The Books of the South: Tales of the Black Company (Chronicles of the Black Company)

by Glen Cook

  “You better get some clothes on.”

  * * *

  Heading down the stairs, Smeds said, “You’d better do the talking.”

  “Good idea.”

  * * *

  Heading up the street, Smeds asked, “You ever killed anybody?”

  “No. I never needed to. I don’t see where I’d have any problem.”

  “I had to once. Cut a guy’s throat. It ain’t like you think. They spray blood all over the place and make weird noises. And they take a long time to croak. And they keep trying to come after you. I still get nightmares about that guy trying to take me with him.”

  Tully looked at him and made a face. “Then do it some other way next time.”

  3

  Each night there was moonlight enough, a thing came down out of the northern Great Forest, quiet as a limping shadow, into the lorn and trammeled place of death called the Barrowland. That place was heavy with the fetor of corruption. A great many corpses lay rotting in shallow graves.

  Limping on three legs, the thing cautiously circled the uncorrupted carcass of a dragon, settled on its haunches in the hole it was digging so patiently, night after night, with a single paw. While it worked it cast frequent glances toward the ruins of a town and military compound several hundred yards to the west.

  The garrison had existed to shield the Barrowland from trespassers with evil intentions and to watch for signs that the old darkness in the ground was stirring. Those reasons no longer existed. The battle in which the digging beast had been crippled, in which the dragon had perished, in which the town and compound had been devastated, had put an end to the need for a military stewardship.

  Except that it had not occurred to anyone in authority to give the surviving Guards new assignments. Some had stayed, not knowing what else to do or where else to go.

  Those men were sworn enemies of the beast.

  Had it been healthy, the thing would not have been concerned. It could have dealt with those men easily. Healthy, it was a match for any company of soldiers. Crippled and still suffering from a dozen unhealed wounds, it would not be able to outrun a man let alone outfight those it would have to get through before it could pursue the messenger the Guards were sure to send flying to their masters if they discovered it.

  Those masters were cruel and deadly and the beast stood no chance against them even when in the best of health.

  Its master could protect it no more. Its master had been hacked to pieces and the pieces burned. Its master’s soul had been imprisoned in a silver spike that had been driven into his skull.

  The beast was doglike in appearance but rather uncertain in size. It had a protean nature. At times it could be as small as a large dog. At other times it might be the size of a small elephant. It was most comfortable being about twice the size of a war-horse. In the great battle it had slain many of its master’s enemies before overpowering sorceries had driven it from the field.

  It came stealthily, again and again, despite the fear of exposure, the pain of its wounds, and its frustration. Sometimes the wall of its excavation collapsed. Sometimes rainwater would fill the hole. And always there was the inescapable vigilance of the only truly watchful guardian the victors had left.

  A young tree stood among the bones, alone. It was near immortal and was far mightier than the night skulker. It was the child of a god. In time, each night, it wakened to the digger’s presence. Its reaction was uniform and violent.

  A blue nimbus formed among the tree’s limbs. Pale lightning ripped toward the monster. It was a quiet sort of lightning, a sizzle instead of boom and crash, but it slapped the monster like an angry adult’s swing at a small child.

  The beast suffered no injury, only extreme pain. That it could not endure. Each time it was hit it fled, to await another night and that delay before the child of the god awakened.

  The monster’s work went slowly.

  4

  Darling left Raven standing there. She rode off with that guy Silent and some other guys that were all that was left of the Black Company, a mercenary outfit that really wasn’t anymore. A long time ago they was on the Lady’s side but something happened to piss them off and they went over to the Rebel. For a long time they was almost the whole Rebel army.

  Raven watched them go into the woods. I could tell he wanted to sit down and cry like a baby, maybe as much because he couldn’t understand as because she did ride off on him. But he didn’t.

  In most ways he was the toughest, hardest bastard I ever saw, and not always in the best ways. When I first found out he was Raven and not Corbie I like to crapped my drawers. A long time ago there was a Raven that rode with the Black Company that was the baddest of the bad. He was with them only about a year before he deserted but he made himself a big rep while he was there. And this was the same guy.

  He said, “We’ll give them a couple hours’ head start so it don’t look like we’re dogging them, then we’ll get out of here.”

  “We?”

  “You want to hang around here now?”

  “That would be desertion.”

  “They don’t know if you’re dead or not. They haven’t counted noses yet.” He shrugged. “Up to you. Come or stay.”

  I could tell he wanted me to come. Right then I was the only thing he had. But he wasn’t going to make no special appeal. Not hard guy Raven.

  I didn’t have no future at the Barrowland and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to ride herd on potatoes. And I didn’t have anybody else in the world, either. “All right. I’m in.”

  He started walking into town. What was left after the fight. I tagged along. After a while, he said, “Croaker was about the closest thing to a friend I had when I was in the Company.” He was still confused.

  Croaker was the boss merc. He wasn’t boss back when Raven was with them, but they had been through a few captains since the old days. Raven was confused because his old buddy and him had gotten in a fight after the Dominator got put down.

  Probably to show off for Darling, Raven had decided he was going to round everything off and close the books by getting rid of the Lady, who lost her powers during the battle. And Croaker said no you don’t and didn’t back down. He put an arrow into Raven’s hip just to show him he was serious.

  “Is a friend somebody who just stands back and lets you do whatever you want whenever you want to do it?”

  He gave me one of his puzzled looks.

  “Maybe he was a whole lot more her friend than he was yours. Way I heard tell, they spent a lot of time together. They rode off into the sunset together. And you know the way those guys are about brotherhood, sticking together no matter what, the Company being their family, them against the whole world. You told me about it enough.”

  There was more I could have said. I could have given it to him by the numbers, how they felt about brothers who ran out on them, but he wouldn’t have got it.

  There wasn’t nobody with more guts in a fight than Raven. He wouldn’t back down from nobody or nothing. But in the emotional tight spots he was ready to pack up and run in a minute. He did it to the Company and he did it to Darling, but they could take care of themselves when he did.

  I think maybe the worst stunt he ever pulled, and the one that still bugs him the most, is when he ran out on his kids.

  He did that back when he enrolled in the Black Company. Maybe he had his reasons, and good ones at the time. He comes up with good excuses. But there’s no getting around the fact that he left his kids when they were too young to take care of themselves. Without making any arrangements for them. He never even told anybody he had kids till he told me, sort of, when he was still being Corbie and started trying to find out what happened to them. They would be grown up now. If they survived.

  He didn’t find out anything.

  I figured he would make finding them his quest now. He didn’t have anything else going. And trudging through the forest headed south, he made noises like that was what he was planning to d
o.

  * * *

  We got as far as Oar. He went out on a drunk. And stayed on it.

  I went on one, too. I went through me some bad girls. All the things a guys does when he’s been out in the woods for a long time, then hits the city. Took me four days to work through that and another day to shake the hangover. Then I took a look at Raven and saw he was just getting started.

  I went and found us a cheap place to stay. Then I got me a job protecting a rich man’s family. That wasn’t hard to do. There were all kinds of rumors about what happened in the Barrowland. The rich saw troubled times coming and wanted to get themselves covered.

  Darling and her bunch were in the city somewhere, for a while. So were the bunch from the Black Company. We didn’t run into any of them before they left out.

  5

  Smeds got sick of Tully’s idea before they were four days out of Oar. Nights were cold in the forest. There was no place to hide from the rain. Whole hordes of bugs chewed on you and you couldn’t get rid of them when you were sick of them like you could with lice and fleas and bedbugs. You could never get comfortable sleeping on the ground—if you could sleep at all with all the racket that went on at night. There were always sticks and stones and roots under you somewhere.

  And there was that bastard Old Man Fish, hardly saying shit but always sneering at you because you didn’t know a bunch of woodsy stuff. Like you needed to know that shit to stay alive on the North Side.

  It was going to be a pleasure to cut his throat.

  Timmy Locan wasn’t much better. Little carrottop runt never shut up. All right, so he was funny most of the time. So he knew every damned joke there ever was and knew how to tell them right and half of them were the kind you wanted to remember so bad it hurt, so you could crack up your friends. But they never came out right for you even when you did remember them.… Damn it, even funny got old after four days.

  Worse than funny, the little prick never slowed down. He bounced up in the morning like he knew it was going to be the best damned day of his life and he went after every damned day like it was. Short people weren’t supposed to be joyous, they were supposed to be cocky and obnoxious. Then you could thump on them and shut them up without feeling bad about it.

  Worst thing of all was, Old Man Fish said they couldn’t follow the road on account of they might run into somebody who would want to know what they were up to or somebody who might remember them after they did the job. It was important that nobody knew who did it. But busting through the tangle of the woods was awful, even with Old Man Fish finding the way.

  Tully hated it worse than Smeds, but he backed the old man up.

  Smeds had to admit they were right. What he didn’t have to admit was that the expedition was worth the slapping branches, the stabbing, tearing briars, and the for-gods’-sake spiderwebs in the face.

  Or maybe the worst was the blisters on his feet. Those started practically before they got out of sight of Oar. Even though he did everything Old Man Fish told him to do, they just kept getting worse. At least they didn’t get infected. That jerk Timmy kept telling cheerful little tales about guys in the army who had had blisters that had gotten infected and they’d had to have their feet or legs chopped off. Dipshit.

  Fourth night in the woods he had no trouble sleeping. In fact, he was getting to that point where he could sleep whenever he stopped moving. The old man observed, “You’re starting to toughen up. We’ll turn you into a man yet, Smeds.”

  Smeds could have killed him then, but it was too much work to get out of his pack straps and go over and do it.

  Maybe the pack was the worst part of it. He had to lug eighty pounds of junk on his back, and what they had eaten of the food part hadn’t lightened the load a bit.

  * * *

  They reached their destination shortly after noon eight days after they departed Oar. Smeds stood just inside the edge of the forest and looked out at the Barrowland. “That’s what all the fuss was about? Don’t look like shit to me.” He sloughed his pack, plopped down on it, leaned against a tree, and closed his eyes.

  “It ain’t what it used to be,” Old Man Fish agreed.

  “You got a name besides Old Man?”

  “Fish.”

  “I mean a front name.”

  “Fish is good.”

  Laconic bastard.

  Timmy asked, “That our tree out there?”

  Tully answered, “Got to be. It’s the only one there is.”

  Timmy said, “I love you, little tree. You’re going to make me rich.”

  Tully said, “Fish, I think we ought to rest up some before we go after it.”

  Smeds cracked an eyelid and glimmed his cousin. That was as close as his cousin had come to complaining since the expedition had started. But Tully was a big-time bitcher. Smeds had wondered how long he would hold out. Tully’s silence so far had helped Smeds keep going. If Tully wanted it bad enough to take what he had been, then maybe it really was as good as he talked.

  The big hit? The one they had been seeking all their lives? Could it be? For that reason alone Smeds would endure.

  Fish agreed with Tully. “I wouldn’t start before tomorrow night. At the earliest. Maybe the night after. We have a lot of scouting to do. We’ll all have to learn the ground the way we learn the geography of a lover.”

  Smeds frowned. Was this no-talk Fish?

  “We have to find a secure place to camp and establish a secondary base for emergencies.”

  Smeds could not keep quiet. “What the hell is all this shit? Why don’t we just go out there and chop the damned thing down and get out of here?”

  “Shut up, Smeds,” Tully snapped. “Where the hell have you been for the last ten days? Get the shit out of your ears and use your head for something besides keeping them from banging together.”

  Smeds shut up. His ears were open, suddenly, and they had caught a very sinister undertone in Tully’s voice. His cousin had begun to sound like he regretted letting him in on the deal. Like maybe he was thinking Smeds was too dumb to be left to live. Right now he had on that same contemptuous look Fish wore so often.

  He closed his eyes, shut out his companions, let his mind roll back over the past ten days, picking up things that he had heard without really hearing because he had been so busy feeling sorry for himself.

  Of course they couldn’t just strut out there and chop the damned tree down. There were soldiers watching the Barrowland. And even if there weren’t any soldiers there was the tree itself, that was supposed to be big mojo. Sorcery there great enough to have survived the dark struggle that had hammered the guts out of this killing ground.

  All right. It wasn’t going to be easy. He would have to work for it harder than he’d ever worked for anything in his life. And he would have to be careful. He would have to keep his eyes open and his brain working. He wasn’t going to give the Kimbro girls music lessons out here.

  * * *

  That day and night they rested. Even Old Man Fish said he needed it. Next morning Fish went to scout for a campsite. Tully said, “You got blisters up to your butt, Smeds. You stay here. Take care of them the way Fish said. You got to get in shape to move if we got to move. Timmy, come on.”

  “Where you going?” Smeds asked.

  “Gonna try getting close to that town. See what we can find out.” They went.

  Fish came back an hour later.

  “That was quick. Find a place?”

  “Not a very good one. River’s moved some since I was up here. Bank’s two hundred yards over there. Not much room to run. Let me look at them feet.”

  Smeds stuck them out. Fish squatted, grunted, touched a couple of places. Smeds winced. “Bad?” he asked.

  “Seen worse. Not often. Got some trenchfoot getting started, too. Others probably got a touch, too.” He looked vacant for a moment. “My fault. I knew you was green and Tully was as organized as a henhouse. Shoulda not let him get in such a big hurry. You get in a hurry you always end up
paying.”

  “Decided what you’re going to do with your cut yet?”

  “Nope. You get to my age you don’t go looking that far ahead. Good chance you might not get there. One day at a time, boy. I’m going to get some stuff for a poultice.”

  Smeds watched the straight-backed, white-haired man fade into the forest silently. He tried to blank his mind. He did not want to be alone with his thoughts.

  Fish returned with a load of weeds. “Chop these into little pieces and put them in this sack. Equal amounts of each kind.” There were three kinds. “When the sack is stuffed close it up and pound on it with this stick. Roll it over once in a while. All the leaves got to get good and bruised.”

  “How long?”

  “Give it a thousand, twelve hundred whacks. Then dump it in this pot. Put in a cup of water and stir it up.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then do another sack. And stir the pot every couple minutes.” The old man faded into the woods without saying where he was going.

  Smeds was pounding his third sack when Fish returned. He sniffed. “Guess you can do a job right when you want.” He settled, took the pot. “Good. That sack will be enough.”

  He turned Smeds’s oldest shirt into bindings for his feet, packed them with soggy, mangled leaves. A cool tingle began soothing his pains.

  Fish made the others treat their feet, too. He did his own.

  Smeds leaned against his tree, troubled. He did not think he was hard enough or bad enough to kill the old man.

  “There between sixty and eighty people still living over there,” Tully said. “Mostly soldiers. But we heard them talking like a big bunch would be leaving in a couple days. Wouldn’t hurt to wait them out on that. We could finish up our scouting.”

  * * *

  Scouting the Barrowland started after sunset, by the light of a quarter moon. The village was dark and silent. It looked a good time to prowl the open ground.

  Out the four went in a loose line abreast barely in sight of one another, Tully guiding on the tree. It was not much of a tree by Smeds’s estimation. Right then it looked like a fat-trunked silver-bark poplar sapling about fifteen feet tall. He could not see anything remarkable there. Why the reputation?