The Return of the Black Company

by Cook, Glen

  Something had been done to it. Something not natural. That kind of stone stood up to everything forever—like the rest of the stone on the plain.

  Thai Dei muttered, “I smell sorcery.”

  “You have a fine nose, my brother.”

  The guys we were following were in a hurry themselves, also following the curve of the wall and whoever was ahead of them. They refused to wait but we continued to gain ground.

  We rounded a knee of wall and found many of the animals and much of the equipment crowded into a shady patch in front of what once must have been the main gate. I glanced upward. The clever builders ran the only protected approach where it could be bombarded at will for a great distance. I wondered if I went up there with a big enough rock could I squash the forvalaka. The black leopard was in a foul mood. She roared and snarled and chewed at the bars of her cage. She was being ignored because of her bad attitude.

  I wondered if we ought not just leave her behind when we turned back. The shadows would find a way.

  The other animals had been left to supervise themselves, too.

  Sparkle and Wheezer, only twenty yards ahead now, were squeezing through the gateway. The gate itself was broken and twisted and hung on a single huge lower hinge. A big crack in the masonry indicated that this damage had been caused by earthquakes, too.

  There was a large open space immediately behind the gate. Most fortifications have them. They are where you put the people the place was built to protect. A lot of the guys were there. A debate was running about whether or not the broken gate should be busted down so the animals and wagons could be brought inside. Concurrently, an argument raged amongst the Nyueng Bao about whether or not they were obligated to follow the Company deeper into the fortress.

  “Shit. I thought you died,” Willow Swan said when he saw me. “Thought we were gonna pick up the stiff on the way back. If you didn’t start smelling too bad.”

  “Thoughtful of you. Where’s the Old Man?” Mather and Blade, I noted, were not among those in the courtyard. I peered around.

  Every vertical surface consisted of the same decomposed basalt. The inner fortress was so huge its magnitude would have stricken me numb had I not experienced Overlook and the Palace in Taglios. Though still standing, it had been cracked a hundred ways. Thousands of chunks great and small had fallen from its face and lay in heaps at the base of the wall.

  “They went inside. Ten minutes ago, maybe. Shouldn’t take long to catch up.” Swan winced as he started toward the steps rising to the skinny door of the inner fortress. I suspected that, as he had a habit of doing, he had begged off earlier and had changed his mind since.

  Thai Dei clumped after me, every slamming step an indictment. Because he joined me several other Nyueng Bao peeled off the debating party and followed.

  The doorway seemed like a veil of darkness. It felt like a veil of darkness when I stepped through it. Like what I thought a veil of darkness ought to feel like, anyway.

  There was little light inside. That little seemed to seep through unseen cracks above and ahead and got all the life sucked out before it reached me. “Quit shoving back there!” I snapped. Thai Dei’s cousins were pushing me forward as they came through the doorway. “And be quiet. I’m trying to listen.” Sounds were coming from somewhere. They were ricocheting around inside a vast empty space, though, which made it impossible to guess where they originated.

  Willow Swan muttered, “I was right the first time. I got no business being in here.” And he was right, for sure, as I would learn before much time passed.

  “Quiet.” In a moment I set off in the apparent direction of the voices.

  107

  I heard Lady and Croaker, Bucket, Hagop, Otto, Loftus, Longo and Clete all cheerfully engaged in a vulgar debate. There was not one highbrow among them. When I caught up I found the whole Old Crew in one ugly clump. They had even brought Howler, Longshadow and Catcher along. Howler and Longshadow were out of their cages. Longshadow was presided over by Blade and Cordy Mather. Howler was alert but Longshadow was little more than a drooling cabbage. The Prahbrindrah Drah had gotten stuck with watching and helping Howler.

  No matter. I approached the Old Man where he and Lady were crouched, peering through a break in a wall at something that was, I guessed, never meant to be seen. Croaker looked back to see who was crowding him. I demanded, “Where’s Narayan Singh?”

  “He’s…” A bewildered, blank look captured his face. It was hard to make out, though. His whole crowd had only one torch burning for light. Longinus held that and he was about twenty feet away. Still, I could see Croaker well enough to see that, suddenly, he looked like he had been hit over the head with an axe handle.

  I turned to Lady. “You tell me. Where’s Narayan Singh? Wasn’t he one of your favorite prisoners?” Was he not somebody who would have been killed a long time ago if a fool name of Murgen was in charge?

  Lady just stared at me. I got the feeling she wanted to put her Lifetaker helmet back on and kick me in the head. But she remained strong. She continued to avoid old habits.

  Croaker said, “I forgot he even existed. How could that happen?”

  Lady went on from there. “What happened? What did Singh do?”

  I ticked fingers. “He escaped. He attacked Uncle Doj. Using a black rumel. He found Catcher’s hideout and freed the Daughter of Night. They’re on the run, probably already plotting how to get back in business.”

  Lady’s fingers probed her waistline, then felt for a left sleeve that did not exist. She had no place to hide a strangling cloth while wearing armor. Her expression of surprise left her looking totally goofy. This sort of thing did not happen to her!

  Soulcatcher, although farther away than Longo and his torch, heard me just fine. She made an inarticulate sound that had to be rage, began to flop on her litter. She seemed to be in awfully good shape for somebody who had been tied and gagged for three days.

  I said, “I think the Mother of Deceivers pulled a fast one.” I thought I would shut my mouth for a while. Croaker was so angry he was shaking.

  Lady handled it better. After a long, exasperated sigh directed at no one in particular she crouched and peered through the crack again. I bent over. There was a hint of reddish light beyond her. She said, “He’s marked now. He can be found. I’ll handle that when we get back to camp. This time I’ll take your advice.” She shook her head suddenly, violently, as though trying to clear it. “She is insidious. I didn’t think she could do that to me. Come on.” She ducked through the gap in the wall.

  “Here. Take this.” Bucket shoved the standard into my hands. I had sort of pretended not to notice him carrying it. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”

  “I overslept.”

  Croaker went through behind Lady. A couple other guys were thinking about going. Nobody was in a hurry, though, so I shoved the head of the standard into the hole and started after it.

  Croaker had a little trouble. He was a big man. I had more trouble than he did because I went into the crack with a long pole.

  Thai Dei grabbed the standard from behind about the same time Croaker got ahold of the other end. One pulled one way and the other pushed the other and I got squished in the middle. After I yelled some and dragged my ass on through and got the damned standard back under control I took the opportunity to look around.

  It was very dark in there. Except for the glow from a crack in the floor about a half mile away.…

  Death is eternity. Eternity is stone.

  “Stone is silent,” Lady said.

  It is immortality of a sort.

  The earth twitched. From up ahead came the scream of stone moving on stone. A hulking darkness above the reddish lightleak heaved.

  Men coming through the crack behind us forced us first three forward. Longo finally arrived with the torch. It did not do much to relieve the darkness but did show us where we were putting our feet. “One-Eye says we’re walking into a trap, boss.” I began telling him
and Lady about my latest night of ghostwalking.

  “Whose trap is it?” Croaker demanded after a while. “That might be critical.”

  I said, “I didn’t have a chance to talk it over with the little shit.”

  Lady said, “It’s my sister’s trap. Have the men drag her in here. I’ll stop listening to me and start taking your advice. She can stay right here when we go back.”

  I nodded as though that plan excited me. Far be it from me to remind her that she had killed Soulcatcher before.

  Croaker raised an eyebrow in my direction but said nothing otherwise. He had a peace to maintain.

  “Get them all in here,” Lady ordered. There were times when she was something more than the Lieutenant.

  They banged Catcher around good dragging her through the crack. But the bitch kept right on smiling behind her gag. That was unnerving. Which is why she did it, I guess. Logically, she ought to be starved, thirsty, littersore and very depressed. Few of the men were gutsy enough to stand guard over her while she was allowed to eat or relieve herself. Usually the job went to Swan or Mather or the Prince—if anybody bothered to remember her at all. Blade, though, would have nothing to do with Catcher. I think he hated her because Lady did and his regard for Lady was well inside the realm of obsession.

  Catcher had a really dark and promising look for good old Murgen, happy or not otherwise.

  “Start exploring,” Lady snapped. She knelt over Catcher but looked up at Croaker. “You’re here. What are you going to do about it?” It was obvious that she was suffering one of her mood swings.

  I knew Croaker wanted to tell her that this was not Khatovar, to insist that we had not traveled halfway across the earth and had not hacked our ways through hell only for the sake of finding an abandoned rockpile already fallen into ruin. But he could not claim that because he did not know the truth.

  He said nothing.

  Croaker was becoming more taciturn all the time.

  Lady muttered under her breath, grabbed Soulcatcher’s chin and forced her sister to look her in the eye. “You have anything you want to share with us, dear? Is there any little secret about this place that you’d trade for not getting left behind when we leave?”

  Catcher winked at me. Lady did not have a hope.

  I got the impression that she was willing to haul out of there right now and to hell with puttering around the rockpile trying to get the angle on everybody else.

  Catcher really was in a bad mood. And Lady, too. Lucky for Kina she was divine.

  Catcher smiled and smiled but never volunteered anything. She would not, not to save her own ass. Which was what I expected. All the Ten Who Were Taken were vulnerable only through their obsessions.

  “Shee-it!” echoed through the darkness. “What the fuck was that? Captain! Murgen. You got to see this.”

  Croaker shrugged and nodded. It did not matter what it was. It was an excuse to get away from the old lady for a minute.

  I shuffled out onto a floor I could sense only by feeling it under my feet. Croaker shuffled behind me. He was muttering like an old madman, shaking his head, wanting to know what the hell he was doing here. This was not the place he had been going for the last thirty years. This was somebody’s cruel joke. This was somebody’s nightmare. This could not be the birthplace of the Free Companies of Khatovar. There was nothing here.

  I felt his despair grow. And knew it would swell till it became deep and black. And then, in all likelihood, it would take a sideways turn when he convinced himself that it had all come to this because he had let himself get distracted. I had no trouble seeing the future, no sheep’s guts needed. Sometime not long after we returned to Kiaulune he would decide we went wrong because we moved before we studied those early Annals. He would decide we had to go get them. And doing that just might generate the bloodshed needed to give Kina her Year of the Skulls.

  She is the darkness, all right.

  I was surrounded by females, human, divine and demigod, every one of whom could drape herself in that cloak. But right now lumbering, dull old Kina seemed to have all her many sets of claws firmly locked on the title.

  “Yah!” The Old Man grabbed my shoulder, stopped me just a few steps short of daydreaming my way into an unscheduled dive into an abyss with no bottom. The weak scarlet light came up from that. So did a trailer of mist. But that gap got only a glance before our attention became fixed on the cause of the recent outburst.

  Now I could get a fair look at what had heaved following that last little tickle of an earth tremor. “Torches!” I bellowed. “Get some light over here. Get some more torches lit.” They did have plenty more, the brothers, but they were being frugal. “It’s a big-ass old wooden throne.” What I could not bring myself to add was that that big-ass old wooden throne had a big-ass old humanoid body nailed to it with silver knives. Throne and body were poised above the abyss, painted cruelly by the red light. I wanted torches so I could see the body better. I thought its eyes were open and I did not want that to be true.

  “What the fuck is it?” somebody asked. “A giant?”

  Thai Dei, lurking in my shadow as always, offered one quick phrase in Nyueng Bao. I did not understand anything but the accusation “Bone Warrior.” “What was that?”

  “It might be the golem Shivetya, Stone Soldier.” Why was he dragging that old stuff out now?

  “Shivetya?” I knew what a golem was. An artificial man, commonly created from clay. In some mythologies all of us descend from such divine knickknacks.

  “It is Gunni myth, Soldier of Darkness. Khadi, or Kina, when she was young, warred with everyone. She so weakened the Lords of Light that the Lords of Darkness thought to see a chance to conquer them and sent an army of demons to attack them. The fighting went so poorly for the Lords of Light that the god Fretinyahl, who is sometimes said to be Kina’s father, begged Kina for help. She agreed, but for reasons of her own. In the final battle on the stone plain Khadi grew bigger and stronger every time she devoured one of the demons.”

  This much of the mythology I knew. Among other versions. Some witnesses claimed Kina was created specially for the last great battle with the demon host sent up by the Lords of Darkness. According to others she was sired by the devil Ranashya who disguised himself in the aspect of Fretinyahl and had his way with Mata, one of the forms the mother goddess takes in Gunni myth. Still others insist Kina is not native to Gunni myth at all but is a powerful outside intruder whose presence was so wicked it had to be accepted even while mostly ignored.

  The key story was pretty basic. Desperate gods chose to battle evil with evil and ended up having their weapon turn and chomp on their fingers. Kina’s creator, or father, eventually tricked her into falling asleep, after which she was imprisoned until her worshippers could spring her with the Year of the Skulls. The Year of the Skulls was something that was going to come. There was no preventing it. Even though Kina was asleep and imprisoned a tiny wisp of her essence had escaped and remained in the world guiding those who would bring on the end of the age. But it could be thwarted indefinitely by the efforts of good and righteous men.

  “Once they understood how they had damned themselves the other Lords of Light directed Fretinyahl to make a demon out of clay and animate it with a shard of his own soul so he would never lose control. This golem was given the name Shivetya, which means Deathless. Shivetya is supposed to guard the gateway to Khadi’s resting place forever. I never heard anything about Shivetya being nailed into place but even the gods are cruel and unforgiving, Bone Warrior.”

  “No shit. And can that crap. I didn’t like it from Gota and Doj and I sure don’t like it from you.” I looked at Croaker. “You follow that? You ever heard any of that before?”

  “Some. A friendly old scholar in Taglios did tell me that while the exact meaning of Khatovar has been lost, similarities with modern dialect suggested something like ‘Place from which Khadi went forth,’ or simply ‘Khadi’s gate.’”

  “And you wanted
to go there anyway?” Were we walking into the realities behind the dark heart of southern myth? I did not want that. I wanted to be on my way to paradise. We were supposed to be on the road to paradise.

  Croaker did not answer me.

  “Tell me more,” I said to the air. A bunch of torches were burning now. Most of the gang were ranged behind me and the Old Man. More light did not stop me having to see what I did not want to see. The thing pinned to the throne had open eyes.

  It did not move, though. “Shit,” Longinus said. “It’s just some kind of goddamn idol. Don’t let’s get all spooked out.”

  I began to inch forward, lowering the standard so I could use it like a pike. I have no clue why I thought that might do me some good against some divine toss-off.

  Croaker came with me.

  We halved the distance to the throne. The engineer brothers stuck close with torches. Everybody else seemed less inclined to look at anything up close. I saw no evidence that the thing on the throne was anything but a carving. At closer view it did begin to look a little crudely made.

  We halved the distance again. I could now inhale the thin vapors from the crack in the floor. They were very cold and smelled faintly of old death.

  For an instant I had a sense of coming home.

  It is immortality of a sort.

  I jumped, looked around. Only Lady seemed to have sensed something, too.

  When I looked back at the toppled throne I saw the hall as it may have appeared a thousand years ago. Or more. When a band of cruel priests were making the original shadows from prisoners of war. It was there for just an instant but that moment was long enough to tell me that this had been a very ugly place once upon a time, long before the advent of the twelve Free Companies.

  “Stop right there,” Croaker whispered.

  I stopped. His tone was urgent. “What?”

  “Look down.”

  I looked. Before us lay the dessicated remains of a crow. Just the way it lay struck terror right down to the bones of my toes. “A shadow got it. We’re not safe here.”