The Black Company tbc-1 Read online

  The Lady followed the path he blazed, dark hair streaming. I stayed in her wake, utterly baffled yet unable, to change what I was doing. We reached the plain three hundred yards behind Soulcatcher. The Lady spurred her mount. Mine kept pace. I was sure one or both animals would stumble over abandoned equipment or bodies. Yet they, and Catcher’s beast too, were as sure-footed as horses on a track.

  Catcher sped directly to the enemy encampment, and through. We followed. In the open country beyond we began to gain. Those beasts, all three, were as tireless as machines. Miles rolled away. We gained fifty yards with every one. I clutched my bow and clung to the nightmare. I’ve never been religious, but that was a time when I was tempted to pray.

  She was as implacable as death, my Lady. I pitied Soulcatcher when she caught him.

  Soulcatcher raced along a road winding through one of the valleys west of Charm. We were near the place where we had rested on a hilltop, and encountered lime thread. I recalled what we had ridden through, back at Charm. A fountain of the stuff, and it hadn’t touched us.

  What was happening back there? Was this some scheme to leave our people at the Rebel’s mercy? It had become clear, toward the end, that the Lady’s strategy involved maximum destruction. That she wanted only a small minority of either side to survive. She was cleaning house. She had but one enemy left among the Taken. Soulcatcher. Catcher, who had been almost good to me. Who had saved my life at least once, at the Stair of Tear, when Stormbringer would have slain Raven and I. Catcher, who was the only Taken to speak to me as a man, to tell me a bit about the old days, to respond to my insatiable curiosities...

  What the devil was I doing here, in a hellride with the Lady, hunting a thing that could gobble me up without blinking?

  Catcher turned the flank of a hill and when, seconds later, we rounded the same impediment, had disappeared. The Lady slowed for a moment, head turning slowly, then yanked her reins, swung toward woods that swept down to the edge of the road. She halted when she reached the first trees. My beast stopped beside hers.

  The Lady threw herself off her mount. I did the same without thinking. By the time I gained my feet her animal was collapsing and mine was dead, standing on stiff legs. Both had fist-sized black burns upon their throats.

  The Lady pointed, started forward. Crouching, arrow across bow, I joined her. I went carefully, soundlessly, sliding through the brush like a fox.

  She stopped, crouched, pointed. I looked along her arm. Flicker, flicker, two seconds of rapid images. They stopped. I saw a figure perhaps fifty feet distant, back to us, kneeling, doing something swiftly. No time for the moral questions I had debated riding out. That creature had made several attempts on my life. My arrow was in the air before I realized what I was doing.

  It smacked into the head of the figure. The figure pitched forward. I gaped a second, then released a long breath. So easy...

  The Lady took three quick steps forward, frowning. There was a rapid rustle to our right. Something rattled brush. She whirled and ran for open country, slapping my arm as she passed.

  In seconds we were on the road. Another arrow lay across my bow. Her arm rose, pointing... A squarish shape slid out of the woods fifty yards away. A figure aboard made a throwing motion our way. I staggered under the impact of the blow from no visible source. Spiderwebs seemed drawn across my eyes, blurring my vision. Vaguely, I sensed the Lady making a gesture. The webs disappeared. I felt whole. She pointed as the carpet began to rise and move away.

  I drew and loosed, with no hope my arrow would strike a moving target at that range.

  It did not, but only because the carpet jerked violently downward and to one side while the arrow was in the air. My shaft ripped past inches behind the carpet rider’s head.

  The Lady did something. The air hummed. From nowhere came a giant dragonfly like the one I had seen in the Forest of Cloud. It streaked toward the carpet, hit. The carpet spun, flipped, jerked around. Its rider fell free, plummeted with a despairing cry. I loosed another shaft the instant the man hit earth. He twitched a moment, lay still. And we were upon him.

  The Lady ripped the black morion off our victim. And cursed. Softly, steadily, she cursed like a senior sergeant.

  “What?” I filially asked. The man was dead enough to satisfy me.

  “It’s not her.” She whirled, faced the wood. Her face blanked for several seconds. Then she faced the drifting carpet. She jerked her head at the wood. “Go see if that’s a woman. See if the horse is there.” She began making come-hither gestures at Catcher’s carpet.

  I went, mind aboil. Catcher was a woman, eh? Crafty, too. All prepared to be chased here, by the Lady herself.

  Fear grew as I slipped through the wood, slow, silent. Catcher had played a game on everyone, and far more shrewdly than even the Lady had anticipated. What next, then? There had been so many attempts on my life... Might this not be the moment to end whatever threat I represented?

  Nothing happened, though. Except that I crept up to the corpse in the wood, ripped off a black morion, and found a handsome youth inside. Fear, anger, and frustration overwhelmed me. I kicked him. Some good, abusing dead meat.

  The fit did not last. I began looking around the camp where the substitutes had waited. They had been there a while, and been prepared to stay a while longer. They had supplies for a month.

  A large bundle caught my eye. I cut the cords binding it, peeped inside. Papers. A bale that must have weighed eighty pounds. Curiosity grabbed me.

  I looked around hastily, saw nothing threatening, probed a little deeper. And immediately realized what I had. These were part of the hoard we had unearthed in the Forest of Cloud.

  What were they doing here? I’d thought Catcher had turned them over to the Lady. Eh! Plot and counterplot. Maybe he had delivered some. And maybe he kept back others he thought would be useful later. Maybe we had been so close on his heels he had not had time to collect them...

  Maybe he would be back. I looked around again, frightened once more.

  Nothing stirred.

  Where was he?

  She, I reminded myself. Catcher was one of the shes.

  I looked around, hunting evidence of the Taken’s departure, soon discovered hoofprints leading deeper into the wood. A few paces beyond the camp they reached a narrow trail. I crouched, looking down an aisle of forest, through golden motes floating in shafts of sunlight. I tried to work myself up to go on.

  Come, a voice said in my mind. Come.

  The Lady. Relieved not to have to follow that trail, I turned back. “It was a man,” I said as I approached the Lady.

  “I thought so.” She had the carpet under one hand, floating two feet off the earth. “Get aboard.”

  I swallowed, did as I was told. It was like climbing aboard a boat from deep water. I almost fell off twice. As she followed me aboard, I told her, “He-she-stayed on the horse and went on down the trail through the woods.”

  “What direction?”

  “South.”

  The carpet rose swiftly. The dead horses dwindled beneath us. We began to drift over the wood. My stomach felt like I had drunk several gallons of wine the night before.

  The Lady cursed softly under her breath. Finally, in a louder voice, she said, “The bitch. She ran a game on us all. My husband included.”

  I said nothing. I was debating whether or not to mention the papers. She would be interested. But so was I, and if I mentioned them now I’d never get a chance to poke through them.

  “I’ll bet that was what she was doing. Getting rid of the other Taken by pretending to be part of their plot. Then it would have been me. Then she would just leave the Dominator in the ground. She would have it all, and be able to keep him restrained. He can’t break out without help.” She was thinking aloud more than speaking to me. “And I missed the evidence. Or ignored it. It was right there all the time. Cunning bitch. She’ll bum for that.”

  We began to fall. I nearly lost what little my stomach containe
d. We fell into a valley deeper than most in the area, though the hills to either hand stood no more than two hundred feet high. We slowed.

  “Arrow,” she said. I had forgotten to ready another.

  We drifted down the valley a mile or so, then upslope till we floated beside an outcrop of sedimentary rock. There we hovered, nudging the stone. There was a brisk cold wind. My hands grew numb. We were far from the Tower, into country where winter held full sway. I shivered continuously.

  The only warning was a soft, “Hang on.”

  The carpet shot forward. A quarter mile distant was a figure lying low on the neck of a racing horse. The Lady dropped till we hurtled along just two feet off the ground.

  Catcher saw us. She threw up a hand in a warding gesture. We were upon her. I released my shaft.

  The carpet slammed up against me as the Lady pulled it upward, trying to clear horse and rider. She did not pull up enough. Impact made the carpet lurch. Frame members cracked, broke. We spun. I hung on desperately while sky and earth wheeled about me. There was another shock as we hit ground, more spinning as we went over and over. I threw myself clear.

  I was on my feet in an instant, wobbling, slapping another arrow across my bow. Catcher’s horse was down with a broken leg. Catcher was beside her, on hands and knees, stunned. A silver arrowhead protruded from her waist, indicting me.

  I loosed my shaft. And another, and another, recalling the terrible vitality the Limper had shown in the Forest of Cloud, after Raven had felled him with an arrow bearing die power of his true name. Still in fear, I drew my sword once my final arrow was gone. I charged. I do not know how I retained the weapon through everything that had happened. I reached Catcher, raised the blade high, swung with a vicious two-handed stroke. It was the most fearful, violent blow I have ever struck. Soulcatcher’s head roiled away. The morion’s face guard popped open. A woman’s face stared at me with accusing eyes. A woman almost identical in appearance to the one with whom I had come.

  Catcher’s eyes focused upon me. Her lips tried to form words. I stood there frozen, wondering what the hell it all meant. And life faded from Catcher before I caught the message she tried to impart.

  I would return to that moment ten thousand times, trying to read those dying lips.

  The Lady crept up beside me, dragging one leg. Habit forced me to turn, kneel... “It’s broken,” she said. “Never mind. It can wait.” Her breathing was shallow, rapid. For a moment I thought it was the pain. Then I saw she was looking at the head. She began to giggle.

  I looked at that face so like her own, then at her. She rested a hand on my shoulder, allowing me to take some of her weight. I rose carefully, slid an arm around her. “Never did like that bitch,” she said. “Even when we were children...” She glanced at me warily, shut up. The life left her face. She became the ice lady once more.

  If ever there was some weird love spark within me, as my brothers accused, it flickered its last. I saw plainly what the Rebel wanted to destroy-that part of the movement which was true White Rose, not puppet to the monster who had created this woman and now wanted her destroyed so it could bring its own breed of terror back to the world. At that moment I’d gladly have deposited her head beside her sister’s.

  Second time, if Catcher could be believed. Second sister. This deserved no allegiance.

  There are limits to one’s luck, one’s power, to how much one dares resist. I hadn’t the nerve to follow through on my impulse. Later, maybe. The Captain had made a mistake, taking service with Soulcatcher. Was my unique position adequate to argue him out of that service on grounds that our commission ended with Catcher’s death?

  I doubted it. It would take a battle, to say the least. Especially if, as I suspected, he had helped the Syndic along in Beryl. The Company’s existence did not appear to be in absolute jeopardy, assuming we survived the battle. He would not countenance another betrayal. In the conflict of moralities he would find that the greater evil.

  Was there a Company now? The battle of Charm had not ended because the Lady and I had absented ourselves. Who knew what had happened while we were haring after a renegade Taken?

  I glanced at the sun, was astonished to discover that only a little over an hour had passed.

  The Lady recalled Charm too. “The carpet, physician,” she said. “We’d better get back.”

  I helped her hobble to the remnant of Catcher’s carpet. It was half a ruin, but she believed it would function. I deposited her, collected the bow she had given me, sat in front of her. She whispered. Creaking, the carpet rose. It provided a very unstable seat.

  I sat with eyes closed, debating myself, as she circled the site of Catcher’s fall. I could not get my feelings straight. I did not believe in evil as an active force, only as a matter of viewpoint, yet I had seen enough to make me question my philosophy. If the Lady were not evil incarnate, then she was as close as made no difference.

  We began limping toward the Tower. When I opened my eyes I could see that great dark block tilting on the horizon, gradually swelling, I did not want to go back.

  We passed over the rocky ground west of Charm, a hundred feet up, barely creeping along. The Lady had to concentrate totally to keep the carpet aloft. I was terrified the thing would go down there, or gasp its last over the Rebel army. I leaned forward, studying the jumble, trying to pick a place to crash.

  That was how I saw the girl.

  We were three quarters of the way across. I saw something move. “Eh?” Darling looked up at us, shading her eyes. A hand whipped out of shadow, dragged her into hiding.

  I glanced at the Lady. She had noticed nothing. She was too busy staying aloft.

  What was going on? Had the Rebel driven the Company into the rocks? Why wasn’t I seeing anyone else?

  Straining, the Lady gradually gained altitude. The slice-of-pie expanded before me.

  Land of nightmare. Tens of thousands of dead Rebels carpeted it. Most had fallen in formation. The tiers were inundated in dead of both persuasions. A White Rose banner on a leaning pole fluttered atop the pyramid. Nowhere did I see anyone moving. Silence gripped the land, except for the murmur of a chill northern wind.

  The Lady lost it for an instant. We plunged. She caught us a dozen feet short of crashing.

  Nothing stirred but wind-rippled banners. The battlefield looked like something from the imagination of a mad artist. The top layer of Rebel dead lay as though they had died in terrible pain. Their numbers were incalculable.

  We rose above the pyramid. Death had swept around it, toward the Tower. The gate remained open. Rebel bodies lay in its shadow.

  They had gotten inside.

  There were but a handful of bodies atop the pyramid, all Rebel. My comrades must have made it inside.

  They had to be fighting still, inside those twisted corridors. The place was too vast to overrun quickly. I listened, but heard nothing.

  The Tower top was three hundred feet above us. We couldn’t get any higher... A figure appeared there, beckoning. It was short and clad in brown. I gaped. I recalled only one Taken who wore brown. It moved to a slightly better vantage, limping, still beckoning. The carpet rose. Two hundred feet to go. One hundred. I looked back on the panorama of death. Quarter of a million men? Mind-boggling. Too vast to have real meaning. Even in the nominator’s heyday battles never approached that scale...

  I glanced at the Lady, She had engineered it. She would be total mistress of the world now-if the Tower survived the battle underway inside. Who could oppose her? The manhood of a continent lay dead...

  A half dozen Rebels came out the gate. They launched arrows at us. Only a few wobbled as high as the carpet. The soldiers stopped loosing, waited. They knew we were in trouble.

  Fifty feet. Twenty-five. The Lady struggled, even with Limper’s help. I shivered in the wind, which threatened to bounce us off the Tower, I recalled the Howler’s long plunge. We were as high as he had been.

  A glance at the plain showed me the forvalaka.
It hung limp upon its cross, but I knew it was alive.

  Men joined the Limper. Some carried ropes, some lances or long poles. We rose ever more slowly. It became a ridiculously tense game, safety almost within reaching distance, yet never quite at hand.

  A rope dropped into my lap. A Guard sergeant shouted, “Harness her up.”

  “What about me, asshole?” I moved about as fast as a rock grows, afraid I’d upset the carpet’s stability. I was tempted to tie some false knot that would give way under strain. I did not like the Lady much anymore. The world would be better for her absence. Catcher was a murdering schemer whose ambitions sent hundreds to their deaths. She deserved her fate. How much more so this sister who had hurried thousands down the shadowed road?

  A second line came down. I tied myself. We were five feet from the top, unable to get higher. The men on the lines took in the slack. The carpet slid in against the Tower. Poles reached down. I grabbed one.

  The carpet dropped away.

  For a second I thought I was gone. Then they hauled me in.

  There was heavy fighting downstairs, they said. The Limper ignored me completely, hurried away to get in on the action. I just sprawled atop the Tower, glad to be safe. I even napped. I wakened alone with the north wind, and an enfeebled comet on the horizon. I went down to audit the endgame of the Lady’s grand design.

  She won. Not one in a hundred Rebels survived, and most of those deserted early.

  The Howler spread disease with the globes he dropped. It reached its critical stage soon after the Lady and I departed, chasing Soulcatcher. The Rebel wizards could not stem it on any significant scale. Thus the windrows of dead.

  Even so, many of the enemy proved partially or wholly immune, and not all of ours escaped infection. The Rebel took the top tier.

  The plan, at that point, called for the Black Company to counterattack. The Limper, rehabilitated, was to assist them with men from inside the Tower. But the Lady was not there to order the charge. In her absence Whisper ordered a withdrawal into the Tower.

  The interior of the Tower was a series of death traps manned not only by the Howler’s easterners but by wounded taken inside previous nights and healed by the Lady’s powers.