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

by Glen Cook

  “Tentatively—pending reports from our allies from the Plain—I’d say we’re wasting our time here.”

  The weirder side of the outfit didn’t come up with anything either. At sundown we clambered back aboard our smelly airborne steed, planning on having breakfast in Oar.

  I was looking forward to my first decent meal in months.

  43

  Smeds was amazed. That bastard Fish sure could stir some shit.

  There was a rumor got started that this silversmith down on Sedar Row—where all the silversmiths and goldsmiths and such were located—had had a guy bring in a giant silver nail and pay him a hundred obols to turn it into a chalice and keep his mouth shut about it. Only this smith had got to celebrating his good fortune last night and had had too much to drink and had bragged to some of his cronies after swearing them to secrecy.

  Today a man’s life was worthless if he had anything to do with the metalworking or jewelry trades. Those who were out after the spike were getting desperate. They were stumbling over each other and causing a lot of damage in the process. Mostly to one another.

  The grays were late getting into the game but when they did they did not fool around, they came with a vengeance, sweeping through the city confiscating every piece of silver they found on the assumption the spike could have been turned into anything by now. They tried giving claim chits but people were having none of that. They had been robbed by the military before.

  There was resistance. There was localized rioting. People and soldiers were hurt and killed. But there were too many soldiers and even now most people were not angry enough to rebel.

  “Pretty sneaky, Fish,” Smeds told the old man, walking down a street where he felt safe talking. “Mean sneaky.”

  “It worked. That don’t mean I’m proud of it.”

  “It worked all right. But for how long?”

  “I figure three, four days. Maybe five if I feed the rumor a couple of new angles. Plus however long it takes Gossamer and Spidersilk to decide the spike isn’t in any of the silver the soldiers are collecting up. So we’ll be all right for maybe a week. Unless one of the freelancers stumbles onto us somehow. But in the long run we’re still had. They’ll get us one way or another. Unless this backward siege breaks. Let even ten people get out of this city and get away and you’ve opened the whole world up to the search. Because if there’s a successful breakout the man who has the spike is sure to be one of the first people gone.”

  “He is?”

  “Wouldn’t you figure that if you were in the place of the twins?”

  “I guess.”

  “Every day they send more men to guard the walls. I don’t know, but I think they’re maybe working against a deadline. If they are, we might use that against them.”

  “A deadline? How’s that?”

  “Those two aren’t anywhere near top dogs in the empire. Sooner or later their bosses have got to get suspicious about what they’re up to. Or one of them might decide to come up here and grab off the spike for himself.”

  “We should have left the sucker where it was and settled.”

  “We should have. But we didn’t. We have to live and maybe die with that. And make no mistake, Smeds. We’re in a fight for our lives. You, me, Timmy, Tully, we’re all dead if they ever get close to us.”

  “If you’re trying to scare the shit out of me, Fish, you’re doing a damned good job.”

  “I’m trying to scare you because I’m petrified myself and you’re the only one I think is steady enough to help me. Tully doesn’t have any backbone at all and Timmy has been living in kind of a daze ever since he lost his hand.”

  “I got a feeling I’m not going to like whatever you’re going to say. What’re you thinking?”

  “One of us needs to steal some white paint. Not buy it but steal it, because a seller might remember who he sold it to.”

  “I can handle that. I know where to get it. If the grays aren’t sitting on it. What’re we going to do with it?”

  “Try to change the focus of this whole mess. Try to politicize it.”

  There he went getting mysterious again. Smeds did not understand but decided he did not have to as long as Fish knew what he was doing.

  That evening was the first time Tully asked to borrow money. It was a trivial amount and he paid it back next morning, so Smeds thought nothing of it.

  That night was the first night Smeds fell asleep thinking about Old Man Fish and how he seemed to have no conscience at all once you got to know him. It was like Fish had decided he was going to get through this mess and get his share from the spike even if he had to sacrifice everybody in Oar. That didn’t seem like the Fish he’d always known. But the Fish he’d always known hadn’t ever had anything at stake.

  He could not be sure where he stood himself. He was neither a thinker nor a doer. He had spent his life drifting, doing what he had to do to get by and not much more.

  He did know that he did not want to die young or even to answer questions on the imperial rack. He knew he did not want to be poor again. He had done that and having money was better. Having a lot of money, like from selling the spike, would be even better.

  He could arrive at no alternative to Fish’s methods of achieving salvation, so he would go on going along. But with an abiding disquietude.

  44

  Toadkiller Dog observed the quickening through tight eyes. He was an ancient thing and had dealt with sorcerers all his days. They were a treacherous breed. And the smell of betrayal hung thick in that monastic cellar.

  He had located the necessary help more quickly than he had expected, in a country called Sweeps, a hundred miles west, where a bloody feud between families of wizards had raged unchecked for three generations. He had examined the respective families and he decided the Nacred had skills best suited to his needs. He had made contact and had struck a bargain: his help overcoming their enemies in return for theirs reconstructing his “companion.”

  He had told them nothing about the Limper.

  The Shaded clan had ceased to exist, root and branch, sorcerers, wives, and nits that might have grown to become lice.

  The twelve leading Nacred were there in the cellar, crowded around the trough of oil where the head, wedded to its new clay body, awaited a final quickening. They muttered to one another in a language he did not understand. They knew betrayal at this point would be painful and expensive.

  They had seen him in action during the scouring of the Shaded. And he had been a cripple then.

  He had made sure he got his own new limb first.

  He growled, just a soft note of caution, an admonition to get on with it.

  They did the thing that had to be done. One of the fool monks who had stayed around to restore the monastery served as the sacrifice.

  Color flowed over the surface of the gray clay. It twitched and shivered almost as if it were becoming genuine flesh.

  The body sat up suddenly, oil streaming off it. The Nacred sorcerers jumped back, startled. The Limper ran hands that had been clay over a body that had been clay. His smile became an ecstatic grin. “Mirror!” he said. His voice was a thunder. He looked at himself, ran fingers lovingly over a face that far exceeded the original at its best.

  A bellow of rage nearly brought the ceiling down.

  Toadkiller Dog caught one glimpse of what the Limper saw in the mirror.

  The gorgeous new fading to reality. Truth. His face as it existed without the cosmetic overlay.

  The Limper flung out of the trough, grabbed it up, hurled its contents around the cellar. The Nacreds retreated, shouted back, hastily prepared their defenses. They did not understand what was happening.

  Toadkiller Dog understood. He knew the Limper’s rages. This one was almost wholly contrived.

  He had been looking in the wrong place when he had been watching the Nacreds for treachery. The Limper was the source of the foul smell.

  He attacked. And in midleap recognized his error.

>   The Limper used the trough to deflect his charge, dashed to the doorway he had been blocking with his bulk. The Limper laughed, pranced up the stairs ahead of Nacred spells. Toadkiller Dog flung after him, but too late.

  The stairwell collapsed.

  Toadkiller Dog started digging.

  “It won’t be that easy, my fine pup. You thought you would use me, eh? Eh? Me! I let you think you could till you did what I needed done. Now enjoy your tomb. It’s better than you deserve but I have no time to prepare you a more suitable fate.” Mad laughter. Tons of earth poured in on what had collapsed already.

  Toadkiller Dog dug furiously but stopped after a moment, snarled at the panic in the darkness behind him. In the ensuing silence he listened very carefully.

  North! The Limper was headed north! He was crazier than ever but he had turned away from his mad quest for revenge.

  There was just one answer to that puzzle. He had set vengeance aside in hopes of gathering more power.

  Toadkiller Dog growled once, softly, almost amused. The shields were off the claws now.

  45

  If you dipped a wad of cotton in paint, then sponged semicircles around a common center you could create a passable imitation of a rose, Smeds discovered.

  After the excitement of the search for Fish’s phantom silversmith had died and he had failed to sell the rumor that one of the twins had taken possession already and was hiding it from her sister, the old man had decided to loose his final bolt. To take advantage of the potential for chaos. To add a new level of distraction to the mess plaguing Oar.

  Which was why Smeds was out after midnight with a bucket of paint for the third night running. Fish had sent him to mark selected points with the sign of the White Rose to give the impression that there was an angry underground about to respond to imperial excesses.

  Fish was after a slower but grander effect this time. He wanted the whole city to hear and begin to hope and believe. He wanted the grays to start worrying. The rest, he said, should take care of itself.

  Smeds finished his three roses and headed home. Elsewhere Fish was painting roses of his own. Smeds had done two the night before and three the night before that, all in places where a partisan strike would be appreciated sincerely by the mass of citizens. Slow and easy, Fish said. Let it build.

  Fish had had a stroke of luck last night. He had stumbled onto a couple of grays who had gotten themselves killed somehow and had painted white roses on their foreheads, claiming them for the movement he wanted to create out of the collective anger.

  Smeds did not like this game. Too dangerous. They had people enough after them from directions enough already. He had worries enough with the spike hunters.

  But that was not on his mind as he stole toward the Skull and Crossbones. He was mulling the puzzle presented by Tully. Earlier in the evening Tully had borrowed money from him for the fourth time in eight days, this time a fair sum and before he had repaid the last loan.

  Smeds never approached the Skull and Crossbones in a hurry. That Nightstalker corporal would catch him sure, first time he did.

  One peek and he knew he wasn’t going in the front way. The corporal and his cronies occupied the porch. So it was the long way around and slide in the back.

  And that was no good either. He found trouble on the way. And it almost found him.

  Two men were lounging inside the mouth of the skinny, scruffy alley that passed behind the Skull and Crossbones. He would have walked into them if one had not coughed and the other had not told him to shut up.

  What was this? Smeds felt no inclination to ask. He settled into a shadow to wait them out.

  A half hour passed. Came the hour. Nothing happened except one man coughed and the other told him to shut up. They were bored. Smeds began to nod.

  A third man arrived running. “He’s coming,” he said, then darted over to hide not eight feet from Smeds. Smeds was wide-awake now.

  Sure enough, someone was coming, and from the sound of his steps he was a little bit drunk. He was talking to himself, too.

  Smeds suffered one startled moment of recognition, then Timmy was into the ambush and the men jumped him so fast he never got a chance to yell.

  Smeds almost jumped in. He half rose, half drew his knife. Then he realized that the most he could hope to do was get himself killed by the other two after he got the first one he reached.

  What the hell was he going to do?

  He was going to follow them. See where they took Timmy, then get Fish and … And listen to Fish tell him he didn’t have ball one.

  For sure too late to do anything here, now. He had to follow them.

  He had no idea who they were but a strong suspicion as to what: bully boys for a freelance spike hunter who had decided to interview citizens who were short a hand.

  Following was less trouble than he had expected. Timmy fought them all the way. That kept them from devoting much attention to their surroundings. And they did not go that far, just a quarter mile into an area of fire-gutted buildings condemned but not yet demolished, so bad the squatters had not moved in.

  They took Timmy inside one of those. Smeds stood in a shadow and looked at it and wondered what he was going to do and kept hearing Fish say they were fighting for their lives now.

  He’d never been much of a fighter. He’d always walked away when he could. When he could not he’d always gotten whipped. He hadn’t had the desire or meanness, or whatever, even when he’d had no choice.

  Which got him to remembering all the bullies who had taunted and slapped and shoved him around and puzzling the eternal why did they do it when he’d never done a thing to them. The old anger bubbled up, along with the nerve-tingling vengeance fantasies, the miasma of bitter hatred.

  One of the men came back out of the building, urinated into the street, backed off, and just leaned against the wall. He didn’t act like he was doing anything but just hanging out. He wasn’t alert enough to be a sentinel.

  Smeds staggered forward without the slightest damned idea what he was doing. Besides shaking so bad his toenails rattled.

  He stumbled, went down on one knee onto a broken brick, could not silence a whining curse, and in the shock of pain suffered an inspiration.

  He came up limping, stumbling, muttering to himself. He headed straight for the man, sort of singing, “Once there was a farmer’s daughter, couldn’t behave like a maiden ought-er.”

  The thug was alert now. But he did not move.

  Smeds did a pratfall, giggled, got onto his hands and knees, pretended a bout with attempted upchucking, then got his feet under him and headed out. Straight into the wall about ten feet from the man watching him. He backed off muttering, looked at the wall like he couldn’t understand where it had come from. Then he put one hand against it for support and started stumbling toward the thug. At a distance of four feet he pretended to take first notice of the man, who was watching more with amused contempt than with suspicion.

  Smeds made a little “Gleep!” he hoped sounded startled and frightened and silently thanked whatever gods there might be that he hadn’t been recognized. Now if the guy just stayed in character and tried to roll him in the guise of helping …

  Smeds stumbled and went down onto hands and knees.

  “Looks like you had one too many, old buddy.” The thug stepped over.

  Smeds made gagging sounds. Inside, he was listening to Old Man Fish. “Like taking a woman, Smeds. Slide it in. Don’t stab.”

  The man started giving him a hand up. He did not see the blade in Smeds’s palm. Smeds leaned against him and began sliding in between his ribs, into his heart.

  One part of Smeds stood outside, guiding his hand. The rest was in a passion of terror and horror, oblivious to the world. Only one coherent thought splashed across that chaos. It was a lie that killing got easier each time you did it.

  When he came out of the fog, consciously, he was a hundred feet away, dragging a still-twitching body.

  �
�What the hell am I…?”

  Getting it out of sight, of course. Because this was just the start.

  He heard a muted scream and realized that another such had opened the first rent in the fog that had possessed him.

  * * *

  Smeds went into the building with the caution and intense concentration of a stalking cat. He compartmented his emotion, did not let them torment him when Timmy screamed. He used the cries to move a few quick steps each time.

  What the hell was he doing?

  The screams came from a basement. Smeds started down the steps, so committed he moved as though under a compulsion. Six steps down he hunkered, then almost stood on his head to get a look around.

  The base of the stair ended a few feet from a doorway without a door in it. Light and the screams came through that. Smeds eased down a couple more steps, then carefully lowered himself over the side, got underneath the stair, looked around.

  It was hard to see much, but it looked like the fires had been gentle here. This part of the basement was untouched. There wasn’t a whiff of old smoke.

  He could make out most of what was being said in that other room. Someone was asking Timmy impatient questions. Another two men were bickering about the character Smeds had killed. One was worried that the man had run out, the other didn’t give a damn.

  Under the stair was not the place to be if someone decided to go looking. The light from the room would give him away. Smeds moved out carefully, got behind a pile of junk to the left of the doorway.

  And there he squatted, unable to think of anything to do.

  Timmy passed out or something. He wasn’t yelling anymore. One man was grumbling about that while the other two went on about the man in the street. The grumbler snapped, “He has been gone too long. Give me some peace. Go find him. Both of you.”

  Two men stomped out and headed upstairs, still arguing. They were the other two who had snatched Timmy.

  Smeds rose, stretched, drifted over till he could see into the room.

  Timmy was tied into a chair, slumped forward, unconscious. A man bent over him, back to Smeds. Too good to be true. He slapped Timmy. “Come on! Come out of it. Don’t die on me now. We’re too close to the truth.”