The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  In a moment the road was clear before me, the polished jet thread wandering up the slope. “You see the way?” I lowered the head of the standard till the iron head touched that thread. I do not know why I did that.

  A vibration went through me that was a dozen times stronger than that coming through the Shadowgate. I gasped. I shuddered. Maybe I sputtered and foamed at the mouth.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Croaker demanded.

  I pushed the standard into his hand. “You just do what I did.” I stepped away. Looking up the slope I realized I was seeing it in a different way. I saw the same old dirty, barren slope with its glistening black thread but also saw a ghost of what it must have been like in an age long gone, when the road was new and the slope, while nearly as barren, had not had such a godsforsaken look.

  Human ghosts moved there, too, though they were even more insubstantial than the road and slope and unfallen fortifications around us.

  Croaker reacted exactly the way I had. But he must have had a clue or two more. As soon as he regained control he passed the standard to Bucket and told him to repeat the process.

  The standard passed from Bucket to Rudy and from Rudy to Thai Dei. Thai Dei thought about it for more than a minute before he went ahead. He did so only when the Old Man told him, “You don’t follow through, you don’t go up the hill.” Thai Dei did not want to do that either but had no choice. He was trapped by his own character as well as, I suspected, the task Uncle Doj had laid upon him.

  Once Thai Dei made his move the other Nyueng Bao followed. Croaker told them, “It doesn’t mean you’re committed to the Company, boys.”

  A moment later I observed, “Now that we’ve got that out of the way what say we climb the mountain?” Good Standardbearer me, I took up the Lance and started trudging.

  It felt good to be headed home.

  What?

  I looked at the others. Nobody appeared to be having trouble keeping touch with reality. Maybe it was another aspect of the dreaming and falling into nightmares.

  Thai Dei hung close to my back. He was not comfortable at all this morning. He had his sword out and ready.

  The black ribbon widened as it climbed the slope. It also seemed to take on depth. Its surface, though flat, assumed an appearance of concavity. If you touched it, it felt hard and cold yet seemed almost soft underfoot.

  The slope steepened a bit. I huffed and puffed. Then the going became easier, the road less timeworn. The horizon line stopped retreating as fast as I chased it.

  “Stop!” Croaker yelled.

  I stopped. I looked back. The Old Man was a hundred yards behind me. Even Thai Dei was having trouble keeping up.

  I looked across the valley. Already I was high enough to look down on all Overlook but the broken tooth that used to be Longshadow’s crystal-capped tower. Men were at work inside the fortress, scurrying little dots. They were Lady’s guys, many having been with her since the Company’s big disaster outside Dejagore. I guess the Captain finally had something in mind for the old stone shack.

  Croaker was puffing badly when he caught up. “Man, I’m really out of shape.”

  “You’re the one wants to take this walk. It’ll suck that belly right off you.” He was not fat. Yet. But he had not been missing any meals lately. “You see the road clearly?” Just to make sure I was not suffering some vision with my eyes open. I am no longer ever quite sure of my place in reality, never unsuspicious that there might not be an objective reality at all. Everything could be dreams inside of dreams, the illusions of souls rolling forever in a Swegah where now and then a few collided and joined in an almost common fantasy.

  You notice, nobody ever sees things exactly the same?

  “The black path? I don’t remember reading anything about that in the Annals.”

  “We never read anything by anybody who ever actually saw any of this. We’ve never read anything by anybody who was closer than two generations to this place. By then the Company had a different set of concerns.”

  Croaker grunted.

  To make sure we held this illusion in common I polled everybody. Even the Nyueng Bao agreed we were following a ribbon of blackness. They did not like that. They were frightened by it but accepted it. The entire world, outside Man’s natural swamp realm, was a frightening place.

  “Everybody got their breath? Let’s trudge on.” I really wanted to get to that plain. I tried to remember what it looked like at night, from up high and far away, but the view had been pretty obscure. I wondered why I never tried to go exploring. I wondered what Kina had to do with the plain. Could this be the plain where she fought the great battle of her legend? I wondered if we would find out why no Taglian would talk about the place, why, when it was mentioned, most walked off shaking their heads and muttering, “Glittering stone.” I wondered how that phrase could have found its way into a language as an idiom for “madness.” Especially inasmuch as we were now certain that the Taglian terror of the Company and the Year of the Skulls had been artificially induced.

  There was not that much more to the slope but I was gasping for air, staring down at the dark guide a step in front of me and pushing for that just one more step when the footing suddenly stopped insisting that I keep climbing. I stumbled, got my balance, overcame an urge to run ahead, halted while the others caught up.

  I examined the plain while I waited.

  “Glittering stone” was apt. The jet path became a wide and perfectly preserved road here and curved gently off into a region of tall, square pillars, each of which glittered as though splattered with polished gold coins. To either side of the road the plain consisted of dark grey basaltic stone cut smooth, showing only the slightest evidence of aging. Nothing grew there. Nothing. Not even a lichen. Not a fly or an ant. The place was unnaturally clean. No dust, no dirt, no leaves.

  The morning sun had set the pillars sparkling but clouds were moving in from the west. We would have an overcast sky soon. Maybe rain before the evening.

  “Hold up, Murgen!” Croaker yelled. “Goddamnit, if you don’t stop charging off I’m going to nail your feet to the ground.”

  I looked down. My feet were moving again. I stopped. I looked back. The others were a hundred yards behind again, right at the rim. Except for Thai Dei. My brother-in-law was an island in between, drawn by his obligation to me but held back by his reluctance to follow the black road.

  “Get your ass back here!” Croaker bellowed. “The fuck you think this is? Some kind of race to the edge of the world?”

  I went back. It was like walking against the wind. The vibration of the standard seemed to change, to become almost plaintive. When I got there I told him, “Captain, take this thing for a while. It’s going to carry me off.”

  He felt it right away. But he was stronger than me, I guess. He planted the damned thing and stared ahead. “You bring something to write on?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Something to write with, too?” He was reminding me of a time when I had done everything right but remember to bring a pen.

  “I’m all set, boss. Long as this wind don’t blow me away.”

  “You still afraid?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said that before you were afraid all the time after you came back.”

  I frowned. I felt no fear at all. Now. “Out there, I guess. I’m fine here.” I looked back at the world. From where we stood you could see only the mountains beyond the broad valley containing Overlook and the ruins of Kiaulune. Not only did there seem to be a heat shimmer between us and them, there was a haze, too. The world seemed very remote.

  I mentioned that to Croaker.

  “I don’t see it,” he said. “There’s always a haze over a forest in the summer. Unless it’s just rained.”

  I shrugged. These days I was not as uncomfortable with the fact that I was different. I had suffered various incarnations of weirdness for too long. “You going up the road?” It stretched so invitingly before us.

&
nbsp; “Not today. What’s that?”

  “What?” I saw nothing but the standing stones. They seemed to be arranged in no special order, spaced well apart from one another.

  “Past the stones.” He pointed. “Let your gaze follow the road. When you can’t make it out anymore just lift your eye to the top of the stones. You’ll see it. Your eyes are younger than mine.”

  I saw something. Just a looming something.

  “It looks like a fortress,” Thai Dei said. The Old Man and I had not been using a secret language. His companions both grunted assent. Rudy and Bucket just looked troubled.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said. I recalled having seen what might have been a light out there during one of my ghostwalks. “Reckon that’s Khatovar?”

  “I couldn’t say from here. But if it’s a fortress and that’s all it is then it stands a good chance of being a big-ass disappointment.”

  Yeah. If you were counting skipping through the gates of paradise when you got to the end of the road. I did not know anybody who was. Unless it was him.

  “How far would you guess that is, Thai Dei?” Croaker asked.

  The Nyueng Boa shrugged. “Many miles. Perhaps a walk of days.”

  Ugh. That gave me a chance to consider what it might mean to spend the night on the plain, inside the Shadowgate, in the land whence the Shadowmasters’ deadly pets had come.

  The Old Man said, “This is enough for today. We’ll go back and set up the major probe.”

  Thinking about shadows, I found, encouraged me to resist the call of the black road.

  I paused on the brink, took one last look at the glittering pillars before I left the mountain.

  It is immortality of a sort.

  “What?”

  “You say something?” Croaker asked. He was fifty feet ahead of me already.

  “No. Just thinking out loud. I think.”

  100

  The Old Man did not sleep in. He and Lady, Otto and Hagop, Swan, Mather and Blade, the Nar, Clete, Longo and Loftus and all the rest of the Old Crew and their bodyguards, with some of Lady’s longtime followers, were on the road to the Shadowgate when I dragged myself out. It was still dark enough that Croaker’s outriders carried torches. “That son of a bitch really wants to get a head start.”

  Thai Dei was awake already. He was boiling water to make breakfast mush. He looked downhill and grunted.

  Big Bucket stumbled up, yawning, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with the back of one hand. “That the Old Man already?”

  “Mudsucker’s eager, isn’t he? Everything set?”

  “Completely. I’ll go drag Sparkle and Wheezer out of the sack.”

  “Wheezer? What the hell is he doing up here?”

  “Came up during the night. Took off early from over there because he didn’t figure he could keep up with the Old Man this morning. Didn’t want to get left behind.”

  “The old boy’s got balls,” I said. Once again I had underestimated the man. With no direct evidence I had assumed he had passed on during the summer. I should have known better. He had been dying when he latched on seven years ago. Every day seemed like it had to be the one when he coughed up his last lung, but something kept him going. “Where’s Red Rudy?”

  “Sent him to check the perimeter.”

  “One more time, eh?” That damned perimeter had been checked and rechecked five hundred times since I had been in charge. It is a military kind of thinking, never trusting anything but the situation right this minute. Time is the implacable eater of all preparations.

  “All hands standing by?” I asked.

  “Said everything was set.” He looked into Thai Dei’s pot. “Looks tasty, my man.”

  Thai Dei had no sense of humor and little ability to recognize sarcasm. He nodded. “A little salt, a little sugar. A handful of tuloc grubs or shredded monkey jerky would improve the flavor.”

  “Twolock grubs?”

  I would not have asked myself.

  “You find them in rotten logs. In the swamp we fell trees so they will have a place to grow.”

  I asked, “Are you nervous?”

  Thai Dei gave me his hard look, like how on earth could I think he would be bothered by anything?

  “You’re chattering like a flock of crows.”

  Thai Dei grunted, recognizing the truth. He went back to being himself.

  “Beetle grubs,” I grumbled. “Only the Nyueng Bao would think of farming them.”

  “What’s wrong with grubs?” Bucket asked. “You fry them in butter, toss in a couple sliced mushrooms … It’s time to play the game.”

  Croaker and Lady were climbing the slope now. I could see them clearly enough to tell that they were dressed in their Widowmaker and Lifetaker costumes with all the showoff spells alive and crawling. They rode the stallions from the stables of the Tower at Charm. Those giants’ hooves struck sparks every time they hit the ground. Their eyes shone red. Their nostrils puffed breath that seemed somehow more than just steam in the cool of the morning. Trumpets, cymbals and drums seemed appropriate but Lady and the Old Man never went in for that kind of thing. Those two, and every man behind them except the prisoners, carried a small arsenal of bamboo.

  Howler was in a small wheeled wooden cage drawn by a brace of black goats. He and Lady must have reached an accommodation because no obvious control measures had been added to the bars. Although he was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers who could bathe him in fireballs before he could get off any really ugly spell.

  Longshadow endured similar confinement but he and Lady had not reached any agreement. His mouth had been sewn shut. His fingers had been sewn together. If he was going to cast any spells he would have to do so by wiggling his ears. But the nervous soldiers nearby would roast him before he could do much more than twitch.

  The guys were rattled because he was in such a state. He kept tearing at the bars of his cage while trying to scream incoherently through his sealed lips.

  Longshadow did not want to go up the mountain.

  The Prahbrindrah Drah was being treated well. Willow Swan and Cordy Mather flanked him, doing their duties as Royal Guards, while Otto, Hagop, the engineer brothers and the Nyueng Bao bodyguards who tagged along after everybody formed a larger diamond around those three. Longinus and Loftus conversed with the Prince as though this venture was nothing remarkable.

  I admired the Prahbrindrah Drah. He was a good man and a sound one. It was a pity we could not let him go home. After his years in the field he had the self-confidence and willpower to stand up to his sister and take up the reins of the state. He had learned enough and had developed the strength of character to resist the extortion efforts of the senior priests.

  The panther that used to be a woman was in a cage that was more like a coffin. She could not stand up. At no time would she be able to use the full leverage of her powerful muscles. She could do little but lie there and be angry.

  The Captain did not believe in taking chances. He had seen what the forvalaka could do ages ago.

  All our enemies would share our adventure. And our fate—unless they elected to warn us about something.

  Rudy slipped down the slope to meet the Captain, alerted by Bucket’s remark about it being game time. I did not look back. I knew he meant that Sleepy had come out of the bunker and was sprawled against the wall by the door again. Just the way we wanted.

  Rudy would ask the Old Man to have his crowd make a racket coming into my shanty monarchy.

  One of Bucket’s favorite Taglian lieutenants, stuck with the name Lhopal Pete to distinguish him from a sergeant everybody called Khusavir Pete (both “Petes” deriving from the center syllable of an eleventeen-syllable Gunni godname), came to tell his leader he would need to bring up a lot more water if the men were going to take care of all the cleanup I wanted them to do while I explored beyond the Shadowgate. Bucket told him, “Wait till that bunch of aristocratic assholes gets on up here. We don’t want anybody to get trampled.”


  “Yes, sir.” Lhopal Pete collected his work party and took them around behind my bunker where they would be out of the way till Croaker arrived and made enough noise to cover the bunch sneaking up on Sleepy.

  I started spooning mush into my mouth. “You’re right, Thai Dei. Even grubs and bugs couldn’t hurt this stuff. Give me a bowl for Sleepy.”

  I took it over myself. “Here you go, kid.”

  Sleepy just stared. I moved the bowl up under his nose. “You better get well enough to feed yourself, kid. I’m in no mood to keep doing it for you.” I glanced back to see how close Croaker was. There was enough light now that torches were becoming superfluous.

  In minutes he was close enough. The racket was loud enough. I dropped the wooden spoon into Sleepy’s lap, seized his wrists, clamped down. The guys came out from behind the bunker. One grabbed Sleepy’s hair and yanked his head back. Another shoved a wad of dirty rag into the kid’s mouth.

  Soulcatcher fought. But the surprise was complete. She never had a chance. “All wrapped up,” I told the Old Man when he stopped his mount beside us.

  “You use every piece of rope you had?”

  Catcher did look like a victim of excessive enthusiasm.

  “Don’t want to take any chances, boss. I wish you’d brought another one of those cages.”

  “Now that would’ve been a dead giveaway, wouldn’t it? Even if I’d known what you planned.”

  Lady stopped right behind Croaker. She had her Lifetaker helmet on. There was no way to tell what she was thinking. She never said a word, just stared at the sister who had caused her so much trouble for so long.

  Catcher did not abandon the Sleepy form. She was not a natural shapeshifter so maybe changing was difficult to do. I did not count on that, though. She had a history of altering her appearance. I asked, “She have to stay this way as long as we’ve got her tied up?”

  Lady did not respond. She just stared.

  “I mean, I wouldn’t want her turning to jelly and oozing away when I wasn’t looking. I guess I could stuff her into a big jar. If I had a jar. If it had a lid that could be sealed.”