Shadow Games: The Fourth Chronicles of the Black Company: First Book of the South (8 page)

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 ton 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.

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.

“See that you don’t. We’re too few and too far from safety to let you indulge
yourself in your usual line of shit.”

I got enough menace into my voice to make him gulp.

His tone was markedly different when he resumed gobbling at our prospective
guides.

Even so, I decided I would pick up a smatter of the language. Just to keep an
ear on him. His often misplaced self-confidence has a way of asserting itself at
the most unpropitious moments.

Straight for a time, One-Eye negotiated a deal that pleased everyone. We had
ourselves guides for the passage through the jungle and intermediary
interpreters for the land that lay beyond.

Relying on his usual moronic sense of humor, Goblin dubbed them Baldo and
Wheezer, for reasons that were self-evident To my embarrassment, the names
stuck. Those two old boys probably deserved better. But then again . . .

We wended our way belween the shaggy, hump-backed hills the rest of that day,

and as darkness approached we topped the cleavage between the pair that flanked
the summit of our passage. From there we could see the sunset, reflecting bloody
wounds of a broad river, and the rich green of the jungle beyond. Behind us lay
the tawny humps, and beyond them a hazy sprawl of indigo.

My mood was reflective, flat, almost down. It seemed we might have reached a
watershed in more than a geographical sense.

Much later, unable to sleep for thoughts that questioned what I was doing here
in an alien land, thoughts that replied that I had nothing else to do and
nowhere else to go, I left my bedroll and the remaining warmth of our campfire.

I headed for one of the flanking hills, moved by some vague notion of going up
where I could get a better view of the stars.