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

by Glen Cook

  Right, old buddy. Sharpshoot when I’m shaking so bad I figure if I live through this one I’m going to be cleaning the brown out of my drawers for a month.

  The monster was only about forty feet away when Silent said hello by smacking it in the face with a bushel of snakes, snakes that hung on and tried to crawl into its ears and mouth and nostrils.

  The snakes never slowed it down but they did take its mind off whatever it had planned for us. It just plowed through.

  I went flying ass over appetite. As I sailed through the air I saw Darling step in, as cool as if she was in a kitchen slicing bread, and take a cut with a two-handed sword I wouldn’t have figured a woman could lift. She was a little high. She hit ribs instead of opening the thing’s belly.

  I hit ground and spent the next couple minutes doing an astronomical survey of a couple hundred newly hatched constellations.

  A savage rain shower soaked me and brought me out of it and to my feet, where I realized that I hadn’t been rained on after all. A windwhale had passed over, dumping a little ballast to slow its fall as it came down after Toadkiller Dog.

  The monster was still headed west. Right behind it was a shimmery something that looked like an elephant with a nest of tentacles for a head. Bomanz’s contribution to the cause.

  That was the last minute when anything made sense.

  The talking stones went berserk, started popping all around. Walking trees jumped up and down. Centaurs ran in circles. Everything that could talk started yelling at everything else. The windwhales went to booming and started dropping like they meant to commit suicide by smashing into the ground. The scarred-up menhir was jabbering at Silent in a lingo I didn’t get and Silent was practically doing a combination flamenco and sword dance trying to tell Darling what the rock was saying.

  I stumbled over to Raven and said, “Old buddy, this looks like a good time to duck out of the party. Before the keepers come to drag them all back to the asylum.”

  He was watching Silent. He said, “Hush.” And a minute later, “The tree god has called the whole thing off. Something’s happened up north. He wants everybody to drop everything and head for home.”

  I looked around. Two windwhales were on the ground already. Critters were piling aboard. The only talking stone around anywhere was the one hanging out with Silent. “There goes our whaleback ride to catch your buddy Croaker.”

  31

  The young tree in the Barrowland had been in a coma since the fire, intelligence damped down while its hurts healed. But there came a day when externals finally registered. There was a bustle and fuss in the Barrowland such as had not been seen since the great battle that had taken place there.

  Curious, and compelled by the mandate of his father, the tree dragged himself out of his fugue, though he was far from completely healed.

  The Barrowland was crawling with soldiers of the shadowed western empire. He sensed the foci of power that had to be their commanders. They were going over every inch of the surrounding ground.

  Why?

  Then the memories came. Not in a flood, thankfully. In snippets and dribbles. In reasonable temporal order. The thing that came to dig, the horror it uncovered. The death that had come out of the forest and fallen upon the town. The fire … The fire … The fire …

  The soldiers went rigid with fear and awe and fled in terror as the lightning crackled among the branches of the tree. Their captains came out and gaped at the fierce blue light washing the Barrowland.

  The tree concentrated its entire intellect upon its immediate forebear and finally, after so many weeks, passed the news of its great failure.

  32

  The twins Gossamer and Spidersilk strode toward the now quiet tree in lockstep. Both wore black leather helmets that hid them completely. Their outfits were mirror images of one another, just as their bodies were. Though their powers were an order of magnitude less deadly and ferocious than those of any of the Ten Who Were Taken, they made the world think otherwise by aping the style and dress of their predecessors.

  Thus they successfully donned the mantle of what it was their ambition to become. And if they survived long enough they might hone their wickedness till they were, indeed, indistinguishable from old terrors now mostly gone from the earth.

  Thus doth evil breed.

  The twins halted three yards from the tree, their fear carefully concealed from their soldiers. They stopped. They stared. They circled the tree, going opposite directions. When they met where they had started they knew.

  Their black hearts were heavy with fear, but also entertained a spark of wicked hope.

  They summoned their lieutenants. In half an hour the troops were headed for Oar.

  The hell with the Limper. There was bigger game afoot.

  33

  It was late afternoon. Smeds looked up from his work on the wall. He grinned. Two more hours and his sentence to the labor battalion—three days for petty vandalism and malicious mischief—would end. And the damned spike would be tucked away safe in a place no one could find. Only he would know that it lay in a pocket in the mortar under a certain merlon stone twenty-seven east of the new east-side tower overlooking the North Gate.

  Smeds was smugly proud of himself for having thought of such a nifty hiding place. Who would think of that? Nobody. And if by some remote chance somebody did, who would go tearing down the whole damned wall to find it? They would pay for the information.

  He grinned again.

  His imperial overseer scowled but did not crack his whip. That whip had taught Smeds quickly to keep up his share of the work even while he was daydreaming.

  His grin died not because the overseer disapproved but because the cloud of dust to the north, that had been approaching for several hours, had come within a mile of the wall and had disgorged two hurried black riders. They had to be Gossamer and Spidersilk.

  They knew about the spike.

  Man, they had come back fast. He did not like what that implied.

  At least maybe now Tully would get a convincing glimpse of what these people were really like when they had their gloves off.

  Time came without a bite from the whip, despite his having wandered off into reveries about a young woman he had met the day before he had let himself get caught painting an obscene slogan on a pre-imperial monument. It had cost him to get a professional letter writer to teach him to inscribe the slogan. He could not read or write his own name.

  That girl was going to be waiting for him tonight, a scant fourteen years of ripening heat.

  He came down out of the scaffolding thinking of a bath and fresh clothing and there was Old Man Fish waiting for him to get his release, a simple formality involving snipping a wire from around his neck. “What’s up?” Smeds asked.

  “I figured somebody ought to come make sure they let you go when they were supposed to. Tully couldn’t be bothered. Timmy’s still laid up.”

  Timmy had let the wizard take the hand the morning Smeds had started his sentence. “He all right? Did it work?”

  “Looks like. No problem with that kind of pain. Let’s go.”

  They walked a way, not talking much. Smeds looked around through narrowed eyes. They were tearing down three times as fast as they were rebuilding. There were clear areas that covered a dozen acres. The gray boys had been more evident since the bunch from the north had come in, but now they were everywhere. Platoons of the Nightstalkers moved around quickly and purposefully. Soldiers from other outfits seemed to be posted on every corner. Twice they were stopped and asked to state their names and business.

  Unprecedented.

  “What the hell is going on?” Smeds asked.

  “I don’t know. They were just getting started when I was coming to get you.”

  “Gossamer and Spidersilk got back from the Barrowland about two hours ago. I watched them from the wall. They were in a hell of a big hurry.”

  “Unh. So there it is.” Fish glanced over, his bushy white eyebrows two ragg
ed caterpillars arching their backs. “Did you put it into the wall?”

  Smeds did not answer.

  “Good. I figured that’s what it had to be. You couldn’t have done better. And I just forgot I even thought you might have been up to something like that.”

  They walked along, listening to the rumors running the streets. One refrain kept coming up. The imperials had sealed the city. Anybody who wanted could get in but they weren’t going to let anyone out till they found someone or something they wanted bad. A house-to-house search had begun already and they were being as thorough as imperials always were.

  “We got a problem,” Smeds said.

  “We have more than one.”

  “I told Tully till I was blue in the face.”

  “Maybe you should have said let’s stay. Contrary as he’s been, he might have decided he had to get out.”

  “I’ll remember that. We got to have a sitdown, all four of us. We got to pound some facts into Tully’s skull.”

  “Yes. Or just do what has to be done whether he likes it or not.”

  “Yeah.”

  They turned into the street that led past the Skull and Crossbones. The shadows made Smeds jumpy. He expected a Gossamer or Spidersilk to come bounding out of every one. He had forgotten his date entirely. “Nothing to do now but cover our asses and try to ride it out. They don’t find anything they’ll figure the spike went on down the road.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They have to loosen up sometime. You can’t keep a city like Oar locked up very long.”

  “They don’t find it easy, Smeds, they’ll try looking hard. Maybe offer some rewards. Big ones, considering the trouble they’re going to already.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw the doc Timmy visited. Remember? I’m pretty sure he caught whatever Timmy had. He had that same look.”

  Smeds stopped walking. “Shit.”

  “Yeah. And then there’s the wizard that did his hand. Two arrows pointing straight at us and too late to dodge them by running away. We have some hard choices to make.”

  Smeds stood staring into the twilight indigo behind spires rising from the heart of the city. Here it was. What he had been afraid this would come to from the beginning, only it wouldn’t be Fish and Timmy he’d have to stick a knife in. “I think I can do it if it has to be done. You?”

  “Yes. If that’s the decision.”

  “Let’s go get a drink and look at the angles.”

  “You don’t want to drink much. If that’s the move we’re going to make. That wizard will have to be done quick. He isn’t stupid. It won’t be long before he figures out that what the grays are looking for might be the same thing that burned Timmy’s hand. And not much longer for him to realize he’s the cutout between us and them. He won’t be easy if he’s looking for us to come.”

  “I’m still going to have to have one long one.”

  Into the Skull and Crossbones. It was the neighborhood social hour but there were tables available. The landlord did not have the sort of personality that brought in the free-spending hordes. To Smeds’s relief his cousin was prominent among the missing.

  Neither of them spoke till a pitcher had been delivered and Smeds had downed a long draft. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Been thinking. The way I see it, we got a whatchamacallit, quorum, right here. You and me. Timmy can’t do anything even if he wanted. And Tully would just argue and fuss and try to take over and make everybody do things his way. Then he’d screw it up and get us all killed.”

  “True.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Old Man Fish smiled softly. “You telling me to decide? You want me to tell you what to do? So that way it isn’t your fault, you were just doing what you were told?”

  Smeds hadn’t thought of it that way consciously. But there was a truth there that startled him.

  “That’s all right,” Fish said. “You just needed to have that up where you could look at it and see if you were trying to be a weasel. How do you feel about doing it?”

  That was an easy one. “I don’t want to. Those guys never done nothing but try to help us when we asked. But better their asses than mine. I ain’t going to let them take me down because I know I’m going to feel bad about doing what, as far as I can see, is the only thing that’ll keep the grays off.”

  “So you just talked yourself into it.”

  Smeds thought about that. His stomach knotted up. “I guess so.”

  “That’s one vote for action.”

  “You go the other way, we have to get Timmy or Tully to kick in a tiebreaker.” Some foolish part of him harkened to a hope that he would be voted down. Another part said it would be nice to be alive to have a guilty conscience.

  “I’m with you.” Fish managed a weak smile. “No tie. I don’t like it either. But I don’t see any other way out. You think of one, let me know. I’ll be plenty happy to change my mind.” Fish poured himself a beer.

  Smeds’s stomach just kept knotting and sinking.

  34

  Toadkiller Dog slipped into the monastery as silent as death. The windwhales were not yet below the horizon, scudding north, inexplicably abandoning their mission when it lacked only a touch of being complete. The monster was puzzled in the extreme but it did not allow that to paralyze him. He had enough distractions in the form of a thousand wounds and pains.

  He slipped through the ruins and down into the subbasement, where he surprised a monk in the process of sabotaging the claywork. One snap of his jaws ended that, though it was probably too late to salvage anything.

  He went over and stared at the head floating in the keg of oil. He was not a fast thinker, but steady, and he got where he wanted to go given time. The debate of the hour was whether or not there was any value in continuing an alliance with a thing so obviously mad and out of control.

  The head stared back, awake and aware and completely helpless. The monster was not a subtle or reflective sort and so did not think it ironic that fate kept rendering helpless what was possibly the most powerful and most dangerous being in the world.

  The head stared with great intensity, as though there was some critical message it had to get across. But what little unspoken communication had existed between them in the past no longer worked.

  Toadkiller Dog whuffed, snapped the head up, and carried it out of the monastery. He concealed it in a place he thought would be safe, then limped away wearily.

  It was start-over-from-scratch time and he had no idea, really, where to find the kinds of recruits he would need to do the tasks he needed done. He knew only where not to look. They had left nothing but desolation behind them in the north.

  He did not hurry. He did not feel pressed. He would live till he ran into something powerful enough to kill him.

  He thought he had all the time in the world.

  35

  There were lights in the wizard’s place. “He live alone?” Fish asked.

  “I don’t know,” Smeds said. The wizard seemed to be the wealthiest man in his neighborhood. He had real windows.

  A shadow moved across a paper shade.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. There’s no guarantee he won’t have friends in, or a client.”

  Smeds started. He had not thought about the chance of this becoming a massacre. He glanced up the street, the direction the patrol had gone. The gray boys were all over the place. This had to go down quick and quiet. “You able to do your part?”

  “Yes. I’m working myself up the same way I did before we attacked at Charm. Big wizard, little wizard, the risks are pretty much the same.”

  “You were at Charm? I didn’t know that.”

  “I was young and dumb. I don’t kick it around. The grays are still fighting that one. They don’t want to let anybody who went there die of old age.”

  “Patrol.”

  They faded into the shadows between two buildings, got down as low as they dared without sprawling in the garbage and dogshit.
At the same moment light spilled from the wizard’s doorway. A woman emerged. The clip-clop of the soldiers’ boots picked up. They reached the woman as she reached the street.

  “Evening, ma’am,” one said. “You’re out late. Consulting the wizard?”

  There was not enough light to see it but Smeds knew she would be looking from one soldier to another, scared, trying to decide if she had good reason to be. She croaked, “Yes.”

  “May we have your name? We have to keep track of everyone who comes and goes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. It’s orders. It’s the same all over town, wherever there’s anybody in his line of business. Me and Luke being naturally lucky, we got this here clown on our beat that don’t seem like he’s going to get done all night.”

  “You can go loaf in a tavern or whatever it is you’d rather be doing. I was his last client tonight.”

  “Yes ma’am. Right after we get your name and how to find you if we need to talk to you again.”

  The woman sputtered but gave the soldiers what they demanded. The grays usually got what they wanted.

  “Thank you, ma’am. We appreciate your cooperation. The streets being what they are at night, Luke will walk you over to make sure you get there safely.”

  Smeds grinned. That was one slick gray boy.

  The silent partner set off with the woman. The other soldier resumed his patrol. Smeds rose. “We’re lucky, he’ll really stop off for a beer.”

  “To get any luckier than we’ve just been the bastard wizard would have to be in there dying of heart failure right now. You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s get it over with. Quietly.”

  Smeds dashed across the street. Quietly. Fish was supposed to give him time to get around back. Then Fish, whom the wizard had not met, would knock on the front door. Smeds was supposed to get in—quietly—and come at the wizard from behind.

  The tactic made no sense to Smeds but he was not the general here.