The Return of the Black Company (98 page)

“No. They’ll be there when we get back.”

I hoped her confidence was justified. Us being gone was an opportunity for all sorts of mischief to happen back up the road.

“Let’s move them out,” Croaker said. “Grab your pole and hike, Standardbearer.”

When I went and tried lifting the standard it came up as though it never had been stuck.

*   *   *

That place up ahead never seemed to get any closer. I hate open country because of that. You can travel for days with the scenery never changing.

Croaker’s mood darkened with time. He grew more impatient to get on. In the afternoon, when he spelled me carrying the standard, he began to pull ahead. After a while I asked Lady, “You figure you better slow him down?”

“What?” She had not noticed, so deep was she into her own interior world.

“Him.” I pointed.

She urged her mount forward.

I kept trudging. Maybe I even slowed down a little. There was no drive to rush forward once the standard was out of hand. In fact, the world behind me grew more and more attractive as time passed, the sky darkened and the plain changed not at all. The only color anywhere was inside our party—unless you counted the gold characters on the pillars.

Lady caught the Old Man. I did not overhear their exchange. I suspect she was a bit sharp. He looked back at me, now understanding how come I zoomed ahead before.

He kept watching till I caught up. “You want to take this thing back now?”

“I still haven’t got the kinks out from carrying it before. You just got to concentrate.”

He grunted. And the next circle we hit turned out to be our campground for the night.

Soon after we settled the men began going to the southern roadhead to study the fortress ahead. And fortress it surely was, partially fallen. Speculation centered on whether or not we would reach it the next day and whether the Old Man would turn back if we did not. There was no reason to be optimistic about that. This close to his goal the Old Man would push on and worry about hunger when the time came.

This time we lighted the communal fires, enjoyed a warm meal. We all needed the morale boost.

There would be fresh meat from now on because we could not feed and water animals doing no useful work.

It is a tough world for livestock.

I asked Thai Dei, “There anything in mythology anywhere that might tell us something about that place up ahead?”

“No. At least in no way we would recognize.”

“You sure? Your buddies seem real uncomfortable with it.”

“They are uncomfortable with everything, this plain in particular. They can see this is a place that should not be. That this is not natural.”

“No shit.”

“It would take an entire nation a thousand years to build something this vast. No monument so huge can be a good thing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Only a very great evil could remain so single of purpose, so uncaring of cost, as to create something so ultimately useless. Consider the evil of the sorcerer Longshadow. He invested a generation in his fortress. It is nothing in comparison to this plain.”

He had a point.

I stepped over to the barrier and stared at the countless sparkling standing stones.

A swarm of sudden shadows flickered over our encampment. I jumped. So did everybody else. The flock of crows wheeled, crossed the sun again, flew on to the north. All but one.

The birds were strangely silent. Not one caw trailed behind them.

The straggler settled atop a column almost directly in line with the fortress ahead. He stalked around, stretched his wings, settled down to watch us.

Pthwan!
A fireball streaked toward the crow. It missed. It had not come from a dedicated crow-killer.

I leapt, grabbed Wheezer’s shoulder, nearly spun him ass over appetite. But I did not get there in time to keep him from loosing another ball.

This one clipped the top of the pillar where the crow perched. It ricocheted slightly left and upward after taking a bite of stone, then caught the squawking, flapping bird squarely. Black feathers exploded.

The earth shook.

This was a big one. I went down. Most of the others did, too. Animals bleated and bellowed. Nyueng Bao yammered at one another. The plain seemed to shimmer and wobble around us.

Lady strode up, balance perfect, to all appearances completely unperturbed. But she kicked old Wheezer so hard he flipped over. “You idiot. You may have just killed us all.” She slammed her hands onto her hips, studied the injured pillar. She did not look like a woman who was convinced that she was about to die. Suddenly, she turned and shouted, “Get those animals under control! Whatever you do, don’t let them run out of the circle.”

A bullock became supper because he was determined to run for it. People took Lady’s orders literally.

The plain heaved one more time, then a stillness gathered. For several seconds there were no sounds and nothing moved.

“Look,” somebody said, murdering the silence.

Part of the distant fortress appeared to be sliding down. In time a remote rumble reached us, long after a cloud obscured the place.

Wheezer coughed. “Shit. Did I do that?”

104

Lady was all business. She snapped orders. Men scurried off in search of her shopping list of apparently unrelated items.

I strolled around the perimeter while waiting to learn what she was doing. Other than the settling dust in the distance this site was identical to the last. When I got to the road leading south I found a place to set the standard waiting. I took advantage.

I went back to Lady and watched over her shoulder while she concocted a rusty-colored dust that swirled in a small, lazy wind-witch in front of her. She considered it for a moment, then sent it splashing against the invisible barrier protecting us from the plain. It behaved like a liquid then. It ran down the barrier, defining it clearly.

It also defined, as clearly as imminent death, the holes Wheezer’s fireballs had opened. And the sun was charging the horizon.

Wheezer garnered some black looks. His hacking got worse but nobody offered any sympathy.

Lady kept everybody too busy to turn ugly.

The flock of crows returned for a second pass, this time laughing all the way. They circled once, then fled northward for good.

Lady’s way of dealing with the deadly holes was not dramatic. She employed no great gaudy sorceries. She took Wheezer’s ragged leather jacket away from him, cut chunks out of it, wadded them up and plugged the holes. Then she used some minor spell to cement them there.

Even she did not seem sure that her fix was a good answer. She snagged Wheezer’s shoulder and dragged him to a particular spot facing the damaged barrier. “Right here. And don’t move. All night. If anything gets through your screams will warn the rest of us.”
Bam!
She slammed him down.

Not a good idea to get her mad at you.

As I moved back to where Thai Dei had settled I overheard murmured prayers from men who seldom behaved as though gods were anything but nuisances.

There is that about the Company. You see little evidence of religion. For most of us all spirituality resides in a blade. Uncle Doj was right about that. But his approach was just too damned mystical.

Maybe the Lance of Passion was once a tutelary but time has taken that away. Any information would be in the Annals hidden back in Taglios.

We are not really a godless bunch. We are just the sort who ignore the gods—probably in the unconscious hope that the gods will not notice us.

Obviously, in Kina’s case, that was not working. It had not worked even before we knew she existed. Half the guys did not believe in Kina even now. That they did not, did not matter. Kina believed in us.

Fresh meat did improve morale dramatically. But darkness coming crushed it right down again. I did not face the night with any eagerness myself. I told Thai Dei, “I just realized something, brother.”

He grunted.

“Almost all the important events in my life happen at night. I was even born right about midnight.”

Thai Dei grunted again but this time looked at me with some curiosity and maybe a little surprise.

“What? That part of Hong Tray’s prophecy or something?”

“No. But it may say something about your ruling stars.”

Oh, boy. They let astrology guide them, too? How come I never heard of this before? “I’ve had a bad day. I’m going to turn in.” Maybe I would get a chance to see my Sarie tonight.

105

Stars. I saw some of those. After I fell asleep and went out of myself and passed through the same murky world as the previous night, I found myself right there in the circle on the plain, my personal shadow oozing around on the protective barrier while scores of its buddies tried to get through the holes Wheezer had blasted. The old fellow sat where Lady had parked him, staring and shaking.

The stars I saw hung above the loom of the crumbling fortress. They formed the constellation that had been the subject of some discussion with Mother Gota a while back. The complete constellation. I wondered why I had not noticed them the night before. I wondered why I noticed them tonight. The sky was supposed to be heavily overcast.

A lot of seeing and thinking seemed to be very selective lately. That probably deserved some reflection itself.

There seemed to be a glimmer of light down south. Or maybe it was just a star caught between crennels on a battlement. Whatever, it went away. And when I went to the southern roadhead, thinking of charging ahead, I found the way blocked not only by the ghosts I had seen previously but by vaguely perceived scores more hanging back behind them. They were much stronger this time. They would not go away when I commanded them. Not right away. They made gestures and probably tried to mouth words behind their ugly masks. I was confident they were trying to communicate. What was not clear.

A warning, perhaps.

I did not go down the southern road.

I toddled round the perimeter. The east and west roads were open. Daring me, I ran down each a short way. They remained real enough but I did not want them to fade away while I was out there. I went back to the gang, then headed north. I would go see what was happening in the world.

There was a lot of sleeping going on around Overlook. Even quite a few sentries were snoozing. I made mental notes where I recognized faces.

I found Goblin and One-Eye snoring in my own bunker below the Shadowgate. Gota was awake but had her eyes closed as she murmured over a prayer shawl vaguely resembling those some Gunni cults used. But she held hers folded in her lap and ran the tip of her fingers over it lightly, as though reading something by touch. She muttered continuously in Nyueng Bao but I could not follow her even when I got up close.

She jumped, looked around wildly, apparently sensing me. There are elements of ancestor worship connected with Nyueng Bao beliefs. Ghosts are certainly very real to them. Gota started asking the air questions.

She seemed to think I was either the spirit of her mother, Hong Tray, or of her grandfather, Cao Khi, spoken of as a necromancer in family oral histories Sarie had related to me. When he got mentioned at all it was with mild embarrassment. We all have those crooked limbs in our family trees. A necromancer who could raise his own shade would make for a particularly gnarly branch.

I did not pay much attention. I wanted to see if they had done something with Uncle Doj. They must have collected him and gone to work getting him healed up.

I could not find Uncle. I did find a crude sign scratched on a weathered fragment of board, in charcoal, in One-Eye’s crude lettering.
KID. IT IS A TRAP
.

Oh, my.

I wanted to shake the little shit awake and ask him what that meant. I tried. Maybe I gave him bad dreams. He did groan and toss. But he did not do anything else. I raged.

What if it was true?

How could it be? And who?

Catcher? Was that why she seemed happy? Or Kina? Did the goddess not want us running loose in the world, threatening to bring on the Year of the Skulls? But she had interceded before to make sure we stayed in the game.

But was it not Kina who had filled the minds of an entire nation with an overwhelming, irrational fear of the Company?

I was confused. I tried to shake One-Eye again. I had no more luck this time. Still raging, I zipped outside and started southward. And ran into a wall of death stench so powerful I reeled away.

Kina. Up very close.

I caught glimpses of slick ebony skin, a chest with lots of breasts, half a dozen arms paddling the air like the legs of an overturned bug. I got an indistinct impression that she was trying to pull herself through the veil between my ghostworld and hers. She seemed driven to deliver an important message. Or maybe she just wanted to jump over and gobble me up.

I did not learn which. I could not stay there. She brought too much fear with her. I fled. No plan. No thought at all. I just went, fast and frenzied.

I found myself in the mountains north of Kiaulune, running away from the plain with my back toward an unseen destination. From out here the stars of the Noose were invisible. No stars could be seen at all. The overcast masked them. I turned to see where I was headed. The sparkle of campfires away to my left caught my attention. I directed my flight that way. Whoever was over there would be human. I needed to be close to something human.

They were the bunch Croaker had sent after my horse. I recognized many of the restless men. Fear was an animate presence in their camp, and a big one. I got in among them, tried to draw warmth and comfort while I steeled myself for another attempt to get back to my flesh. Nobody sensed my presence.

Once I felt ready I left the circle of light and headed southward slowly, trying hard to sense Kina before Kina sensed me. Would she try to ambush me again?

Who knows? I ran into Uncle Doj first.

Actually, he ran into me. He was making no more sound than I as he scouted the camp. Pretty good for an old boy who ought still to be laid up with his wounds.