The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  Croaker said, “I don’t think she can do anything as long as she’s gagged and her hands are tied.”

  “Want we should cut off her fingers?”

  “I think she’ll behave. For now. Won’t you?”

  Catcher did not respond.

  She was over her surprise. Already I could sense calculation and the beginnings of what might be amusement.

  Bucket asked, “Any of you geniuses decide what to do with her now that you’ve caught her?”

  I said something real intelligent like, “Huh?”

  “Like Murgen said, you should of brung a cage. Or was you just going to let her walk?”

  The Old Man’s mood blackened. “Make a litter. She always wanted to be treated like a queen. She can even have her own royal guards. Swan! Mather! You guys can carry the lady.”

  “Aw, go fuck yourself,” Swan said.

  Cordy said, “Take it easy, Willow.”

  “What the fuck’s he gonna do, Cordy? Drag me off to Khatovar?”

  Lady tugged her reins. Her mount turned till she was facing Swan and Mather. After a moment Swan said, “All right. All right.” Ten minutes later he was carrying the downhill end of a litter. He never stopped grumbling but he was far enough behind me that I did not have to listen. Hagop let Swan and Mather start rotating with others after a few miles.

  I went through the Shadowgate first. Croaker followed. After a few dozen yards, he said, “Stop here. I want to experiment. Lower the Lancehead to the black path.” He dismounted as I did that. He took his silver Company badge off his cloak, held it to the Lance for a moment, then knelt and pressed it against the ribbon of black. His knees creaked. He grunted and strained.

  I asked, “What’s that all about?”

  “I’m not sure. Lady thought it couldn’t hurt.”

  So the killer shadows could pick us out of the crowd? Or maybe the other way around. Lady’s instincts were sound. She had been around since before the original Company came down this mountain.

  Croaker told me, “Stay here till everybody goes by. Have all our guys get their badges blessed. And don’t forget yourself.”

  Lady dismounted, followed the Old Man’s example. Then she remounted and continued up the slope, following Croaker, single file.

  Man by man and animal by animal the column filed past. I got puzzled looks from the Company guys and black looks from everybody else. I checked to see where the Old Man was. In Nyueng Bao I told Thai Dei, “If you want you could touch the Lancehead, then that spot on the ground. The others, too.”

  He thought about that. “I wish Uncle was here to make a ruling.”

  “What’s it gonna hurt? And it might be some kind of protection. You don’t have to count it as some big-ass commitment to Company fortunes.”

  He thought some more, probably wondering if we were not sucking them in little by little, then he shouted at the other Nyueng Bao. He gathered them round, told them they had the option and that taking the blessing might offer a measure of protection once the sun went down.

  Many of the Nyueng Bao did not like the idea.

  Sparkle came past leading a string of overburdened but infinitely patient bullocks. “You going to bless the animals, too?” He was being sarcastic but I wondered if it might not be worthwhile. Shadows seldom bothered animals in the world outside—if human prey was available. But we were not in that world anymore.

  The Nyueng Bao argued heatedly but so softly I could not make out a word. Thai Dei eventually had enough. “You do as each of you wishes.” He stalked over, slapped his palm against the head of the Lance, dropped and slapped the black trail, got up and took his place beside me.

  I expected the Old Man to start bellowing any second but he never bothered to look back.

  Howler trundled past. When he reached for the Lance I lifted it. “Keep moving. Friends of the Company only.” I touched each of his black goats on the noggin with the Lancehead. Longshadow came along. The Shadowmaster seemed to be paralyzed. His eyes stared into infinity. I had seen that stare before, but only from guys who had suffered too much terror on the battlefield.

  Fifty people may not sound like a big gang but when you add in all the animals and whatnot necessary to make a long journey it turns into a pretty good parade. Lady and the Old Man were almost to the top when Rudy and Bucket came up as the rearguard. Rudy asked, “You want we should kiss that thing, too?”

  “If you think it’ll help.”

  “I’ll give it a handjob if that’s what it takes to get me through the next three or four nights.”

  “I’ll let you know. I got to get back up front.” By now all the Nyueng Bao had made their decisions one way or another and had dealt with the standard according to their choices.

  I hurried through the routine myself, with Rudy’s help.

  As he neared the top Croaker halted but not to give me a chance to catch up. Good old Murgen would get out front, where he could be the first one to get his head kicked in, only because the Captain had to wait for the troops to adjust to the road so the carts and wagons could make the climb. “’Scuse me. ’Scuse me there,” I said as I clambered past the engineer brothers. “Do a good job so you don’t have to do it again on the way back.”

  A lot of people stood around watching. Construction was not what they did. They felt no urge to learn the trade at this late date. Swan told me, “Lugging this stretcher wasn’t such a bad idea after all.” Mather, though, was working. Cordy Mather was a good man. I wondered how much the Radisha missed him. I wondered if she spent much time trying to figure out why he had not come back.

  I do not believe it was for the sake of the Prahbrindrah Drah.

  None of my no never mind, though.

  Catcher was awake and alert. She looked me in the eye. I think she would have smiled had she had the use of her mouth. I told her, “I want Sleepy back.” She did not respond. She just lay there and twinkled.

  When I caught up with the Old Man and finished puffing I asked, “Did you send anyone to look around where I thought I saw my horse?”

  “Sent a whole company. Left the same time we did.” He looked down the road. “What’s taking them so long?”

  “All generals and no soldiers.” Lady, I noted, had turned her mount completely and was surveying the world from our new vantage point. Men were at work in Overlook already. Smoke rose from cookfires scattered everywhere. Most of the more westerly belonged to Shadowlanders gradually creeping back into the farmland. The sky was overcast. I wondered if we would have rain.

  “What’s that?” Croaker asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “Down there. On the road to your camp.”

  “Your eyes are better … I see it. Little bit of dust.” Somebody, maybe several somebodies, was headed for my camp. They were too far off to make anything of them. They did seem to be in a hurry.

  The carts began to roll. Clete and Longo and Loftus began congratulating themselves loudly. Goats bleated. Bullocks offered bovine complaints. Men cursed. The column began to creak forward.

  “Lead on, Standardbearer,” Croaker said. “And don’t forget that those goats can’t run as fast as you can.” He put his helmet on. The spells on his armor came alive.

  I started walking, standard raised. I knew it would get damned heavy before this was all over.

  My pack was heavy already. I wiggled my shoulders, trying to get the straps settled more comfortably.

  I stepped up onto the plain and set foot on the road. Ahead the standing stones sparkled even with the sun behind the clouds.

  The ground shook just as Croaker and Lady came up behind me. I dropped to one knee but it was not a bad quake. In fact, it was barely perceptible. Embarrassed, I got up and started walking again. “First one of those in a while,” I told Thai Dei. “Took me by surprise.”

  Lady and the Old Man did not seem troubled so I guessed I did not need to be.

  101

  It became a quiet journey once everybody got up onto t
he plain. We were all too nervous to talk. After a mile or so, though, Lady said, “Warn everyone not to leave the road. As long as we stay on it nothing can touch us.”

  Croaker raised a hand to signal a halt. I dropped the butt of the Lance to the road surface. Damn, that thing got heavy fast. The Old Man sent Lady’s news back down the column. He did not question her. He did not distract her at all. Which might mean she was concentrating totally.

  Soon after we resumed moving we reached a place where the road widened out into a big circle. A campground, I reasoned. Lady, in one of her rare remarks, confirmed my guess. Whoever created the plain understood its dangers.

  It was almost noon when we came at last to a standing stone near enough the road to be examined. It was the same kind of rock as the plain’s surface off the road. The sparkle came from metal characters set into the stone. They were characters, that much was clear, but they were none I or anyone else could read.

  It is immortality of a sort.

  I jumped.

  Lady said, “There is great power in this place.”

  “No shit.”

  The earth shivered again, no more strongly than the last time but sufficient to make everyone nervous. These tremors might be harbingers of something worse. Though, I noted, not one of the pillars had been toppled by the vicious quakes of recent years.

  Croaker paid the stone little heed. He kept staring ahead. It was now clear that there was, indeed, some massive structure beyond the forest of stones. It had begun to look like it might be of Overlook’s magnitude.

  The Old Man pushed hard all day, not sparing himself. He spelled me with the standard, setting its butt in his stirrup. Eventually he halted in one of the circles that occurred about each five miles. He stopped only because Lady insisted that it was time. He wanted to keep going. But the column was strung out for miles now and the animals needed rest and water worse than did the men.

  I checked the clouds, wondered if there would be rain and if we could collect any of it. We had brought a lot of water but animals consume a lot and I had a feeling we would get thirsty a long time before we started getting hungry.

  The Captain shed his helmet and the more cumbersome parts of his armor. He was less intrigued with his Widowmaker avatar than was Lady with hers. She bent the knee to comfort, too, though, divesting herself of her helmet, then shaking out her hair. Croaker stared into the distance. He asked, “You make anything of that place?”

  “There is great power there.”

  “There is great power there,” Croaker grumbled. “She’s starting to repeat herself.”

  “That Kina’s hideout?” I asked. “Or Khatovar? Or both? Or neither?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  “Let me hold that for you,” Rudy told me, offering to take the standard. He planted its butt and leaned on it.

  “Where the hell were you the last fifty miles?”

  “Fifty? You’re letting your imagination overload your asshole.”

  “Felt like five hundred, lugging that thing.”

  Rudy chuckled. “Bet you we didn’t do fifteen.” He was having fun. At my expense. “Thought you’d be in shape after all those trips over to suck up to the Old Man.”

  “Rudy, I ain’t in the mood for it.” I wanted to keep an eye and ear on Lady and the Captain, who had moved away once Rudy intruded.

  “Don’t let me get to you, son. I’m just thinking about what a wonderful night it’s going to be.” Behind us the Nyueng Bao had their heads together contemplating those possibilities. A lot of bamboo was in evidence. Sparkle had a team erecting a community cookfire that would be elevated above the surface of the plain. Lady had an idea the road would not like being burned. She had suggested, during the hike, that it might be alive in its own way.

  I wished there was a way to look inside her mind. She had been focused completely since coming onto the plain. Her speculations would be interesting. And she was sharing them with the Old Man, now. And Rudy was keeping me away.

  “Hold on there,” Croaker told Sparkle. “Go ahead and set it up. But don’t start a fire. We’ll eat cold if we can.”

  Shit. We had not eaten well since we left Taglios but plain water and jerky were a step beyond bad.

  “Rudy. You got work to do?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Let me see you doing it.” Croaker turned around, leaned close to Lady again, stared through the stands of pillars. I was willing to bet he was trying to face down his doubts. Right out there might be the culmination of many hellish years that had begun by what, I suspect sometimes, might have been the momentary whim of a man who had had no idea what to do next and who had big trouble changing his mind in public.

  I began to prowl the perimeter of the camping circle. Wherever I looked the view was the same. With an overcast sky that was disorienting.

  “Standardbearer? You all right?”

  “Sindawe. I’m sorry. I guess I’m more distracted than I thought. I never noticed you coming.”

  “The place has that effect, doesn’t it?” I got the impression he would have been ghostly pale had he been capable. “There’s something I thought you should see.”

  “All right.” I followed him through the press of animals and men all trying to set up camp without pushing one another out of the circle or damaging the road.

  “There,” Sindawe told me, indicating the road where it left the circle on the southern side, a fact I determined only because I could see parts of the huge structure down that way.

  “A hole?” That was all I saw. A hole in the road, two inches across and a foot deep. Maybe more. The light was not good enough to betray its bottom.

  “Yes. A hole. It may be a huge leap of faith, or just my imagination, but it strikes me that it would be a perfect place to set the standard.”

  “Sure does.” Had I been past this point before? Had there been a hole? I could not recall. The opportunity to put the damned pole down for a while sure was attractive, though. And grew more so as I stared.

  I dropped the butt of the standard into the hole. It went in a foot and a half. “That’s good,” I muttered. “Perfect place for it, too. Assuming the Old Man don’t have some notion of his own.” I stretched. I had not lugged the standard all day but I had carried it more than anybody else.

  Sindawe grunted. He sounded nervous.

  I felt it, too. Another earth tremor. “Hope it’s not building up to a big one.”

  I looked down at the base of the Lance. The road had hold of it solidly. But when I put it in there, there had been half an inch to spare.

  I tried to pull it out.

  No go.

  It was not vibrating anymore.

  “Shit.”

  Sindawe tried to pull it out. He stopped before he got a hernia.

  “No problem,” I grouched. “If I have to, I’ll just cut it off. Tomorrow.”

  I checked the Old Man and his woman. They still stood shoulder to shoulder, staring southward, now only exchanging the rare word or two. Even with their helmets off they looked pretty spooky.

  Thai Dei materialized to tell me he had our camp set and food prepared. His expression was so bland I knew that he was angry. Here I was out gallivanting around, having a good time, while he was home working his fingers to the bone.

  “I wish you’d grow tits and lose the sausage, we’re going to be married.”

  Another feeble tremor stirred the stone beneath us. I murmured, “And the earth shakes when they walk.”

  “What?” Thai Dei asked.

  “Something from a story I heard when I was a kid. About ancient gods called titans. I was just thinking how far I’ve come since then.” And maybe we were giants.

  102

  I knew I was dreaming because there was a full moon and no clouds overhead. But there was some sort of haze between me and the world because the moon was just the center of a cloud of light drifting across the sky, never rising directly overhead the way it had in the land
of my childhood. The ghostly, bluish light betrayed the restless shadows prowling the bounds of the circle, flowing over and around one another in hundreds. From a thousand miles away, it seemed, I heard Longshadow whimper without respite.

  One large shadow pressed against the edge of the circle not far from where I watched. Something kept it from entering. It spread out upon that invisible surface. I remembered the time I touched a shadow while ghostwalking.

  I began to find traces of the fear that had been missing since I climbed up onto the plain.

  That one shadow seemed to be obsessed with me. I turned away and tried to forget it.

  I looked up. Vaguely fishlike silhouettes moved back and forth against the diffuse moonlight. This must be the kind of view you would have if you were a crab on the bottom of the sea.

  I do not know if it was a true dream. It felt that way. If it was, it would seem that shadows could rise above the surface.

  The schooling shadows suddenly shot off as though impelled by a single will.

  The moon was past its zenith. Maybe that was why.

  Or maybe they were afraid of the creatures who appeared upon the black road, coming from the direction we were headed. They were the shape of men from the waist down and on their right sides. Their heads and left sides were masked by shawls that looked like they were made of polished brass fish scales. There were three of them. They felt like powerful ghosts.

  My big shadow buddy did not run away with the others. I began to have some sense of it, as I had had with that other. It was terrified.

  I caught one little flash of an instant in a place of torture, of pain beyond pain, while priests chanted.

  I rose from my pallet. I went to stand beneath the standard, facing the ghosts. They let the shawls fall from their faces.

  I do not know why. I thought, You motherfuckers are too ugly. Get the fuck off my road. And quit messing with my sleep. I had a feeling if they conformed to legend or whatnot they would be something like the Lady’s Ten Who Were Taken, demons or sorcerer kings who had been enslaved by some power greater and darker than they. Go on. Get out of here. You’re dead. Stay that way. I reached for the Lance, felt it come alive in my ghostly hand. Go on.