by Glen Cook
“That other woman. That married one. She does not have the fire.” His words were a ghost of speech. When he talked, his hands shook too badly to hold his tools.
“She’s afraid to succeed.”
“And afraid not to. You are busy, Little Girl.” He beamed because he had gotten that out without much trouble. “You do what you must. But I have to talk to you again. Soon. Before this happens to me again.” He spoke slowly and with great care. “You are the one.” He was tiring, so great was his mental effort. He beckoned me closer, murmured, “Soldiers live. And wonder why.”
Someone threw the tent flap back. Brilliant light burst inside. I knew it was Gota without being able to see. Her odor preceded her. “Try not to make him talk too much. He’s worn out.”
“I have seen this problem before.” Cold, yet civil. More animated than she had been for some time but still not the caustic, frequently irrational Gota of last year. “I will be of more value here.” Her accent was much less heavy than usual. “Go kill someone, Stone Soldier.”
“Been a while since anybody called me that.”
Gota bowed mockingly as she waddled past. “Bone Warrior. Soldier of Darkness, go forth and conjure the Children of the Dead from the Land of Unknown Shadows. All Evil Dies There an Endless Death.”
I stepped outside, baffled. What was that all about?
Behind me, “Calling the Heaven and the Earth and the Day and the Night.”
I thought I had heard that formula before but could not recall the place or the context. Surely it was sometime when a person of the Nyueng Bao conviction was being particularly cryptic.
The excitement had increased. Someone had stolen some horses already … had acquired them. Let us not leap too far with our conclusions. Several riders were charging around, unguided by any rational plan. Something should have been in place for a situation like this. I grumbled, “This’s what happens when nobody wants to take charge. You three men! Get over here! What in the name of God are you doing?”
After listening to their hemming and hawing, I gave some orders. They galloped off with messages. I murmured, “There is no God but God. God is the Almighty, Boundless in Mercy. Show Mercy unto me, O Lord of the Seasons. Let mine enemies be even more confused than my friends.” I felt like I was inside the eye of a storm of screwups.
My fault? All I did was show up. If I was likely to have that effect, someone should have met me away from witnesses and led me to Sahra’s farm. That might have given us time to get into shape, with nobody the wiser.
We really had very little formal organization, no declared chain of command, and no established table of responsibility. We had no real policies other than fixed enmities and an emotional commitment to release the Captured. We had deteriorated into little more than a glorified bandit gang and I was embarrassed. It was partly my fault.
I rubbed my behind. I had a distinct feeling the Captain was going to catch up on years’ worth of chew-outs. I could make all the excuses I wanted about only being a stand-in for Murgen while he was buried, but I had been chosen as his understudy. And the Annalist is often the Standardbearer, too, and the Standardbearer is generally designated because those in command think he is capable of becoming Lieutenant and possibly, eventually, Captain. Which meant that Murgen had seen something in me a long time ago and the Old Man had not found cause to disagree with him. And I had done nothing with that but have a good time designing torments for our enemies while a woman who was not a pledged member of the Company assumed most of its leadership by default. Sahra’s courage and intelligence and determination were beyond reproach but her skills as a soldier and commander were less so. She meant well but she did not understand strategies not designed around her own needs and desires. She wanted to resurrect the Captured, of course, but not for the benefit of the Black Company. She wanted her husband back. To Sahra, the Company was just a means of achieving her ends.
We were about to pay the price of my reluctance to step forward and serve the interests of the Company.
We were hardly more than the gang of thugs the Protector claimed us to be. I was willing to bet that any determined resistance we encountered hereabouts was likely to shatter what little family spirit the Company had left. We would have to pay for forgetting who and what we were. And my anger, mainly at myself, made me seem twice life-size. I stomped around screaming and foaming at the mouth and before long had bullied everyone into doing something useful.
And then a sorry bunch of ragamuffins trudged out of the New Town and headed for the refugee camp like a reluctant flock of geese, honking and straggling all over. They numbered about fifty and carried weapons. The steel was more impressive than the soldiers carrying it. The local armorer did his job well. Whoever trained recruits did not. They were more pathetic than my gang. And my guys had the advantage of having knocked people over the head before and so had little reluctance to hurt someone again. Particularly if that someone threatened them.
“Tobo. Go get Goblin.”
The boy eyed the approaching disorder. “I can handle that clusterfuck, Sleepy. One-Eye and Goblin have been teaching me their tricks.”
Scary idea, a frenetic teenager with their skills and their lunatic lack of responsibility. “That might well be. You might be a god. But I didn’t tell you to handle it. I told you to go get Goblin. So move it.”
Red anger flooded his face but he went. If I had been his mother, he would have argued until the wave of southerners rolled over us.
I walked toward the soldiers, painfully conscious that I still wore the rags I had had on since the day we sneaked out of Taglios. Nor was I equipped with anything remarkable in the way of weapons. I carried a stubby little sword that never had been much use for anything but chopping wood. I was always at my best as the kind of soldier who stands off at a distance and plinks the enemy when he is not looking.
I found a suitable spot and waited, arms crossed.
61
No grand effort had been made to train these troops or clothe them well. Which reflected the Protector’s disdain for petty detail. What threat could the fledgling Taglian empire possibly face out here at the edge of beyond, anyway? There were no threats from beyond the borders.
The officer leading the pack was overweight, which also told me something about the local military. Peace had persisted for a decade but times were not yet so favorable that this country could support many fat men.
Huffing and puffing, the officer could not speak first. I told him, “Thank you for coming. It shows initiative and a mind capable of recognizing the inevitable swiftly. Have your men stack their weapons over there. Assuming everything goes the way it should, we’ll be able to let them go home in two or three days.”
The officer gulped some more air while he strove to understand what he was hearing. Evidently this little person had some mad notion that she had the upper hand. Though he had no way of telling if I was he, she or it.
I allowed the rags at my throat to fall open long enough for him to see the Black Company medallion I wore as a pendant on a silver chain. “Water sleeps,” I told him, sure rumor had had plenty of time to carry that slogan to the ends of the empire.
Though I failed to intimidate him into ordering his men to disarm instantly, I did buy a few moments for the rest of the gang to gather. And a grim-looking band of cutthroats they were. Goblin and Tobo came down to stand beside me. Sahra shouted at her son from somewhere behind us but he ignored her. He had decided he was one of the big boys now and that stinking Goblin kept encouraging his fantasies.
I said, “I suggest you disarm. What’s your name? What’s your rank? If you don’t get rid of the weapons, a lot of people will get hurt and most of them are going to be you. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you cooperate.”
The fat young man gulped air. I do not know what he had expected. This was not it. I was not it. I expect he was used to bullying refugees too battered by fate to even consider resisting another humiliation.
&n
bsp; Goblin cackled. “Here’s your chance, kid. Show us what you got.”
“Here’s one I’ve been practicing when nobody was around.” Tobo kept on talking but in a whisper so soft I could not make out the words. In a few seconds I did not care about the words, anyway. Tobo began turning into something that was no gangly teenage boy. Tobo began turning into something I did not want to be around.
The kid was a shapeshifter? Impossible. That stuff took ages to master.
At first I thought he was going to become some mythical being, a troll, an ogre, or some misshapen and befanged creature still essentially human in shape, but he went on to become something insectoid, mantislike but big and really ugly and really smelly and getting bigger and uglier and smellier by the second.
I realized I did not smell so good myself. Which is usually a clue that you smell pretty awful to those around you, since you are not normally aware of your own odor.
Like most of what he saw from his teachers, Tobo was presenting an illusion, not undergoing a true transformation. But the southerners did not know that.
I was part of an illusion of my own. Goblin’s huge grin told me who was behind the little practical joke, too. He was not too far over the top with it, either, so I might not have noticed had I not been alerted by what was happening with Tobo.
I seemed to be becoming some more-traditional nightmare. Something like what you might expect to see if for generations they had been saying that the Black Company was made up of guys who ate their own young when they could not roast yours.
“Have your men stack their weapons. Before this gets out of hand.”
Tobo made a clacking noise with his mouth parts. He sidled forward, rotating his bug head oddly as he considered where to start munching. The officer seemed to understand instinctively that predators take the fat ones first. He discarded his weapons where he stood, having no inclination to get any closer to Tobo.
I said, “Men, you might help these fellows dispose of their tools.” My own people were as stunned as the native soldiers were. I was stunned myself but remained plenty scared enough to take advantage while we retained the upper hand psychologically. I went around to the other side of the soldiers, putting them between horrors. Horrors they were not yet sure were entirely illusions. Sorcerers conjured some pretty nasty creatures sometimes. Or so I have heard.
That must be true. My brothers had told me about the ones they had seen. The Annals told me about more.
The southerners began to give up their weapons. Spiff or Wart or somebody remembered to make them lie down on their bellies. Once a handful got it started, the rest found themselves short on the will to resist, too.
Sahra could not hold back anymore. She tied into Goblin. “What are you doing to my son, you crazy old man! I told you I don’t want him playing with—”
A Ssss! and a Clack! erupted from Tobo. A claw on the tip of a very long limb snipped at Sahra’s nose.
The kid was going to be sorry about that stunt later.
Uncle Doj hustled up. “Not now, Sahra. Not here.” He pulled her away. His grip evidently caused her considerable distress. Her anger did not subside but her voice did. The last thing I heard her say was something unflattering about her grandmother, Hong Tray.
I said, “Goblin, enough with the show. I can’t talk to this man if I look like a rakshasa’s mother.”
“It ain’t me, Sleepy. I’m just here to watch. Take it up with Tobo.” He sounded as innocent as a baby.
Tobo was preoccupied, having altogether too much fun playing the scary monster. I told Goblin, “You’re going to be teaching him that stuff, you’d better put some time into getting across the concept of self-discipline, too. Not to mention, you need to teach him not to bullshit people. I know who’s doing what to whom here, Goblin. Stop it.”
I was not disappointed to discover that Tobo had some talent. It was almost inevitable, actually. It was in his blood. What troubled me was the time of life when Goblin and, presumably, One-Eye had chosen to lure his talent into the open. In my opinion, Tobo was at exactly the wrong age to become all-powerful. If no one controlled him while he learned to rule himself, he could become another perpetual adolescent chaotic like Soulcatcher.
“All part of the program, Sleepy. But you need to understand that he’s already more mature and more responsible than you or his mother want to admit. He’s not a baby. You have to remember that most of what you see in him is him showing you what he thinks you expect to see. He’s a good kid, Sleepy. He’ll be all right if you and Sahra don’t mother him to death. And right now he’s at an age when you have to back off and let him stub his toes or regret it later.”
“Child-rearing advice from a bachelor?”
“Even a bachelor can be smart enough to know when the child-rearing part is over. Sleepy, this boy has a big, hybrid talent. Be good to him. He’s the future of the Black Company. And that’s what that old Nyueng Bao granny woman foresaw when she first saw Murgen and Sahra together, back during the siege.”
“Marvelous reasoning, old man. And your choice of time to bring that to my attention is typically, impeccably inconvenient. I’ve got fifty prisoners to deal with. I’ve got a pudgy little new boyfriend here and I need to convince him that he ought to help me talk his fellow captains into cooperating with us. What I don’t have is time to deal with the difficult side of Tobo’s adolescence. Pay attention. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re no longer a secret. The Kiaulune wars have started up again. I wouldn’t be surprised if Soulcatcher herself didn’t turn up someday. Now get me out of this imaginary ugly suit so I can do whatever I have to do.”
“Oh, you’re so forceful!” Goblin made the illusion go away. He made the one surrounding the boy fade, too. Tobo seemed surprised that he could be overruled so easily, but the little wizard softened the blow to his ego by immediately engaging him in a technical critique of what he had accomplished.
I was impressed by what I had seen. But Tobo as the future of the Company? That made me real uncomfortable, despite its questionable reassurance that the Company did have a future.
62
I stirred the fat officer with a toe. “Come on. Hop up here. We need to talk. Spiff, let the rest of these people sit up as soon as their weapons are cleared away. I’ll probably let them go home in a little while. Goblin, you want to go face the music with Sahra? Get that out of the way so it isn’t just waiting for a bad time to blow up on us?”
The fat officer got his feet under him. He looked very, very unhappy, which I could understand. This was not his best day. I took hold of his arm. “Let’s you and me take a walk.”
“You’re a woman.”
“Don’t let it go to your head. Do you have a name? How about a rank or title?”
He offered a regional name about a paragraph long, filled with the unmanageable clicks that mess up a language otherwise already unfit for the normal human tongue. As proof of my assertion, I offer my inability to manage it at much more than a pidgin level despite having spent years in the area.
I picked out what sounded like it identified his personal place in the genealogy of a nation. “I can call you Suvrin, then?” He winced. I got it after a moment. Suvrin was a diminutive. No doubt he had not been called that by anyone but his mother for twenty years.
Oh, well. I had a sword. He did not.
“Suvrin, you’ve probably heard rumors to the effect that we’re not nice people. I want to put your mind at ease. Everything you’ve ever heard is true. But this time we’re not here to loot and pillage and rape the livestock the way we did last time. We’re really just passing through, we hope with minimal dislocation for everybody, both us and you. What I need from you, assuming you’d rather cooperate than lie in a grave being walked on by some replacement who will, is a bit of official assistance aimed at hurrying us on our way. Have I been going too fast for you?”
“No. I speak your language well.”
“That’s not what I—never mind. Here’s what’s
happening. We’re going to go up on the glittering plain—”
“Why?” Pure fear filled his voice. He and his ancestors had lived in terror of the plain since the coming of the Shadowmasters.
I offered a bit of nonsense. “For the same reason the chicken crossed the road. To get to the other side.”
Suvrin found that concept so novel he could think of no response.
I continued, “It’ll take us a while to get ready. We have to assemble provisions and equipment. We have to scout some things. And not all of our people have arrived yet. I’d just as soon not fight a war at the same time. So I want you to tell me how to avoid that.”
Suvrin offered an inarticulate grumble.
“What’s that?”
“I never wanted to be in the army. My father’s doing. He wanted me away from the family, someplace where I couldn’t embarrass him, but he also wanted me doing something he felt to be in keeping with the family dignity. He thought if I was a soldier, there’d be nothing I could mess up. We had no enemies who could embarrass me.”
“Stuff happens. Your father should know that. He’s lived long enough to have a grown-up son.”
“You don’t know my father.”
“You might be surprised. I’ve met plenty just like him. Probably some that were way worse. There’s nothing new in this world, Suvrin. And that includes all kinds of people. How many more soldiers are there around here? How many all told on this side of the mountains? Do any of them have any special loyalty to Taglios? Will they abandon Taglios if the pass is closed?” The Territories south of the Dandha Presh were vast but weak. Longshadow had exploited them mercilessly for more than a generation, then the Shadowmaster and Kiaulune wars had devastated them.
