Cook, Glen - Black Company 3-2 - She Is The Darkness

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She Is The Darkness
by Glen Cook
The Seventh Chronicle of the Black Company
The wind whines and howls with bitter breath. Lightning snarls and barks. Rage
is an animate force upon the plain of glittering stone. Even shadows are
afraid.
The scars of cataclysm disfigure a plain that has known only an age of dark
perfection. A jagged fissure lies like a lightning slash across its face.
Nowhere is that fissure so wide that a child could not step across but it
seems bottomless. Trailers of mist drift forth. Some bear a hint of color. Any
color clashes with the thousand blacks and greys.
At the heart of the plain stands a vast grey stronghold, unknown, older than
any written memory. One ancient tower has collapsed across the fissure. From
the heart of the fastness comes a great deep slow beat like that of a
slumbering world-heart, cracking the olden silence.
Death is eternity. Eternity is stone. Stone is silence.
Stone cannot speak but stone remembers.
1
The Old Man looked up. His quill twitched, betraying his irritation at being
interrupted. "What is it, Murgen?"
"I went for a walk with the ghost. That earth tremor we felt a while ago?"
"What about it? And don't give me none of that around-the-bush crap One-Eye's
always handing out. I don't have time for it."
"The farther south you go the worse the destruction is."
The Old Man opened his mouth, closed it to think some before he said anything
else.
Croaker, the Old Man, the Captain of the Black Company, the right-now-by-god
military dictator of Taglios and all its tributaries, dependencies and
protectorates, does not look the part. He is in his middle fifties, possibly
closer to sixty. He stands more than six feet tall. He has grown slightly
heavy during four years spent mainly in garrison. He has a high forehead with
a feeble crop of hair farther back. Lately he has been affecting a beard on
his chin. It is grizzled. So is what hair still lurks upon his head. His icy
blue eyes are deeply set, giving him a hard, scary look, like some kind of
psychopathic killer.
He does not know. Nobody ever told him. Sometimes he is hurt because people
back off. He does not understand why.
Mostly it's his eyes. They can be really spooky.
He considers himself just one of the guys. Most of the time.
If he understood it he would use his impact to its limit. His belief in the
value of creating illusions in the minds of others borders on religious
conviction.
He stood up. "Let's go for a walk, Murgen."
In the Palace it is always best to be moving if you want to keep your
conversations your own. The Palace is vast, a honeycomb networked with a
labyrinth masking countless secret passageways. I have been mapping those but
could not winkle them all out in a lifetime even if we were not heading south
any day.
The point is, there is always a chance our friends will be listening to
anything we say.
We have been very successful at driving our enemies out beyond arm's reach.
Thai Dei picked us up at the doorway. The Old Man grimaced. He has no personal
prejudice against my bodyguard and brother-in-law but he abhors the fact that
so many Company brothers have acquired similar companions, none of whom are
bound to his direct command. He does not trust the Nyueng Bao. He never has,
never will and cannot explain clearly why.
He does understand that he was not there in hell's forge when the bonds were
hammered into existence. He will stipulate that. He has done his time in other
hells. He was suffering one at that time.
I made a small gesture to Thai Dei. He dropped back a step, symbolically
acknowledging our need for privacy rather than actually accepting it. He would
hear everything we had to say anyway.
So every word we said would be spoken in the dialect of the Jewel City Beryl,
which lies six thousand miles beyond the edge of any world Thai Dei can even
imagine.
I wondered why Croaker bothered walking when he was going to use an alien
tongue. No Taglian would understand a word. "Tell me," he said.
"I walked with the ghost. I went south. I made the routine checks. I was just
following the daily ritual." I understood his desire to walk. Soulcatcher.
Soulcatcher understood the Jewel Cities dialects. She would have more trouble
eavesdropping if she had to find us first.
"Thought I told you to ease up. You're spending too much time out there. It'll
hook you. It's too easy to shake loose from the ache. That's why I don't go
anymore."
I masked my pain. "That's not a problem, boss." He would not believe me. He
knew just how much Sarie meant to me, how much I missed her. How much I hurt.
"I'm handling it. Anyway, what I want you to know is, the farther south you
look the worse the damage done by that earthquake gets."
"Am I supposed to be concerned? Dare I hope that you'll tell me the
Shadowmaster's house fell in on his head?"
"You can hope all you want but you won't hear it from me. Not now. His faults
don't include being a bad architect."
"I had a feeling you wouldn't tell me what I wanted to hear. You're no fun at
all that way."
Part of my job as Annalist is to remind my superiors that they are not gods.
"It didn't happen this time. Overlook came through almost unscathed. But
Kiaulune was destroyed. Thousands were killed. The way disasters go, thousands
more will die from hunger, disease and exposure." The heart of winter was fast
approaching.
Kiaulune is the southernmost city of men. Its name means Shadow Gate. When he
came out of nowhere two decades ago and made himself master of the province,
the Shadowmaster Longshadow changed the name to Shadowcatch. Only the peoples
of the Shadowlands, who are inclined to avoid the Shadowmaster's displeasure,
actually employ names enforced upon them by their enslavement.
"Is that good news?"
"It'll sure slow down construction work on Overlook. Longshadow won't like it
but he's going to have to take time out to help his subjects. Otherwise he'll
run out of people to do his work for him."
Our parade continued slowly through busy hallways. This part of the Palace had
been given over to the war effort completely. Now people were packing. Soon we
would be heading south, bound toward a major and possibly final collision with
the armies of the Shadowmasters. Most of our forces were in transit already, a
slow and difficult process. It takes ages to move large numbers a great
distance.
The men in these offices had been laying the groundwork for years.
Croaker asked, "Are you saying we don't need to get in any big hurry?"
"There's no need now. The quake crippled him."
"There wasn't any pressing need before the quake. We could've gotten there
before he finished his oversized sand castle."
True. We were starting the campaign now mostly because the Captain and his
woman were so thirsty for revenge.
Add the name Murgen to that list. My taste for vengeance was newer and
bloodier. My wife was a more recent victim.
Longshadow and Narayan Singh would pay for Sarie's death. Especially Narayan
Singh.
You living saint of the Stranglers, your nightwalking companion now hunts you,
too.
"Something that hurts him doesn't really change anything at our end."
I agreed. "True. Though it does give us more flexibility."
"Yet it makes sense to jump them while they're stunned. How widespread was the
damage? Was it just Kiaulune?"
"There's heavy damage everywhere south of the Dandha Presh. It gets worse as
you go farther south. Those people won't have much energy to spend trying to
stop an invasion."
"All the more reason to stay on schedule. We'll stomp them while they're
down."
The Old Man was bitter and vindictive. Comes with the job, I guess. And
because of all the evils done to him.
"You ready to travel?" he asked.
"Personally? Me and my whole household have our preparations made. You name
the day and we'll be on the road." My own bitterness leaked through.
I kept telling myself not to let the need for vengeance sink roots too deep. I
dared not let it become an obsession.
Croaker pursed his lips, sour for a moment. My household includes not only
Thai Dei but Sarie's mother, Ky Gota, and Uncle Doj, who is not really
anybody's uncle but is a family attachment nonetheless. Croaker refuses to
trust them. But he does not trust anybody who has not been a brother of the
Company for years.
Proof was immediate. "Murgen, I want you to add the Radisha to the list of
people you check regularly. I'm betting that as soon as we clear the city wall
she'll start fixing to break our hearts."
I did not argue. It seemed likely.
All through our history the Black Company has suffered the ingratitude of our
employers. Usually those blackguards received ample cause to regret their
villainy. This time there was a good chance we could subvert the effort before
the Radisha Drah and her brother, the Prahbrindrah Drah, could deal us any
major treachery.
Right now the Radisha and Prince have to restrain themselves. As long as
Longshadow survives, the Company will remain their lesser fear.
I asked, "You looked at those books yet?"
"Which books?"
He could be exasperating. I snapped, "The books I risked my precious ass to
steal back from Soulcatcher the other night. The lost Annals that are supposed
to tell us why every damned fool lord and priest in this, end of the world is
scared shitless of the Black Company."
"Oh. Those books."
"Yeah. Those . . . " I realized that he was ragging me.
"I haven't had time, Murgen. Although I did find out that we're going to need
a translator. They aren't written in modern Taglian."
"I was afraid of that."
"We're taking the ghostwalker south with us."
The sudden shift surprised me. Lately he has been so paranoid he will not
mention Smoke, by name or otherwise, for any reason, even in a non-Taglian
language.
There is always a crow around somewhere.
I replied. "I assumed we would. The resource is too valuable to leave here."
"We don't want anyone to know if we can help it."
"Uhm?"
"The Radisha already wonders how come we find him so interesting that we'll
take care of him and keep him alive. She no longer thinks there's any chance
he'll recover. If she puts much thought into it she might start adding things
up." He shrugged. "I'll talk to One-Eye. You two can smuggle him out when
nobody's looking."
"One more thing to do in my copious spare time."
"Hey. Enjoy it while you can. Soon we'll get to sleep for ages."
He is not a religious man.
2
"I got to do everything," One-Eye grumbled. "Anything that's got to be done,
just stick it on old One-Eye. He'll take care of it."
I sneered. "That's only if you can't find Murgen first."
"I'm too old for this shit, Kid. I ought to be retired."
The little black man had a point. According to the Annals he is about two
hundred years old, still alive mostly because of his own clever sorcery. And
good luck beyond what any human being deserves.
The two of us were inside a dark circular stairway, lugging a body down on a
litter. Smoke did not weigh much but One-Eye made the job a pain in the ass
anyway. "You about ready to trade off?" I asked. I had the uphill end. I am
more than six feet tall. One-Eye goes five feet if you stand him on a thick
book. But he is a stubborn little shit who can never admit that he is wrong.
For some reason One-Eye had it in his head that the downhill end of a litter
would be the easy one to handle on a stairway.
"Yeah. I think. When we get down to the next landing."
I grinned in the darkness. That would leave us with just one story to go. Then
I grumbled, "I hope that damned Sleepy is on time."
Though barely eighteen Sleepy is a four year veteran of the Company. He went
through the fire of Dejagore with us. He still has a tendency to be late and a
little irresponsible but, hell, he is still awful young.
Youth made him the best man to be driving a wagon around Taglios in the middle
of the night if you did not want to attract attention. A Vehdna Taglian, he
could pass as an apprentice easily. He could not be expected to know what he
was doing. Apprentices do what they are told. Their masters seldom feel
obliged to explain to them.
The kid would have no clue what he was up to tonight. If he arrived on time he
would not guess his part for years. He was supposed to wander off before the
wagon acquired its mysterious burden.
One-Eye would take over after we loaded Smoke. He would explain, if he found
himself in a position where that became necessary, that the corpse back there
was Goblin. No one would know the difference. Smoke had not been seen at all
for four years and seldom publicly before that. And Goblin had not been around
for a while because the Old Man sent him off on a mission weeks ago.
Anybody running into One-Eye would know who he was right away. He is the most
recognizable member of the Company. His ugly old black hat gives him away even
in the dark. It is so damned filthy it glows.
I exaggerate only slightly.
People would believe One-Eye because everyone in Taglios knows the nasty
little runt runs with a toad-faced little white wizard called Goblin.
The trick would be to distract them from Smoke's skin color. Or One-Eye could
put a glamor on him and make him actually look enough like Goblin to deceive
the Taglian eye.
Eventually somebody would discover that Smoke no longer was in the Palace.
Probably later. By accident. When somebody stumbled through the network of
confusion spells surrounding the room where Smoke had lain hidden for years.
"Somebody" would be the Radisha Drah. She and Uncle Doj are the only people
besides me and Croaker and One-Eye who know Smoke is still alive, if
unutterably lost in the land of coma.
He is more useful now than he ever was when he was conscious and the secret
court wizard.
Smoke had been as thoroughly craven as it is possible for a human to be.
We reached the landing. One-Eye damned near dropped his end of the litter. He
was in a hurry to take a break. "Let me know when you're ready," I told him.
"You don't got to go smart-assing me, Kid." He muttered a few words in a dead
tongue, which was totally unnecessary and entirely for show. He could have
said the same thing in Taglian and have achieved the same result. Which was
that a globe of shimmering swamp gas materialized above his ugly hat.
"Did I say anything?"
"You don't got to talk, Kid. You're grinning like a shiteating dog." But he
was puffing too hard to keep it up. "Old fart's heavier than he looks, isn't
he?"
He was. Maybe because he was all lard after four years asleep, getting his
sustenance as soup and gravy and any other sludge I can spoon down him.
He is a mess to take care of. I would let him croak if he was not so damned
useful.
The Company wastes no love on this man.
Maybe I like him better unconscious than conscious, though we never butted
heads personally. I have heard so many horror stories about his cowardice that
I cannot say much in his favor at all. Well, he was a modestly effective fire
marshal when he was awake. Fire is an enemy Taglios knows far more intimately
than any remote Shadowmaster.
If he had not been such a chickenshit and gone over to Longshadow he would not
be in the sad shape he is now.
For reasons unclear even to One-Eye, Smoke's comatose spirit is anchored to
his flesh very loosely. Making a connection with his ka, which is what they
might call it around here, is easy. It takes instructions well. I can connect
with him, detach from my flesh and ride him almost anywhere, to see almost
anything. Which is why he is so special to us today. Which is why it is so
critical to keep everything about him under wraps.
If we succeed in this dark war, victory will come largely because we can "walk
with the ghost."
"I'm ready to go," One-Eye said.
"You come back fast for an old fart."
"You keep running your jaw, Kid, you're never gonna get a chance to find out
what it's like to be old enough to deserve respect but not to get none from
pups like you."
"Don't go picking on me because Goblin ran out on you."
"Where the hell is that stunted mouse turd, anyway?"
I knew. Or thought I knew. I walk with the ghost. One-Eye did not need to
know, though, so I did not clue him in. "Lift the damned litter, limberdick."
"I just know you're going to enjoy life as a polecat, Kid."
We hoisted the litter. Smoke made a gurgling sound. Foamy spit dribbled from
the corner of his mouth. "Hustle up. I need to get his mouth cleaned out
before he drowns himself."
One-Eye saved his breath. We clumped down the stairs. Smoke began making
strangling noises. I kicked the door open and went through without looking
outside first. We got into the street.
"Put him down," I snapped. "Then cover us while I take care of him." Who knew
what might be watching? Taglian nights conceal countless curious eyes.
Everyone wants to know what the Black Company is doing. We take it as a given
that some of those are people we do not even know yet.
Paranoia is a way of life.
I knelt beside the litter, tipped it a little and turned Smoke's head. It
flopped like he had no bones in his neck. Smoke gurgled and hacked some more.
"Hush," One-Eye said.
I looked up. A tall Shadar watchman was headed our way, carrying a lantern.
One of the Old Man's innovations, the night-time foot patrols have crippled
enemy espionage efforts. Now our creativity was about to turn around on us.
The turbaned soldier walked past so close his grey pants actually brushed me.
But he sensed nothing.
One-Eye is no master sorcerer but he does a hell of a job when he
concentrates.
Smoke made that noise again.
The Shadar stopped, looked back. His eyes widened. They were about all that
could be seen between his turban and his massive beard. I do not know what he
saw but he touched his forehead and swept his fingers in a quick half circle
ending over his heart. That was a ward against evil common to all the peoples
of Taglios.
He moved on hurriedly.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Never mind," One-Eye said. "Let's get him loaded." The wagon was waiting
right where Sleepy was supposed to leave it. "He's going to report something.
He'll have his whole family here in a few minutes."
The watchmen were equipped with whistles. Our man remembered his and started
tooting as One-Eye lifted his end of the litter. In seconds another whistle
answered. "He going to keep that shit up?" One-Eye asked.
"I'll lay him on his side. The phlegm should drain off. But you're the guy who
knows the medical stuff. If he's coming down with pneumonia you better start
working on him now."
"Go teach granny to suck eggs, Kid. Just shove the little bastard in the
wagon, then get your ass back through that door."
"Shit. I think I forgot to wedge it open."
"I'd call you a dumb shit but you keep ragging me about stating the obvious.
Unh!" He swung his end of the litter into the bed of the wagon. Good boy
Sleepy had remembered to leave the tailgate down, exactly as he had been
instructed. "I remembered for you."
"You were the last one out anyway." Damn, would I be glad when Goblin came
back and One-Eye could get back to feuding with him. I shoved my end of the
litter.
One-Eye was scrambling up to the driver's seat already. "Don't forget to get
that gate up."
I twisted Smoke's shoulders so his mouth would drain, raised the tailgate and
dropped the oak pins into their slots. "You check on him as soon as you're
clear."
"Shut up and get out of here."
Whistles were shrieking all around us now. Sounded like every watchman on duty
was closing in.
Their interest was going to attract that of others. I ran for the postern
door. Steel tires began to rattle on cobblestones behind me.
One-Eye was going to get a chance to test our cover story.
3
It is a long trail from that postern to the apartment I call home. On the way
I stopped by Croaker's cell to let him know what had happened while we were
getting Smoke out of the house. He asked, "You see anything besides the
Shadar?"
"No. But the uproar is going to attract attention. If they hear that One-Eye
was involved people interested in us will start poking around. They'll be sure
something was going on even if One-Eye sells his story to the watchmen."
Croaker grunted. He stared at the papers he had been trying to read. He was
bone-tired. "Nothing we can do about it now. Go get some sleep. We're going
ourselves in a day or two."
"Uhn." I did not look forward to traveling, especially during wintertime. "I'm
not really looking forward to this."
"Hey. I'm older and fatter than you are."
"But you'll be going toward something. Lady is down there."
He grunted unenthusiastically. Any more you had to wonder about his commitment
to his woman. Ever since the trouble with Blade . . . None of my business.
"Good night, Murgen."
"Yeah. Same to you, chief." He did not want to be civil, that was fine with
me.
I headed for my apartment, though there was nothing for me there but a bed
that would give me no rest. With Sarie gone the place was a wasteland of the
heart.
I closed the door behind me, looked around like maybe she would jump out
laughing and tell me it was all a bad joke. But the joke was not over yet.
Mother Gota still had not finished cleaning up the mess left by the Strangler
raid. And, pushy though she was, she had not touched anything in my work area,
where I was still sorting the burned remains of several of these Annals.
I must have gone drifting with my thoughts. Suddenly I was aware that I was
not alone. I got a knife out in half a heartbeat.
I was not in trouble. The three people staring at me belonged by family right.
They were my in-laws, Sarie's brother Thai Dei with his arm in a sling, Uncle
Doj and Mother Gota. Of the three only the old woman ever said much. And
nothing she said was ever anything I wanted to hear. She could find the bad
side of anything and complain about it forever. "What?" I asked.
Uncle Doj countered, "Did you drift away again?" He sounded troubled. "When
did you go? Dejagore?"
"It wasn't that. That hasn't happened for a while." All three continued to
stare at me like I had something hanging out of my nose. "What?"
Uncle Doj said, "There is something different about you."
"Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant more to me than -- "
I clamped down on the rage. I turned toward the door. No good. Smoke was in a
wagon headed south. They continued to stare at me.
It was like this every time I came back after going out without letting Thai
Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of their sight.
That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of feeling Croaker
got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao. Sarie being gone left a
vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my heart. She had been the soul that
made this weird bunch work.
Uncle Doj asked, "Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?"
The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises associated with his
two-handed longsword style of fighting could become almost as restful and free
of pain as was walking with the ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me
since I became part of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into
the sort of trance the Path requires.
"Not now. Not tonight. I'm tired. Every one of my muscles aches." Yet another
way I was going to miss Sarie. That green-eyed angel had been an artist at
massaging out the accumulated tensions of the day.
We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well.
Now Mother Gota demanded, "What you doing, you, you hide from your own?" in
her abominable Taglian. She refuses to believe she does not speak the language
like a native.
"Work." Even without the Old Man's paranoia I would have kept Smoke to myself.
Hell, I'm taking a huge risk just mentioning him in these pages even though
I'm scribbling them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let
alone reads.
Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her discovering
Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha and the Shadowmaster
away.
Catcher was in the Palace not long ago. She stole those Annals that Smoke hid
before his disaster. I am pretty sure she did not notice Smoke himself. The
network of confusion spells around him is supposedly extremely subtle on its
fringes, so that even a player as powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the
misdirection unless she was really focused on finding something like it.
I told them, "I just talked to the Captain. He said the headquarters group
will leave tomorrow or the next day. You're still determined to go?"
Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me, "We too have
a debt to repay."
The few material possessions the three shared were packed and piled by the
apartment door already. They had been ready to go for days. I was the one who
needed to focus and finalize my preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had
said I was ready to travel.
"I'm going to bed now. Don't wake me up for anything but the end of the
world."
4
Sleep is not an escape from pain. In sleep there are dreams. In sleep I go
places more horrible than those I walk when I am awake.
In dreams I still go back to Dejagore, to the death and disease, the murder
and the cannibalism and the darkness. In dreams Sarie still lives, whatever
the horror of the place she walks.
That night my dreams did not restore me to the wonder of Sarie's company.
I remember only one. It came first as a shadow, an all enveloping malice full
of playful cruelty, as though I was sinking into the soul of a spider that
enjoyed tormenting its victims. The malice did not take note of me. I passed
through to its other side. And there the dream wrenched sideways, twisted, and
took on life, though it was a life entirely of black and white and greys.
I was in a place of despair and death. The sky was lead. Bodies rotted around
me. The stench was strong enough to drive the buzzards away. The sick
vegetation was coated with what looked like thick grasshopper spit. Only one
thing moved, a distant flock of mocking crows.
Even amidst my horror and revulsion I felt that the scene was familiar. I
tried to hang on to that thought, to pursue it, to sustain my sanity by
ferreting out why I would know a place I had never been. I stumbled and
tripped across a plain of bones. Pyramids of skulls were my milemarks.
My foot slipped on a baby's skull that spun and went rattling off to the side.
I fell. And fell. And then I was in another place.
I am here. I am the dream. I am the way to life.
Sarie was there.
She smiled at me, then she was gone, but I clung to her smile as the only
thing capable of letting me keep my head above the waters of a sea of
insanity.
I was in that other place. It was a place of golden caverns where old men sat
beside the way, frozen in time, alive but unable to move so much as an
eyelash. Their insanity slashed the air like a million dueling razors. Some
were covered with glittering webs of ice, as though a million fairy silkworms
had spun them into cocoons of delicate threads of frozen water. An enchanted
forest of icicles hung from the cavern roof.
I tried to dash forward, past the old men, to get out of that place. I ran as
you run in dreams, slowly going nowhere.
And then the horror worsened as I realized that I knew some of those mad old
men.
I ran harder, into the treacly resistance of animate evil laughter.
I swung wildly at whoever was touching me, flung my hand under my pillow to
recover the dagger hidden there. A powerful blow slammed my wrist as it came
into the light. A strong voice snapped, "Murgen."
I focused. Uncle Doj stood over me. He looked grave, troubled. Thai Dei stood
near the foot of my bed, where he could take me from behind if I jumped up at
Doj. Mother Gota stood in the doorway, agitated.
Uncle Doj said, "You were screaming in a language none of us knows. We found
you wrestling with the darkness when we arrived."
"I was having a nightmare."
"I know."
"Hunh?"
"That was obvious."
"Sarie was there."
For one instant Mother Gota's face became a mask of rage. She muttered
something softly and too quickly for me to follow, but I did catch the name
Hong Tray and the word "witch." Sahra's grandmother Hong, long dead, was the
only reason her family had accepted our relationship. Hong Tray had given her
blessing.
Ky Dam, Sahra's grandfather, also gone now, had claimed his wife possessed the
second sight. Perhaps. I had seen her forecasts work out during the siege of
Dejagore. Mostly they had been very sybilline, very vague, though.
I had heard Sarie described as a witch, too, on one occasion.
"What is that smell?" I asked. The shakes had left me. Already I could recall
details of the nightmare only through determined effort. "There a dead mouse
in here?"
Uncle Doj frowned. "This was not one of your journeys through time?"
"No. It was more like a trip to hell."
"Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?" The Path was Doj's religion, his
main reason for being, it sometimes seemed.
"Not right away. I want to get this down while I still remember it all. It
might be important. Some of it seemed familiar." I swung my feet to the floor,
aware that I was still being scrutinized intently.
There was a lot more of that now that Sarie was gone.
It was not yet time to make a point of it.
I went to my writing area, settled and got to work. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei
found their wooden practice swords and began to loosen up on the other side of
the room.
Mother Gota continued to talk to herself as she got busy cleaning up. As long
as she was in the mood I even let her help with my mess, offering suggestions
from the corner of my mouth just often enough to keep her simmering.
5
The great dark ragged square settled slowly through the air, rocking
unpredictably in winter's icy breath. A screech of pain soared up above the
complaints of the wind. Twice the tattered carpet tried to set down atop the
tower where the Shadowmaster stood waiting. Twice the wind threatened it with
disaster. The carpet's master howled again and descended fifty feet to a
larger and safer landing area atop Overlook's massive wall.
The Shadowmaster cursed the weather. This winter gloom was almost as bad as
night. Here, there, shadows came to life in unpredictable corners. All his
labor and genius could not take away every cranny where they might lurk. In
his ideal world he would halt the sun itself directly above the fortress where
it could sear the heart out of the night and slay the terrors that lurked
within.
Longshadow did not go down to meet his henchman the Howler. He would make the
deformed little cripple come to him. In conversation he could pretend that
they were equals but that was not true. A day would come when the Howler would
have to be disposed of altogether. But that time was a long way off yet. Those
damnable nuisances from the Black Company had to be buried first. Taglios had
to be chastised with fire and shadow. Its priests and princes had to be
expunged. Senjak had to be taken and milked of her every dark secret, then she
had to be destroyed, utterly and for all time. Her mad, flighty sister
Soulcatcher had to be hunted down, murdered, and her flesh thrown to wild
dogs.
Longshadow giggled. Much of that he had said aloud. When he was alone he did
not mind verbalizing his thoughts.
His list of people to be rid of grew almost daily.
Here were two more now.
The first two faces to rise from the stairwell were those of the Strangler
Narayan Singh and the child his Deceivers called the Daughter of Night.
Longshadow met her eye only for a moment. He turned to look out over the
devastation north of Overlook. A few fires still burned in the ruins.
The child was barely four but her eyes were windows to the very heart of
darkness. It seemed almost as if her monster goddess Kina sat behind those
hollow pupils.
She was almost as frightening as those living wisps of darkness that, because
he could command them, gave him the title Shadowmaster. She was a child only
in flesh. The thing inside was ages older and darker than the dirty, skinny
little man who served as her guardian.
Narayan Singh had nothing to say. He stood at the edge of the parapet and
shuddered in the chill wind. The child joined him. She did not speak, either,
but she showed no interest in the ruined city. Her attention was on him.
For half a heartbeat Longshadow feared she could read his mind.
He stirred his long, bony frame toward the stairwell, concerned that Howler
was leaving him alone too long with these bizarre creatures. He was startled
to find the Nar general Mogaba, his leading commander, coming up the steps
behind the little sorcerer, engaged in a vigorous conversation in an
unfamiliar tongue.
"Well?"
The Howler was floating in the air, as he often did even when not piloting his
carpet. He spun himself around. "The story is the same from here to the Plain
of Charandaprash. And east and west as well. The quake spared no one. Though
the damage becomes smaller the farther north one travels."
Longshadow turned instantly, stared south. Even in winter's advancing gloom
that plain up there seemed to glitter. Now it even seemed to mock him, and for
a moment he regretted the impulse that had led him to challenge it so many
years ago. He had gained all the power he had dreamed of then and had not
known a moment of peace since.
By its very existence the place beyond Shadowgate taunted him. Root of his
power, it was also his bane.
He saw no evidence that the quake had disturbed anything there. The gate, he
believed, should be proof against all disasters. Only one tool could open the
way from the outside in.
He turned back to find the child smiling, one white tooth showing like a
diminutive vampire fang. She combined the scariest effects of both her
mothers.
Howler shrieked a shriek he cut short partway through. "The destruction leaves
us no choice but to defer the labors of empire till the populace can sustain
them once more."
Longshadow raised a bony, gloved hand to his face, to adjust the mask he
always wore in company. "What did you say?" He must have heard wrong.
"Consider the city before you, my friend. A city which exists only to build
this fortress ever taller and stronger. But those who live there must eat in
order to have the strength to work. They must have shelter from the elements,
else they weaken and die. They must have some warmth and water that does not
lead them to their deaths with dysentery."
摘要：

SheIsTheDarknessbyGlenCookTheSeventhChronicleoftheBlackCompanyThewindwhinesandhowlswithbitterbreath.Lightningsnarlsandbarks.Rageisananimateforceupontheplainofglitteringstone.Evenshadowsareafraid.Thescarsofcataclysmdisfigureaplainthathasknownonlyanageofdarkperfection.Ajaggedfissurelieslikealightnings...

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