The Return of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  With no words exchanged the three lifted it, walked to the edge of the parapet, lockstepped right off into space. They clambered aboard as they fell. Narayan moaned softly, eyes closed. The Daughter of Night was not impressed.

  Howler took control in time not to smear them all over the rocks and wreckage below. He began sliding gently along just a few feet above the ground, trying to keep solid objects between himself and Overlook.

  I took a quick look at Longshadow.

  The Shadowmaster was restless. He had left his studies to stare vaguely toward Kiaulune. He sensed that something was happening but could not determine what.

  Howler was playing around behind his ally’s back.

  I almost lost the little shit. I had to go back to the moment I left him to pick him up again. Soon afterward he drifted past a band of Mogaba’s guerrillas in the ruins. The guerrillas did not see him but sensed him and panicked, thinking one of the Shadowmaster’s pets was on the prowl. The racket they made drew the attention of nearby Taglians. The soldiers saw something shadowy drifting through the darkness. They wasted no time getting off a volley of fireballs.

  Howler changed tactics.

  He put on a burst of speed and employed a spell of concealment—neither of which he wanted to do that near Overlook. I would have lost him then had not chance favored me.

  A wild fireball clipped the corner of the invisible carpet, which began to smolder. The spell of concealment did not include the glow as long as I stayed close.

  Howler hauled ass. But he did stay so low that brush scraped the underside of his carpet. At one point he ploughed through some tents and clotheslines in one of the Prahbrindrah Drah’s division camps. He was less concerned about being noticed by our side than by his own.

  The race brought on a mild sense of exhilaration. I did not notice it immediately. Then it hit me that I was feeling more emotion than usual. Eventually I realized what I was feeling was some feeble spillover from Smoke.

  Sometime during the flight we passed close enough to Uncle Doj and Mother Gota to be noticed but I saw no sign of them. We also swept over my own headquarters close enough to startle the sentries and horses.

  I was not entirely surprised when Howler headed for a certain snow-choked canyon. Smoke did not notice until we were close enough to watch Howler land in front of a waiting Soulcatcher amidst an explosion of terrified crows.

  In my amusement at the birds I relaxed just a little bit. And Smoke rebelled. She is the darkness.

  What?

  That was not me. But it did not happen again.

  I backed out and up and away, content to go back to my flesh with the knowledge that Howler and Soulcatcher were up to some treachery that included Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night.

  The mood Smoke exuded now, if so feeble a thing could be called a mood, was terror.

  And terror was out there roving the night, though it was not the terror that haunted my spirit steed.

  I caught a whiff of corruption as I moved toward my flesh. I saw nothing. I stopped, experimented, moved in a direction away from the invisible source.

  Maybe it caught a whiff of me. The stench grew stronger suddenly. I felt a sensation as of something onrushing. Light flickered in the ghostworld. I saw Kina’s hideous face for an instant, looking directly toward me. But her eyes were blind. Her nostrils flared as though she was trying to catch my wind.

  Smoke’s terror might have been what she smelled. He fled in total panic. She is the darkness.

  It was more feeble this time but it was there. It was not my imagination.

  54

  The Old Man did not seem surprised to hear that Soulcatcher might be up to something with Howler. “I wasn’t counting on it but it seemed like a possibility,” he said. “They’ve worked together for ages. We may have Longshadow by the nuts.”

  “Somebody better have him by something if he controls the Shadowgate. The other thing is…” How could I put it?

  “Other thing?”

  “Smoke is showing signs of personality. I think.” I told him what had happened.

  “Damn! We don’t want him waking up now.” He thought for a while. “I don’t see how we can stop it if it’s happening.”

  “Better see One-Eye about that.”

  “Send him over. Wait! Don’t leave. Tell me about the part of the fortress where Singh and the girl hide out.”

  It turned out this was more than a passing interest. He wanted maps.

  I had that part of the place charted already. All I had to do was get the drawings from One-Eye’s dugout. I brought the little wizard along. He kept grumbling about being wakened in the middle of the night. Once the Old Man had what he needed I shut the curtain to Smoke’s alcove and went off to bed, leaving them to their schemes.

  * * *

  I did not escape Kina just by getting back to my flesh. She was waiting in my dreams. No sooner did I lie down than I found myself in the place of bones. Sahra was waiting.

  I had no trouble recalling that she was an illusion. She looked nothing like the Sahra who lived so miserably at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple. This one was too young, too unworn, despite her pallor and the neck crook characteristic of a Deceiver victim.

  I had begun to suspect that Kina was slow and unimaginative, although extremely powerful. How had she gotten the angle on Lady?

  It was true Lady had not known what she was up against. And ignorance is a chink in the armor a knowledgeable enemy can exploit at will. And, of course, Kina was Queen of the Deceivers.

  It no longer mattered how Kina had fooled Lady. What mattered now was that she did not fool me.

  That thought left me unable to pretend that I was being deceived. I was not kind to the false Sahra.

  Her flesh corrupted and melted right before me. The perfume of Kina, which was the stink of dead bodies, assailed me. A shadow in the grey distance coagulated into a four-armed black dancer a hundred feet tall whose pounding feet threw up clouds of bone dust as she stamped and whirled. Her fangs dripped venom. Her eyes burned like dark coals. Her jewelry of bones clattered and rattled. Her breath was the breath of disease.

  The Daughter of Night rode upon her shoulder like a small second head. She was excited as a child making her first trip to the county fair.

  Kina was not pleased with Murgen.

  Armbones lifted out of the litter, grasping with fleshless fingers. Sahra’s skeleton stumbled toward me. I willed myself away and, behold!, I drifted up and backward a few feet. I willed myself again and moved again, not far, amazed that I had control and bewildered because I had not tried to exercise it before.

  Kina stopped dancing and stomped toward me. Her fangs grew longer. Her six breasts dripped poison. She put on another pair of arms. The Daughter of Night bounced excitedly on her shoulder, immune to the lure of gravity.

  I willed myself away.

  I had control but that was not my world. I could not run away faster than the world’s creator. A great gleaming, taloned black hand swooped down. I dodged. A claw brushed me. I spun ass over appetite into darkness.

  And I was in the cavern filled with old men caught in spiderwebs of ice. I drifted along past faces I not only knew I knew, I remembered the names that went with them.

  I felt a panic like what you would feel if you were closed up in a small place in the dark. A buried-alive panic. I did not let it manage me. I tried, again, to manage myself and found I could move along the cavern if I willed it, like I did when I was walking with Smoke. I moved a whole lot slower here, though.

  I tried moving out through the walls. Like the real world, and unlike riding Smoke, I was constrained pretty much by physical rules. My only way out of the cavern would be forward or back. Which did not make much sense if I was dreaming and had gotten in there without following any complicated route.

  Was it possible physical laws operated only when I was in control? Could it be that I was unable to walk through walls because I never learned the knack in daily life?


  I decided to go forward, up the slope of the cavern floor, because that is what I always did in the fragments of dream I remembered. As I did so I became aware of an inchoate anger growing behind me, as of something hunting that was frustrated. I did my best to speed up.

  There was more in those ice caves than old men. There were more old men, none of them known to me. There were treasures. There was junk, like everything that ever fell down a crack ended up there. There were books.

  Three huge tomes bound in worn, cracked dark leather rested on a large, long stone lectern, as though waiting for three speakers to step up and read at the same time. The first book was open to a page three-quarters of the way through. I caught only a glimpse of the page before some compelling force pushed me away. It was identical to the page the Daughter of Night had been transcribing when Narayan Singh interrupted her so they could go visit Soulcatcher. The calligraphy was superior, more colorful and ornate, but the child had missed nothing important, I was sure.

  The anger behind me grew stronger. It seemed to be looking for a focus. I learned early never to volunteer. I moved on as fast as my will would carry me, wondering what sort of nightmare this was. Its most bizarre and fantastic elements were most real. Maybe it was a mirror of the waking world.

  The anger kept gaining although I saw nothing when I looked back. It did not catch me. I do not think. But without actually passing through anything suddenly I was in another place. There was a full bowl of stars overhead but not even a sliver of moon. I was high in the air. I could distinguish no features on the ground below.

  It was like ghostwalking without the ghost. Only I could not just tell Smoke where to go and get there almost instantly. I could move, it seemed, though it was hard to tell.… I had to have landmarks, I realized. I pushed back my panic.

  I thought. I did have information. I knew up and down. I had a full field of stars overhead, so numerous they almost overwhelmed the outstanding constellations normally used for navigation. Trouble was, I had not studied the southern skies closely. Any astronomical navigation I did would be only slightly better than a guess.

  I caught a faint whiff of corrupt flesh. That whipstroke got me moving toward a cluster of stars I vaguely recalled hanging close to the northern horizon during the spring. There were three of them in a flat triangle, all bright. The star at the peak of the triangle waxed and waned. Many legends attended it, most of them unpleasant. I was not intimate with them.

  From that altitude I could see a fourth star in the constellation, equally bright, below the other three. I recalled seeing that formation when the Company was still far north of Taglios.

  How high was I? Or was I somewhere far north of Kiaulune?

  I stopped moving forward and slanted down toward the earth. I found myself over a region where agriculture was extremely orderly, communal, making the most efficient use of man, animal and equipment, various operations having been laid out in a circle around a central manor with hamlets and single dwellings strung out along the spokes of wheels. Preparations for spring planting had begun although there were no workers in the fields at night.

  I passed over circle after circle. The ground between had been left wild. I suppose it supported game and provided timber and charcoal and firewood.

  I had heard of the region. It was in the Shadowlands west of Kiaulune. Longshadow had been experimenting with agricultural efficiencies in an effort to produce more with fewer workers so he could free up manpower to work construction on Overlook and serve in his armies.

  I was not all that far from my own gang.

  I worked my way eastward. After what seemed like hours I spied the glow from fires burning in the ruins of Kiaulune. I found my own part of our encampment, then my own shelter. I was comfortable enough with my condition to do a little experimenting now.

  It took only moments to learn that while I could not will myself through a wall, or even the blankets One-Eye had hung for a doorway, or the side of a tent, I could slide my point of view through a crack or hole too small for a mouse or snake.

  I could not go back or forth in time. I was confined to the now of my sleeping flesh.

  I had control of the dream. It seemed real. What I saw of the camp was exactly what the camp should have been like while I was sleeping. My imagination was not good enough to make up a whole dream world that mimicked the real world exactly. A big question occurred.

  Would I be able to do this again? Would getting here always be outside my control, the way it had been when I kept tumbling off the wall of today into the horrors of Dejagore?

  If this was going to be one-time I had better use it for all it was worth.

  I snaked back out into a cold I did not feel. For a second I thought about heading for the plain but just the thought stirred up an instant, powerful revulsion. Maybe later.

  I went toward the mountains instead.

  Spying on Soulcatcher would do. Up close. Without disturbing the crows, I discovered. They remained asleep. So did their mistress.

  Her company had left. I was not going to find out a damned thing.

  I could go over to Overlook and see what everybody was doing.… I saw the faintest hint of light in the east. Dawn was on its way. And I began to feel a compulsion to head for the safety of my flesh. That drive grew stronger as the light did the same.

  I headed for my body wondering if I was a dreaming vampire now.

  Mother Gota was awake already. Though Soulcatcher had not been able, Ky Gota seemed to sense me somehow. She turned when I weaseled inside, looked almost directly at me, frowned when she saw nothing, then shuddered the way you do when a chill runs down your spine.

  She went back to her cooking. I noted that she was preparing more food than she, Thai Dei and I could possibly eat all day. I supposed she planned to take some out to Uncle Doj.

  55

  “You look like shit,” One-Eye told me over breakfast.

  “Thanks for the boost.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Bad dreams last night.” He did not know what I had been going through. I chose not to share everything now but I did practice my Forsberger long enough to tell him, “It looks like our friend the crow woman is up to something with her old pal Howler, our favorite Deceiver and the kid.”

  Both Thai Dei and Mother Gota glanced at me sharply. I had used the Taglian for “Deceiver,” tooga. It was the same in Nyueng Bao.

  “And old Longshadow thinks he’s got nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah. The Old Man always says even paranoids sometimes got somebody trying to stab them in the back.” Usually when I let him know I thought he was overdoing the paranoia himself.

  “That kind of thing is nice to know but how can we use it?”

  “Not my problem. I just work here. The Captain gets to make the decisions. That’s why he’s the Captain.” Just for the fun of it I slipped in the Taglian for “captain,” jamadar. Thai Dei and Mother Gota looked me over again. In the context of the Deceivers jamadar means more than just “captain.” It indicates a leader of a band, which is like a small nation of Deceivers. The only Deceiver jamadar now known to be alive was Narayan Singh, who had become jamadar of jamadars before the destruction of his cult.

  They would think we were talking about the living legend, the saint who still walked the earth on his goddess’s behalf.

  I tucked the last of my breakfast away, thanked Mother Gota, got up and left the dugout. Thai Dei followed me. I told him, “I’m just going to see the Captain. If you want to you can stay and work on the house.” We called our hole in the ground the house now.

  Thai Dei shook his head. He had gotten lax about bodyguarding me lately. I did not feel neglected.

  Time has a way of blunting the sharpest edge of determination.

  I waited a moment for One-Eye to join us but he did not come out. More and more the little shit seemed perfectly willing to invite himself to my family meals rather than go to any trouble on his own.

  I sho
uld be surprised after all these years?

  * * *

  Croaker looked about as happy as I felt. His night had been no bed of roses, either. He grumbled, “What is it this time?”

  “Did a little dreaming last night. Went to hell and came back and then went out roaming without using Smoke at all.” I gave him the unhappy details.

  “Could you do that again?”

  “I been falling through rabbit holes in space and cracks in time for over a year. Maybe I’m getting the hang of it.”

  “We wouldn’t need Smoke.”

  “Especially since he’s threatening to wake up.” I must have had a nasty look on my face because he raised an eyebrow. I said, “It’d be fun to watch him try to get used to the new world he’d wake up in.”

  Croaker smirked. “You’d want to stand upwind. He’d shit his guts out when he saw how far we’ve come. By the by, as long as you’re here, it’d be handy if you’d go see Lady. I sent her your maps. She’s going to pick off Narayan and catch the girl. If anybody asks you about the maps all you know is that we captured a couple of Mogaba’s officers who used to belong to Overlook’s garrison.”

  I grunted, not entirely thrilled. I would not be able to lie to Lady convincingly.

  “Experiment with this. I have to know if we can get along without Smoke.”

  “I already know about one severe handicap.”

  “Uhm?”

  “I can’t travel back in time when I’m on my own.”

  He sucked a bunch of air in, blew it out. “Wouldn’t you know? There had to be a catch. Smoke’s got job security.”

  “You said you’d talk to One-Eye about keeping him from waking up.”

  “He wasn’t much help.”

  “Is he ever?”

  “If you see him, send him over.”

  “Right.” I got out of there, paused outside to stare across at the encampment below Overlook’s wall. I said, “The boss wants me to go over there and show Lady how to manage her business.”