Bleak Seasons

24

Goblin and One-Eye had chosen to stay close to me. The real Goblin and One-Eye. I checked every few minutes to make sure. Their attention was on the hills, not the excitement across town or any of their own schemes. Strange lights moved out there.

A band of southerners sent out earlier returned at a gallop, half their number missing. They flew as though devils worse than their boss were after them. They dared ride the way they did only because Stormshadow had been obsessive when she leveled the plain and because there was light from the city.

Fires were burning. Only a few so far, but fires.

Sparkle told me, "They're pulling out down below."

I leaned over and looked. Nobody tried to pick me off. Maybe they thought I was another ghost.

Sure enough, the Shadowlanders were going, leaving us all those wonderful grapnels without ropes, for us to dump on our "maybe we can use these someday" pile.

One-Eye said, "Guess we can put up our swords and go back to our tonk games now."

Overlooking the fact that Dejagore was being invaded elsewhere, I observed, "This is the second time you've come out with that silliness. What moron is going to play with you? Can't be anybody that dumb still alive." One-Eye cheats at cards. And he cheats badly. He gets caught every time. Nobody will play with him.

"Hey, Murgen. Listen. I've reformed. Really. Never again will I dishonor my talent to... "

Why listen? He's said it all before, countless times. The first thing we do after we swear a recruit into the Company is warn him not to play cards with One-Eye.

A party of Shadowlanders withdrawn from my sector headed for the hills. They all had torches. It looked like the Shadowmaster himself might be driving them.

"Cletus! Longinus! You guys far enough along that you can drop a barrage on that crowd?" The brothers were repairing their engines as fast as they could. Two were ready, cocked and loaded. Not much of a barrage. One-Eye asked, "Why do that?"

"Why not? We might get lucky. And can we piss off Shadowspinner more than he already is? He's already vowed to kill us all."

The ballistas thumped. The shafts they hurled did not hit the Shadowmaster. Distractedly, he replied with a spear of energy that dissolved several cubic yards of wall far from any of my guys.

The racket from across town kept getting louder. Some seemed closer than the far wall.

"They're inside," Sparkle said.

"A lot of them," Bucket agreed. "This could get to be a big cleanup job." I liked that positive thinking.

I shrugged. Mogaba liked to keep the cleanups for himself and the Nar and their Taglians.

Fine with me. Mogaba can eat all the pain he can swallow.

I really wanted to take a nap. This long day just kept getting longer. Oh, well. Soon enough I would get to sleep forever.

A short while later I got word that small groups of southerners were in the streets murdering anybody they could catch.

"Sir?"

"Sleepy. What's up, youngster?" Sleepy was a Taglian Shadar we swore into the Company just before I decided to take up this pen. He always looked like he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He also looked like he was about fourteen years old, which was possible. He was paranoid in the extreme, apparently for good reason. He was a good-looking youth. And pretty boys are fair game amongst Taglian men of all three major religious groups. The Stranglers use their more attractive sons to lure victims to their deaths.

Different land, different customs. You may not like them but you do have to live with them. Sleepy liked our ways better than his own.

"Sir," he said, "the Nar aren't trying to keep the southerners from heading this way. They don't bother them at all anymore after they get through and off the wall as long as they don't head into Mogaba's barracks area."

"Is that deliberate?" Bucket asked.

Someone muttered, "Now ask a stupid question."

"What do you think?" One-Eye snapped. "This is the last straw. If that bigheaded, self-important dick shows his face around here... "

"Save it, One-Eye." This was hard to accept. But I could see Mogaba being capable of channeling the enemy our way so as to resolve questions of precedence inside the Company. His morality would allow him to picture it as a brilliant solution to several problems. "Instead of standing around bitching about it how about we do some thinking? Best way to fix Mogaba would be to shove his plan up his ass, no grease."

While the others tried to manage that difficult exercise—thinking—I questioned Sleepy more closely. Unfortunately, he could not add much but the general routes the southerners were using to push deeper into the city.

You couldn't blame the Shadowlanders. Most soldiers of most times jump at the chance to go where resistance is weakest.

Maybe we could use that to pull some into some sort of killing pocket.

I even got a chuckle out of my predicament. "I bet Croaker would have seen this coming a month ago, as paranoid as he was about supposed friends and allies."

A nearby crow squawked agreement.

I should have considered the possibility. I really should have. Farfetched is not the same as impossible. I should have had something planned.

One-Eye became as serious as ever he gets. "You know what this means? If the kid is right?"

"The Company is at war with itself?"

The little guy waved that off like it was just another annoying gnat of reality. "Suppose Mogaba is giving them a golden bridge so they can get rid of us for him? They still have to get through the pilgrims to reach us."

I didn't need to think long to see what he meant. "That asshole. He going to make them kill Shadowlanders in self-defense. He's going to use them up killing his enemies for him."

"Maybe he's a bigger snake than anybody thought," Bucket growled. "It's for sure he's changed a lot since Gea-Xle."

"This ain't right," I muttered, although swords would enter the fight on our side whether or not they wanted to. Other than a few small skirmishes with lost invaders during past attacks the worst that had happened to the Nyueng Bao was that their pilgrimage had gotten them trapped in the middle of somebody else's war. From the first clash of steel they had worked hard to maintain their neutrality.

Shadowspinner has his spies in the city. He would know the Nyueng Bao had no interest in antagonizing him.

"What do you think they'll do?" Goblin asked. "The Nyueng Bao, I mean." His voice sounded odd. How much beer had he put away?

"How the hell would I know? Depends on how they see things. If they think Mogaba dragged them into it on purpose it might get unhealthy to belong to the Company. Mogaba could see this as a chance to squish us into a crack between a rock and a hard place. I'd better go see their Speaker and let him know what's happening. Bucket. Make up a twenty man patrol and go looking for southerners. See if Sleepy is right. One-Eye, go with him. Spot for him and cover our guys. Sparkle, you watch things here. Send Sleepy after me if it gets too much to handle."

Nobody argued. When things get tight the guys do become less fractious.

I descended the stairway to the street.