The Return of the Black Company (101 page)

Thai Dei, lurking in my shadow as always, offered one quick phrase in Nyueng Bao. I did not understand anything but the accusation “Bone Warrior.” “What was that?”

“It might be the golem Shivetya, Stone Soldier.” Why was he dragging that old stuff out now?

“Shivetya?” I knew what a golem was. An artificial man, commonly created from clay. In some mythologies all of us descend from such divine knickknacks.

“It is Gunni myth, Soldier of Darkness. Khadi, or Kina, when she was young, warred with everyone. She so weakened the Lords of Light that the Lords of Darkness thought to see a chance to conquer them and sent an army of demons to attack them. The fighting went so poorly for the Lords of Light that the god Fretinyahl, who is sometimes said to be Kina’s father, begged Kina for help. She agreed, but for reasons of her own. In the final battle on the stone plain Khadi grew bigger and stronger every time she devoured one of the demons.”

This much of the mythology I knew. Among other versions. Some witnesses claimed Kina was created specially for the last great battle with the demon host sent up by the Lords of Darkness. According to others she was sired by the devil Ranashya who disguised himself in the aspect of Fretinyahl and had his way with Mata, one of the forms the mother goddess takes in Gunni myth. Still others insist Kina is not native to Gunni myth at all but is a powerful outside intruder whose presence was so wicked it had to be accepted even while mostly ignored.

The key story was pretty basic. Desperate gods chose to battle evil with evil and ended up having their weapon turn and chomp on their fingers. Kina’s creator, or father, eventually tricked her into falling asleep, after which she was imprisoned until her worshippers could spring her with the Year of the Skulls. The Year of the Skulls was something that
was
going to come. There was no preventing it. Even though Kina was asleep and imprisoned a tiny wisp of her essence had escaped and remained in the world guiding those who would bring on the end of the age. But it could be thwarted indefinitely by the efforts of good and righteous men.

“Once they understood how they had damned themselves the other Lords of Light directed Fretinyahl to make a demon out of clay and animate it with a shard of his own soul so he would never lose control. This golem was given the name Shivetya, which means Deathless. Shivetya is supposed to guard the gateway to Khadi’s resting place forever. I never heard anything about Shivetya being nailed into place but even the gods are cruel and unforgiving, Bone Warrior.”

“No shit. And can that crap. I didn’t like it from Gota and Doj and I sure don’t like it from you.” I looked at Croaker. “You follow that? You ever heard any of that before?”

“Some. A friendly old scholar in Taglios did tell me that while the exact meaning of Khatovar has been lost, similarities with modern dialect suggested something like ‘Place from which Khadi went forth,’ or simply ‘Khadi’s gate.’”

“And you wanted to go there anyway?” Were we walking into the realities behind the dark heart of southern myth? I did not want that. I wanted to be on my way to paradise. We were supposed to be on the road to paradise.

Croaker did not answer me.

“Tell me more,” I said to the air. A bunch of torches were burning now. Most of the gang were ranged behind me and the Old Man. More light did not stop me having to see what I did not want to see. The thing pinned to the throne had open eyes.

It did not move, though. “Shit,” Longinus said. “It’s just some kind of goddamn idol. Don’t let’s get all spooked out.”

I began to inch forward, lowering the standard so I could use it like a pike. I have no clue why I thought that might do me some good against some divine toss-off.

Croaker came with me.

We halved the distance to the throne. The engineer brothers stuck close with torches. Everybody else seemed less inclined to look at anything up close. I saw no evidence that the thing on the throne was anything but a carving. At closer view it did begin to look a little crudely made.

We halved the distance again. I could now inhale the thin vapors from the crack in the floor. They were very cold and smelled faintly of old death.

For an instant I had a sense of coming home.

It is immortality of a sort.

I jumped, looked around. Only Lady seemed to have sensed something, too.

When I looked back at the toppled throne I saw the hall as it may have appeared a thousand years ago. Or more. When a band of cruel priests were making the original shadows from prisoners of war. It was there for just an instant but that moment was long enough to tell me that this had been a very ugly place once upon a time, long before the advent of the twelve Free Companies.

“Stop right there,” Croaker whispered.

I stopped. His tone was urgent. “What?”

“Look down.”

I looked. Before us lay the dessicated remains of a crow. Just the way it lay struck terror right down to the bones of my toes. “A shadow got it. We’re not safe here.”

“We still have the standard.” He did not sound completely confident, though.

I used my toe to flip the dead bird into the crack in the floor, which was just a few feet away. The effort was pointless. Some of the men had seen the dead bird. They understood its significance.

I understood that it meant a lot more than just that shadows roamed this part of the fortress. It meant that Soulcatcher knew the place well. It meant.…

Mad laughter came from back where we had entered. Soulcatcher’s laughter. Lady spun, sorceries forming around her already.

108

The earth shook.

This was a bad one. The worst since we had come up onto the plain. Possibly the worst since the terrible one that destroyed whole cities and killed thousands before we ever left Taglios. I hit the floor and began to slide toward the abyss. Croaker grabbed me and Lady hung on to him. Everybody else fell down, too. Catcher stopped cackling in mid-laugh. Torches scattered around, dropped. There was nothing for them to set on fire.

Something fell from above. Something like little balls of glass or clear hailstones. Some shattered on impact, some bounced. They seemed to have nothing to do with anything. At first.

The throne with the golem aboard shifted, tilted forward until it was almost bottom up, a mouse’s breath short of plunging into the red abyss.

There was an incredible flash of white light. It blinded me momentarily. While I hugged the floor Soulcatcher cursed someone in three voices and as many languages. Rips and cracks and barks tore the air as sorceries flew. More marbles pattered around me. I began to feel weak and sleepy. It occurred to me that shiny bits of glass were exactly what crows liked to carry around and maybe hoard up someplace so their boss could have them rain down when the passion took her.

Soulcatcher had sprung her trap despite all.

I grasped the standard and went fearlessly to sleep, happily sure there was no way Catcher could get off the plain. The shadows would get her. They would get everybody as soon as the sun went down.

*   *   *

I could not sleep without ghostwalking. The moment I slipped loose from my flesh I ran out to try to tell One-Eye or Sleepy or somebody what had happened. When I reached the Shadowgate I found everyone shaken by the earthquake and One-Eye already having worked out a pretty good idea of what had happened. He had the troops packing to run for Overlook. In fact, that was going on everywhere, as though every man out there had had the same notion at the same time. Nobody was in a positive frame of mind.

It took hours to find Sleepy even though Uncle Doj had taken her directly to the company he had circled during the night. She was asleep when I found her, her disguise still good. I poked and prodded and nagged the best a ghost could do and finally drew a response.

I spent much of the day slowly getting a brief message across.

It was nearly sunset when I passed through the Shadowgate headed south. I was wrestling the temptation to run to Sarie. I did not want to be around her when the shadows discovered my flesh.

I do not know what bizarre reasoning moved me. I was convinced that I needed to be inside my body when I died. I might become an eternally wandering spook if I did not.

I met Soulcatcher halfway down the road. She was headed north aboard Lady’s horse at a hell-bent pace. Croaker’s steed galloped a length behind, running just as hard. Its rider had his face buried in the stallion’s mane but trailed wild golden hair that betrayed him. You cannot have the woman you want, go for her little sister? Willow, Willow, you let yourself be damned over some pussy?

I jumped in front of the lead horse, sure I would be seen. My own horse had been able to see me. I would spook these guys.

It saw me fine. And ran right through me. Evidently ghosts did not scare the critters. I jumped up and tried to swat Willow as he charged past.
You treacherous asshole.

Somebody had to let her loose.

How did she get to him?

I continued southward, mood bleak because of my failure. The entire plain seemed to reverberate with Soulcatcher’s laughter.

She had won. After an age, she had won. She had put her sister down. The world was her toy at last.

*   *   *

Darkness gathered. I hurried. I passed a ragtag bunch of men and animals in vain flight northward. They numbered fewer than half our recon company. Sindawe and Bucket were the only noteworthy names among them. I did not see the panther. When I reached that crack into the innermost room I found it blocked. Somebody had stuffed it with rags and rocks and broken masonry, I suppose so the shadows could not loose. Must have been Swan. Catcher knew shadows can slither through the tiniest pinhole. She was the new Shadowmaster.

What a shadow could snake through so could I. And Swan had not done that good a job.

The golem, or whatever it was, still hung above the glowing abyss. I ignored it. I had something to panic about. My body was not where I had left it. There were no bodies around. I had to close my astral eyes and let my flesh draw me to it.

*   *   *

I should have seen it coming. I should have known. I had been only loosely anchored in time for years. And so many of the faces had seemed to be those of men I knew.

My return to awareness, though not actually in flesh yet, took place in the caverns of the old men and the ice cocoons. And I found myself there, at the end of the line, sitting against the cavern wall with the standard across my lap. The Lancehead seemed to whisper and murmur to itself. The rest were everybody who had clambered through that final crack, Old Crew guys, Nyueng Bao, Cordy Mather, Blade, the Prahbrindrah Drah, Isi and Ochiba. Every last fool, including Lady and the Old Man. Little sister and woman scorned had invested the extra minutes to arrange those two, holding hands, heads leaning together, in mockery. Lady radiated rage. This was the second time she had been buried alive, the second husband with whom she had shared a grave.

The Old Man radiated despair.

So did the rest. This was the end of the dream, little as it had been.

I fluttered on up the cavern, between stalactites and stalagmites, webs and lacy structures of ice, to where, an age before the appearance of the Free Companies, desperate, hunted followers of Kina had hidden her holy Books of the Dead from the murderous warlord Rhaydreynak. Rhaydreynak had not found the books nor had Kina’s children survived to return to them.

It could be worse than it was already. Soulcatcher could have found and taken those grim books.

She had not. They remained safe upon their lecterns, open to early passages.

I hustled back to the gang.

Some of them sensed me moving. They focused their anger upon me. Which was maybe good.
Water sleeps,
I thought at them. They were locked in some sorcerous stasis. I was trapped only in my flesh, presumably because I had been away at a convenient time.

Water sleeps.
Catcher might be the darkness but she would learn.
Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.

*   *   *

In the night, when the wind no longer whines through a fortress that was there before the plain that was there before the first Free Company marched, stone whispers. Stone sprouts. Stone grows. Stone buds and stone flowers. A thousand pillars rise where no pillar has stood before. Moonlight sweeps the plain, setting aglitter the characters taking form, remembering a few of the fallen.

It is immortality of a sort.

TOR BOOKS BY GLEN COOK

An Ill Fate Marshalling

Reap the East Wind

The Swordbearer

The Tower of Fear

THE BLACK COMPANY

The Black Company
(The First Chronicle)

Shadows Linger
(The Second Chronicle)

The White Rose
(The Third Chronicle)

Shadow Games
(The First Book of the South)

Dreams of Steel
(The Second Book of the South)

The Silver Spike

Bleak Seasons
(Book One of Glittering Stone)

She Is the Darkness
(Book Two of Glittering Stone)

Water Sleeps
(Book Three of Glittering Stone)

Soldiers Live
(Book Four of Glittering Stone)

Chronicles of the Black Company

(Comprising
The Black Company,

Shadows Linger,
and
The White Rose
)

The Books of the South

(Comprising
Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel,
and
The Silver Spike
)

The Return of the Black Company
(Comprising
Bleak Seasons
and
She Is the Darkness
)

THE INSTRUMENTALITIES OF THE NIGHT

The Tyranny of the Night

Lord of the Silent Kingdom

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.