The Many Deaths of the Black Company

  “Check the foot. Which foot got hurt? The right one, wasn’t it?”

  I uncovered the woman’s right foot. The injury done by Goblin’s booby trap, and Soulcatcher’s own crude self-repairs, were immediately obvious.

  “I hate her even more than I used to,” Lady said. “Except for that heel and her scars she’s still looking just as sleek as she did on her nineteenth birthday. What’s wrong with her?”

  I said, “I can’t tell from here. But I’m not getting any closer till I know it’s safe. Where’d Tobo and Howler go? Get them back here.” This remained a potentially explosive situation, even if no sorcery was active. Soulcatcher would be in a foul temper when she regained consciousness.

  Lady mused, “The child must have a low opinion of our intelligence if she thought this would fool us.”

  I wondered. Maybe we just showed up before the trap could be fully prepared.

  When Tobo returned he told us, “Cat Sith just spotted Soulcatcher at the north edge of the woods. She has Goblin on a leash. She’s rallied some soldiers and has them building earthworks.” He became increasingly distracted as he stared at my sister-in-law.

  Now was that not an interesting set of developments?

  Sleepy blurted, “The Daughter of Night is pretending that she’s the Protector?”

  Tobo almost reeled back when he realized that he was lusting after a woman five hundred years his senior.

  Lady, always an advocate for swift and decisive action when she had been in command, insisted, “We need to press her. Whoever’s in charge. Every second she gets to pull things together will mean more casualties and difficulties for us later.”

  Sleepy did not disagree. It was hard to argue with the truth. She went off to restore order and resume the advance. It was weird that the Taglians, already broken twice and neither well-trained nor motivated, would be rallying. But Tobo insisted that they were doing so and he was not subject to fantasies. Of that sort.

  It seemed unlikely that the Taglians would be well-armed. Most of the Taglian soldiers had thrown down their weapons the first time they fled.

  Lady gripped my hand for a moment. “Think we’ll ever really get to see her?”

  “You begin to wonder if she’s any closer, or any more real, than Khatovar, don’t you?”

  Willow Swan came bounding up. “Is it true? Have we caught Soulcatcher again?”

  “News spreads fast,” I said. “Yes. That’s her. I’m pretty sure. You’re welcome to join me while I examine her. To make sure.” He had gotten closer to her than I ever had as her one-time physician and surgeon. He would have a better chance of spotting physical evidence that this was one of Soulcatcher’s elaborate tricks. If he remembered anything at all after five years away.

  I did not believe this was a trick. There was something badly wrong with my honey’s little sister. I felt that before I got my close-up look.

  Swan examined and grumbled. He had no happy recollections of the way Soulcatcher had used him way back when. But he was not driven by any particular hatred of her, either.

  Sleepy said, “You keep what this woman did to you firmly in mind, Willow Swan. I don’t want to see it happen again. And if I do get a whiff, you can count on getting kneecapped before you score.”

  Swan wanted to rage and protest that there was no damned way that witch was going to get inside his head again. But he did not. He was only flesh and he recognized that that flesh was incapable of rational thought around any female who shared Soulcatcher’s family blood.

  His record spoke for itself.

  “Then why don’t we just kill her?” he asked. Wounded pride burned through his cool. “Right here. Right now. While we’ve got the best chance we’ll ever get. End it all forever.”

  “We won’t because we don’t know what Goblin and Booboo did to her,” I snapped when Lady seemed strangely reluctant to disappoint a fellow whose passion had fixed upon her originally. She would not be developing a sense of compassion at this late date, would she? Or of family? She and her sister were one another’s oldest surviving enemies. “Soulcatcher won’t help us more than she absolutely has to but she will help. For a while.”

  Lady nodded. Her sister was insane but her insanity was pragmatic.

  Sister Soulcatcher showed no signs of recovering.

  I did not say so but my outburst was part whistling past the graveyard. I was increasingly certain that there was something gravely wrong with Soulcatcher. I feared she might be dying. This was the thing that had claimed Sedvod. And nobody else saw it.

  The others were all too excited by the prospect of having her at our mercy.

  71

  Midway Between: Unpleasant Truth

  Getting Soulcatcher awake and aware enough to understand and begin suffering because of her circumstances preoccupied Lady and Swan for some time. Murgen and Thai Dei, Sahra and Uncle Doj joined them. In time they meant to strong-arm Soulcatcher into assisting us but first they wanted to fatten up on a feast of gloating.

  Soulcatcher did not cooperate. She remained steadfastly unaware, exactly the way Sedvod had done.

  The racket of skirmishing rose and fell in the distance, never becoming intense. Our guys did not sound much more ambitious than were our enemies. I did not blame them for a disinclination to get killed when the battle’s outcome had been determined already.

  Riverwalker jogged into sight. “The Captain’s compliments and could you all come up and help her? She has a situation. She’d like some advice.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything.”

  “What kind of situation?” Murgen asked. He was not distracted by Soulcatcher. He understood that when the word “situation” was used this way it meant that his son was about to be asked to jump into something particularly hot.

  “We’re having trouble coming to grips with what’s left of the enemy.”

  I suggested, “Why not just leave them the hell alone now? They’re on the run.” Riverwalker ignored me.

  “At about a hundred yards the soldiers start losing interest. The few who do manage to go on and get within fifty yards say they find themselves thinking how awful they are for interfering with Her and that they really ought to be helping Her fulfill Her holy destiny. ‘Her’ not being defined but they assume they’re thinking about the Protector because the Protector is the devil they know and the devil they thought they were supposed to be chasing.”

  Lady waved me closer. She murmured, “I’ll handle this end. Take the carpet and posts up and bombard the Taglian command from outside spell range.”

  “We’re almost out of fireballs again.”

  “So drop rocks. Or burning brush. Or anything else that will make her concentrate on staying out of the way. Every time she moves a few more of her troops will drift outside the spell. Whereupon they’ll suddenly get smart and run away.”

  Her confident prescription suggested that this was an effect she knew of old.

  I told everyone, “First thing we do is load up on arrows. We’ll just drop them from higher than she can reach. From five hundred feet up they ought to be good and deadly.” My gut knotted. I was talking about bombarding my own flesh and blood.

  But part of me was certain that the girl would avoid personal damage. And part believed that a confrontation had been inherent in the situation from the moment Narayan Singh had snatched our baby from Lady’s arms.

  It did work. The girl, wearing her aunt’s costume, darted around, followed by Goblin. The last few fireballs and firebombs got spent. Their infallible lack of accuracy refreshed my cynical view of our chances of catching a break.

  The pair tried to fight back. Whenever a flier descended below a certain level a string of urine-colored lights flung upward. But I kept them too busy skipping out of harm’s way to concentrate on their marksmanship. I could not tell which was the source of the deadly light.

  I noted that the girl seemed unaware that the guy overhead in the ugly suit wa
s her doting papa.

  Our soldiers grasped the situation quickly and seized those opportunities offered by the shifting perimeter around the Taglian forces.

  The Daughter of Night was no soldier but she was quick and decisive and did have a source of advice in a man who had spent more than a century soldiering.

  Goblin told her to attack, to get what use she could out of the troops she held in thrall. She did attack. Straight toward Sleepy, ignoring the missiles falling around her. Our people had no choice but to run from her while trying to weaken her from extreme rage. Anybody who got too close underwent a sudden change of heart and took up arms on behalf of the Deceiver messiah, without understanding what was happening.

  Because she was indifferent to how many of her helpers perished, Booboo was able to chase around everywhere, breaking up everything before it got organized, gaining a recruit for each two or three men she lost, making it emotionally ever more difficult for our archers to hurl missiles at soldiers who had been comrades not that long before. The girl even came near recapturing Soulcatcher.

  Then Tobo screwed up.

  He assumed that his strength, combined with that of the Howler, would be enough to overpower an untrained girl if they came at her suddenly, from an unexpected direction. And maybe he was right. But he forget that her companion was not the Goblin he had grown up around. This Goblin was infected with wicked godhood.

  That urine-colored light caught the flying carpet a glancing blow just before the Howler and Tobo cut loose with the best they had. A chunk of carpet turned into fluttering black scraps. Howler and Tobo and the rest of the carpet hurtled ahead, safe from spells but not from a brutal beating by the branches of the trees into which they plunged. The Howler got off a couple of heartfelt shrieks.

  The urine-colored bar of light did the magical equivalent of jostling the mystical elbows of the young sorcerer and the ancient one alike. Their spells did a lot of damage to Booboo’s defenders. They even managed to stun their intended targets. But because the spellcasters were bouncing around in the branches in the woods, instead of reporting in, the rest of us never got a chance to take advantage.

  72

  Midway Between: The Rescuers

  We had a standoff of sorts. We could not get at Goblin and the Daughter of Night when they were most vulnerable. Their thugs did not know that we had lost our most potent weapons, at least for a time. My ravens, who had returned conveniently only when it was time for them to become Tobo’s mouthpieces, informed me that Howler and Tobo had survived but were hurt. They were hidden in the woods a few dozen yards from where the Daughter of Night and Goblin, barely recovered enough to keep breathing, were hunkered down.

  I tried to let Sleepy know quietly but Sahra was too alert. In moments she worked herself into a state that even Murgen could not soften. “You’ve got to do something!” she shrieked.

  “The Daughter of Night will hear you,” Murgen growled.

  “You’ve got to get him out of there!”

  “Be quiet!”

  I agreed. Somebody had to do something. That somebody might be me. But the only useful help I had was my two raven assistants. They alternately reported Tobo unconscious or quietly delirious. They could not get reliable orders from him. They refused to let me use them to transmit orders to the other Unknown Shadows. Those were gathering in numbers such that it was impossible not to catch glimpses of them when you turned or moved suddenly.

  “We can’t get close to him,” Murgen told Sahra. He shook her. She was not listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths.

  Shukrat stepped forward. She told us, “I can bring him out.”

  Sahra shut up. Even Sleepy stopped pulling the remains of our army back together and offered her attention for a moment.

  “I’ll need my own clothing back,” Shukrat told us. Her accent was slight. “The enchantment won’t touch me if I’m protected by my own clothing.” Her use of Taglian had become conversational.

  Sahra’s hysteria faded immediately. I will never understand that woman. I would have bet on it getting worse.

  The rest of us exchanged glances. We could not survive without Tobo. Not in this world. Not with our enemies. We had to get him out of there before the Daughter of Night discovered the opportunity that fortune had thrown down at her feet.

  Shukrat said, “You’ve got to trust me sometime. This might be a good time to take a chance.”

  Maybe she was not as dumb as she put on.

  Tobo trusted her.

  I looked over her head to where Sleepy had resumed expostulating angrily with Iqbal Singh and an officer in badly dented Hsien style armor. She had heard. She waved a hand and nodded to indicate that the decision was up to me. I knew the Voroshk kids better than she did.

  “All right,” I told Shukrat. “But I go with you.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll put on Gromovol’s…”

  She was more amused than alarmed, though she was troubled. She was very worried about Tobo.

  Because I have this obsessional thing about loyalties and brotherhood and keeping faith with the past I sometimes have trouble believing that other people respond as flexibly to their situation as they do. I could not have made my peace with such a dramatic shift in circumstances as easily as Shukrat had.

  I said, “That won’t work, eh?”

  “No. The clothing is created specially for each of us. Individually.” She had only that slight accent, no greater than my own, but she did not yet possess a large vocabulary. Her speech was simpler than it might have been. “Though it can be adjusted by a tailor of sufficient skill. The skill takes twenty years to learn, though.”

  “All right. Where’s that stuff stashed? In Tobo’s wagon?” The kid had so much junk he needed his own wagon and teamsters to haul it around. The wagon contained things as diverse as marbles and miracles. He had been indulged all his life and would not leave anything behind. “Let’s go.”

  I hoped he had not left any protective spells where they would keep us from getting at the tools we needed to save his scruffy young butt.

  73

  Midway Between: The Rescue

  Fully attired in her family uniform Shukrat seemed a lot more formidable than the cute little freckle face who hung around with Tobo. Her apparel seemed to be alive, seemed excited to have rejoined her. The black cloth kept stirring around her, restlessly. She resembled an Unknown Shadow who had chosen to let itself be seen. Her blue eyes sparkled. I suspected she might be having fun.

  I told her, “Tobo’s dad and I will come along as far as we can,” although she did not seem to need reassurance. She did understand that having Murgen along meant Thai Dei would be there, too. And Thai Dei did not trust her at all.

  Our sometimes odd personal entanglements did not interest Shukrat. Not that she would ever talk about them with an old fart like me.

  Shukrat forgot that she was wearing that same outfit the day she fell into our hands. When she was not alone. She forgot that she was not invincible.

  Sorcerers never lack for self-confidence. Especially young sorcerers.

  Those whose self-confidence is justified live to become old sorcerers.

  A platoon of elite fighters would creep along behind us, far enough back not to irritate Shukrat’s pride but close enough to salvage her cute little behind if her confidence was not completely justified.

  For Tobo’s sake I would try to make sure she became an older sorceress, by at least one more day.

  * * *

  Murgen scrounged up fireball projectors for himself and Thai Dei. Uncle Doj scrounged up himself and Ash Wand and invited himself into the game. He might be older than dirt but he was still spryer than me. He and his disciples stole through the battered wood in silence so total I wondered if my hearing was going. My old bones were less cooperative so I ended up as rearguard. Today my whole body insisted on reminding me that I had been critically wounded not all that long ago. Although it did that almost ev
ery day.

  I wore my Widowmaker armor. Though the Hsien reproduction was quieter than the metal original that Soulcatcher made I still seemed to be all clang and clatter.

  I took One-Eye’s spear along, against Lady’s advice.

  Shukrat’s flying post trailed behind her. My ravens rode it, one offering directions, the other poised to carry news or unexpected holiday greetings to the rear.

  It would be a holiday somewhere in the world. And fate offered me a glimpse of Goblin in the distance, evidently passed out, much as he had done after proferring the holiday excuse for being drunk, half a lifetime ago. I hefted the black spear.

  I glimpsed the girl, too. She was moving but doing it like a drunk on the brink of passing out. I recalled another time, long ago, when a brother named Raven and I had ambushed a sorceress called Whisper on Soulcatcher’s behalf. Circles of fortune. The madwoman had been our employer at the time. Now she worked for us. Or would be given the opportunity to work for us if I could keep her alive. That might be a tough assignment.

  Seeing the girl and my old friend hurt. I wished I had a weapon I could use to end this here, now.

  One-Eye’s spear seemed to turn in my hand.

  I pointed out the view to Murgen and Thai Dei. I breathed, “On the way out. After we have Tobo and Howler.” I indicated their bamboo poles.

  Murgen worked to keep a blank face. Thai Dei did not have to work. Thai Dei did not come equipped with facial expressions, so far as I could tell. Uncle Doj nodded. Uncle Doj was old friends with unpleasant necessity.

  I told Murgen, “I’ll do it if you can’t.” Sometimes you have to build a wall around your heart.

  A few steps onward we encountered the emotional phenomenon the soldiers had reported. But with the girl stunned it did not overcome reason. I just had to concentrate on not giving myself up to love for the Daughter of Night.

  I did wonder how much worse it had been when she was in control of all her faculties.

  We reached Tobo without incident. Howler lay not ten feet away, miraculously silent. The gods do play amazing games.