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  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.

  Chapter Nine: ACROSS THE SCREAMING SEA

  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.”

  I joined Lady, who gave me a nasty look. I pasted on my sweetest smile and said, “Look here. I’m over on the other side of the line. You got a problem, Lieutenant?”

  He bobbed his head. He was more in awe of my rank and title, unearned though they were, than he was of the woman who was supposed to be his boss. And that was because he believed he owed her certain duties even she could not overrule.

  “The Company has openings for a few good men with military experience,” I said. “Now that we’re out of the empire and don’t have to have the imperial permission, we’re actively recruiting.”

  He caught on real fast, skipped across beside me, gave Lady a big grin.

  “There is one thing,” I said. “You come over here and do it, you’re going to have to take the oath to the Company, same as anybody else. Meaning you can’t pledge yourself to any higher loyalty.”

  Lady gave him a nasty-sweet smile. He stepped back across, figuring he’d better do some serious thinking before he committed himself.

  I told Lady, “That goes for everybody. I would not presume before. But if you come out of the empire and continue to ride with us it will be under the same conditions accepted by everyone else.”

  Such a look she gave me. “But I’m just a woman...”

  “Not a precedent, friend. It didn’t happen often. The world don’t have much room for female adventurers. But women have marched with the Company.” Turning to the lieutenant, I said, “And if you sign on, your oath will be taken as genuine. First time you get an order and look to her for advice on yes or no, out you go. Alone in a foreign land.” It was one of my more assertive days.

  Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then told the lieutenant, “Go talk it over with your men.” The moment he was out of hearing she demanded, “Does this mean we stop being friends? If I take your damned oath?”

  “Do you reckon I stopped being friends with the others when they elected me Captain?”

  “I admit I don’t hear a lot of ‘yes sir,’ ‘no sir,’ ‘your worship sir.’”

  “But you do see them do what they’re told when they know I mean what I say.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Goblin and One-Eye need a little extra convincing once in a while. What’s it going to be? You going to be a soldier?”

  “Do I have a choice, Croaker? You can be a bastard.”

  “Of course you have a choice. You can go back with your men and be the Lady.”

  The lieutenant was talking to his troops and the idea of going on south was proving less popular than he or I had thought it would. Most of the bunch started getting their horses together, facing north, before he finished talking.

  He finally came over and presented us with six men who wanted to go on with us. He did not include himself with the group. Evidently his conscience had shown him a way around doing what he considered to be his duty minutes before.

  I questioned the men briefly and they did seem interested in going on. So I brought them over the line and swore them all in, making a production of it for Lady’s sake. I do not recall doing anything particularly formal for anyone else before.

  I gave the six to Otto and Hagop for dividing between them, and kept the one for me, and later entered their names into the Annals when we learned how they wanted to be known.

  Lady remained content to be called Lady. It sounded like a name when heard by speakers of any language but one, anyway.

  Crows watched the whole show from a nearby tree.

  Chapter Ten: SHADOWMASTERS

  Though the sun stared in through a dozen vaulted windows there was darkness in that place where Darkness met.

  A pool of molten stone simmered in the center of the vast floor. It
cast bloody light upon four seated figures floating a few feet in the air. They faced one another over the pool, forming an equilateral triangle with a couple at its apex. Those two were leagued more often than not. They were allied now.

  There had been war among the four for a long time, with nothing gained, one in relation to another. But at the moment there was an armistice.

  Shadows slithered and swirled and pranced around them. Nothing could be seen of any of them except vague shapes. All four chose to conceal themselves within robes of black, behind black masks.

  The smallest, one of the couple, broke a silence that had reigned an hour. “She has begun moving south. Those who served her and still bear her indelible mark are moving also. They have crossed the sea, and they come bearing mighty talismans. And their road is strewn with those who would join their destinies to that black standard. Including some whose power we would be foolish not to beware.”

  One angle of the triangle made a sound of contempt.

  The other asked, “And what of the one in the north?”

  “The Great One remains secure. The lesser one who lay in the shade of the prisoning tree does so no longer. It has been resurrected and given new form. It comes south too, but it is so insane and vengeance-starved that it is not to be feared. A child could dispose of it.”

  “Have we cause to fear that our presence here is known?”

  “None. Even in Trogo Taglios only a few are convinced that we exist. Beyond the First Cataract we are but a rumor, and not that above the Second. But he who has made himself master in the great swamps may have sensed us stirring. It is possible he suspects there is more afoot than he knew.”

  The reporter’s companion added, “They come. She comes. But harnessed to the pace of man and animal. We still have a year. Or more.”

  The one snorted again, then spoke. “The swamps would be a very good place for them to die. Take care of it. You may impress the one who rules them with the majesty and terror of my Name.” He began to drift away.

  The others stared hard. The anger in the place became palpable.