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 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 Due, 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 Shadar 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 th
e 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.
“You buy it?” I asked.
“Sounds like somebody thought he was going to get his throat cut and made up a story. But we’ll check it out.”
“Just when I was getting used to being warm.”
“You used to being hungry, too?”
Out we rode, and onward and onward we rode, day after day, through fields and forests and hills marred by quake effects and abandoned by the population. The Captain and I rode those giant black stallions, him outfitted in his cold Widowmaker armor and me lugging the bloody standard while Thai Dei tagged along behind like he was trying to become some sort of clown sidekick. We found the prisoner’s ice cave. Near as we could tell, it was a real treasure trove. The earthquake had dropped an avalanche down its throat. The good people of the province had been trying to open it back up. We relieved them of all that hard work and left a troop to await the coming of reinforcements hungry enough to dig for their supper. We continued on toward Kiaulune and Overlook, managing to sustain ourselves and avoid trouble until we were just forty miles north of the stricken city.
The countryside there was unmarred by disaster, quiet, orderly, almost pretty but a little too wintry for my taste. Suddenly, without warning, despite the Old Man’s crows, we ran into Shadowlander cavalry and not a man among them was in a good mood. Their charge broke us into half a dozen clumps. Whereupon a horde of infantry types tried to horn in. Lucky for us they were regional militia, poorly armed, completely inexperienced peasants. Unfortunately, it is true that some totally untrained and inexperienced dickhead can get lucky and kill you just as dead as a martial arts priest like Uncle Doj can.
I managed to get the standard set atop a knoll, the Old Man there with me inside a circle of friendly folks. “The one day you don’t wear the damned costume,” I yelled.’They wouldn’t have had the balls for this shit if you’d dressed up.” Who knows? It might have been true.
“It was getting heavy. And it’s cold and it stinks.” He shrugged into the hideous, grotesque armor. As he lowered the nasty winged helmet onto his head a pair of monster crows dropped onto his shoulders. Traceries of scarlet fire began crawling all over him. A few thousand more crows began zooming around overhead, every one bitching his little heart out.
After a chance to take in the crows, Widowmaker and the Company standard most of our attackers decided to take the rest of the day off.
The stories had to be really bad down here.
The cavalrymen were made of sterner stuff. They continued fighting. They were veterans. And Longshadow probably had them convinced we were going to roast their wives and rape their babies, then turn the rest of them into dog food and shoe leather.
But we scattered them. Before the soldiers could get carried away chasing them, the Old Man headed south again, declaring, “We have bridges to capture and chokepoints to clear.”
A few men did not heed the recall. I asked, “What about them?”
“They have a chance to serve as a valuable object lesson. Those that survive can catch up.” He was feeling hard.
He did not think about arranging care and protection for the wounded. That was not something he had overlooked ever before.
It might be that there were no Company brothers among the wounded even though we had nearly a dozen with us.
That consideration often seemed to lie at the root of his decisions, yet never so blatantly that outsiders were conscious of it. I hoped he would keep it low key. We had troubles enough.
I had seen Shadowcatch a hundred times in Smoke’s dreams. I had spent cumulative days prowling Overlook. I thought I knew the city and the fortress about as well as anyone who lived there. But I was not prepared for a reality unfiltered by Smoke’s thoughtless mind.
The remains of Kiaulune were plain hell. Famine and disease had claimed almost everyone who had not been killed by the earthquake. Longshadow, taking unwanted advice, had tried to help. Too late. But he had allowed refugees to establish themselves in the shadow of Overlook and had been making provision to care for them. In turn, those people were replacing the lost workers who had been building Overlook before the earthquake.
Very little work had gotten done since the disaster. Even Longshadow had been forced to stipulate that survival demands superseded his desire to complete his invulnerable fastness.
There were no children. Some arrangement had been made to care for them elsewhere. A clever step, uncharacteristic of the Shadowmaster. That idea had to have originated with someone else. In fact, I could think of no one in Longshadow’s coterie to whom such a thing would occur.
It looked as though the little construction effort put out lately had been directed principally at providing housing.
This would not keep up once the pressure was off. To Longshadow all the people of the Shadowlands were his to use and dispose of as he saw fit. He just wanted to keep them alive long enough to be used.
“Hell really is leaking into the world,” Croaker observed. He stared at the bleak, stinking, unwalled remains of Kiaulune. He paid no attention to the gleaming magnificence beyond the city.
I did. “We’re too damned close here, boss. We don’t have Lady to cover us.”
That did not seem to trouble him. The only time he paid Overlook any attention was when he paused once to glare and say, “You didn’t get it done in time, did you, you son of a bitch?”
From the limited point of view of someone seeing the fortress with mundane eyes the place seemed immeasurably huge. Mostly the towering walls had been constructed of a grey-white stone but in places blocks of different colors had been worked in, along with silver, copper and gold, to scrawl the whole with cabalistic patterns.
What forces had Longshadow gathered to defend those ramparts since last I walked with the ghost? Did it matter? Could any army scale those incredible walls if the construction scaffolding was cast down?
Most of that was still in place.
Croaker mused, “You may be right. I shouldn’t rub their noses in the fact that I’m out here personally.” He turned a little more and looked past Overlook, at the escarpment in the distance. “Have you ever gotten up there?”
I looked around. No one was there to hear. Not even a crow. “No. I can get about halfway across the space between Overlook and a place on the road where there’s a landslide that seems to be what they call the Shadowgate around here. Not much to look at. But that’s all the farther Smoke will
go.”
“I’ve never done better. Let’s get out of here.”
We withdrew and pitched camp north of Kiaulune. The soldiers were not comfortable there. None of them wanted to set up housekeeping so close to the last and craziest Shadowmaster.
I tended to agree.
Croaker said, “You could be right. I’d feel better myself if Smoke was down here and you could do some scouting.” Then he grinned. “But I do believe that we have a guardian angel better than Lady looking out for us.”
“What? Who?”
“Catcher. She’s as goofy as a squirrel with three nuts but she’s predictable. You been able to get close to her?” Like he was sure I would try.
“Not really. Smoke won’t go.”
“You have to remember how determined she is to use me to get even with Lady for having kept her from getting even before. That means she has to take care of me.”
“Oh.” Dumb me. I had not thought about how he could be using Catcher. “You’re willing to bet your life on Catcher?”
“Hell no. She’s still Soulcatcher. She could get interested in something else and just walk out on everything here.”
“But she does have a score to settle with Longshadow, too.”
“That she does.” He grinned. He was pleased about the way things were going.
I was worried about Soulcatcher. She seldom did anything overt but in her own mind she would be one of the major players. Eventually she would do something dramatic.
Was there anything Croaker had not foreseen and made part of his plan? He did not think so, I am sure.
I did not agree. Because I had rock-hard evidence that he was not ready for everything. There is no way he could have anticipated me starting to have the same sort of nightmares as Lady though I am just as certain that he did expect hers to continue.