“Ease up, Willow,” Mather said.
Swan ignored him. “Call me a cynic, Smoke. But I’d bet about anything you and the Radisha had it scoped out to screw them from the start. Eh? Wouldn’t do to have them slice through the Shadowlands. But why the hell not? I never did get that part.”
“It ain’t over yet, Swan,” Blade said. “Wait. Smoke going to get his turn to cry.”
The others gawked at Blade. He spoke so seldom that when he did they knew it meant something. What did he know?
Swan asked, “You see something I missed?”
Cordy snapped, “Damn it, will you calm down?”
“Why the hell should I? The whole damned world is swamped by conniving old farts like Smoke. They been screwing the rest of us since the gods started keeping time. Look at this little poof. Keeps whining about how he’s got to lay low and not let the Shadowmasters find out about him. I think that means he’s got no balls. That Lady … You know who she used to be? She had balls enough to face them. You give that half a think you’ll realize how she laid more on the line than this old freak ever could.”
“Calm down, Willow.”
“Calm down, hell. It ain’t right. Somebody’s got to tell old farts like this to go suck rocks.”
Blade grunted agreement. But Blade didn’t like anyone in authority.
Swan, not as upset as he put on, noted that Blade was in position to whack the wizard if he got obnoxious.
Smoke smiled. “Swan, once upon a time all us old farts were young loudmouths like you.”
Mather stepped between them. “Enough! Instead of squabbling, how about we get out of here before that mess catches up with us?” Remnants of the battle swirled around the toes of the foothills. “We can gather the garrisons from the towns north of here and collect everybody at Ghoja.”
Swan agreed. Sourly. “Yeah. Maybe some of the Company made it.” He glowered at Smoke.
The old man shrugged. “If some get out they can train a real army. They’d have time enough now.”
“Yeah. And if the Prahbrindrah Drah and the Radisha was to get off their butts they might even line up a few real allies. Maybe come up with a wizard with a hair on his ass. One who wouldn’t spend his whole life hiding out in the weeds.”
Mather started down the back of the hill. “Come on, Blade. Let them bicker.”
After several seconds Smoke confessed, “He’s right, Swan. Let’s get on with it.”
Willow tossed his long golden hair, looked at Blade. Blade jerked his head toward the horses below the hill. “All right.” Swan took a last look at the city and plain where the Black Company had died. “But what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.”
“And what’s practical is practical and what’s needful is necessary. Let’s go.”
Swan walked. He would remember that remark. He was determined to have the last word. “Bullshit, Smoke. That’s bullshit. I seen a new side of you today. I don’t like it and I don’t trust it. I’m going to watch you like your conscience.”
They mounted up and headed north.
3
In those days the Company was in service to the Prahbrindrah Drah of Taglios. That prince was too easygoing to master a numerous, factious people like the Taglians. But his natural optimism and forgiving nature were offset by his sister, the Radisha Drah. A small, dark, hard woman, the Radisha had a will of sword steel and the conscience of a hurtling stone.
While the Black Company and the Shadowmasters contested possession of Dejagore, or Stormgard, the Prahbrindrah Drah held an audience three hundred miles to the north.
The prince stood five and a half feet tall. Though dark, his features were caucasic. He glowered at the priests and engineers before him. He wanted to throw them out. But in god-ridden Taglios no one offended the priesthoods.
He spied his sister signalling from the shadowed rear of the chamber. “Excuse me.” He walked out. Bad manners they would tolerate. He joined the Radisha. “What is it?”
“Not here.”
“Bad news?”
“Not now.” The Radisha strode off. “Majarindi looked unhappy.”
“He got his hand caught in a monkey trap. He insisted we build a wall because Shaza has been having holy visions. But once the others demanded a share he sang a different song. I asked if Shaza had begun having un-visions. He wasn’t amused.”
“Good.”
The Radisha led her brother through tortuous passages. The palace was ancient. Additions were cobbled on during every reign. No one knew the labyrinth whole except Smoke.
The Radisha went to one of the wizard’s secret places, a room sheltered from eavesdroppers by the old man’s finest spells. The Prahbrindrah Drah shut the door. “Well?”
“A pigeon brought a message. From Smoke.”
“Bad news?”
“Our mercenaries have been defeated at Stormgard.” The Shadowmasters called Dejagore Stormgard.
“Badly?”
“Is there any other…?”
“Yes.” Before the appearance of the Shadowmasters Taglios had been a pacifist state. But when that danger first beckoned the Prahbrindrah had exhumed the ancient strategikons. “Were they annihilated? Routed? How badly did they hurt the Shadowmasters? Is Taglios in danger?”
“They shouldn’t have crossed the Main.”
“They had to harry the survivors from Ghoja ford. They’re the professionals, Sis. We said we wouldn’t second-guess or interfere. We didn’t believe they could win at Ghoja, so we’re way ahead. Give me details.”
“A pigeon isn’t a condor.” The Radisha made a face. “They marched down with a mob of liberated slaves, took Dejagore by stealth, destroyed Stormshadow and wounded Shadowspinner. But today Moonshadow appeared with a fresh army. Casualties were heavy on both sides. Moonshadow may have been killed. But we lost. Some of the troops retreated into the city. The rest scattered. Most of the mercenaries, including the captain and his woman, were killed.”
“Lady is dead? That’s a pity. She was exquisite.”
“You’re a lustful ape.”
“I am, aren’t I? But she did stop hearts wherever she went.”
“And never noticed. The only man she saw was her captain. That Croaker character.”
“Are you miffed because he only had eyes for her?”
She gave him a savage look.
“What’s Smoke doing?”
“Fleeing north. Blade, Swan, and Mather will try to rally the survivors at Ghoja.”
“I don’t like that. Smoke should’ve stayed down there. Rallied them there, to support the men in the city. You don’t give away ground you’ve gained.”
“Smoke is scared the Shadowmasters will find out about him.”
“They don’t know? That would surprise me.” The Prahbrindrah shrugged. “What’s he saving himself for? I’m going down there.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“You can’t. Those idiot priests would steal everything but your eyes. Stay. Keep them occupied with their idiot wall. I’ll go. And I’ll kick Smoke’s butt till he gets off it and does something.”
The prince sighed. “You’re right. But go quietly. They behave better when they think you’re watching.”
“They didn’t miss me last time.”
“Don’t leave me twisting in the wind. They’re hard to deal with when they know more than I do.”
“I’ll keep them off balance.” She patted his arm. “Go shock them with your turnaround. Work them into a wall-building frenzy. Get benevolent toward whichever cult shows the most productivity. Get them cutting each other’s throats.”
The Prahbrindrah grinned boyishly. That was the game he loved. That was the way to accumulate power. Get the priests to disarm themselves.
4
It was a bizarre little parade. At its head was a black thing that could not decide if it was a tree stump or someone weirdly built carrying a box under one arm. Behind that a man floated a yard off the ground,
feet foremost, inelegantly sprawled. An arrow had pierced his chest. It still protruded from his back. He was alive, but barely.
Behind the floating man was another with a lance through him. He drifted a dozen feet up, alive and in pain, sometimes writhing like an animal with a broken spine. Two riderless horses followed him, both black stallions bigger than any war charger.
Crows by the hundred circled above, coming and going like scouts.
The parade climbed the hills east of Stormgard, moving in twilight. Once it paused, remained motionless twenty minutes while a scatter of Taglian fugitives passed. They saw nothing. There was magic at work there.
The column continued moving by night. The crows continued flying, formed a rearguard, watched for something. Several times they cawed at shifting shadows, but settled down quickly. False alarms?
The party halted ten miles from the beleaguered city. The thing leading spent hours collecting brush and deadwood, piled it in a deep crack in a granitic hillside. Then it seized the floating lance, dragged its victim off, stripped him down.
A bitter, remote, whispering voice exclaimed, “This isn’t one of the Taken!” when the man’s mask came off.
The crows became raucous. Discussing? Arguing? The leader asked, “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from?”
The injured man did not respond. Maybe he was beyond communication. Maybe he did not speak that language. Maybe he was stubborn.
Torture produced no answers.
The inquisitor tossed the man into the woodpile, waved a hand. The pile burst into flame. The stump thing used the lance to keep its victim from escaping. The burning man had a bottomless well of energy.
There was sorcery at work here.
The burning man was the Shadowmaster Moonshadow. His army had triumphed outside Stormgard but his own fortune had been inglorious.
The party did not move on till the Shadowmaster was consumed, the fire burned to ashes and the ashes cooled. The stump thing gathered the ashes. As it travelled it disposed of those pinch by pinch.
The man with the arrow in him bobbed in the stump thing’s wake. The stallions brought up the rear.
The crows maintained their patrols. Once a large catlike thing came too near and they went into paroxysms. The stump did something mystical. The black leopard wandered away, absent of mind.
5
A slight figure in ornate black armor strained savagely. A corpse toppled off the heap of corpses piled upon the figure. The shift in weight made it possible to wriggle out of the heap. Free, the figure lay motionless for several minutes, panting inside a grotesque helmet. Then it pulled itself into a sitting position.
After another minute the figure struggled out of its gauntlets, revealed delicate hands. Slim fingers plucked at the fastenings holding its helmet. That came away, too.
Long black hair fell free around a face to stun a man. Inside all that ugly black steel was a woman.
* * *
I have to report those moments that way because I don’t recall them at all. I remember a dark dream. A nightmare featuring a black woman with fangs like a vampire. Nothing else. My first clear recollection is of sitting beside the heap of corpses with my helmet in my lap. I was panting, only vaguely aware that I had gotten out of the pile somehow.
The stench of a thousand cruel gut wounds filled the air like the stink of the largest, rawest sewer in the world. It was the smell of battlefields. How many times had I smelled it? A thousand. And still I wasn’t used to it.
I gagged. Nothing came up. I had emptied my stomach into my helmet while I was under the pile. I had a vague recollection of being terrified that I would drown in my own vomit.
I started shaking. Tears rolled, stinging, hot tears of relief. I had survived! I had lived ages beyond the measure of most mortals but I had lost none of my desire for life.
As I caught my breath I tried to put together where I was, what I was doing there. Besides surviving.
My last clear memories weren’t pleasant. I remembered knowing that I was about to die.
I couldn’t see much in the dark but I didn’t need to see to know we had lost. Had the Company turned the tide Croaker would have found me long ago.
Why hadn’t the victors?
There were men moving on the battlefield. I heard low voices arguing. Moving my way slowly. I had to get out of there.
I got up, managed to stumble four steps before I fell on my face, too weak to move another inch. Thirst was a demon devouring me from the inside out. My throat was so dry I couldn’t whine.
I’d made noise. The looters were quiet now.
They were sneaking toward me, after one more victim. Where was my sword?
I was going to die now. No weapon and no strength to use one if I found one before they found me.
I could see them now, three men backlighted by a faint glow from Dejagore. Small men, like most of the Shadowmasters’ soldiers. Neither strong nor particularly skilled, but in my case they needed neither strength nor skill.
Could I play dead? No. They wouldn’t be deceived. Corpses would be cool now.
Damn them!
Before they killed me they would do more than just rob me.
They wouldn’t kill me. They would recognize the armor. The Shadowmasters weren’t fools. They knew who I’d been. They knew what I carried inside my head, treasures they dreamed about getting out. There would be rewards for my capture.
Maybe there are gods. A racket broke out behind the looters. Sounded like a sally from Dejagore, some kind of spoiling raid. Mogaba wasn’t sitting on his hands waiting for the Shadowmasters to come to him.
One of the looters said something in a normal voice. Someone told him to shut up. The third man entered his opinion. An argument ensued. The first man didn’t want to investigate the uproar. He’d had enough fighting.
The others overruled him.
The fates were kind. Two responsible soldiers handed me a life.
I lay where I’d fallen, resting for several minutes before I got onto hands and knees and crawled back to the mound of bodies. I found my sword, an ancient and consecrated blade created by Carqui in the younger days of the Domination. A storied blade, but no one, not even Croaker, had heard its tale.
I crawled toward the hummock where, when I’d seen him last, my love had been making his final stand, just him and Murgen and the Company standard, trying to stem the rout. It seemed an all-night trek. I found a dead soldier with water in his canteen. I drained it and went on. My strength grew as I crept. By the time I reached the hummock I could totter along upright.
I found nothing there. Just dead men. Croaker was not among them. The Company standard was gone. I felt hollow. Had the Shadowmasters taken him? They would want him badly for crushing their army at Ghoja, for taking Dejagore, for killing Stormshadow.
I could not believe they had him. It had taken me too long to find him. No god, no fate, could be so cruel.
I cried.
The night grew quiet. The sortie had withdrawn. The looters would return now.
I started moving, stumbled into a dead elephant and almost shrieked, thinking I had walked right into a monster.
The elephants had carried all kinds of clutter. Some might be useful. I scrounged a few pounds of dried food, a skin of water, a small jar of poison for arrowheads, a few coins, whatever caught my fancy. Then I walked northward, determined to reach the hills before sunrise. I discarded half my plunder before I got there.
I hurried. Enemy patrols would be out looking for important bodies come first light.
What could I do now, besides survive? I was the last of the Black Company. There was nothing left.… Something came into me like a lost memory resurfacing. I could turn back time. I could become what I had been.
Trying not to think did not help. I remembered. And the more I remembered the more angry I became. Anger shaped me till all my thoughts were of revenge.
As I started into the hills I surrendered. Those monsters w
ho had raped my dreams had written their own decrees of doom. I would do whatever it took to requite them.
6
Longshadow paced a room ablaze with light so brilliant he seemed a dark spirit trapped in the mouth of the sun. He clung to that one crystal-walled, mirrored chamber where no shadow ever formed unless called forth by dire exigency. His fear of shadows was pathological.
The chamber was the highest in the tallest tower of the fortress Overlook, south of Shadowcatch, a city on the southern edge of the world. South of Overlook lay a plateau of glittering stone where isolated pillars stood like forgotten supports for the sky. Though construction had been underway for seventeen years, Overlook was incomplete. If Longshadow did finish it, no force material or supernatural would be able to penetrate it.
Strange, deadly, terrifying things hungered for him, lusted for freedom from the plain of glittering stone. They were shadow things that could catch up with a man as suddenly as death if he didn’t cling to the light.
Longshadow’s sorcery had shown him the battle at Stormgard, four hundred miles north of Shadowcatch. He was pleased. His rivals Moonshadow and Stormshadow had perished. Shadowspinner had been injured. A touch here, a touch there, subtly, would keep Shadowspinner weak.
But he couldn’t be killed. Oh, no. Not yet. Dangerous forces were at work. Shadowspinner would have to be the breakwater against which the storm spent its energies.
Those mercenaries in Stormgard should be given every chance to sap Spinner’s troop strength. He was far too strong now that he had possession of all three northern Shadow armies.
Subtlety. Subtlety. Each move had to be made with care. Spinner wasn’t stupid. He knew who his most dangerous enemy was. If he rid himself of the Taglians and their Free Company leaders he’d turn on Overlook immediately.
And she was out there somewhere, shuffling counters in her own game, not in the ripeness of her power but deadly as a krite even so. And there was the woman whose knowledge could be invaluable, alone, a treasure to be harvested by any adventurer.