by Glen Cook
“Do you have a suggestion about how to deal with this threat?” Mogaba showed no emotion, though Shadowspinner getting well meant the date of our executions had been advanced.
I considered suggesting prayer but it was obvious Mogaba was not in the mood. “Afraid not.”
“There is nothing in your books?”
He meant the Annals. Croaker tried hard to get him to study them. Croaker was big on looking for, and deferring to, precedent—mainly because he lacked much confidence in his mastery of strategy and leadership. On the other hand, Mogaba lacked no confidence whatsoever. He always had an excuse not to study Company history. Only recently had it occurred to me that he might not read or write. Those are skills considered unmanly in some places. Maybe that was true among the Nar of Gea-Xle, despite the fact that keeping the Annals was a holy duty of our Black Company forebrethren.
The Nar say very little about their beliefs. The rest of us are aware that they consider us heretics, though.
“Very little. The time-honored tactic is to attract the wizard’s attention to a secondary target where he will do less damage than he wants. You hold his attention there till he gets tired or until you sneak up and cut his throat. Sneakups aren’t practical here. This time Spinner will protect himself better. He might not even come out of his camp if we don’t make him.”
Mogaba nodded, unsurprised. “Sindawe?”
Sindawe is Mogaba’s oldest and closest friend. They go back to early childhood. Sindawe is now Mogaba’s second in command and leader of the Taglian First Legion, which is the best of the Taglian formations. And the oldest. Croaker put Mogaba in charge of training when first we arrived in Laglios and the First is the juggernaut Mogaba built.
Sindawe can pass as Mogaba’s brother. Sometimes he acts like Mogaba’s conscience. Mogaba values his good opinion possibly more than he should.
Sindawe said, “We could try to outrun them.… Whoa, Ga! I’m joking.”
Mogaba didn’t get it. Or if he did he failed to see the humor.
I offered, “Use artillery to distract him, wherever he is. And if we do catch him in range we can hope we get lucky.”
We did that during the big battle that ended with us trapped. And it worked. We even got lucky, some, which was why we were alive to be in deep shit now. But we did not come near eliminating Shadowspinner.
“We will include motion in everything,” Mogaba decided. “Our artillerymen will shoot and run. Wherever the Shadowmaster attacks directly we will fade away instantly. We will cover with enfilading fire till his attention is drawn elsewhere. We will not look him in the eye.”
Mogaba looked me in the eye. He wanted help from Goblin and One-Eye but his pride would not let him ask. He is on record as saying he cannot abide sorcery, that sorcery has no place in the Black Company. It is wicked, dishonorable, the alternative of rogues. The man just cannot lay off the flattery. He spreads that stuff all over those two clowns every time he sees them, too. He has made them some big offers intended to get them to retire from “his” Company.
Help? Ain’t it funny how flexible you get when absolute destruction looks you right in the eye?
Sort of flexible. Mogaba never addressed the matter directly.
I did not twist his tail. I never do. And I hope that drives him crazy. I said, “We will all exercise all our talents to their limit. If we don’t get through this, our differences don’t mean shit.”
Mogaba winced. Among the many things a Nar warrior does not do is employ colorful language. Whatever language he uses.
Good thing we were using the Beryl dialect. Our discussion had gone on long enough that the Taglian officers were beginning to doubt Sindawe’s bland translations. We tried to show the outside world a single face. It was especially important to deceive our employers. In the tradition of these things they are, likely, already figuring out how to screw us as soon as we save their royal butts.
Counting sworn brothers taken in since our advent in this forsaken end of the world, the Nar and Old Crew factions together total sixty-nine men. Dejagore’s main defenders are ten thousand inadequately trained Taglian legionaires, some willing but ineffective former Shadowlander slaves, and some even less effective Jaicuri. Each day snaps our numbers. Old wounds and current diseases thin our ranks as swiftly as enemy attacks. Croaker tried to teach good field hygiene but it has not stuck anywhere outside the Company proper.
Mogaba awarded me a small bow, the way honors are paid in these parts. He would not thank me outright.
Sindawe and Ochiba now had their heads together over some unit reports that had just come in. Sindawe announced, “No time left for talk. They are about to attack.” He spoke Taglian. Unlike Mogaba, he made a grand effort to get beyond pidgin. He strove to understand the culture and thinking of the several Taglian peoples—weird though they are.
Mogaba said, “Then let’s go to our posts. We don’t want to disappoint Shadowspinner.” You could see the edge on the man. He was eager. His excitement was almost unreasonable. He reviewed the tactics he wanted used to reduce friendly casualties.
I left without a word. Without being dismissed.
Mogaba knew I did not consider him Captain. We discuss it occasionally. I will not acknowledge him without a formal vote. He does not want an election yet, either, I suspect because he fears his popularity is not what a Captain’s should be.
I will not force the issue. I might get elected by the Old Crew faction. And I don’t want the job. I am not qualified.
I know my limitations. I am no leader. Hell, I don’t even handle these Annals very well. I don’t see how Croaker kept them up and did all the other stuff he had to do at the same time.
I ran all the way to my section of wall.
12
Something hit me like a small, silent cyclone of darkness that dropped out of the night and nowhere. It devoured me, unseen by anyone around. It grabbed hold of my soul and yanked. I went into the darkness thinking, Boy, the Shadowmaster came back in a huge way, didn’t he?
This was unlike anything I had encountered ever before.
But why come after me? There were few players less significant than I was.
13
I was summoned. I could not resist. I fought, but soon I realized that a strong part of me did not want to win.
I was confused. I had no idea what was happening. I was sleepy.… Was all this just because I wasn’t getting enough sleep?
A voice called my name. The voice seemed vaguely familiar. “Murgen! Come home, Murgen!” I felt violent motion, probably due to a blow I didn’t feel. “Come on, Murgen! You have to fight it.”
What?
“He’s coming. He’s coming back!”
I groaned. A major accomplishment, apparently, because it generated more excitement.
I groaned again. Now I knew who I was but not where I was or why, or who that voice belonged to. “I’m getting up!” I tried to say. Must be some kind of training. “I’m getting up, goddamnit!” And I tried. But my muscles would not lift me.
They were rigid.
Hands pulled on my arms.
A new voice said, “Stand him up. Get him walking.”
The original voice said, “We’ve got to find a way to head these seizures off before they happen.”
“I’m open to suggestion.”
“You’re the doctor.”
“It’s not a disease, Goblin. You’re the sorcerer.”
“It ain’t sorcery, either, Chief.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“Anyway, it isn’t any sorcery like any I ever seen or heard of.”
They had me upright now. My knees would not cooperate but these guys would not let me fall down.
I opened an eye. I saw Goblin and the Old Man. But the Old Man was dead.… I tried my tongue. “I think I’m back.” This time I had it. This time my words were slurred but understandable.
“He is back,” Goblin said.
“Keep him moving.”
/> “He ain’t drunk, Croaker. He’s back. He’s aware. He can hang on here. You can hang on here now, can’t you, Murgen?”
“Yeah. I’m here. I won’t drift away as long as I’m awake.” Where was here? I looked around. Oh. There. Again.
“What happened?” the Old Man asked.
“I got pulled into the past again.”
“Dejagore?”
“It’s always Dejagore. This was the day you came back. The day I met Sarie.”
Croaker grunted.
“It hurts less each time. This trip wasn’t bad. But you lose a lot besides the pain. I didn’t see half the horror I know was there.”
“Maybe that’s good. Maybe if you can shed all of that you can break out of this.”
“I’m not crazy, Croaker. I’m not doing this to myself.”
Goblin said, “It’s getting harder to pull him back, not easier. This time he wouldn’t have made it without us.”
My turn to grunt. I could get caught in a cycle of reliving the nadir of my life, over and over.
Goblin had not guessed the worst. I was not back yet. They had dragged me up out of the deeps of yesterday but I was not home. This was my past, too, only this time I was aware of my dislocation. And I knew what evils lurked in my future.
“What was it like?” Goblin stared like that every time. Like some facial tic of mine might be the one clue he needs to unravel the puzzle and rescue me. Croaker leaned against the wall, the way he does, satisfied now that I was talking.
“Same as every other time. Just less painful. Although this time when I started out I wasn’t really me. That was different. I was just a disembodied voice, just a viewpoint giving a guide’s sort of speech to a faceless visitor.”
“Also disembodied?” Croaker asked. This variation had him interested.
“No. There was somebody there. A complete person but he had no face.”
Goblin and Croaker exchanged troubled looks. At that time Otto and Hagop were still away. “What sex?” Croaker asked.
“Wasn’t clear. It wasn’t the Faceless Man, though. I don’t think it was anybody from our past. Might just have been something out of my own head. I might have separated me into pieces so I wouldn’t have to deal with so much pain in such big blasts.”
Goblin shook his head, not buying that. “It ain’t you, Murgen. Something is doing this. Besides who, we want to know why and why you. Did you catch any clues? How did it go? Try for specifics. It’s teeny details that will give us our handle.”
“I was detached completely when it started. I went down into it gradually. Then I was the Murgen back then, living it all over again, trying to get it all down in the Annals, unaware of the future at all. You remember going swimming when you were a kid? When somebody would come up out of the water behind you to dunk you? He would jump in the air and put his hand on top of your head, then let his weight push you under? If you were in deep water instead of just going straight down you would sort of curve through the water and lay out flat? This whole thing went like that. Only once I was out flat I couldn’t float to the top. I forgot that I have done it all before, almost always the same way, who knows how many times? Maybe if I could remember the future back then I could change the way things went, or maybe at least I could make extra copies of my books so they don’t get.…”
“What?” Croaker was alert now. Mention the Annals and you have his undivided attention. “What was that?”
Did he realize that I was remembering the future? In this time my volumes of the Annals are still safe.
The fear and the pain swarmed in on me, then. The despair followed. Because despite all those plunges back there, and despite the visits here, I cannot stop anything from happening. No amount of willpower can divert the river from the horrors.
For a moment I could not talk because I had so much to say. Then, obliquely, I managed, “You came here about the Grove of Doom. Right?” I knew this night. I have been through this country often enough to know its terrain well. Here the landscape varies slightly from visit to visit but afterward time becomes the same relentless river.
If I squinted I could almost see the ghosts of other versions playing out alternate dialogs.
Croaker was surprised. “The grove?”
“You want me to take the Company out to the Grove of Doom. Right? It’s time for some Deceiver festival. You think Narayan Singh himself might show up for this one. You think there’s a good chance to catch him—or to catch somebody who knows where he has your baby hidden. Worst chance, you think we’ll get the opportunity to kill lots of them and make them hurt more than they already do.”
Croaker has been implacable in his resolve to exterminate the Deceivers. More so even than Lady has been, I think, and she was the more deeply insulted of the two. Once upon a time he wanted his legacy to be the completion of the Black Company’s historical cycle. He wanted to be captain when the Company returned to Khatovar. He has the dream still but a nightmare shoved it aside. The nightmare demands satisfaction. Until its gossamer thread of terror, pain, cruelty and revenge has been spun, Khatovar is going to remain nothing but an excuse, not a destination.
Croaker eyed me uncertainly. “How could you know about the grove?”
“I came back knowing.” Which was true. But the two of us would not give the same meaning to “back.”
“You’ll take the men out there?”
“I can’t not.”
Goblin eyed me weirdly, too, now.
I would do it. And I knew how it would go but I could not tell them that. There were two minds inside my head. The one doing this thinking wasn’t the one heaving on the running lines and reefing the sails.
“I’m all right now,” I told them. And, “I think there is a way to keep me from falling back. At least, to keep me from going so far back. But I can’t get it out.” I would have shared gladly. I did not want to keep stumbling off the edge of time to fall back into those too-real dark dreams of Dejagores past. Not even if I tumbled into a viewpoint almost blind to the horror and cruelty everywhere then.
Croaker started to say something.
I interrupted. “I’ll be down for the staff meeting in ten minutes.”
I could not tell them anything directly but maybe I could get something out sideways.
But I knew nothing would change. The worst of all horrors was waiting up ahead and I was powerless to avert it.
I’d still do my best in the grove. Just in case this time that would come out differently. If I could remember the future well enough to make the right moves.
You. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. You keep dragging me to the wellsprings of pain. Why do you do that? What do you want? Who are you? What are you?
As always, you give me no answers.
14
The goddamned wind had teeth. We huddled in our blankets, shivering, as unmotivated as guys get without hanging it up. Weren’t many of us wanted to be in that haunted grove in the first place.
Yet something I could not quite catch, some elusive emotion deep inside me, told me this was critical, that this had to be done just right. That more than I could imagine hinged upon that.
Unseen trees creaked and cracked. The wind groaned and whined. It was easy to let your imagination get away and brood on the fact that thousands had been tortured and murdered there. You might hear their moans inside the wind, their pleas for mercy ignored even now. You might expect to see broken corpses rising up to demand vengeance on the living.
I faked being a hero. I could not stop shaking, though. I pulled my blanket tighter. That did not help, either.
“Candyass!” One-Eye sneered. Like the little shit wasn’t about to have a seizure himself. “That bonehead Goblin don’t quit farting around and get his dead ass back here I’m gonna go strip him barebutt and nail him to a chunk of ice.”
“That’s creative.”
“Don’t be no wiseass, Kid. I’ll…”
An especially exuberant gust took off with what
he would.
It wasn’t just the cold making us shake, though nobody would admit that. It was the place and the mission and the fact that heavy cloud cover robbed us of even the meager comradeship of starlight.
It was goddamned dark. And these Stranglers might now be friends with the man who ran shadows. A little bird said. Actually, a big black bird said.
“We spend too much time in town,” I grumbled. One-Eye didn’t respond. Thai Dei did, though, with a grunt. But that was a speech for this particular Nyueng Bao.
The wind brought the creak of a stealthy footfall. One-Eye barked, “Goddamnit, Goblin! Quit stomping around. You want the whole damned world to know we’re here?” Never mind that Goblin could not be heard five feet away, dancing. One-Eye refuses to be constrained by mundane reason or consistency.
Goblin drifted into place in front of me, squatted. His little yellow teeth chattered. “All set,” he murmured. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“We’d better do it, then. Before I break out in a case of common sense.” I grunted as I rose. My knees crackled. My muscles did not want to stretch any more. I swore. I was getting too damned old for this shit, though at thirty-four I was the baby of the bunch. “Move out,” I said, loudly enough to be heard by most everyone. You couldn’t use hand signals in that darkness.
We were downwind and Goblin had done his stuff. Noise was not a worry.
The men drifted away, mostly so quietly that I had trouble believing I was alone suddenly except for my bodyguard. We moved, too. Thai Dei covered my back. The night didn’t bother him. Maybe he has eyes like a cat.
I had plenty of mixed feelings. This was the first time I had run a raid. I was not sure I was over Dejagore enough to handle it. I shied at shadows and remained crazy suspicious of everybody outside the Company, for no reason I could understand. But Croaker insisted, so here I was sneaking around in a dark and evil forest with icicles hanging off my butt, directing the first purely Company op in years. Only it wasn’t so purely Company when you considered the fact that all my guys had bodyguards with them.