“Yeah, well.” I’d stated it pretty baldly. A prince did try to cheat our forebrethren and did get his throat cut. But the Company installed a new, friendly, beholden dynasty and did hang around a few years before that Captain got a wild hair and decided to go treasure hunting.
“You have no reservations about commanding a band of hired killers?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I admitted, sliding past the trap nimbly. “But we never cheated a sponsor.” Not exactly. “Sooner or later, every sponsor cheated us.”
“Including yours truly?”
“One of your satraps beat you to it. But given time we would have become less than indispensable and you would have started looking around for a way to shaft us instead of doing the honorable thing and paying us off and simply terminating our commission.”
“That’s what I love about you, Croaker. Your unflagging faith in humanity.”
“Absolutely. Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent,” I grumped.
“You really know how to melt a woman, you know that, Croaker?”
“Huh?” I come armed with a whole arsenal of such brilliant repartee.
“I came out here with some feebleminded notion of seducing you. For some reason I’m not in the mood to try anymore.”
Well. Some of them you screw up royal.
There was an observation catwalk along some parts of the monastery wall. I went up into the northeast corner, leaned on the adobe and stared back the way we had come. Busy feeling sorry for myself. Every couple hundred years that sort of thing leads to a productive insight.
The damned crows were thicker than ever. Must have been twenty of them now. I cursed them and, I swear, they mocked me. When I threw a loose piece of adobe they all jumped up and fled toward...
“Goblin!” I think he was out keeping an eye on me in case I got suicidal.
“Yeah?”
“Get One-Eye and Lady and come up here. Fast.” I turned and stared up the slope at the thing that had caught my eye.
It stopped moving but was unmistakably a human figure in robes so black looking at them was like looking at a rent in the fabric of existence. It carried something under its right arm, about the size of a hatbox, held in place by the natural fall of the limb. The crows swarmed around it, twenty or thirty of them, squabbling over the right to perch upon its shoulders. It was a good quarter mile from where I stood but I felt the gaze from its hooded, unseen face beating upon me like the heat from a furnace.
The crowd turned up with Goblin and One-Eye as quarrelsome as ever. Lady asked, “What is it?”
“Take a look out there.”
They looked. Goblin squeaked, “So?”
“So? What do you mean, so?”
“What’s so interesting about an old tree stump and a flock of birds?”
I looked. Damn! A stump ... But as I stared there was an instant’s shimmer and I saw the black figure again. I shuddered.
“Croaker?” Lady asked. She was still mad at me but concerned even so.
“Nothing. My eyes were playing tricks on me. I thought I saw the damned thing moving. Forget it.”
They took me at my word, stomped off to whatever they had been doing. I watched them go and for another moment doubted my own senses.
But then I looked again.
The crows were flying off in a crowd, except for two headed straight toward me. And the stump was hiking off across the hillside as though intent on circling the monastery. I mumbled a little to myself but it did not do any good.
I tried giving the Temple a few more days to work its magic but the next one hundred fifty years of our journey drummed on in my mind. There was no repose now. I was too itchy to sit. I announced my intention. And I got no kickbacks. Just acquiescent nods. Maybe even relieved nods.
What was this?
I sat up and came out of myself, where I had been spending a lot of time reexamining the familiar old furniture. I had not been paying attention to the others.
They were restless, too.
There was something in the air. Something that told us all it was time to hit the road. Even the monks seemed eager to see us move out. Curious.
Them that stays alive in the soldiering business are them that listens to such feelings even when they make no sense. You feel like you got to move, you move. You stay put and get stomped, it is too late to whine about all that work for nothing.
Chapter Twelve
The shaggy hills
To reach One-Eye’s jungle we had to pass through several miles of woods, then climb over a range of decidedly odd hills. The hills were very round, very steep, and completely treeless, though not especially high. They were covered with a short brown grass that caught fire easily, so that many bore black scars. From a distance they looked like a herd of giant, tawny, humped beasts sleeping.
I was in a state of high nerves. That sleeping-beast image haunted me. I kept half expecting those hills to waken and shrug us off. I caught up with One-Eye. “Is there something weird about these hills that you accidentally forgot to tell me about on purpose?”
He gave me a funny look. “No. Though the ignorant believe them to be burial mounds from a time when giants walked the earth. But they aren’t. They’re just hills. All dirt and rock inside.”
“Then why do they make me feel funny?”
He glanced back the way we had come, puzzled. “It’s not the hills, Croaker. It’s something back there. I feel it, too. Like we just dodged an arrow.”
I did not ask him what it was. He would have told me if he had known.
As the day wore on I realized the others were as jumpy as I was.
Worrying about it did as much good as worrying ever does.
Next morning we ran into two wizened little men of One-Eye’s race. They both looked a hundred years old. One of them kept hacking and coughing like he was about to croak. Goblin cackled. “Must be old Lizard Lips’s illegitimate grandchildren.”
There was a resemblance. I suppose that was to be expected. We were just accustomed to One-Eye being unique.
One-Eye scowled at Goblin. “Keep it up, Barf Bag. You’ll be grocery shopping with the turtles.”
What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us.
Grinning, One-Eye resumed gabbling with his relatives.
Lady said, “I presume these are the guides the monks sent for?”
They had done us that favor on learning our intentions. We would need guides. We were near the end of any road we could call familiar. Once past One-Eye’s jungle we would need somebody to translate for One-Eye, too.
Goblin let out a sudden aggrieved squawk.
“What’s your problem?” I demanded.
“He’s feeding them a pack of lies!”
So what was new about that? “How do you know? You don’t talk that lingo.”
“I don’t have to. I’ve known him since before your dad was whelped. Look at him. He’s doing his classic mighty-sorcerer-from-a-faraway-land act. In about twenty seconds he’s going to ...” A wicked grin spread his mouth around his face. He muttered something under his breath.
