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  There was a pop like that of a cork coming out of a wine bottle.

  One-Eye held a hand full of swamp bottom. It oozed between his fingers and ran down his arm. He lowered his hand and stared in disbelief.

  He let out a shriek and whirled.

  Innocent Goblin was faking a conversation with Murgen. But Murgen was not up to the deceit. His shifty eyes gave Goblin away.

  One-Eye puffed up like a toady frog, ready to explode. Then a miracle occurred. He invented self-restraint. A nasty little smile pranced across his lips and he turned back to the guides.

  That was the second time in my experience that he had controlled himself when provoked. But, then, it was one of those rare times when Goblin had initiated the process of provocation. I told Otto, “This could get interesting.”

  Otto grunted an affirmative. He was not thrilled.

  Of One-Eye, I asked, “Have you finished telling them you’re the necromancer Voice of the North Wind come to ease the pain in their hearts brought on by worry about their wealth?” He’d actually tried to sell that once, to a tribe of savages coincidentally in possession of an eye-popping cache of emeralds. He found out the hard way that primitive does not mean stupid. They were fixing to burn him at the stake when Goblin decided to bail him out. Against his better judgment, he always insisted afterward.

  “It ain’t like that this time, Croaker. I wouldn’t do it to my own people.”

  One-Eye does not have an ounce of shame. Nor even the sense not to lie to those who know him well. Of course he would do it to his own people. He would do it to anybody if he thought he could get away with it. And he has so little trouble conning himself on that.

  “See that you don’t. We’re too few and too far from safety to let you indulge yourself in your usual line of shit.”

  I got enough menace into my voice to make him gulp.

  His tone was markedly different when he resumed gobbling at our prospective guides.

  Even so, I decided I would pick up a smatter of the language. Just to keep an ear on him. His often misplaced self-confidence has a way of asserting itself at the most unpropitious moments.

  Straight for a time, One-Eye negotiated a deal that pleased everyone. We had ourselves guides for the passage through the jungle and intermediary interpreters for the land that lay beyond.

  Relying on his usual moronic sense of humor, Goblin dubbed them Baldo and Wheezer, for reasons that were self-evident To my embarrassment, the names stuck. Those two old boys probably deserved better. But then again...

  We wended our way belween the shaggy, hump-backed hills the rest of that day, and as darkness approached we topped the cleavage between the pair that flanked the summit of our passage. From there we could see the sunset, reflecting bloody wounds of a broad river, and the rich green of the jungle beyond. Behind us lay the tawny humps, and beyond them a hazy sprawl of indigo.

  My mood was reflective, flat, almost down. It seemed we might have reached a watershed in more than a geographical sense.

  Much later, unable to sleep for thoughts that questioned what I was doing here in an alien land, thoughts that replied that I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, I left my bedroll and the remaining warmth of our campfire. I headed for one of the flanking hills, moved by some vague notion of going up where I could get a better view of the stars.

  Wheezer, who had the watch, gave me a gap-toothed leer before spitting a wad of brown juice into the coals. I heard him start wheezing before I was halfway up the hill.

  A lunger I got, yet.

  The moon threatened to rise soon. It would be fat and bright. I picked me a spot and stood looking at the horizon, waiting for that fat orange globe to roll over the lip of the world. The faintest of cool, moist breezes stirred my hair. It was so damned peaceful it hurt.

  “You couldn’t sleep, either?”

  I jerked around.

  She was a dark glob on the hillside just ten feet away. If I had noted her at all, it was as a rock. I stepped closer. She was seated, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her gaze was fixed on the north.

  “Sit down.”

  I sat. “What are you looking at so hard?”

  “The Reaper. The Archer. Vargo’s Ship.” And yesterdays, no doubt.

  Those were constellations. I considered them, too. They were very low, seen from here. This time of year they would be quite high in the sky up north. What she meant began to sink in.

  We had come a far piece, indeed. With many a mile to go. She said, “It’s intimidating when you think about it. It’s a lot of walking.”

  It was.

  The moon clambered over the horizon, monstrous in size and almost red. She whispered “Wow!” and slipped her hand into mine. She was shivering, so after a minute I slid over and put my arm around her. She leaned her head against my shoulder.

  That old moon was working its magic. That sucker can do it to anybody.

  Now I knew what made Wheezer grin.

  The moment seemed right. I turned my head-and her lips were rising to meet mine. When they touched mine I forgot who and what she had been. Her arms surrounded me, pulled me down....

  She shivered in my grasp like a captive mouse. “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Shh,” she said. And that was the best thing she could have said. But she could not leave it there. She had to add, “I never... I never did this...”

  Well, shit. She sure knew how to distract a man, and put a thousand reservations into his mind.

  That moon climbed the sky. We began to relax with each other. Somehow, there were fewer rags separating us.

  She stiffened. The mist went out of her eyes. She lifted her head and stared past me, face slack.

  If one of those clowns had sneaked up to watch I was going to break his kneecaps. I turned.

  We did not have company. She was watching the flash of a distant storm. “Heat lightning,” I said.

  “You think so? It doesn’t seem much farther off than the Temple. And we never saw a storm the whole time we were crossing that country.”

  Jagged lightning bolts ripped down like a fall of javelins.

  That feeling I had discussed with One-Eye redoubled.

  “I don’t know, Croaker.” She began gathering her clothing. “The pattern seems familiar.”

  I followed her lead, relieved. I am not sure I would have been able to finish what we started. I was distracted now.

  “Another time will be better, I think,” she said, still staring at that lightning. “That is too distracting.”

  We returned to camp to find everyone awake yet totally uninterested in the fact that we had been away together. The view was not as good from below, but flashes could be seen. They did not let up.

  “There’s sorcery out there, Croaker,” One-Eye said.

  Goblin nodded. “The heavy stuff. You can feel the screaming edges of it from here.”

  “How far away?” I asked.

  “About two days. Close to that place we stopped.”

  I shivered. “Can you tell what it’s about?”

  Goblin said nothing. One-Eye shook his head. “All I can tell you is I’m glad I’m here and not there.” I agreed, even in my ignorance of what was happening.

  Murgen blanched. He pointed over the book he was studying, which he held out like a protective fetish. “Did you see that?”

  I was looking at Lady and brooding about my luck. The others could sweat the little stuff, like some bloody sorcerers’ duel fifty miles away. I had troubles of my own.

  “What?” I grumbled, knowing he wanted a response.

  “It looked like a giant bird. I mean, like one with a twenty-mile wingspan. That you could see through.”

  I looked up. Goblin nodded. He had seen it, too. I looked to the north. The lightning ended, but some pretty fierce fires had to be burning up there. “One-Eye. Your new buddies there got any idea what’s going on?”

  The little black man shook his head. He had the brim of his hat pulled
forward, cutting his line of sight. That business up there — whatever it was — had him rattled. By his own admission he is the greatest wizard ever produced by his part of the world. With the possible exception of his dead brother, Tom-Tom. Whatever that was out there, it was alien. It did not belong.

  “Times change,” I suggested.

  “Not around here, they don’t. And if they did, these guys would know about it.” Wheezer nodded vigorous agreement although he could not have understood a word. He hawked and spat a brown glob into the fire.

  I had a feeling I was going to have as much fun with him as I did with One-Eye. “What is that crap he’s all the time chewing? It’s disgusting.”

  “Qat,” One-Eye said. “A mild narcotic. Doesn’t do his lungs any good, but when he’s chewing it he doesn’t care how much they hurt him.” He said it lightly, but he meant it.

  I nodded uncomfortably, looked away. “Quieting down up there.”

  No one had anything to say to that.

  “We’re all awake,” I said. “So get packing. I want to move out as soon as we can see to walk.”

  I did not get a bit of argument. Wheezer nodded and spat. Goblin grunted and started getting his things together. The others followed his example, Murgen putting the book away with a care that I approved. The boy might make an Annalist after all. We all kept sneaking looks at the north when we thought our uneasiness would go unnoticed.

  When I was not looking that way, or tormenting myself with glances at Lady, I tried to get an estimate of the reactions of the newer men. We had encountered no sorcery directly yet, but the Company has a way of stumbling into its path. They seemed no more uncomfortable than the old hands.

  Glances at Lady. I wondered if what seemed inevitable on the one hand and foredoomed on the other would ever cease crackling between us. So long as it did it would distort everything else in our relationship. Hell. I liked her fine as a friend.

  There is nothing so unreasonable and irrational and blind — and just plain silly-looking — as a man who works himself into an obsessive passion.

  Women do not look as foolish. They are expected to be weak. But they are also expected to become savage bitches when they are frustrated.

  Chapter Thirteen: WILLOW’S LAST NIGHT LITTLE

  Willow, Cordy Mather, and Blade still had their tavern. Mainly because they had the countenance of the Prahbrindrah Drah. Business wasn’t good now. The priests found out they couldn’t control the foreigners. So they put them off limits. A lot of Taglians did what the priests told them.

  “Shows you how much sense people have,” Blade said. “They had any, they would take the priests to the river and hold them under an hour to remind them they drone like termites.”

  Willow said, “Man, you got to be the sourest son of a bitch I ever seen. I bet if we hadn’t dragged you out, those crocs would of thrown you back. Too rancid to eat.”

  Blade just grinned as he went through the door to the back room.

  Willow asked Cordy, “You reckon it was priests that throwed him in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good house tonight. For once.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow’s the day.” Willow took a long drink. Cordy’s brew was getting better. Then he stood up and hammered the bar with his empty mug. In Taglian he said, “We who are about to die salute you. Drink and be merry, children. For tomorrow, and so forth. On the house.” He sat down.

  Cordy said, “You know how to cheer a place up, don’t you?”

  “You figure we got anything to be cheerful about? They’ll screw it up. You know they will. All those priests mucking about in it? I tell you right out, I get my chance there’s a couple accidentally ain’t going to come back from out there.”

  Cordy nodded and kept his mouth shut. Willow Swan was a lot more bark than bite.

  Swan grumbled, “Up the river if this works out. I’ll tell you something, Cordy. These feet get to moving that direction they’re just going to keep on shuffling.”

  “Sure, Willow. Sure.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I believe everything you tell me, Willow. If I didn’t, would I be here, up to my neck, wallowing in rubies and pearls and gold doubloons?”

  “Man, what do you expect of someplace nobody ever heard of six thousand miles past the edge of any map anybody ever seen?”

  Blade came back. “Nerves getting you guys?”

  “Nerves? What nerves? They didn’t put no nerves in when they made Willow Swan.”

  Chapter Fourteen: THROUGH D’LOC ALOC

  We moved out as soon as there was a ghost of light. It was an easy downhill trail with only a few places where we had trouble with the coach and Lady’s wagon. By noon we reached the first trees. An hour later the first contingent were aboard a ferry raft. Before sundown we were inside the jungle of D’loc Aloc, where only ten thousand kinds of bugs tormented our bodies. Worse on our nerves than their buzzing, though, was One-Eye’s suddenly inexhaustible store of praises and tales of his homeland.

  From my first day in the Company I had been trying to get a fix on him and his country. Every lousy detail had had to be pried out. Now it was everything anyone ever wanted to know, and more. Except specifics of why he and his brother had run away from such a paradise.

  From where I sat swatting myself the answer to that seemed self-evident. Only madmen and fools would subject themselves to such continuous torment.

  So which was I?

  For all there was a route through, we spent almost two months in that jungle. The jungle itself was the biggest problem. It was huge, and getting the coach through was, shall we say politely, a chore. But the people were a problem, too.

  Not that they were unfriendly. Too much the opposite. Their ways were much easier than ours in the north.

  Those sleek, delectable little brown beauties had never seen anything like Murgen and Otto and Hagop and their boys. They all wanted a taste of novelty. The guys were cooperative.

  Even Goblin got lucky often enough to keep an ear-to-ear grin on his ugly clock.

  Poor hapless, inhibited old Croaker planted himself firmly among the spectators and longed his heart out.

  I do not have the hair it takes to pursue a little casual funtime bouncy-bouncy while a more serious proposition is watching from the wings.

  My attitude caused no direct verbal comment — those guys have some tact, sometimes — but I caught enough snide sidelongs to know what they were thinking. And them thinking made me think. When I get introspective I can become broody and unfit company for man or beast. And when I know I am being watched a natural shyness or reluctance sets in and I do not do anything, no matter how auspicious the omens.

  So I sat around on my hands, getting depressed because I feared something important might be slipping away and I was constitutionally incapable of doing anything about it.

  Life sure was less complicated in the old days.

  My temper improved after we scaled a last excessively vegetated and overly bug-infested mountain range and broke out of the jungle onto high plateau savannah.

  From there one of the more interesting aspects of D’loc Aloc seemed to be the fact that we had not attracted a single volunteer soldier. It said something about the peace the people had with their environment. And something about One-Eye and his long-gone brother.

  What the hell had they done? I noticed he made a point of avoiding any talk about his past, his age, or his earlier identity while in the jungle with Baldo and Wheezer. Like anybody would remember something a couple of teenagers had done that long ago.

  Baldo and Wheezer planted us as soon as they had us outside the country of their own people. They claimed they had reached the limit of territory they knew. [They promised to round up a couple of trustworthy natives who could take us on.] Baldo announced that he was going to turn back despite his earlier contract. [He claimed Wheezer would do us just fine as intermediary interpreter.]

  Something had hap
pened to disenchant Baldo. I did not argue with him. His mind was made up. I just did not pay him the full fee he had been promised.

  I was thrilled that Wheezer was going to stay. That guy was a second-rate soul son of One-Eye, full of ridiculous mischief. Maybe there is something in the water in the jungle of D’loc Aloc. Except that Baldo and everyone else we met was almost normal.

  I guess my magnetic personality draws the One-Eye/Wheezer types.

  For sure there was fun in the offing. One-Eye had been taking it from Goblin for two months with never a spark in response. When the blowup came it was sure to be a beauty.

  “The whole thing is backwards,” I said as Lady and I mulled things over. “One-Eye is supposed to pick at scabs while Goblin lays in the weeds waiting like a snake.”

  “Maybe it’s because we’ve crossed the equator. The seasons are reversed.”

  I did not understand that remark until I had given it hours of thought. Then I realized that it had no meaning. It was one of her droll, deadpan jokes.

  Chapter Fifteen: THE SAVANNAH

  We waited six days at the edge of the savannah. Twice bands of dark-skinned warriors came to look us over. The first time, Wheezer told us, “Don’t let them lure you off the road.”

  He said it to One-Eye, not knowing that I had picked up enough of the chatter to follow what they said. I have a fair gift for tongues.

  Most of us old hands do. We have to learn so many.

  “What road?” One-Eye demanded. “That cow path?” He indicated a track that meandered into the distance.

  “Whatever is between the white stones is the road. The road is holy. As long as you stay on it you’ll be safe.”

  On first pitching camp we were warned not to leave a circle circumscribed by white stones. I guessed the significance of the lines of white stones running southward. Trade would demand sheltered routes. Though little trade seemed to be moving these days. Seldom had we encountered any sizable caravan heading north since leaving the empire. We saw no one headed south. Except perhaps a walking stump.

  Wheezer continued, “Beware the plains peoples anyway. They are treacherous. They will employ every blandishment and deceit imaginable to draw you outside. Their women are especially notorious. Remember: They are always watching. To leave the road is death.”