The Books of the South: Tales of the Black Company (Chronicles of the Black Company) (78 page)

20

Our fire burned down till it wasn’t nothing but some patches of red. Once in a while a little flame would shoot up and prance around for a few seconds, then die. I stared up at the stars. Most were ones I’d known all my life, but they had moved to funny parts of the night. The constellations were all askew.

It was a good night for shooting stars. I’d spotted seven already.

“Uncomfortable?” Raven asked. He was watching the sky, too.

He startled me. He hadn’t said anything since back around lunchtime. We didn’t talk much anymore.

“Scared.” I had lost track of time. I had no idea how far we’d come or where we were, except that it was one goddamned long ways from home and down in the south.

“And wondering what the hell you’re doing here, no doubt.”

“No. I think I got a handle on that. My trouble is I don’t like having to sneak everywhere, like a thief. I might get treated like one.”

I did not add that I did not like being in places where the only person who could understand me was him. If something happened to him … That was what scared me the most.

It was too awful to think about.

I said, “But it’s too late to turn back.”

“Some say it’s never too late.”

So he was thinking about his kids again, now he was plenty safe from the risk of actually having to deal with them. Also, maybe, he was having second thoughts about our ride into the unknown.

Opaque as they were to me, and maybe even to him, powerful emotions were driving him. They had Darling’s name hung all over them, though he never mentioned her. One monster of a guilt was perched on his shoulders, flapping and squawking and pecking at his eyes and ears. Somehow he was going to silence that beast by catching his pal Croaker and passing the word about what happened in the Barrowland.

It didn’t make no sense to me. But people never do, a whole lot.

Maybe the determination was starting to wear thin. It was one thing to take off after a guy expecting to catch him in a few weeks and a few hundred miles and something else to be on the track still after months and months and thousands of miles. People aren’t built to take that without any letup. The road can blunt the most iron will.

He let the edges of it show when he said, “Croaker’s been gaining on us again. He doesn’t have to be as careful as we do. We have to speed it up somehow. Else we’re going to chase him all the way to the edge of the world and still never catch him.”

Hell. He was talking to himself, not to me. Trying to find some enthusiasm he had misplaced somewhere back up the road. There wasn’t no way we were going to kick up the pace any. Not without giving up any thought of watching out for trouble from the people in the countries we were going through.

We were pushing so hard now we were killing ourselves slowly.

I glimpsed something off to the north. “There. Did you see that? That’s what I was telling you about the other day. Lightning from a clear sky.”

He missed it. “Maybe it’s storming up there.”

“Just keep an eye peeled.”

We watched a series of flashes so dim their source had to be way over the horizon. Usually that kind of lightning lights up or silhouettes the tops of clouds.

“There isn’t one cloud,” Raven said. “And we haven’t seen one for weeks. And I’d bet we won’t see any as long as we’re crossing this steppe.” He watched another flash go. He shivered. “I don’t like it, Case. I don’t like it at all.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. But I got that tingle again, that bad feeling I got in Oar, that set me off on this crusade.”

“The thing from the Barrowland?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But that wouldn’t make sense. If it was really who I thought it was, he ought to be busy taking over the empire and making himself safe from a few loose Taken who might still be hanging around.”

I’d had some time now to do some thinking about what might have moved in the Barrowland and could have had so much impact on Raven. There was only one answer that fit, though it didn’t seem likely. They had burned his body and scattered the ashes. But they hadn’t been able to find his head.

“If it’s the Limper we really might have trouble. Nothing he ever did made a whole lot of sense. Not to us mortals. He was always crazy as a loon.”

He gave me a surprised look, then a soft smile. “No sawdust between your ears, is there, kid? All right. Put those brains to work trying to figure out why even a crazy wizard would be chasing us around the world. On the thousand-to-one that really is him raising a fuss up there.”

I laid back and started watching for shooting stars again. I counted six more, not really thinking about the Limper because that wasn’t an idea worth taking serious. Limper didn’t have no love for Raven, but he sure didn’t have a grudge big enough to go chasing him, neither. Crazy or not.

“Between a rock and a hard place.” It sort of just slipped out.

“What?”

“Tighten up the buckles on your ego, brother Corvus. It ain’t us he’s after. If it’s him.”

“Eh?” His eyes tightened up into a suspicious squint. That made his cold, hawkish face look more predatory than ever. I had to go use that family name.

“He’s after the same thing we are. The Black Company.”

“That don’t make sense either, Case.”

“Hell it don’t. It’s the only way you can get it to make any sense at all. You’re just not thinking about the world the way one of the Taken would. You got a pretty screwed-up eye, but you still think people is people. Them Taken don’t and never did. To them people are just tools and slaves, live junk to use and throw away. Except for the one that was so powerful she made them
her
slaves. And she’s riding with your buddy Croaker, far as we know. Right?”

The idea sank in. He turned it over, looked at the sharp edges, grunting and shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds. After a while, he said, “She’s lost her powers but she hasn’t lost what she knew. And that was knowledge enough to conquer half a world and tame the Ten Who Were Taken. She’d be one big prize for any wizard who could lay hands on her.”

“There you go.” I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. It took me a while.

21

The old man sat quietly. When he moved at all he did so slowly and carefully. His status was ambiguous. He had chased these people across a continent, damned near killing himself, and for what?

For nothing, that’s what. For nothing.

They were lunatics. They ought to be locked up for their own protection.

The woman watched him from about twenty feet to his left. She was a blue-eyed, stringy-haired blonde about five feet six inches tall, in her middle twenties. She had a square jaw, a too broad, lumpy bottom, and a goofy manner that made you wonder if anybody was home behind those watery eyes. And for all that, there was something strongly sensual there.

She was deaf and mute. She could communicate only via sign language.

She was in charge. She was Darling, the White Rose, the one who had put an end to the Lady’s dark dominion.

How the hell could that be? It didn’t add up.

Off to his right was a man who watched him with the warmth of a snake. He was tall, lean, dusky, hard as a stone with less sense of humor. These days he dressed in black, which had to be a statement of some sort, but who could tell what? He would not talk. He flat refused. Which is why they called him Silent.

He was a wizard himself. The tools of his trade lay scattered around him. As though he expected their unwilling guest to try something.

Silent’s eyes were as black as jet, hard as diamonds, and friendly as death.

Damn it! A man made one mistake and four hundred years later they still wouldn’t let him live it down.

There were three more of them around somewhere, brothers with the surname Torque who seemed to have no given names. They went by absurdities like Paddlefoot, Donkey Dick, and Brother Bear, except that Donkey Dick became Stubby when Darling was in listening distance, even though she couldn’t hear.

All four men worshiped her. And it was obvious to everyone but her that the one called Silent entertained romantic ambitions.

Lunatics. Every single one.

Something behind him yelled, “Seth Chalk! What treachery are you up to now?” and exploded in giggles.

Wearily, for the thousandth time, he replied, “Call me Bomanz. I haven’t used Seth Chalk since I was a boy.” He did not look around.

It had been a long, long time since he had been Seth Chalk. At least a hundred fifty years. He had no exact count. It was a year since he had escaped the thrall of a sorcery that had held him in stasis most of that time. He knew the intervening years of strife and horror—the years of the rise and growth of the Lady’s empire—only by repute, after the fact.

He, Bomanz or Seth Chalk, was a living artifact from before the fact. A fool who had had no business surviving it, who wanted to use these last unexpected gift years to expiate the guilt that was his for his part in the awakening and release of the ancient evil.

These idiots were not ready to believe that, no matter that he’d damned near gotten himself killed keeping that dragon off them during the big final throat cutting in the Barrowland last winter.

Damned fools. He had done all the damage he could do in one lifetime.

The three brothers came from somewhere up forward, joined the watch. So it was not one of them who had shouted. But Bomanz knew that. Two of the three could not speak any language he understood. The third managed Forsberger so brokenly it was not worth his trouble to try.

The fool who could understand a little of Bomanz’s antiquated Forsberger could not sign. Of course. So any communication not heard directly by Silent or lip-read by Darling got garbled and lost.

Only the stones communicated like regular people.

He did not like talking to rocks. There was something perverse about holding converse with rocks.

The trouble with being here was that the human beings, though lunatics, were the sanest, most believable part of the furnishings.

For the first time in his life, if he wanted to build cloud castles he had to go look down.

They had press-ganged him at that camp in the Windy Country. He was on the back of one of those fabulous monsters out of the Plain of Fear, a windwhale. The beast was a thousand feet long and nearly two hundred wide. From below it looked like a cross between a man-o’-war jellyfish and the world’s biggest shark. From up top where Bomanz was, the broad flat back looked like something from an opium smoker’s pipe dream. Like the imaginary forests that might grow in those vast caverns said to lie miles beneath the surface of the earth.

This forest was haunted by enough weird creatures to populate anyone’s fancy nightmare. A whole zoo. And all sentient.

The windwhale was going somewhere in a hurry but was not getting there fast. There had been headwinds all the way. And every so often the monster had to go down and tear up a couple hundred acres to take the edge off its hunger.

The damned thing stank like seven zoos.

A couple weird characters had singled him out for relentless harassment. One was a little rock monkey, mostly tail, no bigger than a chipmunk. It had a high, squeaky, nagging voice that made him remember his long-dead wife, though he never understood a word it said.

There was a shy centauroid creature put together backward, with the humanlike part in the rear. That part of her was disturbingly attractive. She seemed intrigued by him. He kept catching glimpses of her watching him from among the copses of uncertain organs that bewhiskered the windwhale’s back.

Worst, there was a lone talking buzzard who had a smattering of Forsberger and a wiseguy mouth. Bomanz could not get away from the bird, who, if he had been human, would have hung out in taverns masquerading as the world’s foremost authority, armed with an uninformed and ready opinion on every conceivable subject. His cheerful bigotry and who-cares ignorance drove the old man’s temper to its limit.

Things called mantas, that looked like sable flying versions of the rays of tropical seas, symbiotes of the windwhales, with wingspans of thirty to fifty feet, were the most dramatic and numerous of his nonhuman companions. Though they looked like fish, they seemed to be mammals. They lived their whole lives on the windwhale’s back. They were ill-tempered and dangerous and they bitterly resented having to share their territory with lesser life-forms. Only the will of their god contained their spite.

There were dozens more creatures equally remarkable, each more absurd than the last, but they were more shy of humans and stayed out of the way.

Discounting the mantas, the most numerous and pestiferous tribe were the talking stones.

Like most people Bomanz had heard tales of the deadly talking menhirs of the Plain of Fear. The reality seemed as gruesome as the stories. They were as shy as an avalanche and deadly pranksters. They were responsible for the Plain’s deadly reputation. Near as Bomanz could tell, what everyone else considered murderous wickedness they considered practical jokery.

What could be more hilarious than a traveler who, following false directions, stumbled into a lava pit or had his mount snatched out from under him by a giant sand lion?

The stones, in the form of menhirs as much as eighteen feet tall, were the stuff of a thousand stories, hardly a one pleasant. But the seeing and hearing and having to deal with was an experience that made the stories pall—though the stones were on their best behavior now.

They were under constraint, too.

The stones had no language difficulties. Happily, many were a laconic sort. But when they did go to talking their speech was sour, acidic, caustic. The lot were verbal vandals. So how the hell come they were the ones their god had made his diplomatic corps?

It was no wonder the Plain of Fear was a wide-open madhouse. The tree god running it was a twenty-four-karat lunatic.

The stones were gray brown, mostly, without visible orifices or organs. Most were as shaggy with mosses and lichens and bugs as any normal boulder that lay around keeping its mouth shut. They intimidated the hell out of Bomanz, who liked to pretend that he was not scared of any damned thing.