The Black Company tbc-1

by Glen Charles Cook

  I lifted an eyebrow. He was way down. I turned back to the fires and lights and disturbing absence of racket. My eyes kept crossing, my vision clouding. Tom-Tom was right. I needed sleep.

  From the darkness came another of those strange, hopeless cries. This one was closer.

  “Up, Croaker.” The Lieutenant was not gentle. “Captain wants you in the officers’ mess.”

  I groaned. I cursed. I threatened mayhem in the first degree. He grinned, pinched the nerve in my elbow, rolled me onto the floor. “I’m up already,” I grumbled, feeling around for my boots. “What’s it about?”

  He was gone.

  “Will Mercy pull through, Croaker?” the Captain asked. “I don’t think so, but I’ve seen bigger miracles.” The officers and sergeants were all there. “You want to know what’s happening,” the Captain said. “The visitor the other day was an envoy from overseas. He offered an alliance. The north’s military resources in exchange for the support of Beryl’s fleets. Sounded reasonable to me. But the Syndic is being stubborn. He’s still upset about the conquest of Opal. I suggested he be more flexible. If these northerners are villains then the alliance option could be the least of several evils. Better an ally than a tributary. Our problem is, where do we stand if the legate presses?” Candy said, “We should refuse if he tells us to fight these northerners?”

  “Maybe. Fighting a sorcerer could mean our destruction.”

  Wham! The mess door slammed open. A small, dusky, wiry man, preceded by a great humped beak of a nose, blew inside. The Captain bounced up and clicked his heels. “Syndic.”

  Our visitor slammed both fists down on the tabletop. “You ordered your men withdrawn into the Bastion. I’m not paying you to hide like whipped dogs.”

  “You’re not paying us to become martyrs, either,” the Captain replied in his reasoning-with-fools voice. “We’re a bodyguard, not police. Maintaining order is the task of the Urban Cohorts,”

  The Syndic was tired, distraught, frightened, on his last emotional legs. Like everyone else.

  “Be reasonable,” the Captain suggested. “Beryl has passed a point of no return. Chaos rules the streets. Any attempt to restore order is doomed. The cure now is the disease.”

  I liked that. I had begun to hate Beryl.

  The Syndic shrank into himself. “There’s still the forvalaka, And that vulture from the north, waiting off the

  Island.” Tom-Tom started out of a half-sleep. “Off the Island, you say?”

  “Waiting for me to beg.”

  “Interesting.” The little wizard lapsed into semi-slumber.

  The Captain and Syndic bickered about (he terms of our commission. I produced our copy of the agreement. The Syndic tried to stretch clauses with, “Yeah, but.” Clearly, he wanted to fight if the legate started throwing his weight around.

  Elmo started snoring. The Captain dismissed us, resumed arguing with our employer.

  I suppose seven hours passes as a night’s sleep. I didn’t strangle Tom-Tom when he wakened me. But I did grouse and crab till he threatened to turn me into a jackass braying at the Gate of Dawn. Only then, after I had dressed and we had joined a dozen others, did I realize that I didn’t have a notion what was happening.

  “We’re going to look at a tomb,” Tom-Tom said.

  “Huh?” I am none too bright some mornings.

  “We’re going to the Necropolitan Hill to eyeball that forvalaka tomb,”

  “Now wait a minute...”

  “Chicken? I always thought you were, Croaker.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll have three top wizards along, with nothing to do but babysit your ass. One-Eye would go too, but the Captain wants him to hang around.”

  “Why is what I want to know.”

  “To find out if vampires are real. They could be a put-up from yon spook ship.”

  “Neat trick. Maybe we should have thought of it.” The forvalaka threat had done what no force of arms could: stilled the riots.

  Tom-Tom nodded. He dragged fingers across the little

  drum that gave him his name. I filed the thought. He’s worse than his brother when it comes to admitting shortcomings.

  The city was as still as an old battlefield. Like a battlefield, it was filled with stench, flies, scavengers, and the dead. The only sound was the tread of our boots and, once, the mournful cry of a sad dog standing sentinel over its fallen master. “The price of order,” I muttered, I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn’t budge.

  “The cost of chaos,” Tom-Tom countered. Thump on his drum. “Not quite the same thing, Croaker.”

  The Necropolitan Hill is taller than the heighth on which the Bastion stands. From the Upper Enclosure, where the mausoleums of the wealthy stand, I could see the northern ship.

  “Just lying out there waiting,” Tom-Tom said. “Like the Syndic said.”

  “Why don’t they just move in? Who could stop them?” Tom-Tom shrugged. Nobody else offered an opinion. We reached the storied tomb. It looked the part it played in rumor and legend. It was very, very old, definitely lightning-blasted, and scarred with tool marks. One thick oak door had burst asunder. Toothpicks and fragments lay scattered for a dozen yards around.

  Goblin, Tom-Tom, and Silent put their heads together. Somebody made a crack about that way they might have a brain between them. Goblin and Silent then took stations flanking the door, a few steps back. Tom-Tom’ faced it head on. He shuffled around like a bull about to charge, found his spot, dropped into a crouch with his arms flung up oddly, like a parody of a martial arts master. “How about you fools open the door?” he growled.

  “Idiots. I had to bring idiots.” Wham-wham on the drum. “Stand around with their fingers in their noses.”

  A couple of us grabbed the ruined door and heaved. It was too warped to give much. Tom-Tom rapped his drum, let out a villainous scream, and jumped inside. Goblin bounced to the portal behind him. Silent moved up in a fast glide.

  Inside, Tom-Tom let out a rat squeak and started sneezing. He stumbled out, eyes watering, grinding his nose with the heels of his hands. He sounded like he had a bad cold when he said, “Wasn’t a trick.” His ebony skin had gone grey.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  He jerked a thumb toward the tomb. Goblin and Silent were inside now. They started sneezing.

  I sidled to the doorway, peeked. I couldn’t see squat. Just dust thick in the sunlight close to me. Then I stepped inside. My eyes adjusted.

  There were bones everywhere. Bones in heaps, bones in stacks, bones sorted neatly by something insane. Strange bones they were, similar to those of men, but of weird proportion to my physician’s eye. There must have been fifty bodies originally. They’d really packed them in, back when, Forvalaka for sure, then, because Beryl buries its villains uncremated.

  There were fresh corpses too, I counted seven dead soldiers before the sneezing started. They wore the colors of a mutinous cohort.

  I dragged a body outside, let go, stumbled a few steps, was noisily sick- When I regained control, J turned back to examine my booty.

  The others stood around looking green. “No phantom did that,” Goblin said. Tom-Tom bobbed his head. He was more shaken than anyone. More shaken than the sight demanded, I thought.

  Silent got on with business, somehow conjuring a brisk, small maid of a breeze that scurried in through the mausoleum door and bustled out again, skirts laden with dust and the smell of death.

  “You all right?” I asked Tom-Tom.

  He eyed my medical kit and waved me off. “I’ll be okay. I was just remembering.”

  I gave him a minute, then prodded, “Remembering?”

  “We were boys, One-Eye and me. They’d just sold us to N’Gamo, to become his apprentices. A messenger came from a village back in the hills.” He knelt beside the dead soldier. “The wounds are identical.”

  I was rattled. Nothing human killed that way, yet the damage seemed deliberat
e, calculated, the work of a malign intelligence. That made it more horrible.

  I swallowed, knelt, began my examination. Silent and Goblin eased into the tomb. Goblin had a little amber ball of light rolling around his cupped hands. “No bleeding,” I observed.

  “It takes the blood,” Tom-Tom said. Silent dragged another corpse out. “And the organs when it has time.” The second body had been split from groin to gullet. Heart and liver were missing.

  Silent went back inside. Goblin came out. He settled on a broken grave marker and shook his head. “Well?” Tom-Tom demanded.

  “Definitely the real thing. No prank by our friend.” He pointed. The northerner continued its patrol amidst a swarm of fishermen and coasters. “There were fifty-four of them sealed up here. They ate each other. This was the last one left.”

  Tom-Tom jumped as if slapped. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “That means the thing was the nastiest, cunningest, cruelest, and craziest of the lot.”

  “Vampires,” I muttered. “In this day.” Tom-Tom said, “Not strictly a vampire. This is the wereleopard, the man-leopard who walks on two legs by day and on four by night.”

  I’d heard of werewolves and werebears. The peasants around my home city tell such tales. I’d never heard of a wereleopard. I told Tom-Tom as much.

  “The man-leopard is from the far south. The jungle.” He stared out to sea. “They have to be buried alive,” Silent deposited another corpse.

  Blood-drinking, liver-eating wereleopards. Ancient, darkness-wise, filled with a millenium of hatred and hunger. The stuff of nightmare all right, “Can you handle it?”

  “N’Gamo couldn’t. I’ll never be his match, and he lost an arm and a foot trying to destroy a young male. What we have here is an old female. Bitter, cruel, and clever. The four of us might hold her off. Conquer her, no.” “But if you and One-Eye know this thing...” “No.” He had the shakes. He gripped his drum so tight it creaked. “We can’t.”

  Chaos died. Beryl’s streets remained as starkly silent as those of a city overthrown. Even the mutineers concealed themselves till hunger drove them to the city granaries.

  The Syndic tried to tighten the screws on the Captain. The Captain ignored him. Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye tracked the monster. The thing functioned on a purely animal level, feeding the hunger of an age. The factions besieged the Syndic with demands for protection.

  The Lieutenant again summoned us to the officers’ mess. The Captain wasted no time. “Men, our situation is grim.” He paced. “Beryl is demanding a new Syndic. Every faction has asked the Black Company to stand aside.” The moral dilemma escalated with the stakes. “We aren’t heroes,” the Captain continued. “We’re tough. We’re stubborn. We try to honor our commitments. But we don’t die for lost causes.”

  I protested, the voice of tradition questioning his unspoken proposition.

  “The question on the table is the survival of the Company, Croaker.”

  “We have taken the gold. Captain. Honor is the question on the table. For four centuries the Black Company has met the letter of its commissions. Consider the Book of Set, recorded by Annalist Coral while the Company was in service to the Archon of Bone, during the Revolt of the Chiliarchs.”

  “You consider it, Croaker.”

  I was irritated. “I stand on my right as a free soldier.”

  “He has the right to speak,” the Lieutenant agreed. He is more a traditionalist than I.

  “Okay. Let him talk. We don’t have to listen.”

  I reiterated that darkest hour in the Company’s history... till I realized I was arguing with myself. Half of me wanted to sell out.

  “Croaker? Are you finished?”

  I swallowed. “Find a legitimate loophole and I’ll go along.”

  Tom-Tom gave me a mocking drumroll. One-Eye chuckled. “That’s a job for Goblin, Croaker. He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping.”

  Goblin took the bait. “I was a lawyer? Your mother was a lawyer’s...”

  “Enough!” The Captain slapped the tabletop. “We’ve got Croaker’s okay. Go with it. Find an out.”

  The others looked relieved. Even the Lieutenant. My opinion, as Annalist, carried more weight than I liked.

  “The obvious out is the termination of the man holding our bond,” I observed. That hung in the air like an old, foul smell. Like the stench in the tomb of the forvalaka.

  “In our battered state, who could blame us if an assassin slipped past?” “You have a disgusting turn of mind. Croaker,” Tom-Tom said. He gave me another drumroll.

  “Pots calling kettles? We’d retain the appearance of honor. We do fail. As often as not.”

  “I like it,” the Captain said. “Let’s break this up before the Syndic comes asking what’s up. You stay, Tom-Tom. I’ve got a job for you.”

  It was a night for screamers. A broiling, sticky night of the sort that abrades that last thin barrier between the civilized man and the monster crouched in his soul. The screams came from homes where fear, heat, and overcrowding had put too much strain on the monster’s chains. A cool wind roared in off the gulf, pursued by massive storm clouds with lightning prancing in their hair. The wind swept away the stench of Beryl. The downpour scoured its streets. By morning’s light Beryl seemed a different city, still and cool and clean.

  The streets were speckled with puddles as we walked to the waterfront. Runoff still chuckled in the gutters. By noon the air would be leaden again, and more humid than ever. Tom-Tom awaited us on a boat he had hired. I said, “How much did you pocket on this deal? This scow looks like it’d sink before it cleared the Island.”

  “Not a copper, Croaker.” He sounded disappointed. He and his brother are great pilferers and black-marketeers.

  “Not a copper. This here is a slicker job than it looks. Her master is a smuggler.”

  “I’ll take your word. You’d probably know!” Nevertheless, I stepped gingerly as I boarded. He scowled. We were supposed to pretend that the avarice of Tom-Tom and One-Eye did not exist.

  We were off to sea to make an arrangement. Tom-Tom had the Captain’s carte blanche. The Lieutenant and I were along to give him a swift kick if he got carried away, Silent and a half dozen soldiers accompanied us for show. A customs launch hailed us off the Island. We were gone before she could get underway. I squatted, peered under the boom. The black ship loomed bigger and bigger. “That damned thing is a floating island.”

  “Too big,” the Lieutenant growled. “Ship that size couldn’t hold together in a heavy sea.”

  “Why not? How do you know?” Even boggled I remained curious about my brethren.

  “Sailed as a cabin boy when I was young. I learned ships.” His tone discouraged further interrogation. Most of the men want their antecedents kept private. As you might expect in a company of villains held together by its now and its us-against-the-world gone befores.

  “Not too big if you have the thaumaturgic craft to bind it,” Tom-Tom countered. He was shaky, tapping his drum in random, nervous rhythms. He and One-Eye both hated water.

  So. A mysterious northern enchanter. A ship as black as the floors of hell. My nerves began to fray.

  Her crew dropped an accomodation ladder. The Lieutenant scampered up. He seemed impressed.

  I’m no sailor, but the ship did look squared away and disciplined.

  A junior officer sorted out Tom-Tom, Silent, and myself and asked us to accompany him. He led us down stairs and through passageways, aft, without speaking.

  The northern emissary sat crosslegs amidst rich cushions, backed by the ship’s open sternlights, in a cabin worthy of an eastern potentate. I gaped, Tom-Tom smouldered with avarice. The emissary laughed.

  The laughter was a shock. A high-pitched near giggle more appropriate to some fifteen year old madonna of the tavern night than to a man more powerful than any king. “Excuse me,” he said, placing a hand daintily where his mouth would have been had he not been wearing that black morion. Then, “Be s
eated.”’

  My eyes widened against my will. Each remark came in a distinctly different voice. Was there a committee inside that helmet?

  Tom-Tom gulped air. Silent, being Silent, simply sat, I followed his example, and tried not to become too offensive with my frightened, curious stare.

  Tom-Tom wasn’t the best diplomat that day. He blurted, “The Syndic won’t last much longer. We want to make an arrangement...” Silent dug a toe into his thigh. I muttered, “This is our daring prince of thieves? Our man of iron nerve?” The legate chuckled. “You’re the physician? Croaker? Pardon him. He knows me.”

  A cold, cold tear enfolded me in its dark wings. Sweat moistened my temples. It had nothing to do with heat. A cool sea breeze flowed through the sternlights, a breeze for which men in Beryl would kill.

  “There is no cause to fear me. I was sent to offer an alliance meant to benefit Beryl as much as my people. I remain convinced that agreement can be forged-though not with the current autocrat. You face a problem requiring the same solution as mine, but your commission puts you in a narrow place.”

  “He knows it all. No point talking,” Tom-Tom croaked. He thumped his drum, but his fetish did him no good. He was choking up.

  The legate observed, “The Syndic is not invulnerable. Even guarded by you.” A great big cat had Tom-Tom’s tongue. The envoy looked at me. I shrugged. “Suppose the Syndic expired while your company was defending the Bastion against the mob?”

  “Ideal,” I said. “But it ignores the question of our subsequent safety.”

  “You drive the mob off, then discover the death. You’re no longer employed, so you leave Beryl.”

  “And go where? And outrun our enemies how? The Urban Cohorts would pursue us.”

  “Tell your Captain that, on discovery of the Syndic’s demise, if I receive a written request to mediate the succession, my forces will relieve you at the Baition. You should leave Beryl and camp on the Pillar of Anguish.”

  The Pillar of Anguish is an arrowhead of a chalk headland wormholed with countless little caverns. It thrusts out to sea a day’s march east of Beryl. A lighthouse/watchtower stands there. The name comes from the moaning the wind makes passing through the caverns.