Bleak Seasons

41

"Where the hell have you been?" I snarled at One-Eye. "The Company just fought through its nastiest episode in, oh, just days, and you were obviously absent every stinking second." Not that his presence would have made any difference.

One-Eye grinned. My displeasure did not bother him a bit. He had outlived or outstubborned a parade of snotnoses like me. "Shit, Kid, I had to get my Shadowmaster sticker back, didn't I? I've got a lot of work in that thing... What's the matter?"

"Huh?" For a moment I saw a little black louse scuttling across a grey landscape from a height unattainable anywhere in Dejagore, even atop the citadel, where Old Crew guys were not welcome anymore. "Never mind, runt. I'd like to kick your ass but it wouldn't do any good now. So you were out there. What became of Widowmaker and Lifetaker?" While I was arranging a quieter life for our leader those two vanished without a trace.

I wondered how Mogaba would write all this if he was keeping the Annals.

"One-Eye?"

"What?" Now he sounded irritated.

"You want to answer me? What happened to Widowmaker and Lifetaker?"

"You know something, Kid? I don't have the faintest freaking idea. And I don't care. I only had one thing on my mind. I wanted my spear back so I could use it next time that sucker ain't looking. Then I had to worry about dodging a gang of raggedyass Shadowlanders who tried to jump me. They went away somewhere. All right?"

And none of us could fathom that. Because they vanished just when the Shadowlander confidence was rockiest. Shadowspinner had his tail between his legs and his boys could have been broken.

I grumbled, "If that was the Old Man and Lady they would've kept coming till they broke the whole show wide open. Wouldn't they?"

I glared at an albino crow perched not twenty feet away. Its head was cocked. It stared at me with malign intelligence.

There were a lot of crows tonight.

Other agendas were being pursued. I was just one pawn caught up in tides of intrigue. But if we were careful the Company need not get swept away.

Mogaba and the Nar and their Taglian troops stayed busy for days. Maybe the Shadowmasters decided to make Mogaba pay for his failure to fulfill his end of the implicit bargain.

Which was just one more example of the way people down here go bugfuck when they are involved with the Black Company.

It could make a guy nervous if he thought about everybody within a thousand miles seeming to wish he'd never been born.

My guys enjoyed Mogaba's situation. And he could not squawk about their attitudes. We gave him exactly what he asked. We saved his ass and set him up so all he had to do was chase a few Shadowlanders out of town.

I had to see him almost every day at staff meetings. Again and again we showed ourselves to the soldiers, pretending to be brothers marching shoulder to shoulder against our evil foe.

Not once was anybody fooled except maybe Mogaba.

I never took it personal. I took a stance I believed the Annalists of the past would approve, just picturing Mogaba as not one of us.

We are the Black Company. We have no friends. All others are the enemy, or at best not to be trusted. That relationship with the world does not require hatred or any other emotion. It requires wariness.

Perhaps our refusal to remonstrate, or even to acknowledge Mogaba's treachery, was the final straw, or perhaps the back-breaker was his awareness that even his Nar compatriots now believed the real Captain might still live. Whatever, the ultimate and perfect warrior drifted across a boundary from beyond which he could not return. And we did not discover the truth until we had paid in treasures of pain.

It took ten days for Dejagore to return to normal if normal was our state before the great attack. Both sides had suffered terribly. I believed Shadowspinner would now just lick his wounds and let us get hungry for a while.