A hundred-foot splash of oily fire boiled up amidst the cypress.
The barge reeled at the kiss of another flat stone. Timbers flew. Below, the horses shrieked in panic. Some of the crew sang with them. My companions looked grim in the light of the fires.
Shapeshifter kept laying down splash after splash, till the swamp was immersed in a holocaust that beggared both of mine put together. The screams of the pirates became lost in the roar of the flames.
I won my bet.
And Shifter kept laying it down.
A great howling rose within the fire. It faded into the distance.
Goblin looked at me. I looked at him. “Two of them in ten days,” I muttered. We had heard that howling last during the Battle at Charm. “And not friends anymore. Lady, what would I have found if I had opened those graves?”
“I don’t know, Croaker. Anymore, I don’t. I never expected to see the Howler again. That’s for sure.” She sounded like a frightened, troubled child.
I believed her.
A shadow passed the light. A night-flying crow? What next?
Shifter’s companion saw it, too. Her eyes were tight and intense.
I took Lady’s hand. I liked her a lot better now that she had her vulnerability back.
20
Willow up the Creek
Willow scowled at the boat. “I’m so thrilled I could shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Cordy asked.
“I don’t like boats.”
“Why don’t you walk? Me and Blade will cheer you on whenever we see you puffing along the riverbank.”
“If I had your sense of humor, I’d kill myself and save the world the pain, Cordy. Hell, we got to do it, let’s do it.” He headed out the wharf. “You seen the Woman and her pup?”
“Smoke was around earlier. I think they’re on already. Low profile. On the sneak. They don’t want anybody knowing the Radisha is leaving town.”
“What about us?”
Blade grinned. “Going to cry because the girls didn’t come down to drag him back.”
“Going to cry a lot, Blade,” Cordy said. “Old Willow can’t go anywhere without bitching to keep his feet moving.”
The boat wasn’t that bad. It was sixty feet long and comfortable for its cargo, which consisted only of the five passengers. Willow got in his gripe about that too, as soon as he discovered that the Radisha hadn’t brought a platoon of servants. “I was sort of counting on having somebody take care of me.”
“Getting soft, man,” Blade said. “Next thing, you be wanting to hire somebody to fight in your place when you get trouble.”
“Sounds good to me. We done enough of that for somebody else. Haven’t we, Cordy?”
“Some.”
The crew poled the boat into the current, which was almost nonexistent that far down the river. They upped a linen sail and swung the bow north. There was a good breeze. They gained on the current about as fast as a man moving at a lazy stroll. Not fast. But no one was in a big hurry.
“I don’t see why we got to start now,” Willow said. “We ain’t going where she wants. I bet you the river’s still blockaded above the Third Cataract. There won’t be no way we can get past Thresh. That’s far enough to suit me, anyway.”
“Thought you was going to keep on hiking,” Cordy said.
“He remembered they laying for him in Gea-Xle,” Blade said. “Moneylenders got no sense of humor.”
It took two weeks to reach Catorce, below the First Cataract. They hardly saw Smoke or the Radisha the whole time. They got damned tired of the crew, as humorless a bunch of river rats as ever lived, all of them fathers and sons and brothers and uncles of each other so nobody ever dared loosen up. The Radisha would not let them put in at night. She figured somebody would shoot his mouth off and the whole world would find out who was on the river without benefit of armed guards.
That hurt Willow’s feelings from a couple different directions.
The First Cataract was an obstacle to navigation only to traffic coming up the river. The current was too swift for sail or oars and the banks too far and boggy for a towpath. The Radisha had them leave the boat at Catorce, with the crew to wait there for their return, and they made the eighteen-mile journey to Dadiz, above the cataract, on foot.
Willow looked out at river barges coming down, riding the current, and griped.
Blade and Cordy just grinned at him.
The Radisha hired another boat for the passage to the Second Cataract. She and Smoke stopped trying to stay out of sight. She figured they were too far from Taglios for anybody to recognize them. The First Cataract was four hundred eighty miles north of Taglios.
* * *
Half a day out of Dadiz Willow joined Cordy and Blade in the bows. He said, “You guys notice some little brown guys back in town? Kind of watching us?”
Cordy nodded. Blade grunted an affirmative. Willow said, “I was afraid it was my imagination. Maybe I’ll wish it was. I didn’t recognize the type. You guys?”
Cordy shook his head. Blade said, “No.”
“You guys don’t break a jaw chinning.”
“How would they know to be watching us, Willow? Whoever they are? Only one who knows where we’re headed is the Prahbrindrah Drah, and even he don’t know why.”
Willow started to say something, decided he should shut his mouth and think. After a minute, he grunted. “The Shadowmasters. They might know somehow.”
“Yeah. They might.”
“You think they might give us some trouble?”
“What would you do if you was them?”
“Right. I better go nag on Smoke.” Smoke could be the hole card. Smoke claimed the Shadowmasters didn’t know about him. Or if they did, they had no good estimate of his competence.
Smoke and the Radisha had made themselves comfortable in the shade of the sail and were watching the river go by. The river was something worth seeing, Willow would admit. Even here it was half a mile wide. “Smoke, old buddy, we maybe got us a problem.”
The wizard stopped chewing on something he had had in his mouth all morning. He peered at Willow with narrowed eyes. Willow’s style was getting to him.
“Back in Dadiz there was these little brown guys about so high, skinny and wrinkly, that was watching us. I asked Cordy and Blade. They seen them, too.”
Smoke looked at the woman. She looked at Willow. “Not someone you made an enemy of coming south?”
Willow laughed. “Hey. I don’t have no enemies. No. There’s nobody like these guys anywhere between Roses and Taglios. I never saw anybody like them before. I figure that means it’s not me they’re interested in.”
She looked at Smoke. “Did you notice anyone?”
“No. But I wasn’t watching. It seemed unnecessary.”
“Hey. Smoke. You always watch,” Willow said. “This here’s your basic unfriendly old world. You better always be on the lookout when you’re travelling. There’s bad guys out here. Believe it or not, not everybody’s as polite as you Taglians.”
Swan returned to the bow. “That dolt wizard never even noticed the brownies. The guy’s got lard for brains.”
Blade took out a knife and whetstone and went to work. “Better sharpen up. Edge might dull down before the old boy wakes up and sees we’re under attack.”
It was a three-hundred-mile passage to the Second Cataract, where the river scampered nervously between dark and brooding hills, as though too wary to stay in one place long. On the right bank the haunted ruins of Cho’n Delor stared down on the flood, reminding Willow of a heap of old skulls. No traffic had passed along the right bank since the fall of the Paingod. Even animals shunned the area.
On the hilltops beyond the left bank were the ruins of the Triplet Cities, Odd the First, Odd the Second, and Odd the Third. Stories Cordy had heard coming south said they had sacrificed themselves to bring the Paingod down.
Now people lived only along a narrow strip beside the Cataract, in a walled city one st
reet wide and ten miles long, perpetually nervous about ghosts from the wars that were. They called their bizarre city Idon, and had the weirdest bunch of quirks anyone ever saw. Travellers stayed in Idon only as long as absolutely necessary. Likewise, many of the people of Idon themselves.
Passing through, keeping his eyes open while pretending to be gawking at the weirdos, Willow noticed little brown guys skulking everywhere. “Hey. Smoke. You eagle-eyed bastard. You see them now?”
“What?”
“He don’t,” Blade said. “Better sharpen me a couple more knives.”
“Pay attention, old man. They’re all over like roaches.” Actually, Willow had seen only eight or nine. But that was plenty enough. Especially if they had the Shadowmasters behind them.
They had somebody behind them. They made that clear soon after the Radisha found a boat for the trip to Thresh and the Third Cataract.
They got around a bend in the river, where it flowed through country that looked like it was left over from the war between the Triplet Cities and Cho’n Delor, and here came two fast boats loaded down with little brown guys rowing like the winner of the race got to become immortal.
The crew the Radisha had hired took maybe twenty seconds to decide it wasn’t their squabble. They dived overboard and headed for the bank.
“You see them now, Smoke?” Willow asked, starting to ready his weapons. “I hope you’re half the wizard you think you are.” There were at least twenty brown men in each boat.
Smoke’s jaw went high speed as he chomped whatever he chewed all the time. He did nothing till the boats began creeping up to either side. Then he stuck out both hands toward one, closed his eyes and wriggled his fingers.
All the nails and pegs holding the boat together flew around like swarming swallows, pattered into the water. Brown men hollered and gurgled. It didn’t look like many of them knew how to swim.
Smoke took a moment to catch his breath, then turned on the other boat. The brown men there were turning already, heading for shore.
Smoke took that boat apart, too. Then he gave Willow one dark look and went back to his seat in the shadow of the sail. He smirked forever afterward whenever he heard Willow bitching about having to work ship.
“At least we know he’s the real thing now,” Willow grumbled to himself.
* * *
The situation in Thresh was exactly what Willow had predicted. The river was closed to the north. Pirates. The Radisha could find no one willing to hazard the long run north to Gea-Xle, which is where she was determined to go, to wait. Nothing she offered would get anybody to risk the journey. Not even her companions, whom she urged to steal a boat.
She was furious. You would have thought the hinges of the world would lock up if she didn’t get to Gea-Xle.
She did not get.
For months they hung around Thresh, staying out of the way of little brown guys, hearing rumors that the merchants of Gea-Xle had gotten desperate enough to try doing something about the river pirates. Thresh was a snake’s nest of gloom. Without trade upriver it would wither. Any hope that the northerners would break through seemed absurd. Everyone who tried died.
One morning Smoke came to breakfast looking thoughtful. “I had a dream,” he announced.
“Oh, wonderful,” Willow snapped. “I been sitting around here for months now just praying you’d have another one of your nightmares. What do we do this time? Storm the Shadowlands?”
Smoke ignored him. He had been doing that a lot, communicating through the Radisha. It was the only way he could deal with Swan without getting violent. He told the woman, “They’ve departed Gea-Xle. A whole convoy.”
“Can they break through?”
Smoke shrugged. “There’s a power as mighty and cruel as the Shadowmasters in the swamps. Maybe greater than the Shadowmasters. I haven’t been able to find it in my dreams.”
Willow muttered, “I hope the brownies aren’t smoking something, too. They figure we’re going to connect up they might get more ambitious.”
“They don’t know why we’re here, Swan. I poked around. I found out that much. They just want you and me and Cordy. Would have done it to us in Taglios if they caught us there.”
“Comes to the same thing. How long before that convoy gets here?”
The Radisha said, “Smoke? How long?”
The wizard responded with all the steely certitude of his breed. He shrugged.
* * *
The lead boat was spotted by somebody fishing upriver. The news reached Thresh a few hours before the barge. Willow and his group went down to the piers with half the city to wait for it. People howled and cheered until those aboard began disembarking. Then a deep, dread silence fell.
The Radisha grabbed Smoke’s shoulder in a grip obviously painful. “These are your saviors? Old man, I’m about out of patience with you.…”
21
Thresh
We broke the boom. We headed for the trading city Thresh, which lies above the Third Cataract. It was a quiet river going down. There might have been no other human beings in the world outside of us on the barge. But the wreckage that kept pace was a screaming reminder that we were not alone, that we belonged to a bleak and bloody-minded species. I was not fit company for man or beast, as they say.
One-Eye joined me where I stood under the battered croc head Goblin had mounted in the bows. “Be there in a little bit, Croaker.”
I dipped into my trick bag of repartee and countered with an unenthusiastic grunt.
“Me and the runt been trying to get a feel for the place up ahead.”
I cracked him up with another grunt. That was his job.
“Don’t got a good feel to it.” We watched another small fishing boat hoist anchor and raise sail and skitter south with the news of our coming. “Not a real danger feel. Not an all-bad feel. Just not a right feel. Like there’s something going on.”
He sounded puzzled around the edges. “You figure it’s something that might concern us, send your pet to find out what. That’s what you bought him for. Isn’t it?”
He smirked.
The current in a lazy turn of the river held us close to the right bank. Two solemn crows watched our progress from a lone dead tree. Gnarled and ugly, the tree made me think of nooses and hanged men.
“Now why didn’t I think of that, Croaker? Here I just sent him into town to check on the quiff situation.”
Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Croaker.
The imp came back with a disturbing report. There were people in Thresh waiting for us. Specifically us, the Black Company.
How the hell did everybody know we were coming?
* * *
The waterfront was mobbed when we warped in, though nobody really believed we had come from Gea-Xle. I guess they figured we spontaneously generated on the river up around the bend. I kept everyone aboard and mostly out of sight till the rest of the convoy arrived.
It came through untouched. Its guards and crews were simmering with stories of the devastation they had found in our wake. Rejoicing spread through Thresh. The blockade had been strangling the city.
I watched the good citizens from behind a mantlet. Here and there I noted hard-eyed little brown men who seemed less than enchanted with our advent.
“Those the guys you were talking about?” I asked One-Eye.
He gave them the fish-eye, then shook his head. “Ours should be over that way. There they are. Weird.”
I saw what he meant. A man with long blond hair. What the hell was he doing down here? “Keep an eye on them.”
I collected Mogaba and Goblin and a couple of the guys who looked like they ate babies for breakfast and went into conference with the bosses of the convoy. They surprised me. They not only did not argue about paying the balance of our fee, they tossed in a bonus on account of every barge got through. Then I got my key people together and told them, “Let’s get off-loaded and hit the road. This place gives me the creeps.”
Gobl
in and One-Eye complained. Naturally. They wanted to stay and party.
They came around when the iron coach and the great black horses and the Company standard hit the wharfside road. The joy went out of the grand celebration almost immediately. I’d figured it would.
Blank faces watched the unforgotten standard pass.
Thresh had been on the other side when the Company was in service in Goes. Our forebrethren had kicked their butts good. So good they recalled the Company this long after the fact, though Goes itself no longer existed.
* * *
We paused in an open market toward the south edge of Thresh. Mogaba had a couple of his lieutenants dicker for supplies. Goblin went stomping around in a squeaking rage because One-Eye had set Frogface to following him, aping his every word and move. The imp was trudging behind him at the moment, looking deep in thought. Otto and Hagop and Candles were trying to thrash out the details of a pool that would pay off big to the guy who guessed closest to when Goblin would come up with a definitive counterstroke. The trouble was a definition of what could be considered definitive.
One-Eye observed proceedings with a benign, smug smile, certain he had attained ascendancy at last. The Nar stood around looking grimly military and still a little baffled because the rest of us had less rigid, absolute standards. They had not been disappointed in us on the river.
One-Eye ambled over. “Them people are giving us the eye again. Got them all picked out now. Four men and a woman.”
“Round them up and bring them over. We’ll see what’s on their minds. Where’s Wheezer?”
One-Eye pointed, then did a fade. As I approached Wheezer I noted that a dozen of my men had disappeared. One-Eye wasn’t going to take any chances.
I told Wheezer to tell Mogaba we weren’t stocking up for a six-month campaign. We just wanted enough stuff for a meal or two getting past the Cataract. We yakked it back and forth, Mogaba struggling with the Jewel Cities dialect he had begun to pick up already. He was a sharp, smart man. I liked him. He was flexible enough to understand that our two versions of the Company could have arisen easily over two hundred years. He worked at being nonjudgmental.