They think a demon attacked them. They don’t want to come back. Their officers are telling them they can’t survive if they don’t recover their camp and animals.”
That was true. Maybe another glimpse of the demon would encourage them to stay away.
I got the men into a ragged line, advanced to the edge of the wood. Narayan and Sindhu sneaked ahead. I wanted warning if the southerners were inclined to fight. I’d back off.
They fled again. Narayan said they killed those officers who tried to rally them.
“Fortune smiles,” I recall murmuring. I’d have to take a closer look at this demon Kina. She must have some reputation. I wondered why I’d never heard of her.
I withdrew to the captured encampment. We’d come into a lot of useful material. “Ram, get the rest of the band. Have them bring the stakes from the embankment. Narayan, think about which men are least deserving of receiving arms.” There would be enough to go around now, almost.
Arms would be a trust and honor to be earned.
The change was dramatic. You’d have thought it was another Ghoja triumph. Even those who hadn’t participated gained confidence. I saw it everywhere. These men had a new feeling of self-worth. They were proud to be part of a desperate enterprise and they gave me my due place in it. I walked through the camp dropping hints that soon they would be part of something with power.
That had to be nurtured, and continually fertilized with suspicion and distrust of everyone outside the band.
It takes time to forge a hammer. More time than I would get, probably. It takes years, even decades, to create a force like the Black Company, which had been carried forward on the crest of a wave of tradition.
Here I was trying to magic up a Golden Hammer, something gaudy but with no real substance, deadly only to the ignorant and unprepared.
It was time for a ceremony alienating them from the rest of the world. Time for a blood rite that would bind them to one another and me.
I had the stakes from the embankment planted along the road south of the wood. Then I had all the dead southerners decapitated and their heads placed atop the stakes, facing southward, ostensibly warning travellers who shared their ambitions.
Narayan and Sindhu were delighted. They hacked off heads with great enthusiasm. No horror touched them.
None touched me, either. I’d seen everything in my time.
Chapter Ten
Swan lay in the shade on the bank of the Main, lazily watching his bobber float on a still, deep pool. The air was warm, the shade was cool, the bugs were too lazy to bother him. He was half asleep. What more could a man ask?
Blade sat down. “Catch anything?”
“Nope. Don’t know what I’d do if I did. What’s up?”
“The Woman wants us.” He meant the Radisha, whom they had found waiting when they’d reached Ghoja- much to Smoke’s dismay. “She’s got a job for us.”
“Don’t she always? You tell her to stick it in her ear?”
“Thought I’d save you that pleasure.” “I’d rather you’d saved me the walk. I’m comfortable.”
“She wants us to drag Smoke somewhere he don’t want to go.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Swan pulled his line out of the water. There was no bait on his hook. “And I thought there weren’t any fish in that crick.” He left his pole against a tree, a statement of sorts. “Where’s Cordy?”
“Probably there waiting. He was watching Jah. I told him already.”
Swan looked across the river. “I’d kill for a pint of beer.” They’d been in the brewery business in Taglios before the excitement swept them up.
Blade snorted, headed for the fortress overlooking Ghoja ford.
The fort stood on the south bank of the Main. It had been built by the Shadowmasters after their invasion of Taglios had been repulsed, to defend their conquests south of the river. The fortress had been overwhelmed by the Black Company after the victory north of the river. Taglian artisans were reinforcing it and beginning a companion fortress on the north bank.
Swan scanned the scabrous encampment west of the fortress. Eight hundred men lived there. Some were construction workers. Most were fugitives from the south. One large group particularly irked him. “Think Jah has figured out that the Woman is here?”
Jahamaraj Jah was a powerhungry Shadar priest. He had commanded the mounted auxiliaries during the southern expedition. His flight north had been so precipitous he’d beaten Swan’s party to the ford by several days.
“I think he’s guessed. He tried to sneak a messenger across last night.” The Radisha, through Swan, ad forbidden anyone to cross the river. She didn’t want news of the disaster reaching Taglios before its dimensions were known. “Uhm?”
“Messenger drowned. Cordy says Jah thinks he made it.” Blade chuckled wickedly. He hated priests. Baiting them was his favorite sport. All priests, of whatever faith.
“Good. That’ll keep him out of our hair till we figure out what to do with him.”
“I know what to do.”
“Political consequences,” Swam cautioned. “That your solution to everything? Cut somebody’s throat?”
“Always slows them down.”
The guards at the fortress gate saluted. They were favorites of the Radisha and, though neither Blade nor Swan nor Mather wanted it, they commanded Taglios’ defenses now.
Swan said, “I got to learn to think in the long term, Blade. Never thought we’d be back at this after the Black Company showed.”
“You got a lot to learn, Willow.”
Cordy and Smoke waited outside the room where the Radisha holed up. Smoke looked like he had a bad stomach. Like he’d make a run for it if he got a chance.
Swan said, “You’re looking grim, Cordy.” “Just tired. Mostly of playing with the runt.” Swan raised an eyebrow. Cordy was the calm one, the patient guy, the one who poured oil on the waters. Smoke must have provoked him good. “She ready?” “Whenever.”
“Let’s do it. I got a river full of fish waiting.” “Better figure on them getting grey hair before you get back.” Mather knocked, pushed the wizard ahead of him.
The Radisha entered the room from the side as Swan closed the door. Here, in private, with men not from her own culture, she didn’t pretend to a traditional sex role. “Did you tell them, Cordy?”
Willow exchanged glances with Blade. Their old buddy on a nickname basis with the Woman? Interesting. What did he call her? She didn’t look like a Cuddles. “Not yet.” “What’s up?” Swan asked.
The Radisha said, “I’ve had my men mixing with the soldiers. They’ve heard rumors that the woman who was the Lieutenant of the Black Company survived. She’s trying to pull the survivors together south of here.”
“Best news I’ve heard in a while,” Swan said. He winked at Blade.
“Is it?”
“I thought it was a crying shame to lose such a resource.”
“I’ll bet. You have a low mind, Swan.”
“Guilty. Hard not to once you’ve had a gander at her. So she made it. Great. Gets us three off the hook. Gives you a professional to carry on.”
“That remains to be seen. There’ll be difficulties. Cordy. Tell them.”
“Twenty-some men from the Second just came in. They’d stayed off the road to avoid the Shadowmasters’ patrols. About seventy miles south of here they took a couple prisoners. The night before our guys grabbed them Kina and a ghost army supposedly attacked their camp and killed most of them.”
Swan looked at Blade, at the Radisha, at Cordy again. “I missed something. Who’s Kina? And what’s got into
