She winked.
Taut fabric smacked my butt. We went up fast.
Crossing the Plain of Fear was faster by air, but still harrowing. Windwhales quartered across our path. We zipped around them. They were too slow to keep pace. Turquoise manta things rose from their backs, flapped clumsily, caught updrafts, rose above us, then dived past like plunging eagles, challenging our presence in their airspace. We could not outrun them, but outclimbed them easily. However, we could not climb higher than the windwhales. So high, and the air becomes too rare for human beings. The whales could rise another mile, becoming diving platforms for the mantas.
There were other flying things, smaller and less dangerous, but determinedly obnoxious. Nevertheless, we got through. When a manta did attack, Whisper defeated it with her thaumaturgic craft.
To do so, she gave up control of the carpet. We fell, out of control, till she drove the manta away. I got through without losing my breakfast, but just barely. I never asked Elmo and Kingpin, figuring they might not want their dignity betrayed. Whisper would not attack first. That is the prime rule for surviving the Plain of Fear. Don’t hit first. If you do, you buy more than a duel. Every monster out there will go after you.
We crossed without harm, as carpets usually do, and raced on, all day long, into the night. We turned north. The air became cooler. Whisper dropped to lower altitudes and slower speeds. Morning found us over Forsberg, where the Company had served when new in the Lady’s service. Elmo and I gawked over the side.
Once I pointed, shouted, “There’s Deal.” We had held that fortress briefly. Then Elmo pointed the other way. There lay Oar, where we had pulled some fine, bloody tricks on the Rebel, and earned the enmity of the Limper. Whisper flew so low we could distinguish faces in the streets. Oar looked no more friendly than it had eight years ago.
We passed on, rolled along above the treetops of the Great Forest, ancient and virgin wilderness from which the White Rose had conducted her campaigns against the Dominator. Whisper slowed around noon. We drifted down into a wide sprawl that once had been cleared land. A cluster of mounds in its middle betrayed the handiwork of man, though now the barrows are scarcely recognizable.
Whisper landed in the street of a town that was mostly ruin. I presumed it to be the town occupied by the Eternal Guard, whose task it is to prevent tampering with the Barrowland. They were effective till betrayed by apathy elsewhere.
It took the Resurrectionists three hundred seventy years to open the Barrowland, and then they did not get what they wanted. The Lady returned, with the Taken, but the Dominator remained chained.
The Lady obliterated the Resurrectionist movement root and branch. Some reward, eh?
A handful of men left a building still in good repair. I eavesdropped on their exchange with Whisper, understood a few words. “Recall your Forsberger?” I asked Elmo, while trying to shake the stiffness out of my muscles.
“It’ll come back. Want to give Kingpin a look? He don’t seem right.”
He wasn’t bad off. Just scared. Took a while to convince him we were back on the ground.
The locals, descendants of the Guards who had watched the Barrowland for centuries, showed us to our quarters. The town was being restored. We were the forerunners of a horde of new blood.
Goblin and two of our best soldiers came in on Whisper’s next flight, three days later. They said the Company had left Frost.
I asked if it looked like the Limper was holding a grudge.
“Not that I could see,” Goblin said. “But that don’t mean anything.”
No, it didn’t.
The last four men arrived three days later. Whisper moved into our barracks. We formed a sort of bodyguard cum police force. Besides protecting her, we were supposed to help make sure unauthorized persons did not get near the Barrowland.
The Taken called Feather appeared, bringing her own bodyguard. Specialists determined to investigate the Barrowland came up with a battalion of laborers hired in Oar. The laborers cleared the trash and brush, up to the Barrowland proper. Entry there, without appropriate protection, meant a slow, painful death. The protective spells the White Rose left hadn’t faded with the Lady’s resurrection. And she had added her own. I guess she is terrified he will break loose.
The Taken Journey arrived, bringing troops of his own. He established outposts in the Great Forest. The Taken took turns making airborne patrols. We minions watched one another as closely as we watched the rest of the world. Something big was afoot. Nobody was saying so, but that much was obvious. The Lady definitely anticipated a breakout attempt.
I spent my free time reviewing the Guard’s records, especially for the period when Bomanz lived here. He spent forty years in the garrison town, disguised as an antique digger, before he tried to contact the Lady and unintentionally freed her. He interested me. But there was little to dig out, and that little was colored.
Once I’d had his personal papers, having stumbled onto them shortly before Whisper’s Taking. But I passed them on to our then mentor Soulcatcher for transportation to the Tower. Soulcatcher kept them for her own reasons, and they fell into my hands again, during the battle at Charm, as the Lady and I pursued the renegade Taken. I didn’t mention the papers to anyone but a friend, Raven. The Raven, who deserted to protect a child he believed to be the reincarnation of the White Rose. When I got a chance to pick up the papers from where I hid them, they were gone. I guess Raven took them with him.
I often wonder what became of him. His declared intent was to flee so far no one could find him again. He did not care about politics. He just wanted to protect a child he loved. He was capable of doing anything to protect Darling. I guess he thought the papers might turn into insurance someday.
In the Guard headquarters there are a dozen landscapes painted by past members of the garrison. Most portray the Barrowland. It was magnificent in its day. It had consisted of a central Great Barrow on a north-south axis, containing the Dominator and his Lady. Surrounding the Great Barrow was a star of earth raised above the plain, outlined by a deep, water-filled moat. At the points of that star stood lesser barrows containing five of The Ten Who Were Taken. A circle rising above the star connected its inward points, and there, at each, stood another barrow containing another Taken. Every barrow was surrounded by spells and fetishes. Within the inner ring, around the Great Barrow, were rank on rank of additional defenses. The last was a dragon curled around the Great Barrow, its tail in its mouth. A later painting by an eyewitness shows the dragon belching fire on the countryside the night of the Lady’s resurrection. Bomanz is walking into the fire.
He was caught between Resurrectionists and the Lady, all of whom were manipulating him. His accident was their premeditated event. The records say his wife survived. She said he went into the Barrowland to stop what was happening. No one believed her at the time. She claimed he carried the Lady’s true name and wanted to reach her with it before she could wriggle free.
Silent, One-Eye and Goblin will tell you the direst fear of any sorcerer is that knowledge of his true name will fall to some outsider. Bomanz’s wife claimed the Lady’s was encoded in papers her husband possessed. Papers that vanished that night. Papers that I recovered decades later. What Raven snatched may contain the only lever capable of dumping the empire.
Back to the Barrowland in its youth. Impressive construction. Its weather faces were sheathed in limestone. The moat was broad and blue. The surrounding countryside was park-like.... But fear of the Dominator faded, and so did appropriations. A later painting, contemporary with Bomanz, shows the countryside gone to seed, the limestone facings in disrepair, and the moat becoming a swamp. Today you can’t tell where the moat was. The limestone has disappeared beneath brush. The elevations and barrows are nothing but humps. That part of the Great Barrow where the Dominator lies remains in fair shape, though it, too, is heavily overgrown. Some of the fetishes anchoring the spells keeping his friends away still stand, but weather has devoured their
features.
The edge of the Barrowland is now marked by stakes trailing red flags, put there when the Lady announced she was sending outsiders to investigate. The Guards themselves, having lived there always, need no markers to warn them off. I enjoyed my month and a half there. I indulged my curiosities, and found Feather and Whisper remarkably accessible.
That hadn’t been true of the old Taken. Too, the commander of the Guard, called the Monitor, bragged up his command’s past, which stretches back as far as the Company’s. We swapped lies and tales over many a gallon of beer.
During the fifth week someone discovered something. We peons were not told what. But the Taken got excited. Whisper started lifting in more of the Company. The reinforcements told harrowing fables about the Plain of Fear and the Empty Hills. The Company was at Lords now, only five hundred miles distant.
At the end of the sixth week Whisper assembled us and announced another move. “The Lady wants me to take some of you out west. A force of twenty-five. Elmo, you’ll be in command. Feather and I, some experts, and several language specialists will join you. Yes, Croaker. You’re on the list. She wouldn’t deny her favorite amateur historian, would she?”
A thrill of fear. I didn’t want her getting interested again.
“Where’re we headed?” Elmo asked. Professional to the core, the son-of-a-bitch. Not a single complaint.
“A city called Juniper. Way beyond the western bounds of the empire. It’s connected with the Barrowland somehow. It’s a ways north, too. Expect it to be cold and prepare accordingly.”
Juniper? Never heard of it. Neither had anyone else. Not even the Monitor. I scrounged through his maps till I found one showing the western coast. Juniper was way up north, near where the ice persists all year long. It was a big city. I wondered how it could exist there, where it should be frozen all the time. I asked Whisper. She seemed to know something about the place. She said Juniper benefits from an ocean current that brings warm water north. She said the city is very strange-according to Feather, who’d actually been there.
I approached Feather next, only hours before our departure. She couldn’t tell me much more, except that Juniper is the demense of a Duke Zimerlan, and he appealed to the Lady a year ago (just a while before the Captain’s courier letter would have left Charm) for help solving a local problem. That someone had approached the Lady, when the world’s desire is to keep her far away, argued that we faced interesting times. I wondered about the connection with the Barrowland.
The negative was that Juniper was so far away. I was pleased that I would be there when the Captain learned he was expected to head there after resting in Oar, though.
Could be I’d hear his howl of outrage even from that far. I knew he wouldn’t be happy.
Chapter Thirteen: JUNIPER: THE ENCLOSURE
Shed slept badly for weeks. He dreamt of black glass walls and a man who hadn’t been dead. Twice Raven asked him to join a night hunt. Twice he refused. Raven did not press, though they both knew Shed would jump if he insisted. Shed prayed that Raven would get rich and disappear. He remained a constant irritant to the conscience.
Damnit, why didn’t Krage go after him?
Shed couldn’t figure why Raven remained unperturbed by Krage. The man was neither a fool nor stupid. The alternative, that he wasn’t scared, made no sense. Not to a Matron Shed. Asa remained on Krage’s payroll, but visited regularly, bringing firewood. By the wagonload, sometimes. “What’re you up to?” Shed demanded one day. “Trying to build credit,” Asa admitted.
“Krage’s guys don’t like me much.”
“Hardly anybody does, Asa.”
“They might try something nasty....”
“Want a place to hide when they turn on you, eh? What’re you doing for Krage? Why is he bothering with you?”
Asa hemmed and hawed. Shed pushed. Here was a man he could bully. “I watch Raven, Shed. I report what he does.”
Shed snorted. Krage was using Asa because he was expendable. He’d had two men disappear early on. Shed thought he knew where they were. Sudden fear. Suppose Asa reported Raven’s night adventures? Suppose he’d seen Shed....
Impossible. Asa couldn’t have kept quiet. Asa spent his life looking for leverage.
“You’ve been spending a lot lately, Asa. Where are you getting the money?”
Asa turned pale. He looked around, gobbled a few times. “The wood, Shed. Selling the wood.”
“You’re a liar, Asa. Where’re you getting it?”
“Shed, you don’t ask questions like that.”
“Maybe not. But I need money bad. I owe Krage. I almost had him paid off. Then he started buying my little debts from everybody else. That damned Gilbert!... I need to get ahead enough so I don’t have to borrow again.”
The black castle. Two hundred twenty pieces of silver. How he had been tempted to attack Raven. And Raven just smiled into the wind, knowing exactly what he was thinking. “Where’re you getting that money, Asa?”
“Where did you get the money you paid Krage? Huh? People are wondering, Shed. You don’t come up with that kind of money overnight. Not you. You tell me and I’ll tell you.” Shed backed down. Asa beamed in triumph.
“You little snake. Get out before I lose my temper.” Asa fled. He looked back once, face knotted thoughtfully. Damnit, Shed thought. Made him suspicious. He ground his rag into a tacky mug.
“What was that?”
Shed spun. Raven had come to the counter. His look brooked no crap. Shed gave him the gist.
“So Krage hasn’t quit.”
“You don’t know him or you wouldn’t ask. It’s you or him, Raven.”
“Then it has to be him, doesn’t it?”
Shed gaped. “A suggestion, Shed. Follow your friend when he goes wood-gathering.” Raven returned to his seat. He spoke to Darling animatedly, in sign, which he blocked from Shed’s view. The set of the girl’s shoulders said she was against whatever it was he was proposing. Ten minutes later he left the Lily. Each afternoon he went out for a few hours. Shed suspected he was testing Krage’s watchers.
Darling leaned against the door frame, watching the street. Shed watched her, his gaze sliding up and down her frame. Raven’s, he thought. They’re thick. I don’t dare. But she was such a fine looking thing, tall, lean of leg, ready for a man.... He was a fool. He did not need to get caught in that trap, too. He had troubles enough. “I think today would be good for it,” Raven said as Shed delivered his breakfast. “Eh? Good for what?” “For a hike up the hill to watch friend Asa.’’ “Oh. No. I can’t. Got nobody to watch the place.” Back by the counter, Darling bent to pick something off the floor. Shed’s eyes widened and his heart fluttered. He had to do something. Visit a whore, or something. Or get hurt. But he couldn’t afford to pay for it. “Darling couldn’t handle it alone.”
“Your cousin Wally has stood in for you before.” Caught off balance, Shed could not marshall his excuses quickly. And Darling was driving him to distraction. She had to start wearing something that concealed the shape of her behind better. “Uh.... He couldn’t deal with Darling. Doesn’t know the signs.” Raven’s face darkened slightly. “Give her the day off. Get that girl Lisa you used when Darling was sick.” Lisa, Shed thought. Another hot one. “I only use Lisa when I’m here to watch her.” A hot one not attached. “She’ll steal me blinder than my mother....” “Shed!” “Eh?”
“Get Wally and Lisa here; then go keep an eye on Asa. I’ll make sure they don’t carry off the family silver.” “But....” Raven slapped a palm on the tabletop. “I said go!”
The day was clear and bright and, for winter, warm. Shed picked up Asa’s trail outside Krage’s establishment.
Asa rented a wagon. Shed was amazed. In winter stable-keepers demanded huge deposits. Draft animals slaughtered and eaten had no provenance. He thought it a miracle anyone trusted Asa with a team. Asa went directly to the Enclosure. Shed stalked along behind, keeping his head down, confident Asa would not suspect
him even if he looked back. The streets were crowded.
Asa left the wagon in a public grove across a lane running alongside the wall which girdled the Enclosure. It was one of many similar groves where Juniper’s citizenry gathered for the Spring and Autumn Rites for the Dead. The wagon could not be seen from the lane.
Shed squatted in shadow and bush and watched Asa dash to the Enclosure wall. Somebody ought to clear that brush away, Shed thought. It made the wall look tacky. For that matter, the wall needed repairing. Shed crossed and found a gap through which a man could duck-walk. He crept through. Asa was crossing an open meadow, hurrying uphill toward a stand of pines.
The inner face of the wall was brush-masked, too. Scores of bundles of wood lay among the bushes. Asa had more industry than Shed had suspected. Hanging around Krage’s gang had changed him. They had him scared for sure.
Asa entered the pines. Shed puffed after him. Ahead, Asa sounded like a cow pushing through the underbrush.
The whole Enclosure was tacky. In Shed’s boyhood it had been park-like, a fit waiting place for those who had gone before. Now it had the threadbare look that characterized the rest of Juniper.
Shed crept toward hammering racket. What was Asa doing, making so much noise?
He was cutting wood from a fallen tree, stacking the pieces in neat bundles. Shed could not picture the little man orderly, either. What a difference terror made. An hour later Shed was ready to give up. He was cold and hungry and stiff. He had wasted half a day. Asa was doing nothing remarkable. But he persevered. He had a time investment to recoup. And an irritable Raven awaiting his report.
Asa worked hard. When not chopping, he hustled bundles down to his wagon. Shed was impressed.
He stayed, watched, and told himself he was a fool. This was going nowhere. Then Asa became furtive. He collected his tools and concealed them, looked around warily. This is it, Shed thought. Asa took off uphill. Shed puffed after him. His stiff muscles protested every step. Asa traveled more than a mile through lengthening shadows. Shed almost lost him. A clinking brought him back to the track.