The Return of the Black Company (57 page)

“Reminding us?”

“Don’t you get a little tired of those damned crows?”

“Yes, I do. I thought revenge was her thing.”

“If that was all she wanted she would have squashed me a long time ago.”

There was a stir behind me. Scores of eyes were staring at us as everyone in earshot tried to figure out what was going on. It had to be some secret if we were going to talk it over in a language nobody knew.

Willow Swan looked like his feelings were hurt.

“Excuse me, sir,” said a voice from behind me. “The Liberator’s compliments and would you be so good as to get your ass on about the job he gave you? He said to suggest that he wants the answer before sundown.”

That was not in a language no one else understood. It cheered Swan right up. Even Lady chuckled.

I do believe I blushed. “I’ll want to pursue this further,” I told Lady, who did not seem thrilled by the prospect. To the messenger, who happened to be the nephew of a prominent Taglian general, I said, “Just for that I think I’ll go do what the Old Man wants.”

37

It took me a long time to find Goblin but there was no hurry. The Shadowlanders up the pass were being particularly stubborn. Big Bucket was having to use a lot of firebombs to root them out.

I found it hard to believe. Goblin was on the other side of the Dandha Presh. His Shaded Road was an expedition that had pushed a commando force across the Shindai Kus. Croaker had talked about the possibility once, ages ago, before we ever even went after Dejagore, but I always thought it was completely impractical. So much so that the possibility had not occurred to me even when I had found Goblin on the shore of the Shindai Kus.

Goblin was still Goblin. The desert only baked it in. “I’m one step and ten seconds short of exhaustion,” he complained to the man nearest him, a Company brother named Bubba-do who was not too bright and who, I noted, kept Goblin on his left side, which was where he had the bad ear. “But I’m here. I’m in place. I’m on time. And nobody knows we’re here.”

Lights flared in the mountains above. Tiny balls of fire rose over the high Dandha Presh. Bubba-do said, “Looks like da Captain won his bet.”

“I’m worried. This damned thing’s been going too good. I’ve been fighting these people for years. I know how they think. I know Mogaba.” So did Bubba-do but that did not matter in Goblin’s view. “He ain’t going to let himself get whipped by Croaker. Whole point of him going over to the Shadowmaster was he wanted to prove he was a better soldier and general.”

Goblin went on and on. His men ignored him most of the time. After he had heard scouting reports about the surrounding terrain he allowed his men to build several small, carefully hidden fires. That side of the Dandha Presh was colder than the northern slope. It was impossible to manage without heat if you were not moving.

“I should’ve found a farm. Maybe a small town. Someplace where we could get inside.”

“That would mean killing a bunch of people so they couldn’t rat on us and that probably wouldn’t do any good anyway because somebody probably would’ve got away.”

It was almost dark. The excitement in the mountains was getting colorful. I began to wonder if Mogaba himself was not up there directing the resistance.

“You got company,” somebody said. Instantly everybody at Goblin’s fire found a chore that had to be handled right away somewhere else. Everyone but Goblin’s Nyueng Bao bodyguard, who was a man so unobtrusive I had yet to learn his full name. It was Thane, Trine, something like that. This man merely moved to a place more comfortable on a taller rock and laid his sword across his lap, ready for business.

The reason the others wanted to be elsewhere was evident a moment later.

I had found one of my missing targets.

A huge, cruel-looking black panther stalked out of the darkness, settled near the fire. Goblin reached out and scratched her behind the ears.

What the hell? This particular panther had no love for him. Though her squabble with One-Eye was an order of magnitude bigger.

“So you decided to help out after all, eh?” Goblin said. “It never was that hard to get along.” Off he went on an odyssey of the imagination, describing in fantastic detail why she was a natural ally of the rest of us despite One-Eye’s having had to do in Shapeshifter. Shifter really had given him no choice, now, had he? Anyway, it was only a matter of time before they completed their research into the character of release spells. Last time he saw One-Eye they were just three terms and a postulate short of putting a wrap on it.

*   *   *

The wind had a real bite as I went looking for Croaker. There were bits of snow zinging around. Nobody had moved since this afternoon. Fireballs flickered across the sky up ahead. There were almost no fires. There was nothing to burn. Men huddled with one another for warmth. Hardly anyone lifted their eyes as I passed. I could have been the Shadowmaster himself and nobody would have cared. Had I been carrying hot food I would have been hailed as a messiah.

Croaker did not have a fire, either. But he had a girlfriend to keep him warm. Something nobody else had. The rat bastard.

“You want to go for a walk?”

Hell, no, he did not. Neither would you if you were bundled up in some blankets with a beautiful woman on a freezing night. “Use your imagination here, Murgen. Do I look like somebody who wants to be interrupted?”

“All right. Be that way. I’ve finally located the man you asked about. He seems to be where he’s supposed to be. But—”

“Then go keep an eye on him.”

“There’s a complication.”

“Keep an eye on him. He’s not likely to get into much before I can come check on him. Later.”

With him and Lady both scowling at me I decided I would take the hint and go away. Shaking my head. There are things you can accept intellectually but still not imagine. Those two in the throes of passion fell into the latter category.

If he was in no hurry I was not, either. I had a snack and a nap and a dream about Sarie before I got back to work. It was not a dream I wanted. It was Sarie looking aged and haggard and wearing white. But that was a better dream than the visit to ice hell that followed.

That one did not change much with time, nor did any more details develop. But I never got comfortable with it.

*   *   *

Goblin had all his illusions in place but he did not bother the first fugitives to hurry out of the Dandha Presh. Those would be the men least likely to be trouble in later times. He did have a few individuals captured so he could get a better idea of what had happened to the north. He told the panther, “A shithead like Longshadow don’t deserve followers like Mogaba.”

The panther rumbled deep in her throat.

“You got to wonder about Mogaba. Why the hell don’t he just walk?”

Mogaba had everything under control. His fighting withdrawal was going well for him.

The hundred men with Goblin were all young Taglians interested in becoming part of the Black Company, I gathered. Clever Goblin had sold them the notion that this operation was an entrance exam. The nasty little shit.

He had to feel lonely out there. His bodyguard, Thien Duc, knew only a few words of Taglian and had no more inclination to gossip than Thai Dei did. The panther’s conversational skills were limited. The commandos were all under twenty-five. Goblin spoke Taglian well enough but did not speak the language of the young.

In the dialect of the Jewel Cities he muttered, “I miss One-Eye. He may not be worth two dead flies but … Nobody heard that, did they? Us old farts got to stick together. We’re the only ones who know what it’s all about.

“Or do we?

“Yeah. I think we do.”

“Were you saying something, sir?” one of the young sergeants asked, rushing up.

“Talking to myself, lad. Guaranteed intelligent conversation. I was thinking out loud about Mogaba. How everybody on the other side’s got their own thing going. Ten minutes after they whip us everybody over there is going to be measuring everybody else for a dagger in the back.”

“Sir?” The young Shader seemed scandalized by the suggestion that our side might yet lose this war.

“If they blow it, with everything they’ve got going for them, and we come out on top, the same shit is gonna happen on our side.”

Goblin began using his illusions and commandos to begin picking off Shadowlander fugitives, to teach job-appropriate skills while the work was still easy, and to keep the boys from getting bored.

Larger Shadowlander forces began to come down, hurrying, in disarray, walking into Goblin’s setup like they had rehearsed it. Snipers picked off obvious officers. Missile fire drenched the troopers. When they organized for a counterattack they found themselves fighting illusions and shadows.

From my vantage I began to wonder what Goblin was expected to accomplish. He was causing trouble out of all proportion to his numbers but what he was doing was unlikely to have any permanent impact. Unless, of course, him being here meant he was not somewhere else. Which was just the sort of thing that might occur to Croaker. Cook up some cockamamie mission for Goblin so he would not be around getting drunk and feuding with One-Eye and generally obstructing progress.

Still … The Shadowlanders could not find him. He kept giving them ghosts. Word rolled back up into the mountains. Panic rode its back. That effect was all out of proportion to Goblin’s numbers, too.

There was one major theme to Goblin’s ambushes. He was directing his strongest efforts toward eliminating officers. He seemed to have a way to identify those in plenty of time to slide his commandos into position.

The forvalaka. The woman in cat form. She was scouting for him. But how was she communicating?

I spend a lot of time being puzzled by things going on around me.

*   *   *

“I feel like I’m a mushroom on a mushroom farm,” I told Croaker. “Kept in the dark and fed a diet of horseshit.”

Croaker shrugged, said the famous words. “Need to know.”

“He didn’t get Mogaba, if that was the plan. That son of a bitch must take a bath in grease every morning, he’s so slick. He did get that Nar Khucho.”

Croaker grunted.

“Not much of a triumph,” I agreed. “He was already on a stretcher with one leg amputated. But I had to let you know and I’m going to have to put it into the Annals because he did belong to the Company once.”

Croaker shrugged, grunted. That was how we did it.

“He’s got nobody left, then,” I said. “He’s over there all alone, without one friend.”

“Don’t cry for him, Murgen. He’s there because he chose to go there.”

“I’m not crying for him. I had to go through the siege of Dejagore with that guy in charge. Far as I’m concerned anything that happens to him won’t be pain enough.”

“You thought any more about turning the standard over to somebody else?”

“Sleepy’s been bugging me. I told him we’d look at it once we get set up around Overlook.”

“You think he’s the right one, go ahead and start breaking him in. See about his literacy level, too. But I want you staying with the standard for the time being.”

“He’s learning his Taglian. He says.”

“Good. I’ve got work.”

Son of a bitch was not going to let me in on anything.

*   *   *

Goblin’s efforts were the straw that broke the Shadowlander force. They cracked. The survivors scattered. Goblin and his crew faded into the wilds, headed south.

Fear spread before them, far exceeding their capacity for creating despair.

I liked how things were going over there now. The little wizard and his boys were running free in a land not yet prepared to resist. A land not sufficiently recovered from its earthquake horrors to be able to resist.

Still, I felt like we were rushing toward some great doom.

We had done that before. Everything had fallen into our laps—till we found ourselves decimated and besieged in Dejagore.

38

Croaker took the cavalry and me and raced ahead of the army. Fleeing Shadowlanders fell to our lances. Opposition was spotty. Our foragers spread out. The idea was to scavenge whatever supplies were available quickly so we could keep the main force concentrated once it came out of the mountains.

I kept thinking how we had done this same thing after our unexpected victory at Ghoja Ford years ago. But when I mentioned that to Croaker he just shrugged and said, “This is different. There aren’t any armies they can bring up. There aren’t any new sorcerers they can bring out of the woodwork. Are there?”

“They don’t need to. Between them Longshadow and the Howler can eat us alive. If they decide to do it.”

We entered a moderate-sized town that was absolutely empty of people. Nor had there been many there before our appearance in the region. The earthquake had not been kind.

We did find enough shelter to get in out of the cold. We got fires going, which was maybe not a brilliant idea tactically. Nobody warm wanted to go outside again.

This was a problem that would be universal among our troops. Hunger would be the only force capable of keeping the men moving.

It had been a week since I parted with Smoke. I missed him more than I had thought possible a week ago. I had convinced myself that I no longer needed him to deal with my pain. But that had been while he was always there and I was always out roaming the ghostworld.

When you are riding around the east end of hell, trying to keep your mind off the fact that you are freezing your ass off while starving to death, you tend to think about your other troubles.

My big one came back with a vengeance.

The only good of the venture, so far, was the humor to be found in watching Thai Dei try to keep up on that ridiculous swaybacked grey. The man was one stubborn little shit.

At least once every four hours Croaker asked me about my in-laws. I did not know anything. Thai Dei claimed he knew nothing. I reserved judgment on his veracity. Croaker took a jaundiced view toward mine.

Word came in that a Shadowlander deserter had been picked up who knew the location of an ice cave stuffed with edibles.