The Return of the Black Company (41 page)

I was not in trouble. The three people staring at me belonged by family right. They were my in-laws, Sarie’s brother Thai Dei with his arm in a sling, Uncle Doj and Mother Gota. Of the three only the old woman ever said much. And nothing she said was ever anything I wanted to hear. She could find the bad side of anything and complain about it forever.

“What?” I asked.

Uncle Doj countered, “Did you drift away again?” He sounded troubled. “When did you go? Dejagore?”

“It wasn’t that. That hasn’t happened for a while.” All three continued to stare at me like I had something hanging out of my nose. “What?”

Uncle Doj said, “There is something different about you.”

“Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant more to me than—” I clamped down on the rage.

I turned toward the door.

No good. Smoke was in a wagon headed south.

They continued to stare at me.

It was like this every time I came back after going out without letting Thai Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of their sight.

That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of feeling Croaker got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao.

Sarie being gone left a vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my heart. She had been the soul that made this weird bunch work.

Uncle Doj asked, “Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?”

The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises associated with his two-handed longsword style of fighting could become almost as restful and free of pain as was walking with the ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me since I became part of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into the sort of trance the Path requires.

“Not now. Not tonight. I’m tired. Every one of my muscles aches.” Yet another way I was going to miss Sarie. That green-eyed angel had been an artist at massaging out the accumulated tensions of the day.

We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well. Now Mother Gota demanded, “What you doing, you, you hide from your own?” in her abominable Taglian. She refuses to believe she does not speak the language like a native.

“Work.” Even without the Old Man’s paranoia I would have kept Smoke to myself. Hell, I’m taking a huge risk just mentioning him in these pages even though I’m scribbling them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let alone reads.

Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her discovering Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha and the Shadowmaster away.

Catcher was in the Palace not long ago. She stole those Annals that Smoke hid before his disaster. I am pretty sure she did not notice Smoke himself. The network of confusion spells around him is supposedly extremely subtle on its fringes, so that even a player as powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the misdirection unless she was really focused on finding something like it.

I told them, “I just talked to the Captain. He said the headquarters group will leave tomorrow or the next day. You’re still determined to go?”

Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me, “We too have a debt to repay.”

The few material possessions the three shared were packed and piled by the apartment door already. They had been ready to go for days. I was the one who needed to focus and finalize my preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had said I was ready to travel.

“I’m going to bed now. Don’t wake me up for anything but the end of the world.”

4

Sleep is not an escape from pain. In sleep there are dreams. In sleep I go places more horrible than those I walk when I am awake.

In dreams I still go back to Dejagore, to the death and disease, the murder and the cannibalism and the darkness. In dreams Sarie still lives, whatever the horror of the place she walks.

That night my dreams did not restore me to the wonder of Sarie’s company.

I remember only one. It came first as a shadow, an all-enveloping malice full of playful cruelty, as though I was sinking into the soul of a spider that enjoyed tormenting its victims. The malice did not take note of me. I passed through to its other side. And there the dream wrenched sideways, twisted, and took on life, though it was a life entirely of black and white and greys.

I was in a place of despair and death. The sky was lead. Bodies rotted around me. The stench was strong enough to drive the buzzards away. The sick vegetation was coated with what looked like thick grasshopper spit. Only one thing moved, a distant flock of mocking crows.

Even amidst my horror and revulsion I felt that the scene was familiar. I tried to hang on to that thought, to pursue it, to sustain my sanity by ferreting out why I would know a place I had never been. I stumbled and tripped across a plain of bones. Pyramids of skulls were my milemarks.

My foot slipped on a baby’s skull that spun and went rattling off to the side. I fell. And fell. And then I was in another place.

I am here. I am the dream. I am the way to life.

Sarie was there.

She smiled at me, then she was gone, but I clung to her smile as the only thing capable of letting me keep my head above the waters of a sea of insanity.

I was in that other place. It was a place of golden caverns where old men sat beside the way, frozen in time, alive but unable to move so much as an eyelash. Their insanity slashed the air like a million dueling razors. Some were covered with glittering webs of ice, as though a million fairy silkworms had spun them into cocoons of delicate threads of frozen water. An enchanted forest of icicles hung from the cavern roof.

I tried to dash forward, past the old men, to get out of that place. I ran as you run in dreams, slowly going nowhere.

And then the horror worsened as I realized that I knew some of those mad old men.

I ran harder, into the treacly resistance of animate evil laughter.

*   *   *

I swung wildly at whoever was touching me, flung my hand under my pillow to recover the dagger hidden there. A powerful blow slammed my wrist as it came into the light. A strong voice snapped, “Murgen.”

I focused. Uncle Doj stood over me. He looked grave, troubled. Thai Dei stood near the foot of my bed, where he could take me from behind if I jumped up at Doj. Mother Gota stood in the doorway, agitated.

Uncle Doj said, “You were screaming in a language none of us knows. We found you wrestling with the darkness when we arrived.”

“I was having a nightmare.”

“I know.”

“Hunh?”

“That was obvious.”

“Sarie was there.”

For one instant Mother Gota’s face became a mask of rage. She muttered something softly and too quickly for me to follow, but I did catch the name Hong Tray and the word “witch.” Sahra’s grandmother Hong, long dead, was the only reason her family had accepted our relationship. Hong Tray had given her blessing.

Ky Dam, Sahra’s grandfather, also gone now, had claimed his wife possessed the second sight. Perhaps. I had seen her forecasts work out during the siege of Dejagore. Mostly they had been very sybilline, very vague, though.

I had heard Sarie described as a witch, too, on one occasion.

“What is that smell?” I asked. The shakes had left me. Already I could recall details of the nightmare only through determined effort. “There a dead mouse in here?”

Uncle Doj frowned. “This was not one of your journeys through time?”

“No. It was more like a trip to hell.”

“Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?” The Path was Doj’s religion, his main reason for being, it sometimes seemed.

“Not right away. I want to get this down while I still remember it all. It might be important. Some of it seemed familiar.” I swung my feet to the floor, aware that I was still being scrutinized intently.

There was a lot more of that now that Sarie was gone.

It was not yet time to make a point of it.

I went to my writing area, settled and got to work. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei found their wooden practice swords and began to loosen up on the other side of the room.

Mother Gota continued to talk to herself as she got busy cleaning up. As long as she was in the mood I even let her help with my mess, offering suggestions from the corner of my mouth just often enough to keep her simmering.

5

The great dark ragged square settled slowly through the air, rocking unpredictably in winter’s icy breath. A screech of pain soared up above the complaints of the wind. Twice the tattered carpet tried to set down atop the tower where the Shadowmaster stood waiting. Twice the wind threatened it with disaster. The carpet’s master howled again and descended fifty feet to a larger and safer landing area atop Overlook’s massive wall.

The Shadowmaster cursed the weather. This winter gloom was almost as bad as night. Here, there, shadows came to life in unpredictable corners. All his labor and genius could not take away every cranny where they might lurk. In his ideal world he would halt the sun itself directly above the fortress where it could sear the heart out of the night and slay the terrors that lurked within.

Longshadow did not go down to meet his henchman the Howler. He would make the deformed little cripple come to him. In conversation he could pretend that they were equals but that was not true. A day would come when the Howler would have to be disposed of altogether. But that time was a long way off yet. Those damnable nuisances from the Black Company had to be buried first. Taglios had to be chastised with fire and shadow. Its priests and princes had to be expunged. Senjak had to be taken and milked of her every dark secret, then she had to be destroyed, utterly and for all time. Her mad, flighty sister Soulcatcher had to be hunted down, murdered, and her flesh thrown to wild dogs.

Longshadow giggled. Much of that he had said aloud. When he was alone he did not mind verbalizing his thoughts.

His list of people to be rid of grew almost daily.

Here were two more now.

The first two faces to rise from the stairwell were those of the Strangler Narayan Singh and the child his Deceivers called the Daughter of Night. Longshadow met her eyes only for a moment. He turned to look out over the devastation north of Overlook. A few fires still burned in the ruins.

The child was barely four but her eyes were windows to the very heart of darkness. It seemed almost as if her monster goddess Kina sat behind those hollow pupils.

She was almost as frightening as those living wisps of darkness that, because he could command them, gave him the title Shadowmaster. She was a child only in flesh. The thing inside was ages older and darker than the dirty, skinny little man who served as her guardian.

Narayan Singh had nothing to say. He stood at the edge of the parapet and shuddered in the chill wind. The child joined him. She did not speak, either, but she showed no interest in the ruined city. Her attention was on him.

For half a heartbeat Longshadow feared she could read his mind.

He stirred his long, bony frame toward the stairwell, concerned that Howler was leaving him alone too long with these bizarre creatures. He was startled to find the Nar general Mogaba, his leading commander, coming up the steps behind the little sorcerer, engaged in a vigorous conversation in an unfamiliar tongue.

“Well?”

The Howler was floating in the air, as he often did even when not piloting his carpet. He spun himself around. “The story is the same from here to the Plain of Charandaprash. And east and west as well. The quake spared no one. Though the damage becomes smaller the farther north one travels.”

Longshadow turned instantly, stared south. Even in winter’s advancing gloom that plain up there seemed to glitter. Now it even seemed to mock him, and for a moment he regretted the impulse that had led him to challenge it so many years ago. He had gained all the power he had dreamed of then—and had not known a moment of peace since.

By its very existence the place beyond Shadowgate taunted him. Root of his power, it was also his bane.

He saw no evidence that the quake had disturbed anything there. The gate, he believed, should be proof against all disasters. Only one tool could open the way from the outside in.

He turned back to find the child smiling, one white tooth showing like a diminutive vampire fang. She combined the scariest effects of both her mothers.

Howler shrieked a shriek he cut short partway through. “The destruction leaves us no choice but to defer the labors of empire till the populace can sustain them once more.”

Longshadow raised a bony, gloved hand to his face, to adjust the mask he always wore in company. “What did you say?” He must have heard wrong.

“Consider the city before you, my friend. A city which exists only to build this fortress ever taller and stronger. But those who live there must eat in order to have the strength to work. They must have shelter from the elements, else they weaken and die. They must have some warmth and water that does not lead them to their deaths with dysentery.”

“I will not coddle them. Their only purpose is to serve me.”

“Which they can’t do if they’re dead,” the black general observed. “The gods have taken a dislike to us lately. This earthquake hurts us more than all the armies of Taglios have in all the years of this war.”

That was a hearty exaggeration, Longshadow knew. His three fellow Shadowmasters were dead. Their great armies had perished with them. But he got the message. The situation was grim.

“You came to tell me that?” It was presumptuous of the general to come to Overlook unbidden. But Longshadow forgave him. He had a soft spot in his heart for Mogaba, who seemed much like his own younger self. He indulged the Nar where he would have endured far less from his other captains.

“I came to ask you one more time to reconsider your orders forcing me to remain immobile at Charandaprash. After this disaster, more than ever, I’ll need flexibility to buy time.”

It was an old, old argument. Longshadow was weary of it. “If you cannot carry out your orders as given, General, without questioning everyone and nagging me continuously, then I’ll find someone who will. That fellow Blade comes to mind. He’s done wonderful things for us.”