The Return of the Black Company (58 page)

“You buy it?” I asked.

“Sounds like somebody thought he was going to get his throat cut and made up a story. But we’ll check it out.”

“Just when I was getting used to being warm.”

“You used to being hungry, too?”

Out we rode, and onward and onward we rode, day after day, through fields and forests and hills marred by quake effects and abandoned by the population. The Captain and I rode those giant black stallions, him outfitted in his cold Widowmaker armor and me lugging the bloody standard while Thai Dei tagged along behind like he was trying to become some sort of clown sidekick. We found the prisoner’s ice cave. Near as we could tell, it was a real treasure trove. The earthquake had dropped an avalanche down its throat. The good people of the province had been trying to open it back up. We relieved them of all that hard work and left a troop to await the coming of reinforcements hungry enough to dig for their supper. We continued on toward Kiaulune and Overlook, managing to sustain ourselves and avoid trouble until we were just forty miles north of the stricken city.

The countryside there was unmarred by disaster, quiet, orderly, almost pretty—but a little too wintry for my taste. Suddenly, without warning, despite the Old Man’s crows, we ran into Shadowlander cavalry and not a man among them was in a good mood. Their charge broke us into half a dozen clumps. Whereupon a horde of infantry types tried to horn in. Lucky for us they were regional militia, poorly armed, completely inexperienced peasants. Unfortunately, it is true that some totally untrained and inexperienced dickhead can get lucky and kill you just as dead as a martial arts priest like Uncle Doj can.

I managed to get the standard set atop a knoll, the Old Man there with me inside a circle of friendly folks. “The one day you don’t wear the damned costume,” I yelled. “They wouldn’t have had the balls for this shit if you’d dressed up.” Who knows? It might have been true.

“It was getting heavy. And it’s cold and it stinks.” He shrugged into the hideous, grotesque armor. As he lowered the nasty winged helmet onto his head a pair of monster crows dropped onto his shoulders. Traceries of scarlet fire began crawling all over him. A few thousand more crows began zooming around overhead, every one bitching his little heart out.

After a chance to take in the crows, Widowmaker and the Company standard most of our attackers decided to take the rest of the day off.

The stories had to be really bad down here.

The cavalrymen were made of sterner stuff. They continued fighting. They were veterans. And Longshadow probably had them convinced we were going to roast their wives and rape their babies, then turn the rest of them into dog food and shoe leather.

But we scattered them. Before the soldiers could get carried away chasing them, the Old Man headed south again, declaring, “We have bridges to capture and chokepoints to clear.”

A few men did not heed the recall. I asked, “What about them?”

“They have a chance to serve as a valuable object lesson. Those that survive can catch up.” He was feeling hard.

He did not think about arranging care and protection for the wounded. That was not something he had overlooked ever before.

It might be that there were no Company brothers among the wounded even though we had nearly a dozen with us.

That consideration often seemed to lie at the root of his decisions, yet never so blatantly that outsiders were conscious of it. I hoped he would keep it low-key. We had troubles enough.

*   *   *

I had seen Shadowcatch a hundred times in Smoke’s dreams. I had spent cumulative days prowling Overlook. I thought I knew the city and the fortress about as well as anyone who lived there. But I was not prepared for a reality unfiltered by Smoke’s thoughtless mind.

The remains of Kiaulune were plain hell. Famine and disease had claimed almost everyone who had not been killed by the earthquake. Longshadow, taking unwanted advice, had tried to help. Too late. But he had allowed refugees to establish themselves in the shadow of Overlook and had been making provision to care for them. In turn, those people were replacing the lost workers who had been building Overlook before the earthquake.

Very little work had gotten done since the disaster. Even Longshadow had been forced to stipulate that survival demands superseded his desire to complete his invulnerable fastness.

There were no children. Some arrangement had been made to care for them elsewhere. A clever step, uncharacteristic of the Shadowmaster. That idea had to have originated with someone else. In fact, I could think of no one in Longshadow’s coterie to whom such a thing would occur.

It looked as though the little construction effort put out lately had been directed principally at providing housing.

This would not keep up once the pressure was off. To Longshadow all the people of the Shadowlands were his to use and dispose of as he saw fit. He just wanted to keep them alive long enough to be used.

“Hell really is leaking into the world,” Croaker observed. He stared at the bleak, stinking, unwalled remains of Kiaulune. He paid no attention to the gleaming magnificence beyond the city.

I did. “We’re too damned close here, boss. We don’t have Lady to cover us.”

That did not seem to trouble him. The only time he paid Overlook any attention was when he paused once to glare and say, “You didn’t get it done in time, did you, you son of a bitch?”

From the limited point of view of someone seeing the fortress with mundane eyes the place seemed immeasurably huge. Mostly the towering walls had been constructed of a grey-white stone but in places blocks of different colors had been worked in, along with silver, copper and gold, to scrawl the whole with cabalistic patterns.

What forces had Longshadow gathered to defend those ramparts since last I walked with the ghost? Did it matter? Could any army scale those incredible walls if the construction scaffolding was cast down?

Most of that was still in place.

Croaker mused, “You may be right. I shouldn’t rub their noses in the fact that I’m out here personally.” He turned a little more and looked past Overlook, at the escarpment in the distance. “Have you ever gotten up there?”

I looked around. No one was there to hear. Not even a crow. “No. I can get about halfway across the space between Overlook and a place on the road where there’s a landslide that seems to be what they call the Shadowgate around here. Not much to look at. But that’s all the farther Smoke will go.”

“I’ve never done better. Let’s get out of here.”

We withdrew and pitched camp north of Kiaulune. The soldiers were not comfortable there. None of them wanted to set up housekeeping so close to the last and craziest Shadowmaster.

I tended to agree.

Croaker said, “You could be right. I’d feel better myself if Smoke was down here and you could do some scouting.” Then he grinned. “But I do believe that we have a guardian angel better than Lady looking out for us.”

“What? Who?”

“Catcher. She’s as goofy as a squirrel with three nuts but she’s predictable. You been able to get close to her?” Like he was sure I would try.

“Not really. Smoke won’t go.”

“You have to remember how determined she is to use me to get even with Lady for having kept her from getting even before. That means she has to take care of me.”

“Oh.” Dumb me. I had not thought about how he could be using Catcher. “You’re willing to bet your life on Catcher?”

“Hell no. She’s still Soulcatcher. She could get interested in something else and just walk out on everything here.”

“But she does have a score to settle with Longshadow, too.”

“That she does.” He grinned. He was pleased about the way things were going.

I was worried about Soulcatcher. She seldom did anything overt but in her own mind she would be one of the major players. Eventually she would do something dramatic.

Was there anything Croaker had not foreseen and made part of his plan? He did not think so, I am sure.

I did not agree. Because I had rock-hard evidence that he was not ready for everything. There is no way he could have anticipated me starting to have the same sort of nightmares as Lady—though I am just as certain that he did expect hers to continue.

Here near Kiaulune my nightmares were powerful and frequent. I could not take a nap without a visit to the cavern of the old men. Frequently I went to the plain of bones and corpses. On occasion I slipped off to the land of myth. Or so I interpreted it. It was a vast grey place where gods and devils met in divine battle and the most ferocious thing on the field was a gleaming black monster whose footfalls shook the earth, whose claws rent and tore, whose fangs …

The hideous cold place with the slimy old men was there every time, though. Every time. It was repellent in the extreme, yet attractive. Each time, as I walked the cold shadows, I found another familiar face among the old men.

I thought I had it handled. I really did. But that was because I did not think Kina would bother being subtle with a dim candle like me. I ignored the fact that she was the goddess of Deceivers. And forgot that Lady had told me that all that appeared to be Kina did not have to be Kina.

The dead place came to smell sweeter. It became more relaxing, safer, more comfortable, just as walking with the ghost had become comforting. I had a suspicion my enjoyment of that comfort was one reason the Old Man brought me down here ahead of everyone. He wanted me to go cold turkey.

I wanted to tell him I had it handled because I believed I did. But as we lay there in the hills waiting for the rest of the army to trudge up the road I spent a lot of cold days and colder nights huddled by a fire, spooking out Thai Dei, fiddling with my notes and napping. A lot. Because when I slept I could go away from the center, where the pain remained in a hard little core that would not die. Sometimes I even seemed to fly the way I had with Smoke, though not far, nor to anywhere interesting. I was the opposite of Lady, who fought her dreams all the way.

It was a gentle seduction. Kina gradually replaced Smoke.

I noticed that the Captain watched me sidelong in the mornings, warily, when I arose reluctantly. Thai Dei did not say anything but he seemed worried.

39

The men were singing around the campfires even though it had snowed. Morale was up. We were finding enough to eat. We had halfway decent shelter. The enemy was making no attempt to discomfit us. Lead elements of the main force were in the province and scattering in a wide arc around Kiaulune, settling in to await the final phase of the campaign. But even when the mob is sitting around, playing tonk, somebody has to do something to keep things moving. The Old Man reached into his trick bag and pulled the straw with my name on it.

I think he rigged the draw.

I got the job of taking a patrol north to meet a quartermaster crew inbound to begin surveys for camp layouts once we got serious about besieging Overlook. They were bringing in some prisoners Lady thought the Captain would find interesting.

Three times outbound we had brushes with partisans. We had another coming back. The tension was draining. I was exhausted. Still not a hundred percent despite his protests to the contrary, Thai Dei was used up, too. “Message from your honey,” I told the Old Man, tossing him a leather packet that was heavy enough to have a couple bricks inside. “Clete and his brothers are with this bunch. They’re already talking about building a ramp to get over Overlook’s wall.”

“Fat chance. You all right?”

“Dead tired. We ran into partisans again. Mogaba’s changing his style.”

He gave me a hard look but told me, “Get some rest. The guys have found a house I want you to look over tomorrow. You might grab Clete and them and have them tell you how much work the place needs.”

I grunted. I had a nice place now, dug out of the side of a hill, a real blanket hanging in front to keep out the wind and contain the warmth of my fire. Our fire. My brother-in-law holed up there with me. We were turning the place into a manor house in our spare time. Compared to anything we had had since leaving Dejagore.

Between us we had just about enough energy left to grunt at one another over some hard bread while we got the fire built up, then collapsed into piles of rags we had harvested from the ruins of Kiaulune.

I fell asleep wondering how bad the guerrilla problem could get. This time of year we could starve them into submission simply by keeping a lot of foragers out. But if they survived the winter we would have big trouble with them in the spring, when we would have to plant our own crops, then would have to work and protect them through the harvest.

I did not worry about it long. Sleep jumped up and grabbed me. And the dreams were waiting for me.

This time it started with the dead waste, the expanse of corpses and bones, but it was not quite the night land it had been before. The stench was absent. The corpses looked like corpses in paintings, pale, with little blood showing. There was none of the corruption that finds us after we have lain in the sun for a few days. There were no flies, no maggots, no ants, no scavengers tearing at the bodies.

This time some of the corpses opened their eyes as I passed. A few looked vaguely like people I knew long ago. My grandmother. An uncle I had liked. Childhood friends and a couple friends from early days in the Company, now long dead. Most of those seemed to smile at me.

Then I encountered the face that I should have expected, the one the whole series of dreams must have been choreographed to throw at me. Yes, I should have expected it but it did take me completely by surprise. “Sahra?”

“Murgen.” Her response was no more than the stir of a faint breeze. A ghost’s whisper. As you would expect. As I would expect, anyway, being naïve about such things.

I saw the trap instantly. Kina was going to offer me back my dead. What she had taken away she would ransom. At that moment I did not care. Of course.

I could get my Sarie back.

I had my Sarie for as long as it took for my emotions to become totally engaged. Then I was in a dark, cold, terrible place I was meant to believe was where Sarie went when I was not there to pull her into the light.