The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  Croaker looked at me like I ought to have known all about that years ago. “I don’t know, boss. This’s the first I’ve heard about it.” Though I had always suspected that Uncle Doj might be able to do something besides crochet with a sword. In fact, his skills with a blade always did seem almost magically augmented. How could a guy pull off something like that attack on the Deceivers at Charandaprash without getting swamped by sheer weight of numbers?

  I do not know why but I told Lady, “My wife isn’t dead. The Deceivers never touched her when they raided our apartment. Thai Dei and Doj and some cousins took her away, then told me she was dead. They also convinced her that I was dead while they were taking her back to the swamp. They’ve got her stashed in a temple there now, where she won’t embarrass them by being pregnant. Doj and Gota don’t want us two together. They only ever put up with it at all because Gota’s parents insisted.” Sarie, her family and the Nyueng Bao were not something I had discussed with Lady before. I never talked with her much about anything except stuff that needed to go into the Annals or the stuff that she had written there that needed clarification.

  She checked Howler again while she listened to my chatter. She suggested, “Tell me all about this. I’ve always had a feeling that there was something going on.”

  Yeah? Right. Her and everybody else smart enough not to eat dirt.

  Croaker went to the doorway and stuck his head out. He popped back inside. “Hey. Why didn’t you say it’d stopped raining? Maybe I can get these assholes to move a little faster now.” Out he went. I felt for him. He looked even more worn out than I felt.

  I said, “I did tell him.”

  “He doesn’t always listen. Talk to me about the Nyueng Bao.”

  I talked. Lady listened. She asked sharp questions. I returned the favor at times, when we touched on anything I thought I wanted to know.

  She said, “I want to know about your dreams, too.”

  “They’re different than yours. I think.”

  “I know. How they’re different might mean a lot.”

  We talked a long time. But not long enough for me to get out of trekking over to the Shadowgate with the goddamn standard.

  76

  Horses were in short supply. Most that had not gotten eaten had been killed by shadows the previous night. And were getting eaten now. I ended up borrowing Lady’s mount. Croaker never said a word. He did not have to. Down the road somewhere I was going to pay.

  Thai Dei got up behind me. Lady’s stallion, which was used to lugging only her hundred and a few pounds, plus armor occasionally, glared over his shoulder. I told the beast, “It’s only for a little ways. I promise.”

  The Old Division and some of Lady’s troops had moved into camp below the Shadowgate. Tensions were obvious as we rode in. A lot of faces were less than friendly. These were men who had stayed with the Company mainly because their chances of survival were better with us than away from us. Twilight was not far off, though, so no one was inclined to belligerence.

  I decided not to tell anybody why I had brought the standard.

  Word spread fast. Company brothers came out to see if there was anything special in the wind. I ran into people I had not seen for months. Some, even, whom I had not seen since we had left Taglios.

  Sindawe and Isi appeared. They thought something big had to be up since I had come out of my hole. I could see how they might have gotten that odd notion. My job had kept me close to Smoke for a long time.

  Ochiba materialized. He and the other two Nar were the senior officers outside the Shadowgate. All the most senior Taglians had deserted. They had respected their obligations to their prince.

  I suspected they would regret choosing to maintain their honor. If they had not done so already, last night.

  Sindawe caught the stallion’s reins. Thai Dei and I dismounted. Everybody waited for me to say something. I just shrugged. I pulled my pants away from my burning thigh. Riding had been no improvement. Just as I had predicted. “Don’t ask me why I’m here. The Old Man said to come. So I came. What he’s up to is his secret.”

  “So what else is new?” Big Bucket asked. “He ever does say what’s what, nobody will believe him.”

  I glanced around. The ground there was harder than it was back across the way. It was also dryer. Most of the shelters, therefore, were aboveground. The camp gave poverty and squalor a bad name. I saw the ensigns and pennons of battalions that had, a year ago, been renown for their spit and polish. I asked, “Is morale really this bad?”

  “It is over here.”

  “From what I hear the New Division suffered fewer casualties than anybody last night.”

  Sindawe observed, “You’ve been in this business most of your life, Standardbearer. You know morale can have little to do with the facts of a situation. Perceptions are more critical.”

  Absolutely. People want to believe what they want to believe, good, bad, or indifferent, and do not confuse them with facts.

  I said, “We maybe shouldn’t mention it to these guys but I think he expects to head on up there soon.”

  Bucket glared up the unwelcoming slope. “You’re shitting me.”

  “You didn’t believe him when he said that’s where we’re going? He’s never made a secret of the fact that we’re headed for Khatovar. It’s what we’ve been doing since we left the Barrowland.” Half a lifetime ago, it seemed. Before he ever joined up.

  Grimly, Isi observed, “I don’t think you’ll find anyone here who actually believed we’d get this far.” And he had not been with the Company as long as Bucket had.

  Isi was not exaggerating. I do not think anyone but the Old Man ever really believed in Khatovar. The rest of us went along because we had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but follow the standard. Every day was a gift, of sorts, and it did not much matter where the long night caught up. I said, “The last human obstacle went down last night. Lady has Longshadow wrapped up like a birthday present.”

  I glanced around again. Everywhere I looked men were hard at work. It was not something special suddenly put on for me but I did garner plenty of resentful stares just for being a guy from headquarters. Me turning up could only mean more demands, more work, more hardship.

  The light was getting strange. There was not a lot of daylight left. “What are they doing over there?” I asked, indicating a work gang apparently digging a defensive trench. Against shadows that would be as useful as teats on a bull.

  “Burying last night’s dead,” Bucket told me.

  “Oh. Look. You stick with me. Unless you’ve got something critical going. The rest of you go ahead with whatever you were doing.”

  Sindawe told me, “Isi or I would be better guides, Standardbearer. We’re in charge so we don’t do much.” He said that with such a straight face I almost thought he meant it.

  I walked over to the mass grave.

  They were digging a trench because that was the most efficient way to get bodies under the hard ground. I knelt, ran my fingers through what they had broken loose. Despite the rain earlier the hardpan was dry just inches beneath the surface. “It didn’t rain much over here?” I asked.

  “Mostly it just gets cold,” Isi said.

  I stared up the slope, past the Shadowgate. The ground grew more barren by the yard. There was some plant life up there but it was stunted, desertlike growth.

  The corpses the soldiers were planting bore the stamp of shadow death, they were all shriveled up, with skin darkened several shades. Each dead man’s mouth was open in a screaming rictus. The bodies were curled. They could not be straightened.

  Crows circled but the soldiers kept them back.

  I felt the hard soil again, eyed the slope. The rock itself looked like hardened mud, lying in hundreds of thin layers being gnawed away slowly by time. “I guess it wouldn’t rain a lot up there, either, then. Or there would be more gullies and obvious washes.” I wondered if erosion would create ways for shadows to escape from beyond the Shadowga
te. Evidently not. Otherwise the world would have been overrun a long time ago.

  I had never found any record of a time when the Shadowgate had not been there. It was ancient beyond reckoning but even so had not found its way into native religion in any form I recognized. Except, possibly, in the infrequently used idiom common to many southern languages, “Glittering stone,” which seemed to mean an inexplicable possession of dark madness, a sort of demonically savage insanity complicated by congenital stupidity. One of those things Taglians will not discuss with outsiders, however pressed.

  Until the rise of the Shadowmasters there had been very little historical mention of the land beyond Kiaulune, except that it tied in somehow with the rise of the Free Companies of Khatovar over four hundred years ago.

  Though not religious myself I bowed and offered a short Gunni prayer for the dead before I ventured uphill for a closer look at the source of our trouble. Thai Dei beamed at me. I must have done right.

  77

  “Help me plant this thing,” I told Thai Dei as I set up the standard a few yards downhill from a working party of soldiers. Thai Dei piled rocks around the foot of the lance until it would stand by itself. Then we walked uphill a little farther.

  Once upon a time there had been an actual fortress with outbuildings and a genuine gate here. I had not been able to see that in my ghostworld ventures. There were little more than grass-grown foundations left now. Everything had fallen ages ago. But the stone had not been carried away until recently, when some of our bolder soldiers had taken some from the safe side for use in constructing shelters. Which suggested that, chickenshit as they were about the terrors lurking in the past, they were fearless heroes compared to the people who used to live near the place.

  Made me wonder again about how any fear could persist so strongly for so long. And then wonder if maybe Kina was not somehow connected to that effect. Maybe her nightmares leaked over into the dreams of everybody who heard the name Khatovar.

  So why was I not dribbling down my leg?

  Maybe I am too stupid to be scared about the right things.

  The stone that had been used to construct the fortress was not a native rock. It was a greyish sandstone not only foreign to that slope, it was unlike any stone I had seen back in the direction from which we had come. It was not like the stone Longshadow had imported to build Overlook, either.

  I glanced back at Overlook. The setting sun was sneaking in under the clouds, firing the south face of the fortress. That was one wall that Longshadow had gotten completed. The metal signs and seals on its face flamed and fairly thundered with power despite the fallen estate of their creator. “Now that’s impressive,” I said.

  “But it doesn’t do us any good up here,” Isi observed. Glumly, Bucket nodded agreement. Sindawe, I noted, had faded away, gone back to whatever he had been doing before I arrived.

  “What are these guys doing?” The working parties were marking the slope and ruins with colored chalk dusts, augmenting similar markings that had suffered from the rain.

  “Defining the bounds of the gate. Different colors mean different things. I haven’t learned them all myself. I understand the different dusts will glow their particular colors in the dark if they’re excited by the proximity of fireballs. Apparently they define areas of threat and the level of danger to be expected in each.”

  “That what they do?” I asked Bucket.

  He shrugged. “Close enough.”

  I grunted, moved up closer to the workers. As I did I began to feel a vibration or hum that began way down deep inside me. It grew stronger faster. I asked, “Who’s the expert here?”

  A dirty little man, irritated at being interrupted, unbent his back. I stifled a grin. He was Shadar despite being small and in charge of a Gunni work party. He had a beard big enough for the usual six feet plus of his coreligionists. He was not a Company man. I had noticed that over here pledged brothers all wore something to identify themselves—usually some crude version of the fire-breathing skull we had adopted from Soulcatcher twenty years ago. Maybe they thought that might help protect them from whatever came through the Shadowgate.

  “How may I instruct you, Standardbearer?”

  Oh, that man was talented. Without venturing one inch from absolute propriety he let me know exactly how he would like to instruct me, right after I bent over and grabbed my ankles.

  “I’d like to know what you’ve determined about the layout here. Especially where the gate itself used to be, if you know, and where the weakest spots are.”

  “You want to know where the shadows are getting through?”

  “Did the man stutter, hairball?” Bucket demanded.

  I made a calming gesture. “Easy. Yes. Where they’re getting through.”

  “Everywhere between those two yellow splashes.” The little Shadar scowled at Bucket. “The red area is what must have been the actual original gateway.”

  “Thank you. I’ll try not to trouble you much more.”

  The Shadar muttered, “Will miracles never cease?” as I went to walk over the ground. Bucket thought about adjusting the man’s attitude, decided it was not worth the trouble. Not now. But there would be later, when I was not around.

  A few rods below the Shadowgate there were torch racks and the remains of bonfires that had been used to produce light the night before. There were crude bunkers where soldiers had lain waiting for the shadows, protected only by repellent candles and their luck with the bamboo poles. There were two rickety ten-foot towers somebody had thrown up to provide plunging fire.

  I pushed forward into the buzz until I no longer felt comfortable, which was right at the edge of the red chalk dust. From there I could make out the remains of the fallen gate. It must have been truly substantial in its time. It looked like it had been wide enough to permit passage of four men marching abreast. There was no sign that there had ever been a moat or a ditch or anything such, though. And a ditch is the oldest form of defense work there is. It persists today below every wall that is not some engineering monstrosity like the ramparts surrounding Overlook and Dejagore.

  The implication was that the forgotten builders had not been concerned about threats from downhill.

  There were still some strong spells on the Shadowgate. You could feel them growl if you pushed against them hard enough.

  I did not press my luck.

  I mused, “Why is the road in halfway decent shape when everything else here is almost completely gone?” The farther uphill you looked the better preserved the old road was.

  Nobody offered an opinion. Chances were nobody gave a rat’s ass. It was bad enough they just had to be there.

  I strolled back down to the standard. Somehow, vaguely, it seemed to have come alive. I felt a vibration from it, too. That seemed to center on the head of the lance. Which would fit with Croaker’s theories about the Lance of Passion.

  Thai Dei, Bucket and Isi felt what I felt but did not know what it was. I told Thai Dei, “I want to move the standard up where it’ll be the first thing a shadow runs into when it comes through the gate. Let them know the boys are back.” I told Isi, “Tonight shouldn’t be as rough. Lady thinks she’s got Longshadow under control. She might even get the Shadowgate shut down completely before dark.” Which I doubted because that was not very far off anymore.

  The relief on Isi’s face was almost comical.

  A couple of soldiers caught part of what I said and scattered to start rumors that, no doubt, would grow fat in the retelling. Bucket grumbled, “I can’t wait to see the twist that gets put on that by the time it comes back around.”

  Hum! We did not want any Taglians still loyal to the Prahbrindrah Drah to become too confident of their safety. “That’s only might,” I said. “And even if she shuts it down tighter than a virgin’s twat there’s still a shitload of shadows that got out of there last night and are still hiding under rocks and stuff waiting for sunset.” Darkness always comes. “We’re not out of the woods yet. Not by
a long way.”

  I made sure I was overheard saying that, too.

  I will teach you to fear the darkness. Who said that? Lady’s first husband, maybe, back before my time. Certainly somebody who learned a lesson of his own way back in one of the old Annals.

  I added, “We’re going to face it every night for a long time to come.”

  “We’re really going up there?” Bucket asked, pointing, when nobody but Thai Dei could hear him. He did not consider the question a major secret, though, or he would have asked in a language unfamiliar to Thai Dei.

  “Maybe. I don’t know how soon, though. The Old Man keeps talking about getting crops in so we don’t need to kill ourselves foraging.” While I talked I tried to figure how big a circle of influence the standard would cast. With Thai Dei’s help I replanted it an estimated half radius from the Shadowgate, mid-line on the old road. Then I went back down and talked a couple of Vehdna into letting us take over their frontline bunker. Funny. They hardly argued about it.

  Lady’s horse had followed me around the whole while, staying out of the way but missing nothing. I told him, “Thanks a bunch. You can go back to your boss now.” I always talk to mine as an equal. You treat the critters right, they’ll do any damned thing. Even run somebody all the way to Taglios. Or back.

  The horse argued less than the Vehdna soldiers did. Off he trotted.

  I wondered how Sleepy was doing.

  He could not have run far yet. It had not been that long since everything turned to shit.

  78

  Chalk dust bands defined fields of fire for the soldiers, so they could pick off shadows more efficiently. But, though they glowed, the dusts did not betray the shadows perfectly.

  Lady had given me some tools and instructions on how to use them. I was supposed to resist any temptation to take shortcuts.

  A lot of soldiers came to watch. The Taglians were awed because a man who was neither priest nor sorcerer could read. They made me feel like a freak.