Glen Cook - The Black Company

Sailors pushed us off. The moment the oars bit water One-Eye subsided. He had the look of a man headed for the gallows.

The galley took form, a looming, indeterminate shape slightly darker than the surrounding darkness. I heard the fog-hollowed voices of seamen, timbers creaking, tackle working, long before I was sure of my eyes. Our boat nosed in to the fool of an accommodation ladder. The howl came again.

One-Eye tried to dive overboard. We restrained him. The Captain applied a bootheel to his butt. “You had your chance to talk us out of this. You wouldn’t. Live with it.”

One-Eye slouched as he followed the Lieutenant up the ladder, a man without hope. A man who had left a brother dead and now was being forced to approach that brother’s killer, upon which he was powerless to take revenge.

We found the Company on the maindeck, snuggled amongst mounds of gear. The sergeants threaded the mess toward us.

The legate appeared. I stared. This was the first I had seen him afoot, standing. He was short. For a moment I wondered if he were male at all. His voices were often otherwise.

He surveyed us with an intensity that suggested he was reading our souls. One of his officers asked the Captain to fall the men in the best he could on the crowded deck. The ship’s crew were taking up the center flats decking over the open well that ran from the bow almost to the stern, and from deck level down to the lower oar bank. Below, there was muttering, clanking, rattling, as the oarsmen wakened.

The legate reviewed us. He paused before each soldier, pinned a reproduction of the device on his sail over each heart. It was slow going. We were under way before he finished.

The nearer the envoy approached, the more One-Eye shook. He almost fainted when the legate pinned him. I was baffled. Why so much emotion?

I was nervous when my turn came, but not frightened. I glanced at the badge as delicate gloved fingers attached it to my jerkin. Skull and circle in silver, on jet, elegantly crafted. A valuable if grim piece of jewelry. Had he not been so rattled, I would have thought One-Eye to be considering how best to pawn it.

The device now seemed vaguely familiar. Outside the context of the sail, which I had taken as showmanship and ignored. Hadn’t I read or heard about a similar seal somewhere?

The legate said, “Welcome to the service of the Lady, physician.” His voice was distracting. It did not fit expectations, ever. This time it was musical, lilting, the voice, of a young woman putting something over on wiser heads.

The Lady? Where had I encountered that word used that way, emphasized as though it was the title of a goddess? A dark legend out of olden times...

A howl of outrage, pain, and despair filled the ship. Startled, I broke ranks and went to the lip of the air well.

The forvalaka was in a big iron cage at the foot of the mast. In the shadows it seemed to change subtly as it prowled, testing every bar. One moment it was an athletic woman of about thirty, but seconds later it had assumed the aspect of a black leopard on its hind legs, clawing the imprisoning iron. I recalled the legate saying he might have a use for the monster.

I faced him. And the memory came. A devil’s hammer drove spikes of ice into the belly of my soul. I knew why One-Eye did not want to cross the sea. The ancient evil of the north... “I thought you people died three hundred years ago.” The legate laughed. “You don’t know your history well enough. We weren’t destroyed. Just chained and buried alive.” His laughter had an hysterical edge. “Chained, buried, and eventually liberated by a fool named Bomanz, Croaker.”

I dropped to my haunches beside One-Eye, who buried his face in his hands.

The legate, the terror called Soulcatcher in old tales, a devil worse than any dozen forvalaka, laughed madly. His crewmen cringed. A great joke, enlisting the Black Company in the service of evil. A great city taken and tittle villains suborned. A truly cosmic jest.

The Captain settled beside me. “Tell me, Croaker.”

So I told him about the Domination, and the Dominator and his Lady. Their rule had spanned an empire of evil unrivalled in Hell, I told him about the Ten Who Were Taken (of whom Soulcatcher was one), ten great wizards, near-demigods in their power, who had been overcome by the Dominator and compelled into his service. I told him about the White Rose, the lady general who had brought the Domination down, but whose power had been insufficient to destroy the Dominator, his Lady, and the Ten. She had interred the lot in a charm-bound barrow somewhere north of the sea.

“And now they’re restored to life, it seems,” J said. “They rule the northern empire. Tom-Tom and One-Eye must have suspected... We’ve enlisted in their service.”

“Taken,” he murmured. “Rather like the forvalaka.”

The beast screamed and hurled itself against the bars of its cage, Soulcatcher’s laughter drifted across the foggy deck. “Taken by the Taken,” I agreed. “The parallel is uncomfortable.” I had begun to shake as more and more old tales surfaced in my mind.

The Captain sighed and stared into the fog, toward the new land.

One-Eye stared at the thing in the cage, hating. I tried to ease him away. He shook me off. “Not yet, Croaker. I have to figure this.”

“What?”

“This isn’t the one that killed Tom-Tom. It doesn’t have the scars we put on it.”

I turned slowly, studied the legate. He laughed again, looking our way.

One-Eye never figured it out. And I never told him. We have troubles enough.

“The crossing from Beryl proves my point,” One-Eye growled over a pewter tankard. “The Black Company doesn’t belong on water. Wench! More ale!” He waved his tankard. The girl could not understand him otherwise. He refused to learn the languages of the north.

“You’re drunk,” I observed.

“How perceptive. Will you take note, gentlemen? The Croaker, our esteemed master of the arts cleric and medical, has had the perspicacity to discover that I am drunk.” He punctuated his speech with belches and mispronunciations. He surveyed his audience with that look of sublime solemnity only a drunk can muster.

The girl brought another pitcher, and a bottle for Silent. He, too, was ready for more of his particular poison. He was drinking a sour Beryl wine perfectly suited to his personality. Money changed hands.

There were seven of us altogether. We were keeping our heads down. The place was full of sailors. We were outsiders, outlanders, the sort picked for pounding when the brawling started. With the exception of One-Eye, we prefer saving our fight for when we are getting paid.

Pawnbroker stuck his ugly face in through the street doorway. His beady little eyes tightened into a squint. He spotted us.

Pawnbroker. He got that name because he loansharks the Company. He doesn’t like it, but says anything is better than the moniker hung on him by his peasant parents: Sugar Beet.

“Hey! It’s the Sweet Beet!” One-Eye roared. “Come on over, Sugar Baby. Drinks on One-Eye. He’s too drunk to know any better.” He was. Sober, One-Eye is tighter than a collar of day-old rawhide.

Pawnbroker winced, looked around furtively. He has that manner. “The Captain wants you guys.”

We exchanged glances. One-Eye settled down. We had not seen much of the Captain lately. He was all the time hanging around with bigwigs from the Imperial Army.

Elmo and the Lieutenant got up. I did too, and started toward Pawnbroker.

The barkeeper bellowed. A serving wench darted to the doorway, blocked it. A huge, dull bull of a man lumbered out of a back room. He carried a prodigious gnarly club in each hogshead hand. He looked confused.