Glen Cook - The Black Company

“What the devil?”

“Holy Hell!”

I whirled. A vast shadow moved toward us, expanding, as a gigantic carpet descended. Faces peeped over its edges. We froze,, bristling with ready weapons.

“The Howler,” I said, and had my guess confirmed by a cry like that of a wolf challenging the moon.

The carpet grounded. “Get aboard, you idiots. Come on. Move it.”

I laughed, tension draining away. That was the Captain. He danced like a nervous bear along the near edge of the carpet. Others of our brethren accompanied him. I threw my pack aboard, accepted a hand up. “Raven. You showed up in the nick this time.”

“You’ll wish we’d let you take your chances.”

“Eh?”

“Captain will tell you.”

The last man scrambled aboard. The Captain gave Feather and Journey the hard eye, then marched around getting the men evenly distributed. At the rear of the carpet, unmoving, shunned, sat a child-sized figure concealed in layers of indigo gauze. It howled at random intervals.

I shuddered. “What are you talking about?”

“Captain will tell you,” he repeated.

“Sure. How’s Darling?”

“Doing all right.” Lots of words in our Raven.

The Captain settled beside me. “Bad news, Croaker,” he said.

“Yeah?” I reached for my vaunted sarcasm. “Give it to me straight. I can take it.”

“Tough guy,” Raven observed.

“That’s me. Eat nails for breakfast. Whip wildcats with my bare hands.”

The Captain shook his head. “Hang on to that sense of humor. The Lady wants to see you. Personally.”

My stomach dropped to the ground, which was a couple hundred feet down. “Oh, shit,” I whispered. “Oh, damn.”

“Yeah.”

“What did I do?”

“You’d know better than I do.”

My mind hurtled around like a herd of mice fleeing a cat. In seconds I was soaked with sweat.

Raven observed, “Can’t be as bad as it sounds. She was almost polite.”

The Captain nodded. “It was a request.”

“Sure it was.”

Raven said, “If she had a grudge you’d just disappear.”

I did not feel reassured.

“One too many romances,” the Captain chided. “Now she’s in love with you too.”

They never forget, never let up. It had been months since I had written one of those romances. “What’s it about?”

“She didn’t say.”

Silence reigned the rest of the way. They sat beside me and tried to reassure me with traditional Company solidarity. As we came in on our encampment, though, the Captain did say, “She told us to bring our strength up to the thousand mark. We can enlist volunteers from the lot we brought out of the north.”

“Good news, good news.” That was cause for jubilation. For the first time in two centuries we were going to grow. Plenty of stragglers would be eager to exchange their oaths to the Taken for oaths to the Company. We were in high favor. We had mana. And, being mercenaries, we got more leeway than anyone else in the Lady’s service.

I could not get excited, though. Not with the Lady waiting.

The carpet grounded. Brethren crowded around, anxious to see how we had done. Lies and jocular threats flew.

The Captain said, “You stay aboard, Croaker. Goblin, Silent, One-Eye, you too.” He indicated the prisoners. “Deliver the merchandise.”

As the men slid over the side, Darling came bouncing out of the mob. Raven hollered at her, but of course she could not hear. She scrambled aboard, carrying a doll Raven had carved. It was dressed neatly in clothing of

superb miniature detail. She handed it to me and started flashing finger language.

Raven hollered again. I tried to interrupt, but Darling was intent on telling me about the doll’s wardrobe. Some might have thought her retarded, to be so excited about such things at her age. She was not. She had a mind like a razor. She knew what she was doing when she boarded the carpet. She was stealing a chance to fly.

“Honey,” I said, both aloud and with signs, “You’ve got to get off. We’re going...”

Raven yelled in outrage as the Howler lifted off. One-Eye, Goblin, and Silent all glared at him. He howled. The carpet continued to rise.

“Sit down,” I told Darling. She did so, not far from Feather. She forgot the doll, wanted to know about our adventure. I told her. It kept me occupied. She spent more time looking over the side than paying attention to me, yet she missed nothing. When I finished she looked at Feather and Journey with adult pity. She was unconcerned about my appointment with the Lady, though she did give me a reassuring hug good-bye.

The Howler’s carpet drifted away from the Tower top. I waved a feeble farewell. Darling blew me a kiss. Goblin patted his breast. I touched the amulet he had given me in Lords. Small comfort, that.

Imperial Guards strapped Journey and Feather onto litters. “What about me?” I asked shakily.

A captain told me, “You’re supposed to wait here.” He stayed when the others left. He tried to make small talk, but I wasn’t in the mood.

I wandered to the Tower’s edge, looked out on the vast engineering project being undertaken by the Lady’s armies.

At the time of the Tower’s construction huge basalt billets had been imported. Shaped on site, they had been stacked and fused into this gigantic cube of stone. The waste, chips, blocks broken during shaping, billets found unsuitable, and overage, had been left scattered around the Tower in a vast wild jumble more effective than any moat. It extended a mile.

In the north, though, a depressed piece-of-pie section remained unlittered. This constituted the only approach to the Tower on the ground. In that arc the Lady’s forces prepared for the Rebel onslaught.

No one down there believed his labor would shape the battle’s outcome. The comet was in the sky. But every man worked because labor provided surcease from fear.

The pie-slice rose to either side, meeting the rock jumble. A log palisade spanned the slice’s wide end. Our camps lay behind that. Behind the camps was a trench thirty feet deep and thirty wide. A hundred yards nearer the Tower there was another trench, and a hundred yards nearer still, a third, still being dug.

The excavated earth had been transported nearer the Tower and dumped behind a twelve foot log retaining wall spanning the slice. From this elevation men would hurl missiles on an enemy attacking our infantry on ground level.

A hundred yards back stood a second retaining wall, providing another two fathom elevation. The Lady meant to array her forces in three distinct armies, one on each level, and force the Rebel to fight three battles in series.

An earthen pyramid was a building a dozen rods behind the final retaining wall. It was seventy feet high already, its sides sloping about thirty-five degrees.

Obsessive neatness characterized everything. The plain, in places scraped down several feet, was as level as a tabletop. It had been planted with grass. Our animals kept that cropped like a well-kept lawn. Stone roadways ran here and there, and woe betide the man who strayed off without orders.

Below, on the middle level, bowmen were ranging fire on the ground between the nearer trenches. While they loosed, their officers adjusted the positions of racks from which they drew their arrows.

On the upper terrace Guards bustled around ballistae, calculating fire lanes and survivability, ranging their engines on targets farther away. Carts laden with ammunition sat near each weapon.

Like the grass and mannered roadways, these preparations betrayed an obsession with order.

On the bottom level workmen had begun demolishing short sections of retaining wall. Baffling.

I spotted a carpet coming in, turned to watch. It settled to the roof. Four stiff, shaky, wind-burned soldiers stepped off. A corporal led them away.