Elmo and I busied ourselves preparing breakfast. Otto usually handled the cooking, so we had an excuse for breaking routine. After a time, Soulcatcher observed, “There’s no point to you people staying here. Your Captain’s prayers have been answered.”
“We can go?” Elmo asked.
“No reason to stay, is there?”
One-Eye had reasons. We ignored them.
“Start packing after breakfast,” Elmo told us.
“You’re going to travel in this weather?” One-Eye demanded.
“Captain wants us back.”
I took Soulcatcher a platter of scrambled eggs. I do not know why. He did not eat often, and breakfast almost never. But he accepted it, turned his back.
I looked out the window. The mob had discovered the change. Someone had brushed the snow off Raker’s face. His eyes were open, seemed to be watching. Weird.
Men were scrambling around under the table, fighting over the coins we had left behind. The pileup seethedlike maggots in a putrid corpse. “Somebody ought to do him honor,” I murmured. “He was a hell of an opponent.”
“You have your Annals,” Soulcatcher told me. And, “Only a conqueror bothers to honor a fallen foe.”
I was headed for my own plate by then, I wondered what he meant, but a hot meal was more important at the moment.
They were all down at the stable except me and Otto. They were going to bring the wagon around for the wounded soldier. I had given him something to get him through the rough handling to come.
They were taking their time. Elmo wanted to rig a canopy to shield Otto from the weather. I played solitaire while I waited.
Out of nowhere, Soulcatcher said, “She’s very beautiful, Croaker. Young-looking. Fresh. Dazzling. With a heart of flint. The Limper is a warm puppy by comparison. Pray you never catch her eye.”
Soulcatcher stared out the window. I wanted to ask questions, but none would come at that moment. Damn. I really wasted a chance then.
What color was her hair? Her eyes? How did she smile? It all meant a lot to me when I could not know.
Soulcatcher rose, donned his cloak. “If only for the Limper, it’s been worth it,” he said. He paused at the door, pierced me with his stare. “You and Elmo and Raven. Drink a toast to me. Hear?”
Then he was gone.
Elmo came in a minute later. We lifted Otto and started back to Meystrikt. My nerves were not worth a damn for a long time.
Chapter Four: WHISPER
The engagement gave us the most gain for least effort of any I can remember. It was pure serendipity that went one hundred percent our way. It was a disaster for the Rebel.
We were in flight from the Salient, where the Lady’s defenses had collapsed almost overnight. Running with us were five or six hundred regulars who had lost their units. For speed’s sake, the Captain had chosen to cut straight through the Forest of Cloud to Lords, instead of following the longer southern road around.
A Rebel mainforce battalion was a day or two behind us. We could have turned and whipped them, but the Captain wanted to give them the slip instead. I liked his thinking. The fighting around Roses had been grim. Thousands had fallen. With so many extra bodies attaching themselves to the Company, I had been losing men for lack of time to treat them.
Our orders were to report to Nightcrawler at Lords. Soulcatcher thought Lords would be the target of the next
Rebel thrust. Tired as we were, we expected to see more bitter fighting before winter slowed the war’s pace.
“Croaker! Lookee here!” Whitey came charging toward where I sat with the Captain and Silent and one or two others. He had a naked woman draped over his shoulder. She might have been attractive had she not been so thoroughly abused.
“Not bad, Whitey. Not bad,” I said, and went back to my journal. Behind Whitey the. whooping and screaming continued. The men were harvesting the fruits of victory.
“They’re barbarians,” the Captain observed without rancor.
“Got to let them cut loose sometimes,” I reminded him. “Better here than with the people of Lords.”
The Captain agreed reluctantly. He just does not have much stomach for plunder and rape, much as they are part of our business. I think he is a secret romantic, at least when females are involved.
I tried to soften his mood. “They asked for it, taking up arms.”
Bleakly, he asked me, “How long has this been going on, Croaker? Seems like forever, doesn’t it? Can you even remember a time when you weren’t a soldier? What’s the point? Why are we even here? We keep winning battles, but the Lady is losing the war. Why don’t they just call the whole thing off and go home?”
He was partially right. Since Forsberg it has been one retreat after another, though we have done well. The Salient had been secure till Shapeshifter and the Limper got into the act.
Our latest retreat had brought us stumbling into this Rebel base camp. We presumed it was the main training, and staging center for the campaign against Nightcrawler. Luckily, we spotted the Rebel before he spotted us. We surrounded the place and roared in before dawn. We were badly outnumbered, but the Rebel did not put up much of a fight. Most were green volunteers. The startling aspect was the presence of an amazon regiment.
We had heard of them, of course. There were several in the east, around Rust, where the fighting is more bitter and sustained than here. This was our first encounter. It left the men disdainful of women warriors, despite their having fought better than their male compatriots.
Smoke began drifting our way. The men were firing the barracks and headquarters buildings. The Captain muttered, “Croaker, go make sure those fools don’t fire the forest.”
I rose, picked up my bag, ambled down into the din.
There were bodies everywhere. The fools must have felt completely safe. They hadn’t put up a stockade or trenched around the encampment. Stupid. That is the first thing you do, even when you know there is no enemy within a hundred miles. You put a roof over your head later. Wet is better than dead.
I should be used to this. I have been with the Company a long time. And it does bother me less than it used to. I have hung armor plate over my moral soft spots. But I still try to avoid looking at the worst.
You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.
Raven laughs when he reads my accounts. “Sugar and spice,” he calls them, and threatens to take the Annals away and write the stories the way he sees them happen.
Hardass Raven. Mocking me. And who was that out there roaming around the camp, breaking it up wherever the men were amusing themselves with a little torture? Who had a ten year old girl trailing him on an old jack mule? Not Croaker, brothers. Not Croaker. Croaker isn’t no romantic. That is a passion reserved for the Captain and Raven.
Naturally, Raven has become the Captain’s best friend. They sit around together like a couple of rocks, talking about the same things boulders do. They are content just to share one another’s company.
Elmo was leading the arsonists. They were older Company men who had sated their less intense hungers for flesh. Those still mauling the ladies were mostly our young regular hangers-on.
They had given the Rebel a good fight at Roses, but he had been too strong. Half the Circle of Eighteen had ranged themselves against us there. We had had only the Limper and Shapeshifter on our side. Those two spent more time trying to sabotage one another than trying to repel the Circle. Result, a debacle. The Lady’s most humiliating defeat in a decade.
The Circle pulls together most of the time. They do not spend more energy abusing one another than they spend on their enemies.
&
nbsp; “Hey! Croaker!” One-Eye called. “Join the fun.” He tossed a burning brand through a barracks doorway. The building promptly exploded. Heavy oaken shutters blew off the windows. A gout of flame enveloped One-Eye. He came charging out, kinky hair smoldering below the band of his weird, floppy hat. I wrestled him down, used that hat to slap his hair. “All right. All right,” he growled. “You don’t have to enjoy yourself so damned much.”
Unable to stifle a grin, I helped him up. “You all right?”
“Singed,” he said, assuming that air of phony dignity cats adopt after some particularly inept performance. Something like, “That’s what I meant to do all along.”
The fire roared. Pieces of thatch soared and bobbed over the building. I observed, “The Captain sent me to make sure you clowns didn’t start a forest fire.” Just then Goblin ambled around the side of the flaming building. His broad mouth stretched in a smirk.
One-Eye took one look and shrieked. “You maggot brain! You set me up for that.” He let out a spine-tingling howl and started dancing. The roar of the flames deepened, became rhythmic. Soon it seemed I could see something prancing among the flames behind the windows.
Goblin saw it too. His smirk vanished. He gulped, went white, began a little dance of his own. He and One-Eye howled and squawked and virtually ignored one another.
A watering trough disgorged its contents, which arced through the air and splashed the flames. The contents of a water barrel followed. The roar of the fire dwindled.
One-Eye pranced over and took a poke at Goblin, trying to break his concentration. Goblin weaved and bobbed and squeaked and kept on dancing. More water hit the fire.
“What a pair.”
I turned. Elmo had come over to watch. “A pair indeed,” I replied. Fussing, feuding, whining, they could be an allegory of their bigger brethren in the trade. Except their conflict does not run half to the bone, like that between Shifter and the Limper, When you slice through the fog, you find that these two are friends. There are no friends among the Taken.
“Got something to show you,” Elmo said. He would not say anything more. I nodded and followed him.
Goblin and One-Eye kept at it. Goblin appeared to be ahead. I stopped worrying about the fire.
“You figured how to read these northern chicken tracks?” Elmo asked. He had led me into what must have been the headquarters for the whole camp. He indicated a mountain of papers his men had piled on the floor, evidently as tinder for another fire.
“I think I can puzzle it out.”
“Thought you might find something in this stuff.”
I selected a paper at random. It was a copy of an order directing a specific Rebel mainforce battalion to filter into Lords and disappear into the homes of local sympathizers till called to strike at Lords’ defenders from within. It was signed Whisper. A list of contacts was appended.
“I’ll say,” I said, suddenly short of breath. That one order betrayed a half-dozen Rebel secrets, and implied several more. “I’ll say.” I grabbed another. Like the first, it was a directive to a specific unit. Like the first, it was a window into the heart of current Rebel strategy. “Get the Captain,” I told Elmo. “Get Goblin and One-Eye and the Lieutenant and anybody else who maybe ought to be....”
I must have looked weird. Elmo wore a strange, nervous expression when he interrupted. “What the hell is it, Croaker?”
“All the orders and plans for the campaign against Lords. The complete order of battle.” But that was not the bottom line. That I was going to save for the Captain himself. “And hurry. Minutes might be critical. And stop them from burning anything like this. For Hell’s sake, stop them. We’ve hit paydirt. Don’t send it up in smoke.”
Elmo slammed through the door. I heard his bellows fade into the distance. A good sergeant, Elmo. He does not waste time asking questions. Grunting, I settled myself on the floor and began scanning documents.
The door creaked. I did not look up. I was in a fever, glancing at documents as fast as I could yank them off the pile, sorting them into smaller stacks. Muddy boots appeared at the edge of my vision. “Can you read these, Raven?” I had recognized his step.
“Can I? Yes.”
“Help me see what we’ve got here.”
Raven settled himself opposite me. The pile lay between us, nearly blocking our view of one another. Darling positioned herself behind him, out of his way but well within the shadow of his protection. Her quiet, dull eyes still reflected the horror of that far village.
In some ways Raven is a paradigm for the Company. The difference between him and the rest of us is that he is a little more of everything, a little bigger than life. Maybe, by being the newcomer, the only brother from the north, he is symbolic of our life in the Lady’s service. His moral agonies have become our moral agonies. His silent refusal to howl and beat his breast in adversity is ours as well. We prefer to speak with the metallic voice of our arms.
Enough. Why venture into the meaning of it all? Elmo had struck paydirt. Raven and I went sifting for nuggets.
Goblin and One-Eye drifted in. Neither could read the northern script. They started to amuse themselves by sending sourceless shadows chasing one another around the walls. Raven gave them a nasty look. Their ceaseless clowning and bickering can be tiresome when you have something on your mind.
They looked at him, dropped the game, sat down quietly, almost like children admonished. Raven has that knack, that energy, that impact of personality, to make men, more dangerous than he, shudder in his cold dark wind.
The Captain arrived, accompanied by Elmo and Silent. Through the doorway I glimpsed several men hanging around. Funny the way they smell things shaping up.
“What have you got, Croaker?” the Captain asked.
I figured he had milked Elmo dry, so I got straight to the kicker. “These orders.” I tapped one of my stacks.
“All these reports.” I tapped another. “They’re all signed by Whisper. We’re kicking up the veggies in Whisper’s private garden.” My voice was up in the high squeak range.
For a while nobody said anything. Goblin made a few squeaky noises when Candy and the other sergeants rushed in. Finally, the Captain asked Raven, “That right?”
Raven nodded. “Judging by the documents, she’s been in and out since early spring.”
The Captain folded his hands, began pacing. He looked like a tired old monk on his way to evening prayer.
Whisper is the best known of the Rebel generals. Her stubborn genius has held the eastern front together despite the best efforts of the Ten. She is also the most dangerous of the Circle of Eighteen. She is known for the thoroughness with which she plans campaigns. In a war which, too often, resembles armed chaos on both sides, her forces stand out for their tight organization, discipline, and clarity of purpose.
The Captain mused, “She’s supposed to be commanding the Rebel army at Rust. Right?” The struggle for Rust was three years old. Rumor had hundreds of square miles laid waste. During the winter past both sides had been reduced to eating their own dead to survive.
I nodded. The question was rhetorical. He was thinking out loud.
“And Rust has been a killing ground for years. Whisper won’t break. The Lady won’t back off. But if Whisper is coming here, then the Circle has decided to let Rust fall.”
I added, “It means they’re shifting from an eastern to a northern strategy.” The north remains the Lady’s weak flank. The west is prostrate. The Lady’s allies rule the sea to the south. The north has been ignored since the Empire’s frontiers reached the great forests above Forsberg, It is in the north that the Rebel has managed his most spectacular successes.
The Lieutenant observed, “They have the momentum, with Forsberg taken, the Salient overrun, Roses gone, and Rye besieged. There are Rebel mainforcers headed for Wist and Jane. They’ll be stopped, but the Circle must know that. So they’re dancing on the other foot and coming at Lords. If Lords goes, they’re almost to the edge of th
e Windy Country. Cross the Windy Country, climb the Stair of Tear, and they’re looking down at Charm from a hundred miles away.”
I continued scanning and sorting. “Elmo, you might look around and see if you can come up with anything else. She might have something tucked away.”
“Use One-Eye, Goblin, and Silent,” Raven suggested. “Better chance of finding something.”
The Captain okayed the proposal. He told the Lieutenant, “Get that business out there wrapped up. Carp, you and Candy get the men ready to move out. Match, double your perimeter guard.”
“Sir?” Candy asked.
“You don’t want to be here when Whisper gets back, do you? Goblin, come back here. Get a hold of Soulcatcher. This goes to the top. Now.”
Goblin made an awful face, then went into a corner and began murmuring to himself. It was a quiet little sorcery-to start.
The Captain rolled on. “Croaker, you and Raven pack these documents when you’re done. We’ll want them along.”
“I maybe better save the best out for Catcher,” I said. “Some will need immediate attention if we’re to get any use out of them. I mean, something will have to be done before Whisper can put the word out.”
He cut me off. “Right. I’ll send you a wagon. Don’t dilly-dally.” He looked grey around the edges as he stalked outside.
A new strain of terror entered the screaming and shouting outside. I untangled my aching legs and went to the door. They were herding the Rebels together on their drill field. The prisoners sensed the Company’s sudden eagerness to cut and run. They thought they were about to die just minutes before salvation arrived.
Shaking my head, I returned to my reading. Raven gave me a look that might have meant he shared my pain. On the other hand, it might have contained contempt for my weakness. With Raven it is hard to tell.
One-Eye shoved through the door, stomped over, dumped an armload of bundles wrapped in oilskin. Moist clods clung to them. “You were right. We dug these up behind her sleeping quarters.”
Goblin let out a long, shrill screech as chilling as an owl’s when you are alone in the woods at midnight. One-Eye charged the sound.