The Return of the Black Company (50 page)

From conversations overheard I knew Longshadow would part with three or four thumbs to get hold of what Lady knew.

Funny. Whenever he sent Howler to capture her the scheme machine never quite clicked. You would almost think Howler did not want his senior partner to become any more senior.

Someday I will have to get Lady to explain the whole true names thing in a way that even a dummy like me can understand. Maybe I can get her to explain the whole business of sorcery so that those of us who study these Annals will have at least a vague idea of what is going on.

Knowing will not keep us from crapping our small clothes when we run into sorcery but, still, it would be nice to have a notion what is behind all the deadly lights.

*   *   *

The Shadowlander soldiers were all in place. They gnawed field rations sleepily, hard at work at what soldiers do most. While we all waited I hung around those who spoke languages I could understand. The philosophers among them examined the intellects and characters of generals who put their troops into formation and made them stand ready when nothing was going to happen. Nothing. The damned Tals were too damned tired to do anything. They had spent the whole damned night on the move.

“Tal” was a sort of pun. Though short for “Taglian” it also meant “turd” in the Sangel dialects common south of the Dandha Presh.

I felt like I had soldiered with those guys. They spoke my language.

Mogaba had built himself a giant observation tower a safe distance behind the lines. It was wooden. I thought he was going to find it uncomfortable pretty soon. Longshadow and Howler had joined him up there. The atmosphere was not festive but it was far from grim. Nobody was worried about us.

Longshadow threatened to become cheerful. This battle was the culmination of all his planning. When it was over nothing could stop him from making himself master of the world. Except maybe a few allies who did not quite share his ambitions.

I was hurt. A guy likes to be taken seriously. Mogaba had these people, from top to bottom, believing they were invincible.

In the soldiering business you are often what you think you are.

Confidence generates victory.

Howler did not scream once while I watched. Longshadow did not throw one tantrum.

Much as they fussed about Lady you would think they would be more tense.

22

The rising sun began burning off the mist—except around our camp. The wind was a feeble breeze coming from Lady’s flank. Fires smoldered there, keeping the camp obscured. The Shadowlanders could see only the camp followers who had been strong-armed into feeding the fires—and four wooden towers now rising above the smoke and mist. They were your basic siege towers, being assembled from precut parts brought up from barges on the Naghir River only with a lot of effort and plenty of good old-fashioned cussing.

I did not understand. What was the point out here? We were not going to be clambering over any castle walls.

Knowing Croaker, the project was under way just to get Mogaba wondering why.

I dove Smoke into the smoke. The activity inside was not what I expected. The soldiers were asleep. Those who were up and about were mostly camp followers. They fed the fires, assembled the towers, smoothed the ground in paths leading toward Mogaba’s lines, cursed the moment Croaker was born. They had not followed the army so they could do its work.

The soldiers who drove them to their tasks were not kind. The Old Man was clever enough to have had the work crews assembled according to religion, then managed by soldiers who did not cherish their beliefs.

Some details of Croaker’s plan had begun trickling down through the ranks but there was no way anyone could put the pieces together into a whole. He would not let the whole picture get out where a genius could puzzle it out from its fragments.

Now the challenge was to keep the only man who knew what it was alive until … Ah, me, Murgen. Where is your Black Company confidence?

It never existed except as show.

Ha. Here was Willow Swan, tall, blond and beautiful, trying harder than I to understand. An intuition might win him points with Lady. But he was grumbling in confusion to his companions.

I found Lady not far away. She was not worried about what was going on. She was focused on business. She had taken station atop a knoll that raised her above the smoke. She stared up the pass, ready if the other side tried something.

I took Smoke back to One-Eye’s wagon. Time for breakfast.

“About goddamned time, Kid!” One-Eye complained. “You’ve got to start taking shorter trips. You’re gonna end up getting lost out there.”

Everybody kept telling me that. It did not seem to be happening, though, so my share of those fears were fading away. I asked, “Anything interesting happening?”

“There’s a war on. Come on. Get out of the way. I need the old fart so I can do my part. Go get some exercise. Eat something. Make him some soup so you can feed him when I’m done.”

“You feed him when you’re done, bat-breath. You’re the man with the job.”

“You got a real attitude problem, Kid.”

“We about to try something?”

“No. We hiked five hundred goddamn miles in the middle of goddamn winter because they say the brush down here is so goddamn great for cookouts.”

“Everybody acts like they’re drugged.”

“Could be on account of they’re drugged. I don’t know. Just my opinion. I could be wrong. Get out of my way. I got work to do.”

*   *   *

The smoke was awful. And it got worse nearer the front of the army. Scant yards made a huge difference. After my first foray in that direction I decided curiosity could wait. I hung around the wagon. I ate and ate and ate. I used up most of One-Eye’s water. Served him right, the way he abused me.

I thought about Sahra. I knew I would be thinking of her a lot now. Danger has a way of making you dwell on the things most important to you.

The proximity of Narayan Singh haunted me, too. The living saint of the Deceivers was less than a mile away, tending his own cookfire while the Daughter of Night looked on dreamily, well bundled against the morning chill and damp.

I started. Damn! That little reverie was almost real.

I got restless waiting to get back to Smoke. I wanted to see if Singh was making breakfast. I needed to get away from all these thoughts about Sarie.

When would the scars form around the pain? When would it stop hurting so much that I had to run away?

I stared into the fire and tried to banish the thoughts. That was like picking at a scab. The harder I tried to think about something else the more I focused on Sarie. Eventually the fire filled my entire horizon and I seemed to see my wife on the other side, rumpled and beautiful and somewhat pallid as she went about the mundane business of cooking rice. It was like I was looking back through time to a moment I had lived before.

I made a noise like a dog strangling and jumped to my feet. Not again! I was over those falls into the past … wasn’t I?

One-Eye clambered down from the wagon. “All done, Kid. You can have him if you need him but you really ought to give it a break. Ain’t nothing going to happen for a while, anyway.”

“What’re we burning in these fires? I’m having visions or something here.”

One-Eye sucked in a couple gallons of air, held his breath a while, then blew it out, shook his head, disappointed. “You’re imagining things.”

“I never did.”

I never did. That was worth thinking about. I glanced around to see who was listening. Mother Gota was at the family cookfire but her Forsberger was not good enough to give her a clue.

She had appointed herself full-time family cook. Which meant that, even with the demands made by my travels with Smoke, I was in no danger of getting fat. She still lugged her personal arsenal. She acted like she knew how to use it those rare times she troubled to practice with Thai Dei and Uncle Doj. She did not talk to me much anymore. I was not the reason she was here. I was an inconvenience and an embarrassment.

She
knew
none of this would have happened if love and Hong Tray had not gotten in the way of common sense and ancient custom.

I was just as happy she stayed out of my way. I had my own feelings to tame. Among them was the conviction that life might have been much better for me had Sarie’s mother never come to stay with us. Sahra might even be alive still. Though there was no way I could work that out so that it fit any logic.

*   *   *

Much as Smoke called I decided to endure the pain. I had to get used to it sometime. So why not try walking around the camp again? I could stay away from the worst smoke.

Thai Dei materialized almost as soon as I started moving. “Your sling and splints are gone,” I said. “Are you back on the job?”

He nodded.

“Sure it isn’t a little soon for that? You could break that arm again if you don’t give it time enough to heal.”

Thai Dei shrugged. He was tired of being a cripple. That was that. Tough as he was, he was probably right.

“What happened to Uncle Doj?” I had not seen the old boy for a while. If Thai Dei was back Doj might give in to an impulse to go after revenge on his own. His Path of the Sword thinking would find that perfectly reasonable.

Thai Dei shrugged.

He was lucky he did not have to talk for a living. There would be even less of him than there is now.

“Help me out here, brother. I’m going to get real upset if that old man gets himself killed.” Uncle Doj was not ancient. He had maybe ten years on the Old Man and was more spry than Croaker.

“He would not do that.”

“Glad to hear it. Trouble is, anybody can. While we’re at it, remind him to try not being so weird in front of people who don’t know us. The Captain didn’t survive Dejagore with us.”

Thai Dei was positively loquacious all of a sudden. “He lived his own hell.” Which was true but not a point I would expect Nyueng Bao to note.

“He sure did. And it twisted him. Same as Dejagore twisted us. He doesn’t trust anybody anymore. That’s a lonely way to be but he just can’t help it. And he especially don’t trust people whose beliefs and business and motives are completely opaque to him.”

“Uncle?”

“You have to admit that Uncle Doj is odd even by Nyueng Bao standards.”

Thai Dei grunted, conceding the point privately.

“He makes the Captain very nervous.” And the Captain was a very powerful man.

“I understand.”

“I hope so.” Ordinarily even Doj has to pry words out of Thai Dei so I felt rewarded. He remained talkative. I learned a good deal about his childhood with Sahra, which was pretty unremarkable. He believed there was a curse on their family. His father had died when he and Sahra were children. His wife My had drowned when their son To Tan was only a few months old, early in the pilgrimage that had brought the Nyueng Bao into Dejagore just in time for the siege. Sahra had married Sam Danh Qu, who had put her through several years of hell before he died of that fever in the early days of the siege. Then the children had all died, Sahra’s under the swords of Mogaba’s men in Dejagore, To Tan during the Strangler raid that had ended with my wife dead and Thai Dei’s arm broken.

Evidently nobody in this family ever died of old age. This dying family. Mother Gota would bear no more children. Thai Dei had the capacity to become a father again but I did not expect that to happen. I expected Thai Dei to get killed avenging his sister and son.

Thai Dei stopped being communicative when To Tan’s name came up.

*   *   *

The army lined up so: Lady’s division to the left, the Prince’s in the center, the Captain’s two to the right, stacked one behind the other. All our cavalry assembled in the gap between the front and trailing divisions.

Why? The reserve division belongs behind the center. That has been customary since the dawn of time.

And why did Croaker station all his specially trained units behind or beyond Lady’s division?

Either the Old Man thought he could dive Mogaba berserk trying to winkle out the answers or he was letting his hatred for Blade and his paranoia define his tactics.

And why were the camp followers, voluntarily or otherwise, being gathered together right on the front line? Croaker hated camp followers. That he had not run them off weeks ago was a wonder to all who knew him.

I could not find Uncle Doj. Still.

23

I felt it begin before any growl of drum or snarl of trumpet. I ran for the wagon, leaping rocks and fires in the mist.

I had Smoke take me up where Mogaba watched from his high tower, sensed uncertainty immediately. He knew Croaker. He knew that half what the Old Man did would be done to mess with his mind. But which half?

The knowing itself would cause a hesitation at every point of decision.

I loathed Mogaba the traitor but admired Mogaba the man. He was tall, handsome, intelligent. Just like me. But he was the perfect warrior, too.

He had no company but couriers and the two big wazoos. And they were doing a great imitation of two guys sleeping. Their strategy was to wait for Lady to make a move so one could grab her while the other one blindsided her.

Mogaba’s platform provided a less than perfect view though probably the best attainable. A portion of his left flank was masked by a jumble of boulders while to his right a steep knee of stone concealed his flank there along with a portion of the Taglian left wing.

I took Smoke up amongst the crows for a vulture’s-eye view. The smoke was thinning out. People were stumbling uphill, unable to make an orderly advance over the rocky ground.

Now I understood why the troops had been issued calthrops.

Calthrops are like large kids’ jacks, only the tips are sharp and sometimes poisoned. The calthrop is a handy tool if you have to run for it, particularly if the guys after you are going to be on horseback. You scatter calthrops where horses have to follow narrow paths and you have yourself a guaranteed head start—or even grounds for a nasty ambush.

Aha! I spied the missing complimentary in-law.