The Return of the Black Company (69 page)

I passed over circle after circle. The ground between had been left wild. I suppose it supported game and provided timber and charcoal and firewood.

I had heard of the region. It was in the Shadowlands west of Kiaulune. Longshadow had been experimenting with agricultural efficiencies in an effort to produce more with fewer workers so he could free up manpower to work construction on Overlook and serve in his armies.

I was not all that far from my own gang.

I worked my way eastward. After what seemed like hours I spied the glow from fires burning in the ruins of Kiaulune. I found my own part of our encampment, then my own shelter. I was comfortable enough with my condition to do a little experimenting now.

It took only moments to learn that while I could not will myself through a wall, or even the blankets One-Eye had hung for a doorway, or the side of a tent, I could slide my point of view through a crack or hole too small for a mouse or snake.

I could not go back or forth in time. I was confined to the now of my sleeping flesh.

I had control of the dream. It seemed real. What I saw of the camp was exactly what the camp should have been like while I was sleeping. My imagination was not good enough to make up a whole dream world that mimicked the real world exactly. A big question occurred.

Would I be able to do this again? Would getting here always be outside my control, the way it had been when I kept tumbling off the wall of today into the horrors of Dejagore?

If this was going to be one-time I had better use it for all it was worth.

I snaked back out into a cold I did not feel. For a second I thought about heading for the plain but just the thought stirred up an instant, powerful revulsion. Maybe later.

I went toward the mountains instead.

Spying on Soulcatcher would do. Up close. Without disturbing the crows, I discovered. They remained asleep. So did their mistress.

Her company had left. I was not going to find out a damned thing.

I could go over to Overlook and see what everybody was doing.… I saw the faintest hint of light in the east. Dawn was on its way. And I began to feel a compulsion to head for the safety of my flesh. That drive grew stronger as the light did the same.

I headed for my body wondering if I was a dreaming vampire now.

Mother Gota was awake already. Though Soulcatcher had not been able, Ky Gota seemed to sense me somehow. She turned when I weaseled inside, looked almost directly at me, frowned when she saw nothing, then shuddered the way you do when a chill runs down your spine.

She went back to her cooking. I noted that she was preparing more food than she, Thai Dei and I could possibly eat all day. I supposed she planned to take some out to Uncle Doj.

55

“You look like shit,” One-Eye told me over breakfast.

“Thanks for the boost.”

“What’s up?”

“Bad dreams last night.” He did not know what I had been going through. I chose not to share everything now but I did practice my Forsberger long enough to tell him, “It looks like our friend the crow woman is up to something with her old pal Howler, our favorite Deceiver and the kid.”

Both Thai Dei and Mother Gota glanced at me sharply. I had used the Taglian for “Deceiver,”
tooga.
It was the same in Nyueng Bao.

“And old Longshadow thinks he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah. The Old Man always says even paranoids sometimes got somebody trying to stab them in the back.” Usually when I let him know I thought he was overdoing the paranoia himself.

“That kind of thing is nice to know but how can we use it?”

“Not my problem. I just work here. The Captain gets to make the decisions. That’s why he’s the Captain.” Just for the fun of it I slipped in the Taglian for “captain,”
jamadar.
Thai Dei and Mother Gota looked me over again. In the context of the Deceivers
jamadar
means more than just “captain.” It indicates a leader of a band, which is like a small nation of Deceivers. The only Deceiver
jamadar
now known to be alive was Narayan Singh, who had become
jamadar
of
jamadars
before the destruction of his cult.

They would think we were talking about the living legend, the saint who still walked the earth on his goddess’s behalf.

I tucked the last of my breakfast away, thanked Mother Gota, got up and left the dugout. Thai Dei followed me. I told him, “I’m just going to see the Captain. If you want to you can stay and work on the house.” We called our hole in the ground the house now.

Thai Dei shook his head. He had gotten lax about bodyguarding me lately. I did not feel neglected.

Time has a way of blunting the sharpest edge of determination.

I waited a moment for One-Eye to join us but he did not come out. More and more the little shit seemed perfectly willing to invite himself to my family meals rather than go to any trouble on his own.

I should be surprised after all these years?

*   *   *

Croaker looked about as happy as I felt. His night had been no bed of roses, either. He grumbled, “What is it this time?”

“Did a little dreaming last night. Went to hell and came back and then went out roaming without using Smoke at all.” I gave him the unhappy details.

“Could you do that again?”

“I been falling through rabbit holes in space and cracks in time for over a year. Maybe I’m getting the hang of it.”

“We wouldn’t need Smoke.”

“Especially since he’s threatening to wake up.” I must have had a nasty look on my face because he raised an eyebrow. I said, “It’d be fun to watch him try to get used to the new world he’d wake up in.”

Croaker smirked. “You’d want to stand upwind. He’d shit his guts out when he saw how far we’ve come. By the by, as long as you’re here, it’d be handy if you’d go see Lady. I sent her your maps. She’s going to pick off Narayan and catch the girl. If
anybody
asks you about the maps all you know is that we captured a couple of Mogaba’s officers who used to belong to Overlook’s garrison.”

I grunted, not entirely thrilled. I would not be able to lie to Lady convincingly.

“Experiment with this. I have to know if we can get along without Smoke.”

“I already know about one severe handicap.”

“Uhm?”

“I can’t travel back in time when I’m on my own.”

He sucked a bunch of air in, blew it out. “Wouldn’t you know? There had to be a catch. Smoke’s got job security.”

“You said you’d talk to One-Eye about keeping him from waking up.”

“He wasn’t much help.”

“Is he ever?”

“If you see him, send him over.”

“Right.” I got out of there, paused outside to stare across at the encampment below Overlook’s wall. I said, “The boss wants me to go over there and show Lady how to manage her business.”

It was a bright, sunshiny day. There was enough breeze to carry the smoke and stench away. Thai Dei observed, “Maybe some of the ground will dry up.”

Most of the snow had melted. It was springtime. Around Kiaulune that meant mud season. Mud would mean bugs eventually.

I wondered if melting snows would cause floods that would chase Soulcatcher out of her hideout.

It was time spring came to Kiaulune. It had arrived already everywhere else.

56

“I figured you’d crawl out of the woodwork pretty soon,” Willow Swan grumbled when I joined the crowd around Lady. Her staff were munching rolls one-handed while she told them what she wanted done so she could catch Narayan. “You turn up every time things get nasty.”

Blade showed me a smile. “The man needs a girlfriend.”

“Thought he had one, only she already has a boyfriend.”

“That’s where she was last night, eh?”

“Maybe.” It might explain why Croaker was so damned groggy this morning.

That man just had one adventure after another.

Lady was saying, “There were shadows in there before but Jarwaral says they haven’t been a problem lately. These charts supposedly show us where we can find the shadowweavers—if we want. I want. We’ll take them out before we go after the Deceiver. Ah! Murgen.”

“She had to spot me,” I muttered to Blade. I looked for the inevitable crows. They were notable for their scarcity. The couple I did see acted like they were blind drunk.

Lady had employed some spell to diminish the flow of information to her sister.

“You stand out in a crowd,” Swan told me. “The women always notice you.”

Lady continued, “Come here. The Captain sent these charts. What do you know about them?”

“They’re supposed to be reliable.” A hundred percent—unless there had been some heavy renovations in the last few hours.

“They aren’t very extensive.”

Bitch and gripe, bitch and gripe. Nobody is ever satisfied. “Want I should go dig the guy up and let you do some kind of necromantic thing on him?”

She gave me such an ugly look that for a moment I was afraid she would call my bluff. But she did not doubt me, she just was not getting the kind of fear and respect she expected. She relaxed, told me, “Except for the locations of the shadowweaver hideouts and where Singh is holing up there isn’t much here we didn’t know already.”

Which stuff was what the exercise was all about, woman. “There’s a little more. Longshadow is almost always locked up in this tower here, doing whatever he does instead of giving us grief. Howler has an apartment somewhere around here. He keeps two carpets on a flat place over here and a little-bitty, brand-new one rolled up right beside his bed.”

Lady gave me a piercing look. How could I know that?

I told her, “The day he got here Howler started covering his ass in case his partner turned on him someday.”

“Uhm?” she grunted. “Howler would. Particularly in view of what Longshadow tried to do to his previous associates.” She turned her attention to the charts. But I knew she was not satisfied. She could not be satisfied when somebody else knew anything that she did not.

She beckoned Isi, Ochiba and Sindawe closer. The Nar generals worked well with her. They did not do so with the Old Man. Croaker could not trust them even though they stuck with the Company against Mogaba. “Should we do this in the daytime or at night?”

Ochiba, a man I had heard speak maybe five times in that many years, said, “It won’t matter in there.”

“True. But I prefer by daylight. For the impact on morale.”

“It’s daytime now,” Swan observed.

I told Blade, “You can’t get anything past this guy.”

Lady glanced at Willow. “You want to see how well your Guards can perform in there?”

“I’d love to. But that isn’t their job.”

Their job was to look out for the Prince and Princess, neither of whom he or they had been near in recent times.

Everybody there had that thought at the same time I did. Everybody gave Swan a long look. He reddened.

“Sindawe, you’re my second choice.” Lady stepped aside so the tall Nar could move closer to the charts. I had kept wriggling forward. Now I could see that there was more than one set. Only one was the one I had prepared. The other, structured differently, may have been put together by Lady’s people based on what her soldiers had found inside Overlook.

The Nar officer stared for a while. “We ought to rotate fresh troops in before we do anything else.”

Isi agreed. “The men inside have been there a long time, under a lot of pressure.”

Lady said, “I’ll approve that.”

Sindawe said, “We should add numbers for this. Once we start moving there won’t be any point to pretense. Will there?”

“Probably not. Succeed or fail, going ahead will attract some close scrutiny. And the Captain hasn’t given us the option of not going ahead. Has he, Murgen?”

I shrugged. “He’ll always defer to the commander on the scene. You know that. As long as you can make a good argument.”

“We don’t have an option, then. We’ve been stalling in hopes somebody else would come up with a workable solution to the Longshadow dilemma.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The fact that we can’t kill him. You know that, don’t you?”

I knew that. What I did not know was how they planned to send fresh troops into Overlook.

Sindawe said, “We ought to pursue every phase of the effort at once. Here, here, toward these shadowweaver hideouts. Here, toward the Deceiver’s holeup. And a general raid against the garrison and servant population, too. So they don’t interfere in our other efforts.”

“Go for Longshadow, too,” Lady suggested. “You might get lucky.”

I was missing something. There was a hundred-foot wall over there, not nearly as shiny as it used to be, and absent some of its pretty towers, but not one foot shorter than it ever was. Why were these people not impressed? “You all walk through walls or something?”

“If that’s convenient,” Lady replied.

“We’ll crawl,” Sindawe told me.

Soon enough I discovered something else that I had missed while doing my all-seeing thing in the ghostworld—because I had not been looking.

57

They had a tunnel under the wall. Through the foundation, really. But just a wormhole of a thing. A guy my size had to slither on his belly like a snake. I know because I did it.

Fool.

Why did I have to do it in the flesh? I could have gone back and ridden Smoke. I could have seen everything with no claustrophobia, no bruised elbows or knees, no pops in the snot box from the heels of the clown in front of me. No weaseling through the farts and fear smells of the hundred little vegetarians snaking along ahead of me, raising the dead with all the clatter of their weaponry.

Where were the Shadowmaster’s boys? All this racket, they had to be chuckling while they sharpened their swords. They were going to have Tals for their afternoon snack.

The tunnel had been created in part by a liberal application of Lady’s fireball tools. In places its walls were still hot. It was completely new. All I saw when I got to its nether end was a gang of raggedy-ass Taglians who had been on the inside way too long. They looked like they had had a glimpse of heaven but a bunch of assholes like me were blocking the way.