Shadow Games: The Fourth Chronicles of the Black Company: First Book of the South (9 page)

Wheezer, who had the watch, gave me a gap-toothed leer before spitting a wad of
brown juice into the coals. I heard him start wheezing before I was halfway up
the hill.

A lunger I got, yet.

The moon threatened to rise soon. It would be fat and bright. I picked me a spot
and stood looking at the horizon, waiting for that fat orange globe to roll over
the lip of the world. The faintest of cool, moist breezes stirred my hair. It
was so damned peaceful it hurt.

“You couldn’t sleep, either?”

I jerked around.

She was a dark glob on the hillside just ten feet away. If I had noted her at
all, it was as a rock. I stepped closer. She was seated, her arms wrapped around
her knees. Her gaze was fixed on the north.

“Sit down.”

I sat. “What are you looking at so hard?”

“The Reaper. The Archer. Vargo’s Ship.” And yesterdays, no doubt.

Those were constellations. I considered them, too. They were very low, seen from
here. This time of year they would be quite high in the sky up north. What she
meant began to sink in.

We had come a far piece, indeed. With many a mile to go. She said, “It’s
intimidating when you think about it. It’s a lot of walking.”

It was.

The moon clambered over the horizon, monstrous in size and almost red. She
whispered “Wow!” and slipped her hand into mine. She was shivering, so after a
minute I slid over and put my arm around her. She leaned her head against my
shoulder.

That old moon was working its magic. That sucker can do it to anybody.

Now I knew what made Wheezer grin.

The moment seemed right. I turned my head-and her lips were rising to meet mine.

When they touched mine I forgot who and what she had been. Her arms surrounded
me, pulled me down. . . .

She shivered in my grasp like a captive mouse. “What is it?” I whispered.

“Shh,” she said. And that was the best thing she could have said. But she could
not leave it there. She had to add, “I never . . . I never did this . . . ”

Well, shit. She sure knew how to distract a man, and put a thousand reservations
into his mind.

That moon climbed the sky. We began to relax with each other. Somehow, there
were fewer rags separating us.

She stiffened. The mist went out of her eyes. She lifted her head and stared
past me, face slack.

If one of those clowns had sneaked up to watch I was going to break his
kneecaps. I turned.

We did not have company. She was watching the flash of a distant storm. “Heat
lightning,” I said.

“You think so? It doesn’t seem much farther off than the Temple. And we never
saw a storm the whole time we were crossing that country.”

Jagged lightning bolts ripped down like a fall of javelins.

That feeling I had discussed with One-Eye redoubled.

“I don’t know, Croaker.” She began gathering her clothing. “The pattern seems
familiar.”

I followed her lead, relieved. I am not sure I would have been able to finish
what we started. I was distracted now.

“Another time will be better, I think,” she said, still staring at that
lightning. “That is too distracting.”

We returned to camp to find everyone awake yet totally uninterested in the fact
that we had been away together. The view was not as good from below, but flashes
could be seen. They did not let up.

“There’s sorcery out there, Croaker,” One-Eye said.

Goblin nodded. “The heavy stuff. You can feel the screaming edges of it from
here.”

“How far away?” I asked.

“About two days. Close to that place we stopped.”

I shivered. “Can you tell what it’s about?”

Goblin said nothing. One-Eye shook his head. “All I can tell you is I’m glad I’m
here and not there.” I agreed, even in my ignorance of what was happening.

Murgen blanched. He pointed over the book he was studying, which he held out
like a protective fetish. “Did you see that?”

I was looking at Lady and brooding about my luck. The others could sweat the
little stuff, like some bloody sorcerers’ duel fifty miles away. I had troubles
of my own.

“What?” I grumbled, knowing he wanted a response.

“It looked like a giant bird. I mean, like one with a twenty-mile wingspan. That
you could see through.”

I looked up. Goblin nodded. He had seen it, too. I looked to the north. The
lightning ended, but some pretty fierce fires had to be burning up there.

“One-Eye. Your new buddies there got any idea what’s going on?”

The little black man shook his head. He had the brim of his hat pulled forward,

cutting his line of sight. That business up there—whatever it was—had him
rattled. By his own admission he is the greatest wizard ever produced by his
part of the world. With the possible exception of his dead brother, Tom-Tom.

Whatever that was out there, it was alien. It did not belong.

“Times change,” I suggested.

“Not around here, they don’t. And if they did, these guys would know about it.”

Wheezer nodded vigorous agreement although he could not have understood a word.

He hawked and spat a brown glob into the fire.

I had a feeling I was going to have as much fun with him as I did with One-Eye.

“What is that crap he’s all the time chewing? It’s disgusting.”

“Qat,” One-Eye said. “A mild narcotic. Doesn’t do his lungs any good, but when
he’s chewing it he doesn’t care how much they hurt him.” He said it lightly, but
he meant it.

I nodded uncomfortably, looked away. “Quieting down up there.”

No one had anything to say to that.

“We’re all awake,” I said. “So get packing. I want to move out as soon as we can
see to walk.”

I did not get a bit of argument. Wheezer nodded and spat. Goblin grunted and
started getting his things together. The others followed his example, Murgen
putting the book away with a care that I approved. The boy might make an
Annalist after all. We all kept sneaking looks at the north when we thought our
uneasiness would go unnoticed.

When I was not looking that way, or tormenting myself with glances at Lady, I
tried to get an estimate of the reactions of the newer men. We had encountered
no sorcery directly yet, but the Company has a way of stumbling into its path.

They seemed no more uncomfortable than the old hands.

Glances at Lady. I wondered if what seemed inevitable on the one hand and
foredoomed on the other would ever cease crackling between us. So long as it did
it would distort everything else in our relationship. Hell. I liked her fine as
a friend.

There is nothing so unreasonable and irrational and blind—and just plain
silly-looking—as a man who works himself into an obsessive passion.

Women do not look as foolish. They are expected to be weak. But they are also
expected to become savage bitches when they are frustrated.

Willow, Cordy Mather, and Blade still had their tavern. Mainly because they had
the countenance of the Prahbrindrah Drah. Business wasn’t good now. The priests
found out they couldn’t control the foreigners. So they put them off limits. A
lot of Taglians did what the priests told them.

“Shows you how much sense people have,” Blade said. “They had any, they would
take the priests to the river and hold them under an hour to remind them they
drone like termites.”

Willow said, “Man, you got to be the sourest son of a bitch I ever seen. I bet
if we hadn’t dragged you out, those crocs would of thrown you back. Too rancid
to eat.”

Blade just grinned as he went through the door to the back room.

Willow asked Cordy, “You reckon it was priests that throwed him in?”

“Yeah.”

“Good house tonight. For once.”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow’s the day.” Willow took a long drink. Cordy’s brew was getting better.

Then he stood up and hammered the bar with his empty mug. In Taglian he said,

“We who are about to die salute you. Drink and be merry, children. For tomorrow,

and so forth. On the house.” He sat down.

Cordy said, “You know how to cheer a place up, don’t you?”

“You figure we got anything to be cheerful about? They’ll screw it up. You know
they will. All those priests mucking about in it? I tell you right out, I get my
chance there’s a couple accidentally ain’t going to come back from out there.”

Cordy nodded and kept his mouth shut. Willow Swan was a lot more bark than bite.

Swan grumbled, “Up the river if this works out. I’ll tell you something, Cordy.

These feet get to moving that direction they’re just going to keep on
shuffling.”

“Sure, Willow. Sure.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I believe everything you tell me, Willow. If I didn’t, would I be here, up to
my neck, wallowing in rubies and pearls and gold doubloons?”

“Man, what do you expect of someplace nobody ever heard of six thousand miles
past the edge of any map anybody ever seen?”

Blade came back. “Nerves getting you guys?”

“Nerves? What nerves? They didn’t put no nerves in when they made Willow Swan.”

We moved out as soon as there was a ghost of light. It was an easy downhill
trail with only a few places where we had trouble with the coach and Lady’s
wagon. By noon we reached the first trees. An hour later the first contingent
were aboard a ferry raft. Before sundown we were inside the jungle of D’loc
Aloc, where only ten thousand kinds of bugs tormented our bodies. Worse on our
nerves than their buzzing, though, was One-Eye’s suddenly inexhaustible store of
praises and tales of his homeland.

From my first day in the Company I had been trying to get a fix on him and his
country. Every lousy detail had had to be pried out. Now it was everything
anyone ever wanted to know, and more. Except specifics of why he and his brother
had run away from such a paradise.

From where I sat swatting myself the answer to that seemed self-evident. Only
madmen and fools would subject themselves to such continuous torment.

So which was I?

For all there was a route through, we spent almost two months in that jungle.

The jungle itself was the biggest problem. It was huge, and getting the coach
through was, shall we say politely, a chore. But the people were a problem, too.

Not that they were unfriendly. Too much the opposite. Their ways were much
easier than ours in the north.

Those sleek, delectable little brown beauties had never seen anything like
Murgen and Otto and Hagop and their boys. They all wanted a taste of novelty.

The guys were cooperative.

Even Goblin got lucky often enough to keep an ear-to-ear grin on his ugly clock.

Poor hapless, inhibited old Croaker planted himself firmly among the spectators
and longed his heart out.

I do not have the hair it takes to pursue a little casual funtime bouncy-bouncy
while a more serious proposition is watching from the wings.

My attitude caused no direct verbal comment—those guys have some tact,

sometimes—but I caught enough snide sidelongs to know what they were thinking.

And them thinking made me think. When I get introspective I can become broody
and unfit company for man or beast. And when I know I am being watched a natural
shyness or reluctance sets in and I do not do anything, no matter how auspicious
the omens.

So I sat around on my hands, getting depressed because I feared something
important might be slipping away and I was constitutionally incapable of doing
anything about it.

Life sure was less complicated in the old days.

My temper improved after we scaled a last excessively vegetated and overly
bug-infested mountain range and broke out of the jungle onto high plateau
savannah.

From there one of the more interesting aspects of D’loc Aloc seemed to be the
fact that we had not attracted a single volunteer soldier. It said something
about the peace the people had with their environment. And something about
One-Eye and his long-gone brother.

What the hell had they done? I noticed he made a point of avoiding any talk
about his past, his age, or his earlier identity while in the jungle with Baldo
and Wheezer. Like anybody would remember something a couple of teenagers had
done that long ago.

Baldo and Wheezer planted us as soon as they had us outside the country of their
own people. They claimed they had reached the limit of territory they knew.

[They promised to round up a couple of trustworthy natives who could take us
on.] Baldo announced that he was going to turn back despite his earlier
contract. [He claimed Wheezer would do us just fine as intermediary
interpreter.]

Something had happened to disenchant Baldo. I did not argue with him. His mind
was made up. I just did not pay him the full fee he had been promised.

I was thrilled that Wheezer was going to stay. That guy was a second-rate soul
son of One-Eye, full of ridiculous mischief. Maybe there is something in the
water in the jungle of D’loc Aloc. Except that Baldo and everyone else we met
was almost normal.

I guess my magnetic personality draws the One-Eye/Wheezer types.

For sure there was fun in the offing. One-Eye had been taking it from Goblin for
two months with never a spark in response. When the blowup came it was sure to
be a beauty.

“The whole thing is backwards,” I said as Lady and I mulled things over.

“One-Eye is supposed to pick at scabs while Goblin lays in the weeds waiting
like a snake.”

“Maybe it’s because we’ve crossed the equator. The seasons are reversed.”

I did not understand that remark until I had given it hours of thought. Then I
realized that it had no meaning. It was one of her droll, deadpan jokes.