Glen Cook: Bleak Seasons

I grunted again. “Be back.”

“Sure.”

I descended the steep, slippery stair, muscles aching, anticipating the weight of the sack I would be carrying when I came back.

What could Goblin want? Probably a decision on something trivial. That runt and his monocular sidekick religiously avoid taking on any responsibility.

I run the Old Crew, most of the time, because nobody else wants to bother.

We have established ourselves in an area of tall brick tenements close to the wall, southwest of the north gate, which is the only gate still fully functional. From the first hour of the siege we have been improving our position.

Mogaba thinks in terms of attack. He does not believe a war can be won from behind stone walls. He wants to meet the Shadowlanders on the wall, to throw them back, then to charge outside and stomp them. He launches spoiling raids and nuisance attacks to keep them wobbly. He won’t prepare for the possibility that they might get inside the city in significant numbers, although almost every attack puts Shadowlanders on our side of the wall before we can concentrate enough to push them back.

Someday, sometime, things won’t go Mogaba’s way. Someday Shadowspinner’s people are going to grab a gate. Someday we are going to see full scale city war.

That is inevitable.

The Old Crew is ready, Mogaba. Are you?

We will become invisible, Your Arrogance. We have played this game before. We read the Annals. We will be the ghosts who kill.

We hope.

Shadows are the question. Shadows are the problem. What do they know? What will they be able to find?

Those villains have not been called Shadowmasters just because they love the darkness.

With the exceptions of three hidden doors, all entrances to the Company’s quarters have been bricked up. Likewise every window opening below third floor levels. Alleys and breezeways are now a maze of deathtraps. The three usable entrances can be reached only by climbing outside stairways subject to missile fire their entire rise. Where we could manage we have fireproofed.

For the Black Company there is no inactivity during the days of siege. Even One-Eye works. When I can find him.

Every man stays too damned busy and too damned tired to dwell upon our situation.

After entering a concealed entrance known only to the brothers of the Old Crew, the crows and bats, the shadows, the Nyueng Bao watchers down the street and any Nar who care to keep track from the north barbican, I trundled down flight after flight of steps. I reached a basement where Big Bucket dozed beside a lonely, fitful little candle. Quiet though I was, he cracked an eyelid. He wasted no breath on a challenge. A ramshackle, twisted wardrobe tilted against the wall behind him, its door hanging crookedly on one damaged hinge. I pulled the door gently and eased inside.

Any outsider force reaching the cellar would find the wardrobe stuffed with desperately meager food stores.

The cabinet fronts a tunnel. Tunnels join all our buildings. Mogaba and anyone else interested might expect as much. If they got down into our cellars a little work would show them what they hoped to find.

That ought to satisfy them.

The tunnel entered another cellar. Several men were asleep there, amidst tremendous clutter and a smell like a bear’s den. I moved slowly until recognized.

Had I been an intruder I would not have been the first never to return from the underworld.

Now I entered the real secret places.

New Stormgard rose atop old Jaicur. Little effort was made to demolish the old town. Many of the earlier structures had been in excellent condition.

We have a bewildering maze dug out down where no one ought to think to look. It gets a tad bigger whenever a sack of earth goes to the wall or into one of our other projects. It is no cozy warren, though. It takes willpower to go down into those dank, dark places where the air hardly moves, candles never come wholly to life, and there is at least a chance that any shadow may harbor a screaming death.

And me, I have a thing about being buried alive.

It gets no easier with practice.

Hagop and Otto, Goblin and One-Eye and I went through this before, on the Plain of Fear, where for about five thousand years we lived like badgers in the ground.

“Cletus. Where’s Goblin?” Cletus is one of three brothers who serve as our engineers and master artillerymen.

“Around the corner. Next cellar.”

Cletus, Loftus and Longinus are geniuses. They figured out how to bring fresh air down the chimneys of existing structures up top, then into the deep tunnels, let it flow slowly through the complex, then send it up other chimneys. Plain engineering, but it seemed like sorcery to me. A flow of breathable air, though slow and never pure, serves us well enough.

It does nothing to lessen the damp and the smell.

I found Goblin. He was holding a candle for Longinus while the latter slapped wet mortar onto freshly scrubbed stonework about eye level. “What’s the problem, Goblin?”

“Rained like a bastard up there, eh?”

“Gods swiped a river somewhere and dropped it here. Why?”

“We’ve got a thousand leaks down here.”

“Big problem?”

“Could be later on. There’s no drainage. We’re as low as we can go unless the Twelve tunnel goes good.”

“Sounds like an engineering problem to me.”

“It is,” Longinus said, smoothing the mortar. “And Clete did anticipate it. We’ve waterproofed from the start. Trouble is, you can’t tell how you’re doing until you get a really nasty rain. We’re lucky it didn’t go on the way it does during the rainy season. Three days of that, we might’ve gotten flooded out.”

“Still sounds like an engineering problem. You can handle it, right?”

Longinus shrugged. “We’ll work on it. That’s all we can do, Croaker.”

Little dig there. Like telling me, let everybody do their own worrying.

“That’s why you wanted me?” It seemed a little weak, even for Goblin.

“No. Longo, you don’t hear anything.” The toad-faced man made a complex gesture with three fingers of his left hand as he said that. Some half-hinted glimmer trailed behind his fingers momentarily. Longinus went back to work like he was deaf.

“It so important you need to cut him out?”

“He talks. He don’t mean no harm but he can’t help repeating everything he hears.”

“And makes it better when he tells it. I know. All right. Tell me.”

“Something has happened with the Shadowmaster. He’s changed. Me and One-Eye only decided for sure about an hour ago but we think it’s been going on for a while. He’s just kept us from seeing it.”

“What?”

Goblin leaned closer, as though Longinus might yet eavesdrop. “He’s gotten well, Murgen. He’s just about back to normal. He’s been getting his feet under him before he comes down on us with them both at once. We also decided that he is hiding the change more from his buddy Longshadow than he is from us. We don’t scare him that much.”

I stiffened, recalling strange behavior on the encircling plain, going on right now. “Oh, shit!”

“What?”

“He’s going to come tonight. Real soon. They were moving into position when I came down. I thought it was just the usual... We’d better go full alert.” I headed out of there with what energy I had, announcing the alert wherever I saw anybody.

Shadowspinner did not hurry. The Company took its positions on the wall. The Taglian rabble we led got as ready as they ever get. I sent warning to Mogaba and Speaker Ky Dam. Mogaba is a jerk and a lunatic but not a complete fool. He believes he keeps the job separate from personalities. If Goblin claimed we were in big trouble he would listen.