So. Old Buzz came down with the drizzling shits right when his principal started dying from an infestation of supernatural parasites. That wanted a closer look. The timeline might tell us when Buzz picked up what was trying to kill him. Also, maybe who was there when it happened.
I winkled the last worm out. The Old Man brought more snow. I mused, “When is the battlefield not a battlefield?”
The Captain eyed me oddly, shrugged, took off with his trained-bear shuffle.
The day’s puzzle might have an explanation hidden inside the recurring question. That might put me eyeball-to-eyeball with a repellent cousin question that could have multiple readings as well. “When is my enemy not an enemy?”
* * *
Otto and his pal Hagop turned up. The Captain had caught them trying to sneak off to town to help Markeg Zhorab get a little richer. They hauled snow instead.
We did not see the Captain again right away. He went off and stole a short nap. When he did turn up he had the Third in tow, all decorated with light shackles. “He’s all we got left. Silent has gone missing now, too.”
The Third shook his wild shock of curls, lost in the insanities.
Answers had to wait. Two Dead was not improving. Snow packs were not enough. I told the Third, “I need the Colonel awake. We need to talk. Amputation may be his only salvation. I can’t decide that for him.”
“Why bother? We could get shot of him.”
“I save whoever I can.” Not that I have not made exceptions. Not that Two Dead was insufficiently despicable to make the “he needs killing” list. “And he’s Whisper’s pet.”
“Don’t smell like that special a relationship to me.” The Third eyed Two Dead. “It’ll be tough. Feels like Silent put him in a coma for the pain.”
“You can’t bring him out?”
“Didn’t say that. Said it’s gonna be tough. Get ready for some serious screaming. His arm is gonna feel like it’s on fire.”
“Hang on, then.” I slathered Two Dead’s forearm with topical painkiller. “All right. Go.”
* * *
Two Dead surprised us. He did not let the pain unhinge him. He was creepy normal, disinclined to shed any limbs unnecessarily.
He was short four already, you asked me.
“I won’t do it casually,” I promised.
He was caught in a cleft stick. I had no reason to wish him well but he did realize that I would not just maim him when death by inattention would be so much easier.
He played through the pain. “If it’s the best choice, do it.” His speech was slurred. I kept loading him up with painkiller tea.
The Captain talked to him steadily, gently, casually, like he was Two Dead’s cousin. He wanted to slide inside the sorcerer’s head while the man was addled.
I set up to cut, ever more sure that it could not be avoided. I listened. Two Dead made no sense. He was old, hard-core, and stubborn. The Old Man was unlikely to get much.
Then he did get something that I missed. He buttoned up and hit the weather and was gone for fifteen minutes.
I got Two Dead strapped down. The Third whined, “Can I go? I don’t want to see this.”
“You’re going to be Company, you’d better get used to blood.” Which sparked memories I would rather not have recalled. I have eaten a lot of bone candy with the Company.
* * *
There was no choice. Two Dead’s body could not resist the poison. “Sorry, Colonel.” Our senior sorcerers might have helped but they were unavailable. Best not to mention that. Two Dead supposedly had a fecund bent for paranoid violence.
He glared at the Third. The Third said, “I am sorry, sir. I’ll do my best but medical sorcery isn’t among my skills.”
Pain kept Two Dead from helping himself.
I asked the Captain, “How goes the search for our favorite duo?”
“Still missing.” He eyed Two Dead like he suspected a connection.
I asked, “Go ahead, Colonel? Final decision time.”
Two Dead nodded grimly, probably rehearsing the cruelties he would visit on those who had brought him to this, deliberately or otherwise.
“Would you like to remain awake during the procedure?”
“Put me out. Tesch won’t shit himself forever. Anything goes wrong, he’ll see that I don’t walk the road to Hell alone.”
I smelled bluster and some graveyard sneaking-past, whistling.
“As you wish, sir.” I soaked a bandage with pale green fluid. “Third, hold this over his face. Lightly! He has to breathe it.”
The patient went under in seconds. “Third, Captain, watch me close in case there are questions later.”
The Third narrowly avoided messing himself. He got the subtext.
I started. I talked while I worked. “Do Goblin and One-Eye being missing have anything to do with our beetle-infested weasels?”
No reply.
“There is something going on. I’m not blind.”
“They could be up to something illegal,” the Captain said, carefully. “More likely, though, you’re seeing something because you want to.”
The Third protested, “They were just trying to get the straight skinny on Two Dead and Buzzard Neck. Those two aren’t what you think. Goblin remembers Buzz from the Battle at Charm.”
I suffered a half-ass flashback to my nightmare. It did not affect my work. That was old, familiar labor. I can hack off a limb while dead drunk or ready to collapse from exhaustion.
The Captain shrugged. He knew something but he was playing it close.
When is the battlefield not a battlefield? The enemy of my enemy is what and who?
When did those two wizards turn invisible? Right after Two Dead showed up. Because of Buzz? Was Buzz something more than just Two Dead’s lifeguard?
All this family drama and our empire still controls half the world.
The Lady loves the chaos. While her underlings are backstabbing and undercutting one another they are too busy to move on her. She can focus on keeping her husband underground.
* * *
The Old Man wakened me again. “Going to sleep your life away?” He did not roll out the old saw about sleeping all I wanted after I was dead. He made a hand sign. Four men shifted an unconscious Buzz from a litter to a table.
I asked, “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Thought I heard wind chimes. Really faint.”
“Maybe you’re still dreaming.”
Crap! I had been. The nightmare. The Lady was in there with somebody who moved in wind-chime tinkle … Was it a dream? Or something from the Tower? The Lady does touch me strangely, at the oddest of times.
No matter. I was awake now. It was gone, and what was happening in the waking world seemed less rational than any dream. I had cooked up a fresh stew of weird ideas while I was off in slumberville.
I had a client. “Couldn’t you clean him up before you brought him in? I’ll need a month to air the place out.”
Buzz might have been belly-up now if I had not worked on him earlier. His situation was that grim.
Otto, Hagop, Corey, and Minkus Scudd had carried Buzz in. The kids were dead on their feet. Minkus told me, “I tried to keep him hydrated but anything that I put in the top end came out the bottom like there was a pipe straight through.”
“Let me check some stuff.”
Buzz’s pulse was fast and feeble. His temperature was fierce. I peeled back an eyelid. His pupil was a pinpoint. That did not add up. I smelled his breath, risky even when a patient is healthy considering the general disdain for hygiene. I said, “Poke.” Surprised.
I harvested a crop of blank looks.
“It’s everywhere in the fall. A big, waxy-leafed plant that has shiny purple berries in bunches like grapes. They’re poisonous. But they taste so bad that you shouldn’t be able to choke down enough to do this.”
Minkus Scudd asked, “So how did he get past the first mouthful, boss?”
Tha
t would be the question. “I’ve never actually seen poke poisoning but I’m sure this is it. Maybe it started out as something else. He didn’t smell like poke before. There are stains on his lips that weren’t there before. Somebody forced the juice down him.” He must have been dead unconscious. Even a groggy Buzzard Neck would be hard to force.
I saw nobody looking so innocent that he must be guilty but the question was less who done it than why did he do it. Nobody hated Buzz.
Was the point to eliminate Two Dead’s guardian?
* * *
I set Buzz up so we could dump fluids in as fast as they left. I ran the extra bodies out. I turned sleepy again. The Captain observed. The Third assisted me, sort of. Minkus Scudd snored his lungs out on a cot I wanted for me. Two Dead barely breathed on, awash in painkillers.
The Old Man asked, “You had a good dream? That why you want to get back to sleep?”
All I had left was a lingering nostalgia. “It was something about the Lady and the Tower.”
“You don’t usually dream about her, do you?”
When I was the Lady’s prisoner I spent a lot of time around her, and that has cost me years of merciless teasing.
“I don’t. No. Why?”
“Maybe she was trying to tell you something.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, reluctantly. The Lady randomly and wickedly flings fuel into the fire by contacting me.
“Remember what you can while there’s something to recall.”
“Too late, boss. It’s gone. Only … Buzz was in it somewhere. He had on a smiley mask.”
“Really? And us without a wizard to hypnotize you.”
He wanted the Lady to have sent me a dream. “If Goblin was here we could make him channel the message.” Rough on Goblin but I do not mind. That makes for less strain on me. And he does not get accused of inappropriate fraternization when she uses him.
Two Dead groaned. The knockout painkillers were wearing off. I checked the seepage through his dressing. “I’ve had the same nightmare every night since the wizards disappeared.”
“But you didn’t say anything even though she was in them.”
“Because she was in them.”
“Yes. Let us not deliver live ammunition into the hands of anyone who might tease us. Is there a connection?”
“Maybe.” I had had no such suspicion before. We all dream. Sometimes we have nightmares. Those seldom make sense, what little we recall. I never thought that mine meant anything special. Now I got it. She had wanted to tell me something but I would not listen.
It had been a busy double dozen hours since Zhorab whispered, “Flies,” the hours fat with events boasting an almost dreamlike lack of dynamic structure.
Two Dead lapsed into a deeper sleep after I applied another pad soaked green.
* * *
The door opened. Cold and snow and Elmo burst in to bellow, “Look what I caught me this time.”
He had a groggy Goblin by the scruff. The little toad sagged there, cross-eyed, his pupils not right. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I thumped him some to make him cooperate. He maybe has a little concussion.” Thumping recalcitrants was in Elmo’s job description.
Some folks find Goblin or One-Eye getting thumped a blessed notion.
The wizard rasped, “He didn’t have no call to attack me. I was on my way here anyways.”
Nobody swallowed that.
The Captain demanded, “Where you been? And why? Take into consideration my current lack of tolerance for your customary bullshit.”
I checked Buzz again, then moved in on Goblin.
His eyes uncrossed. His little turd brain began to function, sort of. “The Lady touched me.” He gave me an ugly look. “I was happy out there in my cave. But here she came because her honey bear was always asleep or drunk when she tried to get with him. I run off because when Chodroze turned up I remembered his sidekick from Charm. Him and me went eye-to-eye and claw-to-claw back then.”
Buzz was on the other side, then? Not a window-rattling reveal. Others had shifted allegiance in preference to getting dead, Whisper herself included. I had helped set her up. She has nurtured an unreasonable animosity ever since.
Goblin said, “I needed privacy. I had to dip into the demon realms to winkle out the truth.”
The Old Man made an impatient “Come on!” gesture.
“I also wanted out of sight so Tesch wouldn’t remember me.” He would not have forgotten having gone head-to-head with a wizard who was still with the Company. “Back then he was called Essentially Capable Shiiraki, the Spellsmith.”
I remembered that odd name. “I thought he went into the mass grave with all the other Rebel wizards.”
“His family thought so, too. But I found a surviving familiar who knew the real story. Adequately motivated, it barfed up the details.”
“Adequately motivated?” the Old Man asked.
“I told it I wouldn’t report it to the Lady. Seeing as how it had gone to the Tower once before, after the fighting, it was not inclined to go again.”
I understood that sentiment.
“So what is going on?” the Old Man demanded. “You having had a heart-to-heart with this friendly devil.”
“It’s complicated and insane. Chodroze thinks he was sent here to see if we’ve already found the Port of Shadows. He’s supposed to destroy it if he can. Messing with us would be a bonus. But Tesch had a darker mission. He was supposed to kill Chodroze and frame the Company for it, then get hold of the Port of Shadows. Not to destroy it. And he had orders to take out the Company leadership if he got the chance.”
I blurted, “Buzz was supposed to murder Two Dead?”
“Chodroze must’ve made Whisper really unhappy.”
Two Dead was a longtime favorite of Whisper. “She is one vindictive bitch.”
She had loathed the world with smoldering fury from the moment she had become Taken. That made her one of the most powerful beings on earth—but it made her a slave of the Lady at the same time.
My drowsiness fled. “Two Dead could be the good guy? Buzz might be the villain?” Everything I had worked out had to be wrong. “Where does One-Eye fit?”
The Captain leaned in, daring Goblin to be less than completely forthright.
“I don’t know anymore. He stuck with me at the start, but he grabbed his poison sack and vanished after Tesch called up the infested chinkami. He knew what they were. Don’t ask me how. The little turd knows way too much shit that nobody ought to. He said we would be in the shit really deep after the cold weather broke. That’s the last we saw of him.”
The Captain asked, “You got that from the Lady?”
“Mostly I figured it out. She only touched me because her honey wouldn’t listen. Going to suck to be you, Croaker. Your woman ain’t happy with you.” He grinned, showing teeth in desperate need of cleaning.
Why worry? She was weather. I would suffer through. “Instructive, though, eh? Her knowing what’s going on out here when she’s denned up a thousand miles away?” Some of us have trouble remembering what she can do.
The Old Man observed, “What is instructive is that while she sees every sparrow fall she mainly just lets them go plop! People like Whisper keep digging deeper holes by going right on pulling stupid tricks. They’ll cry hard when she finally brings the hammer down.”
That was long-winded for him. Remarkable things must be going on inside his head.
He fixed Goblin with his hard stare. “Tell me again, magic munchkin. Where is One-Eye? What is he up to?” He gestured. Elmo moved over to wrangle the Third when the questioning turned to him. “What’s the blowback likely to be once HQ hears that Buzz and Two Dead screwed the pooch?”
Goblin shuffled. “Some major ass-covering. Tesch will turn out to be some deep-cover Rebel mole. Chodroze was always a loose ballista who let personal grudges color his judgment. It will be all our fault, somehow.”
I observed, “Same old same old. How about if t
hey both survive? Will that shift the battlefield under everybody’s feet?”
“You pull them through, we could see some wicked real excitement down the road. She might even show an interest.”
The Captain said, “I don’t doubt that. We’re the cow flop she uses to distract the flies out here.”
Yes. Our big boss was running a long con. This was another knot in the cord. I said, “I will save them.”
“Standing around with your thumb in your ass?” The Old Man turned to Elmo. “Have him show you where he was supposed to take that food.” He indicated the Third. “One-Eye will be there. Hurt him if you have to but don’t break him. I want him helping Croaker. Goblin. You’re Croaker’s boy till Buzz and Two Dead are healthy enough to dance at his wedding.”
* * *
Elmo and crew found One-Eye snoozing in a derelict shack on the edge of town. They got his head in a sack and his hands tied behind him before he could bark. Nobody came out of it needing splints or stitches.
The Old Man was in a foul humor. He stood back, iron gaze fixed while One-Eye received the Word. The little black man wasted no time getting his shit together. “Focus on Shiiraki. We can’t do anything more for Chodroze except maybe add a slider spell to fight infection.”
“Goblin did that. Laid on a sleeper, too. Minkus can handle him. You fed Buzz poke juice?”
“After the firenz he got in some wine that he thought would help with the shits. You can’t taste firenz in sweet wine. It just gives you a stronger buzz. Blackberry is the best.”
And it was the same color as poke juice. “The juice disguised the real poison?”
“Yep. He got drunk and then did a major stupid. He was already messed up with the shits.” Not exactly confessing. He ransacked my medicine stocks while he talked. “Here it is.” He held up a phial of dirty brown powder. “This will neutralize the firenz. The poke will take care of itself, you put enough liquid through.”
I did not know what firenz was. A poison, clearly. As Goblin did note, One-Eye knew a lot that nobody should. Came of being older than dirt, mostly.
The Old Man reminded One-Eye, “They need to pull through. The Tower is watching. The Tower wants it to happen.”