were desperate to plug an unexpected breach in the wall. Their response was angry and vigorous but only with the power you would expect if they thought the bunch already inside were getting frisky.

  Our people did not reach Longshadow. Which was no surprise. The surprise of the century would have been if the crazy son of a bitch had come floating belly up.

  Likewise Soulcatcher’s little screaming buddy the Howler. Except that Isi, who was running that try, was clever enough to know he just might not be one hundred percent successful at squashing the little shit. So while he kept Howler dancing saving his ass from fifty guys with bamboo poles, five other guys burned his flying carpets. All but the little one that he kept right beside him. And Isi would have gotten that one, too, if Howler had had the balls to chase Isi’s men the way Isi wanted. What Isi failed to appreciate was that very few men were hung as heavy as him.

  However she managed it Lady had a good grasp of events inside the fortress. She recognized the failures where Longshadow and her former employee were concerned. She also knew, somehow, that Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night, by coincidence or the grace of their deity, happened to be away from their quarters when our gang turned up to collect them.

  Their servants were not so lucky.

  Most of those who had chosen to come into Overlook, either to serve the Shadowmaster or just to be safe from pestilence, hunger, or other terrors of the world, were not as lucky as their master. Ochiba took the garrison completely off guard. He and his men must have had trouble hearing their parents when they were growing up. They never got a grasp on the concepts of mercy or noncombatants.

  Which I really did not get a good look at till much later. After I got out of that slaughterhouse. After the casualties started coming in to the tunnel head, for evacuation if the chance came. After Lady stopped sending men in because she thought that would be a waste. After I got me back out of there, in one uncarved piece, dragging one end of a wounded Taglian while Thai Dei pushed the other, with the Taglian complaining all the way and the tunnel about a mile longer going out than it had been coming in. After coming up into free air only to find Willow Swan and Blade there wondering aloud why I was not back inside collecting Longshadow’s ears.

  “Didn’t want to steal your chance to count coup. Sindawe’s got you all set up. All you guys got to do is pick up a couple of sharp knives and slide on in there. You can collect Howler’s scalp while you’re at it. You’ll find them waiting for you together, I think. Up by the Shadowmaster’s tower.”

  “You ready?” Blade asked Swan. “I got my knife.” Blade had a grin on. He was perfectly willing to give Swan just as much crap as he gave me.

  Lady came striding toward us. She was decked out in the complete Lifetaker armor. Threads of red fire slithered over its black, hideous surface faster than the eye could follow. Taglians thought the Lifetaker image matched one of Kina’s Destroyer avatars. Despite what had been done to her and her daughter, plenty of people still thought she was a creature of the dark goddess. Sometimes those people included me.

  There was a connection for sure. She would not discuss it.

  But I did not tell her about me and Smoke. So we were even.

  “Any success to report?” Her voice was a bass boom rolling down a long, cold tunnel. “Anything at all?”

  “Lots of dead people. Both sides. A lot of them aren’t people we especially wanted dead. But I’d say they’ve only got one way left to hang on to the place.”

  “Which is?”

  “Loose the shadows.” I sort of croaked it out. I did not want to be a fortune-teller but that was a future that did not require a lot of divination. “Unless these two get to Longshadow first.” I indicated Swan and Blade.

  Lady was not in a mood for banter.

  She never was. The woman had about as much humor in her as my mother-in-law.

  She did enjoy a good impaling, though.

  She did the thing that created the cyclone of light blades and turned it loose among the taller towers. It drifted around on its own, doing plenty of damage and keeping Longshadow and Howler too busy to finish off her troops.

  58

  “That’s the second time,” the Old Man growled. “I thought I got through to you after the adventure in Kiaulune.” He was pissed off because I had gone inside Overlook. “You take Smoke down there and find out what the Shadowmaster and Howler are doing.”

  When Thai Dei and I had gotten back we had found Croaker already barking and snarling at a gang of couriers. Obviously he thought Lady had started something the rest of us were going to regret.

  I got the feeling Soulcatcher clued in late and was about as thrilled as the Captain. Crows appeared everywhere. They were unpleasant, even for Catcher’s agents. They swooped around shooting crow shit everywhere.

  “When you’re done checking on Longshadow and Howler I want you to start identifying the whereabouts of every man of ours.”

  “Ours?”

  “The Company. Old Crew. Nar. I want to get everybody together. Real soon now.”

  “You got it.”

  “Of course. But add in a dab of common sense, Murgen. To get to Khatovar the Company needs a standardbearer. Probably more than it’ll ever need a Captain or Lieutenant.”

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If anybody had a clue what you were up to it’s just possible they could do the things y
ou want done when you want them done.” I walked away before we squabbled in front of the troops.

  * * *

  Longshadow was taking it out on Howler. And Howler was getting him even more pissed off by not paying a lot of attention. He was witching up some colorful little construct out of thin air. I had to study it a while before I recognized it as a representation of the areas of Overlook that were in our side’s hands. It was a complicated little cyan and magenta mess—with a tail that dipped through the foundations of the wall to Lady’s positions outside.

  He did nothing to restrain his screams. Several came in quick succession, howls that seemed to have a little extra emotion behind them.

  The third howl triggered something inside Longshadow’s head. He shut up. He adjusted his mask, leaned forward to stare at Howler’s construct. He reached out with fingers as skinny as spider legs despite being inside a glove, poked at the tail leading to the outside. “How did she manage that? That should not have been possible.” His lunacy, his rant, vanished like mist in the morning sun. It was almost as if his reason had cleared. “The stone cannot be worked.”

  “That’s Senjak out there, if you’ll recall. She’ll work the stone the same way you did.”

  Longshadow made a noise like a cat’s growl. I thought his moment of lucidity had passed. I thought he was about to have an all-time fit. He fooled me. “Find the Deceiver and his brat. They need to be here, inside this tower, before midnight. If they want to survive.”

  Howler replied with an interrogative grunt.

  “I have no use for them anymore. I owe them nothing. They have done nothing for me. But I will give them this opportunity to survive.”

  I did not wait around to learn what happened next.

  * * *

  “What’re you doing back already?” Croaker demanded when I sat up. “You haven’t been out long enough—”

  “Excuse me, boss. I’ve already got a mother-in-law. Yes, I was out there long enough to hear Longshadow say he’s going to turn the shadows loose tonight.”

  Croaker shut his mouth. I hurried through the information. He said, “You’re right. He didn’t say shadows in that many words but it can’t be anything else. Get back to it. I’ll round up One-Eye and get the word out.”