The Return of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  Thai Dei wanted to know what we were talking about but could see no way to get anything out of us without giving something away himself. If he’d just been the kind who chatters incessantly he could have asked anything and nobody would have thought anything about it.

  I chuckled.

  Puzzled, One-Eye asked, “You going back over there?”

  “Got to. Boss says.”

  One-Eye glared at the distant plateau. “Damned Tals! Just had to stab us in the back. I was all set to retire as soon as we finished Longshadow. But they just had to fuck me up. And now I got to go on up there. Which I’m looking forward to like I’m looking forward to getting a hot poker shoved up my poop chute. Whoa! Here’s my chance.” He scampered toward Croaker’s dugout.

  Lady had come up to the light. She looked more haggard than ever. She must have been walking the ghost for all she was worth. She leaned on a post while she spoke softly to one of the messengers waiting for an assignment. He hurried off toward her camp. She looked at me, frowned as though she was having trouble remembering who I was. Maybe she was. I was supposed to be somewhere else.

  I decided to go there even though it was no resort for tired professional soldiers.

  84

  Mother Gota would not talk to Uncle Doj. Mother Gota would not talk to her darling baby boy. But Mother Gota and silence had been strangers for decades. So Mother Gota talked to me.

  She was not happy about the way her life was going, though she refused to get specific in front of a Soldier of Darkness—family or not.

  I was in a karma-building cycle, apparently. I endured her crabbing, nodding and grunting in the right places while I made notes concerning recent events. I said, “You could always go home. Just pack up and go back to the swamp. Let Uncle boil his own bitterroot.” The root was a recent discovery. Shadowlander fugitives had been caught eating it. It was a common weed that was not completely inedible if you boiled its roots for six or eight hours before you ground them into meal that tasted like soggy white oak sawdust. A lot was getting eaten because there was little else to be found close by. Croaker still had not authorized anyone to begin exploiting Overlook.

  Uncle Doj had discovered bitterroot long ago. He had not eaten much else since Charandaprash. How had he found that much time to spend sitting in one place? Maybe he cured twenty pounds of root at a time.

  “You, Bone Warrior, you would have me abandon my duty?”

  Hell, yes. Anything to get you out of my hair. But I did not say that aloud. I just asked, “What duty is that?”

  She opened her mouth to tell me but Nyueng Bao caution took over. She gulped like a fish out of water, then, as always when pressed, told me, “I go get some wood.” That in Taglian instead of Nyueng Bao, which was good enough for me as long as I asked no questions.

  “Good idea.”

  Thai Dei came to stand by me as I watched her go. I said, “Soon the Company will return to the road to Khatovar. Your people need to decide what to do when that happens.” I reached for a rock.

  I thought I made no giveaway motion but the crow was ready. It just hopped over the whistling stone and offered me one mocking caw for my trouble. The black birds remained scarce but there was always one near me and a dozen around Croaker’s headquarters. Catcher was lying low but she had not stopped watching.

  A nearby Taglian, maybe thinking he could curry favor, aimed a bamboo pole at the crow. “Save that for a shadow!” I snapped. “We’re not out of this yet.” Interesting. The would-be sniper wore a ragged, crudely drawn Company badge. I saw no one armed with bamboo who did not sport some version of our badge. The management had stopped pretending to be fair.

  Red Rudy wandered over, stood leaning on a spear. He stared northward, silently watching something. Nobody else said anything, either. I took advantage of the silence to scribble a few more notes. Finally, Rudy mused, “Ever notice how, when the light is right, you can see where everybody’s going over there?”

  “No.” I looked up.

  He was right. Just now the light had every piece of metal beyond Overlook reflecting right at us. And a whole lot of metal was headed up the road I had walked with that useless One-Eye.… “Oh, no. Whose bright idea was this?”

  Somebody wanted to call on Soulcatcher.

  “Thought you’d be interested.” Rudy collected his spear and strolled off. Probably to find a deep hole to pull in after him.

  “What is happening?” Thai Dei asked.

  I shrugged. “Maybe just the end of the world.”

  Or maybe not. Maybe somebody in the headquarters bunker was playing mind games with her sister.

  The sun moved on. Light no longer glimmered off the moving force. Nobody but Rudy seemed to understand what was happening but everybody sensed that something was. It became very quiet on my far hillside.

  Nothing happened for a while. I made notes. I watched Mother Gota dwindle into the distance. Looked like she planned to do her wood gleaning farther afield.

  Afternoon shadows crept across the far foothills. “That’s dark,” I said. Especially near where Soulcatcher was last seen. That darkness was swelling.…

  I gaped. That was no shadow. That was a cloud of darkness. It boiled out of the canyons and forests and masked the foothills.…

  Crows.

  All the crows we had not seen for the past several days!

  The darkness rose like a blast from a volcano. It began to spread.

  “That’s got to be every crow in the world,” I breathed. The cloud just kept growing. Part seemed headed my way.

  Suddenly, lightning sliced inside it. The wind began to blow. I began to lose track of where and when I was and what I was doing. Somebody asked, “What’s happening?”

  A second voice asked, “What’s that smell?”

  Kina. But I could not explain.

  More lightnings ripped through the thunderhead of crows. Most of that darkness rushed my way. The stench of Kina became overpowering. There were sounds around me, heard as though from a great distance. They did not include the panic that seemed appropriate.

  The darkness bent over and grabbed me, took me up like a mother lifts a frightened infant. The face of Kina was in the darkness but it was not Kina who possessed me. She was angry. Again. She was disoriented.

  She was not alone.

  Lady was there, maybe riding Smoke, maybe in some other fashion. The lightning was her doing, evidently. She had Kina in one sorcerous hand while trying to spank her sister with the other.

  Catcher was there, too. And she seemed amused, not troubled, although she was caught between a devil goddess and a sister who would roast her happily. Soulcatcher would go to the burning stake chuckling at the fire. The woman was completely mad.

  The darkness wrapped me up. It devoured me. It tried to chew me up but found me unpalatable. It spit me out.

  I staggered like a drunk. A voice in my head said, There you are, darling. I missed you. You have been away too long. Moonlight glinted off the corpse-strewn black water lapping at Dejagore’s wall. I imagined something stirring in those waters, something that wanted to grab me and pull me deep into the inky darkness, down amongst the naked bones. I looked to my left and there stood the long-dead Speaker of the Nyueng Bao, Ky Dam. His wife Hong Tray was with him. They smiled. The old woman made a finger sign I knew to be a blessing.

  Darkness swallowed me.

  Darkness had no stomach for me. It puked me up.

  I was in a tree. My eyes saw strangely. I had to turn my head this way and that to see out of one or the other. Men of half a dozen races were slaughtering men of several others below me. The trees were repelled. They loved death but hated the shedding of blood.

  I was in the Grove of Doom. In a tree?

  I raised a hand to feel my eyes. White feathers blocked my vision.

  I lost consciousness.

  I went a hundred places. A hundred places came to me. I seemed to visit all times and all places of the past several years.


  I was on the plain of bones. Darkness had come. A black wind blew the bones about. I tumbled like a leaf. Crows mocked me from the naked trees. I rolled over into a deeper night and in an instant was strolling up the sloped floor of the tunnel where the old men rested in their cocoons of spun ice.

  A great deep booming thundered in my head. It was pain incarnate, yet seemed to carry a message. I tried to listen.

  Time expanded to encompass the throbbing within me, which became a slow, deep voice that speeded up until it turned into Thai Dei nagging worriedly in Nyueng Bao. “Standardbearer! Speak to me.”

  I tried but my jaws would not work. I could do nothing but make inarticulate noises.

  “He’s all right.” That was Uncle Doj. I opened my eyes. Doj knelt beside me, fingers against the side of my neck. “What happened, Bone Warrior?”

  I sat up. My muscles were watery. I was drained. But it seemed no time had passed. I volleyed the question back. “What happened over there?” Crows still swarmed in the distance, though not in clouds like I had seen.

  “Where?” Thai Dei asked.

  “There. Where the birds are.”

  Thai Dei said. “I do not know. I saw nothing unusual.”

  “No cloud of darkness? No lightning?”

  After a pause, “None that I saw.”

  Uncle Doj considered the distance thoughtfully.

  “I need something to eat.” Though I had not been ghostwalking, I was that weak.

  The event was troubling.

  85

  The summons came from Croaker. I went across. Only a few days had passed but already the world had begun to seem peaceful again. The soldiers looked less haggard.

  Shadows were not a problem now. For us.

  “I’m here,” I told the Old Man. The guard outside had sent me right in.

  “Where’s your mother-in-law?”

  “Good question. The other day she said she was going after firewood. We haven’t seen her since.”

  “One-Eye’s gone, too.”

  I gaped. Then I started to snicker. The snicker turned into a guffaw. Before long I was bent double, unable to regain control. “They eloped? Don’t tell me they eloped.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it. Knock off the braying. You sound like a jackass giving birth.” A stone impossibility. He indicated the alcove where special people were stored. “Use Smoke. Find them.”

  I headed that way, still shivering with restless giggles. “How come I have to do it? You and Lady were already here.”

  “We’re busy restructuring the force. We don’t have time.”

  “She over being hooked on ghostwalking?”

  “She’s gonna have to be. Get busy. I don’t have time to jack my jaw, either.” He pointed. He was not in a playful mood. Must have been getting less sleep than usual.

  Smoke was alone behind the curtain. “What happened? You bury the other two?”

  “Stashed them in what’s left of your dugout. We needed the room. Get to work.”

  I pulled the curtain. He was the boss. He did not have to be a nice guy all the time.

  Smoke did not look the same. Lady had done something to keep him under. He seemed more drugged than comatose.

  He smelled, too. Bad. Somebody had been letting their chores slide. “You’re the physician, you ought to know about keeping clean. This guy is a mess.”

  “I’ll get you a bucket.”

  I did not wait for him to tell me. I went to work.

  Croaker had made appropriate preparations. There was drinking water and fresh bread. I ate some of the latter immediately. The command types sure lived the good life. I had not had anything but bad bitterroot for the past several days—and not nearly enough of that. A point I ought to make to Rudy.

  “Send out for sausages,” I muttered. Maybe when we finally found Khatovar it would be like the Vehdna paradise. Hot and hotter running houris driven by an overwhelming passion for smelly old guys with no social skills, houris who spent the rest of their time whipping up lots of freshly cooked food. Good food.

  “Quit stalling around,” Croaker growled a while later. “That little prick is clean enough.”

  I was not anxious to go out. “Somebody ought to watch what he eats.” Smoke looked like he was suffering the early stages of dietary disease.

  Croaker just gave me a dark look. He did not much care, apparently. “You have a problem doing your job?”

  “Cranky, cranky.”

  I had a problem with going out. It had been scary getting batted around between Catcher and Kina and the place of the bones the other day. I had tapped a reservoir of fear I did not know I contained.

  I especially did not like being a bird. That part I had not understood at all.

  Catcher now knew I could walk the ghostworld without her manipulations. Maybe I could because she had opened the way. Now I feared she could hunt me down and snap me up out there whenever the mood took her. I was not inclined to suffer her torments voluntarily.

  “Murgen.”

  I chomped down a last mouthful of bread, followed it with a slug of water. Bloated, I did what I had to do.

  * * *

  Goblin must have had a notion that he was being watched from afar. Or suspected that he could be. I would not have found him had I had no idea how his mind worked. The clever little shit. The spells he used to camouflage himself and his men were of the simplest sort, almost undetectable. All they did was make the eye wander away from what was probably just a modest boulder lurking in the bushes, gently so as to go unremarked even when you were expecting something. He and his rangers were scattered so no concentration stood out. Mogaba did not appear to be a concern.

  I might be wrong but I assumed One-Eye’s first move, if he deserted, would be to find Goblin. They had been best friends before anyone else in the Company was born. If you didn’t count Lady.

  A quick, determined search revealed that One-Eye had not joined Goblin yet. A cruise up and down the road from Kiaulune did not turn him up, either. He must be in hiding for the day.

  I did not feel Kina or Soulcatcher. More confident, I found Goblin again, rode Smoke backward in time.

  Goblin did a good job ambushing the Prahbrindrah Drah’s gang. And no spells concealed the encounter. He’d been too busy with other work.

  * * *

  It was a traditional Black Company–style ambush. The Prince hurried into it at dusk. He was accompanied by several hundred soldiers. They outnumbered Goblin’s force heavily. A few arrows wobbled in from the brush south of the road, striking several Taglians. Ululations went up. Brush rustled. More arrows flew.

  The Prahbrindrah Drah had no idea who was attacking. Shadowlander partisans probably seemed more likely than the Company. He did not know about Goblin.

  We had taught the Taglians to respond to an ambush by counterattacking immediately. That is what the Prince’s companions did, though not quite instantly.

  Better than half charged into the brush, chasing rustlings. A handful of those rustles were created by Goblin’s men but most were contributed by little owls groggily trying to get away from they knew not what without ever rising out of the cover.

  Goblin’s second attack, from the opposite hillside, was far more vigorous and included illusory people the Taglians would know could not possibly be there if they just thought. I saw my own doppelganger wading through the brush waving a nicked-up, rusty sword.

  A couple of Goblin’s men and a gang of ghosts retreated toward Kiaulune, drawing most of the remainder of the Prince’s band with them. Then the remainder of Goblin’s force jumped in after the Prince. It was a brisk fight. When the dust settled our erstwhile employer was a prisoner, alive but in no shape to trouble anyone. He had collected a dozen wounds.

  Goblin faded away. Rangers and illusions harassed and baffled the Taglians till dawn made Goblin’s illusions too obviously illusory.

  The Taglians made a valiant effort to find their Prince. They had no luck. Soon after the next sunset a br
ush with a killer shadow panicked them. They fled north with the news that the Prince might be dead.

  I could imagine the effect that would have when it reached Taglios. The capital would fall into chaos if the priesthoods rejected the Radisha’s right to rule. It could mean civil war. The Woman had noncanonical supporters and there was no alternate heir-apparent. The question of the succession had been around for years but always got pushed aside by more immediate crises.

  Hee-hee. She would start paying the price of her perfidy before we ever glanced her way.

  One-Eye and Gota must still be on the road. Instead of trying to find them there it seemed easier to go all the way back and pick them up as they began their adventure.

  That worked. After a fashion. When Gota caught One-Eye alone they held only a brief discussion before the little wizard grunted, dug a pack out of his ruined bunker and joined her in slipping off into the nearest woods. Obviously the matter had been discussed before. Preparations had been made.

  They did not talk much, which was hard to credit. One-Eye was not known for his reticence and Mother Gota was worse. He only grunted occasionally. When she said anything at all it was just to complain about the general unfairness of life.

  Total silence descended once they entered the shade of the trees. Light and shadow fluttered about as the wind stirred the branches and leaves. They became increasingly hard to track.… Oh, but the little shit was a wizard, wasn’t he? And one who damned well knew about Smoke.

  He made me work at it but I stayed with him till my world began to shake.

  Earthquake? Again?

  It dawned on me at last. Somebody outside the ghostworld wanted me. Reluctantly, I returned to flesh. “About damned time!” the Old Man snapped when I opened my eyes. “I really thought we lost you this time.”

  “Huh?” That came out a dry-throated croak. I tried for a cup but found I had no strength to extend my arm. I was wasted bad. The Captain had to pour water into my mouth for me.

  “I really fucked up. How long was I out there?”

  “Eleven hours.” That was how tough One-Eye had made it to track him.