Bleak Seasons (6 page)

Four hundred men and five elephants swarmed around an incomplete stockade. The
nearest friendly outpost lay a hard day’s march northward. Shovels gnawed the
earth. Hammers pounded. Elephants swung timbers off wagons and helped set them
upright. Only the oxen stood around, lazing in their harnesses.

This nameless post was barely a day old, the newest point in the relentless
Taglian leapfrog into the Shadowlands. Only its watchtower was complete. The
lookout there scanned the southern horizon intently. There was an electric
urgency in the air, a heaviness like the smell of old death, a premonition.

The soldiers were all veterans. Not a one considered fleeing his nerves. Each
had developed the habit and expectation of victory.

The sentinel began to gaze fixedly. “Captain!”

A man distinct for his coloring dropped a shovel, looked up. His true name was
Cato Dahlia. The Black Company called him Big Bucket. Wanted for common theft in
his home city, he had become advisor commander of a battalion of Taglian border
rangers. He was a hardass leader with a reputation for getting his jobs done and
bringing his people back alive.

Bucket scrambled onto the observation platform, puffing. “What have you got?”

The lookout pointed. Bucket squinted. “Help me out here, son. These eyes ain’t
what they used to be.” He could see nothing but the low humped backs of the
Loghra Hills. Scattered clouds hung above those.

“Watch.”

Bucket trusted his soldiers. He selected them carefully. He watched.

One small cloud hung lower than the others, dragging a slanting shadow. This
rogue thunderhead did not travel the same direction as the rest of its family.

“Headed right for us?”

“Looks like it, sir.”

Bucket relied on his intuition. It had served him well during this war without
major battles. And intuition told him that cloud was dangerous.

He descended, spread word to expect an attack. The men of the construction
company, although not combat soldiers, did not want to withdraw. Sometimes
Bucket’s reputation worked against him. His rangers had prospered, freebooting
across the frontier. Others wanted a share.

Bucket compromised. He sent one platoon north with the animals, which were too
valuable to risk. The other workers stayed. They overturned their wagons in the
gaps in the stockade.

The cloud advanced steadily. Nothing could be seen inside its shadow and tail of
falling rain. A chill ran before it. The Taglian soldiers shivered and pranced
to keep warm.

Two hundred yards beyond the ditch, teams of two men shivered in covered,

concealed pits lighted by special candles. One man maintained a watch.

Rain and darkness arrived. Behind the initial few yards of downpour the rain
slackened to a drizzle. Men appeared. They looked old and sad, ragged and pale,

vacant and hopeless, hunched against the chill. They looked as though they had
spent their entire lives in the rain. They bore their rusting weapons without
spirit. They could have been an army raised from the dead.

Their line passed the pits. Behind them came horsemen of the same sort,

advancing like zombies. Next came massed infantry. Then came the elephants.

The men in the pits spied the elephants. They used crossbows to speed poisoned
shafts. The elephants wore no belly armor. The poison caused intense pain. The
maddened beasts rampaged through their own formations. The Shadowlanders had no
idea why the animals were enraged.

Little shadows found the pits. They tried to slither inside. Candlelight drove
them back. They left a deeper chill and a smell of death behind.

The shadows found a pit where rain had gotten to the candle. They left
shrieking, grimacing death in a grave already dug.

Lady encountered the northbound laborers. She questioned them, considered the
cloud in the distance. “This may be what we’re after,” she told her companions.

“Ride!” She urged her stallion to a gallop. Foaled in sorcerous stables when she
was empress of the north, that giant black outdistanced the rest of her party
quickly. Lady studied the cloud as she galloped. Three similar clouds had been
reported near sites where ranger companies had been overrun. This was exactly
what she had come to investigate. It took only minutes to fathom how the raids
were managed. Lines of dark power had been laid down long before the
Shadowlanders withdrew from this region. The attackers were controlled through
those. They would fight without wills of their own while run by those lines.

She could scramble the lines easily now that she sensed them but chose not to do
so. Let the attack proceed. These things cost the Shadowlanders more dearly than
they cost Taglios.

Longshadow must realize that. So why did he find the exchange worthwhile ?

She entered the ranger encampment by leaping her mount over an upturned wagon.

She dismounted as an amazed Bucket ran to meet her. He looked like a condemned
man granted a last minute reprieve. “It’s the Howler, I think,” he said.

“Why?” Lady dragged her gear down from behind her saddle, started changing right
there. “What can he hope to accomplish?”

“I think it ain’t what they’re doing but who they’re doing it to that matters,

Lieutenant.” Though she commanded armies, Lady’s Company title remained
Lieutenant.

“Who they’re doing it to? Yes! Of course.” Every unit lost had been led by
Company men. Seven brothers had fallen. “They’re picking us off.” The belief
that the Company is invincible is the backbone of Taglian military morale and
the black beast of Taglian politics. “That’s crafty. Must be Howler’s idea. He
does love to blindside you.”

Bucket helped her with her armor. That was gothically ornate, black and shiny,

too pretty to be much use in close combat. But her job was to fight sorcery, not
soldiers. Her armor was surfaced by layer upon layer of protective spells.

Rain began to fall as she donned her helmet. Threads of fire snaked along
channels etched into the surface of her armor. She followed Bucket up the
watchtower.

Rain roared down. Sounds of combat grew louder, nearer. Lady ignored those,

extended sorcerous senses in a search for the sorcerer known as the Howler. That
ancient and evil being did not betray himself but he was out there somewhere.

She could smell him.

Was it possible he had learned to control his screaming?

“I’ll catch up with you, you little bastard. Meantime . . . ” She reached down.

A fog formed, became dense, slithered between the raindrops, gained color.

Pastels swirled, deepened, darkened. Soon the entire storm glowed as though some
mad artist had splash-painted it with watercolors.

There were screams inside the storm.

The weather stopped moving. The shrieks of lost soldiers peaked, faded. The
Shadowmaster’s lines of power, twisting and mutating, had turned lethal.

Lady resumed searching for the Howler. She discovered him stealing southward,

flying low and timidly, fleeing the pastel death that had begun eating its way
back along the lines of power. She flung a hastily concocted killing spell. It
failed. Howler’s lead was too great. But he did abandon stealth to run hard.

Lady cursed like any line trooper frustrated.

The rain faded away. The Taglian survivors appeared one by one, at first awed by
the carnage, then grumbling about all the graves that needed digging. Few
Shadowlander survivors were found.

Lady told Bucket, “Tell them to look at the bright side. There will be prize
money for the captured animals.” The Shadowlander animals, excepting the
elephants, had not suffered badly.

Lady glared southward, unforgiving. “Next time, old friend.”

. . . falling . . . again . . .

Trying to hang on. So tired. When I get tired the present gets slippery.

Fragments.

Not even fragments of today.

The past. Not so long ago.

Freezing my ass off. Failing to catch the great villain Narayan.

Lady at play down south.

Fish stench.

The sleeping man. The screaming Deceiver. Dead men.

Only memories but happier than tonight. There is too much pain here.

It is my apocalypse.

Slipping.

Can’t keep my eyes from closing. The summons is too damned powerful.

The pillars might be mistaken for relics of a fallen city. They are not. They
are too few and too randomly placed. Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have
been gnawed deeply by the teeth of the hungry winds.

In the lightning flares, or in the dawns and sunsets when light steals beneath
the edges of the sky, tiny golden characters blaze upon the faces of the
columns.

It is immortality of a sort.

After dark the wind dies. After dark silence rules the glittering stone.

. . . sliding away . . .

A vast whirlpool pulling me down.

Perhaps a force pushing. Was that a lying promise of an end to pain?

I cannot resist.

All lies. Endless lies.

Brown pages, torn pages stiff with blood. Agony. Hard to ride that anchor
through the storm.

There you are! Were you lost? Welcome back. Come! Come! The great adventure is
about to begin. The players are all in place. The engines are wound tight. The
spells are collected and ready, in arsenal number. Oh, it will be a grand night
of doom.

Look there! Look there. Remember them? Goblin and One-Eye, the wizards? But is
that really them? There are two more just like them right over there. And see
this. And that. And there. One, two, three Murgens.

No. Definitely not. You can’t teach those two to suck eggs. They have been in
the fooled you business since your granny’s greatgranny was a stinky little
surprise for your however-many-greats grandpa. They have set glamors all over
this part of the city. If you are a Shadowlander soldier you won’t be able to
tell the figments from the real thing till one of them sticks a knife in you.

Look there! Raven and Silent. They have been gone for years. And there. That is
the old Captain, dead since Juniper. No, they won’t scare any Shadowlanders with
who they might be. Not right away. The southerners never heard of them.

What?

You are right. Absolutely right. Nobody here but Otto and Hagop will know them,

either. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is they can be seen and hardly
anyone will know which ones are dangerous and which are illusions.

This is a first trial. A big experiment, saved up special for the night of
Shadowspinner’s big attack.

Yes. Yes. He did hit hard not that long ago. But he wasn’t really going for a
knockout then. He would have taken it, but that was really a reconnaissance in
force, meant to support planning for this attack.

It is going to be a grand show.

Oh, no, there isn’t one ghost anywhere else in Dejagore. Mogaba wouldn’t have
it. He has no grasp of illusion as a weapon. He has no idea how the Company
really worked. He clings to his grand notion of chivalrous warfare, the great
deadly game, all honor and set rules. He would settled this mess in a trial by
combat between him and any champion the Shadowlanders care to send out.

Oh! Look! That one is interesting. That ugly sucker is Toad-killer Dog. He was a
real nasty devil dog. And the Limper! Oh, yes. Brilliant. If the man behind
Shadowspinner’s mask is anyone the Company has faced before those illusions are
provocations he will have to test. He will betray himself.

No, of course the Shadowmasters would not risk an entire kingdom on the outcome
of a fight between two men. Their champion might lose.

Yes. Mogaba is naive about some things. He is an arrogant, cruel, unsympathetic
general, too.

Ooh. Hear those trumpets. The Company has its own personal bunch of bad guys
down front. Let’s go to the ramparts and watch from close up.

No. They aren’t really bright. Well, you could say that if they were bright they
wouldn’t be in that army in the first place but that wouldn’t be fair. Not many
of those guys had a choice about signing up. Their only real motivation is their
fear of the Shadowmasters.

Sure. No argument. That makes them no less deadly. Hell, a rock can fall out of
the sky and kill you.

Yes, this definitely is the big one. Shadowspinner is set to send every man.

Maybe shadows have come up from Overlook to help.

Bats! Ha. And crows. Which is chasing which? Duck! Almost got you. They are all
over. Never been this many around before.

What is that racket? Oh. Bucket yelling at one of the Murgens to get behind
something because he don’t want to carry no bodies down no goddamn stairs.

And here comes the first barrage. And if that racket across town means anything
the Shadowlanders are hitting hard about where the third and fourth cohorts of
the First Legion are stationed. Those are good regiments. They will put up a
fight.

Like a regular hailstorm, isn’t it? Makes you wonder where they got all the
goddamned arrows and javelins for their engines. Just stay under the mantlet,

you’ll be fine. They aren’t good at laying plunging fire onto elevated targets.

If they let up before they attack the Jaicuri will come out and collect the
missiles and bring them to the soldiers. The Shadowlanders will get them back
business end first.

No, the Jaicuri do not love Mogaba. They don’t love the Taglians or the Black
Company, either. They wish the whole mob was gone. But they have some dark
suspicions about what will happen if Shadowspinner recaptures this burg. So they
sort of try to help, but not much. Not yet.

They help some, they figure maybe Mogaba might be less likely to kick them out
next time he is in one of his moods.

The sky? Dark as the inside of a priest’s heart, isn’t it? Oh. Yes. You’re
right. It isn’t an auspicious sort of night. Never is when they attack without
benefit of a full moon. It’s devil’s work for sure, then. Usually it means the
Shadowmasters want the darkness so they can run their pets to their best
advantage. Or they want everybody terrified that there are shadows to come. Look
at them scurry! Those Jaicuri are motivated tonight, If they become involved in
actually fighting it could be closer than Mogaba or Shadowspinner expect. Whoa!

What was that? Look at that. What the hell is it? That rosy light over the
hills. Here they come. Going to take their whack at breaking the Company. You
don’t think so? Maybe you are right. This could be meant to keep the Company
pinned while Spinner concentrates somewhere softer.

Look at them down there, though. Like maggots. And no covering fire now.

You’re right. The engines will be moving to support the main attack now.

Check that light. It keeps getting brighter. No. Now it’s going away. And it
doesn’t seem like anyone else noticed. That is a little too weird.

Oh. Right again. Must have been a signal to the Shadowlander officers. The
racket is getting louder, now you mention it.

No, I don’t like the sound of it either. The attack had become generalized.

Ho! Look over there! Now we have it there, too. What? The light. Don’t you see
it? There behind the ramparts?

Yes. I see. You’re right again. It is different. This is kind of like the cold
light of a full moon tinged with a little blue, isn’t it. Yeah. It’s kind of
misty, too. Sort of like we are seeing it through an autumn haze. There. Now
it’s so bright you can make out the fighting on the far wall.

Right. Fighting. That means they have a foothold there already. And Mogaba don’t
have any reserves to send up.

Guess we can bend over and kiss our butts goodbye, friend.