Shadow Games tbc-5 Read online

  And south some more, and still we were not back to One-Eye’s origin, the jungles of D’loc-Aloc.

  One-Eye swore that never in his life, outside the Company, had he heard the name Khatovar. It had to lie far beyond the waist of the world.

  There are limits to what frail flesh can endure.

  Those long leagues were not easy. The black iron coach and Lady’s wagon drew the eye of bandits and princes and princes who were bandits. Most times Goblin and One-Eye bluffed us through. The rest of the time we forced them to back down with a little applied terror. There was one long stretch where the magic had gone away.

  If those two had learned anything during their years with the Company, it was showmanship. When they conjured an illusion you could smell its bad breath from seventy feet away.

  I wished they would refrain from wasting that flash upon one another.

  I decided it was time we laid up for a few days. We needed to regain our youthful bounce.

  One-Eye suggested, “There’s a place down the road called the Temple of Travellers’ Repose. They take in wanderers. They have for two thousand years. It would be a good place to lay up and do some research.”

  “Research?”

  “Two thousand years of travellers’ tales makes a hell of a library, Croaker. And a tale is the only donative they ever require.”

  He had me. He grinned cockily. The old scoundrel knew me too well. Nothing else could have stilled my determination to reach Khatovar so thoroughly.

  I passed the word. And gave One-Eye the fish-eye. “That means you’re going to do some honest work.”

  “What?”

  “Who do you think is going to translate?”

  He groaned and rolled his eye. “When am I going to learn to keep my big damned mouth shut?”

  The Temple was a lightly fortified monastery sprawled atop a low hill. It looked golden in the light of a late afternoon sun. The forest beyond and the fields before were as intense a dark green as ever I have seen. The place looked restful.

  As we entered, a wave of well-being cleansed us. A feeling of I have come home washed over us. I looked at Lady. The things I felt glowed in her face, and touched my heart.

  “I could retire here,” I told Lady two days into our stay. Clean for the first time in months, we stalked a garden never disturbed by conflicts more weighty than the squabbles of sparrows.

  She gave me a thin smile and did me the courtesy of saying nothing about the delusive nature of dreams.

  The place had everything I thought I wanted. Comfort. Quiet. Isolation from the ills of the earth. Purpose. Challenging historical studies to soothe my lust to know what had gone on before.

  Most of all, it provided a respite from responsibility. Each man added to the Company seemed to double my burden as I worried about keeping them fed, keeping them healthy, and out of trouble.

  “Crows,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Everywhere we go there’re crows. Maybe I only started noticing them the past couple months. But everywhere we go I see crows. And I can’t shake the feeling they’re watching us.”

  Lady gave me a puzzled look.

  “Look. Right over there in that acacia tree. Two of them squatting there like black omens.”

  She glanced at the tree, gave me another look. “I see a couple of doves.”

  “But...” One of the crows launched itself, flapped away over the monastery wall. “That wasn’t any-”

  “Croaker!” One-Eye charged through the garden, scattering the birds and squirrels, ignoring all propriety. “Hey! Croaker! Guess what I found! Copies of the Annals from when we came past here headed north!”

  Well. And well. This tired old mind cannot find words adequate. Excitement? Certainly. Ecstasy? You’d better believe. The moment was almost sexually intense. My mind focused the way one’s does when an especially desirable woman suddenly seems attainable.

  Several older volumes of the Annals had become lost or damaged during the years. There were some I’d never seen, and never had known a hope of seeing.

  “Where?” I breathed.

  “In the library. One of the monks thought you might be interested. When we were here heading north I don’t remember leaving them, but I wasn’t much interested in that kind of thing then. Me and Tom-Tom was too busy looking over our shoulders.”

  “I might be interested,” I said. “I might.” My manners deserted me. I deserted Lady without so much as an “Excuse me.”

  Maybe that obsession was not as powerful as I’d worked it up to be.

  I felt like an ass when I realized what I had done.

  Reading those copies required teamwork. They had been recorded in a language no longer used by anyone but the temple monks. None of them spoke any language I understood. So our reader translated into One-Eye’s native tongue, then One-Eye translated for me.

  What filtered through was damned interesting.

  They had the Book of Choe, which had been destroyed fifty years before I enlisted and only poorly reconstructed. And the Book of Te-Lare, known to me only through a cryptic reference in a later volume. The Book of Skete, previously unknown. They had a half dozen more, equally precious. But no Book of the Company. No First or Second Book of Odrick. Those were the legendary first three volumes of the Annals, containing our origin myths, referenced in later works but not mentioned as having been seen after the first century of the Company’s existence.

  The Book of Te-Lare tells why.

  There was a battle.

  Always, there was a battle in any explanation.

  Movement; a clash of arms; another punctuation mark in the long tale of the Black Company.

  In this one the people who had hired our forebrethren had bolted at the first shock of the enemy’s charge. They had broken so fast they were gone before the Company realized what was happening. The outfit beat a fighting retreat into its fortified encampment. During the ensuing siege the enemy penetrated the camp several times. During one such penetration the volumes in question vanished. Both the Annalist and his understudy were slain. The Books could not be reconstructed from memory.

  Oh, well. I was ahead of the game.

  Books available charted our future almost to the edge of the maps owned by the monks, and those ran all the way to Here There Be Dragons. Another century and a half of a journey into our yesterdays. By the time we retraced our route that far I hoped we would stand at the heart of a map that encompassed our destination.

  As soon as it was clear that we had struck gold I obtained writing materials and a virgin volume of the Annals. I could write as fast as One-Eye and the monk could translate.

  Time fled. A monk brought candles. Then a hand settled on my shoulder. Lady said, “Do you want to take a break? I could do that for a while.”

  For half a minute I just sat there turning red. That, after I practically ditched her outside. After I never even thought of her all day.

  She told me, “I understand.”

  Maybe she did. She had read the various Books of Croaker-or, as posterity might recall them, the Books of the North-several times.

  With Murgen and Lady spelling me the translation went quickly. The only practical limit was One-Eye’s endurance.

  It was not all one way. I had to trade my later Annals for their older ones. Lady sweetened the deal with a few hundred anecdotes about the dark empire of the north, but the monks never connected my Lady with the queen of darkness.

  One-Eye is a tough old buzzard. He held up. Four days after he made his great discovery the job was done.

  I let Murgen into the game but he did all right. And I had to beg/buy four blank journals in order to get everything transcribed.

  Lady and I resumed our stroll about where we had broken it, but with me a little down.

  “What’s the matter?” she chided, and to my astonishment wanted to know if it was a postcoital depression. Just the faintest of digs there, I think.

  “No. I’ve just found out a to
n about the Company’s history. But I didn’t learn anything that’s really new.”

  She understood but she kept quiet and let me articulate my dissatisfaction.

  “It’s told a hundred ways, poorly and well, according to the skill of the particular Annalist, but, except for the occasional interesting detail, it was the same old march, countermarch, fight, celebrate or run away, record the dead, and, sooner or later, get even with the sponsor for betraying us. Even at that place with the unpronounceable name, where the Company was in service for fifty-six years.”

  “Gea-Xle.” She got her mouth around it like she had had practice.

  “Yeah, there. Where the contract lasted so long the Company almost lost its identity, intermarrying with the population and all that, becoming a sort of hereditary bodyguard, with arms handed down from father to son. But as it always will, the essential moral destitution of those would-be princes made itself evident and somebody decided to cheat us. He got his throat cut and the Company moved on.”

  “You certainly read selectively, Croaker.”

  I looked at her. She was laughing at me quietly.

  “Yeah, well.” I’d stated it pretty baldly. A prince did try to cheat our forebrethren and did get his throat cut. But the Company installed a new, friendly, beholden dynasty and did hang around a few years before that Captain got a wild hair and decided to go treasure hunting.

  “You have no reservations about commanding a band of hired killers?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” I admitted, sliding past the trap nimbly. “But we never cheated a sponsor.” Not exactly. “Sooner or later, every sponsor cheated us.”

  “Including yours truly?”

  “One of your satraps beat you to it. But given time we would have become less than indispensable and you would have started looking around for a way to shaft us instead of doing the honorable thing and paying us off and simply terminating our commission.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Croaker. Your unflagging faith in humanity.”

  “Absolutely. Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent,” I grumped.

  “You really know how to melt a woman, you know that, Croaker?”

  “Huh?” I come armed with a whole arsenal of such brilliant repartee.

  “I came out here with some feebleminded notion of seducing you. For some reason I’m not in the mood to try anymore.”

  Well. Some of them you screw up royal.

  There was an observation catwalk along some parts of the monastery wall. I went up into the northeast corner, leaned on the adobe and stared back the way we had come. Busy feeling sorry for myself. Every couple hundred years that sort of thing leads to a productive insight.

  The damned crows were thicker than ever. Must have been twenty of them now. I cursed them and, I swear, they mocked me. When I threw a loose piece of adobe they all jumped up and fled toward...

  “Goblin!” I think he was out keeping an eye on me in case I got suicidal.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get One-Eye and Lady and come up here. Fast.” I turned and stared up the slope at the thing that had caught my eye.

  It stopped moving but was unmistakably a human figure in robes so black looking at them was like looking at a rent in the fabric of existence. It carried something under its right arm, about the size of a hatbox, held in place by the natural fall of the limb. The crows swarmed around it, twenty or thirty of them, squabbling over the right to perch upon its shoulders. It was a good quarter mile from where I stood but I felt the gaze from its hooded, unseen face beating upon me like the heat from a furnace.

  The crowd turned up with Goblin and One-Eye as quarrelsome as ever. Lady asked, “What is it?”

  “Take a look out there.”

  They looked. Goblin squeaked, “So?”

  “So? What do you mean, so?”

  “What’s so interesting about an old tree stump and a flock of birds?”

  I looked. Damn! A stump ... But as I stared there was an instant’s shimmer and I saw the black figure again. I shuddered.

  “Croaker?” Lady asked. She was still mad at me but concerned even so.

  “Nothing. My eyes were playing tricks on me. I thought I saw the damned thing moving. Forget it.”

  They took me at my word, stomped off to whatever they had been doing. I watched them go and for another moment doubted my own senses.

  But then I looked again.

  The crows were flying off in a crowd, except for two headed straight toward me. And the stump was hiking off across the hillside as though intent on circling the monastery. I mumbled a little to myself but it did not do any good.

  I tried giving the Temple a few more days to work its magic but the next one hundred fifty years of our journey drummed on in my mind. There was no repose now. I was too itchy to sit. I announced my intention. And I got no kickbacks. Just acquiescent nods. Maybe even relieved nods.

  What was this?

  I sat up and came out of myself, where I had been spending a lot of time reexamining the familiar old furniture. I had not been paying attention to the others.

  They were restless, too.

  There was something in the air. Something that told us all it was time to hit the road. Even the monks seemed eager to see us move out. Curious.

  Them that stays alive in the soldiering business are them that listens to such feelings even when they make no sense. You feel like you got to move, you move. You stay put and get stomped, it is too late to whine about all that work for nothing.

  Chapter Twelve

  The shaggy hills

  To reach One-Eye’s jungle we had to pass through several miles of woods, then climb over a range of decidedly odd hills. The hills were very round, very steep, and completely treeless, though not especially high. They were covered with a short brown grass that caught fire easily, so that many bore black scars. From a distance they looked like a herd of giant, tawny, humped beasts sleeping.

  I was in a state of high nerves. That sleeping-beast image haunted me. I kept half expecting those hills to waken and shrug us off. I caught up with One-Eye. “Is there something weird about these hills that you accidentally forgot to tell me about on purpose?”

  He gave me a funny look. “No. Though the ignorant believe them to be burial mounds from a time when giants walked the earth. But they aren’t. They’re just hills. All dirt and rock inside.”

  “Then why do they make me feel funny?”

  He glanced back the way we had come, puzzled. “It’s not the hills, Croaker. It’s something back there. I feel it, too. Like we just dodged an arrow.”

  I did not ask him what it was. He would have told me if he had known.

  As the day wore on I realized the others were as jumpy as I was.

  Worrying about it did as much good as worrying ever does.

  Next morning we ran into two wizened little men of One-Eye’s race. They both looked a hundred years old. One of them kept hacking and coughing like he was about to croak. Goblin cackled. “Must be old Lizard Lips’s illegitimate grandchildren.”

  There was a resemblance. I suppose that was to be expected. We were just accustomed to One-Eye being unique.

  One-Eye scowled at Goblin. “Keep it up, Barf Bag. You’ll be grocery shopping with the turtles.”

  What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us.

  Grinning, One-Eye resumed gabbling with his relatives.

  Lady said, “I presume these are the guides the monks sent for?”

  They had done us that favor on learning our intentions. We would need guides. We were near the end of any road we could call familiar. Once past One-Eye’s jungle we would need somebody to translate for One-Eye, too.

  Goblin let out a sudden aggrieved squawk.

  “What’s your problem?” I demanded.

  “He’s feeding them a pack of lies!”

  So what was new about that? “How do you know? You don
’t talk that lingo.”

  “I don’t have to. I’ve known him since before your dad was whelped. Look at him. He’s doing his classic mighty-sorcerer-from-a-faraway-land act. In about twenty seconds he’s going to ...” A wicked grin spread his mouth around his face. He muttered something under his breath.

  One-Eye raised a hand. A ball of light formed within his curled fingers.

  There was a pop like that of a cork coming out of a Wine bottle.

  One-Eye held a hand full of swamp bottom. It oozed between his fingers and ran down his arm. He lowered his hand and stared in disbelief.

  He let out a shriek and whirled.

  Innocent Goblin was faking a conversation with Murgen. But Murgen was not up to the deceit. His shifty eyes gave Goblin away.

  One-Eye puffed up like a toady frog, ready to explode. Then a miracle occurred. He invented self-restraint. A nasty little smile pranced across his lips and he turned back to the guides.

  That was the second time in my experience that he had controlled himself when provoked. But, then, it was one of those rare times when Goblin had initiated the process of provocation. I told Otto, “This could get interesting.”

  Otto grunted an affirmative. He was not thrilled.

  Of One-Eye, I asked, “Have you finished telling them you’re the necromancer Voice of the North Wind come to ease the pain in their hearts brought on by worry about their wealth?” He’d actually tried to sell that once, to a tribe of savages coincidentally in possession of an eye-popping cache of emeralds. He found out the hard way that primitive does not mean stupid. They were fixing to burn him at the stake when Goblin decided to bail him out. Against his better judgment, he always insisted afterward.

  “It ain’t like that this time, Croaker. I wouldn’t do it to my own people.”

  One-Eye does not have an ounce of shame. Nor even the sense not to lie to those who know him well. Of course he would do it to his own people. He would do it to anybody if he thought he could get away with it. And he has so little trouble conning himself on that.