The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  “But their force is larger?”

  “The combat force is, yes, slightly. But it consists of less disciplined troops. The evidence all says she’s made this move out of political expediency. The Taglian priesthoods have recovered from the blow she struck them four years ago. They have started testing her. She’s just diverting them. Singh’s spies say all the senior Taglians expect this campaign to end in defeat.”

  “Get some rest. Prepare the other carpet. If I must go up there then I must accept the risk fully. I’ll want to arrive there before Mogaba succumbs to the temptation to take the fight to his enemies.”

  Even now, after natural disaster had stalled construction on Overlook indefinitely, Longshadow was determined to stall for time instead of taking the offensive.

  I am no military genius but I have read the available Annals a few times. Nowhere in there did I ever find mention of anybody who won a war sitting on his ass.

  Much as I hate the man personally, professionally I can feel sorry for Mogaba. For about fifteen seconds. Before we cut his throat.

  17

  Smoke seemed untroubled and comfortable after my visit to Overlook so I left the ghostworld long enough to fill both our stomachs with food and water. He had fouled himself. One-Eye was uninclined to stop and clean him up so I did the honors while the vehicle creaked and bounced and tossed me around. The thankless chore done, I decided to relieve myself before I suffered a similar embarrassment while I was out.

  It had happened before.

  I found the whole Ky gang trudging along within rock-throwing distance of the wagon. One-Eye scowled down at me. He did not like having them hang so close. Especially Mother Gota, who kept trying to strike up a conversation. I grinned and headed off into the brush.

  Somebody almost mistook me for a Shadowlander straggler but my luck held and I got back to the wagon in one piece. One-Eye bitched, “I’d like to lay my paws on the dickhead who decided this was a road. This damn seat is beating my ass into a paste.”

  “You could get married, retire, drop out and raise turnips.”

  “You got a serious attitude problem, Kid. You come on anything interesting?”

  “Not really. But I’m going out again. Soon as you stop chattering.”

  “Goddamn kids. You try to be nice—” The left rear wheel fell into a hole, shaking the entire wagon and shutting him up for as long as it took him to marshall an array of curses to direct at his team. I got myself comfortable with Smoke.

  Since the unconscious wizard seemed especially amenable today I decided it might be time to test his limits, to see if I could push him nearer things he had refused to approach in the past.

  I started with what lay south of Overlook, after just a glance in to see that nothing new was happening with Howler and Longshadow.

  Kiaulune in the aftermath of disaster had no appeal. Overlook, while bright, was a mask for madness and despair. Beyond lay rocky grey slopes almost steep enough to be called an escarpment. A road ran from Kiaulune past Overlook and up the boulder-strewn slope. It was a road that had seen little traffic ever, yet it remained clearly defined. Only a few stubborn, hardy weeds had taken root there. Except for one small slide way up the hill no rocks seemed willing to remain on the road’s surface.

  I tried to take Smoke in that direction.

  I enjoyed no more success than I ever had, which meant I managed to cross half the distance from Overlook to the slide before Smoke refused to go any farther.

  Someday the Black Company would go up that road. No one else ever went but we would go. That was the road to Khatovar. That was the road that would lead us to our origins.

  From Kiaulune I rode Smoke north in a sweeping search for Soulcatcher, Lady’s mad, wicked sister. I found no obvious sign immediately but she was skilled at not being seen. I closed in on the Old Man himself, began using Smoke’s ability to move through time as well as space to backtrack the crows that follow the army and hang around him.

  I fooled the coward for just a moment. For long enough to carry myself into view of Lady’s nemesis.

  She was out in the wastes, all alone except for her pets. She was eating, something I had never seen or heard of Soulcatcher doing. She was gorgeous. Gorgeous like only evil can be. For an instant I felt that same twinge I had experienced the first time I saw Sahra.

  Thought of Sahra startled me. Out here was my time free of that pain.…

  The instant I lost my focus Smoke’s cowardly soul seemed to sense how near Soulcatcher it was. It pushed away as though repelled. I did not resist. I needed to be away from there, too.

  Soulcatcher was a madwoman, bold beyond reason, likely to do almost anything if it amused her. She must be having great fun lately.

  If Smoke’s visions could be trusted she was less than a mile away right now, here in the middle of the army, undetected, so close she could strike anyone anywhere instantly whenever the urge came upon her. And such urges did.

  The Old Man needed to know.…

  Or did he?

  He might, reasoning that crows had a limited endurance.

  I went away from there and took Smoke back to the Palace in Taglios. He seemed comfortable with that. We went to the room where he had been hidden so long. Dust was gathering there. The lost Annals were still out of sight where I had concealed them.

  In another part of the Palace the Radisha was going about the daily business of ruling an empire, she and all the powerful priests and lords and functionaries going along with the pretense that she was just standing in momentarily for her brother, the Prahbrindrah Drah. As long as everybody agreed not to notice the Prince’s extended absence, the engines of state continued to function reasonably well.

  In truth, though never stated publicly, the state operated much more efficiently without the Prince present to filter and soften his sister’s will.

  I found the Woman and buzzed around her like an invisible mosquito, forward and backward in time, sticking my long nose into her every conversation—excepting those she had with Cordy Mather when no one else was around. Much.

  I heard enough to know Mather was getting used. But it was use most men willingly endure, at least for a while.

  Her conversations with several senior priests were interesting, though never as explicit as I would like. The Radisha had matured in the seldom-friendly environment of the Palace, where a thousand plots great and small were afoot every day, at the best of times, and there were always ears eager to pick up anything you said.

  She did not plan to keep her word to the Captain and Company. Surprise, surprise. But she was not yet pursuing any vigorous course of betrayal. Like everyone else she was certain Croaker’s winter campaign was either a tactic not directed at the Shadowmaster at all or if pursued genuinely would result in a debacle for Taglian arms. This despite our having seized victory in the face of certain defeat on several occasions earlier.

  We just might be able to make her sorry she was not a more ambitious backstabber.

  What other avenues needed exploration? Goblin? He could manage without me watching over his shoulder.

  Out of curiosity and because I was not yet ready to return to the world, I traced each of my in-laws back for the last few weeks. I learned nothing that would support the Old Man’s paranoia. But they were a cautious folk, just three of them out here amongst folk no Nyueng Bao had reason to trust or love. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj said very little about anything, just like they did when I was around. Mother Gota was little different, too. She just complained about different things.

  Her opinion of me was not completely flattering. Hardly an hour passed when she failed to take the opportunity to damn her mother for having wished me onto the family Ky.

  There were times when I was not too fond of Hong Tray for having wished all her family on me.

  What should I see now? I was not ready to go back yet.

  Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night? They were at Charandaprash with Mogaba, collecting the scabby remnants of t
he Deceiver cult under the Shadowmaster’s standard. Not much mischief they could get up to there.

  Lady, then. Then I would report to the Captain.

  I had not been tracking her but wherever she was I was likely to find somebody the Company needed to watch, like the Prahbrindrah Drah or Willow Swan.

  The Prince was not in Lady’s camp. He was capable of letting duty overrule wishful thinking. He was with his own division, paying attention to business.

  Charandaprash was no longer that far away. Around the lake, over a few hills and valleys, then there we would be, staring across the stony plain at the mouth of the only practical pass through the Dandha Presh.

  Swan was close to Lady, of course. He looked worried whether I rolled back through the days or stayed hovering right now. Lady was having problems she would not share with him or anyone else. She looked as though she had been getting no sleep. I knew she slept very little at the best of times. For her to abandon sleep like this now, as we neared our most important confrontation in years—one that could become a defining event in the Company’s history—suggested that she had no faith in the future at all.

  Running through time did give me a clue or two, though. She was indeed doing without sleep. And whenever she did take a nap she did not rest well. She seemed to be having dreams as ugly as some of mine.

  For some reason crows never came close to her. But they were always around, somewhere in the distance, watching.

  Lady was not interesting. She did nothing but work. She did not bother to look overwhelmingly beautiful anymore, unlike her sister. Was she, like some women do, going all dowdy because she had herself a man?

  She was just fine as far as Willow Swan was concerned. Even after four years of no luck at all he was happy to tag along, using his assignment as commander of royal guards as an excuse to stay near the front.

  So what was worth reporting here? That Lady had to get some rest?

  Maybe. Exhaustion could impair her judgment at a critical moment.

  I started to back away, drifting up and over Lake Tanji, which was pretty damned impressive even from Smoke’s point of view.

  I shivered in the cold wind.…

  There was no wind out there with Smoke. There was no warm, no cold, no hunger, no pain. There was just being and sight.

  And fear.

  For there in the gathering darkness above the lake’s southern shore was a dark ghost of a form with many arms and teats and wicked black lips drawn back to reveal a vampire’s grin.

  You can panic out there. I did.

  18

  “You all right?” One-Eye asked as I came to the front of the wagon. It was dark out. He had turned his team loose to forage nearby, had a fire burning, and was now back on his driver’s seat polishing a spear that looked as though it had been carved from ebony, inlaid with silver highlighting a hundred grotesque figures. “You were thrashing around and yelling back there.”

  “Thanks for coming to see what was wrong.”

  “The old woman said you do that all the time. Didn’t seem worth worrying about.”

  “Probably wasn’t. I just rolled over on your still parts.” Not true but I had a feeling he would have some around somewhere. Even during the worst of the siege of Dejagore he and Goblin had managed to produce something they pretended was beer.

  He bought it long enough to give himself away. If this damned wagon stayed in one place very long something better used as food or horse fodder would turn into something else stinky but liquid and alcoholic.

  “What’s the spear for?” I asked. “Haven’t seen it out for a while.” He had created it for the specific purpose of killing Shadowmasters.

  “Talked to some of our brothers who’ve been with Lady’s division. Came by while you were snoring. Big Bucket and Red Rudy. Said they’ve seen a big black cat a couple three times lately. Figured I ought to be set with my best.”

  He did not sound concerned but he was. That spear was a masterpiece of his art.

  The cat was probably a shapeshifter named Lisa Deale Bowalk who could not shed her animal form because One-Eye had killed her teacher before she learned how. She had tried to get him before. He was confident that she would try again.

  “Catch her if you can,” I told him. “I got a notion we could use her if we let Lady work on her for a while.”

  “Right. That’ll be the main thing on my mind.”

  “I’m going to see the Old Man.”

  “Tell him I want to go home. It’s too damned cold out here for an old man like me.”

  I chuckled, the way I was supposed to. I got down to the ground despite my stiffness and headed the general direction I presumed Croaker would be, based on the size of the fires.

  Good thing One-Eye and I made a habit of using old languages. Thai Dei stepped out of the shadows before I had walked twenty feet. He said nothing but he was there guarding my back, wanted or not.

  19

  The journey continued. Wagons broke down. Animals came up lame. Men injured themselves. Elephants complained about the weather. So did I. It snowed a couple of times, not blankets of big soft wet flakes but the wind-whipped pellet kind that stings your skin and never amounts to anything but a few traces when it is done.

  On the plus side, Mogaba’s cavalry never really got in our way. They were no problem as long as our foragers and scouts did not range too far ahead. I guess Mogaba was more interested in knowing where we were than in wasting soldiers trying to stop us before we came to his strong point.

  Then one afternoon nobody received the routine order to halt and camp. The soldiers stumbled forward doggedly, cursing the bite of the wind while reminding one another that generals are seldom of sound mind and unbesmirched ancestry. They would not be generals if they were.

  I went looking for the Captain.

  There he was, his big crows on his shoulders. More circled him, bickering. He was smiling, the one happy fool in the army. The generals’ general. “Hey, boss. We going to keep humping it all night?”

  “We’re less than ten miles from Charanky-whatsit. I think it would be nice to be camped there when Mogaba gets up in the morning.”

  He lived in his own reality, no doubt about that. Had to be a general. He actually believed he could play with Mogaba’s mind.

  He had not seen Mogaba at Dejagore. Not enough.

  I said, “We’ll be so beat he can come over and dance on our heads.”

  “But he won’t. Longshadow has a ball and chain tied to his tail.”

  “So he kicks ass and lies to his boss later.”

  “That what you’d do?”

  “Uh…” I might.

  “Longshadow will be here watching him. Go get some sleep. When the sun comes up I want you perched on Mogaba’s shoulder.” Uncle Doj was only steps away, taking everything in. We were speaking Forsberger but I wondered if that was enough of a security measure.

  Those crows were never far away.

  What I got from the exchange was that Croaker did have a plan. Sometimes it was hard to believe that.

  “I’m not tired right now.” I was hungry and thirsty, though. Any extended period spent with Smoke leaves me that way. I took advantage of the staff officers’ mess.

  Messengers began to come and go. Croaker grumbled, “Guess it’s time to start telling people what they need to do.”

  “There’s an original concept. After all these years.”

  “Do we really need another smartass Annalist, Murgen? Get some rest.”

  He began gathering senior officers for a meeting. I was not invited.

  * * *

  I went back to One-Eye’s wagon, where I ate some more, drank a lot of water and then went ghostwalking again.

  Me and the fire chief eavesdropped on Croaker and his commanders but I should not have wasted the time. I learned very little. Croaker did all the talking, referring to a detailed map showing everyone where he wanted each unit to light in front of Mogaba. The only real surprise was that he want
ed the Prahbrindrah Drah’s division stationed in the center while his own two divisions positioned themselves on the right flank—excepting one specially trained combat team he wanted on the extreme left, outside Lady’s left flank.

  Interesting. Our right wing just happened to face and lap the Shadowlander division Blade had been given to command.

  Croaker really wanted Blade.

  Narrow-eyed, Lady asked, “Why did you decide to arrange the army this way? We’ve talked about this for three years.…”

  Croaker told her, “Because this is where I want you all.”

  Lady had trouble keeping her temper. In a long life she had not had to do that much.

  Croaker smelled the smoke. “When I don’t explain to you nobody else finds out what I’m planning, either.” He offered some tidbit to one of his crows.

  That helped. A little. But the Prahbrindrah Drah and most of the rest had no idea of the significance of Croaker’s crows.

  I left Smoke, drank again, snacked, made sure the sleeper got some soup. He did not need nearly as much sustenance as I did. Maybe he was sucking on me out there, like some kind of psychic spider.

  I slept. I had bad dreams that I recalled only in shards when I awakened. The Radisha was there. Soulcatcher was there. I suppose the old men in the caverns were there, too, though none of that stuck. Somewhere a bleak fortress.

  I gave up trying to remember, went out with Smoke to try to see our approach as the enemy would.

  Fireballs scattered colored pearls across the night. Torches speckled distant slopes with islands and snakes of light. The Shadowlander commanders watched without remark except when Blade suggested that the Captain was making his force appear more formidable by burning lots of torches.

  They were not concerned. A lot of the junior officers expected Longshadow to turn them loose after they stomped us. They saw themselves heading north in early spring, with the whole summer to plunder and punish.

  But a few were veterans of armies we had embarrassed in the past. Those men showed us more respect. And betrayed a more intense desire to cause us pain. They did not believe it would be easy but they did believe we would be defeated.