“Between a rock and a hard place.” It sort of just slipped out.
“What?”
“Tighten up the buckles on your ego, brother Corvus. It ain’t us he’s after. If it’s him.”
“Eh?” His eyes tightened up into a suspicious squint. That made his cold, hawkish face look more predatory than ever. I had to go use that family name.
“He’s after the same thing we are. The Black Company.”
“That don’t make sense either, Case.”
“Hell it don’t. It’s the only way you can get it to make any sense at all. You’re just not thinking about the world the way one of the Taken would. You got a pretty screwed-up eye, but you still think people is people. Them Taken don’t and never did. To them people are just tools and slaves, live junk to use and throw away. Except for the one that was so powerful she made them her slaves. And she’s riding with your buddy Croaker, far as we know. Right?”
The idea sank in. He turned it over, looked at the sharp edges, grunting and shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds. After a while, he said, “She’s lost her powers but she hasn’t lost what she knew. And that was knowledge enough to conquer half a world and tame the Ten Who Were Taken. She’d be one big prize for any wizard who could lay hands on her.”
“There you go.” I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. It took me a while.
XXI
The old man sat quietly. When he moved at all he did so slowly and carefully. His status was ambiguous. He had chased these people across a continent, damned near killing himself, and for what?
For nothing, that’s what. For nothing.
They were lunatics. They ought to be locked up for their own protection.
The woman watched him from about twenty feet to his left. She was a blue-eyed, stringy-haired blonde about five feet six inches tall, in her middle twenties. She had a square jaw, a too broad, lumpy bottom, and a goofy manner that made you wonder if anybody was home behind those watery eyes. And for all that, there was something strongly sensual there.
She was deaf and mute. She could communicate only via sign language.
She was in charge. She was Darling, the White Rose, the one who had put an end to the Lady’s dark dominion.
How the hell could that be? It didn’t add up.
Off to his right was a man who watched him with the warmth of a snake. He was tall, lean, dusky, hard as a stone with less sense of humor. These days he dressed in black, which had to be a statement of some sort, but who could tell what? He would not talk. He flat refused. Which is why they called him Silent.
He was a wizard himself. The tools of his trade lay scattered around him. As though he expected their unwilling guest to try something.
Silent’s eyes were as black as jet, hard as diamonds, and friendly as death.
Damn it! A man made one mistake and four hundred years later they still wouldn’t let him live it down.
There were three more of them around somewhere, brothers with the surname Torque who seemed to have no given names. They went by absurdities like Paddlefoot, Donkey Dick, and Brother Bear, except that Donkey Dick became Stubby when Darling was in listening distance, even though she couldn’t hear.
All four men worshiped her. And it was obvious to everyone but her that the one called Silent entertained romantic ambitions. Lunatics. Every single one.
Something behind him yelled, “Seth Chalk! What treachery are you up to now?” and exploded in giggles.
Wearily, for the thousandth time, he replied, “Call me Bomanz. I haven’t used Seth Chalk since I was a boy.” He did not look around.
It had been a long, long time since he had been Seth Chalk. At least a hundred fifty years. He had no exact count. It was a year since he had escaped the thrall of a sorcery that had held him in stasis most of that time. He knew the intervening years of strife and horror — the years of the rise and growth of the Lady’s empire — only by repute, after the fact.
He, Bomanz or Seth Chalk, was a living artifact from before the fact. A fool who had had no business surviving it, who wanted to use these last unexpected gift years to expiate the guilt that was his for his part in the awakening and release of the ancient evil.
These idiots were not ready to believe that, no matter that he’d damned near gotten himself killed keeping that dragon off them during the big final throat cutting in the Barrowland last winter.
Damned fools. He had done all the damage he could do in one lifetime.
The three brothers came from somewhere up forward, joined the watch. So it was not one of them who had shouted. But Bomanz knew that. Two of the three could not speak any language he understood. The third managed Forsberger so brokenly it was not worth his trouble to try.
The fool who could understand a little of Bomanz’s antiquated Forsberger could not sign. Of course. So any communication not heard directly by Silent or lip-read by Darling got garbled and lost.
Only the stones communicated like regular people.
He did not like talking to rocks. There was something perverse about holding converse with rocks.
The trouble with being here was that the human beings, though lunatics, were the sanest, most believable part of the furnishings.
For the first time in his life, if he wanted to build cloud castles he had to go look down.
They had press-ganged him at that camp in the Windy Country. He was on the back of one of those fabulous monsters out of the Plain of Fear, a windwhale. The beast was a thousand feet long and nearly two hundred wide. From below it looked like a cross between a man-o’-war jellyfish and the world’s biggest shark. From up top where Bomanz was, the broad flat back looked like something from an opium smoker’s pipe dream. Like the imaginary forests that might grow in those vast caverns said to lie miles beneath the surface of the earth.
This forest was haunted by enough weird creatures to populate anyone’s fancy nightmare. A whole zoo. And all sentient.
The windwhale was going somewhere in a hurry but was not getting there fast. There had been head winds all the way. And every so often the monster had to go down and tear up a couple hundred acres to take the edge off its hunger.
The damned thing stank like seven zoos.
A couple weird characters had singled him out for relentless harassment. One was a little rock monkey, mostly tail, no bigger than a chipmunk. It had a high, squeaky, nagging voice that made him remember his long-dead wife, though he never understood a word it said.
There was a shy centauroid creature put together backward, with the humanlike part in the rear. That part of her was disturbingly attractive. She seemed intrigued by him. He kept catching glimpses of her watching him from among the copses of uncertain organs that bewhiskered the windwhale’s back.
Worst, there was a lone talking buzzard who had a smattering of Forsberger and a wiseguy mouth. Bomanz could not get away from the bird, who, if he had been human, would have hung out in taverns masquerading as the world’s foremost authority, armed with an uninformed and ready opinion on every conceivable subject. His cheerful bigotry and who-cares ignorance drove the old man’s temper to its limit.
Things called mantas, that looked like sable flying versions of the rays of tropical seas, symbiotes of the windwhales, with wingspans of thirty to fifty feet, were the most dramatic and numerous of his nonhuman companions. Though they looked like fish, they seemed to be mammals. They lived their whole lives on the windwhale’s back. They were ill-tempered and dangerous and they bitterly resented having to share their territory with lesser life-forms. Only the will of their god contained their spite.
There were dozens more creatures equally remarkable, each more absurd than the last, but they were more shy of humans and stayed out of the way.
Discounting the mantas, the most numerous and pestiferous tribe were the talking stones.
Like most people Bomanz had heard tales of the deadly talking menhirs of the Plain of Fear. The reality seemed as gruesome as the stories. They were as shy as a
n avalanche and deadly pranksters. They were responsible for the Plain’s deadly reputation. Near as Bomanz could tell, what everyone else considered murderous wickedness they considered practical jokery.
What could be more hilarious than a traveler who, following false directions, stumbled into a lava pit or had his mount snatched out from under him by a giant sand lion?
The stones, in the form of menhirs as much as eighteen feet tall, were the stuff of a thousand stories, hardly a one pleasant. But the seeing and hearing and having to deal with was an experience that made the stories pall — though the stones were on their best behavior now.
They were under constraint, too.
The stones had no language difficulties. Happily, many were a laconic sort. But when they did go to talking their speech was sour, acidic, caustic. The lot were verbal vandals. So how the hell come they were the ones their god had made his diplomatic corps?
It was no wonder the Plain of Fear was a wide-open madhouse. The tree god running it was a twenty-four-karat lunatic.
The stones were gray brown, mostly, without visible orifices or organs. Most were as shaggy with mosses and lichens and bugs as any normal boulder that lay around keeping its mouth shut. They intimidated the hell out of Bomanz, who liked to pretend that he was not scared of any damned thing.
There were moments when he came close to blasting them into talking gravel.
Weird damned creatures!
Every hundred miles the windwhale dropped till its belly dragged. Members of every species, including the Torque brothers, would start singing a merry “Heigh-ho!” work song and would converge on whichever menhir had made itself most obnoxious recently. Hup-hup, over the side it would go, to the accompaniment of dire threats and foul curses. Those stones that pretended to senses of humor would yodel fearfully all the way to the ground.
Damn fool crazies.
No matter how the bleeding rocks fell, they always landed upright, catlike.
The show scared the crap out of the rare peasant unlucky enough to witness it.
The stones were the Plains creatures’ and tree god’s communications lifeline. They spoke to one another mind to mind — though Bomanz was not about to give them credit for true sentience. No one would tell him squat, but he suspected Old Father Tree himself was running this operation — whatever this operation was — from the nether end.
One of those little things he found disconcerting was the fact that no matter how many stones went over the side, the menhir population never diminished. In fact, some of the same old stones turned up back aboard.
Goddamned insanity.
“Hey, Seth Chalk, you sour old fart, you figure out how to screw us over yet? Gawh!”
The talking buzzard had come. Bomanz replied with a gentle, tricky gesture, consisting of wrapping his hand around the bird’s neck. “Just you personally, carrion breath.”
Eyes watched. Nobody moved. Nobody took it seriously. The Torque brothers whooped it up. “Way to go, old man!” Paddlefoot gobbled in his outlandish lingo. “Tie his goofy neck in a knot.”
“Morons!” Bomanz muttered. “I’m surrounded by morons. At the mercy of cretins.” Louder. “I’m going to tie your neck in a knot and braid your toes if you don’t lay off the Seth Chalk and start calling me Bomanz.”
He turned loose.
The buzzard flapped off squawking, “Chalk’s on a rampage! Beware! Beware! Chalk’s gone berserk.”
“Oh, go to hell. Marooned with lunatics.”
General laughter and foolery of a sort he had not seen since his student days. But Darling and Silent neither laughed nor stopped watching him. What the hell did he have to do to make them understand that he was on their side?
“Hah!” It hit him out of the blue. An epiphany. They did not distrust him because it was he whose bumbling had wakened the old evils and loosed them to walk the earth for another dark century. He had done his part in the rectification. No. They knew what had moved his researches in the first place. His quest for tools with which to gain power. His fathomless infatuation with the Lady, which had so distracted him he had made the mistakes that had allowed her to break her bonds.
They might believe he had been broken of his hunger for power, but would they ever believe he was free of his thing for that dark woman? How could he convince them when he had yet to convince himself? She had been a deadly candle to many a man’s moth and the flame did not lose its attraction by being out of sight or out of reach.
He grunted, prized himself off his butt. His legs were stiff. He had been seated a long time. Darling and Silent watched him amble past a stand of something that looked like pink ferns ten feet tall. Little eyes peeped out warily. The ferns were some sort of organ. The mantas used them for an infant creche.
He went as far as his acrophobia let him. It was the first he had looked overboard in a week.
Last time they had been over water. He had been able to see nothing but haziness and blue all the way to undefined horizons.
The air was clearer today. The view was very nearly monochromatic again, but this time brown. Just a few hints of green flecked it. Way, way ahead there was something that looked like it might be smoke from a big fire.
They had to be two miles high. There was not a cloud in the sky.
“Soon you will have your chance to prove yourself, Seth Chalk.”
He glanced back. A menhir stood four feet behind him. It had not been there a moment before. They were that way, coming and going without sound or warning. This one was a little more gray and mica-flecked than most. It had a scar down its face side six inches wide and seven feet long where something had scraped through lichen and weathered surface stone. Bomanz did not understand talking-stone civilization. They had no obvious hierarchy, yet this one generally spoke for them when there was official speaking to be done.
“How so?”
“Do you not feel it, wizard?”
“I feel a lot of things, rock. What I feel most of all is grumpy about the way you all have been doing me. What am I supposed to feel?”
“The mad psychic stink of the thing that you sensed escaping the Barrowland. From Oar. It is no farther away now.”
The talking stones spoke in a dead monotone, usually, yet Bomanz sensed the taint of suspicion that lay in the menhir’s mind. If he could tell the old evil was stirring from as far as Oar, when it was weak, how was it that he could not sense it now, when it was so much stronger?
How was it that he, too, was alive when he was supposed to be dead?
Did he know about the resurrection of the shadow because it had been one with his own? Had they conspired together and come out of the unhallowed earth of the Barrowland together? Was he a slave of that old darkness?
“It was not that that I sensed,” Bomanz said. “I heard the scream of one of the old fetish alarms being tripped when something moved that should not have. That isn’t the same thing at all.”
The stone stood silent for a moment. “Perhaps not. Nevertheless, we are upon the thing. In hours, or a day or two, as the winds decide, the battle will be joined. Your fate may be determined.”
Bomanz snorted. “A rock with a sense for the dramatic. It’s absurd. You really expect me to fight that thing?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s what I think it is …”
“It is the thing called the Limper. And the thing known as Toadkiller Dog. Both are handicapped.”
Bomanz sneered and snorted. “I’d call being without a body something more than a handicap.”
“It is not weak, this thing. That smoke rises from a city still burning three days after its departure. It has become the disciple of death. Killing and destruction are all it knows. The tree has decreed that it be stopped.”
“Right. Why? And why us?”
“Why? Because if it continues amok its course will someday bring it to the Plain. Why us? Because there is no one else. All who had any great power were consumed in the struggle in the Barrowland except th
ee and we. And, most of all, we do it because the god has commanded it.”
Bomanz muttered and grumbled under his breath.
“Prepare yourself, wizard. The hour comes. If you are innocent in our eyes you must be guilty in his.”
Of course. There could be no ground in the middle. Not for him. He did not have the strength to hold it. Never had had, if the truth be known, though he had deluded himself in the years of his quest for knowledge about those who had been enchained by the ancients.
Did he know remorse for the horror brought on by his rumblings? Some. Not as much as he thought he should. He told himself that because of his intercession at the penultimate moment, his self-sacrifice, the outbreak of darkness had been far gentler than it could have been. Without him the night might have lasted forever.
The old man ambled away from the stone, rapt in his own thoughts. He did not notice the stone turning jerkily, keeping its scarred face toward him. The menhirs never moved while being watched by human eyes. How they knew they were being watched no one knew.
Bomanz’s meander took him to the aft end of the windwhale. Small rustlings accompanied him. Chaperons. If he noticed he ignored them. They had been with him always.
He settled upon a soft, unprotesting lump of whale flesh about chair height. It made comfortable sitting. But he knew he would not be staying long. The windwhale was especially fetid here.
For the hundredth time he contemplated escape. All he had to do was jump and use a levitator spell to soften his fall. That was well within his competence. But not within the compass of his courage.
His fear of heights was not totally debilitating. Should he fall, he would retain enough self-possession to save himself. But there was no way he could bring himself to take the plunge voluntarily.
Resigned, he looked back the way he had come. Home, such as it was and had been, lay a thousand miles away. Maybe a lot farther. They were passing over lands of which he had never heard, where all who saw it marveled at the great shape in the sky and had no idea what it was.
There was no guarantee he would step into friendly lands if he did go over the side. In fact, the terrain below looked actively hostile.