The Return of the Black Company (70 page)

I was the last guy in my string. Number one hundred one. When I crawled out of his way number one of the guys being relieved dove into the hole and slithered away.

Only twenty got to leave for each hundred who came in. The twenty were very enthusiastic. But nobody heard the clatter upstairs.

Ochiba, Isi and Sindawe began choosing up teams to go thump on Longshadow’s guys. Sindawe always was decent to me, even when he worked for Mogaba. He was willing to change his ways, though. “Would you like to lead an attack group, Standardbearer?”

“Obviously you have me confused with somebody who thinks he’s a hero.”

“You could make big points by catching Narayan Singh.”

“I don’t need big points. Talk to Blade or Swan.”

Sindawe chuckled. “You won’t see them in here.”

“Why not?”

“They aren’t Company. Lady wouldn’t trust them in a tight place.”

Interesting. She
would
trust these Nar.

Croaker did not. Not one hundred percent. Never.

Sindawe read me plain. He smiled. “This place is tight enough.”

“Yeah. I still ain’t going to be a hero. I’ll just come along behind and watch so I can write it down right.”

“Sin,” Isi called. “Got to move. The garrison knows something’s going on.”

The Shadowlanders were slower than I expected. Sindawe and his pals were faster. About as quickly as it took to think it they led three groups off to the attack, going like they were right at home although none of them had been inside Overlook before.

Overlook inside was no shiny white marvel. Wherever we were, it was way down deep in the ground where it was dirty and damp and unpleasant creatures with two, four or six more legs than me lurked in every shadow. Thai Dei did not like it at all.

He had needed several hundred-man shifts just to find nerve enough to come inside.

“Move back,” I growled at the troops waiting to go out. “For now this tunnel only runs one way. Thai Dei, slap that moron up side the head. Then thump that fool sitting in the mouth of the tunnel gawking. Let’s go, people. There’s a war going on in here. We don’t have time for lolligagging.” I was turning into a real top kick. Now if I could get the vocabulary working.

“Lolligagging” does not exist in Taglian. The word got me a lot of dazed looks. The pithier nouns, verbs and adjectives do exist, mostly, with much of the usual impact. Religious insults work real good, too.

“You,” I said to a head being birthed by the tunnel, “pass the word back that we’re engaged. We need people in here as fast as we can get them.”

Sindawe reappeared. He was the commanding officer for this deathdance. He was amused by my barking. But he was politic. He was a big general only where the Taglian troops were concerned. The day might come when I was his boss inside the Company. He told me, “There’s still the attack on Longshadow to launch. You could spearhead that one.”

I recalled the black spear One-Eye made specially for sticking Shadowmasters. Be a handy tool if I was to do something dumb like go after Longshadow. “I’ll let somebody else have that honor. I don’t want to hog everything.”

Tell the truth, the place had me spooked. The smell of damp stone, vermin and old fear, combined with the cold and bad light, recalled too strongly all my nightmares about old men trapped forever in caverns where never-seen spiders spun webs and cocoons of ice.

Coming inside Overlook had been a dumb idea. I suspected that when I made the decision to visit, but I did not listen to the little voice of fear because all those guys like Blade and Swan were hanging around grumbling about how the boys from headquarters never risk their cute and precious butts when the blood and shit start flying.

It was the usual stuff. I started the same sort of crying about an hour after I took the oath. I just did not want to be the guy the troops thought had spent his last thirty years with his head up his butt.

My message reached the other end of the tunnel. People started arriving at double speed.

I had no idea if Longshadow and Howler realized we had a way into Overlook. They did not act like they were desperate to plug an unexpected breach in the wall. Their response was angry and vigorous but only with the power you would expect if they thought the bunch already inside were getting frisky.

Our people did not reach Longshadow. Which was no surprise. The surprise of the century would have been if the crazy son of a bitch
had
come floating belly up.

Likewise Soulcatcher’s little screaming buddy the Howler. Except that Isi, who was running that try, was clever enough to know he just might not be one hundred percent successful at squashing the little shit. So while he kept Howler dancing saving his ass from fifty guys with bamboo poles, five other guys burned his flying carpets. All but the little one that he kept right beside him. And Isi would have gotten that one, too, if Howler had had the balls to chase Isi’s men the way Isi wanted. What Isi failed to appreciate was that very few men were hung as heavy as him.

However she managed it Lady had a good grasp of events inside the fortress. She recognized the failures where Longshadow and her former employee were concerned. She also knew, somehow, that Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night, by coincidence or the grace of their deity, happened to be away from their quarters when our gang turned up to collect them.

Their servants were not so lucky.

Most of those who had chosen to come into Overlook, either to serve the Shadowmaster or just to be safe from pestilence, hunger, or other terrors of the world, were not as lucky as their master. Ochiba took the garrison completely off guard. He and his men must have had trouble hearing their parents when they were growing up. They never got a grasp on the concepts of mercy or noncombatants.

Which I really did not get a good look at till much later. After I got out of that slaughterhouse. After the casualties started coming in to the tunnel head, for evacuation if the chance came. After Lady stopped sending men in because she thought that would be a waste. After I got me back out of there, in one uncarved piece, dragging one end of a wounded Taglian while Thai Dei pushed the other, with the Taglian complaining all the way and the tunnel about a mile longer going out than it had been coming in. After coming up into free air only to find Willow Swan and Blade there wondering aloud why I was not back inside collecting Longshadow’s ears.

“Didn’t want to steal your chance to count coup. Sindawe’s got you all set up. All you guys got to do is pick up a couple of sharp knives and slide on in there. You can collect Howler’s scalp while you’re at it. You’ll find them waiting for you together, I think. Up by the Shadowmaster’s tower.”

“You ready?” Blade asked Swan. “I got my knife.” Blade had a grin on. He was perfectly willing to give Swan just as much crap as he gave me.

Lady came striding toward us. She was decked out in the complete Lifetaker armor. Threads of red fire slithered over its black, hideous surface faster than the eye could follow. Taglians thought the Lifetaker image matched one of Kina’s Destroyer avatars. Despite what had been done to her and her daughter, plenty of people still thought she was a creature of the dark goddess. Sometimes those people included me.

There was a connection for sure. She would not discuss it.

But I did not tell her about me and Smoke. So we were even.

“Any success to report?” Her voice was a bass boom rolling down a long, cold tunnel. “Anything at all?”

“Lots of dead people. Both sides. A lot of them aren’t people we especially wanted dead. But I’d say they’ve only got one way left to hang on to the place.”

“Which is?”

“Loose the shadows.” I sort of croaked it out. I did not want to be a fortune-teller but that was a future that did not require a lot of divination. “Unless these two get to Longshadow first.” I indicated Swan and Blade.

Lady was not in a mood for banter.

She never was. The woman had about as much humor in her as my mother-in-law.

She did enjoy a good impaling, though.

She did the thing that created the cyclone of light blades and turned it loose among the taller towers. It drifted around on its own, doing plenty of damage and keeping Longshadow and Howler too busy to finish off her troops.

58

“That’s the second time,” the Old Man growled. “I thought I got through to you after the adventure in Kiaulune.” He was pissed off because I had gone inside Overlook. “You take Smoke down there and find out what the Shadowmaster and Howler are doing.”

When Thai Dei and I had gotten back we had found Croaker already barking and snarling at a gang of couriers. Obviously he thought Lady had started something the rest of us were going to regret.

I got the feeling Soulcatcher clued in late and was about as thrilled as the Captain. Crows appeared everywhere. They were unpleasant, even for Catcher’s agents. They swooped around shooting crow shit everywhere.

“When you’re done checking on Longshadow and Howler I want you to start identifying the whereabouts of every man of ours.”

“Ours?”

“The Company. Old Crew. Nar. I want to get everybody together. Real soon now.”

“You got it.”

“Of course. But add in a dab of common sense, Murgen. To get to Khatovar the Company needs a standardbearer. Probably more than it’ll ever need a Captain or Lieutenant.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If anybody had a clue what you were up to it’s just possible they could do the things you want done when you want them done.” I walked away before we squabbled in front of the troops.

*   *   *

Longshadow was taking it out on Howler. And Howler was getting him even more pissed off by not paying a lot of attention. He was witching up some colorful little construct out of thin air. I had to study it a while before I recognized it as a representation of the areas of Overlook that were in our side’s hands. It was a complicated little cyan and magenta mess—with a tail that dipped through the foundations of the wall to Lady’s positions outside.

He did nothing to restrain his screams. Several came in quick succession, howls that seemed to have a little extra emotion behind them.

The third howl triggered something inside Longshadow’s head. He shut up. He adjusted his mask, leaned forward to stare at Howler’s construct. He reached out with fingers as skinny as spider legs despite being inside a glove, poked at the tail leading to the outside. “How did she manage that? That should not have been possible.” His lunacy, his rant, vanished like mist in the morning sun. It was almost as if his reason had cleared. “The stone cannot be worked.”

“That’s Senjak out there, if you’ll recall. She’ll work the stone the same way you did.”

Longshadow made a noise like a cat’s growl. I thought his moment of lucidity had passed. I thought he was about to have an all-time fit. He fooled me. “Find the Deceiver and his brat. They need to be here, inside this tower, before midnight. If they want to survive.”

Howler replied with an interrogative grunt.

“I have no use for them anymore. I owe them nothing. They have done nothing for me. But I will give them this opportunity to survive.”

I did not wait around to learn what happened next.

*   *   *

“What’re you doing back already?” Croaker demanded when I sat up. “You haven’t been out long enough—”

“Excuse me, boss. I’ve already got a mother-in-law. Yes, I
was
out there long enough to hear Longshadow say he’s going to turn the shadows loose tonight.”

Croaker shut his mouth. I hurried through the information. He said, “You’re right. He didn’t say shadows in that many words but it can’t be anything else. Get back to it. I’ll round up One-Eye and get the word out.”

“How long do we have?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what time it is now. Just get going.”

“I’ll need water and food brought in. The water should be sweet.”

“Go.”

I went.

59

I came back to flesh every few minutes to report the whereabouts of those Company brothers I could locate. The Old Man sent warnings to those he could, telling them to get over to the division at the Shadowgate.

Wagons were on the move soon, leaving Lady’s crude factories with stocks of bamboo her workers had been able to reload. The supply seemed woeful to me.

I darted everywhere. When I thought it would not hurt I fluttered northward. Swarms of crows came and went from the ravine where Soulcatcher holed up. I skipped backward in time, watched the Old Man and, sure enough, I found a time when he whispered to those two huge crows of his and they promptly flapped off to gossip with the crazy sister. I could not get Smoke anywhere near her, of course, and anytime I pushed even a little I got that tickling
she is the darkness
sensation.

I got a ghost of the same thing when I swarmed off to see what the Daughter of Night was doing, though Smoke showed no reluctance to move a little closer. The child was writing furiously, her little face contorted in pain. She was working on a different volume. This one she had only just begun.

“Oh, shit!” She finished the first one already? Croaker needed to know that. We might be in deeper shit than I had thought.

Where
was
the Book? I did not see it anywhere. I had better find out.

I took a dive into the past.

I found the Daughter of Night crying. I found Narayan Singh stunned by that. He had not seen that before and did not know how to comfort her, though he had had children of his own in another time, another world, before the Black Company came to Taglios.

I pushed back farther, to discover the cause of this bizarre circumstance. I could think of a hundred unlikely candidates I expected to see cry before that grim midget broke down.

It started when she and Singh returned to their apartment after having escaped it only a step ahead of Lady’s raiders. Though forewarned the child had been too busy writing to pay close attention and had waited almost too long.

Their exit had been so hasty they had had to leave the Book behind.