Glen Cook: Bleak Seasons

Luckily, some of the guys stayed on the job.

“You warm now?” Goblin asked. I puffed heartily as I watched Thai Dei shove a skinny blade into the eye of a sleep befuddled Strangler. Thai Dei doesn’t cut throats. He doesn’t like the mess.

It was over. “How many did we get? How many got away?” I stared the direction Singh had fled. The silence there was not promising. The guys would have raised a real hoorah had they caught him.

Damn! I was excited for a while there. If only I could have dragged him back to Taglios. If wishes were fishes. “Keep some alive. We’ll want somebody to tell us bedtime stories. One-Eye. How the hell did Singh all of a sudden know we were here?”

The runt shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe his goddess goosed him and told him to haul ass.”

“Give me a break. Kina didn’t have anything to do with it.” But I wasn’t that sure. Sometimes it is hard to disbelieve.

Thai Dei gestured.

“Right,” I said. “Just what I was thinking myself.”

One-Eye looked puzzled. Goblin grumbled, “What?” My wizards. Right on top of everything.

“Sometimes I wonder if you guys could find your dicks without a map. The shelter, old-timers. The shelter. Don’t it seem like that’s an awful lot of shack for one runt killer and a kid barely tall enough to bite you on the kneecap? A bit big even for a living saint and the daughter of a goddess?”

One-Eye developed a nasty grin. “Nobody else came out, did they? Yeah. You want I should start a fire?”

Before I could answer him Goblin squealed. I whirled. A shapeless darkness, visible only because of the bonfire, reared out of the shelter entrance then I slammed into the ground, felled by Thai Dei. Fire blasted over my head. Lights crackled. Balls of flame darted in from all around.

The killing darkness took on a moth-eaten look. Then it came apart.

That darkness was why so many of us had been shivering before the attack. But we won this round.

I sat up, crooked a finger. “Let’s see what we’ve caught. It ought to be interesting.” My guys knocked the shelter apart. Sure enough, they turned up a half dozen wrinkled little old men, brown as chestnuts. “Shadowweavers. Running with the Stranglers. Now isn’t that interesting?”

The geezers gobbled their willingness to surrender.

We had run into their kind before. They never were big on personal heroics.

A soldier called Wishbone said, “These Shadowlanders are getting good at this ’I surrender’ stuff.” He sneered. “Everybody down there must be practicing their handy Taglian phrases.”

“Except Longshadow,” I reminded. I told Thai Dei, “Thanks.”

He shrugged, a gesture foreign to the Nyueng Bao. The world did touch him occasionally. “Sahra would expect it.”

And that was very Nyueng Bao. He would blame his actions on his sister’s expectations rather than on any notion of duty or obligation or even friendship.

“What are we supposed to do with these guys?” Wishbone asked. “We got any use for them?”

“Save a couple. The oldest and one other. Goblin. You never said how many got away.”

“Three. That counts Singh but not the kid. But we’re going to get one of them three back on account of he’s hiding in the bushes right over there.”

“Collect him. I’ll give him to the Old Man.”

Sarky One-Eye cracked, “Give them a little authority, they turn into field marshals. I remember this kid when he was so green he still had sheep shit between his toes. He didn’t know what shoes were for.” But the humor wasn’t in his eye. Every move I made he watched like a hawk. Like a crow, in fact, although we had no crows hanging around tonight. Whatever experiment Goblin and One-Eye had going in that area was a complete success during this outing.

Goblin suggested, “Ease up, Murgen. We’ll get the job done. How about some of you lazy asses toss a couple logs on the fire?” He began to circle the hidden Deceiver in the direction opposite that taken by One-Eye.

They were right. I get too serious under stress. I was a thousand years old already. Surviving Dejagore had not been easy. But all the rest of these guys had come through that, too. They had seen Mogaba’s slaughters of innocents. They had suffered the pestilences and plagues. They had seen the cannibalism and human sacrifices, the treacheries and betrayals and all the rest. And they had come away without letting the nightmares rule them.

I have to get a handle on it. I have to get some emotional distance and perspective. But there is something going on inside me that is beyond my control or understanding. Sometimes I feel like there are several of me in there, all mixed up, sometimes sitting behind the real me watching, watching. There may be no chance for me to recover complete sanity and stability.

Goblin came strutting back. He and One-Eye accompanied a man who was not much more than skin and bones. Few Deceivers are in good shape these days. They have no friends anywhere. They are hunted like vermin. Huge bounties ride on their shoulders.

Goblin flashed his toadlike grin. “We’ve got us a red-hand man here, Murgen. A genuine black rumel guy with the red palm. What do you think of that?”

The thought lightened my heart. The prisoner was truly a top Strangler. The red hand meant that he had been there when Narayan Singh tricked Lady into thinking she was being inducted into the Strangler cult when in fact the Deceivers were really consecrating her unborn child as daughter of their goddess Kina.

But Lady had employed a trick of her own, marking every Strangler there with the red hand that could not be denied later. Nothing they tried would take the color away, short of amputation. And a one-handed Strangler could not manage the rumel, the strangling scarf, that was the tool of the Deceivers’ holy trade.

“The Old Man will be pleased.” A red-hand man would know what was going on inside his cult.

I crowded closer to the fire. Thai Dei, done helping dispose of redundant shadowweavers, eased in beside me. How much had Dejagore changed him? I could not imagine him ever being anything but dour, taciturn, remorseless and pitiless, even as a toddler.

Goblin, I noted, was doing that thing he did lately where he watched me from the corner of his eye while pretending to do something else. What were he and One-Eye looking for?

The runt held his hands out. “Fire feels good.”

Paranoia has become our way of life. We have become the new Nyueng Bao. We trust no one. We let no one outside the Black Company know what we are doing until we are sure what the response will be. In particular we prefer keeping the Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister, the Radisha Drah, our employers, way back there in the deep dark shadows.

They are not to be trusted at all, ever, except to serve their own closest interests.

I smuggled my prisoners into the city and hid them in a warehouse near the river, a Company friendly Shadar fish place possessed of a very distinctive air. My men scattered to their families or someplace where they could drink beer. I was satisfied. With one quick, nasty stab we had decimated the surviving Deceiver leadership. We almost got that fiend Narayan Singh. I got within spitting distance of Croaker’s baby. In all honesty I could report that she seemed all right.

Thai Dei knocked the prisoners to their knees, wrinkled his nose.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “But this place don’t stink half as bad as your swamp does.” Taglios claims the river delta but the Nyueng Bao disagree.

Thai Dei grunted. He could take a joke as well as the next guy.

He does not look like much. He is a foot shorter than I am. I outweigh him by eighty pounds. And I am far prettier. He has crudely cropped black hair that sticks out in unkempt spikes. Skinny, lantern-jawed, taciturn and surly, Thai Dei is entirely unappetizing. But he does his job.