Chronicles of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  “What?”

  “The Annals. They’re all that’s left of the Black Company.” Depression had set in fast. “There was an obligation undertaken ages ago, when the Free Companies of Khatovar were formed. If any of us get through this alive, someone should take them back.”

  I do not know if she understood. But: “They’re yours,” she said.

  I wanted to explain, but could not. Why take them back? I am not sure where they are supposed to go. Four hundred years the Company drifted slowly north, waxing, waning, turning over its constituents. I have no idea if Khatovar still exists or if it is a city, country, a person, or a god. The Annals from the earliest years either did not survive or went home already. I have seen nothing but digests and excerpts from the earliest century. … No matter. Part of the Annalist’s undertaking has always been to return the Annals to Khatovar should the Company disband.

  The weather worsened. By Oar it seemed actively inimical, and may have been. That thing in the earth would know we were coming.

  Just north of Oar all the Taken suddenly dropped away like rocks. “What the hell?”

  “Toadkiller Dog,” the Lady said. “We’ve caught up with him. He hasn’t reached his master yet.”

  “Can they stop him?”

  “Yes.”

  I crutched over to the side of the whale. I do not know what I expected to see. We were up in the snow clouds.

  There were a few flashes below. Then the Taken came back. The Lady looked displeased. “What happened?” I asked.

  “The monster got crafty. Ran into the null where it brushes the ground. The visibility is too poor to go after him.”

  “Will it make much difference?”

  “No.” But she did not sound entirely confident.

  The weather worsened. But the whales remained undaunted. We reached the Barrowland. My group went to the Guards compound. Darling’s put up at Blue Willy. The boundary of the null fell just outside the compound wall.

  Colonel Sweet himself greeted us. Good old Sweet who I thought was dead for sure. He had a gimp leg now. I cannot say he was convivial. But then, it was a time when nobody was.

  The orderly assigned us was our old friend Case.

  The Invisible Maze

  The first time Case appeared he rode the edge of panic. Me doing a kindly uncle act did not soothe him. The Lady doing her bit almost kicked him over the edge into hysteria. Having Tracker lurking around in natural form was no help either.

  One-Eye, of all people, calmed him down. Got him onto the subject of Raven and how Raven was doing, and that did the job.

  I had my own near case of hysteria. Hours after we put down, before I even got set up for it, the Lady brought Whisper and Limper to double-check our translations.

  Whisper was supposed to see if any papers were missing. Limper was supposed to plumb his memory of olden times for connections we may have missed. He, it seems, was much into the social whirl of the early Domination.

  Amazing. I could not imagine that hunk of hatred and human wreckage ever having been anything but nastiness personified.

  I got Goblin to keep an eyeball on those two while I broke away to look in on Raven. Everyone else had given him a look-see already.

  She was there, leaning against a wall, gnawing a fingernail, not looking anything like the great bitch who had tormented the world for lo! so many years. Like I said before, I hate it when they go human. And she was human and then some. Flat-assed scared.

  “How is he?” I asked, and when I saw her mood: “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s unchanged. They’ve taken good care of him. Nothing is the matter that a few miracles won’t cure.”

  I dared raise a questioning eyebrow.

  “All the exits are closed, Croaker. I’m headed down a tunnel. My choices grow ever more narrow, and each is worse than the other”

  I settled on the chair Case used while watching over Raven, began playing doctor. Needlessly, but I liked to see for myself. Half-distracted, I said, “I expect it’s lonely, being queen of the world.”

  Slight gasp. “You grow too bold.”

  Didn’t I? “I’m sorry. Thinking out loud. An unhealthy habit known to be the cause of bruises and major hemorrhaging. He does look sound. You think Limper or Whisper will help?”

  “No. But every angle has to be tried.”

  “What about Bomanz?”

  “Bomanz?”

  I looked at her. She seemed honestly puzzled. “The wizard who sprung you.”

  “Oh. What about him? What could a dead man contribute? I disposed of my necromancer. … You know something I don’t?”

  Not bloody likely. She had me under the Eye. Nevertheless. …

  I debated for half a minute, not wanting to give up what might be a whisker of advantage. Then: “I had it from Goblin and One-Eye that he’s perfectly healthy. That he’s caught in the Barrowland. Like Raven, only body and all.”

  “How could that be?”

  Was it possible she had overlooked this while interrogating me? I guess if you do not ask the right questions, you will not get the right answers.

  I reflected on all we had done together. I had sketched Raven’s reports for her, but she had not read those letters. In fact … The originals, from which Raven drew his story, were in my quarters. Goblin and One-Eye lugged them all the way to the Plain only to see them hauled right back. Nobody had plumbed them because they repeated a story already told. …

  “Sit,” I said, rising. “Back in two shakes.”

  Goblin fish-eyed me when I breezed in. “Be a few minutes more. Something came up.” I scrounged up the case in which Raven’s documents had traveled. Only the original Bomanz manuscript resided there now. I fluttered back out, ignored by the Taken.

  Nice feeling, I’ll tell you, being beneath their notice. Too bad it was just because they were fighting for their existence. Like the rest of us.

  “Here. This is the original manuscript. I went over it once, lightly, to check Raven’s translation. It looked good to me, though he did dramatize and invent dialog. But the facts and characterizations are pure Bomanz.”

  She read with incredible swiftness. “Get Raven’s version.”

  Out and back, under Goblin’s scowl and grow] at my departing back: “How long is a few minutes these days, Croaker?”

  She went through those swiftly, too. And looked thoughtful when she finished.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “There may be something here. Actually, something that’s not here. Two questions. Who wrote this in the first place? And where is the stone in Oar that the son mentioned?”

  “I assume Bomanz did most of the original and his wife finished it.”

  “Wouldn’t he have used first person?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s possible the literary conventions of the time forbade it. Raven often chided me for interjecting too much of myself into the Annals. He came of a different tradition.”

  “We’ll accept that as a hypothesis. Next question. What became of the wife?”

  “She came of a family from Oar. I would expect her to go back.”

  “When she was known as the wife of the man responsible for loosing me?”

  “Was she? Bomanz was an assumed name.”

  She brushed my objection aside. “Whisper acquired those documents in Lords. As a lot. Nothing connects Bomanz with them except his story. My feeling is that they were accumulated at a later date. But his papers. What were they doing between the time they left here and the time Whisper found them? Have some ancillary items been lost? It’s time we consulted Whisper.”

  We, however, included me out.

  Whatever, a fire was ignited. Before long, Taken were roaring off to faraway places. Within two days Benefice delivered the stone mentioned by Bomanz’s son. It proved useless. Some Guards appropriated it and used it for a doorstep to their barracks.

  I caught occasional hints of a search progressing from Oar south along the route Jasmine had take
n after fleeing from the Barrowland, widowed and shamed. Hard to find tracks that old, but the Taken have remarkable skills.

  Another search progressed from Lords.

  I had the dubious pleasure of hanging around with the Limper while he pointed out all the mistakes we made transliterating UchiTelle and TelleKurre names. Seems not only were spellings not uniform in those days, but neither were alphabets. And some of the folks mentioned were not of UchiTelle or TelleKurre stock, but outsiders who had adapted their names to local usage. Limper busied himself doing things backwards.

  One afternoon Silent gave me the high sign. He had been spying over the Limper’s shoulder, off and on, with more devotion than I.

  He had found a pattern.

  Gnomen?

  Darling has a self-discipline that amazes me. All that time she was over there at Blue Willy and not once did she surrender to her desire to see Raven. You could see the ache in her whenever his name came up, but she held off for a month.

  But she came, as inevitably we knew she must, with the Lady’s permission. I tried to ignore her visit entirely. And I made Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye stay away too, though with Silent it was a tight thing. Eventually he did agree; it was a private thing, for her alone, and his interests would not be served by sticking his nose in.

  If I would not go to her, she would come to me. For a while, while everyone else was busy elsewhere. For a hug, to remind her there were those of us who cared. To have some moral support there while she worked out something in her mind.

  She signed, “I cannot deny it now, can I?” And a few minutes later: “I still have the soft place for him. But he will have to earn his way back in.” Which was her equivalent of our thinking aloud.

  I felt more for Silent at that moment than for Raven. Raven I’d always respected for his toughness and fearlessness, but I’d never really grown to like him. Silent I did like, and did wish well.

  I signed, “Do not be brokenhearted if you find he is too old to change.”

  Wan smile. “My heart was broken a long time ago. No. I have no expectations. This is not a fairy-tale world.”

  That was all she had to say. I did not take it to heart till it began to illuminate later events.

  She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

  In moments when his needs called him away, we copied everything the Limper left behind and compared it with our own charts. “Oh, hey,” I breathed once. “Oh, hey.”

  Here was a lord from a far western kingdom. A Baron Senjak who had four daughters said to vie with one another in their loveliness. One wore the name Ardath.

  “She lied,” Goblin whispered.

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “More likely, she didn’t know. In fact, she couldn’t have known. Nor could anyone else have, really. I still don’t see how Soulcatcher could have been convinced that the Dominator’s true name was in here.”

  “Wishful thinking, maybe,” One-Eye guessed.

  “No,” I said. “You could tell she knew what she had. She just didn’t know how to dig it out.”

  “Just like us.”

  “Ardath is dead,” I said. “That leaves three possibilities. But if push comes to shove, we only get one shot.”

  “Catalog what else we know.”

  “Soulcatcher was one sister. Name not yet known. Ardath may have been the Lady’s twin. I think she was older than Catcher, though they were children together and not separated by many years. Of the fourth sister we know nothing.”

  Silent signed, “You have four names, given and family. Consult the genealogies. Find who married whom.”

  I groaned. The genealogies were over at Blue Willy. Darling had had them loaded onto the cargo whale with everything else.

  Time was short. The work daunted me. You do not go into those genealogies with a woman’s name and find anything easily. You have to look for a man who married the woman you are seeking and hope the recorder thought enough of her to mention her name.

  “How are we going to manage all this?” I wondered. “With me the only one who can decipher these chicken tracks?” Then a brilliant idea. If I say so myself. “Tracker. We’ll put Tracker on it. He don’t have nothing to do but watch that sapling. He can do that over at Blue Willy and read old books at the same time.”

  Easier said than done. Tracker was far from his new master. Getting the message into his pea brain was a major undertaking. But once that had been accomplished there was no stopping him.

  One night, as I snuggled down under the covers, she appeared in my quarters. “Up, Croaker,”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re going flying.”

  “Uh? No disrespect, but it’s the middle of the night. I had a hard day.”

  “Up.”

  So you don’t argue when the Lady commands.

  The Sign

  A freezing rain was falling. Everything was glazed with crystal ice. “Looks like a warm snap,” I said.

  She was without a sense of humor that night. It took an effort to overlook my remark. She led me to a carpet. It had a crystal dome covering the forward seats. That was a feature recently added to Limper’s craft.

  The Lady used some small magic to melt the ice off. “Make sure it’s sealed tightly,” she told me.

  “Looks good to me.”

  We lifted off.

  Suddenly I was on my back. The nose of the fish pointed at unseen stars. We climbed at a dreadful rate. I expected momentarily to be so high I could not breathe.

  We got that high. And higher. We broke through the clouds. And I understood the significance of the dome.

  It kept in breathable air. Meaning the windwhales could no longer climb higher than the Taken, Always chipping away, the Lady and her gang.

  But what the hell was this all about?

  “There.” A sigh of disappointment. A confirmation that a shadow darkened hope. She pointed.

  I saw it. I knew it, for I had seen it before, in the days of the long retreat that ended in the battle before the Tower. The Great Comet. Small, but no denying its unique silver scimitar shape. “It can’t be. It isn’t due for twenty years. Celestial bodies don’t change their cycles.”

  “They don’t. That’s axiomatic. So maybe the axiom makers are wrong.”

  She tilted the carpet down. “Note it in your writings, but don’t mention it otherwise. Our peoples are troubled enough.”

  “Right.” That comet has a hold on men’s minds.

  Back down into the yuck of a Barrowland night. We came in over the Great Barrow itself, only forty feet up. The damned river was close. The ghosts were dancing in the rain.

  I sloshed into the barracks in a numb state, checked the calendar.

  Twelve days to go.

  The old bastard was probably out there laughing it up with his favorite hound, Toadkiller Dog.

  No Surprise

  Something that lies down in that mind below the mind would not let me be. I tossed and turned, wakened, fell asleep, and finally, in the wee hours, it surfaced. I got up and shuffled through papers.

  I found that piece that made the Lady gasp once, ploughed through that interminable guest list till I found a Lord Senjak and his daughters Ardath, Credence, and Sylith. The youngest, one Dorotea, the scribbler noted, could not attend.

  “Ha!” I crowed. “The search narrows.”

  There was no more information, but that was a triumph. Assuming the Lady was indeed a twin and Dorotea was the youngest and Ardath dead, the odds were now fifty-fifty. A woman named Sylith or a woman named Credence. Credence? That is how it translated.

  I was so excited I got no more sleep. Even that damned off-schedule comet fled my thoughts.

  But excitement perished between the grinding stones of time. Nothing came from those Taken tracing Bomanz’s wife and papers. I suggested the Lady go to the source himself. She was not prepared for the risk. Not yet.

  Our old and stupid friend Tracker produced another gem four days after I elim
inated sister Dorotea. The big goof had been reading genealogies day and night.

  Silent came back from Blue Willy wearing such a look I knew something good had happened. He dragged me outside, toward town, into the null. He gave me a slip of damp paper. In Tracker’s simple style, it said:

  Three sisters were married. Ardath married twice, first a Baron Kaden of Dartstone, who died in battle. Six years later she married Erin No Father, an un-landed priest of the god Vancer, from a town called Slinger, in the kingdom ofVye. Credence married Barthelme of Jaunt, a renowned sorcerer. It is in my memory that Barthelme of Jaunt became one of the Taken, but my memory is not trustworthy.

  No lie.

  Dorotea married Raft, Prince-in-Waiting, of Start. Sylith never married.

  Tracker then proved that, slow though he might be, an occasional idea did perk through his murk of a mind.

  The death rolls reveal that Ardath and her husband, Erin NoFather, an un-landed priest of the god Vancer, from a town called Slinger, in the kingdom ofVye, were slain by bandits while traveling between Lathe and Ova. My untrustworthy memory recalls that this took place just months before the Dominator proclaimed himself.

  Sylith drowned in a flood of the River Dream some years earlier, swept away before countless witnesses. But no body was found.

  We had an eyewitness. It never occurred to me to think of Tracker that way, though the knowledge had been there for the recognition. Maybe we could figure some way to get at his memories.

  Credence perished in the fighting when the Dominator and Lady took Jaunt in the early days of their conquests. There is no record of Dorotea’s death.

  “Damn,” I said. “Old Tracker is worth something after all.”

  Silent signed, “It sounds confused, but reason should provide something.”

  More than something. Without drawing charts, connecting all those women, I felt confident enough to say, “We knew Dorotea as Soulcatcher. We know Ardath wasn’t the Lady. Odds are, the sister who engineered the ambush that killed her. …” There was something missing still. If I just knew which were twins. …

  In response to my question, Silent signed, “Tracker is looking for birth records.” But he was unlikely to score again. Lord Senjak was not TelleKurre.