She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company (3 page)

Four days passed before Croaker was ready to leave Taglios. He spent most of
that time arguing with the Radisha. Their sessions were private. I was not
allowed to sit in. The little I heard from Cordy Mather later suggested they had
butted heads vigorously. And Cordy had not gotten to hear a tenth of what was
said.

I do not think Cordy is real pleased with his role around here anymore. More and
more the Radisha treats him the way some powerful men treat their mistresses. He
is supposed to be the commander of the Royal Guards and he has done a damned
good job there but the more he plooks the Woman the more she seems to think he
is just a toy, not to be trusted with anything substantive.

If he had not been feeling irritable about it he would not have mentioned the
conflict.

“Same old same old?” I asked. “Expenses?” Over the years Croaker got the Radisha
to buy millions of arrows, hundreds of thousands of spears and javelins, tens of
thousands of lances and saddles and sabers. He filled warehouses with swords and
shields. He acquired mobile artillery accompanied by ammunition caissons. He
accumulated dray horses, mule and ox teams by the dozens of hundreds. He had war
elephants and work elephants. Lumber enough to raise new cities. A thousand
unassembled box kites big enough to lift a man . . .

“Same old,” Mather admitted. He tugged angrily at his tangled brown hair. “He
apparently expects this to go bad.”

“This?”

“The winter offensive. That’s what the squabbling was about. Starting to
accumulate replacement stuff now in case this goes bad.”

“Hmm.” That sounded like the Old Man. He could never make enough preparations.

Which was probably why, as the passion of his response to the Strangler raid
waned, he seemed ever less eager to throw everything into the fray.

But knowing Croaker the arguments could be a diversion, too. He might just be
trying to scare the Radisha into being reluctant to pull any political stunts
while he was away.

“He was close to the line.”

“What do you mean?

“There’s a point where the Woman just won’t argue anymore.”

“Oh.” Enough said. I understood. If the Old Man went any further he would have
to exercise his warlord’s powers and place the Princess under arrest. And would
that ever stir up a nest of vipers.

“He’d do it,” I told Mather. I assumed word would get back to the Woman. “But
not over war materiel. I don’t think. If the Prahbrindrah Drah and Radisha don’t
live up to their promises to help the Company get back to Khatovar, though . . .

The Captain could turn unpleasant.”

Taking us back to the Company’s origins in fabled Khatovar had been Croaker’s
main passion for nearly a decade now. If you pressed him a little, sometimes an
almost fanatical determination shimmered behind the usual coterie of masks he
presents to the world.

I hoped Cordy would take that message to his bedmate. Also, I was kind of poking
an anthill with a stick to see if, in his funk, he would reveal the royal
thinking about our quest.

It was not something the Prince and his sister discussed, mostly because the
Prahbrindrah Drah had taken a liking to life in the field and just did not see
his sister anymore. Walking with the ghost told me nothing.

But Smoke was evidence in his own way. It was his terrified determination to
keep the Company away from Khatovar that had led him to defect to the
Shadowmaster and thereby put himself into a position where he might be stricken.

As Lady noted in her contribution to these Annals, the rulers of Taglios, both
religious and lay, have no more love for us than they do for the Shadowmasters.

But we have been gentler. And if we vanish from the stage prematurely they will
have only a short time to regret our passing.

Longshadow has no use whatsoever for priests. He exterminates them wherever he
finds them. Which may be one more reason why Blade deserted to his cause.

Mather’s old friend has the most pernicious case of priest hatred I have ever
encountered.

“How do you feel about Blade?” I asked. The question would divert Mather from
wondering about my agenda.

“I still don’t understand. It just doesn’t make any sense. Did he catch them
doing it?”

“I don’t think so.” I knew. I had walked with the ghost. Smoke can take me
almost anywhere. Even the past, back almost to the very moment when the demon
burst in upon him and drove him into hiding in the farthest shadows of his mind.

But even after having used Smoke to go observe the actual furious encounter
between Blade and the Old Man, alcoholically enhanced, and indeed over Blade’s
too obvious interest in Lady, I still did not understand. “But I’ll tell you,

with the Prince and Blade and Willow Swan and about every other guy in town
drooling all over themselves every time Lady walks by, I don’t know as I blame
him for finally blowing up.”

“Just about as many guys looked at your wife the same way. She was probably the
most beautiful woman any of them ever saw. You didn’t blow.”

“I think that’s a compliment, Cordy. Thanks. For me and Sarie both. You want me
to be honest, I think it was more than Lady. I think the Old Man thinks Blade
was planted on us somehow.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. But you got to know his background.” Cordy was born in my end of the
world. He knew the way things were. “He spent years dealing with the Ten Who
Were Taken. Those monsters laid out schemes that took decades to unfold.”

“And some are still around. Why Blade in particular?”

“Because we don’t know anything about him. Except that you dragged him out of an
alligator pit. Or something.”

“And you do know about me and Willow?”

“Yes.” I did not explain that my Company brothers Otto and Hagop had gone all
the way back to the empire and, in passing, had rooted around in the pasts of
army deserters Cordwood Mather and Willow Swan.

That did not leave Mather feeling comfortable.

Too bad.

It never hurt to have our paranoia worry somebody else so much they behaved
themselves.

I glanced at Thai Dei. He was always there. But I never forgot that. He might be
my bodyguard and brother-in-law and might owe me for saving the lives of some of
his family and I might even like him fairly well but I never talked about
anything substantial in front of him using Taglian or Nyueng Bao unless there
was no other choice.

Maybe the Old Man’s paranoia was rubbing off on me. Maybe it came from how Thai
Dei and Uncle Doj and Mother Gota sometimes seemed almost indifferent to Sahra’s
murder. They acted as though the death of Thai Dei’s son To Tan was ten times
more important . . . They had chosen to stay with me, to take part in the
journey south to extract revenge, then seemed to give the matter little more
thought. For me Sarie’s memory is a holy thing, due its moments every day.

Me thinking about Sarie is not a good thing, though. Every time I do I want to
run to Smoke. But Smoke is not there for me now. One-Eye did get him out of town
and even with the little wizard unlikely to be in a hurry the ghostwalker was
getting farther and farther away.

Croaker sent word that he wanted to see me. I went to his hole in the wall,

started to knock but heard voices inside. I paused, glanced at Thai Dei. He was
not big and not handsome and was always so impassive you could not begin to
guess what he was thinking. At the moment, though, he did not appear to have
heard anything he should not. He just stood there scratching around the splints
on his broken arm.

Then there was a raucous outbreak that sounded like crows squabbling.

I pounded on the door.

The noise stopped instantly. “Enter.”

I did so in time to see a huge crow flap out the one small window in Croaker’s
cell. A twin of the first perched atop a coatrack that looked like it had been
rescued from the gutter. Croaker did not much care about material things.

“You wanted me?”

“Yeah. Couple of things.” He spoke Forsberger from the start. Thai Dei would not
get it but Cordy Mather would if he happened to be listening. And so would the
crows. “We’re going to pull out before sunrise. I’ve decided. A few of the top
priests are starting to think I won’t do them the way Lady did, so they’re
trying to push a little here and there, test the waters. I figure we’d better
hit the road before they get me tied up in knots.”

That did not sound quite like him. When he made deaf-mute signs as he finished I
knew the speech was for other consumption even if it was factual.

Croaker pushed a folded scrap of paper across. “Take care of that before we go.

Make sure you don’t leave any evidence to tie it to us.”

“What?” That did not sound good at all.

“Be ready to move. If you really have to drag the in-laws along have them ready
to go, too. I’ll send word.”

“Your pets tell you anything I need to know?” Like I did not know that they were
not his pets at all but spies or messengers from Soulcatcher.

“Not lately. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be the first to know.”

This was one of those points where the paranoia grabbed me. I could not be sure
of the actual relationship between Croaker, Soulcatcher and those crows. I had
to take him completely on faith at a time when my faith in everything was being
tested severely on every hand.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Make sure you’ve got everything you need. It won’t be long.”

I opened the scrap of paper by the light of one of the few lamps illuminating
the corridor between Croaker’s apartment and mine. I made no attempt to keep
Thai Dei from seeing it. He is illiterate. Plus the note was written in the
formal language of Juniper, as though to a bright six-year-old. Which was lucky
for me since I have only a vague familiarity with the language, from documents
dating back to the time the Company spent there, before I joined.

Soulcatcher was dead in those days. I suppose that is why Croaker chose to use
that language. It was one he felt she was unlikely to know.

The message itself was simple. It instructed me to take the Annals I had
recaptured from Soulcatcher, who had stolen them from where Smoke had had them
hidden from us, and conceal them in the room where we had kept Smoke hidden.

I wanted to go back and argue. I wanted to keep them with us. But I grasped his
reasoning. Soulcatcher and everyone else with an interest in keeping us and
those Annals apart would assume that we would keep them close till we could
decipher them. Out there in the field we would not have time to worry about
protecting them. So we might as well hide them in a place that, right now, only
the Radisha knew existed.

“Shit,” I said softly, in Taglian. No matter how many languages I learn I always
find that word useful. It has pretty much the same meaning in every tongue.

Thai Dei did not ask. Thai Dei almost never does.

Behind me, more than the next lamp away, Croaker came out of his cell with a
black blob perched on his shoulder. That meant he was going to see somebody
native. He thought the crows intimidated the Taglians.

I told Thai Dei, “This is something I have to handle myself. Go tell Uncle Doj
and your mother that we’ll be leaving sometime during the night. The Captain has
decided.”

“You must accompany me partway. I cannot find my way in this great tomb.” He
sounded like he meant it, too.

Nyueng Bao keep their feelings well hidden but I saw no reason why someone who
had grown up in a tropical swamp should feel at home inside an immense pile of
stone. Especially since all his past experience with cities and big buildings
had been negative in the extreme.

I hurried to get him back into territory he knew well enough to walk alone. I
had to get into Croaker’s cell fast, before he and his feathered friend
returned. That is where we were keeping the books right now. We did not want
anyone to know we had them though Soulcatcher surely suspected if she was aware
that they had been stolen from where she had hidden them.

What a convoluted game.

I felt my wrist to make sure I still wore the loop of string that was really an
amulet One-Eye had given me so I would be immune to all the spells of confusion
and misdirection around the chamber where we kept Smoke.

Even before I collected the books, noting that Croaker had shooed all crows,

closed the window and covered it with a curtain, I was thinking how best to
conceal them once I had them where Croaker wanted them to go.

It would not be long after we left that the Radisha would start wondering who
was taking care of the wizard now. My bet was that she would start looking for
him. She was stubborn enough to find her way to the room.

Though she had shown little interest in Smoke lately she had never given up hope
of bringing him back. If we enjoyed many successes against the Shadowmaster she
would want his help even more.

Everything we did seemed to have potentially unpleasant consequences.

When the Old Man decides to move he moves. It was still tomb dark when I left
the Palace and found him waiting with two of the giant black stallions that had
come down from the north with the Black Company. Specially bred during the
Lady’s heyday, with sorcery instilled into their very bones, they could run
forever without getting tired and could outrace any mundane steed. And they were
almost as smart as a really stupid human.

Croaker grinned down at my in-laws. They were completely nonplussed by this
development. How were they supposed to keep up?

Kind of pissed me off, too. “I’ll handle it,” I said in Nyueng Bao. I handed
Thai Dei my stuff, climbed the monster Croaker had brought for me. It had been a
long time since I had ridden one but this one seemed to remember me. It tossed
its head and snorted a greeting. “You too, big boy.” I took my stuff from Thai
Dei.

“Where’s the standard?” Croaker demanded.

“In the wagon with One-Eye. Sleepy put it there before—”

“You let it out of your control? You don’t ever let it out of your control.”

“I was thinking about giving Sleepy the job.” Standard-bearer was one of the
hats I wore. And not one of my favorites. Now that I am Annalist I should be
passing it on. Croaker has mentioned that himself on occasion. “Give me your
stuff now,” I told Thai Dei once I had mine settled in front of me.

Thai Dei’s eyes got big as he realized what I intended.

I told Mother Gota and Uncle Doj, “Stay on the stone road all the way and you’ll
catch up with the army. If you’re stopped show the soldiers your papers.”

Another innovation of the Liberator. More and more people involved in the war
effort were being given bits of paper telling who they were and who was
responsible for them. Since hardly anybody was literate the effort did not seem
worthwhile.

Maybe. But the Old Man always has his reasons. Even when those are simply to
confuse.

Croaker realized what I was doing just as I extended my hand to help Thai Dei
climb. He opened his mouth to raise hell. I said, “Don’t bother. It ain’t worth
a fight.”

Thai Dei looks like a skull with a thin layer of dark leather over it at the
best of times. Now he looked as though he had just heard a death sentence
pronounced. “It’ll be all right,” I told him, realizing he had never been on a
horse. The Nyueng Bao have water buffalo and a few elephants. They do not ride
those, except as children sometimes, helping with the plowing.

He did not want to do it. He really did not. He looked at Uncle Doj. Doj said
nothing. It was Thai Dei’s call.

Croaker must have started looking smug or something. Thai Dei stared at him for
a moment, shuddered all over, then extended his good hand. I pulled. Thai Dei
was as hard and tough as they came but he weighed almost nothing.

The horse gave me a look nearly as ugly as the one I had gotten from my boss.

The fact that they are capable of a job does not make the beasts eager to do it.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Croaker said.

“Go.”

He headed out. The pace he set was savage. He rode like he could feel no pain.

He grumbled and fussed at me to keep up. He grumbled even more after we
collected a cavalry escort south of the city. The regular horses had no hope of
matching the pace he wanted to set. He had to keep waiting for them to catch up.

Usually he was well ahead, surrounded by crows. The birds came and went and when
we exchanged words he always knew things like where Blade was, where our troops
were, where there was resistance to the Taglian advance and where there was
none. He knew that Mogaba had sent cavalry north to blunt our advance.

It was weird. The man just plain knew things he should not. Not without walking
with the ghost. And One-Eye was still ahead of us, making much better time than
I would have believed possible had we not been trying to catch him.

Croaker got over his snit after the first day. He became social again. Headed
for the Ghoja Ford, he asked, “You remember the first time we came here?”

“I remember rain and mud and misery and a hundred Shadowlanders trying to kill
us.”

“Those were the days, Murgen.”

“They were as close to hell as I want to get. And that’s said from the viewpoint
of a man who’s been a whole lot closer.”

He chuckled. “So thank me for this nice new road.”

“Thank you for the nice new road.” The Taglians called it the Rock Road or Stone
Road. The first time we traveled it, it had been nothing but a snake of mud.

“You really think Sleepy is right for the standardbearer job?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

“This is the same Murgen who complained that he’s always the first guy into
every scrape?”

“I said I’ve been thinking. I find I’ve got some extra motivation.” Our other
companions told me I was handling Sarie’s loss pretty well. I thought so myself.

Croaker looked back at Thai Dei, who was clinging desperately to a swaybacked
dapple mare we had picked up thirty miles back. He was handling his problem
moderately well, too, for a guy who could use only one hand.

Croaker told me, “Don’t let motivation get in the way of good sense. When all
the rest is said and done we’re still the Black Company. We get the other guys
to do the dying.”

“I’m in control. I was a Black Company brother a lot longer than I was Sarie’s
husband. I learned how to manage my emotions.”

He did not seem convinced. And I understood. He was concerned not about me as I
existed right now but as I would in a crunch. The survival of the whole Company
might hinge on which way one man jumped when the shitstorm hit.

The Captain glanced back. Despite their best efforts our escort had begun to
string out. He paid no attention to them. He asked, “Learned anything about your
in-laws?”

“Again?” He never let up. And I did not have an answer for him. “How about ‘love
is blind’?”

“Murgen, you’re a damned fool if you really believe that. Maybe you ought to go
back and reread the Books of Croaker.”

He lost me there. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve got me a lady, too. Still alive, granted. We’ve got plenty tied up in each
other. We made us a baby together. Any two fools can do that by accident, of
course, but it’s usually a benchmark in a relationship. But what we have as man
and woman, father and mother, doesn’t mean I trust Lady even a little in any but
that one way. And she can’t trust me. It’s the way she’s made. It’s the life she
lived.”

“Sahrie never had any ambitions, boss. Except maybe to get me to actually go
into the farming I’m always talking about so I wouldn’t get skragged gloriously
in some typically heroic military manner like falling off a horse and drowning
while I was crossing a creek during the rainy season.”

“Sahra never worried me, Murgen. What bothers me is this uncle who doesn’t act
like any other Nyueng Bao I’ve ever seen.”

“Hey, he’s one old guy who has a thing about swords. He’s a priest and his
scripture is sharp steel. And he’s got a grudge. Just keep him pointed toward
the Shadowmaster.”

Croaker nodded grimly. “Time will tell.” He did grim very well.

We crossed the great stone bridge Lady had ordered built at Ghoja. Crows filled
the trees on the southern bank. They squabbled and carried on and seemed to find
us highly amusing.

I said, “I worry more about those things.”

Croaker did not respond. He did order a halt to rest the animals. So many had
gone south ahead of us that there were no well rested remounts available. Amidst
all the saluting and hasty turning out of an honor guard and whatnot, I stared
southward and said, “That little clown is making damned good time.” I had asked
already and had learned that One-Eye was still a day ahead.

“We’ll catch him before we get to Dejagore.” Croaker eyed me as though he feared
the city name would strike me with the impact of some terrible spell. I
disappointed him. Thai Dei, who could follow the conversation because we were
speaking Taglian, showed no reaction, either, though the siege had been as
terrible for his people as for the Company. Nyueng Bao seldom betray any emotion
in the presence of outsiders.

I told Thai Dei, “Give your horse to the groom and let’s see if we can’t find
something decent to eat.” Living on horseback is not a gourmet’s delight.

For the same reason there were no fresh remounts, there were very few delicacies
at the Ghoja fortress, but because we belonged to the Liberator’s party we were
given a newly taken gamecock that was so full of juice and substance my stomach
nearly rebelled at taking it in. After eating we got to stay inside, out of the
cold, and get some sleep. I should have stuck to Croaker in case his talks with
local commanders turned up anything that belonged in the Annals, but after a
short interior debate I chose sleep instead. If he heard anything worthwhile the
Old Man would tell me. If necessary I could come back with Smoke later.

I dreamed but did not remember the dreams long enough to note them down. They
were unpleasant but not overpowering or so terrible Thai Dei had to awaken me.

We were back on the road before sunrise.

We overtook One-Eye passing through the hills that surround Dejagore. When I
first glimpsed his wagon and realized it had to be him I started to shudder and
had to fight an urge to kick my mount into a faster pace. I wanted to get to
Smoke.

Maybe I had more of a problem than I wanted to admit.

I did not show it enough to be noticed, though.

One-Eye never slowed down a bit.

There had been some changes since my days of hell in Dejagore or Jaicur, as its
natives called it, or Stormgard, as it was named while it was the seat of the
deceased Shadowmaster Stormshadow. Poor witch, she had been totally unable to
guard the Shadowlands against the storm of the Black Company.

The plain outside the city had been drained of all water and cleared of wreckage
and corpses, though I thought I could still smell death in the air. Prisoners of
war from the Shadowlands still labored on the city walls and inside the city
itself. Why seemed problematic. There were almost no Jaicuri left alive.

“Interesting notion, planting the plain in grain,” I said, seeing what looked
like winter wheat peeping through last year’s stubble.

“One of Lady’s ideas,” Croaker replied. He still watched me as though he
expected me to start foaming at the mouth any minute. “Anywhere there is a
permanent garrison one of the responsibilities of the soldiers is to raise their
own food.”

When it came to the logistics of war Lady was more the expert than Croaker. Till
we came to Taglios he was never part of anything bigger than the Company. Lady
had managed the warmaking instruments of a vast empire for decades.

The Old Man simply left most of that stuff to Lady. He would rather lie back
scheming his schemes and piling up the tools Lady could use.

The crop notion was not new. Lady had done the same around most of her permanent
installations in the north.

You got to go with what works.

Helps keep the neighbors more tractable, too, if you are not stealing their
daughters and seed grain.

“You sure you’re all right?” Croaker demanded.

We were nearly at the foot of the ramp to the north barbican. One-Eye was no
more than a hundred feet ahead now, perfectly aware of our presence, but not
slowing down a bit. I guess I was starting to push ahead.

“I’ve got it under control, Captain. I don’t fall off into the past anymore and
I hardly ever wake up screaming. I hold it down to a little shaking and
sweating.”

“Anything starts getting to you, I want to know. I expect to be here a while.

You’re going to need to be able to take it.”

“I won’t screw up,” I promised.