“Remember, this is his country,” I said. “He knows it better than we do.”
Silent nodded absently, unconcerned. I glanced at the sun. Maybe two hours of daylight left. I wondered how big a lead they had.
We reached the high road. Silent studied it a moment, rode south a few yards, nodded to himself. He beckoned me, spurred his mount.
And so we rode those tireless beasts, hard, hour after hour, after the sun went down, all the night long, into the next day, heading toward the sea, till we were far ahead of our quarry. The breaks were few and far between. I ached everywhere. It was too soon after my venture with the Lady for this.
We halted where the road hugged the foot of a wooded hill. Silent indicated a bald spot that made a good watchpoint, I nodded. We turned off and climbed.
I took care of the horses, then collapsed. “Getting too old for this,” I said, and fell asleep immediately.
Silent wakened me at dusk. “They coming?” I asked.
He shook his head, signed that he did not expect them before tomorrow. But I should keep an eye out anyway, in case Raven was travelling by night.
So I sat under the pallid light of the comet, wrapped in a blanket, shivering in the winter wind, for hour upon hour, alone with thoughts I did not want to think, I saw nothing but a brace of roebuck crossing from woods to farmland in hopes of finding better forage.
Silent relieved me a couple hours before dawn. Oh joy, oh joy. Now I could lie down and shiver and think thoughts I did not want to think. But I did fall asleep sometime, because it was light when Silent squeezed my shoulder.…
“They coming?”
He nodded.
I rose, rubbed my eyes with the backs of my hands, stared up the road. Sure enough, two figures were coming south, one taller than the other. But at that distance they could have been any adult and child. We packed and readied the horses hurriedly, descended the hill. Silent wanted to wait down the road, around the bend. He told me to get on the road behind them, just in case. You never knew about Raven.
He left. I waited, shivering still, feeling very lonely. The travellers breasted a rise. Yes. Raven and Darling. They walked briskly, but Raven seemed unafraid, certain no one was after him. They passed me. I waited a minute, eased out of the woods, followed them around the toe of the hill.
Silent sat his mount in the middle of the road, leaning forward slightly, looking lean and mean and dark. Raven had stopped fifty feet away, exposed his steel. He held Darling behind him.
She noticed me coming, grinned and waved. I grinned back, despite the tension of the moment.
Raven whirled. A snarl stretched his lips. Anger, possibly even hatred, smouldered in his eyes. I stopped beyond the reach of his knives. He did not look willing to talk.
We all remained motionless for several minutes. Nobody wanted to speak first. I looked at Silent. He shrugged. He had come to the end of his plan.
Curiosity had brought me here, I had satisfied part of it. They were alive, and were running. Only the why remained shadowy.
To my amazement Raven yielded first. “What’re you doing here, Croaker?” I’d thought him able to outstubborn a stone.
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity. Me and Silent, we got an interest in Darling. We were worried.”
He frowned. He was not hearing what he had expected.
“You can see she’s all right.”
“Yeah. Looks like. How about you?”
“I look like I’m not?”
I glanced at Silent. He had nothing to contribute. “One wonders, Raven. One wonders.”
He was on the defensive. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Fellow freezes out his buddies. Treats them like shit. Then he deserts. Makes people wonder enough to go find out what’s happening.”
“The Captain know you’re here?”
I glanced at Silent again. He nodded. “Yeah. Want to let us in on it, old buddy? Me, Silent, the Captain, Pickles, Elmo, Goblin, we all maybe got an idea.…”
“Don’t try to stop me, Croaker.”
“Why are you always looking for a fight? Who said anything about stopping you? They wanted you stopped, you wouldn’t be out here now. You’d never have gotten away from the Tower.”
He was startled.
“They saw it coming, Pickles and the Old Man. They let you go. Some of the rest of us, we’d like to know why. I mean, like, we think we know, and if it’s what we think, then at least you have my blessing. And Silent’s. And I guess everybody’s who didn’t hold you back.”
Raven frowned. He knew what I was hinting, but couldn’t make sense of it. His not being old line Company left a communications gap.
“Put it this way,” I said. “Me and Silent figure you’re going down as killed in action. Both of you. Nobody needs to know any different. But, you know, it’s like you’re running away from home. Even if we wish you well, we maybe feel a little hurt on account of the way you do it. You were voted into the Company. You went through hell with us. You.… Look what you and me went through together. And you treat us like shit. That don’t go down too well.”
It sank in. He said, “Sometimes something comes up that’s so important you can’t tell your best friends. Could get you all killed.”
“Figured that was it. Hey! Take it easy.”
Silent had dismounted and begun an exchange with Darling. She seemed oblivious to the strain between her friends. She was telling Silent what they had done and where they were headed.
“Think that’s smart?” I asked. “Opal? Couple things you should know, then. One, the Lady won. Guess you figured that. Saw it coming, or you wouldn’t have pulled out. Okay. More important. The Limper is back. She didn’t do him in. She shaped him up and he’s her number one boy now.”
Raven turned pale. It was the first I could recall seeing him truly frightened. But his fear was not for himself. He considered himself a walking dead man, a man with nothing to lose. But now he had Darling, and a cause. He had to stay alive.
“Yeah. The Limper. Me and Silent went over this a lot.” Actually, this had occurred to me only a moment earlier. I felt it would go better if he thought some considered deliberation had gone into it. “We figure the Lady will catch on sooner or later. She’ll want to make a move. If she connects you, you’ll have the Limper on your trail. He knows you. He’d start looking in your old stomping grounds, figuring you’d get in touch with old friends. You got any friends who could hide you from the Limper?”
Raven sighed, seemed to lose stature. He put his steel away. “That was my plan. Thought we’d cross to Beryl and hide out there.”
“Beryl is technically only the Lady’s ally, but her word is law there. You’ve got to go somewhere where they’ve never heard of her.”
“Where?”
“This isn’t my part of the world.” He seemed calm enough now, so I dismounted. He eyed me warily, then relaxed. I said, “I pretty much know what I came to find out. Silent?”
Silent nodded, continued his conversation with Darling.
I took the money bag from my bedroll, tossed it to Raven. “You left your share of the Roses take.” I brought the spare horses up. “You could travel faster if you were riding.”
Raven struggled with himself, trying to say thank you, unable to get through the barriers he had built around the man inside. “Guess we could head toward.…”
“I don’t want to know. I’ve met the Eye twice already. She’s got a thing about getting her side set down for posterity. Not that she wants to look good, just that she wants it down true. She knows how history rewrites itself. She doesn’t want that to happen to her. And I’m the boy she’s picked to do the writing.”
“Get out, Croaker. Come with us. You and Silent. Come with us.”
It had been a long, lonely night. I had thought about it a lot. “Can’t, Raven. The Captain has to stay where he’s at, even if he don’t like it. The Company has to stay. I’m
Company. I’m too old to run away from home. We’ll fight the same fight, you and me, but I’ll do my share staying with the family.”
“Come on, Croaker. A bunch of mercenary cutthroats.…”
“Whoa! Hold it.” My voice hardened more than I wanted. He stopped. I said, “Remember that night in Lords, before we went after Whisper? When I read from the Annals? What you said?”
He did not respond for several seconds. “Yes. That you’d made me feel what it meant to be a member of the Black Company. All right. Maybe I don’t understand it, but I did feel it.”
“Thanks.” I took another package from my bedroll. This one was for Darling. “You talk to Silent a while, eh? I got a birthday present here.”
He looked at me a moment, then nodded. I turned so my tears would not be so obvious. And after I said my goodbyes to the girl, and cherished her delight in my feeble present, I went to the roadside and had myself a brief, quiet cry. Silent and Raven pretended blindness.
I would miss Darling. And I would spend the rest of my days frightened for her. She was precious, perfect, always happy. The thing in that village was behind her. But ahead lay the most terrible enemy imaginable. None of us wanted that for her.
I rose, erased the evidence of tears, took Raven aside. “I don’t know your plans. I don’t want to know. But just in case. When the Lady and I caught up with Soulcatcher the other day, he had a whole bale of those papers we dug up in Whisper’s camp. He never turned them over to her. She doesn’t know they exist.” I told him where they could be found. “I’ll ride out that way in a couple weeks. If they’re still there, I’ll see what I can find in them myself.”
He looked at me with a cool, expressionless face. He was thinking my death warrant was signed if I came under the Eye again. But he did not say it. “Thanks, Croaker. If I’m ever up that way, I’ll check into it.”
“Yeah. You ready to go, Silent?”
Silent nodded.
“Darling, come here.” I squeezed her in a long, tight hug. “You be good for Raven.” I unfastened the amulet One-Eye had given me, fixed it on her wrist, told Raven, “That’ll let her know if any unfriendly Taken comes around. Don’t ask me how, but it works. Luck.”
“Yeah.” He stood there looking at us as we mounted, still baffled. He raised a hand tentatively, dropped it.
I told Silent, “Let’s go home.” And we rode away.
Neither of us looked back.
It was an incident that never happened. After all, hadn’t Raven and his orphan died at the gates of Charm?
Back to the Company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to these Annals. Back to fear.
Thirty-seven years before the comet returns. The vision has to be false. I’ll never survive that long. Will I?
SHADOWS
LINGER
For David G. Hartwell,
without whom there would be neither Sword
nor Dread Empire nor Starfishers
Juniper
All men are born condemned, so the wise say. All suckle the breast of Death.
All bow before that Silent Monarch. That Lord in Shadow lifts a finger. A feather flutters to the earth. There is no reason in His song. The good go young. The wicked prosper. He is king of the Chaos Lords. His breath stills all souls.
We found a city dedicated to His worship, long ago, but so old now it has lost that dedication. The dark majesty of his godhead has frayed, been forgotten by all but those who stand in his shadow. But Juniper faced a more immediate fear, a specter from yesteryear leaking into the present upon a height overlooking the city. And because of that the Black Company went there, to that strange city far beyond the bounds of the Lady’s empire. … But this is not the beginning. In the beginning we were far away. Only two old friends and a handful of men we would meet later stood nose-to-nose with the shadow.
Tally Roadside
The children’s heads popped from the weeds like groundhog heads. They watched the approaching soldiers. The boy whispered, “Must be a thousand of them.” The column stretched back and back. The dust it raised drifted up the face of a far hill. The creak and jangle of harness grew ever louder.
The day was hot. The children were sweating. Their thoughts lingered on a nearby brook and a dip in a pool they had found there. But they had been set to watch the road. Rumor said the Lady meant to break the renascent Rebel movement in Tally province.
And here her soldiers came. Closer now. Grim, hard-looking men. Veterans. Easily old enough to have helped create the disaster which had befallen the Rebel six years ago, claiming, among a quarter million men, their father.
“It’s them!” the boy gasped. Fear and awe filled his voice. Grudging admiration edged it. “That’s the Black Company.”
The girl was no student of the enemy. “How do you know?”
The boy indicated a bear of a man on a big roan. He had silvery hair. His bearing said he was accustomed to command. “That’s the one they call the Captain. The little black one beside him would be the wizard called One-Eye. See his hat? That’s how you tell. The ones behind them must be Elmo and the Lieutenant.”
“Are any of the Taken with them?” The girl rose higher, for a better look. “Where are the other famous ones?” She was the younger. The boy, at ten, already considered himself a soldier of the White Rose.
He yanked his sister down. “Stupid! Want them to see you?”
“So what if they do?”
The boy sneered. She had believed their uncle Neat when he had said that the enemy would not harm children. The boy hated his uncle. The man had no guts.
Nobody pledged to the White Rose had any guts. They just played at fighting the Lady. The most daring thing they did was ambush the occasional courier. At least the enemy had courage.
They had seen what they had been sent to see. He touched the girl’s wrist. “Let’s go.” They scurried through the weeds, toward the wooded creek bank.
A shadow lay upon their path. They looked up and went pale. Three horsemen stared down at them. The boy gaped. Nobody could have slipped up unheard. “Goblin!”
The small, frog-faced man in the middle grinned. “At your service, laddy-boy.”
The boy was terrified, but his mind remained functional. He shouted, “Run!” If one of them could escape. …
Goblin made a circular gesture. Pale pink fire tangled his fingers. He made a throwing motion. The boy fell, fighting invisible bonds like a fly caught in a spider’s web. His sister whimpered a dozen feet away.
“Pick them up,” Goblin told his companions. “They should tell an interesting tale.”
Juniper: The Iron Lily
The Lily stands on Floral Lane in the heart of the Buskin, Juniper’s worst slum, where the taste of death floats on every tongue and men value life less than they do an hour of warmth or a decent meal. Its front sags against its neighbor to the right, clinging for support like one of its own drunken patrons. Its rear cants in the opposite direction. Its bare wood siding sports leprous patches of grey rot. Its windows are boarded with scraps and chinked with rags. Its roof boasts gaps through which the wind howls and bites when it blows off the Wolander Mountains. There, even on a summer’s day, the glaciers twinkle like distant veins of silver.
Sea winds are little better. They bring a chill damp which gnaws the bones and sends ice floes scampering across the harbor.
The shaggy arms of the Wolanders reach seaward, flanking the River Port, forming cupped hands which hold the city and harbor. The city straddles the river, creeping up the heights on both sides.
Wealth rises in Juniper, scrambling up and away from the river. The people of the Buskin, when they lift their eyes from their misery, see the homes of the wealthy above, noses in the air, watching one another across the valley.
Higher still, crowning the ridges, are two castles. On the southern height stands Duretile, hereditary bastion of the Dukes of Juniper. Duretile is in scandalous disrepair. Most every structure in Juniper is.
br /> Below Duretile lies the devotional heart of Juniper, the Enclosure, beneath which lie the Catacombs. There half a hundred generations rest, awaiting the Day of Passage, guarded by the Custodians of the Dead.
On the north ridge stands an incomplete fortress called, simply, the black castle. Its architecture is alien. Grotesque monsters leer from its battlements. Serpents writhe in frozen agonies upon its walls. There are no joints in the obsidian-like material. And the place is growing.
The people of Juniper ignore the castle’s existence, its growth. They do not want to know what is happening up there. Seldom do they have time to pause in their struggle for survival to lift their eyes that high.
Tally Ambush
I drew a seven, spread, discarded a trey, and stared at a lone ace. To my left, Pawnbroker muttered, “That did it. He’s down to a rock.”
I eyed him curiously. “What makes you say that?”
He drew, cursed, discarded. “You get a face like a corpse when you’ve got it cold, Croaker. Even your eyes.”
Candy drew, cursed, discarded a five. “He’s right, Croaker. You get so unreadable you’re readable. Come on, Otto.”
Otto stared at his hand, then at the pile, as though he could conjure victory from the jaws of defeat. He drew. “Shit.” He discarded his draw, a royal card. I showed them my ace and raked in my winnings.
Candy stared over my shoulder while Otto gathered the cards. His eyes were hard and cold. “What?” I asked.
“Our host is working up his courage. Looking for a way to get out and warn them.”
I turned. So did the others. One by one the tavern-keeper and his customers dropped their gazes and shrank into themselves. All but the tall, dark man seated alone in shadows near the fireplace. He winked and lifted a mug, as if in salute. I scowled. His response was a smile.
Otto dealt.
“One hundred ninety-three,” I said.
Candy frowned. “Damn you, Croaker,” he said, without emotion. I had been counting hands. They were perfect ticks of the clocks of our lives as brothers of the Black Company. I had played over ten thousand hands since the battle at Charm. Only the gods themselves know how many I played before I started keeping track.