Chronicles of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  “That sounds like the whole Circle to me.”

  Catcher laughed. “Yes. Every one a hypocrite. But there isn’t a one like Whisper. This is incredible, Croaker. How did she unearth so many secrets? How did she get my name? I had it hidden perfectly. I admire her. Truly. Such genius. Such audacity. A strike through Lords, across the Windy Country, and up the Stair of Tear. Incredible. Impossible. And it would have worked but for the accident of the Black Company, and you. You’ll be rewarded. I guarantee it. But enough of this. I’ve got work to do. Nightcrawler needs this information. The Lady has to see these papers.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I grumbled. “Kick ass, then take a break. I’m worn out. We’ve been humping and fighting for a year.”

  Dumb remark, Croaker. I felt the chill of the frown inside the black morion. How long had Soulcatcher been humping and fighting? An age. “You go on now,” he told me. “I’ll talk to you and Raven later.” Cold, cold voice. I got the hell out of there.

  It was all over in Lords when we got there. Nightcrawler had moved fast and had hit hard. You could not go anywhere without finding Rebels hanging from the trees and lampposts. The Company went into barracks expecting a quiet, boring winter, and a spring spent chasing Rebel leftovers back to the great northern forests.

  Ah, it was a sweet illusion while it lasted.

  Tonk!” I said, slapping down five face cards given me on the deal. “Ha! Double, you guys. Double. Pay up.”

  One-Eye grumbled and growled and shoved coins across the table. Raven chuckled. Even Goblin perked up enough to smile. One-Eye had not won a hand all morning, even when he cheated.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Deal, One-Eye.”

  “What’re you doing, Croaker? Eh? How are you doing it?”

  “The hand is quicker than the eye,” Elmo suggested.

  “Just clean living, One-Eye. Clean living.”

  The Lieutenant shoved through the door, face drawn into a fierce scowl. “Raven. Croaker. The Captain wants you. Chop-chop.” He surveyed the various card games. “You degenerates.”

  One-Eye sniffed, then worked up a wan smile. The Lieutenant was a worse player than he.

  I looked at Raven. The Captain was his buddy. But he shrugged, tossed his cards in. I filled my pockets with my winnings and followed him to the Captain’s office.

  Soulcatcher was there. We had not seen him since that day at the edge of the forest. I had hoped he had gotten too busy to get back to us. I looked at the Captain, trying to divine the future from his face. I saw that he was not happy.

  If the Captain was not happy, I wasn’t.

  “Sit,” he said. Two chairs were waiting. He prowled around, fidgeting. Finally, he said, “We have movement orders. Straight from Charm. Us and Night-crawler’s whole brigade.” He gestured toward Soulcatcher, passing the explaining to him.

  Catcher seemed lost in thought. Barely audibly, he finally asked, “How are you with a bow, Raven?”

  “Fair. No champion.”

  “Better than fair,” the Captain countered. “Damned good.”

  “You, Croaker?”

  “I used to be good. I haven’t drawn one for years.”

  “Get some practice.” Catcher started pacing too. The office was small. I expected a collision momentarily. After a minute, Soulcatcher said, “There have been developments. We tried to catch Whisper at her camp. We just missed her. She smelled the trap. She’s still out there somewhere, hiding. The Lady is sending in troops from all sides.”

  That explained the Captain’s remark. It did not tell me why I was supposed to hone my archery skills.

  “Near as we can tell,” Soulcatcher continued, “the Rebel doesn’t know what happened out there. Yet. Whisper hasn’t found the nerve to pass the word about her failure. She’s a proud woman. Looks like she wants to try recouping first.”

  “With what?” Raven asked. “She couldn’t put together a platoon.”

  “With memories. Memories of the material you found buried. We don’t think she knows we got it. She didn’t get close to her headquarters before Limper tipped our hand and she fled into the forest. And just we four, and the Lady, know of the documents.”

  Raven and I nodded. Now we understood Catcher’s restlessness. Whisper knew his true name. He was on the bull’s-eye.

  “What do you want with us?” Raven asked suspiciously. He was afraid Catcher thought we had deciphered that name ourselves. He’d even suggested we kill the Taken before he killed us. The Ten are neither immortal nor invulnerable, but they are damned hard to reach. I did not, ever, want to have a try at one.

  “We have a special mission, we three.”

  Raven and I exchanged glances. Was he setting us up?

  Catcher said, “Captain, would you mind stepping outside for a minute?”

  The Captain shambled through the doorway. His bear act is all for show. I don’t suppose he realizes that we have had it figured for years. He keeps on with it, trying for effect.

  “I’m not going to take you off where I can kill you quietly,” Soulcatcher told us. “No, Raven, I don’t think you figured out my true name.”

  Spooky. I scrunched my head down against my shoulders. Raven flicked a hand. A knife appeared. He began cleaning already immaculate nails.

  “The critical development is this: Whisper suborned the Limper after we made a fool of him in the Raker affair.”

  I burst out, “That explains what happened in the Salient. We had it sewed up. It fell apart overnight. And he was a pure shit during the battle at Roses.”

  Raven agreed. “Roses was his fault. But nobody thought it was treason. After all, he’s one of the Ten.”

  “Yes,” Catcher said. “It explains many things. But the Salient and Roses are yesterday. Our interest now is tomorrow. It’s getting rid of Whisper before she gifts us with another disaster.”

  Raven eyed Catcher, eyed me, pursued his needless manicure. I was not taking the Taken at face value either. We lesser mortals are but toys and tools to them. They are the kind of people who dig up the bones of their grandmothers to win points with the Lady.

  “This is our edge on Whisper,” Soulcatcher said. “We know she has agreed to meet the Limper tomorrow.…”

  “How?” Raven demanded.

  “I don’t know. The Lady told me. Limper doesn’t know we know about him, but he does know he can’t last much longer. He’ll probably try to make a deal so the Circle will protect him. He knows if he doesn’t, he’s dead. What the Lady wants is them to die together so the Circle will suspect she was selling out to the Limper instead of the other way around.”

  “It won’t wash,” Raven grumbled.

  “They’ll believe it.”

  “So we’re going to knock him off,” I said. “Me and Raven. With bows. And how are we supposed to find them?” Catcher would not be there himself, no matter how he talked. Both the Limper and Whisper would sense his presence long before he came within bowshot.

  “Limper will be with the forces moving into the forest. Not knowing that he’s suspected, he won’t hide from the Lady’s Eye. He’ll expect his movements to be taken as part of the search. The Lady will report his whereabouts to me. I’ll put you on his trail. When they meet, you take them out.”

  “Sure,” Raven sneered. “Sure. It’ll be a turkey shoot.” He threw his knife. It bit deep into a windowsill. He stomped out of the room.

  The deal sounded no better to me. I stared at Soulcatcher and debated with myself for about two seconds before I let fear push me in Raven’s wake.

  My last glimpse of Catcher was of a weary person slumped in unhappiness. I guess it is hard for them to live with their reputations. We all want people to like us.

  I was doing one of my little fantasies about the Lady while Raven systematically plunked arrows into a red rag pinned to a straw butt. I had had trouble hitting the butt itself my first round, let alone the rag. It seemed Raven could not miss.

  This time I was playing arou
nd with her childhood. That is something I like to look at with any villain. What twists and knots went into the thread tying the creature at Charm to the little girl who was? Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from? I walk through our barracks and wonder how a giggling, inquisitive toddler could have become a Three Fingers, a Jolly, or a Silent.

  Little girls are twice as precious and innocent as little boys. I do not know a culture that does not make them that way.

  So where does a Lady come from? Or, for that matter, a Whisper? I was speculating in this latest tale.

  Goblin sat down beside me. He read what I had written. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think she made a conscious decision in the beginning.”

  I turned toward him slowly, acutely conscious of Soulcatcher standing only a few yards behind me, watching the arrows fly. “I didn’t really think it was this way, Goblin. It’s a.… Well, you know. You want to understand, so you put it together some way you can handle.”

  “We all do that. In everyday life it’s called making excuses.” True, raw motives are too rough to swallow. By the time most people reach my age, they have glossed their motives so often and so well they fall completely out of touch with them.

  I became conscious of a shadow across my lap. I glanced up. Soulcatcher extended a hand, inviting me to take my turn with the bow. Raven had recovered his arrows, and was standing by, waiting for me to step to the mark.

  My first three shafts plunked into the rag. “How about that?” I said, and turned to take a how.

  Soulcatcher was reading my little fantasy. He raised his gaze to mine. “Really, Croaker! It wasn’t like that at all. Didn’t you know that she murdered her twin sister when she was fourteen?”

  Rats with icy claws scrambled around on my spine. I turned, let a shaft fly. It ripped wide right of the butt. I sprayed a few more around, and did nothing but irritate the pigeons in the background.

  Catcher took the bow, “Your nerves are going, Croaker.” In a blur, he snapped three arrows into a circle less than an inch across. “Keep at it. You’ll be under more pressure out there.” He handed the bow back. “The secret is concentration. Pretend you’re doing surgery.”

  Pretend I’m doing surgery. Right. I have managed some fancy emergency work in the middle of battlefields. Right. But this was different.

  The grand old excuse. Yes, but.… This is different.

  I calmed down enough to hit the butt with the rest of my shafts. After recovering them, I stood aside for Raven,

  Goblin handed me my writing materials. Irritably, I crumpled my little fable.

  “Need something for your nerves?” Goblin asked.

  “Yeah. The iron filings or whatever it is Raven eats.” My self-esteem was pretty shaky.

  “Try this.” Goblin offered me a little six-pointed silver star hanging on a neck chain. At its center was a Medusa head in jet.

  “An amulet?”

  “Yes. We thought you might need it tomorrow,”

  “Tomorrow?” Nobody was supposed to know what was happening.

  “We have eyes, Croaker. This is the Company. Maybe we don’t know what, but we can tell when something is going on.”

  “Yeah. I suppose so. Thanks, Goblin.”

  “Me and One-Eye and Silent, we all worked on it.”

  “Thanks. What about Raven?” When somebody makes a gesture like that, I feel more comfortable shifting the subject.

  “Raven doesn’t need one. Raven is his own amulet. Sit down. Let’s talk.”

  “I can’t tell you about it.”

  “I know. I thought you wanted to know about the Tower.” He had not talked about his visit yet. I had given up on him.

  “All right. Tell me.” I stared at Raven. Arrow after arrow skewered the rag.

  “Aren’t you going to write it down?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I readied pen and paper. The men are tremendously impressed by the fact that I keep these Annals. Their only immortality will be here. “Glad I didn’t bet him.”

  “Bet who?”

  “Raven wanted to make a wager on our marksmanship.”

  Goblin snorted. “You’re getting too smart to get hooked by a sucker bet? Get your pen ready.” He launched his story.

  He did not add much to rumors I had picked up here and there. He described the place he had gone as a big, drafty box of a room, gloomy and dusty. About what I expected of the Tower. Or of any castle.

  “What did she look like?” That was the most intriguing part of the puzzle. I had a mental picture of a dark-haired, ageless beauty with a sexual presence that hit mere mortals with the impact of a mace. Soulcatcher said she was beautiful, but I had no independent corroboration.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember? How can you not remember?”

  “Don’t get all excited, Croaker. I can’t remember. She was there in front of me, then.… Then all I could see was that giant yellow eye that kept getting bigger and bigger and stared right through me, looking at every secret I ever had. That’s all I remember. I still have nightmares about that eye.”

  I sighed, exasperated. “I guess I should’ve expected that. You know, she could come walking by right now and nobody would know it was her.”

  “I expect that’s the way she wants it, Croaker. If it does all fall apart, the way it looked before you found those papers, she can just walk away. Only the Ten could identify her, and she would make sure of them somehow.”

  I doubt it would be that simple. People like the Lady have trouble assuming a lesser role. Deposed princes keep acting like princes.

  “Thanks for taking the trouble to tell me about it, Goblin.”

  “No trouble. I didn’t have anything to tell. Only reason I put it off was it upset me so much.”

  Raven finished retrieving his arrows. He came over and told Goblin, “Why don’t you go put a bug in One-Eye’s bedroll, or something? We’ve got work to do.” He was nervous about my erratic marksmanship.

  We had to depend on one another. If either missed, chances were we would die before a second shaft could be sped. I did not want to think about that.

  But thinking about it improved my concentration. I got most of my arrows into the rag this time.

  It was a pain in the ass damned thing to have to do, night before whatever faced Raven and me, but the Captain refused to part with a tradition three centuries old. He also refused to entertain protests about our having been drafted by Soulcatcher, or demands for the additional knowledge he obviously commanded. I mean, I understood what Catcher wanted done and why, I just could not make sense of why he wanted Raven and me to do it. Having the Captain back him only made it more confusing.

  “Why, Croaker?” he finally demanded. “Because I gave you an order, that’s why. Now get out there and do your reading.”

  Once each month, in the evening, the entire Company assembles so the Annalist can read from his predecessors. The readings are supposed to put the men in touch with the outfit’s history and traditions, which stretch back centuries and thousands of miles.

  I placed my selection on a crude lectern and went with the usual formula. “Good evening, brothers. A reading from the Annals of the Black Company, last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Tonight I’m reading from the Book of Kette, set down early in the Company’s second century by Annalists Lees, Agrip, Holm, and Straw. The Company was in service to the Paingod of Cho’n Delor at that time. That was when the Company really was black.

  “The reading is from Annalist Straw. It concerns the Company’s role in events surrounding the fall of Cho’n Delor.” I began to read, reflecting privately that the Company has served many losing causes.

  The Cho’n Delor era bore many resemblances to our own, though then, standing more than six thousand strong, the Company was in a better position to shape its own destiny.

>   I lost track entirely. Old Straw was hell with a pen. I read for three hours, raving like a mad prophet, and held them spellbound. They gave me an ovation when I finished. I retreated from the lectern feeling as though my life had been fulfilled.

  The physical and mental price of my histrionics caught up as I entered my barracks. Being a semi-officer, I rated a small cubicle of my own. I staggered right to it.

  Raven was waiting. He sat on my bunk doing something artistic with an arrow. Its shaft had a band of silver around it. He seemed to be engraving something. Had I not been exhausted, I might have been curious.

  “You were superb,” Raven told me. “Even I felt it.”

  “Eh?”

  “You made me understand what it meant to be a brother of the Black Company back then.”

  “What it still means to some.”

  “Yes. And more. You reached them where they lived.”

  “Yeah. Sure. What’re you doing?”

  “Fixing an arrow for the Limper. With his true name on it. Catcher gave it to me.”

  “Oh.” Exhaustion kept me from pursuing the matter. “What did you want?”

  “You made me feel something for the first time since my wife and her lovers tried to murder me and steal my rights and titles.” He rose, closed one eye, looked down the length of his arrow. “Thanks, Croaker. For a while I felt human again.” He stalked out.

  I collapsed on the bunk and closed my eyes, recalling Raven strangling his wife, taking her wedding ring, and saying not a word. He had revealed more in that one rapid-fire sentence than since the day we had met. Strange.

  I fell asleep reflecting that he had evened scores with everyone but the ultimate source of his despair. The Limper had been untouchable because he was one of the Lady’s own. But no more.

  Raven would be looking forward to tomorrow. I wondered what he would dream tonight. And if he would have much purpose left if the Limper died. A man cannot survive on hatred alone. Would he bother trying to survive what was coming?

  Maybe that was what he wanted to say.

  I was scared. A man thinking that way could get a little flashy, a little dangerous to those around him.