The Return of the Black Company (39 page)

Hardly anyone not directly involved noticed my guys. They got inside, spread out, dug deep, found what I wanted, gathered it up and got back out long before Soulcatcher discovered that she had been outmaneuvered.

*   *   *

Otto and Hagop directed the raid. Putting them in charge was my way of bringing them back into the family. Good soldiers, they carried out my suggestions, not just cleaning out Soulcatcher’s hideout but grabbing her favorite white crow. They plucked a couple of his feathers and left them in place of the books, tied together with a strand of hair taken from the head of a much younger Soulcatcher, a long time back, and come south with the plunder brought by Otto and Hagop.

That ought to rattle her.

Maybe I should have let Croaker and Lady in on my scheme. In a way, I was making a statement in their names. But this had become personal. I had a statement to make for Murgen. And there was no time for consultations and conferences.

*   *   *

Smoke and I swooped over the guys as they lugged their plunder toward the Palace. I meant to give the books to Croaker as soon as they arrived. He could do whatever he wanted with them. Which probably meant that they would bounce once and land back in my lap, to be disappeared from the ken of all villains and villainesses—probably no better than I had hidden the Widowmaker armor.

I wondered if I was going to get too intimate with the meaning of hubris. Soulcatcher would know who done her wrong. She was maybe only a year younger than Lady, which left her an ageless amount trickier and nastier than me.

But what did I have to lose? The only thing I ever loved was gone. I could dance with disaster and grin to the end. Soulcatcher could not do anything that would hurt more than losing Sahra had.

Really?

Sometimes you bullshit yourself.

100

An hour before sunset four days before the winter solstice, consulting neither the convenience of mortal man, nor sorcerer, nor god or goddess, the earth shifted and shook. In Taglios dishes tumbled off shelves, sleepers awakened in confused panic, dogs howled and cracks appeared in old walls whose foundations had been set with incomplete diligence or without forethought for the possibility of earthquake. It was a half-hour sensation.

In Dejagore structures weakened by former high water or hidden structural defects yielded to the relentless seduction of gravity. Farther south the impact was more severe. Beyond the Dandha Presh, where mountains descended upon valleys with ferocious roars of triumph, the quake left epic horror. Kiaulune was devastated. Even Overlook suffered, though the masonry shrugged off the earth’s worst. Longshadow was in a panic for hours, until it became obvious that the earth’s convulsions had not broken his shadowgates and shadowtraps. Then he began to rage because the destruction and loss of life in Shadowcatch would delay his construction efforts by months. Perhaps even by years.

101

I had the vague feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, though how anybody could get behind me when I was nothing but a floating viewpoint I did not know. The voice was not there but otherwise the feeling of presence was the same as it was during my earliest plunges into the horrors of Dejagore with the taunting spirit that must have been Soulcatcher.

Only a smell accompanied this presence. An odor like.…

Like the smell of the dead Strangler I had found in the deeps of the Palace, like the stench that had become so much a part of life in Dejagore that eventually you noticed it only when it was gone. It was the smell of death.

I had felt a full measure of pain in the delta, imagining that I saw Sahra alive among the Nyueng Bao, despite being out in the numb with Smoke. Now I enjoyed a full measure of terror despite being out there.

I began doing what, in flesh, would have been a full turnaround, slowly. I turned a second time and a third and a fourth, each time faster than the last and each time less in control. And each time around, as I faced what I suspected was southward, I glimpsed something vast and dark and, horribly, each time more clearly, till the last time around I saw a black woman as tall as the sky. She was bare-ass naked. She had four arms and six teats and fangs like a vampire. The stench was her breath. Her eyes burned like windows into hell yet looked into my own and held them and spoke to me with a blistering compulsion and promise—a ferocious eroticism beyond anything I had known with Sahra.

I screamed.

I popped out of Smoke’s universe.

Smoke had wanted to scream, too. I think he came close to being terrified awake.

One-Eye laughed. “Cold enough, Kid?”

I was soaked. With
very
cold water. “What the hell?”

“You try staying out there forever again, I’ll freeze your ass for good.”

I began to shake. “Oh, shit, that’s cold.” I did not tell him what I had seen, why I was really shaking. Probably just my imagination running away with me again, anyway. “You dog turd, what the hell are you trying to do, give me a heart attack or something?”

“No. Just trying to keep you from getting lost. You won’t look out for yourself.”

“I think I’m lost already, old timer.”

*   *   *

The stars wink down in cold irony.

There is always a way.

The wind whines and howls with bitter breath, through fangs of ice. Lightning snarls and barks upon the plain of glittering stone. Rage is a red, near-animate force, as bloated with compassion as a starving serpent. Few shadows frisk among the stellae. Many have been summoned, there or yon.

At its heart the plain is disfigured by the scars of cataclysm. A jagged lightning bolt of a fissure has ripped across the face of the plain. Nowhere is that fissure so wide that a child could not step across but it seems bottomless. Trailers of mist drift forth. Some bear a hint of color when they emerge.

Cracks mar the surface of the great grey stronghold. A tower has collapsed across the fissure. From the fastness comes a deep great slow beat like that of a grumbling world-heart, disturbing the silence of stone.

The wooden throne has shifted sideways. It has tilted a little. The figure nailed thereon has changed its sprawl. Its face is drawn in agony. Its eyelids flutter as though it is about to awaken.

This is immortality of a sort but the price is paid in silver of pain.

*   *   *

And even time may have a stop.

She is the Darkness

Book Two of Glittering Stone

The wind whines and howls with bitter breath. Lightning snarls and barks. Rage is an animate force upon the plain of glittering stone. Even shadows are afraid.

The scars of cataclysm disfigure a plain that has known only an age of dark perfection. A jagged fissure lies like a lightning slash across its face. Nowhere is that fissure so wide that a child could not step across but it seems bottomless. Trailers of mist drift forth. Some bear a hint of color. Any color clashes with the thousand blacks and greys.

At the heart of the plain stands a vast grey stronghold, unknown, older than any written memory. One ancient tower has collapsed across the fissure. From the heart of the fastness comes a great deep slow beat like that of a slumbering world-heart, cracking the olden silence.

Death is eternity. Eternity is stone. Stone is silence.

Stone cannot speak but stone remembers.

1

The Old Man looked up. His quill twitched, betraying his irritation at being interrupted. “What is it, Murgen?”

“I went for a walk with the ghost. That earth tremor we felt a while ago?”

“What about it? And don’t give me none of that around-the-bush crap One-Eye’s always handing out. I don’t have time for it.”

“The farther south you go the worse the destruction is.”

The Old Man opened his mouth, closed it to think some before he said anything else.

Croaker, the Old Man, the Captain of the Black Company, the right-now-by-god military dictator of Taglios and all its tributaries, dependencies and protectorates, does not look the part. He is in his middle fifties, possibly closer to sixty. He stands more than six feet tall. He has grown slightly heavy during four years spent mainly in garrison. He has a high forehead with a feeble crop of hair farther back. Lately he has been affecting a beard on his chin. It is grizzled. So is what hair still lurks upon his head. His icy blue eyes are deeply set, giving him a hard, scary look, like some kind of psychopathic killer.

He does not know. Nobody ever told him. Sometimes he is hurt because people back off. He does not understand why.

Mostly it’s his eyes. They can be really spooky.

He
considers himself just one of the guys. Most of the time.

If he understood it he would use his impact to its limit. His belief in the value of creating illusions in the minds of others borders on religious conviction.

He stood up. “Let’s go for a walk, Murgen.”

In the Palace it is always best to be moving if you want to keep your conversations your own. The Palace is vast, a honeycomb networked with a labyrinth masking countless secret passageways. I have been mapping those but could not winkle them all out in a lifetime—even if we were not heading south any day.

The point is, there is always a chance our friends will be listening to anything we say.

We have been very successful at driving our
enemies
out beyond arm’s reach.

Thai Dei picked us up at the doorway. The Old Man grimaced. He has no personal prejudice against my bodyguard and brother-in-law but he abhors the fact that so many Company brothers have acquired similar companions, none of whom are bound to his direct command. He does not trust the Nyueng Bao. He never has, never will and cannot explain clearly why.

He does understand that he was not there in hell’s forge when the bonds were hammered into existence. He will stipulate that. He has done his time in other hells. He was suffering one at that time.

I made a small gesture to Thai Dei. He dropped back a step, symbolically acknowledging our need for privacy rather than actually accepting it. He would hear everything we had to say anyway.

So every word we said would be spoken in the dialect of the Jewel City Beryl, which lies six thousand miles beyond the edge of any world Thai Dei can even imagine.

I wondered why Croaker bothered walking when he was going to use an alien tongue. No Taglian would understand a word. “Tell me,” he said.

“I walked with the ghost. I went south. I made the routine checks. I was just following the daily ritual.” I understood his desire to walk. Soulcatcher. Soulcatcher understood the Jewel Cities dialects. She would have more trouble eavesdropping if she had to find us first.

“Thought I told you to ease up. You’re spending too much time out there. It’ll hook you. It’s too easy to shake loose from the ache. That’s why I don’t go anymore.”

I masked my pain. “That’s not a problem, boss.” He would not believe me. He knew just how much Sarie meant to me, how much I missed her. How much I hurt. “I’m handling it. Anyway, what I want you to know is, the farther south you look the worse the damage done by that earthquake gets.”

“Am I supposed to be concerned? Dare I hope that you’ll tell me the Shadowmaster’s house fell in on his head?”

“You can hope all you want but you won’t hear it from me. Not now. His faults don’t include being a bad architect.”

“I had a feeling you wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. You’re no fun at all that way.”

Part of my job as Annalist is to remind my superiors that they are not gods. “It didn’t happen this time. Overlook came through almost unscathed. But Kiaulune was destroyed. Thousands were killed. The way disasters go, thousands more will die from hunger, disease and exposure.” The heart of winter was fast approaching.

Kiaulune is the southernmost city of men. Its name means Shadow Gate. When he came out of nowhere two decades ago and made himself master of the province, the Shadowmaster Longshadow changed the name to Shadowcatch. Only the peoples of the Shadowlands, who are inclined to avoid the Shadowmaster’s displeasure, actually employ names enforced upon them by their enslavement.

“Is that good news?”

“It’ll sure slow down construction work on Overlook. Longshadow won’t like it but he’s going to have to take time out to help his subjects. Otherwise he’ll run out of people to do his work for him.”

Our parade continued slowly through busy hallways. This part of the Palace had been given over to the war effort completely. Now people were packing. Soon we would be heading south, bound toward a major and possibly final collision with the armies of the Shadowmasters. Most of our forces were in transit already, a slow and difficult process. It takes ages to move large numbers a great distance.

The men in these offices had been laying the groundwork for years.

Croaker asked, “Are you saying we don’t need to get in any big hurry?”

“There’s no need now. The quake crippled him.”

“There wasn’t any pressing need before the quake. We could’ve gotten there before he finished his oversized sand castle.”

True. We were starting the campaign now mostly because the Captain and his woman were so thirsty for revenge.

Add the name Murgen to that list. My taste for vengeance was newer and bloodier. My wife was a more recent victim.

Longshadow and Narayan Singh would pay for Sarie’s death. Especially Narayan Singh.

You living saint of the Stranglers, your nightwalking companion now hunts you, too.

“Something that hurts him doesn’t really change anything at our end.”

I agreed. “True. Though it does give us more flexibility.”

“Yet it makes sense to jump them while they’re stunned. How widespread was the damage? Was it just Kiaulune?”

“There’s heavy damage everywhere south of the Dandha Presh. It gets worse as you go farther south. Those people won’t have much energy to spend trying to stop an invasion.”