Fear spread before them, far exceeding their capacity for creating despair.
I liked how things were going over there now. The little wizard and his boys were running free in a land not yet prepared to resist. A land not sufficiently recovered from its earthquake horrors to be able to resist.
Still, I felt like we were rushing toward some great doom.
We had done that before. Everything had fallen into our laps till we found ourselves decimated and besieged in Dejagore.
38
Croaker took the cavalry and me and raced ahead of the army. Fleeing Shadowlanders fell to our lances. Opposition was spotty. Our foragers spread out. The idea was to scavenge whatever supplies were available quickly so we could keep the main force concentrated once it came out of the mountains.
I kept thinking how we had done this same thing after our unexpected victory at Ghoja Ford years ago. But when I mentioned that to Croaker he just shrugged and said, “This is different. There aren’t any armies they can bring up. There aren’t any new sorcerers they can bring out of the woodwork. Are there?”
“They don’t need to. Between them Longshadow and the Howler can eat us alive. If they decide to do it.”
We entered a moderate sized town that was absolutely empty of people. Nor had there been many there before our appearance in the region. The earthquake had not been kind.
We did find enough shelter to get in out of the cold. We got fires going, which was maybe not a brilliant idea tactically. Nobody warm wanted to go outside again.
This was a problem that would be universal among our troops. Hunger would be the only force capable of keeping the men moving.
It had been a week since I parted with Smoke. I missed him more than I had thought possible a week ago. I had convinced myself that I no longer needed him to deal with my pain. But that had been while he was always there and I was always out roaming the ghostworld.
When you are riding around the east end of hell, trying to keep your mind off the fact that you are freezing your ass off while starving to death, you tend to think about your other troubles.
My big one came back with a vengeance.
The only good of the venture, so far, was the humor to be found in watching Thai Dei try to keep up on that ridiculous swaybacked grey. The man was one stubborn little shit.
At least once every four hours Croaker asked me about my in-laws. I did not know anything. Thai Dei claimed he knew nothing. I reserved judgment on his veracity. Croaker took a jaundiced view toward mine.
Word came in that a Shadowlander deserter had been picked up who knew the location of an ice cave stuffed with edibles.
“You buy it?” I asked.
“Sounds like somebody thought he was going to get his throat cut and made up a story. But we’ll check it out.”
“Just when I was getting used to being warm.”
“You used to being hungry, too?”
Out we rode, and onward and onward we rode, day after day, through fields and forests and hills marred by quake effects and abandoned by the population. The Captain and I rode those giant black stallions, him outfitted in his cold Widowmaker armor and me lugging the bloody standard while Thai Dei tagged along behind like he was trying to become some sort of clown sidekick. We found the prisoner’s ice cave. Near as we could tell, it was a real treasure trove. The earthquake had dropped an avalanche down its throat. The good people of the province had been trying to open it back up. We relieved them of all that hard work and left a troop to await the coming of reinforcements hungry enough to dig for their supper. We continued on toward Kiaulune and Overlook, managing to sustain ourselves and avoid trouble until we were just forty miles north of the stricken city.
The countryside there was unmarred by disaster, quiet, orderly, almost pretty but a little too wintry for my taste. Suddenly, without warning, despite the Old Man’s crows, we ran into Shadowlander cavalry and not a man among them was in a good mood. Their charge broke us into half a dozen clumps. Whereupon a horde of infantry types tried to horn in. Lucky for us they were regional militia, poorly armed, completely inexperienced peasants. Unfortunately, it is true that some totally untrained and inexperienced dickhead can get lucky and kill you just as dead as a martial arts priest like Uncle Doj can.
I managed to get the standard set atop a knoll, the Old Man there with me inside a circle of friendly folks. “The one day you don’t wear the damned costume,” I yelled. “They wouldn’t have had the balls for this shit if you’d dressed up.” Who knows? It might have been true.
“It was getting heavy. And it’s cold and it stinks.” He shrugged into the hideous, grotesque armor. As he lowered the nasty winged helmet onto his head a pair of monster crows dropped onto his shoulders. Traceries of scarlet fire began crawling all over him. A few thousand more crows began zooming around overhead, every one bitching his little heart out.
After a chance to take in the crows, Widowmaker and the Company standard most of our attackers decided to take the rest of the day off.
The stories had to be really bad down here.
The cavalrymen were made of sterner stuff. They continued fighting. They were veterans. And Longshadow probably had them convinced we were going to roast their wives and rape their babies, then turn the rest of them into dog food and shoe leather.
But we scattered them. Before the soldiers could get carried away chasing them, the Old Man headed south again, declaring, “We have bridges to capture and chokepoints to clear.”
A few men did not heed the recall. I asked, “What about them?”
“They have a chance to serve as a valuable object lesson. Those that survive can catch up.” He was feeling hard.
He did not think about arranging care and protection for the wounded. That was not something he had overlooked ever before.
It might be that there were no Company brothers among the wounded even though we had nearly a dozen with us.
That consideration often seemed to lie at the root of his decisions, yet never so blatantly that outsiders were conscious of it. I hoped he would keep it low key. We had troubles enough.
I had seen Shadowcatch a hundred times in Smoke’s dreams. I had spent cumulative days prowling Overlook. I thought I knew the city and the fortress about as well as anyone who lived there. But I was not prepared for a reality unfiltered by Smoke’s thoughtless mind.
The remains of Kiaulune were plain hell. Famine and disease had claimed almost everyone who had not been killed by the earthquake. Longshadow, taking unwanted advice, had tried to help. Too late. But he had allowed refugees to establish themselves in the shadow of Overlook and had been making provision to care for them. In turn, those people were replacing the lost workers who had been building Overlook before the earthquake.
Very little work had gotten done since the disaster. Even Longshadow had been forced to stipulate that survival demands superseded his desire to complete his invulnerable fastness.
There were no children. Some arrangement had been made to care for them elsewhere. A clever step, uncharacteristic of the Shadowmaster. That idea had to have originated with someone else. In fact, I could think of no one in Longshadow’s coterie to whom such a thing would occur.
It looked as though the little construction effort put out lately had been directed principally at providing housing.
This would not keep up once the pressure was off. To Longshadow all the people of the Shadowlands were his to use and dispose of as he saw fit. He just wanted to keep them alive long enough to be used.
“Hell really is leaking into the world,” Croaker observed. He stared at the bleak, stinking, unwalled remains of Kiaulune. He paid no attention to the gleaming magnificence beyond the city.
I did. “We’re too damned close here, boss. We don’t have Lady to cover us.”
