The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  I can have nightmares about darkness and tight places even when I am awake.

  I turned back. Insofar as I was aware there had been no branchings to make me lose my way.

  I ran into a shadow head-on.

  There was no source of light but the forge where the torturer heated his instruments. That flickered, illuminating the creased, weathered bronze face of the frightened little man who had not become a soldier because he wanted to but because he believed he owed his gods a service when they demanded it. Like all his own people (and as their enemies did also), he hoped his own gods were strongest and would prevail.

  It was one slice of nightmare two seconds long, filled with information so alien most would never make sense to me. I was not sure I should assume that the shadow I had encountered actually connected with a man who had been tortured to death after having been captured in some religious war. No religion in these parts worked that way. Not even the Deceivers did—though they had tortured some victims, in ages past, in the Grove of Doom, during their Festival of Lights.

  My encounter with the shadow had not been that bad, really. I did not think collisions would be troublesome as long as I was ghostwalking. But it probably would have been a fatal meeting had it come while I was in my own body.

  The incident did leave me goofy and disoriented. I floated back up to the remnants of the crystal chamber. The place had cooled down. The light had gone dead. But there was another light in the world now, despite the overcast. Daylight was coming at last.

  Just as I realized that night’s siege was ending a final small volley of fireballs erupted near the Shadowgate. Then the world went still. And for a few minutes nobody and nothing was killing anybody or anything anywhere within sight.

  I looked south and reflected that there was no Smoke to keep me from going over there and taking a peek. And shadows did not bother me in this state. And if they did try, why, they behaved like rodents. No matter how big and ferocious, they stayed close to the surface. They wanted to be able to get into hiding quickly. And I could fly.

  I started southward. I really did. But something happened.

  The earth shook again.

  Lightning struck Overlook only a dozen feet away.

  Thai Dei woke me up.

  The effect was, I headed south but something grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and I spun northward like a leaf snatched up by a dust devil.

  * * *

  “I don’t want to get up,” I told the hand abusing my repose. “I’m tired. I worked all night.” I was tired. I had worked all night. Hard. I did want to roll over and snooze for another eight hours.

  Thai Dei poked me again. And then there was the other problem. Maybe a bigger problem.

  My feet were wet.

  I pushed myself up onto one elbow as Thai Dei told me, “You must get up!”

  “I hate to admit it. You’re right. I gotta get up.” I had to get up because rainwater was running in in a stream, turning the floor to mud.

  I banged my head against a log. “What the hell?” The overhead had fallen halfway in. The far wall had collapsed. The only reason I could see anything was that Thai Dei had brought a candle—the shadow repeller—when he came to visit. “What happened?”

  “Earthquake.”

  Oh. Yeah. It had not occurred to me that I could become a disaster victim, too.

  By the time I got my knees under me I saw that Thai Dei must have done a lot of work just to get to me. I was in a pocket. Most of our dugout must have fallen in. “Mother Gota?” I asked. I had shifted to Nyueng Bao without thinking.

  “I don’t know.” He responded in the same language. “She never came home.” His voice had an uncharacteristic edge. The strain was getting to him. Every few years he cracked and stopped being the ice man for minutes at a time.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Where the roof fell in.”

  I had to duckwalk to look at the hole. Yeah. I could see where he had squeezed his way in. There was some ugly grey sky out there. It was drizzling still. Thai Dei was about half my size, though. “I’m going to have to stay down here for a couple months before I can get through that. I shouldn’t have put on all that weight after we got out of Dejagore.” We had looked bad back then. Like walking skeletons, most of us.

  I wondered if that had anything to do with my dreams.

  “Take the candle. I’ll go up and make the hole bigger.”

  My bodyguard. This was about the first time he ever had a real chance to save my ass and it was from being smothered by a vicious sod roof.

  He pushed himself up into the opening. He wiggled. He squirmed. He dropped back down. “You need to push me.”

  “Too many snacks while we were sitting around here bullshitting. Go.” I set the candle aside very carefully. It had become very important to me. I did not want to be down there in that tight, cold, wet place without a light.

  I grabbed his legs and pushed. There must have been enough water in the hole to lubricate it. He popped through. I chuckled at a mental image of the earth giving birth to that ugly little man, like some clay devil in the Gunni myths.

  I heard voices. Something blocked the dirty light. Croaker called, “Hey, deadbeat, you still breathing down there?”

  “I’m fine. I was thinking about taking a nap.”

  “You might as well. We’re going to be a while getting you out.”

  “All right. I’ll be fine.” As long as the candle lasted.

  I looked at it. It had a lot of life left. Those things were designed to last.

  I began to think about what Thai Dei had had to do to come down into a place where shadows might be hiding just to see how I was doing. And that made me wonder that much more about the landscape of his interior world. Maybe I was a sloppy thinker. Or maybe just not yet experienced enough at being Nyueng Bao. I could not even work out how to treat Thai Dei like he was several different, distinct characters.

  He and the Nyueng Bao believed he owed me a debt so great he had devoted his life to protecting me. He would lay that, and maybe even his soul, down for me. But at the same time he would willingly lie to and deceive the foreigner who was a cause for shame on his family. And, certainly, he would tell a Soldier of Darkness nothing that might cast any light upon Nyueng Bao attitudes toward the Black Company.

  Come to think of it, not even my darling, beloved Sarie had gone that far. She could always change the subject without appearing to have done so.

  I said something into the hole but nobody answered. Well, screw them. I was tired.

  I sat down in the deepening mud and did go back to sleep.

  I did not go anywhere. I did not do anything but sleep.

  72

  I was a terrible mess when prisoners from the Prince’s division hauled me out of the ground. Otto and Hagop, who belonged with the Old Division and whom I had not seen since Charandaprash, came to stare down at me. “Looks like one a them mole-rat things they got down here,” Otto said.

  “Only filthier. It wasn’t raining, Ott, I’d say get a bucket a water and throw it on him.”

  “Comics,” I muttered. “You just gave away why you signed on. Your only way to get out of town ahead of an audience turned ugly.”

  “His disposition’s improved since the last time we saw him,” Hagop observed. “He don’t let these little setbacks bother him anymore.”

  “How you guys been keeping? We don’t get a lot of personal news over here.”

  Hagop frowned. Otto said, “A nick here, a ding there. Nothing serious.” Practically ever since I met them one or both had been recovering from some kind of wound. It was what they were known for. They were icons, practically. Otto and Hagop could not be killed, only injured, and as long as they stayed alive the Black Company would survive.

  Hagop said, “We was sent over with a bunch of stuff for the Old Man and some stuff for you to put in the Annals. Names.”

  “Oh.” Croaker and I always tried to record the names of our f
allen brethren the best we could. A lot of guys counted on it. Once they were gone it would be the only evidence that they had ever lived. It was immortality of a sort.

  “Lot a names,” Hagop persisted. “Hundreds. Last night was not a good night for the Old Division.”

  “You going to be able?” Otto asked. “Is everything buried down there in the mud?”

  “It is. But I was more careful with the Annals and that stuff than I was with me. I kept them in a room with logs for the walls and floor and ceiling, with drainage and everything. Just in case. I figured the Shadowmaster would be the problem, though. Hundreds of names? Really? Any I know?”

  “They’re just all on a list.”

  “I’ll have to add them on at the back of the volume I’m doing now.” If there were hundreds they would be recent enlistees, their names likely unknown to me. They would be recorded on a payroll somewhere but that had nothing to do with me.

  Thai Dei materialized. I had not noted his absence till he did. He said, “My mother was all right.” He did not sound real sure about that, though.

  “Uhm?”

  “They found her in the wizard’s hole when they dug him out. Which was why they were so long getting to you. Your Captain knew you were all right. He did not know if the wizard was dead or alive.”

  He meant One-Eye, I realized. Well, of course, if the quake had been bad enough to overcome the fine craftsmanship Thai Dei and I put into our place, then One-Eye’s place could not be anything but a rainwater pool by now.

  “She was in One-Eye’s dugout?”

  Embarrassed, whispering because there were other Nyueng Bao around, Thai Dei admitted, “They were both dead drunk. Passed out in their own vomit. Didn’t even know the roof had fallen in till the rescuers pulled them out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “But I’m just going to have to laugh.” It came on me hard. It was more than just picturing those two getting plotzed together. It was the release of all the stress from last night.

  Otto and Hagop stared at the slopes to the south, restraining their own amusement.

  I suffered another laugh seizure. I realized that, before lunch, word would be all over what was left of the army. Undoubtedly it would suffer severe exaggaration and would evolve into some prurient epic before it reached our most remote outpost.

  The slope that had been the home of the headquarters group had turned into thirty acres of pockmarks. Hardly a dugout had survived. Prisoners were digging in a dozen different places.

  I spotted one familiar face, then another, directing rescue teams. “So. She didn’t stay mad at them.”

  “What?” Thai Dei asked.

  “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.” Speak of the devil. There she came out of the Old Man’s bunker. Which had survived unscathed. Croaker was right behind her. Neither looked rested. But they sure looked pleased with themselves.

  I grumbled inarticulately, deep in my throat. My wife was half a world away.

  Croaker ambled over. “Time for your annual bath, Murgen.”

  “If I just stand here in the rain long enough…”

  Lady stared a hole through me. She wanted to interrogate me. But not now, not here, not in front of so many people who did not need to hear my answers because half of them did not themselves know where their loyalties lay.

  I asked, “How bad did we get hurt last night?”

  Croaker shuddered. Maybe some cold rainwater got inside his collar. “I don’t know yet. Lady has almost two thousand people she still can’t account for.”

  “They keep turning up, though,” she said, joining us. “I imagine we’ll find most of them eventually.” Probably dead.

  I said, “Otto and Hagop say we lost a big chunk of the Old Division.”

  Croaker nodded. “They brought a list. It’s way longer than I hoped. We still don’t have anything useful from the other divisions. The New Division is still disorganized and the Prince’s fell apart completely. Did you have something you wanted to say in private? You have that look.”

  “Yes.” Smoke rose from the crude chimney of Croaker’s shelter. Warm sounded good. I would make up something to tell him if I had to.

  I joined him in the warmth with no remorse and little sympathy for the guys I had left out in the rain.

  Lady followed us inside. She wore a smug but hungry look.

  * * *

  Lady had one of Croaker’s rough maps spread before the fire. “Can you pinpoint where he went down?” She meant the Howler. “Maybe we can still catch him if he was hurt bad.”

  “What’s that?” the Old Man asked when I mumbled.

  “Uh … I said, ‘you never stop tempting trouble, do you?’”

  Lady did not turn me into a toad. Nor even one of Otto’s ugly little mole-rats. She was in a good mood this morning, as opposed to last night.

  Smoke groaned. He startled me, though it was his second groan since I had come into Croaker’s shelter. I glanced that way. The curtain was open. Longshadow and Narayan Singh had been stacked in the alcove with the stricken wizard. I could not imagine Lady and the Old Man fooling around with that crew piled up only a few feet away, but it was obvious that they had taken complete advantage of their opportunity.

  I was mildly surprised Lady would turn her prisoners over—even to her old man. Longshadow represented a great opportunity to gain power. And Singh … Lady owed Singh a lot. But so did the Captain.

  Maybe they would make a family project out of Narayan.

  She asked fewer questions than I expected, mainly about Smoke’s limitations. I did not mention that I was developing an ability to travel without the comatose wizard. She did not ask. Croaker, though, noted that I knew about Howler even though I had been in my own bunker during the Taken’s run of bad luck.

  “I’ll send Blade,” she decided. “He’s levelheaded. He can get a job done without getting himself or Howler killed.”

  I wanted to ask how Blade and Swan had slithered back into her favor but management decisions were none of my business. I had had Lady explain that to me already, emphatically, regarding another matter.

  She left to offer Blade his opportunity.

  While she was away Croaker asked, “Where’s the standard?”

  “Buried in my dugout.”

  “Uhm. How about the Annals and stuff?”

  “They’re in there, too. But they should be all right for now. If we have another quake, or a lot more rain, though … I don’t know.”

  “We’ll go after that as soon as we’ve got our people dug out.”

  “How come she brought Singh and the Shadowmaster here?”

  He understood. “Because I’m the physician. And they’re both about half a heartbeat short of dying. Maybe if she’d had somebody of her own handy, whom she trusted…” He let it trail off. He would never trust his woman completely, where ambition might enter the equation.

  “She’s probably less risk than you think. I think I figured it out last night.”

  “What?”

  “Her relationship to Kina. How it works and why it exists. I think I got it.”

  “You have time to think when you’re out playing spook?”

  “Some.”

  “So tell me about my sweetie and Kina.”

  “Begin with the premise that she’s pretty damned bright.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He smiled at some private thought.

  “Not to mention pretty strong-willed.”

  “You going to waste my time with understatements? Or are you going to get on with it?”

  “Onward. I think that, a long time ago, before we ever got to Gea-Xle, when she first showed unexpected signs of regaining some power, she understood that some force down here meant to use her. And she let it happen. And that lulled that force into thinking that it had claimed a slave when in fact what it really got was a parasite.”

  Several possible responses stirred behind Croaker’s eyes. But he said only, “Go on.”

  “That’s pretty much
it. While the goddess was using her, Lady was limpeting herself to Kina so she could suck off power she could use herself. I think she’s burrowed in so deep Kina can’t get rid of her without crippling herself. I think Lady may even have some control over what the goddess does. Kina got real upset last night. The Daughter of Night was being threatened directly. But when she tried to help the kid, even though she managed to get really destructive, her efforts never quite hit their mark.”

  “And you think Lady…?”

  “Yes. He’s right.” Lady stepped into the weak light. No telling how long she had been behind us, listening. She was the darkness when it came to moving quietly. “That doesn’t leave this place. So long as they think I’m the real thing the end results will be the same as if I were.”

  I discovered some interesting mold formations developing on the wall in front of me. I gave them my devoted attention.

  Croaker said, “If you’re like some kind of leech or something, how come Kina hasn’t tried to get rid of you?”

  “Most of Kina is asleep. The part that isn’t is interested only in bringing on the Year of the Skulls. And she’s pretty stupid besides. She didn’t understand what I’d done till recently. She may ponder it for years before she decides to do something about it.”

  I said, “She does seem to look at time in a different way.”

  Lady continued, “I’m concerned that my beloved sister may have solved the puzzle, too. Or will now that she has the girl. The girl knows.”

  I said, “Catcher’s hiding out in the same place she has ever since she got here.” The Old Man knew where that was.

  Croaker said, “I’d love to take a crack. But we’ve only got ten hours to get ready for another night.”

  I understood. But boy would it have been nice to get Catcher tucked safely into the past.

  Twenty minutes of speculation did nothing to unravel Catcher’s ultimate motives. Not even Lady could guess what Catcher really wanted or what she might do next.

  “She was that way when she was four years old,” Lady said. “Hell. She was born unpredictable.”

  I must have looked too interested. The story stopped there.

  I did not overlook the fact that neither Croaker nor Lady ever referred to their child in any way that might suggest that she was anything but an unnatural monster entirely unconnected to them.