A shadowy shape appeared. It was tall, thin, clad in loose black pantaloons and a hooded shirt. It examined each body briefly, seemed pleased. It faced Raven. Shed glimpsed a face all of sharp angles and shadows, lustrous, olive, cold, with a pair of softly luminous eyes.
“Thirty. Thirty. Forty. Thirty. Seventy,” it said.
Raven countered, “Thirty. Thirty. Fifty. Thirty. One hundred.”
“Forty. Eighty.”
“Forty-five. Ninety.”
“Forty. Ninety.”
“Done.”
They were dickering! Raven was not interested in quibbling over the old people. The tall being would not advance his offer for the youth. But the dying man was negotiable.
Shed watched the tall being count out coins at the feet of the corpses. That was a damned fortune! Two hundred twenty pieces of silver! With that he could tear the Lily down and build a new place. He could get out of the Buskin altogether.
Raven scooped the coins into his coat pocket. He gave Shed five.
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that a good night’s work?”
It was a good month’s work, and then some. But to get only five of. …
“Last time we were partners,” Raven said, swinging onto the driver’s seat. “Maybe we will be again. But tonight you’re a hired hand. Understand?” There was a hard edge to his voice. Shed nodded, beset by new fears.
Raven backed the wagon. Shed felt a sudden chill. That archway was hot as hell. He shuddered, feeling the hunger of the thing watching them.
Dark, glassy, jointless stone slid past. “My god!” He could see into the wall. He saw bones, fragments of bones, bodies, pieces of bodies, all suspended as if floating in the night. As Raven turned toward the gate, he saw a staring face. “What kind of place is this?”
“I don’t know, Shed. I don’t want to know. All I care is, they pay good money. I need it. I have a long way to go.”
The Barrowland
The Taken called the Limper met the Company at Frost. We’d spent a hundred and forty-six days on the march. They were long days and hard, grinding, men and animals going on more by habit than desire. An outfit in good shape, like ours, is capable of covering fifty or even a hundred miles in a day, pushing hell out of it, but not day after week after month, upon incredibly miserable roads. A smart commander does not push on a long march. The days add up, each leaving its residue of fatigue, till men begin collapsing if the pace is too desperate.
Considering the territories we crossed, we made damned good time. Between Tome and Frost lie mountains where we were lucky to make five miles a day, deserts we had to wander in search of water, rivers that took days to cross using makeshift rafts. We were fortunate to reach Frost having lost only two men.
The Captain shone with a glow of accomplishment—till the military governor summoned him.
He assembled the officers and senior noncoms when he returned. “Bad news,” he told us. “The Lady is sending the Limper to lead us across the Plain of Fear. Us and the caravan we’ll escort.”
Our response was surly. There was bad blood between the Company and the Limper. Elmo asked, “How soon will we leave, sir?” We needed rest. None had been promised, of course, and the Lady and the Taken seem unconscious of human frailties, but still . …
“No time specified. Don’t get lazy. He’s not here now, but he could turn up tomorrow.”
Sure. With the flying carpets the Taken use, they can turn up anywhere within days. I muttered, “Let’s hope other business keeps him away a while.”
I did not want to encounter him again. We had done him wrong, frequently, way back. Before Charm we worked closely with a Taken called Soul-catcher. Catcher used us in several schemes to discredit Limper, both out of old enmity and because Catcher was secretly working on behalf of the Dominator. The Lady was taken in. She nearly destroyed the Limper, but rehabilitated him instead, and brought him back for the final battle.
Way, way back, when the Domination was aborning, centuries before the foundation of the Lady’s empire, the Dominator overpowered his greatest rivals and compelled them into his service. He accumulated ten villains that way, soon known as the Ten Who Were Taken. When the White Rose raised the world against the Dominator’s wickedness, the Ten were buried with him. She could destroy none of them outright.
Centuries of peace sapped the will of the world to guard itself. A curious wizard tried to contact the Lady. The Lady manipulated him, effected her release. The Ten rose with her. Within a generation she and they forged a new dark empire. Within two they were embattled with the Rebel, whose prophets agreed the White Rose would be reincarnated to lead them to a final victory.
For a while it looked like they would win. Our armies collapsed. Provinces fell. Taken feuded and destroyed one another. Nine of the Ten perished. The Lady managed to Take three Rebel chieftains to replace a portion of her losses: Feather, Journey, and Whisper—likely the best general since the White Rose. She gave us a terrible time before her Taking.
The Rebel prophets were correct in their prophecies, except about the last battle. They expected a reincarnated White Rose to lead them. She did not. They did not find her in time.
She was alive then. But she was living on our side of the battleline, unaware of what she was. I learned who she was. It is that knowledge which makes my life worthless should I be put to the question.
“Croaker!” the Captain snapped. “Wake up!” Everybody looked at me, wondering how I could daydream through whatever he’d said.
“What?”
“You didn’t hear me?”
“No, sir.”
He glowered his best bear glower. “Listen up, then. Be ready to travel by carpet when the Taken arrive. Fifty pounds of gear is your limit.”
Carpet? Taken? What the hell? I looked around. Some of the men grinned. Some pitied me. Carpet flight? “What for?”
Patiently, the Captain explained, “The Lady wants ten men sent to help Whisper and Feather in the Barrowland. Doing what I don’t know. You’re one of the ones she picked.”
Flutter of fear. “Why me?” It was rough, back when I was her pet.
“Maybe she still loves you. After all these years.”
“Captain. …”
“Because she said so, Croaker.”
“I guess that’s good enough. Sure can’t argue with it. Who else?”
“Pay attention and you’d know these things. Worry about it later. We have other fish to fry now.”
Whisper came to Frost before the Limper. I found myself tossing a pack aboard her flying carpet. Fifty pounds. The rest I had left with One-Eye and Silent.
The carpet was a carpet only by courtesy, because tradition calls it that. Actually, it is a piece of heavy fabric stretched on a wooden frame a foot high when grounded. My fellow passengers were Elmo, who would command our team, and Kingpin. Kingpin is a lazy bastard, but he swings a mean blade.
Our gear, and another hundred pounds belonging to men who would follow us later, rested at the center of the carpet. Shaking, Elmo and Kingpin tied themselves in place at the carpet’s two rear corners. My spot was the left front. Whisper sat at the right. We were heavily bundled, almost to immobility. We would be flying fast and high, Whisper said. The temperature upstairs would be low.
I shook as much as Elmo and Kingpin, though I had been aboard carpets before. I loved the view and dreaded the anticipation of falling that came with flight. I also dreaded the Plain of Fear, where strange, fell things cruise the upper air.
Whisper queried, “You all use the latrine? It’s going to be a long flight.” She did not mention us voiding ourselves in fear, which some men do up there. Her voice was cool and melodious, like those of the women who populate your last dream before waking. Her appearance belied that voice. She looked every bit the tough old campaigner she was. She eyed me, evidently recalling our previous encounter in the Forest of Cloud.
Raven and I had lain in wait where she was expected to
meet the Limper and lead him over to the Rebel side. The ambush was successful. Raven took the Limper. I captured Whisper. Soulcatcher and the Lady came and finished up. Whisper became the first new Taken since the Domination.
She winked.
Taut fabric smacked my butt. We went up fast.
Crossing the Plain of Fear was faster by air, but still harrowing. Windwhales quartered across our path. We zipped around them. They were too slow to keep pace. Turquoise manta things rose from their backs, flapped clumsily, caught updrafts, rose above us, then dived past like plunging eagles, challenging our presence in their airspace. We could not outrun them, but outclimbed them easily. However, we could not climb higher than the windwhales. So high and the air becomes too rare for human beings. The whales could rise another mile, becoming diving platforms for the mantas.
There were other flying things, smaller and less dangerous, but determinedly obnoxious. Nevertheless, we got through. When a manta did attack, Whisper defeated it with her thaumaturgic craft.
To do so, she gave up control of the carpet. We fell, out of control, till she drove the manta away. I got through without losing my breakfast, but just barely. I never asked Elmo and Kingpin, figuring they might not want their dignity betrayed.
Whisper would not attack first. That is the prime rule for surviving the Plain of Fear. Don’t hit first. If you do, you buy more than a duel. Every monster out there will go after you.
We crossed without harm, as carpets usually do, and raced on, all day long, into the night. We turned north. The air became cooler. Whisper dropped to lower altitudes and slower speeds. Morning found us over Forsberg, where the Company had served when new in the Lady’s service. Elmo and I gawked over the side.
Once I pointed, shouted, “There’s Deal,” We had held that fortress briefly. Then Elmo pointed the other way. There lay Oar, where we had pulled some fine, bloody tricks on the Rebel, and earned the enmity of the Limper. Whisper flew so low we could distinguish faces in the streets. Oar looked no more friendly than it had eight years ago.
We passed on, rolled along above the treetops of the Great Forest, ancient and virgin wilderness from which the White Rose had conducted her campaigns against the Dominator. Whisper slowed around noon. We drifted down into a wide sprawl that once had been cleared land. A cluster of mounds in its middle betrayed the handiwork of man, though now the barrows are scarcely recognizable.
Whisper landed in the street of a town that was mostly ruin. I presumed it to be the town occupied by the Eternal Guard, whose task it is to prevent tampering with the Barrowland. They were effective till betrayed by apathy elsewhere.
It took the Resurrectionists three hundred seventy years to open the Barrowland, and then they did not get what they wanted. The Lady returned, with the Taken, but the Dominator remained chained.
The Lady obliterated the Resurrectionist movement root and branch. Some reward, eh?
A handful of men left a building still in good repair. I eavesdropped on their exchange with Whisper, understood a few words. “Recall your Fors-berger?” I asked Elmo, while trying to shake the stiffness out of my muscles,
“It’ll come back. Want to give Kingpin a look? He don’t seem right.”
He wasn’t bad off. Just scared. Took a while to convince him we were back on the ground.
The locals, descendants of the Guards who had watched the Barrowland for centuries, showed us to our quarters. The town was being restored. We were the forerunners of a horde of new blood.
Goblin and two of our best soldiers came in on Whisper’s next flight, three days later. They said the Company had left Frost. I asked if it looked like the Limper was holding a grudge.
“Not that I could see,” Goblin said. “But that don’t mean anything.”
No, it didn’t.
The last four men arrived three days later. Whisper moved into our barracks. We formed a sort of bodyguard cum police force. Besides protecting her, we were supposed to help make sure unauthorized persons did not get near the Barrowland.
The Taken called Feather appeared, bringing her own bodyguard. Specialists determined to investigate the Barrowland came up with a battalion of laborers hired in Oar. The laborers cleared the trash and brush, up to the Barrowland proper. Entry there, without appropriate protection, meant a slow, painful death. The protective spells the White Rose left hadn’t faded with the Lady’s resurrection. And she had added her own. I guess she is terrified he will break loose.
The Taken Journey arrived, bringing troops of his own. He established outposts in the Great Forest. The Taken took turns making airborne patrols. We minions watched one another as closely as we watched the rest of the world.
Something big was afoot. Nobody was saying so, but that much was obvious. The Lady definitely anticipated a breakout attempt.
I spent my free time reviewing the Guard’s records, especially for the period when Bomanz lived here. He spent forty years in the garrison town, disguised as an antique digger, before he tried to contact the Lady and unintentionally freed her. He interested me. But there was little to dig out, and that little was colored.
Once I’d had his personal papers, having stumbled onto them shortly before Whisper’s Taking. But I passed them on to our then mentor Soulcatcher for transportation to the Tower. Soulcatcher kept them for her own reasons, and they fell into my hands again, during the battle at Charm, as the Lady and I pursued the renegade Taken. I didn’t mention the papers to anyone but a friend, Raven. The Raven, who deserted to protect a child he believed to be the reincarnation of the White Rose. When I got a chance to pick up the papers from where I hid them, they were gone. I guess Raven took them with him.
I often wonder what became of him. His declared intent was to flee so far no one could find him again. He did not care about politics. He just wanted to protect a child he loved. He was capable of doing anything to protect Darling, I guess he thought the papers might turn into insurance someday.
In the Guard headquarters there are a dozen landscapes painted by past members of the garrison. Most portray the Barrowland. It was magnificent in its day.
It had consisted of a central Great Barrow on a north-south axis, containing the Dominator and his Lady. Surrounding the Great Barrow was a star of earth raised above the plain, outlined by a deep, water-filled moat. At the points of that star stood lesser barrows containing five of The Ten Who Were Taken. A circle rising above the star connected its inward points, and there, at each, stood another barrow containing another Taken. Every barrow was surrounded by spells and fetishes. Within the inner ring, around the Great Barrow, were rank on rank of additional defenses. The last was a dragon curled around the Great Barrow, its tail in its mouth. A later painting by an eyewitness shows the dragon belching fire on the countryside the night of the Lady’s resurrection, Bomanz is walking into the fire.
He was caught between Resurrectionists and the Lady, all of whom were manipulating him. His accident was their premeditated event.
The records say his wife survived. She said he went into the Barrowland to stop what was happening. No one believed her at the time. She claimed he carried the Lady’s true name and wanted to reach her with it before she could wriggle free.
Silent, One-Eye and Goblin will tell you the direst fear of any sorcerer is that knowledge of his true name will fall to some outsider. Bomanz’s wife claimed the Lady’s was encoded in papers her husband possessed. Papers that vanished that night. Papers that I recovered decades later. What Raven snatched may contain the only lever capable of dumping the empire.
Back to the Barrowland in its youth. Impressive construction. Its weather faces were sheathed in limestone. The moat was broad and blue. The surrounding countryside was park-like. … But fear of the Dominator faded, and so did appropriations. A later painting, contemporary with Bomanz, shows the countryside gone to seed, the limestone facings in disrepair, and the moat becoming a swamp. Today you can’t tell where the moat was. The limestone has disappeared beneath
brush. The elevations and barrows are nothing but humps. That part of the Great Barrow where the Dominator lies remains in fair shape, though it, too, is heavily overgrown. Some of the fetishes anchoring the spells keeping his friends away still stand, but weather has devoured their features.
The edge of the Barrowland is now marked by stakes trailing red flags, put there when the Lady announced she was sending outsiders to investigate. The Guards themselves, having lived there always, need no markers to warn them off.
I enjoyed my month and a half there. I indulged my curiosities, and found Feather and Whisper remarkably accessible. That hadn’t been true of the old Taken. Too, the commander of the Guard, called the Monitor, bragged up his command’s past, which stretches back as far as the Company’s. We swapped lies and tales over many a gallon of beer.
During the fifth week someone discovered something. We peons were not told what. But the Taken got excited. Whisper started lifting in more of the Company. The reinforcements told harrowing fables about the Plain of Fear and the Empty Hills. The Company was at Lords now, only five hundred miles distant.
At the end of the sixth week Whisper assembled us and announced another move. “The Lady wants me to take some of you out west. A force of twenty-five. Elmo, you’ll be in command. Feather and I, some experts, and several language specialists will join you. Yes, Croaker. You’re on the list. She wouldn’t deny her favorite amateur historian, would she?”
A thrill of fear. I didn’t want her getting interested again.
“Where’re we headed?” Elmo asked. Professional to the core, the son-of-a-bitch. Not a single complaint.
“A city called Juniper. Way beyond the western bounds of the empire. It’s connected with the Barrowland somehow. It’s a ways north, too. Expect it to be cold and prepare accordingly.”
Juniper? Never heard of it. Neither had anyone else. Not even the Monitor, I scrounged through his maps till I found one showing the western coast. Juniper was way up north, near where the ice persists all year long. It was a big city, I wondered how it could exist there, where it should be frozen all the time. I asked Whisper. She seemed to know something about the place. She said Juniper benefits from an ocean current that brings warm water north. She said the city is very strange—according to Feather, who’d actually been there.