The Return of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  Those would have been self-inflicted during his final struggle. “Shadow got him,” I said. Needlessly.

  Croaker eyed me. I shrugged. “No shadows have gotten through since I’ve been on guard.” I was sure. There would have been an uproar.

  “They’re under control, then,” he said. “It’s her, using Longshadow’s leftovers.”

  Catcher was the new Shadowmaster. Maybe she was honing her skills.

  Lady observed, “There’s nothing we can do about this kind of attack except never go anywhere alone and never without bamboo.… What’s the matter with him?”

  The “him” she referred to was the Company Annalist, who had started making weird noises. He jerked around, apparently trying to swallow his own tongue. So they told me later. At the time I was out of touch with my body entirely. I was a fly who never saw the swatter coming.

  I went to the place of all the bones for a moment and for that whole eternity seemed to be smeared all over the grim landscape. A white crow mocked me. Then I was the white crow. Then I was out of there but I did not follow my habitual course. I did not get to see all those grumpy old men glowering from their cocoons of ice. I got to wing my way away through curtains of darkness back to those gaunt and wonderful days when first I met my Sarie, then before that, where I met my own ghost and joined it in a tour of the besieged city. None of the words from my invisible beak were my own but the madwoman who manufactured them did not seem to be paying attention to or really directing what was happening. Poor me. I was like a moth caught in an unexpected squall. The hammer of my desperate wings did nothing to daunt a gale indifferent to my existence.

  I saw a lot of death and despair. I learned nothing new and saw nothing I had not had a more intimate relationship with in the past.

  Catcher maybe just poked at me in passing, because she was bored, or maybe she was unaware that she had bumped me at all. It did not matter. I could not retaliate. All I could do was flap like a son of a bitch and hope I could survive one more storm.

  Darkness came.

  90

  I wakened in the alcove where Smoke used to be stored. It was dark. I had no idea how long I had been out. The meeting was over, that was certain. I did not hear a sound.

  I started to clamber out of there, found I was incredibly weak. My legs betrayed me when I tried to stand. I pitched forward through the curtain masking the alcove.

  There was a sudden mouselike scurry. I lifted my head. The little bit of light betrayed the rodent.

  Thai Dei was stuffing papers back into piles while trying to appear innocent. Maybe he was. He could not read.

  “There you are. I got worried.” He helped me up. “What happened?”

  My knees were watery. “I had one of those attacks like I used to have when we were in Dejagore and Taglios.”

  “Why did they…? They all trooped out of here hours ago. Even the guards went away.”

  “What time is it?” The meeting had begun early in the morning.

  “Be sunset in an hour.”

  “Shit. A whole day shot, then.” Thai Dei helped me stay standing. I did not shake him off. I looked for food. Food always helped after a long ghostwalk with Smoke.

  This was not the same. At least cold, tough, burnt mutton did not help. And there was nothing else available.

  What I wanted was something alcoholic. A few amateurs had arisen to take One-Eye’s place. Best known were Willow Swan and Cordy Mather, who had stayed around despite being free to go back north. Cordy no longer had that fire in his belly where the Radisha was concerned. But their product was no good. And, if I wanted some, I had to acquire it through intermediaries since we all had to pretend to observe the rules.

  But I had a suspicion, of late, about where One-Eye could have hidden his manufacturing equipment. There was a small, reinforced cubby in my old dugout where I had kept the Annals and the odd private item. It had survived disasters unscathed. Mother Gota had helped build it.

  We climbed up out of Croaker’s dugout, me still wobble-kneed and griping. “I wish the hell he’d move into the fucking fortress.” The experimentation was all over but our crowd was still scattered through the hills, roughing it. An hour of light remained. “Where is everybody?” I did not see a soul closer than the ruins of Kiaulune. That gave me a little shock of fright. Had I returned to the world I left when the seizure took me? Was I caught in another layer of dream?

  “They all went away. Even the guards.” Thai Dei repeated the news as though he was talking to someone both deaf and dense. “Else I could not have entered the Liberator’s shelter.”

  It had been a while since anybody called the Old Man that. “I take it Uncle Doj went to keep an eye on them.”

  Thai Dei did not reply.

  I headed for my former home. “Compared to the bunker we moved to over there this dump was a palace.”

  Lady and the Old Man had turned my palace into a prison. The downhill side entrance that we put in for Mother Gota and Uncle Doj now opened into an exercise area fenced with captured spears. Lisa Bowalk lay in a cage there, muzzle on paws, exposed to the elements, dully resigned. The Prahbrindrah Drah paced, avoiding glittering spearpoints and the reach of the shapeshifter’s claws. He seemed patient, counting his condition only a temporary setback.

  Neither Longshadow, Howler, nor Narayan Singh were outside. Singh’s absence was not surprising. He was punished if he ventured into the light. But the former Shadowmaster was not and he hated the darkness inside. He feared what might be lurking there.

  The poor old boy had lost all his self-confidence. He spent most of his time shivering, rocking and whimpering to himself. He was losing weight. Which was hard to believe.

  The stench was awful. Those people had no friends now. They lived worse than animals in the cruelest zoo or feedlot. Passersby were encouraged to torment Longshadow and the living saint of the Deceivers.

  Howler had not earned his final standing on Lady’s shitlist. He was treated with indifference yet fed the best table scraps.

  Smoke would be inside somewhere, too. He and the prince were treated best. Bowalk was fed and otherwise ignored—as long as she behaved.

  A sign that could be read by only a few actually insisted that the Prahbrindrah Drah was an honored guest. Somebody’s little joke.

  “A good storm would help with the smell,” I said. I glanced at the sky. Relief seemed unlikely anytime soon.

  Thai Dei grunted. He raised a hand.

  Something was up. He was on his toes, nostrils flaring. His head moved in little jerks as he tried to hear something.

  I froze. This was his business. His expertise.

  I heard it, too, now. Scratching from within the dugout. Months had gone by and still I had no clear idea why Longshadow and Singh remained among the living. They kept farting around, Croaker and Lady would regret not having disposed of them quickly.

  Lady thought they might be useful. Someday. Somehow. Somewhere.

  “Better find out what it is,” I said. With no enthusiasm whatsoever. This kind of thing always meant trouble. “What happened to Uncle Doj?” He might be handy to have around if something happened. I was not carrying anything but a little three-ball bamboo stick.

  Thai Dei stepped over to the headquarters company woodpile—now serviced by Shadowlander peasant contractors—and selected a yard of kindling with a burly knot at one end. He gestured me forward.

  I slipped down and yanked on the door of my former home.

  Narayan Singh, the living saint of the Deceivers, tumbled into the twilight. He had been kept inside for a long time. He was naturally dark-skinned but had acquired a pasty, maggoty coloration. Maybe Lady was doing more than just keeping him locked up in his own filth. She could be subtle when she wanted. She just did not want that often.

  Thai Dei bopped him on the noggin.

  Poor old Narayan. His life had not gone well for a long time. And the son of a bitch had earned every second of pain. Bet his goddess snickered whenever
she thought about him.

  Half of his torment would be the waiting, knowing that someday Lady would take time to offer him some specialized, personalized, unloving attention.

  “Let’s be real careful,” I told Thai Dei.

  Thai Dei grunted. He wore the ultimate Nyueng Bao stone face. To Tan had not been forgotten.

  “Don’t even think about it, Thai Dei. Lady would roast you. Besides, there’re more of them inside. And they’re all worse than Singh.”

  I meant worse trouble but it did not turn out that way. Both Longshadow and Howler wore hobbles and metal gags. Longshadow had not eaten well since his capture. A starved sorcerer is a tame sorcerer, I guess. Covered with filth, Howler and the Shadowmaster barely had the strength to crawl into the light after—they thought—Narayan had opened the way.

  Even famine had not yet tamed them completely. A point worth keeping in mind.

  Thai Dei remarked, “They were supposed to seal off the kennel side.”

  “Don’t look like anybody bothered. Keep an eye on them. Without breaking anything. Or anybody. I’ll be right back out.”

  Thai Dei grunted again. In deep disappointment.

  “We’ll get our turn,” I promised.

  Smoke was still inside. He had looked so bad for so long he did not look much worse now. His clothing had decayed into rotten rags. He was chained. One chain trailed back into the darkness.

  The others had been chained, too. The guys had shown that much sense before they took off wherever they went. Somehow, the villains managed to get loose. I wondered if they would have dragged Smoke any farther had they had the strength and time to manage a successful getaway.

  Might have been amusing to watch them return to a world that had changed completely during their holidays.

  I stepped over the little wizard, found a small lamp and got it burning. Except for the stink and mess everything was pretty much as we had left it. A ragged shawl belonging to Ky Gota still lay tangled on a three-legged chair liberated from Kiaulune ages ago. There was no evidence that the prisoners had spent any time in this part of the dugout.

  Following Smoke’s chain, I discovered that the one side had been walled off. But the carpenters had done a poor job using salvage lumber that had not stood up to someone’s patient ministrations.

  I ducked through the hole.

  The stench was a lot thicker on the other side. I had seen less filthy pigsties.

  The prisoners had not explored their prison thoroughly. They had not found my little cubby. But someone else had and had decided to take advantage of it.

  One-Eye’s lost manufacturing equipment and finished product had been stuffed into the hole, along with what looked like a bunch of treasures harvested from the ruined city. Mother Gota had enjoyed collecting junk during her nocturnal rambles.

  I dragged out a jug, popped its cork. Damn, that stuff smelled nasty! Some kind of distilled spirits … I took a long pull that left my eyes running. The stuff tasted worse than it smelled.

  After a second throat-burning draught I raised my lamp high, trying to get some light in there past the clutter. I had left a few treasures of my own, though nothing important enough to have dragged on over to the Shadowgate yet. I did not recall what all I had stashed.

  “Ah! What’s this?” I snaked an arm in through the junk.

  As I closed my fingers on ragged burlap I managed to elbow a stack of earthenware bottles piled on their sides. One-Eye evidently had meant to revisit them long ago because even an ignoramus like me knows you do not leave bottled beer horizontal forever.

  It took only that nudge to get the bottles banging against one another, then blasting their contents all over me and the inside of the dugout. I snagged one spewing bottle and got some of its contents inside me. Not bad, but a little yeasty.

  “I’m all right!” I shouted in response to Thai Dei’s inquiry from outside. “I found One-Eye’s treasure.” In more ways than one, I discovered. The object wrapped in burlap was that wonderful wizard-killer spear he had whittled while we were trapped in Dejagore. The gold and silver inlays alone were worth a fortune.

  More evidence that the little wizard had not planned to stay away forever. He did not know I knew but he had continued working on that spear secretly, always improving it, making it ever more his masterwork.

  “And what’s this?” There was another object in burlap, behind the spear. Had the little shit been making knockoffs of his own artwork?

  No. This was a bow, with arrows. I did not recognize it immediately because I had not seen it in more years than I wanted to count, but it was the weapon Lady had given Croaker way back when she was still The Lady. I thought the boss lost it a long time ago.

  Croaker always had another secret.

  I had to wonder if he had not had some part in One-Eye’s desertion.

  It was always possible that he did not know what had become of the bow.

  I collected spear and bow and as many stoneware containers as I could lug. I could send Thai Dei in for more beer and …

  I could not carry my lamp and plunder, too. I used to live here. I could find my way around without a lamp. Besides, there was a glimmer of twilight still leaking in through the doorway.

  The alcohol was taking effect. As I stepped over him I told Smoke, “I wouldn’t have your luck on a bet, chief.”

  Smoke opened his eyes.

  I jumped. It had been five or six years.… And he did not appear to be in a friendly mood.

  I discovered that I just wanted to get out and indulge my taste for beer.

  Thai Dei helped me with my burdens. Somehow, one bottle of beer stuck to his hand. I noted that his charges were all healthy still, though Narayan Singh might have acquired a fresh crop of bruises.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” I grumbled again. “I’ve got stuff to do. But we can’t go off and leave these characters alone. They’re bound to get into some kind of mischief.” Longshadow, Howler and Singh were not volunteering to go back into captivity.

  I took another long drink.

  The quiet really bothered me. It might indicate yet another less-than-brilliant attempt to subdue Soulcatcher. She had grudges enough against us as it was.

  I had seen the ground that had suffered Lady’s barrage. It bore no resemblance to its springtime self. Rocks as big as houses had had holes punched right through them. Most of the busted-up trees had burned. There had been rockslides and cave-ins. In places the rock appeared to have become plastic. It had sagged like candle wax. Catcher’s cave could not be found.

  The only bodies found so far were those of crows. There was no evidence that Soulcatcher or her prisoner had suffered any serious discomfiture.

  Live crows laughed amongst the tortured rocks.

  91

  Thai Dei grunted. These days he was positively garrulous, sometimes mouthing as many as two entire sentences in an hour. But this time he needed no words. He just put his beer in his other hand and pointed into the gathering darkness.

  The missing folks were returning in a mob, coming from the direction of Catcher’s disaster. Why would they all charge off into the foothills? Because the Old Man realized my seizure must have been caused by Lady’s rascal sister?

  No. He would not bother for something that trivial.

  But he would go to all that trouble to round up Sleepy.

  “Where did you find him?” I asked Sparkle, who was leading the mule dragging the travois onto which Sleepy was strapped. It was obvious that the kid had had it rough. His weight was down. His wardrobe was not much fresher than Narayan Singh’s. Whom I mentioned to the Old Man as soon as I found him. “It was pure luck that we showed up when we did. We got them under control. But you’ve got to do something. Or they’re going to become a major bite in the ass someday. Where did Sleepy come from?”

  “A patrol spotted him in the hills not far from Lady’s tear-up. He didn’t know who he was.”

  I grunted. I laid a narrow look on the kid as he p
assed. “It took this whole mob to bring him in?”

  “Took them all to hunt him down. You all right now? What happened?”

  “I had one of my seizures. Like I used to have when I went back to Dejagore.”

  He frowned, tossed off orders right and left. Soldiers scattered to resume chores they should not have abandoned.

  “Did you know that One-Eye had your bow?”

  “My bow? What bow?”

  “The one Lady gave you as a present.”

  “No. I didn’t. Though maybe I told him to put it away for me one time. Or something. I haven’t seen it in so long I’d forgotten it.” He sniffed the air. “What else did you find?” I still smelled of beer.

  “All kinds of treasures. And circumstantial evidence that One-Eye wasn’t planning to stay away forever.”

  Croaker grunted. It was getting too dark to read his expressions well. Was he irked because I had figured something out? Or was he considering the possibilities?

  I said, “I can’t believe that finding Sleepy would cause so much excitement.”

  “Lady hoped we could catch Catcher all goofed up, too.”

  “But we already knew she was all right. She was sending shadows down. She was messing with me.” Maybe she was just tickling me because I was there when her big sister yanked her pigtails.

  “We didn’t know. We suspected. If Sleepy had been her prisoner and wandered away, then maybe she wasn’t in control after all. There isn’t anybody around here who wouldn’t love to add Catcher to our zoo. And, too, there was the chance that … the girl…”

  Yeah. There was the chance they could grab their daughter back. Maybe when nobody was looking. “Where’s Lady?”

  “Still out there.” His tone told me I had used my quota of questions in that area.

  “Sleepy said anything useful?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t said anything. He doesn’t act like he’s all there.”

  “Just what this outfit needs. Another goofball.”

  “You finding One-Eye’s stash reminds me. You stumbled over either one of our prodigal conjuremen lately?”