man, woman, and child proclaimed me savior.
I tried comforting myself with the thought that I was not the first Captain with doubts, and far from the first to get embroiled in a local situation armed only with a glimmer of the true problems and stakes. Maybe I was luckier than some. I had Lady, for whom the waters of intrigue were home. If I could tap her talent. I had Mogaba, who, despite those cultural and language barriers that still existed between us, had begun to look like the best pure soldier I’d ever known. I had Goblin and One-Eye and Frogface and-maybe-Shifter. And I had four hundred years of Company shenanigans in my trick bag. But none of that appeased my conscience or stilled my doubts.
What had we gotten into on our simple ride back into the Company’s origins?
Was that half the trouble? That we were in unknown territory so far as the Annals were concerned? That I was trying to work without a historical chart?
There were questions about our forebrethren and this country. I’d had little opportunity to ferret out information. The hints I had gathered suggested that those old boys had not been nice fellows. I got the impression that the diaspora of the original Free Companies had been a nut religious thing. The moving doctrine, a vestige of which survived among the Nar, must have been terrible. The name of the Company still struck fear and stirred intense emotion.
The exhaustion caught up. I fell asleep, though I did not realize it till the conversation of crows awakened me.
I bounced up. The others looked at me oddly. They did not hear it. They were about finished with their meal.
Otto was keeping the pot hot for me.
I looked into a lone nearby tree and saw several crows, their ugly heads all cocked so they could look at me. They started chattering. I had a definite feeling they wanted my attention.
I ambled toward them.
Two flew when I was halfway to the tree, gaining altitude in that clumsy way crows have, gliding to the southeast toward an isolated stand of trees maybe a mile away. A good fifty crows circled above those trees.
The remaining crow left the lone tree when he was satisfied I had seen that. I turned to lunch in a thoughtful mood. Halfway through a bad stew I concluded that I had to assume I had been given a warning. The road passed within yards of those trees.
As we mounted up, I said, “People, we ride with weapons bare. Goblin. See those trees yonder? Keep an eye on them. Like your life depends on it.”
“What’s up, Croaker?”
“I don’t know. Just a hunch. Probably wrong, but it don’t cost nothing to be careful.”
“If you say so.” He gave me a funny look, like he was wondering about my stability.
Lady gave me an even funnier look when, as we approached the woods, Goblin squeaked, “The place is infested!”
That’s all he got to say. The infestation broke cover. Those little brown guys. About a hundred of them. Real military geniuses, too. Men on foot just don’t go jumping people on horseback even if they do outnumber them.
Goblin said, “Gleep!” And then he said something else. The swarm of brown men became surrounded by a fog of insects.
They should have shot us down with arrows.
Otto and Hagop chose what I considered the stupider course. They charged. Their momentum carried them through the mob. My choice seemed the wiser. The others agreed. We just turned away and trotted ahead of the brown guys, leaving them to Goblin’s mercies.
My beast stumbled. Master horseman that I am, I promptly fell off. Before I could get to my feet the brown guys were all around me, trying to lay hands on. But Goblin was on the job. I don’t know what he did, but it worked. After they knocked me around a little, leaving me a fine crop of bruises, they decided to keep after those who had had sense enough to stay on their horses.
Otto and Hagop thundered past, making a rear attack. I staggered to my feet, looked for my mount. He was a hundred yards away, looking at me in a bemused sort of way. I limped toward him.
Those little guys had some kind of petty magic of their own going, and no sense at all. They just kept on. They dropped like flies, but when they outnumber you a dozen to one you got to worry about more than just a favorable kill ratio.
I did not see it well, busy as I was. And when I did manage to drag my abused flesh aboard my animal’s back the whole brouhaha had swept out of sight down a narrow, shallow valley.
I have no idea how, but somehow I managed to get disoriented. Or something. When I got organized and started after my bunch I could not find them. Though I never got much chance to look. Fate intervened in the form of five little brown guys on horses that would have been amusing if they hadn’t been waving swords and lances and rushing at me with intent to be obnoxious.
On another day I might have stayed forty yards ahead and plinked at them with my bow. But I wasn’t in the mood. I just wanted to be left alone and to get back together with the others.
I galloped off. Up and down and around a few hills and I lost them easily. But in the process I lost myself. During all the fun the sky clouded over. It started to drizzle. Just to make me that much more enchanted with my chosen way of life. I set out to find the road, hoping I would find traces of my companions there.
I topped a hill and spied that damned crow-surrounded figure that had been haunting me since the Temple of Travellers’ Respose. It was striding along in the distance, directly away from me. I forgot about the others. I kicked my mount into a gallop. The figure paused and looked back. I felt the weight of its stare but did not slow. I would unravel this mystery now.
I charged down a shallow hill, leapt a wash in which muddy water gurgled. The figure was out of sight for a moment. Up the other side. When I reached the crest there was nothing to be seen but a few random crows circling no particular point. I used language that would have distressed my mother immensely.
I did not slow but continued my career till I reached the approximate point where I had seen the thing last. I reined in, swung down, began stomping around looking for sign. A mighty tracker, me. But, moist as the ground was already, there had to be traces. Unless I was crazy and seeing things.
I found traces, sure enough. And I felt the continued pressure of that stare. But I did not see the thing I sought. I was baffled. Even considering the probability that there was sorcery involved, how could it have vanished so completely? There was no cover anywhere around.
I spotted some crows starting to circle about a quarter mile away. “All right, you son of a bitch. We’ll see how fast you can run.”
There was nothing there when I got there.
The cycle repeated itself three times. I got no closer. The last time I halted I did so atop a low crest that, from a quarter mile, overlooked a hundred-acre wood. I dismounted and stood beside my horse. We stared. “You, too?” I asked. His breathing was as uneven as mine. And those monster beasts never got winded.
That was a sight, down there. Never have I seen so many crows except maybe on a recent battlefield.
In a lifetime of travel and study I have come upon half a hundred tales about haunted forests. The woods are always described as dark and dense and old or the trees
are mostly dead, skeleton hands reaching for the sky. This wood fit none of the particulars except for density. Yet it sure felt haunted.
I tossed my reins across the horse’s neck, strapped on a buckler, drew my sword from its saddle scabbard, and started forward. The horse came along behind me, maybe eight feet back, head down so his nostrils were almost to the ground, like a hound on the track.
The crows were most numerous over the center of the wood. I did not trust my eyes but thought I detected some squat dark structure among the trees there. The closer I got the slower I moved, meaning maybe a part of me was still infected with common sense. The part that kept telling me that I was not cut out for this sort of thing. I wasn’t some lone brawling swordsman who stalked evil into its lair.
I am a dope cursed with an unhealthy portion of curiosity. Curiosity had me by the chin whiskers and kept right on dragging me along.
There was one lone tree that approximated the stereotype, a bony old thing about half dead, as big around as me, standing like a sentinel thirty feet from the rest of the wood. Scrub and saplings clustered around its feet,
