Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

He said the smoldering redhead from the other day was our target.

  “How do you know?” I demanded. In sign.

  Silent tapped the side of his head, pointed to his eyes, then his nose. Shorthand sign meaning he paid attention and he used his noggin when he smelled something a little off.

  He had seen something that was not just prime split tail. So he had stalked her. To the Temple of Occupoa. And had been watching ever since.

  “Predictable,” I signed. Rebels everywhere hide stuff under their houses of worship. “Let’s raid the place.” I was unconcerned about the wrath of Occupoa. The gods seldom defend themselves. “Send her off to the Tower.”

  Elmo agreed. “Along with our least favorite Taken.”

  Elmo and I were the responsible, sensible voices. We got shouted down. Goblin jumped up and down. Every fifth sign he deployed was a vertical middle finger.

  One-Eye insisted, “We’ll play a riff on Roses.”

  “Why?”

  “To gouge the Limper. Maybe frame him for something.”

  “Or we can just give him the girl and get him out of town.”

  Their enthusiasm faded as they recalled the truth of that bitter winter operation in Roses. Of circumstances that started the Limper on the road to now, notably unhappy with the Company.

  Silent signed, “Croaker makes a good point. Wimpy, but solid.”

  One-Eye, though, being One-Eye, smelled opportunity. But One-Eye had a hundred-plus-year record of being One-Eye.

  That considered, the level of enthusiasm plummeted.

  I refused to go to the Captain or Limper with their idiot plan. It relied entirely on the near-immortal, almost demigod Limper being too stupid to see through them. I said, “To even start that going we’d need something magically useful from our target. You guys got some of her hair? Nail clippings? Dirty underwear? Didn’t think so. Let’s go dig her out and turn her over.”

  I did, as noted, remain deft enough to avoid being the man asked to sell the scheme. That honor went to Silent.

  Silent is no bumbler but he did not close the deal. The Captain’s response was, “Find the girl and bring her in. That’s all. Nothing else.”

  Nobody wanted to hear what I thought after Silent came back. One-Eye insisted, “You worry too much, Croaker. You give the little shit too much credit. He ain’t some genius. He’s just an asshole bully whose knack for sorcery is so big he don’t need to think.”

  “Lot of that going around.”

  Goblin said, “Look at all he’s been through since he got out of the ground. None of it made him any smarter; it only made him more careful about what evidence he leaves behind.”

  Why did that make me nervous? “He can smash us like slow roaches without breaking a sweat.”

  One-Eye insisted, “He’s as dumb-ass as you can be and survive. He’s the kind of guy you can hit with the same con five times running and he still won’t figure out what happened.”

  Idiot.

  Limper might be dumb as a bushel of rocks but he was not up against the first string over here. And he had come here with a plan.

  I insisted that we keep on rooting through the records. I told the others to tell me about every death of a girl child.

  It was past my bedtime but I restrained my resentment when summoned by the Captain and Limper. The Old Man said, “We hear you found something.”

  “I did. But I think it’s bogus,” I reported honestly.

  The Captain said, “Good work. Keep digging. But you can’t use Goblin or One-Eye anymore. They’re going TDA somewhere else.” His glance at the Limper was so bland I knew he wanted to feed the man to the lions.

  “They’re useless, anyway. They can’t stay focused even when they’re not feuding.”

  The Captain said, “One more thing before you go.”

  My stomach sank. “Sir?”

  “You were seen messing around with the lord’s carpet. Why? What were you up to?”

  “Messing with it? No, sir. I was talking about it to Hagop. He was all excited. He never saw a carpet up close before. He knew I had to ride carpets a couple times, back when. He wanted to know what it was like. We just talked. We never touched anything.” I was babbling but that was all right. The Limper was used to terrified behavior. “Why? Is it important, sir?”

  The Old Man glanced at his companion, inviting questions or comments. The old spook just stared through me.

  “Apparently not. Dismissed.”

  I tucked my tail and ran. How did the Captain keep cool around that monster?

  I fled the dread for the Dark Horse, where the useless pair and Silent waited. I passed the latest, and, in sign, added, “I don’t like it, guys. The Captain thinks we’re up to something. If the Limper catches on…”

  One-Eye cursed, said something about my damned defeatist attitude, but then gave up. Even he is only blind in one eye.

  Goblin acquiesced, too. Both had, at last, grasped the magnitude of the overreach they yearned to indulge. Well-founded terror settled into their hearts.

  Despite all, we did not go get the girl. Goblin and One-Eye disappeared with the Limper. Silent evaded that fate by being impossible to find. I assumed he was eyes on the target.

  Neither Elmo, Candy, nor the Lieutenant would let us make the catch without a full complement of supporting wizards.

  Silent was supposed to keep hiding in her shadow.

  Elmo’s call for men able to read the local language produced three and a half men, the half being a lost-cause half-ass apprentice shared by Goblin and One-Eye who called himself the Third. The Third because his father and grandfather had worn the same name. I never understood how he survived in the murky weirdness between his teachers.

  The Third came by my town place. He looked less a sorcerer than did One-Eye or Goblin—and was bigger than those two squished together.

  He made me wish they were. “They’re going to raid the Temple of Occupoa tonight. One-Eye wants your help.”

  The terror had not taken deep enough root. A sanctioned operation was planned for the next morning.

  “One-Eye needs his head examined by incompetent authority. Somebody willing to recommend decapitation therapy.” But I got armed up and put together.

  The Third resembled the Captain some, though he was uglier. He talked about as much as the Old Man, too. I asked, “Where were One-Eye and Goblin the last couple days?”

  “Doing something with the Limper. Developing new skills for the Tides Elba hunt.”

  I was skeptical.

  We caught up with the runts and two of the soldiers who could read the local writing, Cornello Crat and Ladora Ans. I started kvetching. “Where’s Silent? Where’s Elmo?”

  “Couldn’t find them,” One-Eye grumbled. He pulled his floppy rag of a hat down so the brim concealed his face. “Be quiet. Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t going to happen. You want to play tonk with the Taken because you think you can scam some money. But you’re so damned blind stupid you don’t see that the real stake you’re shoving into the pot is the Company. All six hundred forty lives.”

  Goblin looked chagrined. One-Eye, though, just wanted to be pissed off. He started to give me a piece of his mind.

  “For the last time, dumb fuck. Listen! With the kind of luck you have playing penny ante tonk you want me to help play against the Limper? I can’t believe that even you are that stupid. We’ll do it the way it’s set. Tomorrow. And you won’t hand the Limper the excuse he wants.”

  One-Eye said nothing. His eye did get big. Seldom had he seen me so intense and never so foul of mouth.

  He would have dismissed me, even so, if Goblin had not shaken like a dog just in out of the rain. “I’m going to side with Croaker on this. On reflection. Get your greed and ego out of it. Consider it on its merits.”

  One-Eye launched a rant about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  Goblin shook all over again, looked a little p
uzzled, then tied into One-Eye. “How the hell do you talk yourself into this shit? How the hell do you stay alive?”

  Victory! I had turned Goblin. Crat and Ans came with him. The Third had made his position clear already by vanishing after he delivered me.

  I had a horrible acid stomach. A slight but stubborn tremor kept my hands unreliable. Crat and Ans seemed just as rocky.

  One-Eye realized that if he wanted to pull this off he would have to do it by himself. That startled and amazed him.

  There was some low cunning under that ugly old black hat. He could back off when nobody else was greedy enough or stupid enough to let him bet their hand.

  “You asshole, Croaker. You win. I hope you got guts enough to put in the Annals what a huge pussy you were when we had a chance to make the biggest score ever.”

  “Oh, it’ll be there. Count on that. Including the fact that the Company survived despite you.” I went on to point out that the Company’s mission was not to make a big score for One-Eye.

  It started to get heated. Then Silent and Elmo turned up. They, in essence, took our little black brother into protective custody, to protect him from himself.

  I consulted Elmo. Elmo consulted Candy. Candy consulted the Lieutenant. When even the gods were not looking, the Lieutenant may have consulted the Captain.

  Word rolled down. Make the move, though Silent’s girl was, likely, not really Tides Elba.

  Elmo was in charge. Goblin and Silent would supply sorcery support. One-Eye and the Third were assigned a critically important secondary mission: a census of goats in Utbank parish. The Lady needed to know.

  The Captain overlooks a lot. A good officer knows when not to see. But that blindness has limits.

  Being me, I found the dark side before the action began. “We took care of One-Eye’s run for the crazy prize but we didn’t get out of the cleft stick.”

  Goblin said, “Humor him. It’ll take less time. And we won’t have to listen to him grumble from now till we lay him down with a stone on top to keep him from getting back up. Speak, Wise One.” He went right on getting ready. So did the others. They would hear me out but did not plan to listen.

  “The Old Man figures that this probably isn’t Tides Elba. So how will the locals respond when we break into a holy place and drag off a temple girl who hasn’t done anything but catch Silent’s eye?”

  Elmo told me, “The same orders said go get her, Croaker. That’s our problem. Not what comes after. We got people who get paid to worry about what comes after. You aren’t one of them. Your job is to come along behind and plug up the holes in any of these dickheads who forget to duck.”

  He was right. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately.” And, honestly, I did not.

  A platoon on the move scattered the locals, but then they followed at a distance, moved by boneheaded nosiness.

  I fell in beside Goblin. “Where did you and One-Eye go those two days with the Limper? What did you do?”

  His broad, pallid face slowly collapsed into a deep frown. “With the Limper? We didn’t go anywhere with the Limper.”

  “You didn’t? But the Old Man told me you were going TDA with the spook. Who was right there when he said it. You were gone two days. Then you came back all determined to do stuff that we already decided would be suicidal.”

  “Two days? You’re sure?”

  “Two. Ask Elmo.”

  He turned contemplative. After maybe fifty yards he asked, “What does the Captain say?”

  “Nothing. He isn’t talking much these days. He has the foulest Taken of them all homesteading in his right front pocket.”

  A hundred yards of silence. The big ugly dome of the Temple of Occupoa now loomed over the tenements surrounding it. It had some claim to minor-wonder-of-the-world status because that huge beehive shape, over eighty feet high, was made entirely of concrete. For those interested in engineering, the temple must be fascinating. Building it had taken a generation.

  The people of Aloe did not give a bat’s ass.

  Goblin said nothing more but did look like a man who had just enjoyed some surprisingly unpleasant revelations.

  There are steps up to the entrance of Occupoa’s temple, two tiers, the lower of seven steps and the upper of six. Those numbers are almost certainly significant. They were granite that mixed grays with a bit of white. The columns and walls were a native greenish-gray limestone, easy to work but susceptible to weathering. Scaffolding masked the west face.

  It was not a holy day. It was too early for traffic related to Occupoa’s fund-raising efforts. It was quiet.

  I climbed the thirteen steps still wondering why we were doing this. Still worrying about the whole Tides Elba puzzle. I had questioned every Aloen I knew. They insisted the name was unknown, that there was no Rebel leader by that name. I believed them. That many people could not all be fine enough actors to appear so honestly baffled.

  On the other hand, one did wonder how they could be so sure there was no Rebel named Tides Elba.

  We paused at the temple entrance. Silent and Goblin conjured several spectral entities to go in first, to trigger ambushes or booby traps.

  They were not needed. Temple defense consisted of one ancient beadle asleep on a chair just inside the entrance. His mission appeared to be to discourage unauthorized withdrawals from a nearby poor box.

  Goblin did something to deepen his sleep.

  One squad moved in and spread out. The rest stayed outside and surrounded the temple. We ran into a whole lot of nothing happening on the inside. The main place of worship was round, with the altar on a short dais in the middle. That was black stone without a single bloodstain. Occupoa had a more enlightened attitude toward the disposal of virgins. Instead, the altar boasted racks of votive candles, only a handful of which were burning.

  The whole place seemed a little shabby.

  I had my teeth clamped so tight my jaw began to ache. This was no Rebel stronghold. Had we been scammed after all? Why did I keep recalling the Limper’s evil way of laughing when things were going his way?

  I had a powerful urge to turn back. I did not.

  Elmo asked, “Which way, Goblin? Silent?” He sounded uneasy. That would be because we had run into no one but the beadle.

  I flashed a nervous grin, certain One-Eye would have tried to plunder that poor box had he been along instead of handling critical empire business in Utbank.

  “Straight ahead. If you didn’t have a dozen guys clanking and whispering you could hear the people up there.”

  I started to worry about One-Eye and Goblin again. What had been done to them while they were out of touch? Maybe Limper brainwashed them. Which could only be for the better in One-Eye’s case.

  Could this raid be part of Limper’s grand scheme to discredit the Company?

  Elmo prodded me. “Move along. What’s with you, anyway? You’re turning into the worst daydreamer.”

  Sounds of surprised excitement broke out ahead.

  The excitement was not the run-for-it kind. It was the what-the-hell-is-going-on kind. It took place in a combination kitchen and dining hall where sixteen women, of a vast range of ages, had been sharing a late breakfast. The older women asked the questions. Elmo ignored them. He asked, “Silent? Which one?”

  Silent pointed.

  The girl from the street shared a table with five others who might have been her sisters. An effort had been made to make them look alike, but our target stood out once you spotted her. She had an aura, a magnetism that marked her as extremely special.

  Maybe our employer had taken a gander into the future and had seen what the girl might become.

  Elmo said, “Silent, get her. Tuco, Reams, help him. Goblin, cover. No weapons.” All stated in a language not spoken in Aloe.

  There was no resistance. The old women stopped protesting and demanding, started asking why we were doing this.

  Silent stood the girl up, bound her wrists behind her. I noted that he wore gloves and was caref
ul to make no skin-to-skin contact. She asked what was going on, once, then succumbed to fear. Which made me feel so awful I just wanted to help her. I could imagine the horrors she expected at our hands.

  “Wow,” Elmo said, very softly.

  “Indeed,” Goblin agreed. “Potent. Maybe she is something special.”

  We went back out the way we had come in, Goblin and I doing rearguard duty. Elmo, in the lead and in a hurry, caught a kid in the process of robbing the poor box. Elmo responded harshly.

  The would-be thief was unconscious when I settled down to treat his broken arm. Elmo had avoided shedding too much blood.

  Goblin stuck with me. Elmo collected the platoon and, with Silent valiantly negating whatever it was the girl gave off under stress, headed for the compound. Scores of baffled Aloens watched. Some tagged along after Elmo.

  Goblin studied the locals for signs of belligerence. Preoccupied, he did not hear what I thought I heard from the shadows inside the temple. If it was not my frightened imagination running away with me.

  It was a drag-scrape, sudden clop! then another drag-scrape. Like somebody with a bad leg having a hard time keeping quiet while crossing a wide stone floor.

  “How come you think I imagined it?” I demanded. Goblin and I were approaching the Dark Horse. Our presence was not necessary at the compound. Elmo could handle all that. And, when the temple girl proved not to be Tides Elba, he could be the man who got in there and did some serious planning on how to track and catch the real thing.

  “Because I got a great view of the southern sky.” He pointed.

  From out of the distance, unhurried, a flying carpet headed across town, no more than fifty feet above the rooftops. Two people were visible on the side toward us, one wearing a filthy, floppy black hat.

  So. The Limper had gone to Utbank parish to find out what One-Eye was up to. And had decided to bring him and the Third back, not entirely convinced that the Old Man had sent them out there because One-Eye’s greed was complicating matters.

  “All right. It must have been my guilty conscience. Let’s reward ourselves for work well done with some of Master Zhorab’s fine ale.”