Bleak Seasons (32 page)

I could work my anger out on Uncle Doj when he got back.

If he came.

Not one Strangler attack team achieved its tactical objective, but even so their
raid was successful psychologically. It stunned the city. It shocked the
leadership. It generated terror out of all proportion to actual damages. Croaker
grabbed it and turned it around.

Next morning, while most of us were still wrestling with our emotions, he went
to the Taglian mob and spoke in his old guise as Liberator. He announced a new
and furious era of total, relentless warfare against the Shadowmaster and tooga
although he divulged few real facts about the Palace raid. That set rumor
running wild through the alleys and byways and fueled fresh anger. For years the
war had been a long way away, in the old Shadowland, and so had become
emotionally remote to most of the people. The Deceiver raid brought the war back
home. The old enthusiasm resurfaced.

The Liberator told the crowd that the years of preparation were over. It was
time to carry justice to the wicked.

But moving immediately meant a winter campaign. I asked the Old Man if he really
intended that.

“Damned straight. More or less. They have their feet up down there. You know
that. You’ve been riding Smoke. I mean, who would be crazy enough to take a
crack at the Dandha Presh when the snow is flying?”

Who indeed? “It’ll mean some major hardships for the soldiers.”

“If an old fart like me can take it they all can take it.”

Right. Only some of us can take it better than others. Some of us are obsessed.

Hell. Us Black Company guys have obsessions and hatreds enough for everybody.

Work became my all. I was past the evil time. No longer did I fall back into
cruel yesterdays in order to escape crueler todays that I could detect. But I
did not sleep well. Hell still lurked beyond sleep’s wall. I lost myself in the
Annals, rerecording everything the fire had claimed. I ran away by riding Smoke
out into the past, where and when I could, to check my recollections.

One-Eye’s arsenal increased its production. The Old Man drove the ruling class
crazy trying to get money to pay for everything.

Word of the new stage spread through the Taglian territories as fast as horses
could run.

Lady began gathering her forces and training them to deal with the darknesses
that had given the Shadowmasters their name.

I became aware that Goblin had dropped out of sight, completely, but that only
weeks after the actual event. I feared that he had been murdered. But Croaker
did not seem concerned.

One-Eye was fussed. He was desperate to get his sidekick connected with my
mother-in-law but he could not unearth a trace of the little toad.

In the night when the wind no longer licks through its unglazed windows, nor
prances along its untenanted halls, nor whispers to its million creeping
shadows, the fortress is filled with the silence of stone.

Cold cruel dreams stir within the figure pinned to the throne so ancient that
bits have given up to dry rot. A gleam from beyond flickers. The figure sighs,

drawing in the light, exhaling a balloon of dream that somehow finds its way
through the tortuous passages of the fastness and out into the world in search
of a receptive mind. Upon the plain itself the shadows swirl like minnows
sensing the passing of a huge predator.

The stars wink down in cold irony.

There is always a way.

House of pain? Mocking laughter. She is beautiful. Yes. Almost as beautiful as
I. But she is not for you.

The woman tucked a child in for the night. Her slightest movement bespoke grace.

I . . . There was an I, suddenly. NO! Not for you! She is mine!

Nothing is yours but what I give you. And I give you pain. This is the house of
pain. No! Whatever you are . . . GO!

“Ouch!” I opened my eyes. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei crouched beside me, one to
either side, looking concerned. I rolled my head, surprised to see them back so
soon.

I was on the floor in my workroom. But I was dressed for bed. “What am I doing
here?”

“You walked in your sleep,” Doj told me. “Also talked, which alerted us.”

“Talked?” I never talk in my sleep. But I do not walk in my sleep, either. “Gods
damn it! I was having another spell!” And this time I remembered. Some. “I have
to get this down. Right now. Before I lose it.” I scrambled across the room. In
moments I was scratching away.

And when I was done I realized I did not have a clue about anything. I threw my
pen down.

Mother Gota appeared. She carried a pot of tea. She poured for me, then for Doj
and Thai Dei. Sahra’s death had hurt her deeply. For the moment her normal,

contentious character was submerged. She was an automaton.

This had been going on for days.

“What is the trouble?” Uncle Doj asked.

“There’s nothing there. I remembered perfectly but can’t find a clue toward an
explanation.”

“Then you must relax. Stop fighting yourself. Thai Dei. Get the practice
swords.”

I wanted to scream that this was not the time. But this was his answer to all
stress. Come to the swords. Pursue the exercise rituals. Parade the stances. To
do it right required total concentration. And it always worked, no matter how
much I disbelieved.

Even Gota joined us, though she was less adept than I.

The night that I had tried to find my way back from Smoke’s hideout I had
wondered if One-Eye had cast some confusion spells around there. I learned that
he had and had scattered random pockets of confusion all through the disused
parts of the Palace so the one critical area would not stand out. He gave me an
amulet of charmed woolen strings, several colors twisted together, that I was
supposed to wear on my wrist. It would let me pass through the spells no more
confused than my usual state.

“Be careful,” he told me. “I change these spells every day now that you’re
working Smoke regular. I don’t want nobody stumbling in there while you’re out
of body. Especially not the Radisha.”

That made sense. There was no calculating Smoke s value. No instrument for
espionage this valuable had ever existed before. We did not dare risk
compromising him.

The Old Man gave me a list of regular checks he wanted made. These included
keeping a close watch on Blade. He did not use that information immediately,

though. I supposed he was laying back, letting Blade gain confidence. And,

occasionally, letting Blade deal with our religious problem children for us,

too.

I did not ask but I am sure the policy was coolly deliberate. The priesthoods
provided our main political challenges. Made sense to me, too, to use them up
keeping Blade from getting too strong.

I had my personal list of investigations, too, some meant to satisfy my own
curiosity, most to get straight events that needed to be recorded in the Annals.

I spent about ten hours a day just working on the books.

I rise, write, eat, write, visit Smoke, write, sleep for a little while, then
get up and do it all again. I do not sleep long or well because I do not care to
tarry in the house of pain.

Uncle Doj has decided not to return to his swamp. Likewise, Mother Gota. They
stay out of my way, mostly. But they are always here, always watching. They have
expectations.

The new phase of the war is here. They have decided to play a part. They mean
the cruelty of the Deceivers to be requited by the cruelty of the Nyueng Bao.

One of the big problems of espionage, I have discovered, is figuring out where
to look for the information you want. When I need to know something for the
Annals I usually have an idea when things happened, where and who was involved.

It is a chance to flit off and double check my memory, which I have found to be
astonishingly unreliable.

Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And
often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking
we have invested.

One-Eye has his ego problems, of course. Maybe they are why he will not let me
wander through his arms factory. If it does not have something to do with
guarding his ledgers from outside scrutiny. I will spy on him now that he plans
to close down soon.

One-Eye carries a lot on his old shoulders. Among the things he does is he acts
as a sort of Minister of Armaments. He has a whole fortified section of town
where he oversees the manufacture of everything from arrowheads to monster siege
engines.

Much of his production gets crated up and sent straight to the docks, to be
loaded aboard barges and sent downriver to the delta where, via a series of
crude canals, the barges are worked over into the Naghir River, which shares the
delta. Then they travel up the Naghir and its tributaries to armories near the
frontier. I have no doubt that some of the material fails to reach its
destination. I expect that One-Eye somehow profits. I hope he has sense enough
not to sell to the enemy. Croaker catches him doing that and One-Eye will think
that Blade gets treated like a mischievous kid brother.

My first swoop into the arsenal was a quick psychic raid. One-Eye’s compound
consisted of a gaggle of once dissimilar and unrelated structures now
interconnected in a mad maze. All windows and most doors had been bricked up.

Men selected for their size, bad tempers and lack of imagination infested the
few entrances. They allowed no one in and no one out. The street outside the
freight entrance was crowded day and night. Files of wagons and carts, drawn by
weary oxen, crept forward to be unloaded and loaded by weary workmen watched
banefully by the unimaginative men, who foamed at the mouth if carters and
laborers so much as made eye contact. Around and amongst the carts swarmed
countless runners carrying long poles from which hung dozens of pails filled
with hot food for the workers. The guards checked every pail. They even took
turns checking on each other.

Taglios has a richly diverse, complex, and deeply specialized labor economy.

Folks will make a living one way or another and other folks will give them room.

Near the Palace is a bazaar devoted entirely to grooming services, catering
mainly to Palace functionaries. One guy does nothing but trim nose hairs. Right
beside him, operating in a space less than four feet wide, with oils and silver
tools displayed on a tiny inlaid table, is an old character who will clean the
wax from your ears. He does nothing else but retail gossip. This business has
been in his family for generations. He is sad because he has no son to inherit.

When he goes his family will lose that space in the bazaar.

It is all symptomatic of horrid overpopulation and the desperate difficulty of
surviving at the bottom. I would not want to be a Taglian of low caste.

Lucky me, I did not have to check in with One-Eye’s thugs. There seemed to be no
provision against magical espionage. I darted inside. I guess One-Eye did not
worry because Longshadow could no longer send his pets snooping this far. But
what about the Howler? He could sneak up on us any time he wanted.

Trying to track Howler was one of my regular duties.

The arsenal workers were doing ordinary things. Making arrowheads. Sharpening
them. Making arrows. Fletching them. Building artillery pieces. Attempting to
mass produce a light cotton body armor for the ordinary infantryman who, no
doubt, would discard it because it was hot and uncomfortable and a nuisance to
lug around.

Only the glassblowers surprised me.

There were two dozen workers in that department and most were employed producing
small, thin bottles. A platoon of apprentices tended fires, heated the silicates
that became raw glass, carried off trays of bottles once they cooled. Those went
to carpenters who placed them into crates with sawdust packing. A few of the
crates went aboard big long haul wagons but most went to the waterfront.

What the devil?

There was a big piece of slate in One-Eye’s office. Upon it, in Forsberger, were
chalked what appeared to be production targets. Fifty thousand bottles. Three
million arrows. Five hundred thousand javelins. Ten thousand cavalry lances. Ten
thousand sabers. Eight thousand saddles. One hundred fifty thousand infantry
short swords.

Some of those numbers were absurd and there was no way any could be reached by
One-Eye’s arsenal alone. But production took place all over the Taglian
territories, most often in one-man blacksmith shops. One-Eye’s main job was to
keep track. Which looked to me a lot like letting the fox do bedcheck at the
chicken house.

The list also included animals and wagons and lumber by the hundred barge loads,

much of which I did understand. But five thousand box kites, ready for assembly,

twelve feet by three feet? Each with one thousand feet of string? One hundred
thousand yards of silk in bolts six feet tall?

He was not going to get that one.

I went roving to see what else was being readied for Mogaba and his friends.

I saw training camps where commando teams prepared for every imaginable terrain
and mission. Down south, Lady pursued her own programs, creating forces prepared
to operate offensively on the sorcerous battlefield.

She had scoured the Taglian territories for every person possessed of even the
slightest magical talent and had schooled them just enough to make them useful
in a program I could not fathom no matter how I poked at it. As Longshadow had
noted, she was stripping the Taglian territories of bamboo. That got cut into
several standard lengths and had red-hot rods run through to burn out the
joints. Lady had the resulting tubes packed with little spongy colored marbles
created by her squads of hedge wizards.

Another game of baffle the Shadowmaster? Half of what we were doing was smoke
and mirrors meant to confuse the opposition and make them waste resources or
commit them in the wrong places. But I was more confused than Longshadow could
possibly be.