Shadow Games: The Fourth Chronicles of the Black Company: First Book of the South (6 page)

Though the empire retained a surface appearance of cohesion, a failure of the
old discipline snaked through the deeps beneath. When you wandered the streets
of Opal you sensed the laxness. There was flip talk about the new crop of
overlords. One-Eye spoke of an increase in black marketeering, a subject on
which he had been expert for a century. I overheard talk of crimes committed
that were not officially sanctioned.

Lady seemed unconcerned. “The empire is seeking normalcy. The wars are over.

There’s no need for the strictures of the past.”

“You saying it’s time to relax?”

“Why not? You’d be the first to scream about what a price we paid for peace.”

“Yeah. But the comparative order, the enforcement of public safety laws . . . I
admired that part.”

“You sweetheart, Croaker. You’re saying we weren’t all bad.”

She knew damned well I’d claimed that all along. “You know I don’t believe
there’s any such thing as pure evil.”

“Yes there is. It’s festering up north in a silver spike your friends drove into
the trunk of a sapling that’s the son of a god.”

“Even the Dominator may have had some redeeming quality sometime. Maybe he was
good to his mother.”

“He probably ripped her heart out and ate it. Raw.”

I wanted to say something like, you married him, but did not need to give her
further excuses to change her mind. She was pressed enough.

But I digress. I was remarking on the changes in the Lady’s world. What brought
the whole thing home was having a dozen men drop in and ask if they could sign
on with the Black Company. They were all veterans. Which meant there were men of
military age at loose ends these days. During the war years there had been no
extra bodies anywhere. If they were not with the grey boys or that lot they were
with the White Rose.

I rejected six guys right away and accepted one, a man with his front teeth done
up in gold inlays. Goblin and One-Eye, self-appointed name givers, dubbed him
Sparkle.

Of the other five there were three I liked and two I did not and could find no
sound reasons for going either way with any of them. I lied and told them they
were all in and should report aboard The Dark Wings in time for our departure.

Then I conferred with Goblin. He said he would make sure that the two I did not
like would miss our departure.

I first noticed the crows then, consciously. I attached no special significance,

just wondered why everywhere we went there seemed to be crows.

One-Eye wanted a private chat. “You nosed around that place where your
girlfriend is staying?”

“Not to speak of.” I had given up arguing about whether or not Lady was my
girlfriend.

“You ought to.”

“It’s a little late. I take it you have. What’s your beef?”

“It isn’t something you can pin down like sticking a nail through a frog,

Croaker. Kind of hard to get a good look around there, anyway, what with she
brought a whole damned army along. An army that I think she figures on dragging
along wherever we go.”

“She won’t. Maybe she rules this end of the world, but she don’t run the Black
Company. Nobody runs with this outfit who don’t answer to me and only to me.”

One-Eye clapped. “That was good, Croaker. I could almost hear the Captain
talking. You even got to standing the way he did, like a big old bear about to
jump on something.”

I was not original, but I didn’t think I was that transparent a borrower,

either. “So what’s your point, One-Eye? Why has she got you spooked?”

“Not spooked, Croaker. Just feeling cautious. It’s her baggage. She’s dragging
along enough stuff to fill a wagon.”

“Women get that way.”

“Ain’t women’s stuff. Not unless she wears magical lacies. You’d know that
better than me.”

“Magical?”

“Whatever that stuff is, it’s got a charge on it. A pretty hefty one.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought you ought to know.”

“If it’s magical it’s your department. Keep an eye out”—I snickered—“and let me
know if you find anything useful.”

“Your sense of humor has gone to hell, Croaker.”

“I know. Must be the company I keep. My mother warned me about guys like you.

Scat. Go help Goblin give those two guys the runs, or something. And stay out of
trouble. Or I’ll take you across the water in a nice bouncy rowboat we’ll pull
along behind the ship.”

It takes some doing for a black man to get green around the gills. One-Eye
managed it.

The threat worked. He even kept Goblin from getting into mischief.

Though not in keeping with the time sequence, I hereby make notation of four new
members of the Company. They are: Sparkle, Big Bucket (I don’t know why; he came
with the name), Red Rudy, and Candles. Candles came with his name, too. There is
a long story to tell how he got it. It does not make sense and is not especially
interesting. Being the new guys they mostly stayed quiet, stayed out of the way,

did the scut work, and worked on learning what we were all about. Lieutenant
Murgen was happy to have somebody around he outranked.

Our black iron coaches roared through Opal’s streets, flooding the dawn with
fear and thunder. Goblin outdid himself. This time the black stallions breathed
smoke and fire, and flames sprang up where their hooves struck, fading only
after we were long gone. Citizens stayed under cover.

One-Eye lolled beside me, restrained by protective cords. Lady sat opposite us,

hands folded in her lap. The lurching of the coach bothered her not at all.

Her coach and mine parted ways. Hers headed for the north gate, bound toward the
Tower. All the city—we hoped—would believe her to be in that coach. It would
disappear somewhere in uninhabited country. The coachmen, handsomely bribed,

should head west, to make new lives in the distant cities on the ocean coast.

The trail, we hoped, would be a dead one before anyone became concerned.

Lady wore clothing that made her look like a doxy, the legate’s momentary fancy.

She travelled like a courtesan. The coach was jammed with her stuff and One-Eye
reported that a load had been delivered to The Dark Wings already, with a wagon
to carry it.

One-Eye was limp because he had been drugged.

Faced by a sea voyage, he became balky. He always does. Old in knowing One-Eye’s
ways, Goblin had been prepared. Knockout drops in his morning brandy did the
trick.

Through wakening streets we thundered, down to the waterfront, amidst the
confusion of arriving stevedores. Onto the massive naval dock we rolled, to its
very end, and up a broad gangway. Hooves drummed on deck timbers. Finally, we
halted.

I stepped down from the coach. The ship’s captain met me with all the
appropriate honors and dignities—and a furious scowl on behalf of his savaged
deck. I looked around. The four new men were there. I nodded. The captain
shouted. Hands began casting off. Others began helping my men unharness and
unsaddle horses. I noticed a crow perched on the masthead.

Small tugs manned by convict oarsmen pulled The Dark Wings off the pier. Her own
sweeps came out. Drums pounded the beat. She turned her bows seaward. In an hour
we were well down the channel, running with the tide, the ship’s great black
sail bellied with an offshore breeze. The device thereon was unchanged since our
northward journey, though Soulcatcher had been destroyed by the Lady herself
soon after the Battle at Charm. The crow kept its perch.

It was the best season for crossing the Sea of Torments. Even One-Eye admitted
it was a swift and easy passage. We raised the Beryl light on the third morning
and entered the harbor with the afternoon tide.

The advent of The Dark Wings had all the impact I expected and feared.

The last time that monster put in at Beryl the city’s last free, homegrown
tyrant had died. His successor, chosen by Soulcatcher, became an imperial
puppet. And his successors were imperial governors.

Local imperial functionaries swarmed onto the pier as the quinquireme warped in.

“Termites,” Goblin called them. “Tax farmers and pen-pushers. Little things that
live under rocks and shy from the light of honest employment.”

Somewhere in his background was a cause for a big hatred of tax collectors. I
understand in an intellectual sort of way. I mean there is no lower human
life-form—with the possible exception of pimps—than that which revels in its
state-derived power to humiliate, extort, and generate misery. I am left with a
disgust for my species. But with Goblin it can become a flaming passion, with
him trying to work everybody up to go out and treat a few tax people to
grotesque excruciations and deaths.

The termites were shaken and distressed. They did not know what to make of this
sudden, obviously portentous arrival. The advent of an imperial legate could
mean a hundred things, but nothing good for the entrenched bureaucracy.

Elsewhere, all work came to a halt. Even cursing gang leaders paused to stare at
the harbinger ship.

One-Eye eyeballed the situation. “Better get us out of town fast, Croaker. Else
it will turn into the Tower all over again, this time with too many people
asking too damned many questions.”

The coach was ready. Lady was inside. The mounts, both great and normal, were
saddled. A small, light, closed wagon was brought up and assembled by the Horse
Guards and filled with Lady’s plunder. We were ready to roll when the ship’s
captain was ready to let us.

“Mount up,” I ordered. “One-Eye, when that gangway goes down you make like the
horns of hell. Otto, take this coach off here like the Limper himself is after
you.” I turned to the commander of the Horse Guards. “You break trail. Don’t
give those people down there a chance to slow us down.” I boarded the coach.

“Wise thinking,” Lady said. “Get away fast or risk falling into the trap I
barely escaped at the Tower.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I can fake this legate business only if nobody looks
at me too close.” Far better to roar through town and leave them thinking me a
foul-tempered, contemptuous, arrogant Taken legate southward bound on a mission
that was no business of the procurators of Beryl.

The gangway slammed down. One-Eye let loose the hell-horn howl I wanted. My mob
surged forward. Gawkers and the privileged alike scattered before our
fire-and-darkness apparition. We thundered through Beryl as we had thundered
through Opal, our passage spreading terror. Behind us, The Dark Wings put out
with the evening tide, under orders to proceed to the Garnet Roads and begin an
extended patrol against pirates and smugglers. We exited the Rubbish Gate.

Though the normal animals were exhausted, we carried on till darkness lent us
its mask.

Despite our haste to get away from the city, we did not camp far enough out to
escape its attention entirely. When I wakened in the morning I found Murgen
waiting on me with three brothers who wanted to join up. Their names were
Cletus, Longinus, and Loftus. They had been kids when we were in Beryl before.

How they recognized us during our wild ride I do not know. They claimed to have
deserted the Urban Cohorts in order to join us. I did not feel much like dealing
with an extensive interrogation, so took Murgen’s word that they seemed all
right. “They’re fools enough to want to jump in with us without knowing what’s
going on, let them. Give them to Hagop.”

I now had two feeble squads, Otto and the four from Opal, and Hagop and the
three from Beryl. Such was the Company’s history. Pick up a man here, enlist two
there, keep on keeping on.

Southward and southward. Through Rebosa, where the Company had seen service
briefly, and where Otto and Hagop had enlisted. They found their city changed
immensely and yet not at all. They had no trouble leaving it behind. They
brought in another man there, a nephew, who quickly earned the name Smiley
because of his consistent sullenness and sarcastic turn of phrase.

Then Padora, and on, to that great crossroads of trade routes where I was born
and where I enlisted just before the Company ended its service there. I was
young and foolish when I did. Yes. But I did get to see the far reaches of the
world.

I ordered a day of rest at the vast caravan camp outside the city wall, along
the westward road, while I went into town and indulged myself, walking streets I
had run as a kid. Like Otto said about Rebosa, the same and yet dramatically
changed. The difference, of course, was inside me.

I stalked through the old neighborhood, past the old tenement. I saw no one I
knew—unless a woman glimpsed briefly, who looked like my grandmother, was my
sister. I did not confront her, nor ask. To those people I am dead.

A return as imperial legate would not change that.

We stood before the last imperial mile marker. Lady was trying to convince the
lieutenant commanding our guards that his mission was complete, that imperial
soldiers crossing the frontier might be construed as an unacceptable
provocation.

Sometimes her people are too loyal.

A half-dozen border militiamen, equally divided between sides, clad identically
and obviously old friends, stood around a short distance away, discussing us in
murmurs of awe. The rest of us fidgeted.

It seemed ages since I had been beyond imperial frontiers. I found the prospect
vaguely unsettling.

“You know what we’re doing, Croaker?” Goblin asked.

“What’s that?”

“We’re travelling backward in time.”

Backward in time. Backward into our own history. A simple enough statement, but
an important thought.

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Let me go stir the pot. Else we’ll never get moving.”