The near past
Corbie
The Barrowland lies far north of Charm, in the Old Forest so storied in the legends of the White Rose. Corbie came to the town there the summer after the Dominator failed to escape his grave through Juniper. He found the Lady’s minions in high morale. The grand evil in the Great Barrow was no longer to be feared. The dregs of the Rebel had been routed. The empire had no more enemies of consequence. The Great Comet, harbinger of all catastrophes, would not return for decades.
One lone focus of resistance remained, a child claimed to be the reincarnation of the White Rose. But she was a fugitive, running with the remnants of the traitorous Black Company. Nothing to fear there. The Lady’s overwhelming resources would swamp them.
Corbie came limping up the road from Oar, alone, a pack on his back, a staff gripped tightly. He claimed to be a disabled veteran of the Limper’s Forsberg campaigns. He wanted work. There was work aplenty for a man not too proud. The Eternal Guard were well-paid. Many hired drudgework taken off their duties.
At that time a regiment garrisoned the Barrowland. Countless civilians orbited its compound. Corbie vanished among those. When companies and battalions transferred out, he was an established part of the landscape.
He washed dishes, curried horses, cleaned stables, carried messages, mopped floors, peeled vegetables, assumed any burden for which he might earn a few coppers. He was a quiet, tall, dusky, brooding sort who made no special friends, but made no enemies either. Seldom did he socialize.
After a few months he asked for and received permission to occupy a ramshackle house long shunned because once it belonged to a sorcerer from Oar. As time and resources permitted, he restored the place. And like the sorcerer before him, he pursued the mission that had brought him north.
Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day Corbie worked around town, then went home and worked some more. People wondered when he rested.
If there was anything that detracted from Corbie, it was that he refused to assume his role completely. Most scutboys had to endure a lot of personal abuse. Corbie would not accept it. Victimize him and his eyes went cold as winter steel. Only one man ever pressed Corbie once he got that look. Corbie beat him with ruthless, relentless efficiency.
No one suspected him of leading a double life. Outside his home he was Corbie the swamper, nothing more. He lived the role to his heart. When he was home, in the more public hours, he was Corbie the renovator, creating a new home from an old. Only in the wee hours, while all but the night patrol slept, did he become Corbie the man with a mission.
Corbie the renovator found a treasure in a wall of the wizard’s kitchen. He took it upstairs, where Corbie the driven came up from the deeps.
The scrap of paper bore a dozen words scribbled in a shaky hand. A cipher key.
That lean, dusky, long-unsmiling face shed its ice. Dark eyes sparkled, Fingers turned up a lamp. Corbie sat, and for an hour stared at nothing. Then, still smiling, he went downstairs and out into the night. He raised a hand in gentle greeting whenever he encountered the night patrol.
He was known now. No one challenged his right to limp about and watch the constellations wheel.
He went home when his nerves settled. There would be no sleep for him. He scattered papers, began to study, to decipher, to translate, to write a story-letter that would not reach its destination for years.
Five
The Plain of Fear
One-Eye stopped by to tell me Darling was about to interview Corder and the messenger. “She’s looking peaked, Croaker. You been watching her?”
“I watch. I advise. She ignores. What can I do?”
“We got twenty-some years till the comet shows. No point her working herself to death, is there?” “Tell her that. She just tells me this mess will be settled long before the comet comes around again. That it’s a race against time.”
She believes that. But the rest of us cannot catch her fire. Isolated in the Plain of Fear, cut off from the world, the struggle with the Lady sometimes slips in importance. The Plain itself too often preoccupies us.
I caught myself outdistancing One-Eye. This premature burial has not been good for him. Without his skills he has weakened physically. He is beginning to show his age. I let him catch up.
“You and Goblin enjoy your adventure?”
He could not choose between a smirk or scowl.
“Got you again, eh?” Their battle has been on since the dawn. One-Eye starts each skirmish. Goblin usually finishes.
He grumbled something.
“What?”
“Yo!” someone shouted. “Everybody up top! Alert! Alert!”
One-Eye spat. “Twice in one day? What the hell?”
I knew what he meant. We have not had twenty alerts our whole two years out here. Now two in one day? Improbable.
I dashed back for my bow.
This time we went out with less clatter. Elmo had made his displeasure painfully apparent in a few private conversations.
Sunlight again. Like a blow. The entrance to the Hole faces westward. The sun was in our eyes when we emerged.
“You damned fool!” Elmo was yelling. “What the hell you doing?” A young soldier stood in the open, pointing. I let my gaze follow.
“Oh, damn,” I whispered. “Oh, double bloody damn.”
One-Eye saw it too. “Taken.”
The airborne dot drifted higher, circling our hideout, spiraling inward. It wobbled suddenly.
“Yeah. Taken. Whisper or Journey?”
“Good to see old friends,” Goblin said as he joined us.
We had not seen the Taken since reaching the Plain. Before that they had been in our hair constantly, having pursued us all the four years it had taken us to get here from Juniper.
They are the Lady’s satraps, her understudies in terror. Once there were ten. In the time of the Domination, the Lady and her husband enslaved the greatest of their contemporaries, making them their instruments: the Ten Who Were Taken. The Taken went into the ground with their masters when the White Rose defeated the Dominator four centuries ago. And they arose with the Lady, two turns of the comet back. And in fighting among themselves- for some remained loyal to the Dominator-most perished.
But the Lady obtained new slaves. Feather. Whisper. Journey. Feather and the last of the old ones, the Limper, went down at Juniper, when we overcame the Dominator’s bid for his own resurrection. Two are left. Whisper. Journey.
The flying carpet wobbled because it had reached the boundary where Darling’s null was enough to overpower its buoyancy. The Taken turned away, falling outward, got far enough to recover complete control. “Pity it didn’t come straight in,” I said. “And come down like a rock.”
“They’re not stupid,” Goblin said. “They’re just scouting us now.” He shook his head, shuddered. He knew something I did not. Probably something learned during his venture outside the Plain.
“Campaign heating up?” I asked.
“Yep. What’re you doing, bat-breath?” he snapped at One-Eye. “Pay attention.”
The little black man was ignoring the Taken. He stared at the wild wind-carved bluffs south of us.
“Our job is to stay alive,” One-Eye said, so smug you knew he had something to get Goblin’s goat. “That means don’t get distracted by the first flashy show you see.”
