The Many Deaths of the Black Company

  A single bird glided to the southeast, rather drunkenly, Narayan thought. Soon no black bird could be seen in any direction.

  Narayan said, “Let’s move on now. While we can. You know, I think that haze down south might be the Dandha Presh. We’ll be in the mountains in another week. She won’t have a hope of catching us there.”

  He was whistling in the dark. And they both knew it.

  * * *

  The Daughter of Night led the way. She was far more mobile than Narayan. Frequently she grew impatient with Narayan’s inability to keep up. Sometimes she cursed him and hit him. He suspected that she would desert him if she had any other resource. But her horizons never did extend far beyond the boundaries of their cult and she understood that the living saint had far more influence with the Deceivers than did any ill-schooled female messiah whose status as such was accepted only because it bore the living saint’s chop of authenticity.

  Narayan’s lagging actually saved them. The girl was squatting in brush, looking back with ill-concealed irritation. “There’s a clearing. It’s big. Not much cover. Shall we wait until dark? Or should we work our way around?” It was much too difficult for her to keep them invisible when they were in the open.

  Narayan sometimes wondered what she might have become had she grown up with her birth mother. Lady would have turned her into a dark terror by now, he was certain. Not for the first or even the hundredth time he wished Kina had allowed him to sacrifice Lady the day he had claimed the newly born Daughter of Night. His life since would have been much easier had the woman died then. “Let me look.”

  Narayan crouched. Pain clawed his bad leg as though someone was slashing him with a dull knife. He peered out at a stony waste almost devoid of life—except for a stunted, twisted stump of a tree smack in the middle. It stood just over five feet tall. There was a familiar feeling to it. He had not seen it before but knew he should recognize it. “Don’t move,” he told the Daughter of Night. “Don’t even breathe fast. There’s something not quite right out there.”

  He froze. The girl froze. She never questioned him in these things. He was right every time.

  It came to him eventually. He whispered. “That’s the Protector, that stump. Wrapped inside an illusion. She’s used the trick before. I heard about it when I was a prisoner of the Black Company. It was one of the devices she used when she was stalking them and they kept telling each other to look out for it. Look carefully at the root of that branch that twists around twice and ends in a cluster of little twigs. See the crow hiding there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Back away carefully. Slowly. What?… Freeze!”

  The girl froze. She remained unmoving for many minutes, until Narayan began to relax. She murmured, “What was it?” Neither the stump nor the crow had done anything alarming.

  “There was something.…” But he was no longer sure. It had been there in the corner of his eye for an instant but not there when he looked directly. “Over by that big red boulder.”

  “Hush!” The girl stared in another direction. “I think … There. Something … I can’t see anything but I can feel it. I think it’s watching the tree.…”

  Grrr!

  Both felt rather than heard the growl from behind them.

  Such was their self-discipline, after years on the run, that neither so much as flinched. Something large and dark and not quite there trotted past. The living saint’s mouth opened wide but no scream came forth. The girl drifted closer to him without making any sudden movement.

  What seemed like a series of large black cutouts of an unfamiliar animal flickered across the open ground. It looked nothing like a dog. It had too many limbs. But in its brief moment beside the stump it lifted a hind leg and loosed a river.

  And then, of course, it was not there anymore. But Soulcatcher was, in her own form. And she was in a towering rage.

  “Something has changed,” Narayan gasped through his pain.

  “Something more than Mother.”

  Something more than the Mother of Night.

  Something that, from that moment onward, left them feeling as though they were being watched every moment—even when they could see nothing around them anywhere.

  29

  Khatovar: The Lords of the Upper Air

  My ravens worked hard. Within the same hour I learned that Sleepy had broken out into our homeworld and that the forvalaka had left the Voroshk and was rushing our way. I began issuing orders immediately. Bowalk could not possibly arrive for hours but I wanted to make sure that each of my companions was exactly positioned and that all of my resources could be brought to bear almost instantly.

  Willow Swan followed me around reminding me that most of the fussing I was doing was exactly the sort of half-ass officiousness I resented from Sleepy.

  “You want to make your future home in Khatovar, Swan?”

  “Hey, don’t kill the messenger.”

  I grunted unhappily, went and collected my sweetheart. “It’s time we got dressed up. Get ready for the show.”

  “Ooh!” she said. “I’ve always had a weakness for men in black with birds on their shoulders.”

  * * *

  Our preparations were complete. Our dozen surviving fireball projectors were positioned, I felt, to perfection to bring the forvalaka under saturating fire as she attacked me. If that did not destroy her itself it would drive her to me, directly onto One-Eye’s black spear. I looked forward to our confrontation. That was unusual for me. I am not one of those men who enjoys the killing side of this business.

  The ravens had the monster just an hour away. People were having a last meal so we could get the fires all put out before it arrived. There was a pig that Doj had killed. It went fast. Not many vegetarians in my crew.

  Murgen joined Lady and me where we were playing paper, rock, knife with Willow Swan. “Goblin’s here. He just came over the rim of the plain. There’s two guys with him. That’s a good look for you.” He had not yet seen the new Widowmaker armor in action.

  “Bless the Captain and her infinite wisdom,” I grumbled. “That was quick. Let’s keep an eye on the little shit.” Like that needed repeating. I asked Lady, “Should I put him to work?”

  “Absolutely. Right out front. One-Eye was his best friend, wasn’t he?”

  “Murgen, when he gets down here, after we talk to him, I want him positioned down there where I put the pair of two-inchers. We don’t know if either of those has anything left in them. Then have those guys fall back to cover the approach to the Shadowgate. You and Thai Dei stay with Goblin.”

  Murgen offered me a carefully blank look.

  “If you have to, stick him. Or bop him over the head. If he gives you a reason.”

  “Which might be?”

  “I don’t know. You’re an intelligent adult. Don’t you think you can tell if he needs smacking around?”

  “Don’t you think that that’s what those guys with him are there for?”

  I had not thought of that. It did seem probable. “Are they men we know well enough to trust completely?”

  “I couldn’t make out who they were yet when I came over here.”

  “Then the instruction stands.”

  * * *

  I studied Goblin intently. I had not seen him since before I had gone underground. He had aged a lot. “Last I knew of you, you’d deserted.”

  “I’m sure One-Eye explained all that.” The voice was the same but there was an indefinable difference in the man that, probably, had more to do with time and the betrayals of memory than it did with any evil new within him, but I have never gone far wrong by being suspicious.

  Goblin’s stature approached the extreme low altitude end of normal humanity. And he was wide, despite not having eaten well in recent years. And he had almost no hair at all anymore. Nor did he smile readily. He seemed infinitely tired, as though he labored under a weight of weariness that stretched all the way back into antiquity.

  My long nap in the cav
e of the ancients had not been all that restful, either.

  “One-Eye was a notorious liar. The way I heard it—fifteen years after the fact—was that it was all your idea and he just got dragged along.”

  “The Captain was satisfied.” He did not argue and he did not make light. And that was the last clue I needed. There was no humor left in this Goblin. That was the big change.

  “Good for her. You’ve arrived just in time. The forvalaka is only minutes away. We’re going to kill it this time. You didn’t lose any of your skills while you were trapped, did you?”

  Something stirred in the deeps of his eyes. It seemed cold and angry but might have been just his irritation because so many pairs of eyes peered at him so intently, so suddenly.

  “Captain?”

  That had to be one of the real old hands. Everyone else was out of the habit, though many still called Lady “Lieutenant” because Sleepy never filled that position officially. Sahra did much of the work despite her official status as an outsider.

  Why did we set such store by these tiny distinctions?

  “What?”

  “There’s movement out there. Probably the Black Hounds coursing the forvalaka. Which means the monster is getting close.”

  “Full alert. Murgen, show Goblin his post.” I clattered and clanked. The armor was mainly costume but it was real and it was heavy.

  “Captain!” From farther away. “Down there!” A man stood out of his concealment, pointing.

  I gawked.

  “Shit!” Lady exploded. “Why the hell didn’t your crows tell us about that?” She dove for cover.

  Three flying things were headed toward us from the west, in a V formation. My man had spotted them so far away that, despite their speed, we had time to observe their approach. Eagle-eye there was a guy who deserved a bonus.

  The flyers had made the mistake of approaching at an altitude calculated to avoid the notice of the Unknown Shadows. That left them completely vulnerable to detection by the naked eye because it silhouetted them against the clear blue sky on the one day the weather chose to be neither overcast nor rainy.

  Lady snapped. “You concentrate on the shape changer, darling. This is a diversion. I’ll deal with it.” She shouted orders. I boomed a few of my own.

  She was wrong, of course. The forvalaka was the diversion for those flying Voroshk—though Bowalk would be convinced that the reverse was true. Once they moved closer the airborne sorcerers appeared to be rippling lumps clinging to long fenceposts. They were wrapped in and trailed acres of something resembling black silk cloth.

  They must have had some reason to believe that we would not be able to see them. They made no effort not to be noticed.

  When they slowed their approach I suspected immediately they wanted to coordinate timing with the forvalaka—and I was right.

  A burst of screams and dark fury erupted a scant hundred yards from our most forward post. Unknown Shadows were all over the forvalaka. Exactly as they were supposed to be, suddenly and briefly, at that point.

  The moment Bowalk stopped charging to rip at the spooks they faded away.

  For that moment she made a wonderful target.

  The fireball projectors opened up.

  Unfortunately, most that worked sped their blazing, unpredictable missiles toward the Khatovaran sorcerers. Only two light bamboo pieces remained trained on the monster. And one of those gave up the ghost after projecting just one bilous green ball that flew in erractic skips and jerks but did graze the beast along the flank scars she had gained during our previous encounter. She took a solid hit in the shoulder from the other projector.

  She could scream.

  I did not look away. Lady kept talking, keeping me informed. She told me the flyers had been surprised completely. That made me suspect that there had been little honesty between Lisa Daele Bowalk and the Voroshk sorcerers.

  They should have known. All of them.

  The Voroshk were not entirely unprepared for trouble. They had surrounded themselves with protective spells which did shunt the lightest fireballs aside—usually from the path of the leader into those of the trailing two. But those spells could not turn everything and they weakened quickly.

  I was bracing to receive the charge of the forvalaka when one of the flyers streaked across in front of me, behind Bowalk, tumbling, all that silk aflame. A scream ended abruptly as the sorcerer impacted somewhere to my right.

  My strategy was to channel the forvalaka toward me and One-Eye’s spear, hurting it as much as possible as it approached. I had mounted the black spear in the end of a twelve foot bamboo pole to give myself a little added reach. Once Bowalk was pinned, the people with the fireballs could finish her off. Assuming One-Eye’s spear had not lost its potency with his death.

  And assuming the people with the fireballs were not busy with the distraction overhead. I risked a glance. The lead flyer was circling back. Whatever he had intended to do he had not, because he had been forced to concentrate on his defenses instead. The remaining Voroshk had come to a halt several hundred yards east of us, smoldering, drifting on the breeze, evidently still alive but just barely. Before I shifted my attention back to the forvalaka I noted that that flyer was gaining altitude very slowly.

  A swarm of javelins and arrows buzzed around the werepanther. The darts were all poisoned. Just in case a few did penetrate her skin.

  Wonder of wonders! A lot of arrows were sticking. A sort of black haze seemed to cover the monster, making the boundary between her and the rest of the universe appear poorly defined.

  Lady was yelling. A lot. Fire discipline was critical. We would be able to create no new fireball-spitting bamboo poles until we were safely back in our own world. Half of those we started this fight with were out of action already. The guys had not been in a real fight for years but they did remember what was what. The fireballs stopped going up even before my wife started yelling again. Several men did take the opportunity to put fireballs into the forvalaka, though. Poor Lisa had no friends.

  She was not as invulnerable as I had expected. She began to stagger drunkenly well before I had hoped she would respond to the poisons. The endurance and stamina of her kind were legendary and in our experience were exceeded only by the ferocious vitality of the sorcerers who had belonged to the circle that had been known as the Ten Who Were Taken. Of whom Soulcatcher and the Howler were the last. Of whom there would be no survivors much longer.

  I was determined. I had a whole list of people who were going to blaze the way to hell for me.

  Now the monster was up again, evidently shaking off the effects of missiles and fireballs and chemicals. She was gathering herself for the charge that would get her in amongst us and render her safe from our most dangerous weapons just when she could start using her jaws and claws.

  I do not know what the Voroshk tried to do. I know the fireballs flew again, there was a shudder in the ground like somebody had hit it a few yards away with a ten-thousand-pound hammer, then the forvalaka launched herself my way in a sort of weak, half-hearted leap, one hind paw dragging in the dust. Smoke came off her at a dozen points. The stench of burnt flesh preceded her.

  I glimpsed the last Voroshk streaking across the sky behind the monster. He was tumbling.

  Bowalk batted at my makeshift pike as she flew toward me. Her effort was weak and slow. The head of One-Eye’s spear entered and passed through the flesh of her right shoulder, which had been injured badly already. I felt it bounce off bone. She screamed. Her weight ripped my weapon out of my hand even though I had the butt of the bamboo pole set firmly against the ground.

  Her momentum spun her around. She managed to slap me with a paw and send me ass over appetite before she landed and became preoccupied with the black spear. My armor withstood her claws. I barely knew up from down for a moment but I did keep my head attached to the end of my neck.

  I regained possession of my bamboo pole but not of the spear. The forvalaka was writhing around, screaming
and snarling and snapping at the spear while my comrades were careful to stay out of her way. The occasional arrow or javelin continued to dart in, when there was no risk of a miss.

  The Voroshk remained out of the struggle. One burned on the slope east of us. One rose higher and higher, now yielding streamers of smoke. The last circled cautiously, either looking for an opening or just observing. Each time he started to dart in, a score of bamboo poles pointed his way, offering to welcome him. I suspect most were dead. But he could find out the truth of that only the hard way.

  A huge black sword of a design similar to Doj’s Ash Wand came with the Widowmaker costume. I drew it as the forvalaka tried to come at me. I felt almost foolish behind the excitement and fear. It had been decades since I had used a sword anywhere but in practice sessions with Doj. I did not know this one at all. It might be little more than a showpiece. It might snap the first time I struck a blow.

  The shapeshifter staggered forward a few steps. Someone hit it a glancing shot with a fireball. Javelins and arrows continued to arrive. It snapped at the wound where One-Eye’s spear stood forth, again. The arrows and javelins all fell out eventually but not that black spear. It was working its way slowly deeper.

  I stepped in, struck. The tip of my blade bit several inches into the big cat’s left shoulder. She barely stumbled. The wound bled for seconds only, then closed, healing before my eyes.

  I struck again, near the same site. Then again. Not despairing. Her vitality was no surprise. But her wounds were not healing as fast as once they had. And that spear was worming its way deeper. And she seemed to be losing the will to fight.

  Shouts!

  The healthy Voroshk was boring in on me, coming fast, his protection turning first the fireballs rising to meet him, then the arrows and bolts. I pranced around and braced myself to flail away when he got close enough. He raised one hand as if to throw something. But before he could, my white crow appeared out of nowhere and hit him from behind. In the head. His chin slammed against his chest.