Glen Cook - Shadow Games

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.”

Lady was intensely interested in the discussion. She understood, too. And Goblin cracked, “You’re dead, Maggot Lips.”

“What?” One-Eye squeaked.

“The first set of sweet hips that shakes your way will lead you right off to the cannibals’ cookpots.”

“They aren’t cannibals...” Sudden panic tautened One-Eye’s face.

It took him that long to realize that Goblin had understood him while he was talking with Wheezer. He looked at the rest of us. Some of us gave ourselves away.

He looked that much more distraught. He whispered to Wheezer with great animation.

Wheezer cackled. His laugh seemed half chicken cluck, half peacock call. It cost him a coughing fit.

It was a bad one. One-Eye beckoned me. “You’re sure you can’t dp something for this guy, Croaker? He busts a lung and dies, we’re hurting.”

“Nothing. He shouldn’t be traipsing around to begin with...” No point singing that song. Wheezer refused to hear it. “You or Goblin ought to be able to do him more good than I can.”

“You can’t help a guy who won’t let you.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “How long before we get us some guides?”

“All I hear is ’soon’ when I ask.”

Soon indeed. A pair of tall black men came up the road at a steady, hardy trot. They were the sleakest, healthiest specimens I had seen in a long time. Each carried a sheaf of javelins across his back; a short-hafted, long-bladed spear in his right hand; and a shield of some white and black striped hide upon his left arm. Their limbs moved in perfect cadence, as though each man was half of some marvelous, rhythmic machine.

I glanced at Lady. No thoughts were evident on her face. “They would make grand soldiers,” she said.

The two trotted straight to Wheezer, feigning a vast indifference to the rest of us. But I felt them studying us

sidelong. White people had to be rare this side of the jungle. They barked at Wheezer in an arrogant tongue filled with clicks and stops.

Wheezer did some heavy kowtowing. He responded in the same language, whining like a slave addressing an ill-tempered master.

“Trouble,” Lady prophesied.

“Right-o.” This contempt for the outsider was not a new experience. I had to get busy and establish who said “Jump!” and who asked “How high?”

I talked to Goblin using the finger speech of the deaf. One-Eye caught it. He cackled. That stirred our new guides’ indignation.

It would be touchy. They had to give me what they themselves knew was provocation. Only then would they accept being put in their place.

One-Eye was getting big ideas. I signed him to restrain himself, to prepare some impressive illusion. Aloud, I demanded, “What’s all the babble? Get into the middle of that.”

He started nagging Wheezer.

Wheezer carried on like a man caught between a rock and a hard place. He told One-Eye that the K’Hlata did not bargain. He said they would go through our things and pick out what they thought was worth their trouble.

“They try that and they’ll get their fingers bitten off at the elbow. Tell them that. Politely.”

It was too late for polite. Those guys understood the language. But One-Eye’s growling threw them. They did not know what to do next.

“Croaker!” Murgen called. “Company.”

Company indeed. Some of the boys who had given us the fish-eye earlier.

They were just the specific for the bruised egos of our new friends. The boys jumped up and down and howled and banged their spears against their shields. They hurled taunts. They pranced along the stone-marked boundary. One-Eye trotted after them.

The fish were not biting. But they had a little bait of their own. Something got said.

The two warriors howled and attacked. That caught everyone off guard. Three outsiders went down. The others subdued our guides quickly, though not without further mishap.

Wheezer poised on the boundary, wringing his hands and carping at One-Eye. While crows circled high above.

“Goblin!” I snapped. “One-Eye! Get with it!”

One-Eye cackled, reached up, grabbed his hair, and yanked.

He peeled himself from under that silly hat. And the fanged and fiery thing behind the peeling was ugly enough to turn a buzzard’s stomach.

Which was all show, all distraction, while Goblin got on with the meat of it.

Goblin seemed to be surrounded by giant worms. It took me a moment to realize all those squirms were lengths of rope. I shrieked when I saw the state of our gear.

Goblin howled with laughter as a hundred chunks of rope went slithering through grass and air to pester, climb, bind, garrote.

Wheezer pranced around in an absolute apoplectic fit. “Stop! Stop! You’re destroying the whole concord.”

One-Eye ignored him. He put the mask back over the horror while punishing Goblin with ferocious looks. He resented Goblin’s ingenuity.

Goblin was not finished. Having strangled everyone not already carved up or nominally friendly, he had his ropes drag the corpses across the boundary.

“No outside witnesses,” One-Eye assured me, blind to those damned crows. He glared at Goblin. “What might the little toad have been up to?”

“Say what?”

“Those ropes. That was no spur-of-the-moment piece of work, Croaker. It would take months to charm that much line. I know who he had in mind, too. No bloody more nice, polite, long-suffering One-Eye. The gloves are off now. I’m going to get my revenge before that little bastard catches me with my back turned.”

“Preemptive vengeance?” There was a One-Eye concept for you.

“I told you, he’s up to something. I’m not going to stand around and wait...” “Ask Wheezer what to do about the bodies.” Wheezer said bury them deep and do a prime job of camouflaging.

“Trouble,” Lady said. “Any way you look at it.” “The animals are rested. We’ll outrun it.” “I hope so. I wish...” There was something in her voice that I could not decipher: I did not get it till later. Nostalgia. Homesickness. Longing for something irrevocably lost.

Goblin dubbed our new guides the Geek and the Freak. Despite my displeasure the names clung.

We crossed the savannah in fourteen days, without mishap, though Wheezer and the guides panicked each time they heard distant drums.

The message they dreaded did not come till we had left the savannah for the mountainous desert bounding it on the south. Both guides immediately begged to be allowed to stay with the Company. An extra spear is an extra spear.

One-Eye told me, “The drums said they’ve been declared outlaws. What they said about us you don’t want to hear. You decide to go back north again you’d better think about another way to get there.”

Four days later we made camp on some heights overlooking a large city and a broad river that flowed southeast. We had come to Gea-Xle, eight hundred miles below the equator. The mouth of that river, sixteen hundred miles farther south, lay at the edge of the world on the map I had made at the Temple of Travellers’ Repose. The last place name marked, with great uncertainty, was Troko Tallio, a ways upriver from the coast.

Once camp was set to my satisfaction I went looking for Lady. I located her among some high rocks. But instead of studying the view she was staring into a tin teacup. For an instant the cup appeared to contain a pinprick spark. Then she sensed my approach. She looked up, smiled.

There was no spark in the cup when I looked again. Must have been my imagination.