Shapeshifter’s presence in Gea-Xle, the dead again living, waiting for Lady. There were hidden schemes brewing. Too much had happened to let me believe otherwise.
I had not pressed her. Yet. She was being a good soldier. Maybe waiting …
For what?
I had learned long ago that I can find out more around her sort by watching and listening and thinking than I ever do by asking. They lie and mislead even when there is no need. More, except in her own case, I did not think she had any better idea what was stirring than I did.
The grove staff showed us to a private bower with its own hot mineral bath. The Nar spread out. Goblin and One-Eye found themselves inconspicuous posts. Frogface stayed close, to interpret.
We settled.
“How is your research coming?” Lady asked. She toyed with some plump purple grapes.
“Strangely is the only way to describe it. I think we’re right up next to the place where you come to the end of the earth and fall off the edge.”
“What? Oh. Your sense of humor.”
“Taglios is infested with chartmakers. They do good work. But I can’t find one map that will get me where I want to go.”
“Maybe you haven’t been able to make them understand what you need.”
“It wasn’t that. They understood. That’s the problem. You tell them what you need and they go deaf. New maps only run to the southern borders of Taglian territory. When you can find an old one, it fades to blank eight hundred miles southeast of the city. It’s the same even with maps so good they show damned near every tree and cottage.”
“They’re hiding something?”
“A whole city? Don’t seem likely. But it does look like there’s no other explanation.”
“You asked the appropriate questions?”
“With the silver-tongued cunning of a snake. When the blank space comes up translation problems develop.”
“What will you do?”
Dusk had come. Lamplighters were at work. I watched a moment. “Maybe use Frogface somehow. I’m not sure. We’re far enough back that the Annals are almost useless. But the indicators are that we head straight for that blank space. You have any thoughts about it?”
“Me?”
“You. Things are happening around the Company. I don’t think that’s because I strut so pretty.”
“Phooey.”
“I haven’t pressed, Lady. For all there’s reason. And I won’t—unless I have to. But it would be nice to know why we’ve got one dead Taken hanging around watching us out of the bushes and another one that used to be your buddy trying to kill us back in those swamps. Might be interesting to know if he knew you were aboard that barge, or if he was working on a grudge against Shifter, or if he just wanted to keep traffic from moving down the river. Might be interesting to know if we’re likely to run into him again. Or somebody else who didn’t die on time.”
I tried to keep my tone gentle and neutral but some of my anger got through.
The first food arrived, bits of iced melon soaked in brandy. While we nibbled, some thoughtful soul gave our guardians food as well. Less elegant fare, perhaps, but food nevertheless.
Lady sucked a melon ball and looked thoughtful. Then her whole stance changed. She shouted, “Don’t eat that stuff!” She used the tongue of the Jewel Cities, which by now even the most thick-witted of the Nar understood.
Silence grabbed the grove. The Nar dropped their platters.
I rose. “What is it?”
“Someone has tampered with their food.”
“Poison?”
“Drugged, I’d guess. I’d have to check more closely.”
I went and got the nearest’s platter. He looked grim behind his Nar mask of indifference. He wanted to hurt somebody.
He got his chance when I turned back with my plunder.
A quick shuffle of feet. A thwack! of wood against flesh. A cry of pain that was little more than a whimper. I turned. The Nar had his spearpoint resting on the throat of a man sprawled before him. I recognized one of the lamplighters.
A long knife lay not far from his outflung hand.
I surveyed our surroundings. Bland faces watched from every direction.
“One-Eye. Frogface. Come here.” They came. “I want something low-key. Something that won’t disturb anybody’s dinner. But something that will have him in a mood to talk when I’m ready. Can do?”
One-Eye snickered. “I know just the thing.” He rubbed his hands in wicked glee while Goblin, left out, pouted. “I know just the thing. Go enjoy your dinner and sweet nothings. Old One-Eye will take care of everything. I’ll have him ready to sing like a canary.”
He gestured. An invisible force snagged the lamplighter’s heels. Up he went, wriggling like a fish on a line, mouth stretched to scream but nothing coming out.
I settled opposite Lady. A jerk of my head. “One-Eye’s idea of low-key. Don’t let the victim scream.” I popped a melon ball into my mouth.
One-Eye stopped lifting the lamplighter when his nose was twenty feet off the ground.
Lady began poking through the Nar’s food.
* * *
The expedient of turning my back on One-Eye did not let me attain the mood I’d had in mind when arranging the evening. And Lady remained troubled.
I glanced over my shoulder occasionally.
The captive shed bits of clothing like dead leaves peeling away. The flesh beneath, betrayed, crawled with tiny lime and lemon glowing worms. When two of different hues butted heads they sparked and the failed assassin tried to shriek. When the mood took him, One-Eye let the man fall till his nose was a foot off the ground. Frogface whispered into his ear till One-Eye hoisted him up again.
Real low-key. What the hell would he have done if I’d asked for a show?
Goblin caught my eye. I raised an eyebrow. He used deaf sign to tell me, “Company coming. Looks like big stuff.”
I pretended no greater interest than my meal while watching Lady intently. She seemed possessed of no special awareness.
There were two of them, well dressed and courteous. One was a native, walnut brown but not of negroid stock. The people of Taglios were dark but not negroid. The negroid peoples we had seen there were all visitors from up the river. The other one we knew already, Willow Swan, with the hair as yellow as maize.
Swan spoke to the Nar nearest him while his companion appraised One-Eye’s efforts. I nodded to Goblin, who went to see if he could get any sense from Swan.
He came back looking thoughtful. “Swan says the guy with him is the boss wog around here. His choice of words, not mine.”
“I guess it was bound to come.” I exchanged glances with Lady. She had on her empress’s face, readable as a rock. I wanted to shake her, to hug her, to do something to free up the passion that had appeared so briefly before going underground. She shrugged.
I said, “Invite them to join us. And tell One-Eye to send the imp over. I want him to check on Swan’s translations.”
The serving staff got down on their faces as our guests approached. It was the first time I had seen that kind of behavior in Taglios. Swan’s prince was the real thing.
Swan got right to it. “This here’s the Prahbrindrah Drah, the head guy around here.”
“And you work for him.”
He smiled. “In a left-hand sort of way. Drafted. He wants to know if you’re looking for a commission.”
“You know we’re not.”
“I told him. But he wanted to check it out personal.”
“We’re on a quest.” I thought that sounded dramatic enough.
“A mission from the gods?”
“A what?”
“These Taglians are superstitious. You ought to know that by now. That would be the way to get the quest idea across. Mission from the gods. Sure you couldn’t stick around for a while? Take a break from the road. I know how rough it is, travelling and travelling. And my man needs somebody to do his dirty work. You guys got a rep for han
dling that stuff.”
“What do you really know about us, Swan?”
He shrugged. “Stories.”
“Stories. Hunh.”
The Prahbrindrah Drah said something.
“He wants to know why that guy is hanging up in the air.”
“Because he tried to stab me in the back. After somebody tried to poison my guards. After a while I’m going to ask him why.”
Swan and the Prahbrindrah chattered. The Prahbrindrah looked irked. He glanced at One-Eye’s pet, chattered some more.
“He wants to know about your quest.”
“You heard it all coming down the river. You told him already.”
“Man, he’s trying to be polite.”
I shrugged. “How come so much interest in a few people just passing through?”
Swan started looking nervous. We were starting to move in toward it. The Prahbrindrah said several sentences.
Swan said, “The Prahbrindrah says you’ve talked about where you’ve been—and he would like to hear more about your adventures because far peoples and places intrigue him—and your quest, but you haven’t really said where you’re going.” He sounded like he was trying to translate very accurately. Frogface gave me a shallow nod.
We had told Swan’s bunch little during the passage south from the Third Cataract. We had hidden from them as much as they from us. I decided to pronounce the name maybe better kept to myself. “Khatovar.”
Willow did not bother translating.
The Prahbrindrah chattered.
“He says you shouldn’t do that.”
“Too late to stop, Swan.”
“Then you got troubles you can’t even imagine, Captain.” Swan translated. The Prince replied. He got excited.
“Boss says it’s your neck and you can shave with an axe if you want, but no sane man says that name. Death could strike you down before you finished.” He shrugged and smirked as he spoke. “Though it’s likely more mundane forces will slaughter you if you insist on chasing that chimera. There’s bad territory between here and there.” Swan looked at the Prince and rolled his eyes. “We hear tales of monsters and sorcery.”
“Hey, really.” I plucked a morsel from a small bird, chewed, swallowed. “Swan, I brought this outfit here all the way from the Barrowland. You remember the Barrowland. Monsters and sorcery? Seven thousand miles. I never lost a man. You remember the river? Folks who got in my way didn’t live to be sorry. Listen close. I’m trying to say a couple of things here. I’m eight hundred miles from the edge of the map. I won’t stop now. I can’t.” It was one of the longest speeches I’ve ever made, outside reading to the men from the Annals.
“Your problem is those eight hundred miles, Cap. The other seven thousand were a stroll in the country.”
The Prahbrindrah said something short. Swan nodded but did not translate. I looked at Frogface. He told me, “Glittering stone.”
“What?”
“That’s what he said, chief. Glittering stone. I don’t know what he meant.”
“Swan?”
“It’s a local expression. ‘The walking dead’ is the closest way to say it in Rosean. It has something to do with old times and something called the Free Companies of Khatovar, which was bad medicine back when.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The Black Company is the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, Swan.”
He gave me a sharp look. Then he translated.
The Prince chattered back. He stared at One-Eye’s victim as he did.
“Cap, he says he supposes anything is possible. But a returning company ain’t been spotted since his granddaddy’s granddaddy was a pup. He wonders, though. Says maybe you’re real. Your coming was foretold.” Quick glance at Frogface, with a scowl, like the imp was a traitor. “And the Shadowmasters have warned him against dealing with you. Though that would be the natural inclination, considering the devastation and despair spread by the fanatics of old.”
I glanced at Frogface. He nodded. Swan was striving for exactitude.
Lady said, “He’s playing games, Croaker. He wants something. Tell him to get to the point.”
“That would be nice, Swan.”
He continued translating, “But yesterday’s terror means nothing today. You are not those fanatics. That was seen on the river. And Trogo Taglios will bow the neck to no one. If the pestilence in the south fears a band of freebooters, he is willing to forget the ancient scores and tend to those of his own time. If you too can forget.”
I didn’t have the foggiest what the hell he was talking about.
“Croaker!” Lady snapped, catching the scent of what was in the back of my mind almost before I did. “We don’t have time for you to indulge your curiosity about the past. There’s something going on here. Tend to it before we get our butts in a sling.”
She was turning into one of the guys for sure.
“You getting the idea where we stand, Swan? You don’t really figure we think running into you and the woman up there was by chance, do you? Talk me some plain talk.”
* * *
Some not so very plain talk took a while. Darkness came and the moon rose. It climbed the sky. The operators of the grove became exasperated but were too polite to ask their ruling prince to bug off. And while we stayed, so did the scores who had come out to look at us.
“Definitely something going on,” I whispered to Lady. “But how do I dig it out of him?”
The Prahbrindrah played down everything he said, but the presence of the city fathers shrieked that Taglios was approaching a perilous crossroads. An undercurrent in what I heard told me the Prince wanted to spit in the face of calamity.
Willow tried to explain. “A while back—and nobody’s sure exactly when because nobody was looking for it—what you might call a darkness turned up in a place called Pityus, which is like four hundred miles southeast of Taglios. Nobody worried about it. Then it spread to Tragevec and Kiaulune, which are pretty important, and Six and Fred, and all of a sudden everybody was worried but it was too late. You had this huge chunk of country ruled by these four sorcerers that refugees called Shadowmasters. They had a thing about shadows. Changed Tragevec’s name to Shadowlight and Kiaulune to Shadowcatch and nowadays most everybody calls their empire the Shadowlands.”
“You’re going to get around to telling me what this’s got to do with us, aren’t you?”
“Within a year after the Shadowmasters took over they had those cities—which hadn’t practiced war since the terror of Khatovar—armed and playing imperial games. In the years since, the Shadowmasters have conquered most of the territories between Taglios’s southern frontiers and the edge of the map.”
“I’m starting to smell it, Croaker,” Lady said. She had grown grim as she listened.
“I am, too. Go on, Swan.”
“Well, before they got to us … Before they went to work on Taglios they had some kind of falling out down there. Started feuding. The refugees talk about the whole big show. Intrigues, betrayals, subversions, assassinations, alliances shifting all over. Whenever it looked like one of them was starting to get ahead the others would gang up. Was like that for fifteen, eighteen years. So Taglios wasn’t threatened.”
“But now they are?”
“Now they’re all looking this way. They made a move last year but it didn’t work out for them.” He looked smug. “What they got here in this berg is all the guts anybody could ask—and not a bat in broad daylight’s notion what the hell to do with them. Me and Cordy and Blade, we kind of got drafted last year. But I wasn’t never much of a soldier and neither was they. As generals we’re like tits on a boar hog.”
“So this isn’t about bodyguarding and dirty-tricking for your Prince at all. Is it? He wants to drag us into his fight. Did he think he could get us on the cheap or something? Didn’t you make a report about our trip down here?”
“He’s the kind of guy who’s got to check things for himself. Maybe he figured to see if you rated yourself che
ap. I told him all the stories I ever heard about you guys. He still wanted to see for himself. He’s a pretty good old boy. First prince I ever seen that tries to do what a prince is supposed to do.”
“Rarer than frog hair, then. I’m sure. But you said it, Swan. We’re on a mission from the gods. We don’t have time to mess in local disputes. Maybe when we’re on our way back.”
Swan laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You really don’t got no choice.”
“No?” I tried to read him. I couldn’t. Lady shrugged when I looked at her. “Well? Why not?”
“To get where you want to go you got to head right through the Shadowlands. Seven, eight hundred miles of them. I don’t think even you guys can make it. Neither does he.”
“You said they were four hundred miles away.”
“Four hundred miles to Pityus, Cap. Where it started. They got everything from the border south now. Seven, eight hundred to Shadowcatch. And like I said, they started on us last year. Took everything south of the Main.”
I knew the Main to be a broad river south of Taglios, a natural frontier and barrier.
Swan continued, “Their troops are only eighty miles from Taglios some places. And we know they’re planning a push as soon as the rivers go down. And we don’t figure they’re gonna be polite. All four Shadowmasters said they would get mean if the Prahbrindrah had anything to do with you guys.”
I looked at Lady. “Damned awful lot of folks know more about what I’m doing and where I’m going than I do.”
She ignored me. She asked, “Why didn’t he run us off, Swan? Why did he send you to meet us?”
“Oh, he never sent us. He didn’t know about that part till we got back. He just figures if the Shadowmasters are scared of you guys then he ought to be friends with you.”
It wasn’t me who frightened them, but why give that away? Swan and his buddies and boss didn’t need to know who Lady had been. “He’s got guts.”
“They all got guts. Out the yang-yang. Pity is, they don’t know what to do with them. And I can’t show them. Like he says, the Shadowmasters would come sooner or later anyway, so why appease them? Why let them pick their time?”