The Many Deaths of the Black Company

“I’ll include them in my prayers as well.” Sleepy squeezed Suruvhija’s shoulder reassuringly, thinking the woman was too perfect to be real. At least as men saw wives. But she was Shadar, too, and she believed, and the roles of all members of the family were clearly defined by her religion.

  Sleepy took time to talk to Iqbal’s children, too. They were bearing up bravely. As they would, for they were good Shadar, too, despite the strange lands and societies they had seen.

  When she was around Iqbal’s children, Sleepy sometimes even vaguely regretted having abandoned the woman’s role. But that never lasted more than a few seconds.

  “Blade. Pass the word. I want the whole gang up to this fort before sunset. If that’s possible. Once they see some numbers I’m sure they’ll give up.”

  Blade told her, “You know you have to stop before long. The animals need time to graze and recover. And we have a tail of stragglers that has to stretch all the way back to Charandaprash.”

  People got hurt or sick or just could not keep up. It irked Sleepy but it was a fact of life. Her strength was down maybe a thousand men already. That would worsen rapidly if she continued to drive hard.

  “When they get here the most worn-out ones can take over as our garrison.” That was a tactic as old as soldiering.

  She would not admit it but she needed a rest herself. She could not imagine when she would get one, though.

  43

  The Taglian Shadowlands: The Shadowgate

  “Seem like there’s much point dragging my weary ass over there?” I asked Lady. There was just enough dawn-light to show the vague outline of the slope leading up to the Shadowgate. Which was still miles and miles from where we had spent the night. This part of the journey was one of those where you spend the whole day trying not to look ahead because every time you do it seems you have not gotten ten feet closer. Way to our left a smoky haze concealed the New City and the lower half of ruined Overlook. A lot of unpleasant memories connected us with those places.

  “What do you mean?” My sweetheart was as tired and morning-cranky as I was. And her bones were a lot older than mine.

  “Well, we didn’t get killed last night. That means the gate hasn’t collapsed yet. Old Longshadow’s still holding out.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean Tobo’s got everything under control? So why beat ourselves up getting on over there?”

  Lady smirked at me. She did not have to tell me. We would cross the valley because, in the end, I would want to see everything for myself. Because I would want to get it all into the Annals, right. She had chided me fifty times during the ride south because I was trying to work out a way to write on horseback. I could get so much more done if I could do it while we were traveling.

  Then she chirped, “You are getting old.”

  “What?”

  “A sign of advancing age. You start obsessing about how much you have to get done in the time that you have left.”

  I made noises in the back of my throat but did not argue. That kind of thinking was familiar. So was being unable to fall asleep because I was tracking my heartbeat, trying to tell if something was wrong.

  You would think a guy in my line of work would make his peace with death at an early age.

  We ran into several locals while crossing the valley, the bottom land of which was decent farmland and pasture. We did not receive one friendly greeting. I did not see one welcoming smile. Nobody raised a hand in defiance but I had no trouble feeling the abiding resentment of a tormented nation. There had been no serious fighting in these parts for years but the adult population were all survivors of the terrible times, whether they were natives or immigrants who had come in to settle the depopulated lands and to escape even worse horrors elsewhere. They did not want the evils of the past to return.

  This land had suffered grotesquely under the Shadowmaster Longshadow. It had continued to suffer after his defeat. The Kiaulune wars devoured most everything that Longshadow and the Shadowmaster wars had not. And now the Black Company had returned. Out of the place of glittering stone, an abode of devils. The season of despair appeared to be threatening again.

  “Can’t say I blame them,” I told Lady.

  “What?”

  I explained.

  “Oh.” Indifferently. Some attitudes never wither. She had been a powerful lord a lot longer than she had been just another tick on the underbelly of the world. Compassion is not one of the qualities that endeared her to me.

  We found Tobo impatient with our dawdling. “I see the old gal’s still here,” I said of the Shadowgate. Lady and I produced our keys and let the crew cross over, Murgen first so he could make sure his boy still had all his arms and legs and fingers and toes.

  “It is,” the wonder child confessed. “But probably only because Longshadow still hasn’t left the plain.”

  “What?” Lady was irritated. “We made promises. We owe the Children of the Dead.”

  “We do,” Tobo said. “But we won’t be allowed to kill ourselves. Shivetya knew we forgot to disarm Longshadow’s booby trap so he kept Longshadow from leaving.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I sent messengers. That was the news they brought back.”

  Lady’s mood had not improved. “The File of Nine will be smoking. We don’t need them as enemies. We may have to flee to the Land of Unknown Shadows again.”

  “Shivetya will release Longshadow the second we finish refurbishing our gate.”

  My companions were nervous. Willow Swan was pale, sweating, dancing with anxiety and, most of all, un-Swanlike, silent. He had not, in fact, spoken all day.

  Thinking about the shadows can do that to you if you have witnessed one of their attacks.

  Tobo asked, “You two ready to go to work?”

  I shook my head. “Are you kidding?”

  Lady said, “No.”

  Tobo told us, “I can’t finish this alone.”

  I replied, “And you can’t finish it with assistants so tired they’re guaranteed to make mistakes. I have a premonition. Longshadow will keep till tomorrow.”

  Tobo admitted that he would. Shivetya would see to it. But he did so with poor grace.

  Lady said, “Let’s go set up camp.” Murgen, Swan and the others probably should have been doing that instead of standing around being anxious.

  Once we crossed the barrier Lady wondered, “Why is Tobo in such a hurry?”

  I snickered. “I think it might have to do with Booboo. He hasn’t seen her for a long time. Sleepy says he was completely smitten.”

  While I spoke her expression transformed from curious to completely appalled. “I’d hope not.”

  Murgen suggested, “There were two rather attractive Voroshk girls. One of them might have something to do with it.”

  44

  The Shadowlands: Gate Repairs

  The dreamwalkers came during the night. Their presence was so powerful that even Swan, Panda Man and Spook saw them. I heard them speak clearly although I never understood a word.

  Lady and Tobo did get something out of them.

  They put their heads together over breakfast. They decided that the Nef wanted to warn us about something.

  “You think so?” I sneered. “There’s a new interpretation.”

  “Hey!” Tobo chided me. “It has something to do with Khatovar.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  The youth shrugged. “Your guess is better than mine. I’ve never been there.”

  “Last time we saw the dreamwalkers they were headed out into Khatovar in the middle of all the shadows on the plain. You think they saw something they think we ought to know?”

  “Absolutely. Any idea what?”

  Lady asked, “Have you had your Unknown Shadow friends try to talk to the Nef?”

  “I have. It doesn’t work. The Nef don’t communicate with the plain shadows, either.”

  “Then what was the Unknown Shadows’ problem last night? The B
lack Hounds kept carrying on so bad they woke me up several times.”

  “Really?” Tobo was puzzled. “I never noticed.”

  Nor did I. But I am deaf and blind to most supernatural stuff. Plus, for once, I had not been tossing around listening for my heart to stop.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  “Booboo isn’t going anywhere, kid.”

  Tobo frowned. Then got it. He did not become embarrassed or defensive. “Oh? Oh. You don’t know? She’s already gone. There was a fight with the garrison from Nijha. Runmust’s troop got overrun. The Taglians captured the Daughter of Night. Sleepy has cavalry trying to run them down now.”

  I shook my head and grumped, “It won’t do her any good. A million horsemen won’t be enough now.”

  “Aren’t you pessimistic.”

  “He’s right,” Lady opined. She lapsed into an old northern language I had not heard since I was young and which I never had understood completely. She seemed to be reciting a song as a poem. It had a refrain that went something like, “Thus do the Fates conspire.”

  * * *

  We were on the inside of the Shadowgate, hard at it. Tobo was making tiny, elegant adjustments to the strands and layers of magic that made up the mystic portal. The training I had received had elevated me to the level of a semiskilled bricklayer. Compared to me Tobo was the sort of master artisan who created panoramic tapestries by weaving them instead of embroidering them. I was nothing but the lead finger man on the bow-tying team.

  Even Lady was little more than a hodcarrier on this job. But hodcarriers are needed, too.

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Tobo said after I tried out my similes. “But I’m mostly doing embroidery and plain old-fashioned knot tying on broken threads. Parts of this tapestry were plain outright crippled. It’ll never be completely right, even if it’s stronger than when it started.”

  “But you can weasel Longshadow’s booby trap out of there?”

  “It’s kind of like lancing a boil and cleaning it out, but yes. He actually made a pretty crude job of it. Obviously, he didn’t know much about Shadowgates. He did know that there was no one in our world who knew more. What he didn’t understand was that there were more keys.”

  “Of course he knew,” I said. “That’s why he sent Ashutosh Yaksha, his apprentice, to infiltrate the Nyueng Bao priests at the temple of Ghanghesha.”

  Tobo looked puzzled, like he did not recall that story.

  “He knew they had a key there and he wanted it. So he could get back to Hsien. If you don’t know that story you’d better corner your uncle. Because that’s what he told Sleepy.”

  Tobo smiled weakly. “Well, maybe. I suppose.”

  “What do you mean, you suppose?”

  Lady paused what she was doing. “Don’t play Doj’s games, Tobo. You won’t be fooling anybody. I was there. Inside the white crow. I know what the man said.”

  “That’s probably it. Doj told Sleepy a bunch of stories. Some were probably true but some he probably made up. Stuff he thought might be true because it sounded plausible based on what he did know. Master Santaraksita spent years searching the records at Khang Phi. The history of our world’s Nyueng Bao isn’t much like what Doj might’ve wanted you to believe.”

  “Which was it?” I mused aloud. “Was he lying or making it up?” I have known plenty of people who would not admit ignorance even in the most obvious circumstance.

  Tobo said, “Master Santaraksita says our ancestors left Hsien as fugitives, sneaking out like snakes using a secretly manufactured key. They were trying to get away from the Shadowmasters. There was supposed to be a regular, gradual evacuation across the plain. Because they were persecuted followers of Khadi they did favor the organizational structure we’ve seen in other bands of believers but those people weren’t mercenaries and they weren’t missionaries. They weren’t a Free Company. They weren’t a band of Stranglers. They were just running away because the Shadowmasters insisted they had to give up their religion. Master Santaraksita says their priests probably made up a more dramatic history after they’d been settled in the river delta for a while. After several generations spent wandering. Before they arrived the only people in the swamp were Taglian fugitives and criminals and a few remote descendants of the Deceivers Rhaydreynek tried to wipe out. Maybe the Nyueng Bao wanted to impress them.”

  Tobo’s hands never stopped moving while he talked. But their movements had nothing to do with what he was saying. He was mending things that I could not see.

  “How much did Doj lie?” I was determined to pin that on him. I never did trust that old man.

  “That’s the intriguing part. I don’t know. I don’t think he really knows. He did tell me that a lot of what he told Sleepy originally he said just because it sounded believable and like something she wanted to hear. When you get right down to it, except for his skill with Ash Wand, Uncle Doj is a bigger fraud than most priests. Most priests actually believe what they preach.”

  Lady said, “Sounds like he’s spent time hanging around with Blade.”

  Tobo continued, “The key my ancestors used to cross the plain was created secretly in Khang Phi. It went back to Hsien so the next group of fugitives could use it. They never got the chance.”

  “But they had the golden pick.” Which was the key that Sleepy eventually found and used to get onto the plain so she could release us Captured from underneath Shivetya’s fortress.

  “That must have been the key that belonged to the Deceivers who hid the Books of the Dead back in Rhaydreynek’s time. They must’ve hidden the pickax under the temple of Ghanghesha. The temple has a long history. It started out as a Janaka shrine. The Gunni took over and used it as a retreat. Then the survivors of Rhaydreynek’s pogrom chased the Gunni out. But they faded away. Nyueng Bao folklore talks about bitter fighting over doctrine in the early days. A century later Gunni holy men from the cult of Ghanghesha began to come back to the swamp. Eventually most Nyueng Bao forgot Khadi and adopted Ghanghesha. A few generations back the pick turned up when the temple was being repaired. Somebody realized that it had to be an important relic. It wasn’t till more recent times, when Longshadow, and later Soulcatcher, found out about it, that anyone realized how important it had to be.”

  “What about the pilgrimages?”

  “Originally people from Hsien were supposed to meet our people at the Shadowgate with news from home and more refugees. But the Shadowmasters found out. Plus on this side my ancestors lost touch with the past. Contrary to legend, and unlike the way things are now, there wasn’t that much pressure from outside. Hanging on to old ways and old ideas wasn’t that important a way to maintain the identity of the Nyueng Bao.

  “Whatever Doj says, most Nyueng Bao aren’t devoted to tradition and keeping the old ways. Most don’t remember anything anymore. You saw that while we were in Hsien. The Nyueng Bao aren’t anything like those people over there.”

  Lady and I exchanged looks. Neither of us assumed Tobo was telling any more of the truth than Doj ever had. Though the boy was not necessarily lying consciously. I glanced at Thai Dei. He gave nothing away.

  I said, “I’ve been wondering why Doj never found any Path of the Sword guys over there.”

  “That’s easy. The Shadowmasters wiped them out. They were the warrior caste. They kept fighting till there weren’t any of them left.”

  I had, for years, wondered why a sword-worshipping cult would be part of a people descended from a band of worshippers of Kina, who, in my world, did not believe in shedding blood. I still did not know. But now I knew that nobody else was likely to know, either.

  I told Lady, “I’m surprised Sleepy never picked up on the fact that the supposed priest of this Nyueng Bao band went around carving people into steaks.”

  “Deceiver people at that,” she added. “He slaughtered them by the score at Charandaprash.”

  Tobo is a clever young man. He understood that we did not find his version of history more convincing than Doj
’s.

  I still was not sure whether he believed what he was saying.

  It did not matter.

  Lady poked me. She whispered, “Murgen and Willow Swan have drawn my attention to an interesting phenomenon. You’ll want to see for yourself. Tobo, drop doing what you’re doing and look at this, too.”

  By then I knew it would be something I did not want to see. Thai Dei, Murgen and the others were debating the best places to take cover already.

  I turned. Lady pointed. A trio of Voroshk flyers, appearing only slightly larger than dots, hovered above the rim of the plain. They were way up high and a long way away, motionless.

  I asked, “Anybody want to guess how well they can see us?”

  Lady said, “They can tell we’re here but that’s it. Unless they have a farseeing device.”

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Scouting around, I imagine. Now that their gate is gone they can get onto the plain whenever they want. During the day they’re safe as long as they stay off the ground. And they probably won’t have much trouble with shadows even at night if they stay high up. We’ve never seen shadows go higher than ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the shielding.”

  “Think they’re looking for us? Or are they just looking?”

  “Both, probably. They’ll want revenge. And maybe even a safe new world.”

  The Voroshk did not move while we were talking. I pictured similar trios ranging to all points of the plain, perhaps hoping they could open the way without us. “Tobo, can they get off of the plain?”

  “I don’t know. They won’t be able to here. Not without one of my keys. I’ll install something that’ll kill them if they try.”

  I admired his confidence. “Suppose they have somebody as slick as you are? What’s to keep him from undoing your spells the way you’re undoing Longshadow’s?”

  “Lack of training. Lack of the knowledge we got out of Khang Phi. You have to know a little about these things to redo them.”

  Lady asked, “Can they break through the gateway into Hsien?” The knowledge was there.

  “I don’t know. They got the forvalaka through. Maybe they could shove their own people through on a slow, one-at-a-time basis. They never tried before. But they’ve never been desperate before. And time isn’t on their side.”