The Return of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  I was in Taglios!

  I smelled smoke. The lantern?

  No. The odor came from the stairwell behind me.

  I recalled dropping a lamp. Recalled a confused cacophony of wheres and whens. “I’m all right. Just had a dizzy spell.”

  Laughter from across the street.

  The Shadar glanced back but otherwise seemed indifferent. He did not want to believe my story. He wanted to find something wrong right here right now. He did not like foreigners. And us northerners were all madmen and drunks. But, unfortunately, we were also very much in favor with the Palace.

  I got up. I had to get moving. My mind was clearing. The truth was coming back. I had a desperate need to get to the old familiar entrance to the Palace because I had to get to my apartment in a hurry.

  The moon suddenly splashed its light down into the street. It had to be past midnight. I saw the woman watching from across the way. I started to say something to the Shadar but a sharp whistle came from the distance, in the direction the monster had seemed to be moving. Another patrolman needed assistance. He said, “Take care, foreigner.” He jogged away.

  I ran too, not pausing to take the elementary step of closing the sally door.

  I reached my customary entrance. Something was wrong. Cordy Mather’s Guards should have been on duty there.

  I was unarmed except for a belt knife. I drew it, pretending I was a fierce commando. There was no way Mather’s gang would leave an entrance uncovered. You could not bribe those guys to screw up.

  I found the sentries in the guard room. They had been strangled.

  No need to question the prisoner further, now. But who was the target? The Old Man? Almost certainly. The Radisha? Probably. And anyone else important that they could get.

  I fought panic, managed to keep from haring off blindly. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj were up there, anyway.

  I stripped the shirt off one dead guard, wrapped my throat. That should afford some protection against a Strangler’s scarf. Then I bounded upstairs like a mountain goat who was long out of practice. I reached my own floor so winded I had to lean against the stairwell wall and strain to keep from puking. My legs were jelly.

  Alarms banged everywhere now. It was happening as I stood there. I got some wind back, left the stairwell for the corridor—and tripped over a dead man.

  He was filthy and undernourished. A blade had laid him open from left shoulder to right hip. His right hand lay ten feet away. It still clutched a black rumel. There was blood everywhere. Some still seeped from the corpse.

  I stared at the scarf. The dead man had murdered many times. Now Kina had betrayed him.

  Such treachery is one of the goddess’s more endearing qualities.

  Only Ash Wand could cut that clean and deep.

  Another corpse lay near my apartment door. A third lay in the doorway itself, holding the door open.

  All the blood was fresh. The corpses still bled. As yet few flies were in evidence.

  Knowing I did not want to do so I entered my quarters ready to sink bare teeth into anything that moved.

  I smelled something.

  I spun and stabbed as someone skinny and brown and unwashed flew at me, hit me, threw me backwards. A black rumel spun around my neck but failed its function because of the shirt wrapping.

  I hurtled backward into my worktable. There was a sharp pain in the back of my head. Inside I screamed, “Not again!”

  Darkness closed down.

  * * *

  Pain awakened me. My arm was on fire.

  My crash into the table had overturned a lamp. My papers, my Annals, were burning. I was burning. I leaped up shrieking, beating my arm, and when I had that extinguished I began jumping around trying to save the papers. I saw nothing else and thought of nothing else. This was my life, going up in smoke. And beyond the smoke there was only the house of pain, only the bleak seasons.

  Way, way over there, like down a long, cruel tunnel, I saw Uncle Doj kneeling beside Thai Dei. Between them and me lay three dead men. The floor was invisible beneath their blood. Two of the dead showed Ash Wand’s characteristic precision cuts. The other had fallen to a cross cut that betrayed a hint of raggedness. The swordsman had been in the grip of an uncontrolled rage.

  Uncle Doj held Thai Dei’s head against his chest. Thai Dei’s left arm hung as though broken. His right surrounded To Tan on his lap. The five-year-old’s head was tilted at a bizarre angle. Thai Dei’s face was pale. His mind was not in this world.

  Uncle Doj rose, came toward me, stared into my eyes, shook his head, then stepped close and wrapped powerful arms around me. “They were too many and too fast.”

  I collapsed.

  This was the present. This was today. This was the new hell where I did not want to be.

  … fragments …

  … just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.

  Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their context no longer known.

  All that remains of two volumes of Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four years of history. Gone forever.

  Uncle Doj wants something. He is going to make me drink some strange Nyueng Bao philtre.

  Fragments …

  … all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain, scattered in this bleak season.…

  Darkness. And in the darkness, shards of time.

  Hey there! Welcome to the city of the dead.…

  86

  The apartment was overrun with guards.

  What was going on? I was confused. Another fainting spell?

  Smoke. Blood. The present. The hard present that breathed pain like a dragon breathes fire.

  I became aware of the Captain’s presence. He came from the back of the apartment shaking his head. He eyed Uncle Doj curiously.

  Cordy Mather blew in looking like a man encountering the worst horror show of a long and unhappy lifetime. He went straight to the Old Man. I heard only “… dead men all over the place.”

  I could not catch Croaker’s response.

  “… were after you?”

  Croaker shrugged.

  “You just moved out last.…”

  A Guard rushed in. He whispered to Mather. Mather barked, “Listen up! We’ve still got some live ones out there. Be careful.” He and the Old Man moved a little closer. “They’re lost in the labyrinth. We’ll need One-Eye to find them all.”

  “The excitement never ends, does it?” Croaker sounded really tired.

  To no one special Uncle Doj announced, “They have only just begun to pay.” His Taglian was excellent considering he had been unable to speak a word the day before.

  Mother Gota came from the back, bent and moving slowly. Typically of Nyueng Bao women dealing with disaster she had brewed tea. This was quite possibly the worst day of her life. It would be a good pot.

  The Captain gave Uncle Doj another searching look, then knelt beside me. “What happened here, Murgen?”

  “I’m not sure. I walked in in the middle of it. Stabbed a guy. That one. Got thrown across a table. Tripped and fell through a hole in time. Maybe. Woke up on fire.” I still had charred pages around me. My arm hurt like hell. “There were dead people all over. I lost it. Next thing I knew it was now.”

  Croaker caught Mather’s eye. He used a rocking motion of his right hand to indicate Uncle Doj.

  Cordy Mather asked Uncle for his story. He spoke perfect Nyueng Bao.

  It was a night of a thousand surprises.

  Uncle Doj said, “These Deceivers were skilled. They gave no warning. I wakened just an instant before two fell upon me.” He explained how he had evaded death, breaking a neck and a spine in the process. He described his kills clinically, even critically.

  He spoke harshly of both himself and Thai Dei. He was down on himself because he had allowed himself to be tempted into pursuing other Deceivers when they fled. Their flight proved to be a diversion. Thai Dei, who had not been drawn away, received crit
icism for showing the instant of hesitation that had cost him his broken arm.

  “Cheap lesson for him,” Croaker observed. Uncle Doj nodded, missing the Captain’s sarcasm. He had to face the cruel cost of having allowed himself to be deceived.

  There were fourteen corpses in my apartment, not including those of butchered Annals. Twelve had been Deceivers. One had been my wife and one my nephew. Six perished by Ash Wand, three at Thai Dei’s hands. Mother Gota gutted two and I pigstuck one when I walked in.

  Grasping my shoulder in what was meant to be a comforting gesture, Uncle Doj said, “A warrior does not slay women or children. That is the work of beasts. When beasts kill men all men are constrained to hunt and destroy them.”

  “Nice talk,” Croaker said. “But the Deceivers never claimed to be warriors.” He was not impressed by Uncle’s speech.

  Neither was Mather. “It’s religion, Old Timer. Their Path. They are the priests of death. The sex or age of their sacrifices doesn’t mean squat. Their victims all go straight to paradise and never have to take another turn around on the wheel of life, no matter how buggered up their karma was.”

  Uncle Doj’s mood grew blacker by the minute. “I know tooga,” he muttered. “No more tooga.” Nobody was revealing any mysteries to him.

  Cordy smiled wickedly at the swordmaster. “You guys probably won a high spot on their desirable victim list by killing so many of them. If you’re a Deceiver there’s big status to be gained by killing somebody who has killed a lot of people.”

  I heard Mather’s blather but it did not register as sense. I muttered, “Tooga ain’t no crazier than any other religion around here.”

  That seemed to offend everyone equally.

  Good.

  Mather turned to fuss at his Guards. They had failed their trust. My own disaster was just one of several. Others were still happening.

  Numbly, I said, “You can’t defend against this kind of thing, Mather. These guys weren’t commandos.” I swatted the nearest corpse with the charred sheets I was holding. “They came in here expecting to make it to paradise by midnight. Probably didn’t even have an escape plan.” In a softer voice, I said, “Captain, you might better check on Smoke.”

  Croaker frowned like I had given away everything but asked only, “You need anything? Want somebody to stay?” He understood what Sarie meant to me.

  “This is where I came from. When I kept falling back. I got family with me, Captain. If I start to go bugfuck in the head they’ll cool me down. You really want to help? Fix Thai Dei’s arm. Then go do what you got to do.”

  Croaker nodded. He made a small gesture that, in normal times meant “Go!” but which meant a good deal more now. “Narayan Singh is going to wake up some morning and realize that he has reaped the whirlwind. There is no safe place for him anymore.”

  I rose. Grimly, I set out for my bedroom. Behind me, Thai Dei groaned as Croaker set his arm. The Old Man paid him no other mind. He was busy issuing orders that meant a major intensification of the war.

  Uncle Doj followed me.

  The reality hurt less than the anticipation had. I indulged in the pointless gesture of removing the rumel from my wife’s throat. I stood there with the scarf dangling, staring. This Strangler must have been a true master. Her neck was not broken, nor had her throat been bruised. She looked like she was sleeping. There was no pulse when I touched her, though. “Uncle Doj. Can I be alone?”

  “Of course. But drink this first. It will help you to rest.” He handed me something that smelled really nasty.

  Did we do this already?

  He went away. I laid down beside Sarie for the last time. I held her while the medicine began to course through me, calling forth sleep. I thought all the usual thoughts, nurtured the usual hatreds. I thought the unthinkable, that it might be best that this had happened before Sahra learned what it really meant to be Company.

  I reminisced the great miracle. Ours was a match that never should have been. A match neither ever regretted for an instant, yet one created by a force so slight as the unspoken whim of an old woman cursed with hysterical, unreliable precognitive visions.

  I thought both sanely and crazily—and commenced the process of beatification that is inevitable after any untimely death. I slept. But even in Nod I could not escape the pain. I dreamed cruel dreams I could not reclaim when I awakened. It was almost as if Kina herself were mocking me, telling me that triumph was a costly deception.

  * * *

  Sarie was gone when I awakened, my head throbbing with a medicinal hangover. I stumbled around until I ran into Mother Gota. The old woman was fussing over some tea and talking to herself exactly the way she talked to the rest of the world. “Where is Sahra?” I asked. “Tea. Please. What happened to her?”

  Gota looked at me like I was mad. “She is dead.” No pulling punches for her.

  “I know that. Her body is gone.”

  “They have taken her home.”

  “What? Who?” Anger began to rise within me. How dare they…? Who was they?

  “Doj. Thai Dei. Her cousins and uncles. They have taken Sahra and To Tan home. I am here to watch over you.”

  “She was my wife. I…”

  “She was Nyueng Bao before she was your wife. She is Nyueng Bao now. She will be Nyueng Bao tomorrow. Hong Tray’s fantasies cannot change that.”

  I gained control before I exploded completely. Gota was right, from a Nyueng Bao point of view.

  Also, there was not a lot I could do about it right now. Not without coming up with a lot more ambition than I had this morning. All I really wanted to do was sit around feeling sorry for myself.

  I went back to our room with my tea. I settled on our bed, picked up the jade amulet that had belonged to Hong Tray. It seemed very warm this morning, more alive than I. I had not worn it for a long time. I slipped it onto my wrist now.

  I could work my anger out on Uncle Doj when he got back.

  If he came.

  87

  Not one Strangler attack team achieved its tactical objective, but even so their raid was successful psychologically. It stunned the city. It shocked the leadership. It generated terror out of all proportion to actual damages.

  Croaker grabbed it and turned it around.

  Next morning, while most of us were still wrestling with our emotions, he went to the Taglian mob and spoke in his old guise as Liberator. He announced a new and furious era of total, relentless warfare against the Shadowmaster and tooga although he divulged few real facts about the Palace raid. That set rumor running wild through the alleys and byways and fueled fresh anger. For years the war had been a long way away, in the old Shadowland, and so had become emotionally remote to most of the people. The Deceiver raid brought the war back home. The old enthusiasm resurfaced.

  The Liberator told the crowd that the years of preparation were over. It was time to carry justice to the wicked.

  But moving immediately meant a winter campaign. I asked the Old Man if he really intended that.

  “Damned straight. More or less. They have their feet up down there. You know that. You’ve been riding Smoke. I mean, who would be crazy enough to take a crack at the Dandha Presh when the snow is flying?”

  Who indeed? “It’ll mean some major hardships for the soldiers.”

  “If an old fart like me can take it they all can take it.”

  Right. Only some of us can take it better than others. Some of us are obsessed.

  Hell. Us Black Company guys have obsessions and hatreds enough for everybody.

  Work became my all. I was past the evil time. No longer did I fall back into cruel yesterdays in order to escape crueler todays—that I could detect. But I did not sleep well. Hell still lurked beyond sleep’s wall. I lost myself in the Annals, rerecording everything the fire had claimed. I ran away by riding Smoke out into the past, where and when I could, to check my recollections.

  One-Eye’s arsenal increased its production. The Old Man drove the ruling clas
s crazy trying to get money to pay for everything.

  Word of the new stage spread through the Taglian territories as fast as horses could run.

  Lady began gathering her forces and training them to deal with the darknesses that had given the Shadowmasters their name.

  I became aware that Goblin had dropped out of sight, completely, but that only weeks after the actual event. I feared that he had been murdered. But Croaker did not seem concerned.

  One-Eye was fussed. He was desperate to get his sidekick connected with my mother-in-law but he could not unearth a trace of the little toad.

  * * *

  In the night when the wind no longer licks through its unglazed windows, nor prances along its untenanted halls, nor whispers to its million creeping shadows, the fortress is filled with the silence of stone.

  Cold cruel dreams stir within the figure pinned to the throne so ancient that bits have given up to dry rot. A gleam from beyond flickers. The figure sighs, drawing in the light, exhaling a balloon of dream that somehow finds its way through the tortuous passages of the fastness and out into the world in search of a receptive mind. Upon the plain itself the shadows swirl like minnows sensing the passing of a huge predator.

  The stars wink down in cold irony.

  There is always a way.

  88

  House of pain?

  Mocking laughter.

  She is beautiful. Yes. Almost as beautiful as I. But she is not for you.

  The woman tucked a child in for the night. Her slightest movement bespoke grace.

  I … There was an I, suddenly.

  NO! Not for you!

  She is mine!

  Nothing is yours but what I give you. And I give you pain. This is the house of pain.

  No! Whatever you are …

  GO!

  89

  “Ouch!” I opened my eyes. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei crouched beside me, one to either side, looking concerned. I rolled my head, surprised to see them back so soon.

  I was on the floor in my workroom. But I was dressed for bed. “What am I doing here?”