The Captain shone with a glow of accomplishment-till the military governor
summoned him.
He assembled the officers and senior noncoms when he returned. “Bad news,” he
told us. “The Lady is sending the Limper to lead us across the Plain of Fear. Us
and the caravan we'll escort.”
Our response was surly. There was bad blood between the Company and the Limper.
Elmo asked, “How soon will we leave, sir?” We needed rest. None had been
promised, of course, and the Lady and the Taken seem unconscious of human
frailties, but still. . . .
“No time specified. Don't get lazy. He's not here now, but he could turn up
tomorrow.”
Sure. With the flying carpets the Taken use, they can turn up anywhere within
days. I muttered, “Let's hope other business keeps him away a while.”
I did not want to encounter him again. We had done him wrong, frequently, way
back. Before Charm we worked closely with a Taken called Soulcatcher. Catcher
used us in several schemes to discredit Limper, both out of old enmity and
because Catcher was secretly working on behalf of the Dominator. The Lady was
taken in. She nearly destroyed the Limper, but rehabilitated him instead, and
brought him back for the final battle.
Way, way back, when the Domination was aborning, centuries before the foundation
of the Lady's empire, the Dominator overpowered his greatest rivals and
compelled them into his service. He accumulated ten villains that way, soon
known as the Ten Who Were Taken. When the White Rose raised the world against
the Dominator's wickedness, the Ten were buried with him. She could destroy none
of them outright.
Centuries of peace sapped the will of the world to guard itself. A curious
wizard tried to contact the Lady. The Lady manipulated him, effected her
release. The Ten rose with her. Within a generation she and they forged a new
dark empire. Within two they were embattled with the Rebel, whose prophets
agreed the White Rose would be reincarnated to lead them to a final victory.
For a while it looked like they would win. Our armies collapsed. Provinces fell.
Taken feuded and destroyed one another. Nine of the Ten perished. The Lady
managed to Take three Rebel chieftains to replace a portion of her losses:
Feather, Journey, and Whisper-likely the best general since the White Rose. She
gave us a terrible time before her Taking.
The Rebel prophets were correct in their prophecies, except about the last
battle. They expected a reincarnated White Rose to lead them. She did not. They
did not find her in time.
She was alive then. But she was living on our side of the battleline, unaware of
what she was. I learned who she was. It is that knowledge which makes my life
worthless should I be put to the question.
“Croaker!” the Captain snapped. “Wake up!” Everybody looked at me, wondering how
I could daydream through whatever he'd said.
“What?”
“You didn't hear me?”
“No, sir.”
He glowered his best bear glower. “Listen up, then. Be ready to travel by carpet
when the Taken arrive. Fifty pounds of gear is your limit.”
Carpet? Taken? What the hell? I looked around. Some of the men grinned. Some
pitied me. Carpet flight? “What for?”
Patiently, the Captain explained, “The Lady wants ten men sent to help Whisper
and Feather in the Barrowland. Doing what I don't know. You're one of the ones
she picked.”
Flutter of fear. “Why me?” It was rough, back when I was her pet.
“Maybe she still loves you. After all these years.”
“Captain. ...”
“Because she said so, Croaker.”
“I guess that's good enough. Sure can't argue with it. Who else?”
“Pay attention and you'd know these things. Worry about it later. We have other
fish to fry now.”
Whisper came to Frost before the Limper. I found myself tossing a pack aboard
her flying carpet. Fifty pounds. The rest I had left with One-Eye and Silent.
The carpet was a carpet only by courtesy, because tradition calls it that.
Actually, it is a piece of heavy fabric stretched on a wooden frame a foot high
when grounded. My fellow passengers were Elmo, who would command our team, and
Kingpin. Kingpin is a lazy bastard, but he swings a mean blade.
Our gear, and another hundred pounds belonging to men who would follow us later,
rested at the center of the carpet. Shaking, Elmo and Kingpin tied themselves in
place at the carpet's two rear corners. My spot was the left front. Whisper sat
at the right. We were heavily bundled, almost to immobility. We would be flying
fast and high, Whisper said. The temperature upstairs would be low.
I shook as much as Elmo and Kingpin, though I had been aboard carpets before. I
loved the view and dreaded the anticipation of falling that came with flight. I
also dreaded the Plain of Fear, where strange, fell things cruise the upper air.
Whisper queried, “You all use the latrine? It's going to be a long flight.” She
did not mention us voiding ourselves in fear, which some men do up there. Her
voice was cool and melodious, like those of the women who populate your last
dream before waking. Her appearance belied that voice. She looked every bit the
tough old campaigner she was. She eyed me, evidently recalling our previous
encounter in the Forest of Cloud.
Raven and I had lain in wait where she was expected to meet the Limper and lead
him over to the Rebel side. The ambush was successful. Raven took the Limper. I
captured Whisper. Soulcatcher and the Lady came and finished up. Whisper became
the first new Taken since the Domination.
She winked.
Taut fabric smacked my butt. We went up fast.
Crossing the Plain of Fear was faster by air, but still harrowing. Windwhales
quartered across our path. We zipped around them. They were too slow to keep
pace. Turquoise manta things rose from their backs, flapped clumsily, caught
updrafts, rose above us, then dived past like plunging eagles, challenging our
presence in their airspace. We could not outrun them, but outclimbed them
easily. However, we could not climb higher than the windwhales. So high, and the
air becomes too rare for human beings. The whales could rise another mile,
becoming diving platforms for the mantas.
There were other flying things, smaller and less dangerous, but determinedly
obnoxious. Nevertheless, we got through. When a manta did attack, Whisper
defeated it with her thaumaturgic craft.
To do so, she gave up control of the carpet. We fell, out of control, till she
drove the manta away. I got through without losing my breakfast, but just
barely. I never asked Elmo and Kingpin, figuring they might not want their
dignity betrayed. Whisper would not attack first. That is the prime rule for
surviving the Plain of Fear. Don't hit first. If you do, you buy more than a
duel. Every monster out there will go after you.
We crossed without harm, as carpets usually do, and raced on, all day long, into
the night. We turned north. The air became cooler. Whisper dropped to lower
altitudes and slower speeds. Morning found us over Forsberg, where the Company
had served when new in the Lady's service. Elmo and I gawked over the side.
Once I pointed, shouted, “There's Deal.” We had held that fortress briefly. Then
Elmo pointed the other way. There lay Oar, where we had pulled some fine, bloody
tricks on the Rebel, and earned the enmity of the Limper. Whisper flew so low we
could distinguish faces in the streets. Oar looked no more friendly than it had
eight years ago.
We passed on, rolled along above the treetops of the Great Forest, ancient and
virgin wilderness from which the White Rose had conducted her campaigns against
the Dominator. Whisper slowed around noon. We drifted down into a wide sprawl
that once had been cleared land. A cluster of mounds in its middle betrayed the
handiwork of man, though now the barrows are scarcely recognizable.
Whisper landed in the street of a town that was mostly ruin. I presumed it to be
the town occupied by the Eternal Guard, whose task it is to prevent tampering
with the Barrowland. They were effective till betrayed by apathy elsewhere.
It took the Resurrectionists three hundred seventy years to open the Barrowland,
and then they did not get what they wanted. The Lady returned, with the Taken,
but the Dominator remained chained.
The Lady obliterated the Resurrectionist movement root and branch. Some reward,
eh?
A handful of men left a building still in good repair. I eavesdropped on their
exchange with Whisper, understood a few words. “Recall your Forsberger?” I asked
Elmo, while trying to shake the stiffness out of my muscles.
“It'll come back. Want to give Kingpin a look? He don't seem right.”
He wasn't bad off. Just scared. Took a while to convince him we were back on the
ground.
The locals, descendants of the Guards who had watched the Barrowland for
centuries, showed us to our quarters. The town was being restored. We were the
forerunners of a horde of new blood.
Goblin and two of our best soldiers came in on Whisper's next flight, three days
later. They said the Company had left Frost.
I asked if it looked like the Limper was holding a grudge.
“Not that I could see,” Goblin said. “But that don't mean anything.”
No, it didn't.
The last four men arrived three days later. Whisper moved into our barracks. We
formed a sort of bodyguard cum police force. Besides protecting her, we were
supposed to help make sure unauthorized persons did not get near the Barrowland.
The Taken called Feather appeared, bringing her own bodyguard. Specialists
determined to investigate the Barrowland came up with a battalion of laborers
hired in Oar. The laborers cleared the trash and brush, up to the Barrowland
proper. Entry there, without appropriate protection, meant a slow, painful
death. The protective spells the White Rose left hadn't faded with the Lady's
resurrection. And she had added her own. I guess she is terrified he will break
loose.
The Taken Journey arrived, bringing troops of his own. He established outposts
in the Great Forest. The Taken took turns making airborne patrols. We minions
watched one another as closely as we watched the rest of the world. Something
big was afoot. Nobody was saying so, but that much was obvious. The Lady
definitely anticipated a breakout attempt.
I spent my free time reviewing the Guard's records, especially for the period
when Bomanz lived here. He spent forty years in the garrison town, disguised as
an antique digger, before he tried to contact the Lady and unintentionally freed
her. He interested me. But there was little to dig out, and that little was
colored.
Once I'd had his personal papers, having stumbled onto them shortly before
Whisper's Taking. But I passed them on to our then mentor Soulcatcher for
transportation to the Tower. Soulcatcher kept them for her own reasons, and they
fell into my hands again, during the battle at Charm, as the Lady and I pursued
the renegade Taken. I didn't mention the papers to anyone but a friend, Raven.
The Raven, who deserted to protect a child he believed to be the reincarnation
of the White Rose. When I got a chance to pick up the papers from where I hid
them, they were gone. I guess Raven took them with him.
I often wonder what became of him. His declared intent was to flee so far no one
could find him again. He did not care about politics. He just wanted to protect
a child he loved. He was capable of doing anything to protect Darling. I guess
he thought the papers might turn into insurance someday.
In the Guard headquarters there are a dozen landscapes painted by past members
of the garrison. Most portray the Barrowland. It was magnificent in its day. It
had consisted of a central Great Barrow on a north-south axis, containing the
Dominator and his Lady. Surrounding the Great Barrow was a star of earth raised
above the plain, outlined by a deep, water-filled moat. At the points of that
star stood lesser barrows containing five of The Ten Who Were Taken. A circle
rising above the star connected its inward points, and there, at each, stood
another barrow containing another Taken. Every barrow was surrounded by spells
and fetishes. Within the inner ring, around the Great Barrow, were rank on rank
of additional defenses. The last was a dragon curled around the Great Barrow,
its tail in its mouth. A later painting by an eyewitness shows the dragon
belching fire on the countryside the night of the Lady's resurrection. Bomanz is
walking into the fire.
He was caught between Resurrectionists and the Lady, all of whom were
manipulating him. His accident was their premeditated event. The records say his
wife survived. She said he went into the Barrowland to stop what was happening.
No one believed her at the time. She claimed he carried the Lady's true name and
wanted to reach her with it before she could wriggle free.
Silent, One-Eye and Goblin will tell you the direst fear of any sorcerer is that
knowledge of his true name will fall to some outsider. Bomanz's wife claimed the
Lady's was encoded in papers her husband possessed. Papers that vanished that
night. Papers that I recovered decades later. What Raven snatched may contain
the only lever capable of dumping the empire.
Back to the Barrowland in its youth. Impressive construction. Its weather faces
were sheathed in limestone. The moat was broad and blue. The surrounding
countryside was park-like. . . . But fear of the Dominator faded, and so did
appropriations. A later painting, contemporary with Bomanz, shows the
countryside gone to seed, the limestone facings in disrepair, and the moat
becoming a swamp. Today you can't tell where the moat was. The limestone has
disappeared beneath brush. The elevations and barrows are nothing but humps.
That part of the Great Barrow where the Dominator lies remains in fair shape,
though it, too, is heavily overgrown. Some of the fetishes anchoring the spells
keeping his friends away still stand, but weather has devoured their features.