Glen Cook: She Is The Darkness

“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.