The Return of the Black Company (74 page)

“More treachery from our friend Soulcatcher, no doubt.”

“I’d bet on it.”

“You need to get back out there. She wouldn’t do just that one thing. It would leave her too vulnerable.”

“Huh?” My turn to make funny noises.

“She’s got to know we can get in and out of there whenever we want. She has to cover her sweet little ass. Go see what she’s up to before she really gets going.”

“On my way, boss.”

I drank some sugar water and went out.

*   *   *

Smoke did not want to go back to Overlook. I got my way. I tricked him, sort of, by ducking back to before Catcher pushed her way into his awareness. Then I zipped forward and watched the shadow explode off Longshadow’s pinky.

It went for Howler. It hit Howler. Howler howled. And fought it off somehow. It darted at Narayan Singh, who shrieked as it struck him. Howler and Catcher together forced the animate darkness away from the Deceiver. Singh lapsed into unconsciousness immediately.

The shadow was not whipped yet. It struck at the Daughter of Night.

The instant she screamed the ghostworld began to fill with the stench of Kina. A cyclone of rage roared toward Overlook. Smoke squeaked
she is the darkness
and away we went, streaking out of there like a shaft from a ballista. We went high and we went north and we went fast. The fireworks at the Shadowgate vanished behind the Dandha Presh. We were north of Dejagore before I could exert any control.

The ghostworld had become one protracted whimper from my steed. He was fleeing somewhere where he expected to be safe. Somewhere that the deepest part of him recalled from days when he was still an ordinary mortal.

He had only just begun to respond to directions when we drifted into the Palace.

The place was a beehive. Priests and Guards and functionaries rushed everywhere. There was excitement out on the city streets, too. Shadar watchmen roamed in packs, making arrests by the score.

This bore closer examination.

I checked the prisoners. A few seemed vaguely familiar. I dipped around in time and discovered that they were being collected in the empty Black Company barracks. I found some definitely familiar faces in the crowd there.

They were all people who had been friendly to the Company.,

I zipped around for a look at the Radisha, ran back in time to the beginning.… Near as I could tell her adventure had been going on for only a short while, though she had spent hours earlier getting her assets positioned. Actual arrests commenced just about the time Soulcatcher strolled into Longshadow’s chamber at Overlook.

Sleepy!

Shit! I sped to Banh Do Trang’s warehouse.

Sleepy had not been arrested. Not yet. Several Shadar were in the neighborhood. They were looking for Sleepy. Their curses left me no doubt that they were after him specifically. But they could not find his hiding place.

I went after the kid. I gave it everything I could. If it worked in the swamp it ought to work in the city. I got right down there in his face and screamed. I tried to mess his hair and pull his ears.

He spooked.

So he did happen to be out of the way when the watchmen arrived, though he was still close enough to overhear and understand.

I did not wait around. He had sense enough to saddle up and get out of town and never mind waiting for an answer from Sarie.

I grabbed Smoke by the ectoplasmic short hairs and headed south. He was not even a little bit eager to go.

I returned to my flesh. The Old Man was waiting for me. “What’s the word?”

“Kina was coming. Smoke spooked. He headed north. I just got back. The shit’s flying up there, too.”

“Oh? How so?”

“The Radisha is rounding up anybody who ever smiled at one of us. She started at almost exactly the same minute that Soulcatcher jumped on Longshadow.”

He did not ponder that. “We’ve got a problem, then. Get back out there. I want to know if anything else is going wrong.”

I sucked some sugar water and went.

What else was going wrong? Right here in Kiaulune the Prahbrindrah Drah was trying to disarm Lady’s troops. She was inside Overlook. She did not know yet. I did not know how to get word to her quickly. I decided to try the same tack I had with Sleepy. Maybe I could startle her into doing something.

I found her already in the stairwell leading up to Longshadow’s crystal chamber. Several of our best Company brothers were with her.

I dropped down in front of her and screeched, “Booga! Booga! Booga! Get your ass back outside!”

She jumped. She squinted into the darkness right about where the eyes of my viewpoint floated. “Murgen?”

“Get your butt out of here, woman. It’s a trap. And the Prince’s troops are trying to disarm your men.”

She turned and barked orders.

Damn! She was a whole lot more sensitive than the others.

I whipped out of there. The stink of Kina had begun to fill the stairwell.

A dark nimbus clutched itself to Longshadow’s crystal tower. Kina had little strength she could project into this world but it was all focused now. I made Smoke move higher so I could look down into the chamber.

The Daughter of Night had recovered from the attack of the shadow. She used the strength lent her by her goddess to drive the thing back at the Shadowmaster.

Longshadow, of course, had been completely mad from the beginning, as paranoid as they come. He never trusted Howler. About all he and the little stinker had in common was their hatred of the Company. Mutual hatred for somebody else never has been sound grounds for a marriage.

The Shadowmaster had planned for a moment like this—though he had not anticipated Soulcatcher being there to help the turncoat, nor had he expected the Strangler and his brat to contribute distractions of their own. Nevertheless, he had been thorough. He had overengineered by a large factor. It might be enough. If they had underestimated him.

The towertop chamber became a bizarre pot filled with growls and shrieks, bits of smoke that came and went too fast for the eye to track, changing colors, knives of pure energy that slashed stone and crystal and ricocheted off stubborn protective spells and never considered the loyalty of anyone who got in the way.

Soulcatcher cried out like a child suddenly injured. She dropped to one knee, whimpering, but did not abandon the fight. Howler howled. The Daughter of Night babbled passages from the first Book of the Dead. The stench of Kina was awful in the ghostworld but the child had not finished copying the book before Howler stole it. She could not bring Kina all the way home without all of it.

Longshadow edged toward the doorway. It looked like he might actually get out. Presumably once he did the chamber would implode or in some other fashion destroy everybody still inside. That was the sort of trap I would have set.

They called Singh a living saint. He was, supposedly, the best of his kind of his generation. A dubious distinction in most of our eyes, but every man should be lucky enough to discover the one thing he can do better than anyone else alive.

The Shadowmaster thought no more of Narayan than he did of a mouse. The Deceiver was just there.

He was
there
one moment and
here
the next. His strangling cloth encircled the Shadowmaster’s throat like black lightning.

A black rumel man becomes a master Strangler in part by mastering his own fear and excitement in times of stress. Narayan Singh had that knack though he had had little opportunity to exercise it recently. He had done so now. He remained calm enough not to break the Shadowmaster’s neck. He understood the cost.

Strangulation is a slow process. Its victim seldom cooperates. Singh shouted, “I need armholders!” At first he said that in Deceiver cant. Only the child understood. She did not have the strength to restrain the Shadowmaster.

She told Soulcatcher, “You! Take his right arm and pull. You. The smelly one. Take hold of his left arm. Now. In the name of my mother.”

Catcher snapped, “In the name of your real mother, who happens to be my pain-in-the-ass sister, you’re going to get a paddling as soon as we finish with this piece of shit.” The voice she used was a dead ringer for that of somebody I used to know who had been a devout believer in not sparing the rod.

Longshadow was one stubborn fish. He thrashed a lot longer than I thought any human could without air. The kid told the others, “Make sure you don’t kill him.”

“Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, brat.” This time Catcher’s voice was identical to Goblin’s. I felt a sudden fear for the little wizard.

Longshadow collapsed. “Tie him and gag him and put him in that chair of his,” Catcher told Howler. “Fix him good. Then look around for any more surprises he may have here.” The shadow had vanished, either out the cracked door, into hiding or destroyed.

Howler, panting, asked, “And what’ll you be doing, O mighty one?”

“Setting the pecking order straight.” She grabbed the Daughter of Night, dropped to one knee, bent the struggling child over the other, mouthed a spell that flung Narayan Singh across the room hard enough to knock him cold, then yanked the kid’s pants down and proceeded to apply a well-deserved tanning.

The child never cried but tears filled her eyes once Catcher finished. She felt both humiliated and deserted. Again she faced a crisis of faith. The stench of Kina had faded as soon as the kid got too busy to mess with her incomplete summoning.

Catcher said, “You give me any more crap, sweetheart, and next time you get intimately acquainted with a willow switch. You got him tied up good?”

“I’m working on it. You’ve waited this long you don’t need to get in any big damned hurry now.”

“I want to get control of his shadows. They’re not going to sit still—”

“I know the plan. I helped write it.” Howler screeched. There was a world of irritation in his cry.

I had to see the Old Man.

65

“They’re squabbling among themselves already,” I told Croaker after he shooed everybody outside. “But they definitely have Longshadow on the hook. Catcher intends to make him do whatever she wants.”

“She going to do a Taking?”

I had not thought of that. That kind of stuff had happened only way, way back. “Would she know how?”

“She might. But she might not have enough to work with where Longshadow is concerned. She might need to know his true name. We know he’s got that hidden in the Shadowgate spell.”

“What’s going on here?”

“I’ve ordered the New Division to move over to the Shadowgate and relieve the Old Division. If I get them entangled with the shadows before they understand what the Prahbrindrah Drah is doing, they won’t be able to participate. All they’ll have time for is fighting shadows.”

“What excuse did you give them?”

“The Old Division doesn’t have enough bamboo.”

On a night like tonight no general was going to let his men surrender their bamboo to another outfit.

“Also, that I want the Old Division to attack Overlook from the south. Those are the orders I actually sent to get them started. They won’t get their real orders till after they separate.”

We had rehearsed a move from the Shadowgate to the south wall several times. Maybe the Old Man was still thinking way ahead of everybody else.

“I think I was able to warn Lady.” I told him what I had done. “It seemed like the right call in the circumstances. I know she’ll ask questions later.”

“Oh, she will. And she’ll crap bricks when she gets her answers.”

“You don’t seem particularly terrified.”

“I was her prisoner in the Tower at Charm before she learned to love me. I used up my scared then.”

I would not count on her love if I was him. They had not been much of a loving couple lately. Guys like me never stop loving their Saries but other people do fall out of love when there is a lot of stress for a long time. I said, “I have to check on Goblin. I had a really ugly thought while I was watching them fight over there. If Catcher was as thorough as I think she’d be, old One-Eye might be an orphan.”

“Shit,” Croaker said softly. “I overlooked that angle completely. Look, while you’re searching for that little shit tell Smoke ‘white wedding’ and ‘white knight’ every little bit. Alternate them. That’ll make Goblin easier to spot.”

“I figured there was something—”

“And any time you see crows, anywhere, panic them. We need to blind Catcher as much as we can.”

“She fooled you, eh?”

“Say I underestimated her ambitions. Obviously, now, she’s up to more than just getting even with Lady. Go on.”

*   *   *

The “white wedding, white knight” mantra worked wonders. Smoke and I found Goblin almost immediately. And he was in deep shit, just as I feared, only it was not nearly as deep as some probably hoped. When Smoke and I got there we found him and his boys lying very quietly amongst some rough rocks feeling very nasty. In a very few minutes somebody was going to get hurt. Bad.

I had to dive into the pool of time to find out why.

Goblin is just a minor wizard but he
is
one. He comes equipped with a normal Company complement of distrust, too. He could not control shadows or crows, bats or mice, or any other creature well enough to use it to collect information but he could manipulate some creatures some ways. His choice was a miniature owl common on the south side of the Dandha Presh. It did not grow much bigger than your fist.

He kept the critters posted in the bushes around his camp wherever he went to ground. And they always fluttered ahead when he was on the march. He moved only by night except when he chose to attack some of Longshadow’s loyalists.

Goblin suffered no surprises.

He was not surprised when the forvalaka came padding through the darkness and leapt at him with a thunderous growl. Owls using a call unique to that particular danger had cried out as the beastwoman passed.

There were no official plans for her to be anywhere nearby tonight.

There had been a lot of unnecessary, unexplained crow activity in the neighborhood lately, too.

Goblin had become suspicious. He had prepared. Just in case. After a while even a Company man as lazy as One-Eye will react to signs and portents.