The Books of the South: Tales of the Black Company (Chronicles of the Black Company) (21 page)

“If you say so.” He gave me a funny look, like he was wondering about my stability.

Lady gave me an even funnier look when, as we approached the woods, Goblin squeaked, “The place is infested!”

That’s all he got to say. The infestation broke cover. Those little brown guys. About a hundred of them. Real military geniuses, too. Men on foot just don’t go jumping people on horseback even if they do outnumber them.

Goblin said, “Gleep!” And then he said something else. The swarm of brown men became surrounded by a fog of insects.

They should have shot us down with arrows.

Otto and Hagop chose what I considered the stupider course. They charged. Their momentum carried them through the mob. My choice seemed the wiser. The others agreed. We just turned away and trotted ahead of the brown guys, leaving them to Goblin’s mercies.

My beast stumbled. Master horseman that I am, I promptly fell off. Before I could get to my feet the brown guys were all around me, trying to lay hands on. But Goblin was on the job. I don’t know what he did, but it worked. After they knocked me around a little, leaving me a fine crop of bruises, they decided to keep after those who had had sense enough to stay on their horses.

Otto and Hagop thundered past, making a rear attack. I staggered to my feet, looked for my mount. He was a hundred yards away, looking at me in a bemused sort of way. I limped toward him.

Those little guys had some kind of petty magic of their own going, and no sense at all. They just kept on. They dropped like flies, but when they outnumber you a dozen to one you got to worry about more than just a favorable kill ratio.

I did not see it well, busy as I was. And when I did manage to drag my abused flesh aboard my animal’s back the whole brouhaha had swept out of sight down a narrow, shallow valley.

I have no idea how, but somehow I managed to get disoriented. Or something. When I got organized and started after my bunch I could not find them. Though I never got much chance to look. Fate intervened in the form of five little brown guys on horses that would have been amusing if they hadn’t been waving swords and lances and rushing at me with intent to be obnoxious.

On another day I might have stayed forty yards ahead and plinked at them with my bow. But I wasn’t in the mood. I just wanted to be left alone and to get back together with the others.

I galloped off. Up and down and around a few hills and I lost them easily. But in the process I lost myself. During all the fun the sky clouded over. It started to drizzle. Just to make me that much more enchanted with my chosen way of life. I set out to find the road, hoping I would find traces of my companions there.

I topped a hill and spied that damned crow-surrounded figure that had been haunting me since the Temple of Travellers’ Repose. It was striding along in the distance, directly away from me. I forgot about the others. I kicked my mount into a gallop. The figure paused and looked back. I felt the weight of its stare but did not slow. I would unravel this mystery now.

I charged down a shallow hill, leapt a wash in which muddy water gurgled. The figure was out of sight for a moment. Up the other side. When I reached the crest there was nothing to be seen but a few random crows circling no particular point. I used language that would have distressed my mother immensely.

I did not slow but continued my career till I reached the approximate point where I had seen the thing last. I reined in, swung down, began stomping around looking for a sign. A mighty tracker, me. But, moist as the ground was already, there had to be traces. Unless I was crazy and seeing things.

I found traces, sure enough. And I felt the continued pressure of that stare. But I did not see the thing I sought. I was baffled. Even considering the probability that there was sorcery involved, how could it have vanished so completely? There was no cover anywhere around.

I spotted some crows starting to circle about a quarter mile away. “All right, you son of a bitch. We’ll see how fast you can run.”

There was nothing there when I got there.

The cycle repeated itself three times. I got no closer. The last time I halted I did so atop a low crest that, from a quarter mile, overlooked a hundred-acre wood. I dismounted and stood beside my horse. We stared. “You, too?” I asked. His breathing was as uneven as mine. And those monster beasts never got winded.

That was a sight, down there. Never have I seen so many crows except maybe on a recent battlefield.

In a lifetime of travel and study I have come upon half a hundred tales about haunted forests. The woods are always described as dark and dense and old or the trees are mostly dead, skeleton hands reaching for the sky. This wood fit none of the particulars except for density. Yet it sure felt haunted.

I tossed my reins across the horse’s neck, strapped on a buckler, drew my sword from its saddle scabbard, and started forward. The horse came along behind me, maybe eight feet back, head down so his nostrils were almost to the ground, like a hound on the track.

The crows were most numerous over the center of the wood. I did not trust my eyes but thought I detected some squat dark structure among the trees there. The closer I got the slower I moved, meaning maybe a part of me was still infected with common sense. The part that kept telling me that I was not cut out for this sort of thing. I wasn’t some lone brawling swordsman who stalked evil into its lair.

I am a dope cursed with an unhealthy portion of curiosity. Curiosity had me by the chin whiskers and kept right on dragging me along.

There was one lone tree that approximated the stereotype, a bony old thing about half dead, as big around as me, standing like a sentinel thirty feet from the rest of the wood. Scrub and saplings clustered around its feet, rising waist high. I paused to lean against it while I talked myself into or out of something. The horse came up till his nose bumped my shoulder. I turned my head to look at him.

Snake hiss.
Thump!

I gawked at the arrow quivering in the tree three inches from my fingers and only started to get myself down when it struck me that the shaft had not been meant to stick me in the brisket.

Head, shaft, and fletching, that bolt was as black as a priest’s heart. The shaft itself had an enameled look. An inch behind the head was a wrap of white. I levered the arrow out of the tree and held the message close enough to read.

It is not yet time, Croaker.

The language and alphabet were those of the Jewel Cities.

Interesting. “Right. Not yet time.” I peeled the paper off, crumpled it into a ball, tossed it at the wood. I looked for some sign of the archer. There was none. Of course.

I shoved the arrow into my quiver, swung onto my saddle, turned the horse and rode about a step. A shadow ran past, of a crow flying up to have a look at the seven little brown men waiting for me atop the hill. “You guys never give up, do you?”

I got back down, behind the horse, took out my bow, strung it, drew an arrow—the arrow just collected—and started angling across the hillside, staying behind my mount. The little brown guys turned their toy horses and moved with me.

When I had a nice range I jumped out and let fly at the nearest. He saw it coming and tried to dodge, only he did himself more harm than good. I meant to put the shaft into his pony’s neck. It slammed in through his knee, getting him and the animal both. The pony threw him and took off, dragging him from a stirrup.

I mounted up fast, took off through the gap. Those little horses did not move fast enough to close it.

So we were off, them pounding after me at a pace to kill their animals in an hour, my beast barely cantering and, I think, having a good time. I can’t recall any other horse I’ve ridden looking back to check the pursuit and adjusting its pace to remain tantalizingly close.

I had no idea who the brown guys were but there had to be a bunch of them the way they kept turning up. I considered working on this bunch, taking them out one by one, decided discretion was the better part. If need be I could bring the Company down and forage for them.

I wondered what became of Lady and Goblin and the others. I doubted they had come to any harm, what with our advantage in mounts, but …

We were separated and there was no point spending the remaining daylight looking for them. I would get back to the road, turn north, find a town and someplace dry.

The drizzle irritated me more than the fact that I was being hunted.

But that stretch of forest bothered me more than the rain. That was a mystery that scared the crap out of me.

The crows and walking stump were real. No doubt of that anymore. And the stump knew me by name.

Maybe I ought to bring the Company down and go after whatever hid there.

The road was one of those wonders that turns to mud hip deep if somebody spits on it. There were no fences in this part of the world, so I just rode beside it. I came to a village almost immediately.

Call it a stroke of fate, or timing. Timing. My life runs on weird timing. There were riders coming into town from the north. They looked even more bedraggled than I felt. They were not little brown men but I gave them the suspicious eye anyway and looked for places to duck. They were carrying more lethal hardware than I was, and I had enough to outfit a platoon.

“Yo! Croaker!”

Hell. That was Murgen. I got a little closer and saw that the other three were Willow Swan, Cordy Mather, and Blade.

What the hell were they doing down here?

26

Overlook

The one who had withdrawn everything but moral support did not give up his right to complain and criticize.

The gathering of the Shadowmasters took place in the heights of a soaring tower in that one’s new capitol fortress, Overlook, which lay two miles south of Shadowcatch. It was a strange, dark fortress, more vast than some cities. It had thick walls a hundred feet high. Every vertical surface was sheathed in plates of burnished brass or iron. Ugly silver lettering in an alphabet known only to a few damascened those plates, proclaiming fearful banes.

The Shadowmasters assembled in a room not at all in keeping with their penchant for darkness. The sun burned through a skylight and through walls of crystal. The three shrank from the glare, though they were clad in their darkest apparel. Their host floated near the southern wall, seldom withdrawing his gaze from the distance. His preoccupation was obsessive.

Out there, many miles away but visible from that great height, lay a vast flat expanse. It shimmered. It was as white as the corpse of an old dead sea. The visitors thought his fear and fixation dangerously obsessive. If it was not feigned. If it was not the fulcrum of an obscure and deadly strategem. But it was impossible not to be impressed by the magnitude of the defenses he had raised.

The fortress had been seventeen years in the building and was not yet more than two-thirds completed.

The small one, the female, asked, “It’s quiet out there now?” She spoke the language that was emblazoned upon the fortress walls.

“It’s always quiet during the day. But come the night … Come the night…” Fear and hatred blackened the air.

He blamed
them
for his dire circumstances.
They
had mined the shadows and had awakened the terror, then they had left him to face the consequences alone.

He turned. “You have failed. You have failed and failed and failed. The Radisha went north without inconvenience.
They
sailed through the swamps like vengeance itself, so easily
she
never had to lift a finger. They go where they will and do what they will, without peril, so blithely sure they don’t even notice your meddling. And now they and she are on your marches, conjuring mischief there. So you come to me.”

“Who could have suspected they would have a Great One as companion? That one was supposed to have perished.”

“Fool! Was he not a master of change and illusion? You should have known he was there waiting for them. How could such a one hide?”

“Did you know he was there and fail to inform us?” the female mocked.

He whirled back to the window. He did not answer. He said, “They are on your marches now. Will you deal with them this time?”

“They are but fifty mortal men.”

“With her. And the Great One.”

“And we are four. And we have armies. Soon the rivers will go down. Ten thousand men will cross the Main and obliterate the very Name of the Black Company.”

A sound came from the one at the window, a hissing that grew up to become cold, mocking laughter. “They will? That has been tried numberless times. Numberless. But they endure. For four hundred years they have endured. Ten thousand men? You joke. A million might not suffice. The empire in the north could not exterminate them.”

The three exchanged glances. Here was madness. Obsession and madness. When the threat from the north was expunged perhaps this one ought to follow it.

“Come here,” he said. “Look down there. Where that ghost of an old road winds through the valley up toward the brilliance.” Something turned and coiled there, a blackness deeper than that of their apparel. “You see that?”

“What is it?”

“My shadow trap. They come through the gateway you breached, the great old strong ones. Not the toys you drew into your services, these. I could loose them. I might if you fail again.”

The three stirred. He had to go for certain.

He laughed, reading their thoughts. “And the key to that trap is my Name, my brethren. If
I
perish the trap collapses and the gateway stands open to the world.” He laughed again.

The male who spoke the least when they gathered spat angrily and made to depart. After hesitating the other two followed. There was nothing more to be said.

Mad laughter pursued them down the endless spiral of the stairs.

The woman observed, “Maybe he can’t be conquered. But while he persists in facing south he offers us no peril. Let us ignore him henceforth.”

“Three against two, then,” her companion grumbled. The other, in the lead, grunted.