rising waist high. I paused to lean against it while I talked myself into or out of something. The horse came up till his nose bumped my shoulder. I turned my head to look at him.
Snake hiss. Thump!
I gawked at the arrow quivering in the tree three inches from my fingers and only started to get myself down when it struck me that the shaft had not been meant to stick me in the brisket.
Head, shaft, and fletching, that bolt was as black as a priest’s heart. The shaft itself had an enameled look. An inch behind the head was a wrap of white. I levered the arrow out of the tree and held the message close enough to read.
It is not yet time, Croaker.
The language and alphabet were those of the Jewel Cities.
Interesting. “Right. Not yet time.” I peeled the paper off, crumpled it into a ball, tossed it at the wood. I looked for some sign of the archer. There was none. Of course.
I shoved the arrow into my quiver, swung onto my saddle, turned the horse and rode about a step. A shadow ran past, of a crow flying up to have a look at the seven little brown men waiting for me atop the hill. “You guys never give up, do you?”
I got back down, behind the horse, took out my bow, strung it, drew an arrow-the arrow just collected-and started angling across the hillside, staying behind my mount. The little brown guys turned their toy horses and moved with me.
When I had a nice range I jumped out and let fly at the nearest. He saw it coming and tried to dodge, only he did himself more harm than good. I meant to put the shaft into his pony’s neck. It slammed in through his knee, getting him and the animal both. The pony threw him and took off, dragging him from a stirrup.
I mounted up fast, took off through the gap. Those little horses did not move fast enough to close it.
So we were off, them pounding after me at a pace to kill their animals in an hour, my beast barely cantering and, I think, having a good time. I can’t recall any other horse I’ve ridden looking back to check the pursuit and adjusting its pace to remain tantalizingly close.
I had no idea who the brown guys were but there had to be a bunch of them the way they kept turning up. I considered working on this bunch, taking them out one by one, decided discretion was the better part. If need be I could bring the Company down and forage for them.
I wondered what became of Lady and Goblin and the others. I doubted they had come to any harm, what with our advantage in mounts, but...
We were separated and there was no point spending the remaining daylight looking for them. I would get back to the road, turn north, find a town and someplace dry.
The drizzle irritated me more than the fact that I was being hunted.
But that stretch of forest bothered me more than the rain. That was a mystery that scared the crap out of me.
The crows and walking stump were real. No doubt of that anymore. And the stump knew me by name.
Maybe I ought to bring the Company down and go after whatever hid there.
The road was one of those wonders that turns to mud hip deep if somebody spits on it. There were no fences in this part of the world, so I just rode beside it. I came to a village almost immediately.
Call it a stroke of fate, or timing. Timing. My life runs on weird timing. There were riders coming into town from the north. They looked even more bedraggled than I felt. They were not little brown men but I gave them the suspicious eye anyway and looked for places to duck. They were carrying more lethal hardware than I was, and I had enough to outfit a platoon.
“Yo! Croaker!”
Hell. That was Murgen. I got a little closer and saw that the other three were Willow Swan, Cordy Mather, and Blade.
What the hell were they doing down here?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Overlook
The one who had withdrawn everything but moral support did not give up his right to complain and criticize.
The gathering of the Shadowmasters took place in the heights of a soaring tower in that one’s new capitol fortress, Overlook, which lay two miles south of Shadowcatch. It was a strange, dark fortress, more vast than some cities. It had thick walls a hundred feet high. Every vertical surface was sheathed in plates of burnished brass or iron. Ugly silver lettering in an alphabet known only to a few damascened those plates, proclaiming fearful banes.
The Shadowmasters assembled in a room not at all in keeping with their penchant for darkness. The sun burned through a skylight and through walls of crystal. The three shrank from the glare, though they were clad in their darkest apparel. Their host floated near the southern wall, seldom withdrawing his gaze from the distance. His preoccupation was obsessive.
Out there, many miles away but visible from that great height, lay a vast flat expanse. It shimmered. It was as white as the corpse of an old dead sea. The visitors thought his fear and fixation dangerously obsessive. If it was not feigned. If it was not the fulcrum of an obscure and deadly strategem. But it was impossible not to be impressed by the magnitude of the defenses he had raised.
The fortress had been seventeen years in the building and was not yet more than two-thirds completed.
The small one, the female, asked, “It’s quiet out there now?” She spoke the language that was emblazoned upon the fortress walls.
“It’s always quiet during the day. But come the night... Come the night...” Fear and hatred blackened the air.
He blamed them for his dire circumstances. They had mined the shadows and had awakened the terror, then they had left him to face the consequences alone.
He turned. “You have failed. You have failed and failed and failed. The Radisha went north without inconvenience. They sailed through the swamps like vengeance itself, so easily she never had to lift a finger. They go where they will and do what they will, without peril, so blithely sure they don’t even notice your meddling. And now they and she are on your marches, conjuring mischief there. So you come to me.”
“Who could have suspected they would have a Great One as companion? That one was supposed to have perished.”
“Fool! Was he not a master of change and illusion? You should have known he was there waiting for them. How could such a one hide?”
“Did you know he was there and fail to inform us?” the female mocked.
He whirled back to the window. He did not answer. He said, “They are on your marches now. Will you deal with them this time?”
“They are but fifty mortal men.”
“With her. And the Great One.”
“And we are four. And we have armies. Soon the rivers will go down. Ten thousand men will cross the Main and obliterate the very Name of the Black Company.”
A sound came from the one at the window, a hissing that grew up to become cold, mocking laughter. “They will? That has been tried numberless times. Numberless. But they endure. For four hundred years they have endured. Ten thousand men? You joke. A million might not suffice. The empire in the north could not exterminate them.”
The three exchanged glances. Here was madness. Obsession and madness. When the threat from the north was expunged perhaps this one ought to follow it.
“Come here,” he said. “Look down there. Where that ghost of an old road winds through the valley up toward the brilliance.” Something turned and coiled there, a blackness deeper than that of their apparel. “You see that?”
