The Return of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  Sometimes the leaning throne slips a millionth of an inch, tilting farther. This happens more and more frequently now.

  Stone shudders. Eternity sneers as it devours its own tail. This cold feast is almost finished.

  Even death is restless.

  34

  I could hear One-Eye cursing fate in general and several Vehdna Taglians in particular. One wheel of the wagon had become pinched between boulders and the soldiers were not getting it pried out fast enough to suit the little wizard. He had been in a foul temper all morning. I do believe he thought we would not continue on south after we won at Charandaprash. I do believe he thought the Old Man would be content to occupy the pass, then withdraw to warmer climes and wait for summer.

  Where was Longshadow going to go? Home. And because of the earthquake home was a house that would not be completed any time soon. So where was the big hurry? What kind of tunnel-vision fanatic did not even take time out for one good drunk after winning a battle so huge and obviously unwinnable going in?

  One-Eye had been saying all this and a lot more from the minute Croaker had told him to move out. One-Eye was not a happy trooper.

  He was even more unhappy because I got to ride. My fever and chills thing kept coming and going. The Captain saw that as a good excuse to keep me near Smoke—against whom he continued to caution me regularly. I did not tell him that walking with the ghost was becoming as unattractive as attractive, that it was getting scary out there. I had not talked it over with One-Eye yet, either. I knew I should. I would not like myself much anymore if something happened because I failed to warn them.

  But I did not want to cry wolf, either. One-Eye had not mentioned running into anything unusual during his occasional trips out. Maybe I was letting my imagination get the best of me.

  I was in pretty good shape for the moment. A little shaken by the ride but neither feverish nor fighting a chill. Might be an opportune time to take a look around.

  Outside, One-Eye snarled something at Thai Dei. “Not a good idea, One-Eye,” I snapped in Jewel Cities dialect. “He’d as soon kick your ass as look at you.”

  “Ha! That ought to be interesting. See what JoJo does. Might even wake him up.”

  Like most Company members One-Eye had a Nyueng Bao bodyguard. His was Cho Dai Cho, as unobtrusive and unambitious a bodyguard as ever lived. He was around only because the tribal elders had decreed it. He did not seem to have much interest in saving One-Eye from himself or anyone else. I had not seen Cho four times in the last month.

  * * *

  I could not find Soulcatcher. I knew she was there and Smoke was not fighting me but the woman was operating under a spell that hid her from even this sort of seeing. I could guess where she was roughly, though, because of the comings and goings of crows in the mountains west of us.

  I looked around for One-Eye’s shapeshifter friend Lisa Bowalk but there was no trace of her, either. Nor could I pinpoint Mogaba and the couple of Nar who had chosen to stand by him when he deserted the Company for service to the Shadowmaster.

  This was something to think about. If people had begun to suspect we were watching … But there was Longshadow in his crystal dome atop Overlook’s tallest tower, seated at a stone desk, calmly giving orders to messengers, arranging for the defense of his dwindling empire rationally and with vigor and making no effort to hide himself from me.

  And down below, in a private apartment, here was an uncomfortable and weakened Narayan Singh cringing in a corner while the Daughter of Night, like a dwarf rather than a child, apparently carried on half of a conversation with her spiritual mother. There was a smell of Kina in the room but not that terrifying sense of presence I had encountered before.

  I observed for a while. I ran back the hours. There was no doubt. Narayan Singh was not running anything anymore. He was an adjunct to the Daughter of Night, useful principally as a voice through which she could communicate with the Shadowmaster and the Deceivers. But Singh was beginning to suspect that his usefulness was running its course, that it would not be very much longer at all before the child would be ready to dispose of him.

  When the time came she would do it with no more thought or emotion than she would discarding a well-gnawed pork rib.

  Her communions with her divine parent were reshaping her fast.

  Kina seemed to be in a hurry, perhaps pressed for time, so that she did not have time to wait for the child to mature into her role.

  I was very uncomfortable around the kid even though she was a hundred miles away. I got out of there.

  I tried tracking Howler down but caught only glimpses as he buzzed here and there on his raggedy-ass, oft-patched smaller carpet. He seemed to have upped his level of precaution dramatically, too. I could spot him only when he was in a really big hurry and, apparently, outrunning his invisibility shield.

  Who would he be hiding from? If he did not know about me?

  There was still the Radisha, whom I had not spied on for way too long.

  In present time she was in the midst of a large audition with the chief priests of the major temples of the city. The subject was, not surprisingly, the war. In particular, the sacrilegious, atheistic, anticlerical stance of the men directing the Taglian effort. The new generation of priests were much less contentious amongst sects than had been their predecessors, who had paid for their stubbornly parochial attitudes with their lives.

  “There’s no doubt,” the Radisha admitted to a priest of Rhavi-Lemna, a goddess of brotherly love, “that the Liberator has been sending troops raised among the devout to pursue his feud with Blade.” News from the war zone was still far away. “He’s blatant about it, it’s true, but you people keep going along with it.”

  A priest in vermilion grumbled, “Because Blade has been promised the protectorship here when the Shadowmaster triumphs. He’ll exterminate us all. If he’s still alive.”

  “Which brings us to the crux again, doesn’t it? Even though my brother has become a competent commander and a corps of experienced officers has developed, neither the soldiers themselves nor the people believe we can defeat the Shadowmaster without the guidance of the Black Company. We’re still in a position where we’re compelled to let darkness wrestle darkness, hoping our hand of darkness triumphs and we can control it after it does so.”

  Rhavi-Lemna was a reasonable goddess. It would not be natural for her priests to be firebrands. But the Gunni have a hundred gods and goddesses, great and small, and some of them are a lot less tolerant. Someone shouted, “We should kill them now! They’re a greater danger to our way of life than any masked sorcerer eight hundred miles away.”

  There were still many Taglians who had not served in the armies nor traveled south to see what legacy the Shadowmasters had left in the lands retaken from their rule. Men who did not believe simply because they preferred something else to be true.

  This was an unending squabble that might not be settled in my lifetime. There was a war on and as long as we did not yet have it won the “Kill them now!” school of thinking would remain a distinct minority. But the “Kill them later!” school had plenty of members.

  “There aren’t more than fifty or sixty of them,” the Radisha countered. “How hard can it be to dispose of them once they’ve outlived their usefulness?”

  “Pretty damned hard, I imagine. The Shadowmasters haven’t managed. Neither have the Deceivers.”

  “Steps are being taken.”

  Interesting. I had not seen any sign of that.

  Time to cruise days gone by, then.

  Away I went. Skipping like a seven-year-old girl, toes coming down every hour or so as I headed toward the last time I checked on the Woman. There was not much there. A lot of the same stuff. One idea after another bounced off Cordy Mather in the deeps of night, every one rejected by Mather, and the more vigorously so the better the Woman seemed to like them.

  Of more interest was the fact that she had started looking for Smoke. In fact, she was getting suspiciou
s, though not yet in any major way. Mather kept telling her we were all right and must have made some arrangement to look out for Smoke. We would not just let the old boy starve.

  “They hate him, dear. He did everything he could to undercut the Black Company.”

  “They would find a crueler way to get even. After they woke him up. So he could appreciate the pain.”

  Cordy echoed my thoughts perfectly. Starvation would do fine but I wanted him conscious while he went.

  Waking up to find himself in our hands might just be enough. He would have a shit hemorrhage.

  All the way back to my last visit I found nothing particularly exciting. The Woman never said anything interesting except when she was finished using Mather and then she said nothing original. Yet I could not help thinking that something was going on.

  She was the Radisha Drah. Her whole life had been spent aware that everything she said or did might be observed by someone who did not wish her well.

  I skipped back to today but did not find anything to hurry back to the Old Man.

  There would be some excitement when the news from Charandaprash arrived. People would stop thinking as clearly and carefully. I would be back.

  I took a dive into Smoke’s old hiding place before I left. The old Annals were right where I had hidden them.

  Interesting to note, though, as I departed, that there were crows all over the Palace district.

  * * *

  One-Eye was still cursing when I came out. Cursing again, I learned, as I let myself down from the rear of the wagon. A different wheel was stuck. We had moved several miles. I was bone dry. I lifted the lid on One-Eye’s waterbarrel. There was not much there. The little that remained was pretty nasty. I drank it anyway.

  I walked around to where One-Eye was abusing a fresh crew of victims. “You little shit. Quit barking at the help. They’ll stuff that damned hat down your throat and I’ll end up having to walk. Where’s the Old Man?”

  35

  “Crows all over, eh?” Croaker mused. “Interesting. Guess it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Hers?” There were crows around us right now. Naturally. He would not let Lady run them off.

  “Probably.”

  “Are they all nowadays?”

  “Take it for granted. You won’t be unpleasantly surprised. Tell me about Longshadow.” The last sentence was not verbal at all but in the finger speech we had learned way back when Darling, the White Rose, was with the Company. We employed it sparingly anymore and I had not thought of using it to get around the crows. It was so obvious when you considered it. There would be no way for the critters to relay the signs.

  Nobody believed that the birds understood what they relayed now. They just carried the words.

  My fingers were no longer as nimble as once they had been. I had a hard time telling him that Longshadow had done a turnaround and was all business now, calm and sane and decisive.

  “Interesting,” he said. He looked up the pass. The Prince’s troops, in the vanguard, had sprung a Shadowlander ambush. The fighting was getting heavy. The column was crushing up behind it. This could get bad.

  I looked at the slopes rising to either hand. If Mogaba had a lot of men up there he could embarrass us easily.

  “He doesn’t,” Croaker said, as though I had spoken my thoughts.

  “You’re getting spooky.” He wore most of the fancy Widowmaker armor most of the time now. There was hardly ever a time when he did not have a crow on his shoulder. He seemed to know his favorites because he always had tidbits for them.

  “When I have to play a role I try to live it.” He began talking with his fingers again. “I want you to find Goblin. It is critical.”

  “Huh?”

  He signed, “I would do it myself but there is no time.” Aloud, he added, “These delaying tactics are working very well for Mogaba. This pass is just too damned tight.” He turned away, strode up the stalled column. The Prahbrindrah Drah was about to get talked to like a new recruit.

  Suddenly, over his shoulder, he shot, “Where’re your in-laws, Murgen?”

  “What?”

  “Where are they? What’re they up to?” He used colloquial Taglian, which meant he did not care what Thai Dei heard. Or specifically wanted him to know about the query.

  “I haven’t seen them.” I glanced at Thai Dei. He shook his head. “Maybe they went home.”

  “I don’t think so. If that was the case the rest of these clowns would be gone with them. Wouldn’t they?”

  I did not think so but there was no need arguing the point. Croaker would never be comfortable with the Nyueng Bao. I told him I would keep an eye out and would let him know if I learned anything, then moved along.

  I ran into Sleepy on the way back to One-Eye’s wagon. “Hey, kid. How you doing?” I had not seen him since I gave him his assignment that night in Taglios. He had been working with Big Bucket, helping oversee the special forces teams. He looked tired but still not old enough to be a soldier.

  “I’m tired and hungry and beginning to wonder if being buttfucked by my uncles really was worse than this.”

  Anybody who could sustain a sense of humor after what Sleepy had suffered was all right by me.

  I wondered if he would ever go back and kill them. I doubted it. That sort of thing was acceptable in this bizarre southern culture.

  Sleepy asked, “You talk to the Captain yet?”

  “I talk to him all the time. I’m the Annalist.”

  “I mean about the standardbearer job. You said you might…”

  “Oh. Yeah.” His excitement was obvious. But becoming standardbearer meant those above you thought you were destined for big things in the Company. The standardbearer often became Annalist. Frequently he became Lieutenant because he was always near the center of things and knew everything that was going on. The Lieutenant almost always becomes Captain when the job comes open.

  Croaker was an anomaly of epic proportion, elected at a time when there were only seven of us, none more qualified, and nobody else would take the job.

  “I bounced it off him. He didn’t say no. He’ll probably leave it up to me. And that means it’s a someday sort of thing because right now everybody in this army is working twenty hours a day. There’s no time to teach you anything.”

  “We’re not doing anything. I could just hang around you and—”

  Big Bucket’s voice rose above all the other tumult of an army on the move, telling Sleepy to get his dead ass back up here, they’ve decided nobody else can crack this nut but us.

  “Good luck. And don’t get in a hurry, kid,” I told him. “Hell. Do like I’m doing with the Annals. Wait till the siege of Overlook. We’ll have plenty of time then. Including learning to read and write.”

  “I’ve been learning. Believe it or not. I know fifty-three common characters already. I can puzzle out almost anything.”

  Written Taglian is fairly complicated because there are more than a hundred characters in the common alphabet and another forty-two in the High Taglian used only by Gunni priests. A lot of the characters duplicate what they mean but distinguish caste. Caste is very important among the Gunni.

  “Keep at it,” I told Sleepy. “You’ll make it on determination.”

  “Thanks, Murgen.” The kid began scooting uphill, sliding through the press like he was greased.

  “Don’t thank me,” I mumbled. Most standardbearers are not as lucky as I have been. It is not a job with an extended life expectancy.

  I spotted Lady across the pass, as always surrounded by her admirers and most of the Nar who had not deserted the Company. I headed that way.

  36

  Men moved to let me through. Things like that happen when you can leave someone as a good taste or foul odor in history’s mouth. Croaker really made the importance of the Annals an article of faith with everyone in the Company.

  Lady looked around. Her ordinarily impassive expression betrayed an instant of irritation. I said, “Looks l
ike we’re going to be stalled here till Bucket’s crew convince Mogaba’s people they’d really rather go home and get in out of this weather.”

  That was looking kind of bleak. A wind was building. It was colder than the wind had been for days. Heavy clouds were piling up overhead. Looked as if we were going to get some snow.

  “Yeah. Let’s hope,” Swan said. “We need to get down out of these rocks.” He was not talking to me, really. “I hate mountains.”

  “I’m not too fond of cold and snow, either,” I said. Of Lady I asked, “You really need to keep avoiding me?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How can you be getting your powers back? I thought that business in the Barrowland stripped you forever.”

  “I’m a thief. Otherwise, none of your business.”

  Her entourage sneered at me, mostly because they thought that would make points with her.

  “Have you been dreaming again?”

  She thought about that one before admitting, “Yes.”

  “I thought so. You’ve been looking a little ragged.”

  “You want to play you have to pay the price. What about you, Annalist?”

  I found I was reluctant to reveal anything. Especially in front of those guys. I forced myself. “Yeah. Something that might have been Kina turned up in my dreams a couple times. Almost like an intrusion from outside. I wondered if that might have been the same time she was bothering you.”

  That interested her. You could see the thoughts begin moving behind her eyes, the consideration, the calculation. She told me, “If it happens again, note the time. If you can.”

  “I’ll try. How did you manage to go head-to-head with Kina the other night and come out in one piece?”

  Without missing a beat Lady shifted to Groghor, a language on its last death rattle. “That was not Kina.” I learned it from my grandmother, whose people had all been wiped out in the consolidation wars that had built the Lady’s empire. Granny was dead and so was my mother and I had not used the tongue except to cuss people out since I signed on with the Company.