Bleak Seasons (36 page)

I backed away, embarrassed for my Captain. I had not thought that he could be
such a complete asshole. I did not understand why he was so insecure about Lady.

I felt for Blade, deeply, and had to think less of one of my heroes.

Now that I reflected on it, I recalled occasional bestowals of unpleasantries
upon Willow Swan that had not gotten out of hand. And Croaker had even exchanged
cross words with the Prahbrindrah Drah once.

I sensed a pattern. It was not one I wanted to see. But it was obvious if you
looked for it.

Croaker was obsessed with his woman. He would alienate anyone who offered her
too much attention, however costly that might be.

Shit. Why? She was not Sarie.

We had lost Blade already. I do not have a lot of use for Willow Swan, who is
much too pretty and too blond, but I would really hate to have the Company on
the wrong side of the Prince just because one man could not be sure of his
woman.

More scales fell from my eyes, leaving disappointment behind.

I needed to take this up with the brain trust, the oldest of the old, One-Eye,

Otto and Hagop. Goblin was too far away and Lady both too far and disqualified
by being too intimately involved. A Captain who thought with his balls instead
of his brains could get a lot of people killed.

I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own
ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of
them was ingenious enough to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for
power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and
female do.

But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from
the same dichotomy.

Say, Ky Sahra.

Gods, Murgen. You need to get away from this half-dead old man. You are a hired
sword. A soldier. You should not be playing philosophical games. Not even with
yourself.

I popped out of contact with Smoke. “It’s time, One-Eye. She’s gone.”

The little wizard tossed a friendly miniature owl into the darkened hallway.

Untouched by confusion spells it headed for that part of town where it imagined
it nested. It did not look for any particular human. That was not its mission.

But plenty of humans looked for it. When it fluttered past them two dozen Black
Company veterans and their Nyueng Bao bodyguards rushed a building that had
deserved razing a generation before the Shadowmasters entered this quarter of
the world.

I had tracked Soulcatcher back to that building from her raid on Smoke’s
library. She felt so safe there she was almost contemptuous of security
precautions. She had managed to get by undisturbed there for years.

She was going to be one unhappy player when she discovered that she was less in
control than she imagined.

I watched, pleased, while Black Company soldiers took the building by the
numbers and in a manner so professional that not one Captain ever would have
found cause for complaint.

The men now even had the knack of getting their jobs done without stumbling over
the Nyueng Bao, who were worse than a herd of cats when it came to getting
underfoot. You just had to use them like they were your shadows.

Hardly anyone not directly involved noticed my guys. They got inside, spread
out, dug deep, found what I wanted, gathered it up and got back out long before
Soulcatcher discovered that she had been outmaneuvered.

Otto and Hagop directed the raid. Putting them in charge was my way of bringing
them back into the family. Good soldiers they, they carried out my suggestions,

not just cleaning out Soulcatcher’s hideout but grabbing her favorite white
crow. They plucked a couple of his feathers and left them in place of the books,

tied together with a strand of hair taken from the head of a much younger
Soulcatcher, a long time back, and come south with the plunder brought by Otto
and Hagop.

That ought to rattle her.

Maybe I should have let Croaker and Lady in on my scheme. In a way, I was making
a statement in their names. But this had become personal. I had a statement to
make for Murgen. And there was no time for consultations and conferences.

Smoke and I swooped over the guys as they lugged their plunder toward the
Palace. I meant to give the books to Croaker as soon as they arrived. He could
do whatever he wanted with them. Which probably meant that they would bounce
once and land back in my lap, to be disappeared from the ken of all villains and
villainesses probably no better than I had hidden the Widowmaker armor.

I wondered if I was going to get too intimate with the meaning of hubris.

Soulcatcher would know who done her wrong. She was maybe only a year younger
than Lady, which left her an ageless amount trickier and nastier than me.

But what did I have to lose? The only thing I ever loved was gone. I could dance
with disaster and grin to the end. Soulcatcher could not do anything that would
hurt more than losing Sahra had.

Really?

Sometimes you bullshit yourself.

An hour before sunset four days before the winter solstice, consulting neither
the convenience of mortal man, nor sorcerer, nor god or goddess, the earth
shifted and shook. In Taglios dishes tumbled off shelves, sleepers awakened in
confused panic, dogs howled and cracks appeared in old walls whose foundations
had been set with incomplete diligence or without forethought for the
possibility of earthquake. It was a half-hour sensation.

In Dejagore structures weakened by former high water or hidden structural
defects yielded to the relentless seduction of gravity. Farther south the impact
was more severe. Beyond the Dandha Presh, where mountains descended upon valleys
with ferocious roars of triumph, the quake left epic horror. Kiaulune was
devastated. Even Overlook suffered, though the masonry shrugged off the earth’s
worst. Longshadow was in a panic for hours, until it became obvious that the
earth’s convulsions had not broken his shadowgates and shadowtraps. Then he
began to rage because the destruction and loss of life in Shadowcatch would
delay his construction efforts by months. Perhaps even by years.

I had the vague feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, though how
anybody could get behind me when I was nothing but a floating viewpoint I did
not know. The voice was not there but otherwise the feeling of presence was the
same as it was during my earliest plunges into the horrors of Dejagore with the
taunting spirit that must have been Soulcatcher. Only a smell accompanied this
presence. An odor like . . . Like the smell of the dead Strangler I had found in
the deeps of the Palace, like the stench that had become so much a part of life
in Dejagore that eventually you noticed it only when it was gone. It was the
smell of death.

I had felt a full measure of pain in the delta, imagining that I saw Sahra alive
among the Nyueng Bao, despite being out in the numb with Smoke. Now I enjoyed a
full measure of terror despite being out there.

I began doing what, in flesh, would have been a full turnaround, slowly. I
turned a second time and a third and a fourth, each time faster than the last
and each time less in control. And each time around, as I faced what I suspected
was southward, I glimpsed something vast and dark and, horribly, each time more
clearly, till the last time around I saw a black woman as tall as the sky. She
was bare-ass naked. She had four arms and six teats and fangs like a vampire.

The stench was her breath. Her eyes burned like windows into hell yet looked
into my own and held them and spoke to me with a blistering compulsion and
promise a ferocious eroticism beyond anything I had known with Sahra. I
screamed.

I popped out of Smoke’s universe.

Smoke had wanted to scream, too. I think he came close to being terrified awake.

One-Eye laughed. “Cold enough, Kid?”

I was soaked. With very cold water. “What the hell?”

“You try staying out there forever again, I’ll freeze your ass for good.”

I began to shake. “Oh, shit, that’s cold.” I did not tell him what I had seen,

why I was shaking really. Probably just my imagination running away with me
again, anyway. “You dog turd, what the hell are you trying to do, give me a
heart attack or something?”

“No. Just trying to keep you from getting lost. You won’t look out for
yourself.”

“I think I’m lost already, old timer.”

The stars wink down in cold irony.

There is always a way.

The wind whines and howls with bitter breath, through fangs of ice. Lightning
snarls and barks upon the plain of glittering stone. Rage is a red, near-animate
force, as bloated with compassion as a starving serpent. Few shadows frisk among
the stellae. Many have been summoned, there or yon.

At its heart the plain is disfigured by the scars of cataclysm. A jagged
lightning bolt of a fissure has ripped across the face of the plain. Nowhere is
that fissure so wide that a child could not step across but it seems bottomless.

Trailers of mist drift forth. Some bear a hint of color when they emerge.

Cracks mar the surface of the great grey stronghold. A tower has collapsed
across the fissure. From the fastness comes a deep great slow beat like that of
a grumbling worldheart, disturbing the silence of stone.

The wooden throne has shifted sideways. It has tilted a little. The figure
nailed thereon has changed its sprawl. Its face is drawn in agony. Its eyelids
flutter as though it is about to awaken.

This is immortality of a sort but the price is paid in silver of pain.

And even time may have a stop.