Shadows Linger (19 page)

JUNIPER: BANISHED
The summons from Whisper caught me unprepared. It was too early for the daily
report. I'd barely finished breakfast. I knew it meant trouble. I was not
disappointed.

The Taken prowled like a caged animal, radiating tension and anger. I went
inside by the numbers, stood at a perfect attention, giving no excuse for the
picking of nits-in case whatever it was was not my fault.

She ignored me for several minutes, working off energy. Then she seated herself,

stared at her hands thoughtfully. Her gaze rose. And she was in complete
control. She actually smiled. Had she been as beautiful as the Lady, that smile
would have melted granite. But she was what she was, a scarred old campaigner,

so a smile only ameliorated the grimness of her face.

“How were the men disposed last night?” she asked. Baffled, I responded, “Excuse
me? You mean their temper?”

“Where were they stationed?”

“Oh.” That was properly Elmo's province, but I knew better than to say so. The
Taken do not tolerate excuses, sound though they may be. “The three men on the
ship south with Bullock, looking for that man Asa.” I worried about her having
sent them. When I do not understand the motives of the Taken, I get paranoid.

"Five down in the Buskin pretending to be foreign sailors. Three more down there
watching people we've found especially interesting. I'd have to double-check
with Elmo to be positive, but at least four more were in other parts of the
city, trying to pick up something of interest. The rest of us were here in the
castle, off duty. Wait. One man would have been down in the Duke's secret police
office, and two would have been at the Enclosure, hanging around with the
Custodians. I was with the Inquisitors most of the night, picking their brains.

We're scattered pretty thin right now. I'll be glad when the Captain gets here.

We've got too much going for the available manpower. The occupation planning is
way behind."

She sighed, rose, resumed pacing. “My fault as much as anyone's, I suppose.” She
looked out a window for a long time. Then she beckoned. I joined her.

She indicated the black castle. "Just whiskers short. They're trying to open the
way for the Dominator already. It's not yet time, but they're getting hurried.

Maybe they've sensed our interest."

This Juniper business was like some giant, tentacled sea beast from a sailor's
lie. No matter where we turned or what we did, we got deeper into trouble. By
working at cross-purposes with the Taken, trying to cover an increasingly more
obvious trail, we were complicating their efforts to deal with the peril of the
black castle. If we did cover well, we just might make it possible for the
Dominator to emerge into an unprepared world.

I did not want that horror upon my conscience.

Though I fear I tend not to record it that way, we were embroiled in substantial
moral quandaries. We are not accustomed to such problems. The lot of the
mercenary does not require much moralizing or making of moral decisions.

Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the
customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The great issues
become how well he does his job, how faithfully he carries out his commission,

how well he adheres to a standard demanding unswerving loyalties to his
comrades. He dehumanizes the world outside the bounds of his outfit. Then
anything he does, or witnesses, becomes of minor significance as long as its
brunt is borne outside the Company.

We had drifted into a trap where we might have to face the biggest choice in the
Company's history. We might have to betray four centuries of Company mythos on
behalf of the greater whole.

I knew I could not permit the Dominator to restore himself, if that turned out
to be the only way we could keep the Lady from finding out about Darling and
Raven.

Yet. . . . The Lady was not much better. We served her, and, till lately, well
and faithfully, obliterating the Rebel wherever we found him, but I don't think
many of us were indifferent to what she was. She was less evil than the
Dominator only because she was less determined about it, more patient in her
drive for total and absolute control.

That presented me with another quandary. Was I capable of sacrificing Darling to
prevent the Dominator's return? If that became the price?

“You seem very thoughtful,” Whisper said.

"Uhm. There're too many angles to this business. The Custodians. The Duke. Us.

Bullock, who has axes of his own to grind." I had told her about Bullock's
Buskin origins, feeding her seemingly irrelevant information to complicate and
distract her thinking.

She pointed again. “Didn't I suggest a close watch be kept on that place?”

“Yes, ma'am. We did for a while, too. But nothing ever happened, and then we
were told to do some other things. ...” I broke off, quaking with a sudden nasty
suspicion.

She read my face. “Yes. Last night. And this delivery was still alive.”

“Oh boy,” I murmured. “Who did it? You know?”

“We just sensed the consequent changes. They tried to open the way. They weren't
strong enough yet, but they came very close.”

She began to prowl. Mentally, I ticked off the roster for the Buskin last night.

I was going to ask some very pointed questions.

"I consulted the Lady directly. She's very worried. Her orders are to let
ancillary business slide. We're to prevent any more bodies reaching the castle.

Yes, the rest of your Company will be here soon. From six to ten days. And there
is much to be done to prepare for their arrival. But, as you observed, there is
too much to do and too few to do it. Let your Captain cope when he arrives. The
black castle must be isolated."

“Why not fly some men in?”

“The Lady has forbidden that.”

I tried to look perplexed. “Buy why?” I had a sweating, fearful suspicion that I
knew.

Whisper shrugged. “Because she doesn't want you wasting time making hellos and
briefing newcomers. Go see what can be done about isolating the castle.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I departed, thinking it had gone both better and worse than I had anticipated.

Better, because she did not throw one of her screaming rages. Worse, because she
had in effect announced that we who were here already were suspect, that we
might have succumbed to a moral infection the Lady did not want communicated to
our brethren.

Scary.

“Yeah,” Elmo said when I told him. He did not need it explained. “Which means we
got to make contact with the Old Man.”

“Messenger?”

“What else? Who can we break loose and cover?”

“One of the men from the Buskin.”

Elmo nodded. “I'll handle that. You go ahead and figure how to isolate the
castle with the manpower we have.”

“Why don't you go scout the castle? I want to find out what those guys were
doing last night.”

“That's neither here nor there now, Croaker. I'm taking over. Not saying you
done a bad job, just you didn't get it done. Which is my fault, really. I'm the
soldier.”

"Being a soldier won't make any difference, Elmo. This isn't soldier's work.

It's spy stuff. And spies need time to worm into the fabric of a society. We
haven't had enough of that."

“Time is up now. Isn't that what you said?”

“I guess,” I admitted. “All right. I'll scout the castle. But you find out what
went on down there last night. Especially around that placed called the Iron
Lily. It keeps turning up, just like that guy Asa.”

All the while we talked, Elmo was changing. Now he looked like a sailor down on
his luck, too old to ship, but still tough enough for dirty work. He would fit
right in down in the Buskin. I told him so.

“Yeah. Let's get moving. And don't plan on getting much sleep till the Captain
gets here.”

We looked at one another, not saying what lay in the backs of our minds. If the
Taken did not want us in touch with our brethren, what might they do when the
Company hove in sight, coming out of the Wolanders?

Up close, the black castle was both intriguing and unsettling. I took a horse
over, circled the place several times, even flipped a cheerful wave at the one
movement I detected atop its glassy ramparts.

There was some difficult ground behind it-steep, rocky, overgrown with scraggly,

thorny brush which had a sagey odor. Nobody lugging a corpse would reach the
fortress from that direction. The ground was better along the ridgeline to east
and west, but even there an approach was improbable. Men of the sort who sold
corpses would do things the easy way. That meant using the road which ran from
the Port River waterfront, through the scatter of merchant class houses on the
middle slopes, and just kept on to the castle gate. Someone had followed that
course often, for wheel ruts ran from the end of the road to the castle.

My problem was, there was no place a squad could lie in wait without being seen
from the castle wall. It took me till dusk to finalize my plan.

I found an abandoned house a ways down the slope and a little upriver. I would
conceal my squad there and post sentries down the road, in the populated area.

They could run a message to the rest of us if they saw anything suspicious. We
could hustle up and across the slope to intercept potential body-sellers. Wagons
would be slow enough to allow us the time needed.

Old Croaker is a brilliant strategist. Yes, sir. I had my troops in place and
everything set by midnight. And had two false alarms before breakfast. I learned
the embarrassing way that there was legitimate night traffic past my sentry
post.

I sat in the old house with my team, alternately playing tonk and worrying, and
on rare occasions napping. And wondering a lot about what was happening down in
the Buskin and across the valley in Duretile.

I prayed Elmo could keep his fingers on all the strings.

JUNIPER: LISA
Shed spent an entire day lying in his room, staring at the ceiling, hating
himself. He had sunk as low as a man could. There was no deed too foul for him
anymore, and nothing more he could do to blacken his soul. A million-leva
passage fee could not buy him aboard on Passage Day. His name had to be written
in the Black Book with those of the greatest villains.

“Mr. Shed?” Lisa said from the doorway next morning, as he was contemplating
another day of ceiling study and self-pity. “Mr. Shed?”

“Yeah?”

“Bo and Lana are here.”

Bo and Lana, with a daughter, were his mother's servants. “What do they want?”

“Their accounts settled for the month, I expect.”

“Oh.” He got up.

Lisa stopped him at the head of the stair. “I was right about Sue, wasn't I?”

“You were.”

“I'm sorry. I wouldn't have said anything if we could have afforded it.”

“We? What do you mean, we? Oh, hell. Never mind. Forget about it. I don't want
to hear about it anymore.”

“Whatever you say. But I'm going to hold you to your promise.”

“What promise?”

“To let me manage the Lily.”

“Oh. All right.” At that moment he did not care. He collected the monthly
accounting from the servants. He had chosen them well. They were not cheating
him. He suggested they deserved a small bonus.

He returned upstairs for the money. Lisa watched him go, perplexed. He realized
his mistake too late. Now she wondered why he had money today when he'd had none
yesterday. He located his dirty clothing, emptied his pockets onto his bed. And
gasped.

“Oh, damn! Damn,” he muttered. “What the hell am I going to do with three gold
pieces?”

There was silver, too, and even a fistful of copper, but. ... It was a gyp! A
fortune he could not spend. Juniper law made it illegal for commoners to hold
minted gold. Even incoming foreigners had to exchange theirs for silver-though
foreign silver was as welcome as local. Lucky, too, for the black castle mintage
was a decidedly odd coinage, though in the standard weights.

How could he get rid of the gold? Sell it to some ship captain headed south?

That was the usual procedure. He slipped it into his most secret hiding place,

with the amulet from the black castle. A useless fortune. He assessed the
remainder.

Twenty-eight pieces of silver, plus several leva in copper. Enough to take care
of his mother and Sal. Way short of enough to pry Gilbert off his back. “Still
be in the damned money trap,” he whined.

He recalled Sue's jewelry, smiled nastily, muttered, “I'll do it.” He pocketed
everything, returned to the ground floor, paid his mother's servants, told Lisa,

“I'm going out for a while.”

First he made sure Wally's family was cared for, then ambled down toward
Gilbert's place. No one seemed to be around. Gilbert was not like Krage, in that
he felt he needed an army on hand, but he did have his bone-breakers. They were
all away. But someone was in Gilbert's office because lamplight illuminated the
curtains. He smiled thoughtfully, then hustled back to the Lily. He went to a
table back in the shadows, near where Raven used to sit. A couple of foreign
sailors were seated there. Tough merchandise if he'd ever seen it. They'd been
around for some time.They said they and their friends, who came and went, had
missed their ship. They were waiting for another. Shed could not recall having
heard the name of their home port.

“You men like to pick up some easy money?” he asked.

“Who doesn't?” one responded.

And the other, “What you got in mind?”

“I have a little problem. I've got to do some business with a man. He's liable
to get vicious.”

“Want some back-up, eh?”

Shed nodded.

The other sailor looked at him narrowly. “Who is he?”