The Books of the South: Tales of the Black Company (Chronicles of the Black Company) (88 page)

Fish was crouched in front of the office door, which he had pushed open about three inches. Smeds joined him, his knife sliding into his hand. “It was unlocked?”

“Yes. I don’t like it.”

“Maybe it’s so clients can get in anytime.”

Fish ran his hand up the inside of the door. “Maybe, but there’s a heavy latch catch. Let’s be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name.”

Fish pushed the door open, looked inside. “Clear.” He slipped in.

Smeds followed, headed for the door connecting with the house. It was unlocked, too. It opened toward him. He pulled. It swung smoothly, soundlessly. He heard a faint
snick
behind him as Fish closed the latch. He saw nothing suspicious in the room before him. He stepped inside.

Maybe it was a whisper of cloth in motion. Maybe it was a little intake of breath. Maybe it was both. Whatever, Smeds spun down and away.

A line of fire sliced across his shoulder blade.

He landed on his knees facing the office, watching a shape collide with Fish. Fish said, “Shit!” At the same moment the shape squealed. Then it threw itself sideways and floundered through the leaded-glass window a step ahead of Smeds.

Fish came to the window. “That was him.”

“He was expecting us.”

“Too damned smart. Figured too much out. Can’t let him get away.” Fish jumped through the window.

The physician was going for all he was worth, legs and arms flailing. That fat little hedgehog was no sprinter.

Smeds followed Fish. He passed the older man moments later, and gained steadily on his prey, who had gotten a sixty-yard head start. The physician glanced back once, stumbled. Smeds gained ten yards while he was getting his balance. Fear lent him renewed stamina and speed. He stayed the same distance ahead for half a minute.

The physician knew he was not going to outrun anyone. Smeds knew he knew that. Unless he was running in a blind panic he had developed a strategy, had chosen an ultimate destination.…

The physician zigged right, into a narrow alleyway.

Smeds slowed, approached cautiously.

Footfalls pounded away in the darkness.

He went after them. He was just as careful rounding another corner, again without need. Gods, it was dark in there! Third corner.

He stopped dead. There were no sounds of flight. He tried listening for heavy breathing but could not be sure he heard anything because his own intruded too much.

What now?

Nothing to do but go forward.

He dropped down and advanced in a careful duck walk. His muscles protested. He was grateful for the toughening they had gotten in the Great Forest.

There! Was that breathing?

Couldn’t tell for sure. The echoes of Fish’s approach overrode it.

Scrape! Swish!

What must have been a foot missed his face by a fraction of an inch. He flung himself forward but the physician was already moving again. Smeds’s knife ripped along his hip.

Smeds went down hard but caught hold of a heel and managed to hang on. He snaked forward, stabbing at the man’s calf, his target invisible in the darkness. The man squealed like an injured rabbit.

Smeds was so startled he let go. Then he realized he was letting his man get away. He got up and charged ahead, smashed into the man.

“Please! I won’t tell anyone! I swear!”

Pain slashed along Smeds’s ribs on this left side.

He flailed away with his knife, hitting anything he could. The physician tried to scream and fight back and run away all at the same time. Smeds held on with one hand, kept hacking with the other. The physician pulled him out into a street.

Smeds kept hacking.

The physician collapsed.

Fish arrived. “Shit, Smeds. Shit.”

“Got him.”

“You sure he didn’t get you, too?”

Smeds looked at himself. He was covered with blood. Some of it was his own.

Somebody yelled up the street. People had begun coming to stoops and windows.

Fish bent, slashed the physician’s throat, said, “We’ve got to get out of here. There’ll be soldiers here in a minute.” He looked at the dead man’s hand. “Unh. A mess. He touched you with that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on.” Fish offered him a hand. “You make it?”

“I’m all right for now.”

Fish headed back into the alley.

Smeds began feeling it as soon as the excitement began to go out of him. He knew he would not be able to get away if a chase developed.

Instead of making for the Skull and Crossbones Fish headed into the West End.

“Where we going?” Smeds asked.

“Reservoir. Get you cleaned up. We take you home looking like that the gray boys are going to be around to ask what happened before you can get your boots off.”

38

I don’t know what I expected to see when we got to Opal. Maybe nothing changed from my last time there. I sure wasn’t ready for the mess we found. I gaped incredulously as we glided over the ruins, where a few survivors scurried around like frightened mice. I went and told Darling, “Don’t look to me like there’s much chance we’ll find the people you want.”

Odds never bothered Darling.

Raven and Silent now had especially black feelings for me. I’d had the gall to tell Darling who she had to find if she wanted to force Raven to face his past. Neither of them wanted that to happen.

Both of them was so busy thinking about themselves they didn’t have time to wonder what Darling really thought or felt about anything.

We crossed most of the city. Up north we spied several large, neatly arranged camps. The tents were too numerous to be all army, but they showed us that the imperials were there, responding to the destruction of the city in a quick, orderly fashion. Below, soldiers and civilians were at work leveling way for the new. Though they stopped to gawk, these people did not run away.

Darling ordered us to watch for the standard of the military commander. She figured that was the place to start since the city was obviously under martial law. I couldn’t figure why she thought she’d get any cooperation, though.

I asked, “What do you feel about old Raven these days?” I was real careful to keep my hands hid from him and Silent both.

I figured she wouldn’t understand what I meant. I was wrong. She signed, “Once I had a child’s love for a man who saved me and nurtured me and risked everything to protect me when, long before I could believe it myself, he recognized the role I would play in the struggle with the darkness. That child was like a very little girl in some ways. She was going to marry Daddy when she grew up, and it never occurred to her that things might not turn out that way till she tried to pursue it, and to press it.

“I was never really a girl, or a woman, or a human being to Raven, Case. Even though he did awful things for me. I was a symbol, an expiation, and when I insisted on becoming a person he did the only thing he could do to keep on serving the symbol and not have to deal with a flesh-and-blood woman.”

“That is kind of how I always thought it was,” I signed.

“Many men admire Raven. He fears nothing concrete. He takes no crap from anyone. People who mess with him get hurt, and the hell with the consequences. But those are the only dimensions he has. They are the only dimensions he permits himself. How can I remain emotionally entangled with a man who will not allow himself emotions, however much he did for me in other ways? I appreciate him, I honor him, I may even revere him. But that is all anymore. He cannot change that with some demonstration, like a boy hanging by his knees from a branch to impress a girl.”

I grinned because I had a gut feeling that’s exactly what Raven had in mind.

Poor sucker. There just wasn’t nothing left for him to win. But he wasn’t the kind to accept that even if she told him to his face, point-blank.

I wanted to sneak in one or two about Silent, too, but I didn’t get a chance. The military headquarters got spotted and the windwhale dropped down and moved up to it, anchored itself in place by dropping tentacles to grab rocks and trees. Its presence overhead was disconcerting to those in the camp.

I like that word, disconcerting. I got it from Bomanz. Such a sly way to say they were having shit hemorrhages down there.

There was a big hoorah, all kinds of whoop and holler and carrying on, when a bunch of Plain critters ganged up on the scar-faced stone and threw it over the side, almost into the lap of the command staff down there.

Them old boys were pretty shook. I wondered how much more excited they would get if they knew the White Rose her own self was right over their heads. But they wasn’t going to try nothing, no matter what they knew. Who’d want to duke it out with four pissed-off windwhales, which is what they would get if they wasn’t polite.

Scarstone popped back up. He talked. Silent translated for Darling. I didn’t hear anything. The Torque boys had let me know I was supposed to stay back, so I stayed back. Darling made a bunch of signs that I guess the stone could see somehow. It went away. After a while it came back.

After four rounds of that it didn’t go away anymore. But the windwhale stayed where it was, so I guessed a deal had been struck.

I went to try to talk it over with Raven. But he was in about as foul a mood as I ever saw, and anyway he had pegged me for some kind of traitor, so I gave it up and went off to shoot the shit with the Torques and the talking buzzard and a couple other Plain creatures that wasn’t too shy.

*   *   *

Darling goes after something she usually gets what she wants. This time she got it just before noon next day.

A hoorah broke out downstairs. Darling sent Scarstone to check it out. It came back and reported. She got up and walked over to Raven, who watched her like she was the hangman coming. She signed at him. He got up and followed her, again with the eagerness of a man headed for the gallows.

I knew him well enough to see the signs. He was putting himself into a role. I tagged along, wondering what it would be. Most everybody else moved closer, too.

Two young people around twenty came puffing up over the side of the windwhale.

So the impossible was possible, the improbable a sure thing. Unless the army down there figured they could placate Darling with a couple of ringers.

The boy looked like Raven twenty years younger. Same dark hair and coloration, same determined face not yet hardened into grimness.

I was only a step behind when Raven got his first look at them. He cursed softly, muttered, “She looks like her mother.”

It was plain they had not been told they were here for a family reunion. They were just puzzled and scared. Mostly scared. And more so as the mob closed in around them. They did not recognize Raven.

They did recognize Darling. And that scared them even more.

Everybody waited for somebody else to say something.

Raven whispered, “Do something, Case.” Desperately. “I’m lost.”

“Me? Hell, I don’t even speak the lingo that good.”

“Case, help me out. Try to get this moving. I don’t know what to do.”

All right. I thought of a couple of suggestions for him, but I was never a guy who kicked crippled dogs. I went to work in my feeble Jewel Cities dialect. “You have no idea why you were brought here, do you?”

They shook their heads.

“Relax. You ain’t in no danger. We just want to ask about your ancestors. Especially your parents.”

The boy rattled something.

“You’ll have to talk slower, please.”

The girl said, “He said our parents are dead. We’ve been on our own since we were children.”

Raven winced. I figured the voice must be like that of his wife, too.

Silent translated for Darling, who really gave them the eye. Seeing they was Raven’s kids, I didn’t figure it was so amazing they pulled through.

“What do you know about your parents?”

The girl took on the answering chores. Maybe she thought her brother was too excitable. “Very little.” She told me pretty much what I had been able to find out for myself when we were headed south. She did know that her mother had not been a nice person. “We’ve managed to live her down. Last year we won a judgment that took some of our father’s properties from her family and returned them to us. We expect to win more such judgments.”

That was something, anyway. The girl had conjured up no special regard for the woman who had brought her into the world.

The boy said, “I don’t remember my mother at all. After our births I think she had as little to do with us as she could. I remember nurses. She probably got what she deserved.”

“And your father?”

“I have vague memories of a very distant man who wasn’t home much but who did visit when he was. Probably out of obligation and for appearance’ sake.”

“Do you have any special feeling about him now?”

“Why should we?” the girl asked. “We never really knew him, and he’s been dead for fifteen years.”

I faced Darling, signed, “Is there any point going on?”

She signed, “Yes. Not for their sake. For his.”

I asked Raven, “You got anything to put in?”

No. He didn’t. I could see him thinking maybe he was going to slide out of this after all.

It wasn’t going to be that easy. Darling had me tell them that their father had not died, that he had been harried into exile by their mother’s confederates. She had me hit the high spots of their years together.

They had had time to get over being scared. Now they were getting suspicious. The boy demanded, “What the hell is going on? How come these questions about our old man? He’s history. We don’t care. If he was to walk up right now and introduce himself I’d say so what. He’d be just another guy.”

I signed to Darling, “You going to keep pushing it?” and asked Raven, in Forsberger, “You want to call his bluff?”

Negatives all around. Bunch of wimps. So Raven
was
going to slide out. I told his kids, “Your father was very important in the life of the White Rose. He was a stand-in parent to her for years and she knew how it pained him to be in exile. She stopped here because she wanted to try to give back something of what she’d had and you couldn’t.”