Chronicles of the Black Company

  Grey fire ripped through the room, for an instant exposing its entirety, branding the carnage on the backs of my eyeballs. The forvalaka screamed, this time with genuine pain. Point for the wizards.

  It streaked toward me. I hacked in panic as it whipped past. I missed. It whirled, took a running start, leapt at the wizards. They met it with another flashy spell. The forvalaka howled. A man shrieked. The beast thrashed on the floor like a dying snake. Men stabbed it with pikes and swords. It regained its feet and streaked out the exit we had kept open for ourselves.

  “It’s coming!” the Captain bellowed to the Lieutenant.

  I sagged, knowing nothing but relief. It was gone. … Before my butt hit the floor One-Eye was dragging me up. “Come on, Croaker, It hit Tom-Tom. You got to help.”

  I staggered over, suddenly aware of a shallow gash down one leg. “Better clean it good,” I muttered. “Those claws are bound to be filthy.”

  Tom-Tom was a twist of human wreckage. His throat had been torn out, his belly opened. His arms and chest had been ripped to the bone. Amazingly, he was still alive, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing any physician could have done. Not even a master sorcerer, specializing in healing, could have salvaged the little black man. But One-Eye insisted I try, and try I did till the Captain dragged me off to attend men less certain of dying. One-Eye was bellowing at him as I left.

  “Get some lights in here!” I ordered. At the same time the Captain began assembling the uninjured at the open doorway, telling them to hold it.

  As the light grew stronger the extent of the debacle became more evident. We had been decimated. Moreover, a dozen brothers who had not been with us lay scattered around the chamber. They had been on duty Among them were as many more of the Syndic’s secretaries and advisers.

  “Anybody see the Syndic?” the Captain demanded. “He must have been here.” He and Match and Elmo started searching. I did not have much chance to follow that. I patched and sewed like a madman, comandeering all the help I could. The forvalaka left deep claw wounds which required careful and skillful suturing.

  Somehow, Goblin and Silent managed to calm One-Eye enough so he could help. Maybe they did something to him. He worked in a daze barely this side of unconsciousness.

  I took another look at Tom-Tom when I got a chance. He was still alive, clutching his little drum. Damn! That much stubbornness deserved reward. But how? My expertise simply was not adequate.

  “Yo!” Match shouted. “Captain!” I glanced over. He was tapping a chest with his sword.

  The chest was of stone. It was a strongbox of a type favored by Beryl’s wealthy. I guess this one weighed five hundred pounds. Its exterior had been fancifully carved. Most of the decoration had been demolished. By the tearing of claws?

  Elmo smashed the lock and pried the lid open. I glimpsed a man lying atop gold and jewels, arms around his head, shaking. Elmo and the Captain exchanged grim looks.

  I was distracted by the Lieutenant’s arrival. He had held on downstairs till he got worried about nothing having happened. The forvalaka had not gone down.

  “Search the tower” the Captain told him. “Maybe it went up.” There were a couple levels above us.

  When next I glanced at the chest it was closed again. Our employer was nowhere in evidence. Match was seated atop it, cleaning his nails with a dagger. I eyed the Captain and Elmo. There was something the slightest bit odd about them.

  They would not have finished the forvalaka’s task for her, would they? No. The Captain couldn’t betray Company ideals that way. Could he?

  I did not ask.

  The search of the tower revealed nothing but a trail of blood leading to the tower top, where the forvalaka had lain gathering strength. It had been badly hurt, but it had escaped by descending the outer face of the tower.

  Someone suggested we track it. To that the Captain replied, “We’re leaving Beryl. We’re no longer employed. We have to get out before the city turns on us.” He sent Match and Elmo to keep an eye on the native garrison. The rest evacuated the wounded from the Paper Tower.

  For several minutes I remained unchaperoned. I eyed the big stone chest. Temptation arose, but I resisted. I did not want to know.

  Candy got back after all the excitement. He told us the legate was at the pier offloading his troops.

  The men were packing and loading, some muttering about events in the Paper Tower, others bitching about having to leave. You stop moving and immediately put down roots. You accumulate things. You find a woman. Then the inevitable happens and you have to leave it all. There was a lot of pain floating around our barracks.

  I was at the gate when the northerners came. I helped turn the capstan that raised the portcullus. I felt none too proud. Without my approval the Syndic might never have been betrayed.

  The legate occupied the Bastion. The Company began its evacuation. It was then about the third hour after midnight and the streets were deserted.

  Two-thirds of the way to the Gate of Dawn the Captain ordered a halt. The sergeants assembled everyone able to fight. The rest continued with the wagons.

  The Captain took us north on the Avenue of the Older Empire, where Beryl’s emperors had memorialized themselves and their triumphs. Many of the monuments are bizarre, and celebrate such minutia as favorite horses, gladiators, or lovers of either sex.

  I had a bad feeling even before we reached the Rubbish Gate. Uneasiness grew into suspicion, and suspicion blossomed into grim certainty as we entered the martial fields. There is nothing near the Rubbish Gate but the Fork Barracks.

  The Captain made no specific declaration. When we reached the Fork compound every man knew what was afoot.

  The Urban Cohorts were as sloppy as ever. The compound gate was open and the lone watchman was asleep. We trooped inside unresisted. The Captain began assigning tasks.

  Between five and six thousand men remained there. Their officers had restored some discipline, having enticed them into restoring their weapons to the armories. Traditionally, Beryl’s captains trust their men with weapons only on the eve of battle.

  Three platoons moved directly into the barracks, killing men in their beds. The remaining platoon established a blocking position at the far end of the compound.

  The sun was up before the Captain was satisfied. We withdrew and hurried after our baggage train. There wasn’t a man among us who hadn’t had his fill.

  We were not pursued, of course. No one came besieging the camp we established on the Pillar of Anguish. Which was what it was all about. That and the release of several years of pent-up anger.

  Elmo and I stood at the tip of the headland, watching the afternoon sun play around the edges of a storm far out to sea. It had danced in and swamped our encampment with its cool deluge, then had rolled off across the water again. It was beautiful, though not especially colorful.

  Elmo had not had much to say recently. “Something eating you, Elmo?” The storm moved in front of the light, giving the sea the look of rusted iron. I wondered if the cool had reached Beryl.

  “Reckon you can guess, Croaker”

  “Reckon I can.” The Paper Tower. The Fork Barracks. Our ignoble treatment of our commission. “What do you think it will be like, north of the sea?”

  “Think the black witch will come, eh?”

  “He’ll come, Elmo. He’s just having trouble getting his puppets to jig to his tune.” As who did not, trying to tame that insane city?

  “Uhm.” And, “Look there.”

  A pod of whales plunged past rocks lying off the headland. I tried to appear unimpressed, and failed. The beasts were magnificent, dancing in the iron sea.

  We sat down with our backs toward the lighthouse. It seemed we looked at a world never defiled by Man. Sometimes I suspect it would be better for our absence.

  “Ship out there,” Elmo said.

  I didn’t see it till its sail caught the fire of the afternoon sun, becoming an orange triangle edged with gold, rocking and bobbing
with the rise and fall of the sea. “Coaster. Maybe a twenty tonner.”

  “That big?”

  “For a coaster. Deep water ships sometimes run eighty tons.”

  Time pranced along, fickle and faggoty. We watched ship and whales. I began to daydream. For the hundredth time I tried to imagine the new land, building upon traders’ tales heard secondhand. We would likely cross to Opal. Opal was a reflection of Beryl, they said, though a younger city. …

  “That fool is going to pile onto the rocks.”

  I woke up. The coaster was perilously near said danger. She shifted course a point and eluded disaster by a hundred yards, resumed her original course.

  “That put some excitement into our day,” I observed.

  “One of these days you’re going to say something without getting sarcastic and I’ll curl up and die, Croaker.”

  “Keeps me sane, friend.”

  “That’s debatable, Croaker. Debatable.”

  I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask.

  “She’s coming around,” Elmo said.

  “What? Oh.” The coaster wallowed in the swell, barely making way, while her bows swung toward the strand below our camp.

  “Want to tell the Captain?”

  “I expect he knows. The men in the lighthouse.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep an eye out in case anything else turns up.”

  The storm was sliding to the west now, obscuring that horizon and blanketing the sea with its shadow. The cold grey sea. Suddenly, I was terrified of the crossing.

  That coaster brought news from smuggler friends of Tom-Tom and One-Eye. One-Eye became even more dour and surly after he received them, and he had reached all time lows already. He even eschewed squabbling with Goblin, which he made a second career. Tom-Tom’s death had hit him hard, and would not turn loose. He would not tell us what his friends had to say.

  The Captain was little better. His temper was an abomination. I think he both longed for and dreaded the new land. The commission meant potential rebirth for the Company, with our sins left behind, yet he had an intimation of the service we were entering. He suspected the Syndic had been right about the northern empire.

  The day following the smuggler’s visit brought cool northern breezes. Fog nuzzled the skirts of the headland early in the evening. Shortly after nightfall, coming out of that fog, a boat grounded on the beach. The legate had come.

  We gathered our things and began taking leave of camp followers who had trickled out from the city. Our animals and equipment would be their reward for faith and friendship. I spent a sad, gentle hour with a woman to whom I meant more than I suspected. We shed no tears and told one another no lies. I left her with memories and most of my pathetic fortune. She left me with a lump in my throat and a sense of loss not wholly fathomable.

  “Come on, Croaker,” I muttered as I clambered down to the beach. “You’ve been through this before. You’ll forget her before you get to Opal.”

  A half dozen boats were drawn up on the strand. As each filled northern sailors shoved it into the surf. Oarsmen drove it into the waves, and in seconds it vanished into the fog. Empty boats came bobbing in. Every other boat carried equipment and possessions.

  A sailor who spoke the language of Beryl told me there was plenty of room aboard the black ship. The legate had left his troops in Beryl as guards for the new puppet Syndic, who was another Red distantly related to the man we had served.

  “Hope they have less trouble than we did,” I said, and went away to brood.

  The legate was trading his men for us. I suspected we were going to be used, that we were headed into something grimmer than we could imagine.

  Several times during the wait J heard a distant howl. At first I thought it the song of the Pillar, But the air was not moving. When it came again I lost all doubt. My skin crawled.

  The quartermaster, the Captain, the Lieutenant, Silent, Goblin, One-Eye, and I waited till the last boat. “I’m not going,” One-Eye announced as a boatswain beckoned us to board.

  “Get in,” the Captain told him. His voice was gentle. That is when he is dangerous.

  “I’m resigning. Going to head south. Been gone long enough, they should’ve forgotten me.”

  The Captain jabbed a finger at the Lieutenant, Silent, Goblin, and me, jerked his thumb at the boat. One-Eye bellowed. “I’ll turn the lot of you into ostriches. …” Silent’s hand sealed his mouth. We ran him to the boat. He wriggled like a snake in a firepit.

  “You stay with the family” the Captain said softly.

  “On three,” Goblin squealed merrily, then quick-counted. The little black man arced into the boat, twisting in flight. He bobbed over the gunwale cursing, spraying us with saliva. We laughed to see him showing some spirit. Goblin led the charge that nailed him to a thwart.

  Sailors pushed us off. The moment the oars bit water One-Eye subsided. He had the look of a man headed for the gallows.

  The galley took form, a looming, indeterminate shape slightly darker than the surrounding darkness. I heard the fog-hollowed voices of seamen, timbers creaking, tackle working, long before I was sure of my eyes. Our boat nosed in to the foot of an accommodation ladder. The howl came again.

  One-Eye tried to dive overboard. We restrained him. The Captain applied a bootheel to his butt. “You had your chance to talk us out of this. You wouldn’t. Live with it.”

  One-Eye slouched as he followed the Lieutenant up the ladder, a man without hope. A man who had left a brother dead and now was being forced to approach that brother’s killer, upon which he was powerless to take revenge.

  We found the Company on the maindeck, snuggled amongst mounds of gear. The sergeants threaded the mess toward us.

  The legate appeared. I stared. This was the first I had seen him afoot, standing. He was short. For a moment I wondered if he were male at all. His voices were often otherwise.

  He surveyed us with an intensity that suggested he was reading our souls. One of his officers asked the Captain to fall the men in the best he could on the crowded deck. The ship’s crew were taking up the center flats decking over the open well that ran from the bow almost to the stern, and from deck level down to the lower oar bank. Below, there was muttering, clanking, rattling, as the oarsmen wakened.

  The legate reviewed us. He paused before each soldier, pinned a reproduction of the device on his sail over each heart. It was slow going. We were under way before he finished.

  The nearer the envoy approached, the more One-Eye shook. He almost fainted when the legate pinned him. I was baffled. Why so much emotion?

  I was nervous when my turn came, but not frightened. I glanced at the badge as delicate gloved fingers attached it to my jerkin. Skull and circle in silver, on jet, elegantly crafted. A valuable if grim piece of jewelry. Had he not been so rattled, I would have thought One-Eye to be considering how best to pawn it.

  The device now seemed vaguely familiar. Outside the context of the sail, which I had taken as showmanship and ignored. Hadn’t I read or heard about a similar seal somewhere?

  The legate said, “Welcome to the service of the Lady, physician.” His voice was distracting. It did not fit expectations, ever. This time it was musical, lilting, the voice of a young woman putting something over on wiser heads.

  The Lady? Where had I encountered that word used that way, emphasized as though it was the title of a goddess? A dark legend out of olden times. …

  A howl of outrage, pain, and despair filled the ship. Startled, I broke ranks and went to the lip of the air well.

  The forvalaka was in a big iron cage at the foot of the mast. In the shadows it seemed to change subtly as it prowled, testing every bar. One moment it was an athletic woman of about thirty, but seconds later it had assumed the aspect of a black leopard on its hind legs, clawing the imprisoning iron. I recalled the legate saying he might have a use for the monster.

  I face
d him. And the memory came. A devil’s hammer drove spikes of ice into the belly of my soul. I knew why One-Eye did not want to cross the sea. The ancient evil of the north. … “I thought you people died three hundred years ago.”

  The legate laughed. “You don’t know your history well enough. We weren’t destroyed. Just chained and buried alive” His laughter had an hysterical edge. “Chained, buried, and eventually liberated by a fool named Bomanz, Croaker.”

  I dropped to my haunches beside One-Eye, who buried his face in his hands.

  The legate, the terror called Soulcatcher in old tales, a devil worse than any dozen forvalaka, laughed madly. His crewmen cringed. A great joke, enlisting the Black Company in the service of evil. A great city taken and little villains suborned. A truly cosmic jest.

  The Captain settled beside me. “Tell me, Croaker.”

  So I told him about the Domination, and the Dominator and his Lady. Their rule had spanned an empire of evil unrivalled in Hell. I told him about the Ten Who Were Taken (of whom Soulcatcher was one), ten great wizards, near-demigods in their power, who had been overcome by the Dominator and compelled into his service. I told him about the White Rose, the lady general who had brought the Domination down, but whose power had been insufficient to destroy the Dominator, his Lady, and the Ten. She had interred the lot in a charm-bound barrow somewhere north of the sea.

  “And now they’re restored to life, it seems,” I said. “They rule the northern empire. Tom-Tom and One-Eye must have suspected. … We’ve enlisted in their service.”

  “Taken,” he murmured. “Rather like the forvalaka.”

  The beast screamed and hurled itself against the bars of its cage. Souicatcher’s laughter drifted across the foggy deck. “Taken by the Taken,” I agreed. “The parallel is uncomfortable.” I had begun to shake as more and more old tales surfaced in my mind.

  The Captain sighed and stared into the fog, toward the new land.

  One-Eye stared at the thing in the cage, hating. I tried to ease him away. He shook me off. “Not yet, Croaker. I have to figure this.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t the one that killed Tom-Tom. It doesn’t have the scars we put on it.”