Chronicles of the Black Company

  But she did turn her loose once.

  That is getting ahead, slightly. First we all sneaked back, not letting anyone know there had been summit. The Lady and I returned after Darling, trying to look like we had had an energetic and thorough encounter. I could not help chuckling at some envious looks.

  The Lady and I went outside the null again next morning, after Darling distracted Silent, One-Eye, and Goblin by sending them to dicker with the menhirs. Father Tree could not make up his mind. We went the other direction. And tracked Taken.

  Actually, there was little tracking to do. They were not yet free of the coral. The Lady called upon that power she held over them and they ceased to be Taken.

  Her patience was exhausted. Maybe she wanted them to serve as an object lesson. … In any event, buzzards—real buzzards—were circling before we returned to the Hole.

  That easy, I thought. For her. And for me, when I tried to kill the Limper, with every damned thing going my way, impossible.

  She and I went back to translating. So busy did we stay that I did not remain abreast of the news from outside. I was a little vacant, anyway, because she had expunged my memories of the meeting with Darling.

  Anyhow, somehow, the White Rose got right with Father Tree. The shaky alliance survived.

  One thing I did notice. The menhirs stopped ragging me about strangers on the Plain.

  They meant Tracker and Toadkiller Dog all the time. And the Lady, Two of three were no longer strangers. No one knew what had become of Toadkiller Dog. Even the menhirs could not trace him.

  I tried to get Tracker to explain the name. He could not remember. Not even Toadkiller Dog himself. Weird.

  He was the tree’s creature now.

  Son of the Tree

  I was nervous. I had trouble sleeping. Days were slipping away. Out west, the Great Tragic was gnawing its banks. A four-legged monster was running to its overlord with news that it had been found out. Darling and the Lady were doing nothing.

  Raven remained trapped. Bomanz remained trapped in the long fires he had called down on his own head. The end of the world tramped ever closer. And nobody was doing anything.

  I completed my translations. And was no wiser than before. It seemed. Though Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye kept fooling with charts of names, cross-indexing, seeking patterns. The Lady watched over their shoulders more than did I. I fiddled with these Annals. I bothered myself with how to phrase a request for the return of those I had lost at Queen’s Bridge. I fussed. I grew ever more antsy. People became irritated with me. I began taking moonlight walks to work off my nervous energy.

  One night the moon was full, a fat orange bladder just scaling the hills to the east. A grand sight, especially with patrolling mantas crossing its face. For some reason the desert had a lilac luminescence upon all its edges. The air was chill. There was a dust of powder swirling on the breeze, fallen that afternoon. A change storm flickered far away to the north. …

  A menhir appeared beside me. I jumped three feet. “Strangers on the Plain, rock?” I asked.

  “None stranger than you, Croaker.”

  “I get a comedian. You want something?”

  “No. The Father of Trees wants you.”

  “Yeah? See you.” Heart pounding, I headed toward the Hole.

  Another menhir blocked the path.

  “Well. Since you put it that way.” Faking bravery, I headed upstream.

  They would have herded me. Best accept the inevitable. Less humiliation.

  The wind was bitter around the barren, but when I crossed the boundary it was like stepping into summer. No wind at all, though the old tree was tinkling. And heat like a furnace.

  The moon had risen enough to flood the barren with light now argent. I approached the tree. My gaze fixed on that hand and forearm, still protruding, still gripping a root, still, it seemed, betraying the occasional feeble twitch. The root had grown, though, and seemed to be enveloping the hand, as a tree used for a line post will envelop a wire tacked to it. I stopped five feet from the tree.

  “Come closer,” it said. In plain voice. In conversational tone and volume.

  I said, “Yipe!” and looked for the exits.

  About two skillion menhirs surrounded the barren. So much for running away.

  “Stand still, ephemeral.”

  My feet froze to the ground. Ephemeral, eh?

  “You asked help. You demanded help. You whined and pleaded and begged for help. Stand still and accept it. Come closer.”

  “Make up your mind.” I took two steps. Another would have me climbing him.

  “I have considered. This thing you ephemera fear, in the ground so far from here, would be a peril to my creatures if it rose. I sense no significant strength in those who resist it. Therefore …”

  I hated to interrupt, but I just had to scream. You see, something had me by the ankle. It was squeezing so hard I felt the bones grinding. Crushing. Sorry about that, old-timer.

  The universe turned blue. I rolled in a hurricane of anger. Lightning roared in Father Tree’s branches. Thunder rolled across the desert. I yelled some more.

  Bolts of blue hammered around me, crisping me almost as much as my tormentor. But, at last, the hand turned me loose.

  I tried to run away.

  One step and down I went. I kept on, crawling, while Father Tree apologized and tried to call me back.

  Like Hell. I would crawl through the menhirs if I had to. …

  My mind filled with a waking dream, Father Tree delivering a message direct. Then the earth got quiet, except for the wish as menhirs vanished.

  Big hoopla from the direction of the Hole. A whole gang charged out to find the cause of the uproar. Silent reached me first. “One-Eye,” I said. “I need One-Eye.” He is the only one beside me with medical training. And contrary though he is, I could count on him to take medical instructions.

  One-Eye showed up in a moment, along with twenty others. The watch had reacted quickly. “Ankle,” I told him. “Maybe crushed. Somebody get some light up here. And a damned shovel.”

  “A shovel? Are you off your gourd?” One-Eye demanded.

  “Just get it. And do something for the pain.”

  Elmo materialized, still buckling buckles. “What happened, Croaker?”

  “Old Tree wanted to talk. Had the rocks bring me over. Says he wants to help us. Only while I was listening, that hand got ahold of me. Like to ripped my foot off. The racket was the tree saying, ‘Now stop that. That’s not polite.’”

  “Cut his tongue out after you fix his leg,” Elmo told One-Eye. “What did it want, Croaker?”

  “Your ears gone? To help with the Dominator. Said he thought it over. Decided it was in his own best interest to keep the Dominator down. Give me a hand up,” One-Eye’s efforts were paying dividends. He had sponged one of his wild jungle glops onto my ankle—it had swollen three times normal size already—and the pain was fading.

  Elmo shook his head.

  I said, “I’ll break your damned leg if you don’t get me up.” So he and Silent hoisted me, but supported me.

  “Bring them shovels,” I said. A half dozen had appeared. They were entrenching tools, not real ditchdiggers. “You guys insist on helping, get me back over to the tree.”

  Elmo growled. For a moment I thought Silent might say something. I eyed him expectantly, smiling. I had been waiting twenty-some years.

  No luck.

  Whatever vow he had taken, whatever it was that had driven him to abstain from speech, it had put a steel lock on Silent’s jaw. I have seen him so pissed he could chew nails, so excited he lost sphincter control, but nothing has shaken his resolution against talking.

  Blue still sparkled in the tree’s branches. Leaves tinkled. Moonlight and torchlight mixed into weird shadows the sparks sent dancing. … “Around him,” I told my body slaves. I had not seen it myself, so it must be beyond that trunk.

  Yep. There it was, out twenty feet from the base of the tree. A
sapling. It stood about eight feet tall.

  One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, those guys gobbled and gaped like startled apes. But not old Elmo. “Get a few buckets of water and soak the ground good,” he said. “And find an old blanket we can wrap around the roots and the dirt that comes up with them.”

  He caught right on. Damned farmer. “Get me back downstairs,” I said. “I want to see this ankle myself, in better light.”

  Going back, with Elmo and Silent carrying me, we encountered the Lady. She put on a suitably solicitous act, fussing all over me. I had to endure a lot of knowing grins.

  Only Darling knew the truth even then. With maybe a little suspicion on Silent’s part.

  Shadows In Shadowland

  There was no time inside the Barrowland, only shadow and fire, light without source, and endless fear and frustration. From where he stood, snared in the web of his own device, Raven could discern a score of Domination monsters. He could see men and beasts put down in the time of the White Rose to prevent those evils from escaping. He could see the silhouette of the sorcerer Bomanz limned against frozen dragon fire. The old wizard still struggled to take one more step toward the heart of the Great Barrow, Didn’t he know that he had failed generations ago?

  Raven wondered how long he had been caught. Had his messages gotten through? Would help come? Was he just marking time till the darkness exploded?

  If there was a clock to count the time, it was the growing distress of those set to guard against the darkness. The river gnawed ever closer. There was nothing they could do. No way for them to summon the wrath of the world.

  Raven thought he would have done things differently had he been in charge back when.

  Vaguely, Raven recalled some things passing nearby, shades like himself. But he knew not how long ago, or even what they were. Things moved at times, and one could tell nothing certain. The world had a whole different look from this perspective.

  Never had he been so helpless, so frightened. He did not like the feeling. Always he had been master of his destiny, dependent upon no one. …

  There was, in that world, nothing to do but think. Too much, too often, his thoughts came back to what it meant to be Raven, to things Raven had done and not done and should have done differently. There was time to identify and at least confront all the fears and pains and weaknesses of the inside man, all of which had created the ice and iron and fearless mask he had presented to the world. All those things which had cost him everything he had valued and which had driven him into the fangs of death again and again, in self-punishment

  Too late. Far too late.

  When his thoughts cleared and coagulated and he reached this point, he sent shrieks of anger echoing through the spirit world. And those who surrounded him and hated him for what he might have triggered, laughed and reveled in his torment.

  Flight West

  Despite my exoneration by the tree, I never quite regained my former status with my comrades. Always there was a certain reserve, perhaps as much from envy of my apparent sudden female wealth as from trust slow to heal. I cannot deny the pain it caused me. I had been with those guys since I was a boy. They were my family.

  I did take some ribbing about getting onto crutches in order to get out of work. But my work would have gone on had I had no legs at all.

  Those damned papers. I had them committed to memory, set to music. And still I did not have the key we sought, nor what the Lady hoped to find. The cross-referencing was taking forever. The spelling of names, in pre-Domination and Domination times, had been free-form. TelleKurre is one of those languages where various letter combinations can represent identical sounds.

  Pain in the damned fundament.

  I do not know how much Darling told the others. I was not at the Big Meeting. Neither was the Lady. But word came out: The Company was moving out.

  One day to get ready.

  Topside, near nightfall, on my crutches, I watched the windwhales arrive. There were eighteen of them, all summoned by Father Tree. They came with their mantas and a whole panoply of Plain sentient forms. Three dropped to the ground. The Hole puked up its contents.

  We began boarding. I got a ration because I had to be lifted, along with my papers, gear, and crutches. The whale was a small one. I would share it with just a few people. The Lady. Of course. We could not be separated now. And Goblin. And One-Eye. And Silent, after a bloody sign battle, for he did not want to be separated from Darling. And Tracker. And the child of the tree, for whom Tracker was guardian and I was in loco parentis. I think the wizards were supposed to keep an eye on the rest of us, though little they could have done had a situation presented itself.

  Darling, the Lieutenant, Elmo, and the other old hands boarded a second wind whale. The third carried a handful of troops and a lot of gear.

  We lifted off, joined the formation above.

  A sunset from five thousand feet is unlike anything you will see from the ground. Unless you are atop a very lonely mountain. Magnificent.

  With darkness came sleep. One-Eye spelled me under. I still had a good deal of swelling and pain.

  Yes. We were outside the null. Our whale flew the far flank from Darling. Specifically for the Lady’s benefit.

  Even then she did not give herself away.

  The winds were favorable and we had the blessing of Father Tree. Dawn found us passing over Horse. It was there the truth finally surfaced.

  Taken came up, all in their fish-carpets, armed to the gills. Panic noises wakened me. I got Tracker to help me stand. After one glance at the fire of the rising sun, I spied the Taken drifting into guardian positions around our whale. Goblin and them expected an attack. They howled their hearts out. Somehow One-Eye found a way for it all to be Goblin’s fault. They went at it.

  But nothing happened. Almost to my surprise, too. The Taken merely maintained station. I glanced at the Lady. She startled me with a wink. Then: “We all have to cooperate, whatever our differences.”

  Goblin heard that. He ignored One-Eye’s ranting for a moment, stared at the Taken. After a bit he looked at the Lady. Really looked.

  I saw the light dawn. In a more than normally squeaky voice, and with a truly goofy look, he said, “I remember you.” He remembered the one time he had had a sort of direct contact with her. Many years ago, when he tried to contact Soulcatcher, he had caught her in the Tower, in the Lady’s presence. …

  She smiled her most charming smile. The one that melts statues.

  Goblin threw a hand in front of his eyes, turned away from her. He looked at me with the most awful expression, I could not help laughing. “You always accused me. …”

  “You didn’t have to go and do it, Croaker!” His voice climbed the scale till it became inaudible. He sat down abruptly.

  No lightning bolt splattered him across the sky. After a time he looked up and said, “Elmo is going to crap!” He giggled.

  Elmo was the most unremitting of them all when it came to reminding me of my romances about the Lady.

  After the humor went out of it, after One-Eye had been through it, too, and Silent had had his worst fears confirmed, I began to wonder about my friends.

  One and all, they were westward bound on Darling’s say-so. They had not been informed, in so many words, that we were allied with our former enemies.

  Fools. Or was Darling? What happened once the Dominator was down and we were ready to go after each other again? …

  Whoa, Croaker. Darling learned to play cards from Raven. Raven was a cutthroat player.

  It was the Forest of Cloud by nightfall. I wonder what they made of us in Lords. We passed right over. The streets filled with gawkers.

  Roses passed in the night. Then the other old cities of our early years in the north. There was little talk. The Lady and I kept our heads together, growing more tense as our strange fleet neared its destination and we drew no nearer unearthing the nuggets we sought.

  “How long?” I asked. I had lost track of time.

&nbs
p; “Forty-two days,” she said.

  “We were in the desert that long?”

  “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

  I gave her a startled look. A joke? Even an old cliché? From her?

  I hate it when they go human on you. Enemies are not supposed to do that.

  She had been crawling all over me with it for a couple months.

  How can you hate?

  The weather stayed halfway decent till we got to Forsberg. Then it became clabbered misery.

  It was solid winter up there. Good, briskly refreshing winds loaded up with pellets of powder snow. A nice abrasive for a tender face like mine. A bombardment to clear out the lice on the backs of the whales, too. Everybody cussed and fussed and grumbled and huddled for warmth that dared not be provided by man’s traditional ally, fire. Only Tracker seemed untouched. “Don’t anything bother that thing?” I asked.

  In the oddest voice I ever heard her use, the Lady replied, “Loneliness. If you want to kill Tracker the easy way, lock him up alone and go away.”

  I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Whom did I know who had been alone a long time? Who, maybe, just maybe, had begun to wonder if absolute power were worth the absolute price?

  I knew beyond the glimmer of doubt that she had enjoyed every second of pretend on the Plain. Even the moments of danger. I knew that had I had the hair on my ass, there in the last days, I could have become more than a pretend boyfriend. There was a growing and quiet desperation to her in that time as going back to being the Lady approached.

  Some of that I might have appropriated out of ego, for a very critical time faced her. She was under a lot of stress. She knew the enemy we faced. But not all was ego. I think she actually did like me as a person.

  “I got a request,” I said softly, in the middle of the huddle, banishing thoughts caused by a woman pressed against me.