The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  This had been going on for days.

  “What is the trouble?” Uncle Doj asked.

  “There’s nothing there. I remembered perfectly but can’t find a clue toward an explanation.”

  “Then you must relax. Stop fighting yourself. Thai Dei. Get the practice swords.”

  I wanted to scream that this was not the time. But this was his answer to all stress. Come to the swords. Pursue the exercise rituals. Parade the stances. To do it right required total concentration. And it always worked, no matter how much I disbelieved.

  Even Gota joined us, though she was less adept than I.

  90

  The night that I had tried to find my way back from Smoke’s hideout I had wondered if One-Eye had cast some confusion spells around there. I learned that he had—and had scattered random pockets of confusion all through the disused parts of the Palace so the one critical area would not stand out. He gave me an amulet of charmed woolen strings, several colors twisted together, that I was supposed to wear on my wrist. It would let me pass through the spells no more confused than my usual state.

  “Be careful,” he told me. “I change these spells every day now that you’re working Smoke regular. I don’t want nobody stumbling in there while you’re out of body. Especially not the Radisha.”

  That made sense. There was no calculating Smoke’s value. No instrument for espionage this valuable had ever existed before. We did not dare risk compromising him.

  The Old Man gave me a list of regular checks he wanted made. These included keeping a close watch on Blade. He did not use that information immediately, though. I supposed he was laying back, letting Blade gain confidence. And, occasionally, letting Blade deal with our religious problem children for us, too.

  I did not ask but I am sure the policy was coolly deliberate. The priesthoods provided our main political challenges. Made sense to me, too, to use them up keeping Blade from getting too strong.

  I had my personal list of investigations, too, some meant to satisfy my own curiosity, most to get straight events that needed to be recorded in the Annals. I spent about ten hours a day just working on the books.

  * * *

  I rise, write, eat, write, visit Smoke, write, sleep for a little while, then get up and do it all again. I do not sleep long or well because I do not care to tarry in the house of pain.

  Uncle Doj has decided not to return to his swamp. Likewise, Mother Gota. They stay out of my way, mostly. But they are always here, always watching. They have expectations.

  The new phase of the war is here. They have decided to play a part. They mean the cruelty of the Deceivers to be requited by the cruelty of the Nyueng Bao.

  * * *

  One of the big problems of espionage, I have discovered, is figuring out where to look for the information you want. When I need to know something for the Annals I usually have an idea when things happened, where and who was involved. It is a chance to flit off and double-check my memory, which I have found to be astonishingly unreliable.

  Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking we have invested.

  * * *

  One-Eye has his ego problems, of course. Maybe they are why he will not let me wander through his arms factory. If it does not have something to do with guarding his ledgers from outside scrutiny. I will spy on him now that he plans to close down soon.

  One-Eye carries a lot on his old shoulders. Among the things he does is he acts as a sort of Minister of Armaments. He has a whole fortified section of town where he oversees the manufacture of everything from arrowheads to monster siege engines. Much of his production gets crated up and sent straight to the docks, to be loaded aboard barges and sent downriver to the delta where, via a series of crude canals, the barges are worked over into the Naghir River, which shares the delta. Then they travel up the Naghir and its tributaries to armories near the frontier. I have no doubt that some of the material fails to reach its destination. I expect that One-Eye somehow profits. I hope he has sense enough not to sell to the enemy. Croaker catches him doing that and One-Eye will think that Blade gets treated like a mischievous kid brother.

  * * *

  My first swoop into the arsenal was a quick psychic raid. One-Eye’s compound consisted of a gaggle of once dissimilar and unrelated structures now interconnected in a mad maze. All windows and most doors had been bricked up. Men selected for their size, bad tempers and lack of imagination infested the few entrances. They allowed no one in and no one out. The street outside the freight entrance was crowded day and night. Files of wagons and carts, drawn by weary oxen, crept forward to be unloaded and loaded by weary workmen watched banefully by the unimaginative men, who foamed at the mouth if carters and laborers so much as made eye contact. Around and amongst the carts swarmed countless runners carrying long poles from which hung dozens of pails filled with hot food for the workers. The guards checked every pail. They even took turns checking on each other.

  Taglios has a richly diverse, complex, and deeply specialized labor economy. Folks will make a living one way or another and other folks will give them room. Near the Palace is a bazaar devoted entirely to grooming services, catering mainly to Palace functionaries. One guy does nothing but trim nose hairs. Right beside him, operating in a space less than four feet wide, with oils and silver tools displayed on a tiny inlaid table, is an old character who will clean the wax from your ears. He does nothing else but retail gossip. This business has been in his family for generations. He is sad because he has no son to inherit. When he goes his family will lose that space in the bazaar.

  It is all symptomatic of horrid overpopulation and the desperate difficulty of surviving at the bottom. I would not want to be a Taglian of low caste.

  Lucky me, I did not have to check in with One-Eye’s thugs. There seemed to be no provision against magical espionage. I darted inside. I guess One-Eye did not worry because Longshadow could no longer send his pets snooping this far. But what about the Howler? He could sneak up on us any time he wanted.

  Trying to track Howler was one of my regular duties.

  The arsenal workers were doing ordinary things. Making arrowheads. Sharpening them. Making arrows. Fletching them. Building artillery pieces. Attempting to mass produce a light cotton body armor for the ordinary infantryman—who, no doubt, would discard it because it was hot and uncomfortable and a nuisance to lug around.

  Only the glassblowers surprised me.

  There were two dozen workers in that department and most were employed producing small, thin bottles. A platoon of apprentices tended fires, heated the silicates that became raw glass, carried off trays of bottles once they cooled. Those went to carpenters who placed them into crates with sawdust packing. A few of the crates went aboard big long-haul wagons but most went to the waterfront.

  What the devil?

  There was a big piece of slate in One-Eye’s office. Upon it, in Forsberger, were chalked what appeared to be production targets. Fifty thousand bottles. Three million arrows. Five hundred thousand javelins. Ten thousand cavalry lances. Ten thousand sabers. Eight thousand saddles. One hundred fifty thousand infantry short swords.

  Some of those numbers were absurd and there was no way any could be reached by One-Eye’s arsenal alone. But production took place all over the Taglian territories—most often in one-man blacksmith shops. One-Eye’s main job was to keep track. Which looked to me a lot like letting the fox do bedcheck at the chicken house.

  The list also included animals and wagons and lumber by the hundred barge loads, much of which I did understand. But five thousand box kites, ready for assembly, twelve feet by three feet? Each with one thousand feet of string? One hundred thousand yards of silk in bolts six feet tall?

  He was not going to get that one.

  * * *

  I went roving to see what else was being readied for Mogaba and his friends.

  I saw
training camps where commando teams prepared for every imaginable terrain and mission. Down south, Lady pursued her own programs, creating forces prepared to operate offensively on the sorcerous battlefield.

  She had scoured the Taglian territories for every person possessed of even the slightest magical talent and had schooled them just enough to make them useful in a program I could not fathom no matter how I poked at it. As Longshadow had noted, she was stripping the Taglian territories of bamboo. That got cut into several standard lengths and had red-hot rods run through to burn out the joints. Lady had the resulting tubes packed with little spongy colored marbles created by her squads of hedge wizards.

  Another game of baffle the Shadowmaster? Half of what we were doing was smoke and mirrors meant to confuse the opposition and make them waste resources or commit them in the wrong places. But I was more confused than Longshadow could possibly be.

  Lady slept less than did the Captain. Croaker seldom slept more than five hours a night. If sheer drive could conquer Mogaba and the Shadowmaster we were surefire winners.

  Both Lady and the Old Man hide so much inside themselves that even after all these years I have no sure grasp of how they think. They share a strong love but seldom demonstrate it. They want to recover their daughter and avenge themselves upon the Deceivers but never speak of the child publicly. Croaker is determined to lead the Company back to mysterious Khatovar, to unearth its origins, but does not talk about that at all anymore.

  On the surface it would seem those two live only for the war.

  * * *

  I drifted back to One-Eye’s factory. I was reluctant to leave Smoke. I knew if I delayed much longer I would return to find my body exhausted, starved, and extremely thirsty. The smart way to use Smoke was to take short journeys mixed with lots of times out for snacks and drinks. But that was hard to recall out there, especially when there was so much pain waiting back in my own slice of reality.

  This time I discovered a room I had overlooked earlier. In it Vehdna workers moved lazily amongst a dozen ceramic tubs. Some carried buckets from which they scooped fluid into the tubs a cup at a time. The fluid came from a vat a man kept stirring when he was not adding water or some white powder.

  I saw little remarkable about those tubs. The solution got added at one end. At the other end fluid trickled down a glass tube into a large earthenware jug. Once filled each jug got stopped and carried carefully to storage on shelves well out of the way. Unlike wines, they were shelved upright. Curiously, the lamps in the room burned unusually bright.

  I studied one tub, noted that small bubbles kept rising at the end where the workers added the fluid. At the far end, well below the surface, were dozens of short rods caked with a silvery-white substance. On the floor of the tub were several handleless glass cups. Using ceramic tools a gloved worker moved a cup under a rod, scraped stuff off into the cup. Once that settled he used wooden tongs to lift the cup from the tub. He carried it with considerable care but, nevertheless, managed to stumble.

  The stuff off the rod blazed fiercely when exposed to the air.

  I had to get back to my flesh. I had to eat. Soon enough I would have to pack because real soon all of us would be headed south. The war’s next stage was gathering momentum.

  91

  Otto and Hagop were back, after innumerable frustrating delays on the last river leg, which should have been the easiest part of their journey. They were concealed in the same Shadar waterfront warehouse that I had used to hold the captives from the Grove of Doom. One-Eye collected me from my quarters. He and I and my brown shadow headed for the river.

  The Old Man beat us there. He could drop everything when he really wanted. “You all right, Murgen?”

  “I’m handling it.”

  “He’s spending too much time with Smoke,” One-Eye said.

  “That don’t sound healthy. Would you look at these guys?” He meant Otto and Hagop, though the others of their expedition were confined to the warehouse, too, and were not enthusiastic about being kept away from their families.

  It had been almost three years.

  Neither Otto nor Hagop looked much different. I told Hagop, “I’d almost given up on you guys.” We shook hands. I shook with Otto, too. “I thought your luck finally ran out.”

  “We came close, Murgen. We used up a lot.”

  “So,” the Old Man said. “What took so long?”

  “Actually, there ain’t that much to tell.” Hagop looked at Croaker oddly, as though to make sure he was talking to the real Old Man. Croaker was in his Shadar disguise. “We went, we did what we could, we came back.” Like a fourteen-thousand-mile round trip was routine? In the Company we do not brag about the big stuff. “We didn’t do a lot of sightseeing.”

  While Hagop talked Otto made a circuit of the doors and windows. He asked, “We need to worry about spies?”

  “This is Taglios,” Croaker replied. By which he meant that everyone is always watching everyone else, looking for an edge.

  “We figured you guys would have them all squared away by now.”

  “That’s a lot of squaring. Shadowlander spies, yeah, they aren’t a problem. Lady and Goblin and One-Eye took care of them.”

  I said, “We still have the priesthoods.”

  “And we’ve had a little Deceiver trouble lately.”

  Something in my face warned Hagop against pursuing that. Not now. “How goes the war, then?”

  “Slowly,” Croaker told him. “We can talk about that later. You do us any good up there?”

  “Not much, to be honest.”

  “Damn!”

  “We did get a bunch of stuff for the Annals. Murgen, you might want to work it in. It’s stuff about what other people were doing that will help make better sense of what we did. I figure you could work it in between stuff that Croaker wrote. That way them that comes after us can see both sides. Huhm?”

  “Maybe you ought to take over.” Sourly.

  “Learn me how to read and write. I’m too old for this other shit.”

  “Might do that,” I glanced at Croaker. “Long as you don’t edit me.”

  The Old Man grinned.

  Hagop chuckled. “The gods forfend, Murgen. Not me. Hey. I found out all about what happened after we left up there, too. You wouldn’t believe the excitement. The Limper came back one more time. Don’t worry. It’s all settled now. The empire is boring these days.”

  “Sounds like I wish I was back home.”

  Croaker asked, “Did you actually get into the Tower?”

  “We spent six months there. Mainly getting the runaround at first.”

  “And?”

  “We finally convinced them that Lady was getting her powers back. They got cooperative then. Folks in the Tower these days like not having her around.”

  “Gee. That’ll break her heart,” I said.

  Hagop grinned. “Yeah. They won’t send us any help. Say they don’t want to make any new enemies. I think it’s mostly because they don’t want Lady getting nostalgic for her good old days and heading back north.”

  Croaker said, “We figured that. There’s nothing in this for them but keeping Lady away. What did you get?”

  “They opened their records. Lent us translators. Even opened graves when we asked.”

  “They would have an interest in who was buried there themselves.”

  “Damned if they didn’t. They had to change their linens after we told them who all turned up alive down here. See, they had a major scare when the Limper came back and damned near took them apart.”

  I said, “That guy had a bigger boner for us than Soulcatcher does.” No way did we need to add the Limper to our list of enemies. “What about my turnip seeds?”

  Hagop said, “They made sure of Limper this time. Absolutely sure. I got your seeds. Turnips and parsnips and even some seed potatoes—if they haven’t spoiled.”

  Croaker said, “They would make sure of Limper.” He watched Otto prowl. Otto was restless, un
comfortable. “So they let you poke around and even gave you some help with it. What did you learn?” That had been the point. To see if they knew anything way up north that we could use here.

  “Not much. It don’t seem likely that Longshadow was ever one of the Taken.”

  I was confident of that. I was sure he would have betrayed himself to Howler by now if they had been allies in the past. “Those potatoes. Did you get the little kind like I…”

  Hagop glowered at me, told the Old Man, “There is the remotest chance that he could be the Faceless Man, Moonbiter, or Nightcrawler—although everybody up there was sure those three really did bite the dust. It was just that we couldn’t come up with any bodies.”

  “How about one of the later Taken?” Croaker mused.

  “Five actually survived. Journey, Whisper, Blister, Creeper and Learned. But Lady stripped all five of their powers. In front of witnesses.”

  “But Lady has been getting her powers back,” I argued.

  “A point. On the other hand, we know the exact day when the Shadowmasters appeared. Even the hour, I gather. All the later Taken were still in business up north. In fact, most of them weren’t even Taken yet.”

  I traded glances with the Old Man. He began pacing. He said, “When Soulcatcher held me captive she told me one of the Shadowmasters who died at Dejagore wasn’t ever one of the Taken.”

  I added, “Neither was Shadowspinner.”

  Hagop said, “All they could tell us, really, was that they didn’t have a clue if Longshadow used to be one of the old mob. The written record supported them.”

  Croaker kept pacing, narrowly avoided a collision with Otto, but stayed well away from the cluster of unhappy Taglians awaiting his blessing upon their desires to go home. After all this time could they recognize him through his Shadar disguise? Probably.

  I was sure he was thinking that this war with the Shadowmasters was no ordinary struggle, that the stakes went far beyond simple survival. He said, “We’ve taken three of the bastards down. But Longshadow is the worst. He is the craziest. He’s working on Overlook day and night.…”