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

by Glen Cook

  The more we rode along, the more Raven dried out and turned back into the real Raven. And I don’t mean into the Corbie that I got to know when I first met him, I mean the real bad-ass so tough and hard he was death on a stick. I don’t think it ever occurred to him to take a drink after he made up his mind that he had something else to do.

  We had practice sessions every morning before we rode out and every evening after we set camp. Even when he was at his weakest it was all I could do to handle him. When he really started coming back he beat me at everything but throwing rocks and running footraces.

  His hip never let up on him.

  He wouldn’t never stop over at an inn or in a village. Putting away temptation, I guess.

  You ain’t never going to impress me with nothing if you think you’re going to tell me tall tales and you ain’t never seen the Tower at Charm. There ain’t nothing ought to be that big. It’s got to be five hundred feet tall and as black as a buzzard’s heart. I never seen nothing like it before and I don’t expect I ever will again.

  We never went too close. Raven said there wasn’t no sense getting those people’s attention. Damned straight. That was the heart of the empire, the home of the Lady and all those old evils called the Ten Who Were Taken.

  I went off a few miles and kept my head down while Raven skulked around trying to find something out. I was perfectly happy to get rested up from all those hundreds of miles of riding.

  He materialized out of a sunset that painted the horizon with end-of-the-world fires. He sat down across from me. “They’re not in the Tower. They stopped there for a couple weeks, but then they headed south again. She followed them.”

  I got to admit I groaned. I never was a whiner in all my soldiering days, but I never got put through anything like this, either. A man ain’t made for it.

  “We’re gaining on them, Case. Fast. If they fool around in Opal like they did here we’ll have them.” He gave me a fat smile. “You wanted to see the world.”

  “Not the whole damned thing in a week. I kind of counted on enjoying the seeing.”

  “We don’t get them turned around and headed toward the trouble, there might not be much damned world left.”

  “You going to take time out to look for your kids while we’re down there?” I wanted to see the sea. I wanted that since I was little. A traveling man come through and told us kids lies about the Jewel Cities and the Sea of Torments. From then on I always thought about the sea when I was digging potatoes or pulling weeds. I pretended I was a sailor, holy-stoning a deck, but I was going to be a ship’s master someday.

  What did I know?

  More than the sea, now, I wanted to see Raven do right and get right with himself and his kids.

  He gave me a funny look, then just ducked the question by not answering it.

  * * *

  We accumulated a fair arsenal here and there as we rode along. Just outside Opal we got a chance to show it off. Not that that done a lot of good.

  This great big old hairy-ass black iron coach come roaring out of the city and straight up the road at us, them horses looking like they was breathing fire. I never saw anything like it.

  Raven had. “That’s the Lady’s! Stop it!” He whipped out a bow and strung it.

  “The Lady’s coach? Stop it? Man, you’re crazy! You got guano for brains.” I got my bow out, too.

  Raven threw up a hand in a signal for them to halt. We tried to look stand-and-deliver, your money or your life. Mean.

  Them coachmen never even slowed down. It was like they never even saw us. I ended up going ass over appetite into a ditch with about a foot of muck and water in it. When I got up I saw Raven had ended up in some blackberry bushes on the other side. “Arrogant bastards!” he shouted after the coach.

  “Yeah. Got no damned respect for a couple of honest highwaymen.”

  Raven looked at me and started laughing. I looked at him and went to laughing right back. After a minute, he said, “There wasn’t anybody inside that coach.” He sounded puzzled.

  “When did you have time to look?”

  “I think I know what’s happening. Come on. We have to hurry. Catch your horse.”

  I caught her. She was too stupid to hold a grudge. But his kept leading him around, looking back like he was thinking, You ain’t going to pull that crazy shit on me again, you son of a bitch. This game went on for a while. I finally stopped it by sneaking up on the beast from the other direction.

  We blew about a half hour diddling around there.

  The big black ship was about a half hour down the channel when we got to the waterfront. For a minute I thought Raven was going to chop that gelding of his into fish bait. But he just dismounted and stood there on the wharf, staring out to the sea. Whenever a local growled at us about being in the way he just gave them one of those looks that stilled the heart and quickened the feet.

  He had it all back, whatever it was. Those weren’t soft guys, there on that waterfront.

  The black ship faded into the haze out on the water. Raven shuddered his way back to the racket and fish smells. “Guess we’ll have to sell the horses and find a ship headed for Beryl.”

  “Hang on here, man. Enough is enough. Reasonable is reasonable. You figure on heading all the way to the end of the world? Look around here. This is Opal. Almost ever since I’ve known you I been hearing how you got to get back to Opal and find out about your kids. Look it! We’re here! Let’s do it.”

  The guy was my friend. But he had trouble hanging in. Before he was Raven he was Corbie, and before he was Corbie he was Raven. And sometime way back he was somebody else before he got to be Raven the first time. I don’t know who, but I know he was somebody high-class and he came from Opal and he left two kids behind, twins, when he got on with Croaker and that bunch and headed north for the fighting in Forsberg.

  He plain left those kids to the winds of fortune. He tortured himself because he didn’t know what happened to them, because he wasn’t shit as a father. Me, I figured it was high time he got that all straightened out.

  He thought about it a long time. He kept looking down the coast, eastward, like the answer might be there. What I saw when I looked that way was the homes of rich people on top of cliffs, overlooking the sea. I always kind of suspected he was one of them.

  “Maybe when we come back through,” he said, finally. “When we’re headed north again.”

  “Sure.” Bullshit.

  He heard me thinking. He sort of shrank into himself. He did not look at me.

  Best ship we could get for Beryl was on some kind of fat scow leaving in two days. I got sick just looking at it.

  Raven got good and polluted that night even though I never said another word about his kids. I guess he heard me thinking. Or he heard himself, which is worse.

  I got up early. Raven would be nursing a hangover all day. He was one of those old farts had to tell you all about how he never got one when he was young. I went off to look around.

  I did all right. I never got lost. And the city had so many different kinds in it after a couple generations being part of the empire that almost everywhere I could find somebody who spoke one of the languages that I did.

  It wasn’t a lot of fun rooting around in a friend’s past. I didn’t learn a whole lot, anyway. I couldn’t find hardly anybody who remembered anything, and what they did remember mostly sounded like it was fairy tale. Good stories always get bigger. But I think I got some sense out of all the nonsense.

  A long time back a character named the Limper was the governor of the province that included Opal. The Limper was one of the original Ten Who Were Taken, the undead sorcerer-devils who were the Lady’s champions. They were called Taken because they had been great villains in their own right once, but they had been enslaved by a greater and darker power.

  This one called the Limper was about as corrupt and rotten a governor as ever there was.

  I knew the guy later. He had been up to the Barrowland for the
last big battle, where he got his. All I can say is, there wasn’t no one anywhere in this wide world who shed a tear when he went down. Of all the Taken he was the craziest and nastiest.

  Anyway, he was the boss in Opal and him and his cronies was gutting the province, stealing the coppers off dead men’s eyes. A certain Baronet Corvo, whose family had become allied with the empire when it first came into the area, went off on an assignment somewhere. While he was gone his old lady got to messing around with the Limper’s gang. To the point where she helped rob the baronet’s family of most of its honors and titles and all its properties. She helped frame some uncles and cousins and brothers so they could be executed and their properties confiscated.

  I couldn’t find out much about her. The marriage was arranged and there never was any love in it. I got the impression it was set up to end a feud that had been going on for a hundred years. It didn’t work.

  She cleaned out and killed off Raven’s family. Then he killed her and her whole gang except for the Limper himself. Maybe he could have gotten everything back if he had wanted. The Limper never was in good with the Lady. But Raven found Darling, the White Rose, who became the Lady’s mortal enemy.…

  Not a bad job of finding out, if I do say so myself. Even if I couldn’t find out one thing about Raven’s kids. I only run into two people who remembered there was kids. They didn’t know what happened to them.

  Nobody cared but me, it seemed.

  * * *

  We sold the horses. They didn’t bring enough. They was pretty ragged after the beating they took coming south. Raven had a bad hangover and wasn’t in no mood to argue. But I was getting brave in my old age.

  I asked him, “What’s the point in us chasing Croaker halfway across the world? Especially when the last time you ran into him he put an arrow into you? Say we do catch him. If he don’t finish the job, if he even listens, what’s he going to do about whatever happened up north?”

  I got to admit I was plenty skeptical about what he claimed maybe happened up there. Even if he did study a little black sorcery way back when.

  I guess you could call it nagging. I said, “I figure you got a lot more important business right here in Opal.”

  He gave me an ugly look. “I don’t much care what you think about that, Case. Mind your own business.”

  “It is my business. It’s me getting dragged halfway across the world and maybe ending up getting killed someplace I never heard of because you got problems inside your head.”

  “You aren’t a slave, Case. There’s no one holding a knife to your throat.”

  I couldn’t say I owe you, man, but you wouldn’t understand nothing about that. You taught me to read and write and believe I had a little value as human being before you went off the end. So I said, “If I drop out, who’s going to clean you up when you puke all over yourself? Who’s going to drag you out after you start a fight in some tavern and get your ass stomped?”

  He’d done that last night and if I hadn’t showed up when I did he maybe would’ve gotten himself killed.

  This guy who was riding off to save the world.

  He was in a rotten mood. His head ached with the hangover. His hip hurt. His body ached from the beating. But he could not find a way to answer me even in that humor. He just said, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do, Case, right or wrong. I’d like to have you along. If you can’t make it, no hard feelings.”

  “What the hell else I got to do with my life? I got nothing to tie me down.”

  “Then why do you keep bitching?”

  “Sometimes I like to have what I’m doing make some kind of sense.”

  We got on the boat, which was a grain ship crossing over in ballast to collect a cargo, and we were off to a part of the world even Raven hadn’t seen before. And before we got to the other side we was both damned sure we shouldn’t have done it. But we did decide not to try walking back to Opal when the ship’s master refused to turn her around.

  Actually, the trip didn’t start out all that bad. But then they had to go untie the mooring ropes.

  A storm caught us halfway over. It wasn’t supposed to blow at that time of year. “It never storms this season,” the bosun promised us right after the wind split a sail the topmen didn’t reef in time. For four more days it kept on not storming at that time of year. So we were four more days behind when we hit the dock in Beryl.

  I didn’t look back. Whatever I’d thought about Raven and his kids and obligations before, that wasn’t interesting now. They were on the other side of the big water and I was cured of wanting to be a sailor. If Raven suddenly decided he had to go back and balance accounts I was going to tell him to go pick his nose with his elbow.

  The bunch we were chasing had left a plain trail. Raven’s buddy had gone through Beryl like thunder and lightning, pretending to be an imperial legate on a mystery mission.

  “Croaker is in a big hurry now,” Raven said. “It’s going to be a long chase.”

  I gave him a look but I didn’t say it.

  We bought new horses and rounded up travel stuff. When we headed out what they called the Rubbish Gate we were seven days behind. Raven took off like he was going to catch up by tomorrow morning.

  16

  In the heart of the continent, far to the east of the Barrowland, Oar, the Tower, and Opal, beyond Lords and even that jagged desolation called the Windy Country, lies that vast, inhospitable, infertile, bizarre land called the Plain of Fear. There is sound reason for the name. It is a land terrible to men. Seldom are they welcomed there.

  In the heart of the Plain of Fear there is a barren circle. At the circle’s center stands a gnarly tree half as old as time. The tree is the sire of the sapling standing sentinel over the Barrowland.

  The few scabrous, primitive nomads who live upon the Plain of Fear call it Old Father Tree and worship it as a god. And god that tree is, or as close as makes no difference. But it is a god whose powers are strictly circumscribed.

  * * *

  Old Father Tree was all a-rattle. Had he been human, he would have been in a screaming rage. After a long, long delay his son had communicated details of his lapse in the matter of the digging monster and the buried head and the wicker man’s insane murder spree.

  The tree’s anger was not entirely inspired by the tardiness of his son. As much was directed at his own impotence and at the dread the news inspired.

  An old devil had been put down forever and the world had relaxed, had turned to its smaller concerns. But evil had not missed a stride. It was back in the lists already. It was running free, unbridled, unchallenged, and looked like it could devour the world it hated.

  He was a god. On the wispiest evidences he could discern the shapes of potential tomorrows. And the tomorrows he saw were wastelands of blood and terror.

  The failure of his offspring could be precursor to the greater failure of his own trust.

  When his hot fury had spent itself he sent his creatures, the talking stones, into the farthest, the most hidden, the most shadowed reaches of the Plain, carrying his call for an assembly of the Peoples, the parliament of the forty-odd sentient species inhabiting that most bizarre part of the world.

  Old Father Tree could not move himself, nor could he project his own power beyond certain limits, but he did have the capacity to fling out legates and janissaries in his stead.

  17

  The old man could barely keep himself upright in the saddle when he reached Lords. His life had been sedentary. He had nothing but will and the black arts with which to sustain himself against the hazards of travel and his own physical limits.

  His will and skill were substantial but neither was inexhaustible nor indefatigable.

  He learned that he was just five days behind his quarry now. The White Rose and her party were in no hurry, and were having no trouble getting around the imperial authorities. For all his desperation he took two days off to rest. It was an investment of time he was sure would pay dividends down
the road.

  * * *

  When he left Lords he did so with a horse and pack mule selected for stamina and durability, not for speed and beauty. The long far leg of the next stage would take him through the Windy Country, a land with a bad reputation. He did not want to linger there.

  As he passed through ever smaller, meaner, and more widely separated hamlets, approaching the Windy Country, he learned that he was gaining ground rapidly—if closing the gap by four days in as many weeks could be called rapid.

  He entered the uninhabited land with little optimism for a quick success. There were no regular, fixed tracks through the Windy Country, which even the empire shunned as worthless. He would have to slow down and use his talent to find the trail.

  Or would he? He knew where they were headed. Why worry about where they were now? Why not forget that and just head for the place where they would leave the Windy Country? If he kept pushing he might get there before they did.

  * * *

  He was three-quarters of the way across the desolation, into the worst badlands, a maze of barren and wildly eroded stone. He had made his camp and had fed himself and had lain back to watch the stars come out. Usually it took him only moments to fall asleep, but tonight something kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness. It took him a while to figure out what it was.

  For the first time since entering the Windy Country he was not alone within that circle of awareness open to the unconscious scrutiny of his mystic sensibilities. There was a party somewhere about a mile east of him.

  And something else was moving in the night, something huge and dangerous and alien that cruised the upper airs, hunting.

  He extended his probing mind eastward, cautiously.

  Them! The quarry! And alert, troubled, as he was. Certain something was about to happen.

  He withdrew immediately, began breaking camp. He muttered all the while, cursing the aches and infirmities that were with him always. He kept probing the night for that hunting presence.

  It came and went, slowly, still searching. Good. There might be time.