Behind the floating man was another with a lance through him. He drifted a dozen feet up, alive and in pain, sometimes writhing like an animal with a broken spine. Two riderless horses followed him, both black stallions bigger than any war charger.
Crows by the hundred circled above, coming and going like scouts.
The parade climbed the hills east of Stormgard, moving in twilight. Once it paused, remained motionless twenty minutes while a scatter of Taglian fugitives passed. They saw nothing. There was magic at work there.
The column continued moving by night. The crows continued flying, formed a rearguard, watched for something. Several times they cawed at shifting shadows, but settled down quickly. False alarms?
The party halted ten miles from the beleaguered city. The thing leading spent hours collecting brush and deadwood, piled it in a deep crack in a granitic hillside. Then it seized the floating lance, dragged its victim off, stripped him down.
A bitter, remote, whispering voice exclaimed, “This isn’t one of the Taken!” when the man’s mask came off.
The crows became raucous. Discussing? Arguing? The leader asked, “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from?”
The injured man did not respond. Maybe he was beyond communication. Maybe he did not speak that language. Maybe he was stubborn.
Torture produced no answers.
The inquisitor tossed the man into the woodpile, waved a hand. The pile burst into flame. The stump thing used the lance to keep its victim from escaping. The burning man had a bottomless well of energy.
There was sorcery at work here.
The burning man was the Shadowmaster Moonshadow. His army had triumphed outside Stormgard but his own fortune had been inglorious.
The party did not move on till the Shadowmaster was consumed, the fire burned to ashes and the ashes cooled. The stump thing gathered the ashes. As it travelled it disposed of those pinch by pinch.
The man with the arrow in him bobbed in the stump thing’s wake. The stallions brought up the rear.
The crows maintained their patrols. Once a large catlike thing came too near and they went into paroxysms. The stump did something mystical. The black leopard wandered away, absent of mind.
Chapter Five
A slight figure in ornate black armor strained savagely. A corpse toppled off the heap of corpses piled upon the figure. The shift in weight made it possible to wriggle out of the heap. Free, the figure lay motionless for several minutes, panting inside a grotesque helmet. Then it pulled itself into a sitting position.
After another minute the figure struggled out of its gauntlets, revealed delicate hands. Slim fingers plucked at the fastenings holding its helmet. That came away, too.
Long black hair fell free around a face to stun a man. Inside all that ugly black steel was a woman.
I have to report those moments that way because I don’t recall them at all. I remember a dark dream. A nightmare featuring a black woman with fangs like a vampire. Nothing else. My first clear recollection is of sitting beside the heap of corpses with my helmet in my lap. I was panting, only vaguely aware that I had gotten out of the pile somehow.
The stench of a thousand cruel gut wounds filled the air like the stink of the largest, rawest sewer in the world. It was the smell of battlefields. How many times had I smelled it? A thousand. And still I wasn’t used to it.
I gagged. Nothing came up. I had emptied my stomach into my helmet while I was under the pile. I had a vague recollection of being terrified that I would drown in my own vomit.
I started shaking. Tears rolled, stinging, hot tears of relief. I had survived! I had lived ages beyond the measure of most mortals but I had lost none of my desire for life.
As I caught my breath I tried to put together where I was, what I was doing there. Besides surviving.
My last clear memories weren’t pleasant. I remembered knowing that I was about to die.
I couldn’t see much in the dark but I didn’t need to see to know we had lost. Had the Company turned the tide Croaker would have found me long ago.
Why hadn’t the victors?
There were men moving on the battlefield. I heard low voices arguing. Moving my way slowly. I had to get out of there.
I got up, managed to stumble four steps before I fell on my face, too weak to move another inch. Thirst was a demon devouring me from the inside out. My throat was so dry I couldn’t whine.
I’d made noise. The looters were quiet now.
They were sneaking toward me, after one more victim. Where was my sword?
I was going to die now. No weapon and no strength to use one if I found one before they found me.
I could see them now, three men backlighted by a faint glow from Dejagore. Small men, like most of the Shadowmasters’ soldiers. Neither strong nor particularly skilled, but in my case they needed neither strength nor skill.
Could I play dead? No. They wouldn’t be deceived. Corpses would be cool now.
Damn them!
Before they killed me they would do more than just rob me.
They wouldn’t kill me. They would recognize the armor. The Shadowmasters weren’t fools. They knew who I’d been. They knew what I carried inside my head, treasures they dreamed about getting out. There would be rewards for my capture.
Maybe there are gods. A racket broke out behind the looters. Sounded like a sally from Dejagore, some kind of spoiling raid. Mogaba wasn’t sitting on his hands waiting for the Shadowmasters to come to him.
One of the looters said something in a normal voice. Someone told him to shut up. The third man entered his opinion. An argument ensued. The first man didn’t want to investigate the uproar. He’d had enough fighting.
The others overruled him.
The fates were kind. Two responsible soldiers handed me a life.
I lay where I’d fallen, resting for several minutes before I got onto hands and knees and crawled back to the mound of bodies. I found my sword, an ancient and consecrated blade created by Carqui in the younger days of the Domination. A storied blade, but no one, not even Croaker, had heard its tale.
I crawled toward the hummock where, when I’d seen him last, my love had been making his final stand, just him and Murgen and the Company standard, trying to stem the rout. It seemed an all night trek. I found a dead soldier with water in his canteen. I drained it and went on. My strength grew as I crept. By the time I reached the hummock I could totter along upright.
I found nothing there. Just dead men. Croaker was not among them. The Company standard was gone. I felt hollow. Had the Shadowmasters taken him?
They would want him badly for crushing their army at Ghoja, for taking Dejagore, for killing Stormshadow.
I could not believe they had him. It had taken me too long to. find him. No god, no fate, could be so cruel.
I cried.
The night grew quiet. The sortie had withdrawn. The looters would return now.
I started moving, stumbled into a dead elephant and almost shrieked, thinking I had walked right into a monster.
The elephants had carried all kinds of clutter. Some might be useful. I scrounged a few pounds of dried food, a skin of water, a small jar of poison for arrowheads, a few coins, whatever caught my fancy. Then I walked northward, determined to reach the hills before sunrise. I discarded half my plunder before I got there.
I hurried. Enemy patrols would be out looking for important bodies come first light.
What could I do now, besides survive? I was the last of the Black Company. There was nothing left...
