Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It mutters across grey pavements that sweep from horizon to horizon. It sings around scattered black pillars, a chorus of ghosts. It tumbles leaves and scatters dust come from afar. It teases the hair of a corpse that has lain undisturbed for a generation, mummifying. Impishly, the gale tosses a leaf into the cadaver’s silently screaming mouth, tugs it away again. The wind carries the breath of winter. Lightning leaps from pillar to ebon pillar like a child skittering from base to base in a game of tag. For a moment there is color on that spectral plain. The pillars might be mistaken for relics of a fallen city. They are not. They are too few and too randomly placed. Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have been gnawed deeply by the teeth of the hungry wind.
. . . fragments . . .
. . . just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.
Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their context no longer known.
All that remains of two volumes of the Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four years of history. Gone forever.
Or are they? I do not want to go back. I do not want to relive the horror. I do not want to reclaim the pain. There is pain too deep to withstand right here, right now. There is no way to recapture the totality of that awfulness, anyway. The mind and heart, safely over to the farther shore, simply refuse to encompass the enormity of the voyage.
And there is no time. There is a war on.
Always there is a war on.
Uncle Doj wants something. Just as well to stop now. Teardrops make the ink run.
He is going to make me drink some strange philtre.
Fragments . . .
. . . all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain, scattered in this bleak season . . .
And in the darkness, shards of time.
Hey, there! Welcome to the city of the dead. Don’t mind those guys staring. Ghosts don’t see a lot of strangers, at least of a friendly persuasion. You’re right. They do look hungry. That happens during these siege things.
Try not to look too much like a lamb roast.
Think that’s a joke? Stay away from the Nar.
Welcome to Dejagore, what the Taglians call this deathtrap. The teeny brown Shadowlanders the Black Company grabbed it from call it Stormgard. People who actually live here always called it Jaicur even when that was a crime. And who knows what the Nyueng Bao call it. And who cares, eh? They aren’t talking and they aren’t part of the equation anyway.
That’s one of them. That rascal there, no meat on him and a skull face. Everybody around here is some shade of brown but theirs is different. It has a grey cast to it. Almost deathly. You won’t mistake a Nyueng Bao for anything else.
Their eyes are like polished coal no fire will ever warm.
That noise?
Sounds like Mogaba, the Nar and the First Legion rooting out Shadowlanders again. Some get inside almost every night. They are like field mice. You just can’t get rid of them all.
Found some the other day that had been in hiding since the Company took the city.
How about that smell out there? It was worse before the Shadowlanders started burying the bodies. Maybe a shovel was a little too complicated a machine.
Those long mounds that radiate from the city like spokes have corpses stacked like cordwood inside. Sometimes they didn’t pile the dirt on deep enough and the gasses of corruption burst the mounds open. That’s when you hope the wind is blowing their way.
You see how positively they are thinking, all the not-yet-filled-trenches they are digging. A lot of the dirt goes into the ramps.
The elephants are the worst. They take forever to rot. They tried burning them once, but all that did was irritate the buzzards. So where they could they just dragged the bodies over and incorporated them into their ramps.
Who? The ugly little guy with the uglier hat? That is One-Eye. You must have been warned about him.
How come One-Eye? On account of the eye patch. Clever, huh?
The other runt is Goblin. You should have been warned about him, too. No? Well, stay out of their way. All the time is best, but especially if they are arguing, and most particularly if they have been drinking. As wizards go they are no earthshakers but they are more than you will be able to handle.
Puny as they are, they are the main reason the Shadowlanders have stayed out there in the country roughing it, leaving the wallowable luxuries of the city to the Taglian troops and Black Company.
No, now pay attention. Goblin is the white one. All right, you’re right, he is overdue for his annual bath. Goblin is the one who looks like a toad. One-Eye is the one with the hat and the patch.
The guys in the once-upon-a-time-they-were-white tunics are Taglian soldiers. Every day now every one of them asks himself what damned fool notion made him enroll in the legions.
The folks wearing the colored sheets and unhappy expressions are locals. Jaicuri.
Fancy this. When the Company and the legions swooped down from the north and surprised Stormshadow they hailed the newcomers as liberators. They strew the streets with rose petals and favorite daughters.
Now the only reason they don’t stab their liberators in the back is that the alternative is worse. Now they are alive enough to starve and be abused.
Shadowspinner is not famous for kindness and kissing babies.
The kids all over? Those almost happy and fat urchins? Nyueng Bao. All Nyueng Bao.
The Jaicuri nearly stopped making babies after the Shadowmasters came. Most of the few that were born failed to survive the hard times since. The handful still breathing are protected more fiercely than any treasure. You won’t find them running naked through the streets, squealing and totally ignoring strangers.
Who are the Nyueng Bao? You never heard of them?
It is a good question. And a hard one to answer.
The Nyueng Bao don’t talk to outsiders except through their Speaker but the word is that they are religious pilgrims who were on the homeward leg of a once-in-a-generation hadj who got trapped by circumstance. The Taglian soldiers say they hail from vast river delta swamps west of Taglios. They are a primitive, minuscule minority abhorred by the majority Gunni, Vehdna, and Shadar religions.
The whole Nyueng Bao people makes the pilgrimage. And the whole people got caught right in the deep shit here in Dejagore.
They need to work on their timing. Or they should sharpen their skills at appeasing their gods.
The Black Company cut a deal with the Nyueng Bao. Goblin and their Speaker gobbled for half an hour and it was settled. The Nyueng Bao would ignore the Black Company and Taglians for whom the Company is responsible. The Nyueng Bao would be ignored in turn.
It works. Mostly.
Their men are a sort you don’t want to upset. They don’t take shit from anybody.
They never start anything except, according to the Taglians, by being too damned stubborn to do what they are told.
Sounds like One-Eye style reasoning at work there.
Just kick those crows. They’re getting too goddamn bold! Think they own the place . . . Hey! You got one. Grab it! They aren’t good eating but they are a sight better than no eating at all.
Shit. Got away. Hell, that happens. Head for the citadel. You get your best look at the layout from up there.
Those guys? They are Company. Never guess, huh? White guys down here? The one with the wild hair is Big Bucket. He turned into a pretty fair sergeant. He is just crazy enough. With him are Otto and Hagop. They have been around longer than anybody but Goblin and One-Eye. Those two have been Old Crew for generations. One-Eye ought to be sneaking up on two hundred.
That bunch is Company, too. Shirking work. The antique lunger is Wheezer. Not much good for anything. How he got through the big brawl no one knows. They say he busted heads with the best of them.
The other two black guys are the Geek and the Freak. No telling why. Nothing wrong with them. Look like a couple of rubbed ebony statues, don’t they?
You think these names just come out of a hat? They earn them the hard way. Usually they come out from under One-Eye’s hat, really. Yeah, they probably have real names. But they have been called by nicknames so long even they have trouble remembering.
Goblin and One-Eye are the main ones not to forget. And to remember not to put behind you. They do not deal well with temptation.
This is Glimmers Like Dewdrops Street. Nobody knows why. A real mouthful, right? You ought to hear it in Jaicuri. A jawbreaker. This is the route the Company took coming in to snatch the tower. Maybe they will rename it Runs With Blood Street.
Yeah, the Company charged through here in the heart of the night, killing anything that moved, and jammed in there before they had any idea what was happening. With Shapeshifter’s help they roared on up the tower where they let him help finish off Stormshadow before they tagged him.
It was an old Company grudge. They owed Shifter from another generation, when Shifter, helping Soulcatcher break the city’s resistance, murdered One-Eye’s brother Tom-Tom when the Company was in service to the Syndic of Beryl. Croaker, One-Eye and Goblin, Otto and Hagop are the only guys left from those days. Hell, Croaker is gone now. Isn’t he? History-worshipping slob is buried out there in one of those mounds. Fertilizing the plain. Mogaba is the Old Man now. Sort of, in his own mind.
Those who form it come and go but the Company is forever. Every brother, great or small, is a snack just not yet snapped up by the devouring maw of time.
Those big black monster men watching the gate are the Nar. They are descendants of the Black Company of centuries ago. Scary beasts, aren’t they? Mogaba and a whole herd of his pals joined the Company quest at Gea-Xle. The Old Crew have had no pleasure of them.
You mix the whole crowd up and squeeze them dry, you could not come up with two ounces of sense of humor.
There used to be a lot more of them than there are now but they keep getting themselves killed. They are bone crazy, the whole lot. For them the Company is a religion. Only their Company is not the Black Company of the Old Crew. That becomes more apparent almost by the hour.
All Nar stand more than six feet tall. All Nar run like the wind and leap like gazelles. Mogaba chose only the most athletic and warriorly to join the quest for Khatovar. All the Nar are quick as cats and strong as gorillas. All the Nar use their weapons like they were born with them in their hands.
The rest? The ones who call themselves the Old Crew? Yeah. It is true. The Company is more than a job. If it was just a job, just selling swords to whoever would pay, the Black Company would not be in this part of the world. There was work a plenty in the north. The world never lacks for potentates who want to bully their subjects or neighbors.
The Company is family for those who belong. The Company is home. The Company is a nation of outcasts, alone and defying the whole world.
Now the Company is trying to complete its cycle of life. It is on a quest in search of its birthplace, fabled Khatovar. But all the world seems determined that Khatovar shall be unattainable, a virgin forever hidden behind a veil of shadow.
The Company is home, sure, but Croaker was the only one who ever went completely misty-eyed over that damned angle.
For him the Black Company was a mystery cult though he never went as far as Mogaba and made it a holy calling.
Watch your step. They still don’t have all the mess cleaned out from the last attack. If you couldn’t tell by the smell. The Jaicuri don’t help much anymore. Maybe it is lack of civic pride.
The Nyueng Bao? They are just here. They stay out of the way. They have this notion that they can stay neutral. They will learn. Shadowspinner is going to teach them. Nobody stays neutral in this world. The best you can do is choose your spot to jump in.
Little out of shape? You will come around. A few weeks running hither and yon, blunting Shadowspinner’s probes and hustling out on Mogaba’s spoiling raids, will get you as sharp as a Nyueng Bao sword.
You thought sieges were all just laying around relaxing and waiting the other guy out?
Man, this other guy is a foamy mouth lunatic.
And not just nuts. He is a sorcerer. A major player, though he hasn’t shown much here. Before the Old Man got himself offed in the big slugfest that trapped everyone here he hurt Spinner real bad. The old devil just hasn’t been himself since. Poor baby.
This is it. Top of the tower. And there is the whole stinking burg, laid out like it is on one of those sand tables Lady always liked.
Oh, yeah. Those rumors have made it here, too. They started with some Shadowlander prisoners. Maybe that was Kina up north. Or something. But it could not have been Lady. She died right out there. Fifty guys saw her taken down. Half of them got killed trying to rescue her.
How can you say that? You can’t be sure? How many eyewitnesses does it take? She is dead. The Old Man is dead. They’re all dead, them what did not get inside before Mogaba sealed the gates.
The whole mob is dead. All but the crowd in here. And they are caught between lunatics. It’s a tossup who is crazier, Mogaba or Shadowspinner.
You see it all? That is it. Dejagore enduring the siege of the Shadowmasters. Not real impressive, is it? But every one of those burned areas memorializes a ferocious hand to hand, house to house negotiation with the Shadowlanders.
Fires start easily in Dejagore.
Hell is supposed to be hot, isn’t it?
. . . who I am, on the improbably remote chance that my scribblings do survive. I am Murgen, Standardbearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost the standard in battle. I am keeping unofficial Annals because Croaker is dead, One-Eye won’t, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I was the heir Croaker trained. I will do it even without official sanction.
I will be your guide for a few months or weeks or days, however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end.
Nobody inside these walls is going to get out of this. There are too many of them and too few of us. Our sole advantage is that our commander is as mad as theirs. That makes us unpredictable. Don’t add much hope, though.
Mogaba will not give up as long as he personally is capable of hanging onto something with one hand while he throws rocks with the other.
I expect my writings to blow away on a dark wind, never to be touched by another eye. Or they might become the tinder Shadowspinner uses to light the pyre under the last man he murders after taking Dejagore.
If anyone does find this, brother, we begin. This is the Book of Murgen, last of the Annals of the Black Company. The long tale winds down.
I will die lost and frightened in a world so alien I cannot understand a tenth of it when I focus all my soul. It is so old.
Times lies heavily here. Two thousand-year-old traditions underpin incredible absurdities taken completely for granted. Dozens of races and cultures and religions exist in a mix that should be volatile but has persisted so long that conflicts are just reflexive twitches in an ancient body mostly too tired to bother anymore.
Taglios is only one large principality. There are scores more, mostly now in the Shadowlands, all pretty similar.
The major peoples are the Gunni, the Shadar, and the Vehdna, names which which define religion, race and culture all at once. The Gunni are the most numerous and widespread. Gunni temples, to a bewilderingly broad pantheon, are so numerous you’re seldom out of sight of one.
Physically, Gunni are small and dark but not black like the Nar. Gunni men wear toga-like robes, weather permitting. Their bright mix of colors declare caste, cult, and professional alliances. Women, too, dress brightly, but in several layers of wraparound cloth. They veil their faces if unmarried, though marriages are made early. They wear their dowries as jewelry. Before they go out they illustrate their foreheads with the caste/cult/professional markings of both their husbands and their fathers. I will never decipher those hieroglyphs.
Shadar are paler, like heavily tanned whites from the north. They are big, usually over six feet. They do not shave or pluck their beard, unlike the Gunni. Some sects never cut their hair. Bathing is not forbidden but it is a vice seldom indulged. Shadar all dress in grey and wear turbans to define their status. They eat meat. Gunni do not. I have never seen a Shadar woman. Maybe they find their babies under cabbage leaves.
The Vehdna are the least numerous of the major Taglian ethnic groups. They are as light as the Shadar but smaller, more lightly built, with ferocious features. They share none of the Shadar’s spartan values. Their religion forbids almost everything, rules honored in the breach quite often. They like a little color in their costume, though not bright like the Gunni. They wear pantaloons and real shoes. Even the poorest conceal their bodies and wear something atop their heads. Low-caste Gunni wear nothing but loincloths. Married Vehdna women wear only black. You can see nothing but their eyes. Unmarried Vehdna women you don’t see at all.
Only the Vehdna believe in an afterlife. And that only for men except for a few female warrior saints and daughters of prophets who had balls big enough to be honorary men.
Nyueng Bao, rarely seen, usually wear loose-fitting long-sleeve pullover shirts and baggy lightweight pants, generally black, men and women alike. Children go naked.
Any city down here is glorious chaos.
It is always a holy day for somebody.
From the citadel tower it is obvious that Dejagore is a complete contrivance. Of course, most walled cities are shaped by the probability that, part of the time, neighboring states will be managed by thugs. Your own city’s masters will never be worse than benevolent despots, of course, and their worst ambition will be to heighten the hometown’s glory.
Until the appearance of the Shadowmasters one short generation ago war was an alien concept throughout this part of the world. It had seen neither armies nor soldiers in all the centuries since the Black Company’s departure.
Into this improbable paradise came the Shadowmasters, lords of darkness from the far reaches of the earth who brought with them all the wolves of the old nightmare. Soon inept armies were about. They stalked unprepared kingdoms like great cruel behemoths even the gods could not stay. The dark tide spread. Cities crumbled. A lucky few the Shadowmasters chose to rebuild. The peoples of the newly-founded Shadowlands were given their options: obedience or death.
Jaicur was reborn as Stormgard, seat of the Shadowmaster Stormshadow, she who could bring the winds and thunder howling and bellowing in the darkness. She who had borne the name Stormbringer in another age and place.
First Stormshadow raised a mound forty feet high on top of the ruins of captured Jaicur, at the heart of a plain she had flattened absolutely by slaves and prisoners of war. Earth for the mound came from the ring of hills completely surrounding the plain. With the mound complete and faced on its outer sides with several layers of imported stone, Stormshadow built her new city up top. And that she surrounded with walls another forty feet high. She did not overlook the latest theories about towers for enfilading fire and barbicans to protect her elevated gates.
All the Shadowmasters seemed driven by a paranoid need to make themselves safe in their home places.
Never once in her planning, though, did she take into account the possibility that she might have to resist the onslaught of the Black Company.
I wish we were half as wicked as I talk.
Dejagore has four gates. Each stands at one point of the compass rose. Each is at the end of a paved highway running straight in from the hills. Only the road from the south carries any traffic these days.
Mogaba has sealed three gates, leaving only sally ports which are guarded by his Nar at all times. Mogaba is determined to fight. He is just as determined that not one of our raggedy-ass Taglian legionnaires will run off and not go down with him.
None of us, be we Black Company Old Crew, Nar, Jaicuri, Taglian, Nyueng Bao, or someone else who had the bad luck to get caught here, is going to get out alive. Not unless Shadowspinner and his gang get so bored they go looking for someone else to bully. Right. You’ve got the eight and ten of swords and to go down you’re going to bet your ass on pulling the nine.
Your chances of pulling that nine are better than ours of getting out of here.
The fortified encampment of the Shadowlanders stands south of the city. It is so close we can reach it with our heavy artillery. You can see charred timbers where we tried to burn them out the day of the big battle. We have raided them a few times since then, too, but no longer have the strength to risk.
We can’t seem to discourage Shadowspinner, though.
Like most warlords he doesn’t let reality get in the way of his doing whatever he wants to do.
The artillery gives them a wake-up five nights out of five, pick a random time. That keeps them cranky and tired and a lot less effective whenever they attack. Trouble is, so much effort keeps us tired and cranky, too. And we have other projects going as well.
Shadowspinner is a puzzle. He is not the first of his kind in Company experience. The heavyweight killers in our past, though, when faced with a situation like this, would have stomped on Dejagore like jumping on an anthill before looking for a real challenge. But here lightweights Goblin and One-Eye can slide around quickly and treacherously enough to parry Spinner’s every feeble thrust.
His weakness is a mystery.
Makes you nervous when an enemy doesn’t do everything you think he can. And a Shadowspinner doesn’t become a top badass being gentle. One-Eye sees everything in its wickedest light. He says Spinner is slacking because Longshadow has a hold on him and is weakening him deliberately. Your basic old time power politics with the Company in the middle. Before we came along the Shadowmasters did find their biggest challenges in fighting one another.
On principle Goblin seldom agrees with One-Eye about anything. He claims Shadowspinner is lulling us while he recovers from wounds that were more serious than we suspected.
My guess is, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Crows circle the Shadowlander camp. Always they circle. Some come, some go, but a baker’s dozen minimum are there all the time. Others haunt us day and night. Wherever I go, whenever, a crow is nearby. Except inside. They don’t get inside. We don’t let them inside. Those that try end up in somebody’s pot.
Croaker had a thing about crows. I think I understand it now. But the bats bother me more.
We don’t see the bats as often. The crows get most of them. (These crows are not ashamed to come out at night.) And those that the crows don’t get we do, most of the time. Inevitably, though, a few get away. And that isn’t good.
They spy for the Shadowmasters. They are the far-ranging eyes of wickedness out here where our enemies cannot always manipulate the living darkness.
Only two Shadowmasters remain. Spinner has problems. They do not have the reach or control they showed back when they could and did run the shadows into the very heart of the Taglian Territories.
They are fading from the stage.
One dreams.
Dreams too easily become nightmares.
When you look down from the citadel you have to wonder how the Jaicuri manage, all jammed inside Dejagore’s walls. Truth is, they don’t and never did.
At one time the hills surrounding the plain were covered with farms and orchards and vineyards. After the shadow came enterprises gradually disappeared as the peasant families abandoned the land. And then the antishadow, the Black Company, came, ever so hungry after the long sprint south from the victory at Ghoja Ford. And then came the Shadowlander armies which battered us.
Now the hills bear little but memories of what once was. Vultures never picked bones much cleaner than those hills have been gleaned.
The wisest peasants were those who fled early. Their children will repopulate the land.
Later the stupid ones ran here, inside the false safety of Dejagore’s walls. When Mogaba is particularly cranky he drives a few hundred out the gate. They are just mouths crying to be filled. Food must be husbanded for those willing to die defending the walls.
Locals who fail to contribute, or who demonstrate a weakness for getting sick or seriously injured, go out the gate right behind the peasants.
Shadowspinner won’t take any in but those willing to help raise his earthworks and dig his burial trenches. The former means laboring under falls of missiles directed by old friends inside, while the latter means making the bed where you will lie as soon as you are useful no longer.
Hard choices.
Mogaba cannot fathom why his military genius isn’t universally hailed.
He doesn’t mess with the Nyueng Bao. Not yet. They haven’t contributed much to Dejagore’s defense but they don’t sap resources, either. Their babies are getting fat while the rest of us tighten our belts.
You don’t see many dogs or cats now. Horses manage only because they are militarily protected, and then only a handful of them. We’re going to eat hearty when the last fodder is gone.
Small game like rats and pigeons are becoming scarce. Sometimes you hear the outraged protest of a crow taken by surprise.
The Nyueng Bao are survivors.
They are a race possessed of a single impassive face.
Mogaba does not bother them mainly because when anybody does the whole bunch gets pissed off. And they consider fighting a really serious, holy business.
They stay out of the way when they can but they aren’t pacifists. A couple of times the Shadowlanders have regretted trying to push through their part of town.
The Nyueng Bao generated an amazing amount of carnage both times.
Rumor among the Jaicuri says they eat their enemies.
It is true, human bones showing evidence of butchery and cookery have been found. Jaicuri are mainly of the Gunni religion. Gunni are vegetarians.
I do not believe the Nyueng Bao are responsible, but Ky Dam refuses to deny even the blackest allegation against his people.
Maybe he will accept any canard that makes the Nyueng Bao seem more dangerous. Maybe he wants that kind of talk so fear will build.
Survivors grasp the tools at hand.
I wish they would talk. I’d bet they could tell stories that would curl your toes and straighten your hair.
Ah! Dejagore! Those halcyon days, slouching through hell with a smile on.
How long before all the fun goes out of the town?
Bone tired, just as I had been every night for as long as I could remember, I went to take my turn on the wall. I had no ambition at all and even less energy. Seated in a crenel, I heaped aspersions on the ancestors of all my bitty Shadowlander buddies. I am afraid I lacked creativity but I made up for that with virulence. They were up to something out there. You could hear rattlings and mutterings and see torches moving around.
There were all the harbingers of a night without sleep. Couldn’t these people be normal and handle their business during regular hours?
It didn’t sound like they were more enthusiastic than me. I caught the occasional sharp remark about me or my foredaddies, like this mess was all my fault. I guess they were motivated mainly by their sure knowledge that they would never go home if they didn’t recapture Stormgard.
Maybe nobody on either side would get out of this one alive.
A crow called, mocking us all. I didn’t bother throwing a rock at it.
It was misty out. A half-hearted drizzle came and went. Lightning stalked beyond the hills to the south. It had been hot and humid all day, then had turned viciously stormy toward evening. Lakes of water stood in the streets. Stormshadow’s engineers had not made good drainage a high priority, despite the natural advantages available.
It would not be a good night for attacking tall walls. And not much easier for anyone defending them.
Still, I almost felt sorry for the little buggers down below.
Candles and Red Rudy finished the long climb from the street, groaning. Each carried a heavy leather sack. Candles grumbled, “I’m too old for this shit.”
“If it works out we’ll all get to get old.”
Both men leaned on merlons while they caught their wind. Then they dumped their sacks into the darkness. Somebody down there swore in a Shadowlander dialect. “Serves you right, asshole,” Rudy growled back. “Go home. Let me sleep.”
All of the Old Crew invested time hauling dirt.
“I know,” Candles told me. “I know. But what good is alive if you’re too damned tired to give a shit?”
If you read the Annals you know our brothers have said the same thing since the beginning. I shrugged. I could come up with nothing inspirational. Mostly you don’t try to justify or motivate, you just go on.
Candles grumbled, “Goblin wants you. We’ll cover you here.”
In battered Shadowlander Rudy shouted downward, “Yeah, I know your turkey gobble. Fuck you.”
I grunted. It was my watch but I could leave if I wanted. Mogaba didn’t even pretend to try to control the Old Crew anymore. We did our part. We held our ground. We just would not conform to his ideas of what the Black Company ought to be.
But there was going to be one hell of a showdown if the Shadowmaster and his circus ever hit the road.
“Where is he?”
“Down Three.” That he signed in finger speech. We use deaf speech frequently if we talk business out in the open. Bats and crows can’t read it. Neither can any of Mogaba’s faction.
I grunted again. “Be back.”
“Sure.”
I descended the steep, slippery stair, muscles aching, anticipating the weight of the sack I would be carrying when I came back.
What could Goblin want? Probably a decision on something trivial. That runt and his monocular sidekick religiously avoid taking on any responsibility.
I run the Old Crew, most of the time, because nobody else wants to bother.
We have established ourselves in an area of tall brick tenements close to the wall, southwest of the north gate, which is the only gate still fully functional. From the first hour of the siege we have been improving our position.
Mogaba thinks in terms of attack. He does not believe a war can be won from behind stone walls. He wants to meet the Shadowlanders on the wall, to throw them back, then to charge outside and stomp them. He launches spoiling raids and nuisance attacks to keep them wobbly. He won’t prepare for the possibility that they might get inside the city in significant numbers, although almost every attack puts Shadowlanders on our side of the wall before we can concentrate enough to push them back.
Someday, sometime, things won’t go Mogaba’s way. Someday Shadowspinner’s people are going to grab a gate. Someday we are going to see full scale city war.
That is inevitable.
The Old Crew is ready, Mogaba. Are you?
We will become invisible, Your Arrogance. We have played this game before. We read the Annals. We will be the ghosts who kill.
We hope.
Shadows are the question. Shadows are the problem. What do they know? What will they be able to find?
Those villains have not been called Shadowmasters just because they love the darkness.
With the exceptions of three hidden doors, all entrances to the Company’s quarters have been bricked up. Likewise every window opening below third floor levels. Alleys and breezeways are now a maze of deathtraps. The three usable entrances can be reached only by climbing outside stairways subject to missile fire their entire rise. Where we could manage we have fireproofed.
For the Black Company there is no inactivity during the days of siege. Even One-Eye works. When I can find him.
Every man stays too damned busy and too damned tired to dwell upon our situation.
After entering a concealed entrance known only to the brothers of the Old Crew, the crows and bats, the shadows, the Nyueng Bao watchers down the street and any Nar who care to keep track from the north barbican, I trundled down flight after flight of steps. I reached a basement where Big Bucket dozed beside a lonely, fitful little candle. Quiet though I was, he cracked an eyelid. He wasted no breath on a challenge. A ramshackle, twisted wardrobe tilted against the wall behind him, its door hanging crookedly on one damaged hinge. I pulled the door gently and eased inside.
Any outsider force reaching the cellar would find the wardrobe stuffed with desperately meager food stores.
The cabinet fronts a tunnel. Tunnels join all our buildings. Mogaba and anyone else interested might expect as much. If they got down into our cellars a little work would show them what they hoped to find.
That ought to satisfy them.
The tunnel entered another cellar. Several men were asleep there, amidst tremendous clutter and a smell like a bear’s den. I moved slowly until recognized.
Had I been an intruder I would not have been the first never to return from the underworld.
Now I entered the real secret places. New Stormgard rose atop old Jaicur. Little effort was made to demolish the old town. Many of the earlier structures had been in excellent condition.
We have a bewildering maze dug out down where no one ought to think to look. It gets a tad bigger whenever a sack of earth goes to the wall or into one of our other projects. It is no cozy warren, though. It takes willpower to go down into those dank, dark places where the air hardly moves, candles never come wholly to life, and there is at least a chance that any shadow may harbor a screaming death.
And me, I have a thing about being buried alive.
It gets no easier with practice.
Hagop and Otto, Goblin and One-Eye and I went through this before, on the Plain of Fear, where for about five thousand years we lived like badgers in the ground.
“Cletus. Where’s Goblin?” Cletus is one of three brothers who serve as our engineers and master artillerymen.
“Around the corner. Next cellar.”
Cletus, Loftus and Longinus are geniuses. They figured out how to bring fresh air down the chimneys of existing structures up top, then into the deep tunnels, let it flow slowly through the complex, then send it up other chimneys. Plain engineering, but it seemed like sorcery to me. A flow of breathable air, though slow and never pure, serves us well enough.
It does nothing to lessen the damp and the smell.
I found Goblin. He was holding a candle for Longinus while the latter slapped wet mortar onto freshly scrubbed stonework about eye level. “What’s the problem, Goblin?”
“Rained like a bastard up there, eh?”
“Gods swiped a river somewhere and dropped it here. Why?”
“We’ve got a thousand leaks down here.”
“Big problem?”
“Could be later on. There’s no drainage. We’re as low as we can go unless the Twelve tunnel goes good.”
“Sounds like an engineering problem to me.”
“It is,” Longinus said, smoothing the mortar. “And Clete did anticipate it. We’ve waterproofed from the start. Trouble is, you can’t tell how you’re doing until you get a really nasty rain. We’re lucky it didn’t go on the way it does during the rainy season. Three days of that, we might’ve gotten flooded out.”
“Still sounds like an engineering problem. You can handle it, right?”
Longinus shrugged. “We’ll work on it. That’s all we can do, Croaker.”
Little dig there. Like telling me, let everybody do their own worrying.
“That’s why you wanted me?” It seemed a little weak, even for Goblin.
“No. Longo, you don’t hear anything.” The toad-faced man made a complex gesture with three fingers of his left hand as he said that. Some half-hinted glimmer trailed behind his fingers momentarily. Longinus went back to work like he was deaf.
“It so important you need to cut him out?”
“He talks. He don’t mean no harm but he can’t help repeating everything he hears.”
“And makes it better when he tells it. I know. All right. Tell me.”
“Something has happened with the Shadowmaster. He’s changed. Me and One-Eye only decided for sure about an hour ago but we think it’s been going on for a while. He’s just kept us from seeing it.”
“What?”
Goblin leaned closer, as though Longinus might yet eavesdrop. “He’s gotten well, Murgen. He’s just about back to normal. He’s been getting his feet under him before he comes down on us with them both at once. We also decided that he is hiding the change more from his buddy Longshadow than he is from us. We don’t scare him that much.”
I stiffened, recalling strange behavior on the encircling plain, going on right now. “Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“He’s going to come tonight. Real soon. They were moving into position when I came down. I thought it was just the usual . . . We’d better go full alert.” I headed out of there with what energy I had, announcing the alert wherever I saw anybody.
Shadowspinner did not hurry. The Company took its positions on the wall. The Taglian rabble we led got as ready as they ever get. I sent warning to Mogaba and Speaker Ky Dam. Mogaba is a jerk and a lunatic but not a complete fool. He believes he keeps the job separate from personalities. If Goblin claimed we were in big trouble he would listen.
Alarms sounded everywhere. Shouts of anger at being anticipated rose outside the wall.
The civilian population began to respond. Fear swept the darkened streets. This felt bigger than usual. As always, the old-timers among the Jaicuri recalled the first coming of the Shadowmasters. Back then the enemy first wave consisted of deadly flickers of darkness.
“One-Eye. Any shadows out there?”
“Won’t be any of those, Murgen. They have to come up from Shadowcatch. Longshadow would have to be in on it.”
“Good.” I’ve seen what the shadows can do, on a small scale. The Jaicuri were right to be scared.
“I promise you some sorcery, though. It’s already gathering.”
“I love how you can always cheer me up, runt.” I surveyed the walls beyond our section. Hard to see much but it looked like any assault would meet a ready defense.
Which meant nothing if Spinner was in good form.
“Murgen!”
“What?”
“Behind you.”
I looked.
Ky Dam, Speaker of the Nyueng Bao, accompanied by a son and some grandsons, by gesture asked if he could come up to the battlements. Only the son was armed. He was a squat, emotionless man rumored to be some kind of master swordsman. I nodded. “Welcome aboard.”
The Speaker looked like he was about a thousand years older than One-Eye but was spry enough to climb without help. He didn’t have a lot of himself to move around. His hair was evenly distributed around his head and face but very little of it remained. It consisted of white wisps. He was covered with liver spots. His skin color had faded. He was more pallid than some of us northerners.
He bowed slightly.
I responded in kind, trying to match his bow exactly. That would indicate an honor between equals, which ought to earn me some good guy points because, although junior in years, I was senior here because he was on Company ground and I was Company top dog.
Clever me, I make every effort to be polite to the Speaker. And I keep reminding the guys to be respectful and protective of all Nyueng Bao, even if provoked. I am trying to encourage the taking of a longer view than is usual with ordinary people.
We have no friends anywhere in these strange lands.
Ky Dam faced the darkened plain. His presence was strong. Many Jaicuri believe he is a sorcerer. Goblin and One-Eye say he can be called a wizard in the word’s most archaic sense, of wise man.
The old boy drew a breath that seemed to enhance his aura of strength. “It will be different tonight.” He spoke mainstream Taglian with no accent.
“Their master has recovered his powers.”
The Speaker glanced at me sharply, then at Goblin and One-Eye. “Ah. So.”
“Exactly.” I’ve always wanted to do that when some old fart made cryptic noises. I couldn’t help myself when the perfect opportunity arrived.
I eyeballed the Speaker’s escort. The swordmaster seemed too squat and bulky for his reputation. Such as it was. Not a lot crosses the cultural boundary.
The grandsons looked like most Nyueng Bao men in their prime. Like if they smiled, or showed any emotion whatsoever, they would forfeit their souls. Like they had cactus plugs up their butts, in Goblin’s words.
I went on with my work while Ky Dam considered the night. His escort stayed out of my way.
Big Bucket checked in. “All set, boss.”
And the Shadowmaster’s men sounded like they were ready to play. Their horns began calling like bulls in rut. I grumbled, “It won’t be long.” They could put it off for another twenty years, though. I wouldn’t mind. I was in no hurry.
A Taglian messenger stumbled up from the street, fought for breath, croaked out word that Mogaba wanted me.
“On my way. Less than five minutes,” I told him. I scanned the darkness. “Hold the fort, Bucket.”
“Just what this outfit needs. Another comedian.”
“Oh, I’ll slay them.”
Ky Dam said something. The swordmaster squinted at the night. For half a heartbeat there was a ghostly flicker in the hills. Star? Reflection of a star? No. The night was cool, wet and overcast.
The Speaker said, “There may be more happening than is immediately apparent, Bone Warrior.”
“Perhaps.” Bone Warrior? “But, unlike Nyueng Bao, we are not warriors. We are soldiers.”
The old man got his mind around that quickly. “As you will, Stone Soldier. All may not be as it seems.” Was he making these up as he went?
He did not seem pleased by his speculation. He turned, hastened down the stair. His grandsons had trouble keeping up.
“What was that about?” Bucket asked.
“I don’t have a clue. I’ve been summoned by His Holiness, the Prince of the Company.” As I stepped to the stair I glanced at One-Eye. The little wizard was staring toward the hills, about where Ky Dam had done the same. He seemed both puzzled and unhappy.
I didn’t have time to ask. Nor did I have much inclination.
I had had bad news enough already.
Mogaba stands six feet five. Any fat on him has to be between his ears because there isn’t an ounce anywhere else. All bone and muscle, he moves like a cat, his slightest twitch pure liquid grace. He works hard to stay hard but not to become overly muscled. He is very dark but a deep mahogany more than an ebony. He glows with conviction, an unshakable inner strength.
He has a ready wit but never smiles. When he does show humor it is entirely surface, for effect, an illusion spun for his audience. He doesn’t feel it and probably doesn’t understand it. He is as focused as any human being who ever lived. And that focus is the creation and maintenance of Mogaba, greatest warrior who ever lived.
He is almost as good as he wants to be. He might be as good as he thinks he is. I never saw anyone who could match his individual skills.
The other Nar are almost as good, almost as arrogantly self-confident.
Mogaba’s self-opinion is his big weakness but I don’t think anyone could get him to believe that. He and his reputation stand squarely at the center of his every consideration.
Sadly, self-indulgence and self-admiration aren’t always traits that will inspire soldiers to win battles.
There is no love lost between Mogaba and the rest of us. His rigidity split the Company into Old Crew and Nar factions. Mogaba envisions the Black Company as an ages old holy crusade. Us Old Crew guys see it as a big unhappy family trying to survive in a world that really is out to get us.
The debate would be much more bitter were Shadowspinner not around to snap up the mantle of bigger common enemy.
Many of Mogaba’s own people are less than thrilled with the way his mind is working these days.
Something Croaker harped about, from the moment he first set quill to paper, is what might be called matters of form. It is not good form to bicker with your superiors, however wrong they may be and however one-sided their determination of their superiority is. I try to maintain good form.
Croaker quickly elevated Mogaba to third in the Company, after himself and Lady, because of his exceptional talents. But that did not automatically entitle Mogaba to assume command if Croaker and Lady were gone. New Captains are supposed to be elected. In a situation like the one here in Dejagore the custom is to poll the soldiers to see if they think an immediate election is necessary. If they think the old Captain has become mad, senile, dead, incompetent, or otherwise in need of permanent replacement then a election will be held.
I cannot recall any instance in the Annals when the senior candidate was rejected by the soldiers, but if an election were held today a precedent might be set. In a secret ballot even many of the Nar might declare no confidence in Mogaba.
There will be no vote while we are besieged. I will oppose any effort to hold one. Mogaba may be mad and I may not be able to go along with him in areas he considers religious, but only he has the will to control thousands of skittish Taglian legionnaires while keeping the Jaicuri in line. If he should fall his assistant Sindawe would step up, then Ochiba, and only then, maybe, if I can’t hide fast enough, me.
Soldiers and civilians both fear Mogaba more than they respect him after all this time besieged. And that troubles me. The Annals demonstrate over and over that fear is the most fertile soil for treachery.
Mogaba holds staff conferences in the citadel. There is a war room there, once the toy of the sorceress Stormshadow. Mogaba considers meeting there a great concession to the distances us underlings must hike. He does not like leaving his own part of the action. For that reason I could count on this being short.
He was polite enough, though it was a strained courtesy obvious to all. He said, “I received your message. It was not entirely clear.”
“I garbled it intentionally. I didn’t want the messenger telling everybody on his way to see you.”
“It is not good news, then, I assume.” He spoke the Jewel Cities dialect the Company picked up when it was in service to the Syndic of Beryl. Most of us used it only when we did not want the natives to understand what we were saying. Mogaba used it because he did not yet have enough Taglian to get by without interpreters. Even his Jewel Cities dialect was badly accented.
“Definitely not good news,” I said. Mogaba’s friend Sindawe translated for the Taglian officers present. I continued, “Goblin and One-Eye tell me Shadowspinner is completely healthy again and means tonight to be his big comeback show. So tonight won’t be just another raid, it will be a big punchout for the whole works.”
A dozen pairs of eyes stared, praying I was making the sort of bad joke Goblin and One-Eye would find hilarious. Mogaba’s own eyes were icy. He wanted to make me recant by sheer weight of his gaze.
Mogaba has no use for One-Eye or Goblin. They are one of the big sources of contention between him and the Old Crew. He is sure that real wizards, however puny, have no place among real warriors, who are supposed to rely on their strength, their wit, their will, and even maybe their superior steel if they have it.
Goblin and One-Eye, besides being wizards, besides being sloppy and undisciplined and rowdy, worst of all fail to agree that Mogaba is the best thing that could have happened to the Black Company.
Mogaba hates Shadowspinner in part because he knows the Shadowmaster will never meet him in a trial by combat that can be sung about down through the ages.
Mogaba wants his place in the Annals. He lusts after a major place in the Annals. And he is going to get that, but not the way he wants.
“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 Taglios 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.
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.
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, god-damnit!” 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 Dejagore’s 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.
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.
I got over the self-confidence hurdle just by getting myself moving. Hell, it was too late to stop anything.
I stopped worrying about me and went to work worrying about how we would look after the raid was over. If we blew it we could not blame that on Taglian treachery or factionalism or incompetence, the usual sand in the machine.
I reached the crest of a low ridge. My hands were frozen but my body was wet inside my clothing. Light wavered ahead. The Deceivers, those lucky bastards, had a bonfire to keep them warm. I paused to listen. I heard nothing.
How did the Old Man know the leaders of the Strangler bands would gather for this particular festival? It was downright spooky the way he knew stuff sometimes. Maybe Lady was rubbing off. Maybe he had some magical talent he never mentioned.
I observed, “We’re about to find out if Goblin still has that talent.”
Thai Dei did not spend a precious grunt. Silence was comment enough.
There were supposed to be thirty to forty top Deceivers over there. We hunt them relentlessly and have done so since Narayan snatched Lady and Croaker’s baby. The Old Man has eliminated mercy from the Company vocabulary. And that fits Deceiver philosophy perfectly, though I would bet those guys up ahead would not think that way in a minute.
Goblin still had the knack. The sentries were napping. Still, inevitably, all did not go as planned.
I was fifty feet from the bonfire, sneaking along beside this especially big, ugly shelter when somebody went heeling and toeing out its end like all the devils in Hell were after him. He bent under the weight of a big bundle. That bundle wriggled and whimpered.
“Narayan Singh!” I knew him instantly. “Stop!”
Right, Murgen. Freeze him with your voice.
The rest of the guys recognized him too. A yell went up. We could not believe our luck, though I had been warned that the big prize might be there to grab. Singh was the number one Deceiver, the villain Lady and the Captain want to spend long years killing, an inch at a time.
The bundle had to be their daughter.
I yelled orders. Instead of responding the men did whatever they thought of. Mostly they went after Singh. The racket wakened the rest of the Deceivers. The quickest tried to run.
Luckily, some of the guys stayed on the job.
“You warm now?” Goblin asked. I puffed heartily as I watched Thai Dei shove a skinny blade into the eye of a sleep befuddled Strangler. Thai Dei doesn’t cut throats. He doesn’t like the mess.
It was over. “How many did we get? How many got away?” I stared the direction Singh had fled. The silence there was not promising. The guys would have raised a real hoorah had they caught him.
Damn! I was excited for a while there. If only I could have dragged him back to Taglios. If wishes were fishes. “Keep some alive. We’ll want somebody to tell us bedtime stories. One-Eye. How the hell did Singh all of a sudden know we were here?”
The runt shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe his goddess goosed him and told him to haul ass.”
“Give me a break. Kina didn’t have anything to do with it.” But I wasn’t that sure. Sometimes it is hard to disbelieve.
Thai Dei gestured.
“Right,” I said. “Just what I was thinking myself.”
One-Eye looked puzzled. Goblin grumbled, “What?” My wizards. Right on top of everything.
“Sometimes I wonder if you guys could find your dicks without a map. The shelter, old-timers. The shelter. Don’t it seem like that’s an awful lot of shack for one runt killer and a kid barely tall enough to bite you on the kneecap? A bit big even for a living saint and the daughter of a goddess?”
One-Eye developed a nasty grin. “Nobody else came out, did they? Yeah. You want I should start a fire?”
Before I could answer him Goblin squealed. I whirled. A shapeless darkness, visible only because of the bonfire, reared out of the shelter entrance then I slammed into the ground, felled by Thai Dei. Fire blasted over my head. Lights crackled. Balls of flame darted in from all around.
The killing darkness took on a moth-eaten look. Then it came apart.
That darkness was why so many of us had been shivering before the attack. But we won this round.
I sat up, crooked a finger. “Let’s see what we’ve caught. It ought to be interesting.” My guys knocked the shelter apart. Sure enough, they turned up a half dozen wrinkled little old men, brown as chestnuts. “Shadowweavers. Running with the Stranglers. Now isn’t that interesting?”
The geezers gobbled their willingness to surrender.
We had run into their kind before. They never were big on personal heroics.
A soldier called Wishbone said, “These Shadowlanders are getting good at this ‘I surrender’ stuff.” He sneered. “Everybody down there must be practicing their handy Taglian phrases.”
“Except Longshadow,” I reminded. I told Thai Dei, “Thanks.”
He shrugged, a gesture foreign to the Nyueng Bao. The world did touch him occasionally. “Sahra would expect it.”
And that was very Nyueng Bao. He would blame his actions on his sister’s expectations rather than on any notion of duty or obligation or even friendship.
“What are we supposed to do with these guys?” Wishbone asked. “We got any use for them?”
“Save a couple. The oldest and one other. Goblin. You never said how many got away.”
“Three. That counts Singh but not the kid. But we’re going to get one of them three back on account of he’s hiding in the bushes right over there.”
“Collect him. I’ll give him to the Old Man.”
Sarky One-Eye cracked, “Give them a little authority, they turn into field marshals. I remember this kid when he was so green he still had sheep shit between his toes. He didn’t know what shoes were for.” But the humor wasn’t in his eye. Every move I made he watched like a hawk. Like a crow, in fact, although we had no crows hanging around tonight. Whatever experiment Goblin and One-Eye had going in that area was a complete success during this outing.
Goblin suggested, “Ease up, Murgen. We’ll get the job done. How about some of you lazy asses toss a couple logs on the fire?” He began to circle the hidden Deceiver in the direction opposite that taken by One-Eye.
They were right. I get too serious under stress. I was a thousand years old already. Surviving Dejagore had not been easy. But all the rest of these guys had come through that, too. They had seen Mogaba’s slaughters of innocents. They had suffered the pestilences and plagues. They had seen the cannibalism and human sacrifices, the treacheries and betrayals and all the rest. And they had come away without letting the nightmares rule them.
I have to get a handle on it. I have to get some emotional distance and perspective. But there is something going on inside me that is beyond my control or understanding. Sometimes I feel like there are several of me in there, all mixed up, sometimes sitting behind the real me watching, watching. There may be no chance for me to recover complete sanity and stability.
Goblin came strutting back. He and One-Eye accompanied a man who was not much more than skin and bones. Few Deceivers are in good shape these days. They have no friends anywhere. They are hunted like vermin. Huge bounties ride on their shoulders.
Goblin flashed his toadlike grin. “We’ve got us a red-hand man here, Murgen. A genuine black rumel guy with the red palm. What do you think of that?”
The thought lightened my heart. The prisoner was truly a top Strangler. The red hand meant that he had been there when Narayan Singh tricked Lady into thinking she was being inducted into the Strangler cult when in fact the Deceivers were really consecrating her unborn child as daughter of their goddess Kina.
But Lady had employed a trick of her own, marking every Strangler there with the red hand that could not be denied later. Nothing they tried would take the color away, short of amputation. And a one-handed Strangler could not manage the rumel, the strangling scarf, that was the tool of the Deceivers’ holy trade.
“The Old Man will be pleased.” A red-hand man would know what was going on inside his cult.
I crowded closer to the fire. Thai Dei, done helping dispose of redundant shadowweavers, eased in beside me. How much had Dejagore changed him? I could not imagine him ever being anything but dour, taciturn, remorseless and pitiless, even as a toddler.
Goblin, I noted, was doing that thing he did lately where he watched me from the corner of his eye while pretending to do something else. What were he and One-Eye looking for?
The runt held his hands out. “Fire feels good.”
Paranoia has become our way of life. We have become the new Nyueng Bao. We trust no one. We let no one outside the Black Company know what we are doing until we are sure what the response will be. In particular we prefer keeping the Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister, the Radisha Drah, our employers, way back there in the deep dark shadows.
They are not to be trusted at all, ever, except to serve their own closest interests.
I smuggled my prisoners into the city and hid them in a warehouse near the river, a Company friendly Shadar fish place possessed of a very distinctive air. My men scattered to their families or someplace where they could drink beer. I was satisfied. With one quick, nasty stab we had decimated the surviving Deceiver leadership. We almost got that fiend Narayan Singh. I got within spitting distance of Croaker’s baby. In all honesty I could report that she seemed all right.
Thai Dei knocked the prisoners to their knees, wrinkled his nose.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “But this place don’t stink half as bad as your swamp does.” Taglios claims the river delta but the Nyueng Bao disagree.
Thai Dei grunted. He could take a joke as well as the next guy.
He does not look like much. He is a foot shorter than I am. I outweigh him by eighty pounds. And I am far prettier. He has crudely cropped black hair that sticks out in unkempt spikes. Skinny, lantern-jawed, taciturn and surly, Thai Dei is entirely unappetizing. But he does his job.
A Shadar fishmonger brought the Captain to us. Croaker was getting old. We were going to have to call him Boss or Chief or something. You cannot call the Captain the Old Man once he’s really old, can you?
He was dressed like a Shadar cavalryman, all turban, beard and plain grey clothing. He eyed Thai Dei coolly. He did not have a Nyueng Bao bodyguard himself. He loathed the idea despite his having to disguise himself whenever he wanted to walk the streets alone. Bodyguards are not traditional. Croaker is stubborn about Company traditions.
Hell, the Shadowmaster’s officers all employ bodyguards. Some have several. They could not survive without them.
Thai Dei reflected Croaker’s gaze impassively, unimpressed by the presence of the great dictator. He might say, “He is one man. I am one man. We begin even.”
Croaker examined my prizes. “Tell it.”
I told it. “But I missed Narayan. I was this close. That bastard has a guardian angel. There’s no way he should have slipped Goblin’s sleep spell. We chased him for two days but even Goblin and One-Eye couldn’t hang onto his track forever.”
“He had help. Maybe from his guardian demon. Maybe from his new buddy the Shadowmaster, too.”
“How come they went back to the grove? How did you know they would be there?”
I thought he would say a big black bird told him.
They are less numerous these days but the crows still follow him everywhere. He talks to them. Sometimes they talk to him, too. So he says.
“They had to come someday, Murgen. They are slaves to their religion.”
But why this particular Festival of Lights? How did you know?
I did not press. You don’t press Croaker. He has grown cranky and secretive in his old age. In his own Annals he did not always tell the whole truth about personal things, his age especially.
He kicked the shadowweaver. “One of Longshadow’s pet spook doctors. You’d think he wouldn’t have enough left to waste them anymore.”
“I don’t reckon he expected us to jump them.”
Croaker tried to smile. He produced a nasty, sarcastic sneer instead. “He’s got lots of surprises coming.” He kicked the Deceiver. “Let’s don’t hide them. Let’s take them to the Palace. What’s the matter?”
Ice had blasted my back, like I was out on the wind of the Grove of Doom again. I didn’t know why but I had a grim sense of foreboding.
“I don’t know. You’re the boss. Anything special you want in the Annals?”
“You’re the Annalist now, Murgen. You write what you have to write. I can always bitch.” Unlikely. I send everything over but I don’t think much gets read. He asked, “What was special about the raid?”
“It was colder than a well digger’s ass out there.”
“And that walking sack of camel snot Narayan Singh got away from us again. So that’s what you write. Him and his kind are going to get back into our story before we’re done. When we’re roasting him, I hope. Did you see her? Was she all right?”
“All I saw really was a bundle that Singh carried. I think it was her.”
“Had to be. He never lets her out of his sight.” He pretended he did not care. “Bring them to the Palace.” That chill hit me again. “I’ll make sure the guards know you’re coming.”
Thai Dei and I exchanged looks. This might get tough. People in the streets would recognize the prisoners. And the prisoners might have friends. And for sure they did have enemies by the thousand. They might not survive the trip. Or we might not.
The Old Man said, “Tell your wife I said hello and I hope she likes the new apartment.”
“Sure.” I shivered. Thai Dei frowned at me.
Croaker produced a sheaf of papers rolled into a tube. “This came in from Lady while you were gone. It’s for the Annals.”
“Someone must have died.”
He grinned. “Bang it around and fit it in. But don’t polish it so much she gets all righteous again. I can’t stand it when she flays me with my own arguments.”
“I learned the first time.”
“One-Eye says he thinks he knows where he left his papers from when he thought he was going to have to keep the Annals.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
Croaker grinned again, then ducked out.
Four hundred men and five elephants swarmed around an incomplete stockade. The nearest friendly outpost lay a hard day’s march northward. Shovels gnawed the earth. Hammers pounded. Elephants swung timbers off wagons and helped set them upright. Only the oxen stood around, lazing in their harnesses.
This nameless post was barely a day old, the newest point in the relentless Taglian leapfrog into the Shadowlands. Only its watchtower was complete. The lookout there scanned the southern horizon intently. There was an electric urgency in the air, a heaviness like the smell of old death, a premonition.
The soldiers were all veterans. Not a one considered fleeing his nerves. Each had developed the habit and expectation of victory.
The sentinel began to gaze fixedly. “Captain!”
A man distinct for his coloring dropped a shovel, looked up. His true name was Cato Dahlia. The Black Company called him Big Bucket. Wanted for common theft in his home city, he had become advisor commander of a battalion of Taglian border rangers. He was a hardass leader with a reputation for getting his jobs done and bringing his people back alive.
Bucket scrambled onto the observation platform, puffing. “What have you got?”
The lookout pointed. Bucket squinted. “Help me out here, son. These eyes ain’t what they used to be.” He could see nothing but the low humped backs of the Loghra Hills. Scattered clouds hung above those.
“Watch.”
Bucket trusted his soldiers. He selected them carefully. He watched.
One small cloud hung lower than the others, dragging a slanting shadow. This rogue thunderhead did not travel the same direction as the rest of its family.
“Headed right for us?”
“Looks like it, sir.”
Bucket relied on his intuition. It had served him well during this war without major battles. And intuition told him that cloud was dangerous.
He descended, spread word to expect an attack. The men of the construction company, although not combat soldiers, did not want to withdraw. Sometimes Bucket’s reputation worked against him. His rangers had prospered, freebooting across the frontier. Others wanted a share.
Bucket compromised. He sent one platoon north with the animals, which were too valuable to risk. The other workers stayed. They overturned their wagons in the gaps in the stockade.
The cloud advanced steadily. Nothing could be seen inside its shadow and tail of falling rain. A chill ran before it. The Taglian soldiers shivered and pranced to keep warm.
Two hundred yards beyond the ditch, teams of two men shivered in covered, concealed pits lighted by special candles. One man maintained a watch.
Rain and darkness arrived. Behind the initial few yards of downpour the rain slackened to a drizzle. Men appeared. They looked old and sad, ragged and pale, vacant and hopeless, hunched against the chill. They looked as though they had spent their entire lives in the rain. They bore their rusting weapons without spirit. They could have been an army raised from the dead.
Their line passed the pits. Behind them came horsemen of the same sort, advancing like zombies. Next came massed infantry. Then came the elephants.
The men in the pits spied the elephants. They used crossbows to speed poisoned shafts. The elephants wore no belly armor. The poison caused intense pain. The maddened beasts rampaged through their own formations. The Shadowlanders had no idea why the animals were enraged.
Little shadows found the pits. They tried to slither inside. Candlelight drove them back. They left a deeper chill and a smell of death behind.
The shadows found a pit where rain had gotten to the candle. They left shrieking, grimacing death in a grave already dug.
Lady encountered the northbound laborers. She questioned them, considered the cloud in the distance. “This may be what we’re after,” she told her companions. “Ride!” She urged her stallion to a gallop. Foaled in sorcerous stables when she was empress of the north, that giant black outdistanced the rest of her party quickly. Lady studied the cloud as she galloped. Three similar clouds had been reported near sites where ranger companies had been overrun. This was exactly what she had come to investigate. It took only minutes to fathom how the raids were managed. Lines of dark power had been laid down long before the Shadowlanders withdrew from this region. The attackers were controlled through those. They would fight without wills of their own while run by those lines.
She could scramble the lines easily now that she sensed them but chose not to do so. Let the attack proceed. These things cost the Shadowlanders more dearly than they cost Taglios.
Longshadow must realize that. So why did he find the exchange worthwhile ?
She entered the ranger encampment by leaping her mount over an upturned wagon. She dismounted as an amazed Bucket ran to meet her. He looked like a condemned man granted a last minute reprieve. “It’s the Howler, I think,” he said.
“Why?” Lady dragged her gear down from behind her saddle, started changing right there. “What can he hope to accomplish?”
“I think it ain’t what they’re doing but who they’re doing it to that matters, Lieutenant.” Though she commanded armies, Lady’s Company title remained Lieutenant.
“Who they’re doing it to? Yes! Of course.” Every unit lost had been led by Company men. Seven brothers had fallen. “They’re picking us off.” The belief that the Company is invincible is the backbone of Taglian military morale and the black beast of Taglian politics. “That’s crafty. Must be Howler’s idea. He does love to blindside you.”
Bucket helped her with her armor. That was gothically ornate, black and shiny, too pretty to be much use in close combat. But her job was to fight sorcery, not soldiers. Her armor was surfaced by layer upon layer of protective spells.
Rain began to fall as she donned her helmet. Threads of fire snaked along channels etched into the surface of her armor. She followed Bucket up the watchtower.
Rain roared down. Sounds of combat grew louder, nearer. Lady ignored those, extended sorcerous senses in a search for the sorcerer known as the Howler. That ancient and evil being did not betray himself but he was out there somewhere. She could smell him.
Was it possible he had learned to control his screaming?
“I’ll catch up with you, you little bastard. Meantime . . . ” She reached down. A fog formed, became dense, slithered between the raindrops, gained color. Pastels swirled, deepened, darkened. Soon the entire storm glowed as though some mad artist had splash-painted it with watercolors.
There were screams inside the storm.
The weather stopped moving. The shrieks of lost soldiers peaked, faded. The Shadowmaster’s lines of power, twisting and mutating, had turned lethal.
Lady resumed searching for the Howler. She discovered him stealing southward, flying low and timidly, fleeing the pastel death that had begun eating its way back along the lines of power. She flung a hastily concocted killing spell. It failed. Howler’s lead was too great. But he did abandon stealth to run hard. Lady cursed like any line trooper frustrated.
The rain faded away. The Taglian survivors appeared one by one, at first awed by the carnage, then grumbling about all the graves that needed digging. Few Shadowlander survivors were found.
Lady told Bucket, “Tell them to look at the bright side. There will be prize money for the captured animals.” The Shadowlander animals, excepting the elephants, had not suffered badly.
Lady glared southward, unforgiving. “Next time, old friend.”
. . . falling . . . again . . .
Trying to hang on. So tired. When I get tired the present gets slippery.
Fragments.
Not even fragments of today.
The past. Not so long ago.
Freezing my ass off. Failing to catch the great villain Narayan.
Lady at play down south.
Fish stench.
The sleeping man. The screaming Deceiver. Dead men.
Only memories but happier than tonight. There is too much pain here.
It is my apocalypse.
Slipping.
Can’t keep my eyes from closing. The summons is too damned powerful.
The pillars might be mistaken for relics of a fallen city. They are not. They are too few and too randomly placed. Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have been gnawed deeply by the teeth of the hungry winds.
In the lightning flares, or in the dawns and sunsets when light steals beneath the edges of the sky, tiny golden characters blaze upon the faces of the columns.
It is immortality of a sort.
After dark the wind dies. After dark silence rules the glittering stone.
. . . sliding away . . .
A vast whirlpool pulling me down.
Perhaps a force pushing. Was that a lying promise of an end to pain?
I cannot resist.
All lies. Endless lies.
Brown pages, torn pages stiff with blood. Agony. Hard to ride that anchor through the storm.
There you are! Were you lost? Welcome back. Come! Come! The great adventure is about to begin. The players are all in place. The engines are wound tight. The spells are collected and ready, in arsenal number. Oh, it will be a grand night of doom.
Look there! Look there. Remember them? Goblin and One-Eye, the wizards? But is that really them? There are two more just like them right over there. And see this. And that. And there. One, two, three Murgens.
No. Definitely not. You can’t teach those two to suck eggs. They have been in the fooled you business since your granny’s greatgranny was a stinky little surprise for your however-many-greats grandpa. They have set glamors all over this part of the city. If you are a Shadowlander soldier you won’t be able to tell the figments from the real thing till one of them sticks a knife in you.
Look there! Raven and Silent. They have been gone for years. And there. That is the old Captain, dead since Juniper. No, they won’t scare any Shadowlanders with who they might be. Not right away. The southerners never heard of them.
What?
You are right. Absolutely right. Nobody here but Otto and Hagop will know them, either. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is they can be seen and hardly anyone will know which ones are dangerous and which are illusions.
This is a first trial. A big experiment, saved up special for the night of Shadowspinner’s big attack.
Yes. Yes. He did hit hard not that long ago. But he wasn’t really going for a knockout then. He would have taken it, but that was really a reconnaissance in force, meant to support planning for this attack.
It is going to be a grand show.
Oh, no, there isn’t one ghost anywhere else in Dejagore. Mogaba wouldn’t have it. He has no grasp of illusion as a weapon. He has no idea how the Company really worked. He clings to his grand notion of chivalrous warfare, the great deadly game, all honor and set rules. He would settled this mess in a trial by combat between him and any champion the Shadowlanders care to send out.
Oh! Look! That one is interesting. That ugly sucker is Toad-killer Dog. He was a real nasty devil dog. And the Limper! Oh, yes. Brilliant. If the man behind Shadowspinner’s mask is anyone the Company has faced before those illusions are provocations he will have to test. He will betray himself.
No, of course the Shadowmasters would not risk an entire kingdom on the outcome of a fight between two men. Their champion might lose.
Yes. Mogaba is naive about some things. He is an arrogant, cruel, unsympathetic general, too.
Ooh. Hear those trumpets. The Company has its own personal bunch of bad guys down front. Let’s go to the ramparts and watch from close up.
No. They aren’t really bright. Well, you could say that if they were bright they wouldn’t be in that army in the first place but that wouldn’t be fair. Not many of those guys had a choice about signing up. Their only real motivation is their fear of the Shadowmasters.
Sure. No argument. That makes them no less deadly. Hell, a rock can fall out of the sky and kill you.
Yes, this definitely is the big one. Shadowspinner is set to send every man. Maybe shadows have come up from Overlook to help.
Bats! Ha. And crows. Which is chasing which? Duck! Almost got you. They are all over. Never been this many around before.
What is that racket? Oh. Bucket yelling at one of the Murgens to get behind something because he don’t want to carry no bodies down no goddamn stairs.
And here comes the first barrage. And if that racket across town means anything the Shadowlanders are hitting hard about where the third and fourth cohorts of the First Legion are stationed. Those are good regiments. They will put up a fight.
Like a regular hailstorm, isn’t it? Makes you wonder where they got all the goddamned arrows and javelins for their engines. Just stay under the mantlet, you’ll be fine. They aren’t good at laying plunging fire onto elevated targets.
If they let up before they attack the Jaicuri will come out and collect the missiles and bring them to the soldiers. The Shadowlanders will get them back business end first.
No, the Jaicuri do not love Mogaba. They don’t love the Taglians or the Black Company, either. They wish the whole mob was gone. But they have some dark suspicions about what will happen if Shadowspinner recaptures this burg. So they sort of try to help, but not much. Not yet.
They help some, they figure maybe Mogaba might be less likely to kick them out next time he is in one of his moods.
The sky? Dark as the inside of a priest’s heart, isn’t it? Oh. Yes. You’re right. It isn’t an auspicious sort of night. Never is when they attack without benefit of a full moon. It’s devil’s work for sure, then. Usually it means the Shadowmasters want the darkness so they can run their pets to their best advantage. Or they want everybody terrified that there are shadows to come. Look at them scurry! Those Jaicuri are motivated tonight, If they become involved in actually fighting it could be closer than Mogaba or Shadowspinner expect. Whoa! What was that? Look at that. What the hell is it? That rosy light over the hills. Here they come. Going to take their whack at breaking the Company. You don’t think so? Maybe you are right. This could be meant to keep the Company pinned while Spinner concentrates somewhere softer.
Look at them down there, though. Like maggots. And no covering fire now.
You’re right. The engines will be moving to support the main attack now.
Check that light. It keeps getting brighter. No. Now it’s going away. And it doesn’t seem like anyone else noticed. That is a little too weird.
Oh. Right again. Must have been a signal to the Shadowlander officers. The racket is getting louder, now you mention it.
No, I don’t like the sound of it either. The attack had become generalized.
Ho! Look over there! Now we have it there, too. What? The light. Don’t you see it? There behind the ramparts?
Yes. I see. You’re right again. It is different. This is kind of like the cold light of a full moon tinged with a little blue, isn’t it. Yeah. It’s kind of misty, too. Sort of like we are seeing it through an autumn haze. There. Now it’s so bright you can make out the fighting on the far wall.
Right. Fighting. That means they have a foothold there already. And Mogaba don’t have any reserves to send up.
Guess we can bend over and kiss our butts goodbye, friend.
Damn! The shit is about to start flying but I just realized that when I started putting these notes together I missed doing the famous formula Croaker always used to open a new volume. So here goes:
In those days the Company was in service to the Prabrindrah Drah of Taglios, a prince whose domains spanned territories more vast than those of many empires. We were participating in the occupation and protection of the recently captured city Dejagore.
And I hope princie and his skag sister the Radisha choke on our memory.
The shitstorm arrived. Every man defending our section of wall stayed busy returning some of it to the southerners. The illusory doppelgangers appeared to be hard at work, too. Funny how they could wander around never getting hurt.
“One-Eye! Goblin!” I yelled. “Where the hell are you peckerheads? What the frack is going on over there?” I watched a feeble arrow pass through a Murgen a dozen yards away. “What’s that weird light?” Whatever it was, it gave me the feeling that things could get worse than they looked already.
I got no response whatsoever from my favorite wizards. “Rudy. Flip a flare ball out there. Let’s see what’s sneaking around.” Until recently my now less than favorite wizards had provided spot illumination. “Bucket! Where the hell are Goblin and One-Eye?” Ten minutes ago I had three pairs underfoot, all of them squabbling. Now they were gone and the Shadowlanders were quieter than mice below.
Red Rudy yelled at Loftus and Cletus. One of their engines thumped. A blazing ball arced outward, its only purpose to betray what the enemy was doing in the darkness.
Sparkle piped, “I seen them headed downstairs.”
Suckass. “Why?” This was for sure not the time to wander away.
“Uh . . . They went to talk to Pirmhi and some of them guys from the Horse Brigade.”
I shook my head. I would choke them myself. In the middle of a goddamned battle . . .
The fireball revealed that the Shadowlanders had pulled back from the wall. Spending our missiles was a waste. The southerners were setting up engines capable of throwing grapnels in clusters. That was a stupid way to do business against an eighty-foot wall with veteran soldiers on top, but if they wanted to play it that way we would accommodate them. I was confident that, no matter how many ropes they threw up, we could cut or dislodge their lines before they could climb that high, then, with lungs ready to fall out and arms too heavy to lift, get busy defending their bridgehead while other equally dim types made the same climb carrying a half ton of equipment apiece. “Goblin!” Goddamnit, I wanted to know what that light was over there.
The Shadowlanders had not scaled the wall there. They had attacked off of earthen ramps. Not a surprise. They had been building the ramps from the beginning. That was just basic siegework, employed since the dawn of time and one reason your thoughtful modern prince builds his stronghold on a crag or headland or island. Naturally, the besieger spans the last dozen feet with a bridge he can yank back if a dangerous counterattack develops.
The flareball smashed down four hundred yards out. It continued to provide light until the southerners buried it with sand originally intended to extinguish firebombs if we used them. “One-Eye! I’m going to have your wrinkled balls for breakfast!”
I snarled, “Cletus, keep throwing them fireballs. Who’s got messenger duty? Feet? Go find Goblin and One-Eye . . . Never mind. One of them brain-damaged runts just turned up.”
One-Eye said, “You rang, milord?”
“Are you sober? Are you ready to get to work now?” He stared at that nasty light across town without me coaching him. I asked, “What is that?” The light seemed more sinister now.
One-Eye raised a hand. “Kid, why not take this gods given opportunity to exercise your least well-honed talent?”
“What?”
“Be patient, dickhead.”
The mist or haze or dust started getting thicker. The light grew brighter. Neither happening buoyed my confidence. “Talk to me, old man. This ain’t the time for any of your bullshit.”
“That haze, that ain’t no mist, Murgen. The light ain’t shining off it. It’s making the light.” And the mist and light were drifting toward the city.
“Horse puckey. You can see where there’s a light burning in their camp.”
“That’s something else. There’s two things going on at once, Murgen.”
“Three things, halfwit.” Goblin had arrived, beer breath and all. Presumably all was well at the secret brewery, the arrangements with the cavalry were secure, and he and One-Eye could take time off to help the Black Company defend Dejagore.
Heaven help them if Mogaba discovered what they were doing with grain supposedly set aside for the horses. I wouldn’t have a prayer of saving their butts nor would I offer one.
“What?” One-Eye barked. “Murgen, the man is a walking provocation.”
“Watch, bonehead,” Goblin countered. “It’s already happening.”
One-Eye gasped, suddenly astonished, then frightened. Ignorant in the dark arts, it took me longer to catch it.
Shadows snaked through that blazing dust cloud, thin things little more than suggestions but with something flitting back and forth amongst them. I thought both of a weaver’s shuttle and of spiders. Whichever, web or net, something was forming inside the blazing dust.
They did call him Shadowspinner.
The glimmering cloud grew larger and brighter. The web grew with it.
“Shit,” Goblin muttered. “Now what do we do about this?”
“Exactly what I’ve been trying to get out of you two clowns for the last five minutes!” I bellowed.
“Well!”
“Maybe you could pay attention over here if you can’t do anything about that!” Bucket yelled. “Murgen, those fools have gotten so many ropes up that we can’t . . . Shit!” Another barrage of grapnels fell amongst us. In moments they showed the strain that meant some moron was trying to climb them.
So much for my belief that there was no chance the southerners could scale my wall.
Guys were hard at work with knives and swords and axes. Imaginary people stood around looking fierce. I heard a man grumble that if he had half a brain he would have sharpened his knives. Rudy reminded him, “If you kept your pecker in your pants more you’d have time.”
Some Jaicuri women, naturally, inevitably, did what they had to do to survive.
Doing my part, I hacked on ropes but kept turning to check that light and the webs forming inside it.
Goblin howled, creased by a nearly spent arrow. The cut, on his cheek, was trivial. Arrows have little energy by the time they reach us. He was outraged because fate dared show him the back of her hand at all.
He danced around. Words of power virtually dripped from his mouth in pastel colors. He waved his arms. He foamed at the mouth. He jumped up and down, shrieked, flapped his arms.
His doppelgangers all did the same. It was quite a show.
In all likelihood the gymnastics and yelling had nothing to do with results eventually achieved but I don’t mind showmanship as long as he produces. Croaker was right. Showmanship is the biggest part of the game.
Everything hemp within three hundred yards burst into flame. That was a happy eventuality where our relationship with our attackers was concerned but not something likely to wring cries of joy from anyone else, either. Temporary defense works began to fall apart. Our artillery pieces flared and died. They had included lots of rope. Some guys use rope for belts. Some wear sandals made of rope. Hemp is a commonplace everywhere. Some fools like One-Eye even smoke it.
Cletus bellowed, “Goddamn you, Goblin, I’m gonna chop your ass into cat food.” The rest of us just pulled our pants up and amused ourselves by dropping masonry bits mined from our cellars onto the cursing tangle of limbs wriggling at the foot of the wall.
One-Eye ignored all that, though he took a moment to smirk at the side effects embarrassing Goblin. Then he began to stare at the glow rising from the enemy camp. And began to stutter.
“Come on, shithead,” I growled. “You’ve played with this stuff for ages. What have we got here?” Not that I wanted to know. That web of shadow woven into the light was now obvious to all but the blind.
“Maybe we might ought to head for the cellar,” One-Eye suggested. “I promise you, me and the runt ain’t gonna do nothing with that. Bet you even Longshadow would be bugeyed if he was here to see it. The man put a lot of work in, getting that ready. It’s going to get real unhealthy around here real soon.” Without investing a quarter of the study time Goblin agreed. “If we seal the doors and use the white candles we can hold out till sunrise.”
“This some kind of shadow magic, then?”
“Some kind,” Goblin agreed. “Don’t ask me to look so close I catch its attention.”
“Heaven forbid you should actually take a risk. Can either of you come up with a more practical suggestion?”
“More practical?” One-Eye sputtered.
“We’re fighting a battle here.”
Goblin said, “We could retire from the soldiering racket. Or we could surrender. Or we could offer to change sides.”
“Maybe we could offer up a half-pint human sacrifice to one of Geek and Freak’s bloodthirsty gods.”
“You know what I really miss about Croaker, Murgen?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me whether I want to hear it or not.”
“Damned straight you are. I miss his sense of humor.”
“Wait a minute. His sense of humor? Are you shitting me? What sense of humor? The man . . . ”
“He knew none of us were going to get out of this world alive, Murgen. He never took himself completely serious.”
“Are you talking about the guy who used to be the Old Man? Croaker? Company Annalist and chief bonesetter in his spare time? Some kind of comedian?”
While we bickered the rest of the world bustled along with its business. Which meant our situation deteriorated by the minute. A human weakness, as old as time, arguing while the house burns down around you.
One-Eye interjected, “You gents go ahead and debate if you want. I’m going to invite the boys downstairs, treat them to a beer and take a turn or two at tonk.” He stabbed a crooked black finger earthward.
The gleaming dust with cruel web inside began to arc up over the city. It just might grow enough to net us all.
A vast stillness set in.
Inside the city and out, friend and foe, people of a dozen races and religions all focused upon that shadow web.
Shadowspinner, of course, was totally involved in creating his deadly artifact.
The Shadowlander assault lost impetus as the Shadowmaster’s soldiers decided to hunker down and let their boss make their jobs easier.