Blade chuckled.
89
Silence stretched. I found a battered mug left over from Kiaulune’s glory days, helped myself to tea from a pot steeping beside Croaker’s crude hearth. The stuff was more bitter than medicine. That explained why it was still there. I pretended to enjoy it.
“Clete,” Croaker said. “What’s the agricultural situation?” Only in the Black Company would a siege engineer be in charge of farming.
Cletus said, “Nothing new to report. Exceptional crops threatening to mature earlier than the locals predicted. We could do worse than to establish ourselves here.” Cletus and his brothers centered a faction interested in settling down. They felt their new weapons could discourage our most determined enemies. They made no strong representations, though.
The Company had slogged through hell for an age. Now we possessed a rich province and a fine fortress and our only serious enemies were hundreds of miles away and probably disinclined to come after us anytime soon.
I did not listen to the editorializing following a suggestion that the gods loved us because our crops were doing so well. I paid no attention till Longinus started telling us why we no longer needed to be afraid of anyone.
“If the Radisha really traded away half her power so she could keep her position that means the priests are really in charge. I don’t see them, no matter how much they fear us or hate Blade, ever saddling themselves with another real army. The cost and the threat to their power...”
I had heard it all before. The priests would not let the Radisha come after us.
I did not believe it. He was whistling in the dark. But I was a ghostwalker. I could go anywhere and see anything. I had to work harder to mislead myself.
“You’re wrong, Longo,” I said. “We’ll have company here eventually. Probably way sooner than any of us would like.” I even had the Old Man’s attention, suddenly.
“I had a dream.” Most everyone knew that I had visions. The mechanics and reliability remained my secret. To avoid troubling people who might worry about me, I blamed it all on the kinds of seizures I had been having since the siege.
Lady clucked her tongue, an irksome habit she did not know she had acquired. She and Croaker were turning into everybody’s grandparents. The inner circle needed young blood bad. She asked, “Could you tell us about your dream, Murgen? Or do we have to wait for the book?” She was annoyed with me because I had begun making new revisions to her volume of the Annals. Some of our latest class of enlistees had been around back then. Not all of them recalled events the same as she did.
“The high point, like the boss said, is that our old pal Mogaba isn’t unemployed anymore.”
A general susurrus. Had they thought that the Old Man was joking?
“I don’t get much from my dreams. I have no control over them. I get knocked back in time sometimes but I can’t go whenever I want to find out why something happened after we find out that it did happen. I have to wait for news from our friends on the scene just like everybody else.” We do have friends up north who supply us with reliable intelligence. I check up on them whenever I can.
We did not use Smoke much anymore. He wanted to wake up. He was not really in a coma now, anyway. Lady had to struggle to make him useful. She took advantage of the resulting opportunities herself.
I continued, “But Soulcatcher must have been in touch with Mogaba at some point. She recommended him to the Radisha. Bet you the Woman took him on mostly because she didn’t want to get Catcher pissed off at her. Mogaba’s already promising the priests that he’ll catch Blade and Lady for them.” There had been huge bounties on those two from the moment the Radisha turned on the Company.
Mogaba never let failure dent his confidence.
Blade volunteered, “I could go hit them back first. It would be fun to pick them off and watch the live ones squirm...”
“No.” Croaker was in no mood for flights of fancy. “I know who’d pick off who if you went dancing with Mogaba. Sindawe. Talk to me about this.”
“I’m hearing this for the first time. I need to think about it, Captain.”
“Think out loud.”
“Mogaba is alone.” By which Sindawe meant that Mogaba had no Nar adherents anymore. Those who had gone with him when he left the Company were dead. “His sanity will be more strained than ever. He may become obsessed with destroying you, personally, because you took away his birthright.”
Croaker grunted, unsurprised. “Murgen. How long before he can get into our hair? It took four years for us to get where we could make it here still in good enough shape to starve. And we wouldn’t be as happy as we are now if the Radisha had fooled us and stayed faithful. We didn’t lose as many men fighting as I expected and a lot fewer to disease.”
He let slide the fact that we had come during the off season, when, normally, moving an army is next to impossible.
“Speaking of numbers,” Bucket said. “That last bunch who wanted to go home are long gone.”
Lady stated the obvious. “Mogaba won’t have to train the way we did. He can round up men we’ve already trained for him.”
The Old Man asked me, “What does the Radisha want from Mogaba?”
“The priests think he should just maintain control of the territories we overran. Some of them are real excited about their chances to make a killing down there. But the Woman just wants to keep us south of the mountains.” I chuckled. “His job will be the same as it was when he worked for Longshadow. Only he’ll plug the bottle from the other end.”
“Mogaba will come someday,” Isi observed. “As Sindawe said.”
Croaker grunted again.
Bucket said, “If he don’t bring half a shitload of timber, kites, and tons of bamboo, and comes in the summer...”
Longo cracked, “He could have peasants carry his supplies up, then eat the peasants.”
Sindawe, Ochiba and Isi glared.
Croaker said, “Stick to business. There’re changes happening in Taglios. Thanks to Murgen’s spells we know about some of them.”
Everybody waited for him to say something more. He did not. Finally, Lady remarked, “Soulcatcher is still a problem.”
Definitely. She had not responded to Lady’s barrage. Yet. I was not supposed to look for her but I did know she was still around. She was shielding herself with illusions and moving a lot. I had every confidence that she had lost no interest in causing us misery.
No one ever mentioned the child. I knew she had survived and had been rescued, not by the Kina to whom she wept her appeals but by Catcher, to the accompaniment of merry taunts. Lady and Croaker had hardened their hearts. Which was understandable. They had had scarcely more contact with her than some unknown child born the same day at the far end of the world.
I would not say anything. I was supposed to avoid Catcher until I received specific orders otherwise. The Old Man’s tolerance for my improvisations had been exhausted.
Sleepy’s loss remained unforgiven.
Croaker asked, “What about your mother-in-law, Murgen? What about Goblin and One-Eye?”
What could I say? “They’re still missing.” That could not be blamed on me. Not yet. He might find a way.
Our last contact with any of them had come when some of Goblin’s rangers had arrived with the Prahbrindrah Drah in manacles, Lisa Bowalk snarling in a cage on a cart, and no word at all about what Goblin was doing or why he was doing it. I did not think his desertion was part of the Old Man’s master plan. I refused to believe that Croaker could plan that far ahead. The pasty-faced little wizard was out there somewhere, playing out his own scheme.
I did not get many chances to look for him anymore. The dreams did not come as often now. If they did I visited Sarie first. Sarie and my son, that absolutely beautiful drooling lump she nicknamed Tobo because she did not want to pick a real name without me there to talk it over and find out face-to-face what his name would be and why.
She was determined to join me, though by no
w even the most remote parts of the swamp had heard about the falling-out between the Radisha and the Black Company. That would put Sahra at greater risk if she left the temple. Almost all the Nyueng Bao who had left their swamps in recent times have been associated with the Company somehow.
Sarie’s keepers were alert. They expected her to try something now she was no longer the size of a small house. Clever woman, she was using guerrilla tactics while she regained her strength. Every day in every way she made the priestly population more miserable. That was easy. She just imitated her mother. When the time came they would, probably, lack enthusiasm for the task of her recapture.
Croaker stared at Lady. He was waiting for her to say something else about her sister. The others did the same. Catcher weighed on all our minds. Her luck never stopped running strong. Her grudge list kept getting longer. Though there was no way we could hurt our cause any more. She could not do worse than kill us, could she?
Hell, we all take on a death sentence when we join the Company.
Lady said, “Several soldiers have gone missing the last couple of nights. Some probably deserted. But not all of them.” She waved. Isi and Ochiba, already cued, brought a bundle to the front of the crowd. They dropped it on the dirt floor.
I did not remind the Old Man that we could enjoy real floors and real furniture if he would just move into Overlook.
Lady said, “This may be a little ripe.”
Oh-oh.
Isi and Ochiba spun the dead man out of his wrappings. He did not stink as bad as I expected. He was shriveled like an old mummy. His mouth was open in a scream that would never end. He seemed to have suffered a lot of bruises before he died.
Those would have been self-inflicted during his final struggle. “Shadow got him,” I said. Needlessly.
Croaker eyed me. I shrugged. “No shadows have gotten through since I’ve been on guard.” I was sure. There would have been an uproar.
“They’re under control, then,” he said. “It’s her, using Longshadow’s leftovers.”
Catcher was the new Shadowmaster. Maybe she was honing her skills.
Lady observed, “There’s nothing we can do about this kind of attack except never go anywhere alone and never without bamboo... What’s the matter with him?”
The “him” she referred to was the Company Annalist, who had started making weird noises. He jerked around, apparently trying to swallow his own tongue. So they told me later. At the time I was out of touch with my body entirely. I was a fly who never saw the swatter coming.
I went to the place of all the bones for a moment and for that whole eternity seemed to be smeared all over the grim landscape. A white crow mocked me. Then I was the white crow. Then I was out of there but I did not follow my habitual course. I did not get to see all those grumpy old men glowering from their cocoons of ice. I got to wing my way away through curtains of darkness back to those gaunt and wonderful days when first I met my Sarie, then before that, where I met my own ghost and joined it in a tour of the besieged city. None of the words from my invisible beak were my own but the madwoman who manufactured them did not seem to be paying attention to or really directing what was happening. Poor me. I was like a moth caught in an unexpected squall. The hammer of my desperate wings did nothing to daunt a gale indifferent to my existence.
I saw a lot of death and despair. I learned nothing new and saw nothing I had not had a more intimate relationship with in the past.
Catcher maybe just poked at me in passing, because she was bored, or maybe she was unaware that she had bumped me at all. It did not matter. I could not retaliate. All I could do was flap like a son of a bitch and hope I could survive one more storm.
Darkness came.
90
I wakened in the alcove where Smoke used to be stored. It was dark. I had no idea how long I had been out. The meeting was over, that was certain. I did not hear a sound.
I started to clamber out of there, found I was incredibly weak. My legs betrayed me when I tried to stand. I pitched forward through the curtain masking the alcove.
There was a sudden mouselike scurry. I lifted my head. The little bit of light betrayed the rodent.
Thai Dei was stuffing papers back into piles while trying to appear innocent. Maybe he was. He could not read.
“There you are. I got worried.” He helped me up. “What happened?”
My knees were watery. “I had one of those attacks like I used to have when we were in Dejagore and Taglios.”
“Why did they...? They all trooped out of here hours ago. Even the guards went away.”
“What time is it?” The meeting had begun early in the morning.
“Be sunset in an hour.”
“Shit. A whole day shot, then.” Thai Dei helped me stay standing. I did not shake him off. I looked for food. Food always helped after a long ghostwalk with Smoke.
This was not the same. At least cold, tough, burnt mutton did not help. And there was nothing else available.
What I wanted was something alcoholic. A few amateurs had arisen to take One-Eye’s place. Best known were Willow Swan and Cordy Mather, who had stayed around despite being free to go back north. Cordy no longer had that fire in his belly where the Radisha was concerned. But their product was no good. And, if I wanted some, I had to acquire it through intermediaries since we all had to pretend to observe the rules.
But I had a suspicion, of late, about where One-Eye could have hidden his manufacturing equipment. There was a small, reinforced cubby in my old dugout where I had kept the Annals and the odd private item. It had survived disasters unscathed. Mother Gota had helped build it.
We climbed up out of Croaker’s dugout, me still wobble-kneed and griping, “I wish the hell he’d move into the fucking fortress.” The experimentation was all over but our crowd was still scattered through the hills, roughing it. An hour of light remained. “Where is everybody?” I did not see a soul closer than the ruins of Kiaulune. That gave me a little shock of fright. Had I returned to the world I left when the seizure took me? Was I caught in another layer of dream?
“They all went away. Even the guards.” Thai Dei repeated the news as though he was talking to someone both deaf and dense. “Else I could not have entered the Liberator’s shelter.”
It had been a while since anybody called the Old Man that. “I take it Uncle Doj went to keep an eye on them.”
Thai Dei did not reply.
I headed for my former home. “Compared to the bunker we moved to over there this dump was a palace.”
Lady and the Old Man had turned my palace into a prison. The downhill side entrance that we put in for Mother Gota and Uncle Doj now opened into an exercise area fenced with captured spears. Lisa Bowalk lay in a cage there, muzzle on paws, exposed to the elements, dully resigned. The Prahbrindrah Drah paced, avoiding glittering spearpoints and the reach of the shapeshifter’s claws. He seemed patient, counting his condition only a temporary setback.
Neither Longshadow, Howler, nor Narayan Singh were outside. Singh’s absence was not surprising. He was punished if he ventured into the light. But the former Shadowmaster was not and he hated the darkness inside. He feared what might be lurking there.
The poor old boy had lost all his self-confidence. He spent most of his time shivering, rocking and whimpering to himself. He was losing weight. Which was hard to believe.
The stench was awful. Those people had no friends now. They lived worse than animals in the crudest zoo or feedlot. Passersby were encouraged to torment Longshadow and the living saint of the Deceivers.
Howler had not earned his final standing on Lady’s shitlist. He was treated with indifference yet fed the best table scraps.
Smoke would be inside somewhere, too. He and the prince were treated best. Bowalk was fed and otherwise ignored as long as she behaved.
A sign that could be read by only a few actually insisted that the Prahbrindrah Drah was an honored guest. Somebody’s little joke.
“A g
ood storm would help with the smell,” I said. I glanced at the sky. Relief seemed unlikely anytime soon.
Thai Dei grunted. He raised a hand.
Something was up. He was on his toes, nostrils flaring. His head moved in little jerks as he tried to hear something.
I froze. This was his business. His expertise.
I heard it, too, now. Scratching from within the dugout. Months had gone by and still I had no clear idea why Longshadow and Singh remained among the living. They kept farting around, Croaker and Lady would regret not having disposed of them quickly.
Lady thought they might be useful. Someday. Somehow. Somewhere.
“Better find out what it is,” I said. With no enthusiasm whatsoever. This kind of thing always meant trouble. “What happened to Uncle Doj?” He might be handy to have around if something happened. I was not carrying anything but a little three-ball bamboo stick.
Thai Dei stepped over to the headquarters company woodpile now serviced by Shadowlander peasant contractors and selected a yard of kindling with a burly knot at one end. He gestured me forward.
I slipped down and yanked on the door of my former home.
Narayan Singh, the living saint of the Deceivers, tumbled into the twilight. He had been kept inside for a long time. He was naturally dark-skinned but had acquired a pasty, maggoty coloration. Maybe Lady was doing more than just keeping him locked up in his own filth. She could be subtle when she wanted. She just did not want that often.
Thai Dei bopped him on the noggin.
Poor old Narayan. His life had not gone well for a long time. And the son of a bitch had earned every second of pain. Bet his goddess snickered whenever she thought about him.
Half of his torment would be the waiting, knowing that someday Lady would take time to offer him some specialized, personalized, unloving attention.
“Let’s be real careful,” I told Thai Dei.
Thai Dei grunted. He wore the ultimate Nyueng Bao stone face. To Tan had not been forgotten.