Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

SHAGGY DOG BRIDGE:

A BLACK COMPANY STORY

GLEN COOK

TO PARAPHRASE A bit player named Rusty, “Shit happens. Sometimes no matter how much you dog-gnaw the bone you don’t get it to make no sense, ‘specially the who done what why.”

So it was with the shaggy dog bridge.

THE GREENS AND grays around and below me had become perilously hypnotic. Then a buccaneer deer fly snagged a big-ass bite just west of my Adam’s apple.

I let go the rope to take a swipe. Naturally, I missed the agile little buzzard.

Better lucky than smart, sometimes. My lifeline caught me. I stood on my head on a hundred feet of air while the guys up top lowered away. The dickheads on the stone shelf below grinned but tucked the needle in the trick bag for later.

I lack the born-again haughteur of a cat. No way could I manage a pretense of deliberate intent.

“Hold still.” One-Eye smeared something stinky on the bug bite. “That will kill any eggs.”

“Admirable caution,” I grumbled. We had yet to see the botfly horror in these parts, but the people hunting us would deploy them gleefully if they had some and could get them to bite Black Company guys exclusively.

Eight men crowded the ledge. More would follow me down. At the narrow end Rusty told Robin, “I ain’t carrying that dumbass crab catcher out’n here, he gets hisself hurt.”

Rusty was a FNG, with us only six months. He had no hope of becoming a Fucking Old Guy. He was an asshole and a bully. His type never prospers with us.

First aid complete, One-Eye faced the view.

“Sure is something. So much green.” The Rip. To the left it was a thousand feet more to the bottom. To the right, cliff collapses had choked the canyon partially, so long ago that heavy forest cloaked the fill.

One-Eye gave his filthy black hat a quarter turn, ‘To confuse the enemy,’ and said, “Something ain’t right, Croaker. I smell something gone off.”

His wizard’s sniffer was why Elmo had brought him along.

BEFORE HUMANITY BEGAN counting time, and maybe before there was any humanity to count it, something weird smacked the living shit out of this end of the world. Maybe a god swung a cosmic cleaver. Maybe some natural force acted up. Whatever, a knife-edge wound slashed the earth for seven hundred miles, across the grain, through mountains and forests, swamps and plains, often more than a thousand feet deep, never more than an eighth of a mile wide. It drained lakes and shifted rivers. Our side, the west, boasted hundreds of square miles of dense hardwood forest on rounded mountains with deep valleys between. Tough traveling. From what I could see the east side was exactly the same.

We were on the run. Bad people were after us, in no special hurry. We were nuisances. They had bigger fish in the pan, like overrunning the unconquered civilized world. They pushed just hard enough to keep us from wriggling loose.

We had been herded here, to be pinned against the Rip. We would cross only if we abandoned our wagons, animals, equipment, our crippled and sick. First, though, we had to find a way down this side, then up the other.

Rusty belonged to a faction disgruntled because the feeble and dying were sucking up resources that could be better used to keep him chubby.

Whittle said, “I gettin’ weak-kneed in the ’membrance, some, but seems like dere was you all graveyard sick jes’ las’ spring. De buzzards was roostin’ on your shoulders.” Whittle whittled while he talked. He could lure some peculiar folk art out of plain dead wood.

Robin caught Rusty’s wrist. Whittle was not just a master at finding hideous things hidden inside chunks of wood. He was a master at letting out the ugly stuff inside people.

Elmo declaimed, “Gentlemen, save it for our enemies.”

We had plenty, including several Taken.

One-Eye went into a trance, for sure smelling something not right.

I exchanged looks with Robin. The boy was Rusty’s favorite victim… and his only excuse for a friend.

Some relationships answer only to their own secret logic.

Robin showed a flash of private pain. He knew there was a pool. How long would Rusty last?

Rusty shook him off.

Whittle rose from his couch of broken granite. “First news you know, you goin’ to be blessed to fine out what pain an’ sufferin’ is all about.”

Elmo interposed himself. “That’s it. Knock it off.”

Whittle leaned around him. “First time you wink loud.” He jerked a thumb toward some crows above the far side of the gorge.

One-Eye blurted, “It’s all illusion!”

Elmo snapped, “What is?” He was on edge. If we did not find an out soon our next all-Company assembly would happen at the bottom of a shallow mass grave. The Rip left no room to run. Unless…

Elmo was convinced that the ‘unless’ was his to create.

Escape was sure to be expensive. We would take nothing but personal weapons and what we could carry or wear. It would become pure march or die.

Whisper, the Taken managing the hunters, was enjoying the cat and mouse. We had messed her up for years. But she had us now.

One-Eye, always drowning in showers of self-delusion, suddenly wanted to call shenanigans.

Elmo loomed fierce, as only a natural born first sergeant can. “Talk, runt. Straight. I’m fresh out of patience for witch-man talk-around.”

He was displacing his irritation with Rusty, but scapegoating a sorcerer can become a less than profitable exercise.

One-Eye had looked past the moment. He had seen something to make him nervous. “That woods mostly isn’t real. It’s the most persistent daylight illusion I’ve ever seen but from up close you can tell.” His old black face twisted. He was puzzled.

The troops stayed quiet. Sorcery encountered in strange country never bodes well. It is a definite conversation stopper.

One-Eye scowled at the Rip some more.

Elmo prodded, “Any day now.”

“Sometimes even sergeants need to be patient.”

Certainly not their nature but this one let a few minutes glide. Then One-Eye sighed, sagged under the weight of the world. “I’m not strong enough to see inside. We have to go look.”

Rusty barked, “We ain’t out here to go poking sticks in no hornet nests.”

Elmo glowered. “That’s exactly why we’re here, moron. The name says it. Recon. We look. We poke. We find out.”

And we might ought to get on with looking for our latest way out.

For centuries the Company has found one. Always.

This was the twentieth-something search but my first. I was ‘too valuable’ for grunt work. I had invited myself on the sneak and had stayed out of sight till it was too late for Elmo to send me back… and too late for me to admit that I had made a mistake.

The view of the Rip, though, was amazing.

Nervously, the squad helped One-Eye study the landscape. He became fixated on the Rip to our right. We stayed quiet. Nature did not. The crow posse across the way kept getting louder. The birds had a lot to debate. Closer by, buzzing insects scouted our potential as fodder.

One-Eye announced, “I’m going to mess with the old girl’s wig and makeup.”

“Meaning? Try some plain language.”

“All right. What a grouch.” He frustrated Elmo by taking time to loose a curse that crisped every bloodsucker within fifty yards. Though selfishly motivated, that did move him a few slots down the communal shit list. “All them five hundred year oaks and ashes and chestnuts, hardly any of them are real.”

Elmo cut to it. “Means somebody has something to hide. Saddle up, troops. We’re gonna take a peek.”

WE WORKED MORE sideways than down. Come mid-afternoon we busted through some thorns and found a fine place to rest, a flat, wide, descending ledge that ran in the direction we were headed.

Super genius Rusty announced, “It’s almost like a road.”

Even the parliament of crows seemed to go quiet.

One-Eye butchered the silence. “You don’t see what you don’t expect.”

It was obvious once someone said it. This was a road cut into the wall of the Rip. It had been there for ages. It showed signs of use, though not recently.

Elmo split the band. Rusty, Robin, and two others he sent upslope, to find a way back to camp. The rest of us went the other direction.

I got everybody scowling by asking, “Who could be using this? Where could it go?”

Elmo suggested, “How about you shut the fuck up?” He indicated the caucusing crows. “One of them just asked a dumbass question, too.”

‘Dumbass’ was the Croaker referent of the day.

I am nothing if not unable to take a hint. “One-Eye, you saying all this nature is fake? The bug bites sure feel real.”

“Seventy per cent. Just to hide the road.”

Elmo signaled a halt.

One tight turn under leaves turning golden had us facing an unexpected phantom bridge. It spanned the Rip where the massive collapses had filled the gap two thirds of the way.

“Nobody do anything till I say it’s all right,” One-Eye ordered. “Including you, Croaker.” He babbled about lethal residual magic, the half-lives of curses, and the magnitude of the sorcery needed to drop the walls of the gorge.

The more I stared the more real that bridge became.

The top hundred feet was a complex of mutually supporting wooden beams perched on two massive stone piers. The taller pier rose two hundred feet from the scree. The worked blocks making it up fit so finely that mortar had not been necessary.

Serious sorcery helped, surely, or time would have taken considerably bigger bites.

One-Eye said, “There are no booby trap spells.”

Elmo said, “I don’t like it. It’s too damned convenient.”

I grumbled, “So some villain four hundred years back built a bridge just to lure the Black Company into a trap?”

One-Eye argued, “If it was convenient we would’ve found it a long time ago. We’d be five hundred miles east of here, now.”

Whittle volunteered to go over first. If he found no trouble we would set a cold camp on the other side.

WE MEANT TO give Whittle a forty yard lead, keeping him within bowshot, but at twenty yards he began to fade.

The crows got all raucous again.

“The illusion is old,” One-Eye said. “It’s getting patchy.”

WE FOUND A shack twenty yards beyond the end of the bridge. Inside there was firewood cut for cooking and split for heating, with tinder and kindling. Elmo nixed a fire. Grumble grumble. Mountain nights got chilly, but no need to attract the attention of the people who stored the wood.

It rained enthusiastically all night. The roof leaked only a little.

Come morning Elmo sent three guys back to report. I made myself scarce and deaf so none of them would be me.

Elmo told me later, “You are so lucky you count as an officer. I’d beat you bloody if you were a grunt.”

We ate a nasty cold breakfast. One-Eye gave the shack a going-over. All he found was a coin so corroded its provenance could not be determined. Elmo announced, “Now we scout. Croaker, how about you wait here for whoever the lieutenant sends.” Phrasing a suggestion but sounding all officious. One-Eye, Whittle, and Zeb the archer nodded.

Selfish bastards. They just wanted to make sure I did not get killed and leave them to self-medicate when they caught the crabs or came up with a dose of the clap.

One-Eye grumbled, “There’s that stubborn look, Elmo. He gets that look, somebody is about to come down with the drizzling shits.”

“Screw it, then,” Elmo said.

I smirked. I got my way, I did, without a word of argument.

WE WALKED A ways. The road was hidden by leaves and brush and faded spells. While you were on it, though, there was no missing it.

Some of the crows stuck with us. They never shut up.

“A secret bridge and a secret road,” I mused. “Used, but not much.”

“It’s old,” One-Eye said. “Way old.”

The world is filthy with old things. Many of them are deadly.

The road did not have that smell.

It was on no modern map. Were it, we would have been long gone.

The road inclined upward for a mile, then began a gentle descent. We encountered our first obstacle after eight or nine miles. Deadwood had clogged a culvert during the night. Run-off had overtopped the road and washed away some fill.

Elmo said, “This won’t be hard to fix. Pray there’s nothing worse.”

The road was wide enough to carry everything we had.

The crows shrieked, scattered. I jumped like somebody had slammed me with a hot iron spike. I squawked, “Spread out! Get down! Get under something and don’t move. Don’t even breathe.”

I took my own advice.

I had just stopped twitching when I heard the scream that had set me off repeated.

It was not audible. It was inside my head, a paean of agony, rage and hatred. It approached unsteadily but should pass to the south.

“Taken!” I breathed. One of the Lady’s enslaved sorcerers. Whisper has been after us forever, carrying a bushel of grudges. This airborne sack of pain, grief, and hate, though, was not one I recognized.

Taken are hard to kill. Whisper was harder than most. Yet death is the only escape for the Taken.

Each was once a massively wicked sorcerer who fell prey to the Lady. They never forgot who and what they were but could do little to resist. They were the most damned of the damned.

This latest reeked of aggravated despair and self-loathing.

The scream faded. One-Eye called, “Allee-allee-in-free!”

Elmo observed, “Must be a new one.”

One-Eye bobbed his head. That stupid black hat flopped off. I said, “She wasn’t hunting.”

“She?”

“Felt that way. It don’t matter. Taken is Taken. Elmo, we’ve hiked far enough.” I was not used to all this walking. And the farther we went the farther I would have to walk back, uphill all the way.

“We’ll stay here. We’ll work on the road while we wait.”

Whittle reserved his opinion, as did Zeb. One-Eye did not. Elmo paid no attention. One-Eye is always whining about something.

A FEW RIDERS caught up next morning. They said the Company was on the move. The enemy had not yet noticed.

Elmo told the riders to take over fixing the road. He and his crack team would go find the next obstacle.

The dick.

Our corvine escort never rematerialized. We heard nary a caw.

THE MOON WAS near full in a cloudless sky. The screaming Taken passed again, unseen but strongly felt. I could not get back to sleep. I imagined ghosts slinking through the moonlight. I heard things not there sneaking toward me. I had caught more from that Taken than just a scream.

We found another little bridge next morning. It spanned a steep run where the rushing water was barely a yard wide. One rough-hewn replacement plank had not yet begun to gray.

We smelled smoke soon afterward. Lots of smoke, wood and something with a sulfurous note.

I guessed, “There’s a village ahead.”

Whittle volunteered to scout. Elmo sent One-Eye instead. One-Eye could make himself invisible. He could use birds and animals to spy, given time to prepare them. No breeze stirred a leaf while he was gone, which explained why the smoke hung around.

One-Eye reported. “There are a hundred homesteads scattered around a valley. Motte and timber bailey, in the middle, town around it. Wooden blockhouse where the road leaves the woods. It isn’t manned. People are in the fields but they’re not working. They’re watching the sky.”

A FARMING COMMUNITY hidden in the mountains? Sketchy. Whittle guessed, “Dey’s maybe bein’ religious crazies.”

The cleared ground was a mile wide and several long. The road dropped in near the north end. It wandered the open ground beside a modest river. The river had been dammed in three places, creating one large and two small pools. The large one served watermills on either bank, a flour mill and another, its purpose less obvious. As reported, a blockhouse guarded our approach.

Elmo pointed. “There. In the woods. Tailings piles.”

He might know. He supposedly ran away from some mines when he was thirteen. But we all lie about who we used to be.

One-Eye was right about the people. They were bothered.

Elmo suggested, “Let’s don’t let them know we’re here.”

We kept a rotating one-man watch.

THE MOON WAS full. I had the watch. Whittle would relieve me. Shifting moon shadows had me spooked. I squeaked like a little girl when Whittle got there.

“Gods damn! Do you have to sneak?”

“Yes.” Of course he did. The locals had sent four youths to the blockhouse come sunset.

I had eavesdropped and had learned two things. The boys were not alert and I could not understand a word they said.

I whispered, “Other than those kids coming out nothing’s… Shit!” The Taken was coming. I sprawled on my belly, bit my lip, wrestled my dread. All that pain and hatred passed directly overhead, fifty feet up, illuminated by the moon.

“Weird,” I breathed once it was gone. “I didn’t see a carpet, just a lot of flapping cloth.” Maybe scarlet cloth. Hard to tell colors by moonlight.

“No carpet,” Whittle agreed. Taken use flying carpets.

Petals of cloth whipping in a violent updraft, like leaping black flames, crowned the bailey in the moonlight.

The boys in the blockhouse wailed.

I whispered, “Think they know something they don’t like?”

Screaming came from the valley.

“Gots me a ’spicion.”

The night puked One-Eye, shaking. He said nothing. Not much needed saying. Something ugly was going on yonder.

The bailey produced what sounded like a god’s liquid fart, then violet and darker lightning. We missed some of the show because it was in indigos too dark to see.

“Something awful is happening,” I blurted.

Whittle chuckled. “Mought be blessed to spell him quiet.”

One-Eye tapped my lips. “Shut the fuck up.”

I bobbed my head. I was now inspired. My precious ass’s fine health could benefit from an extended silence.

Purple lightning pranced among the rooftops of the town skirting the motte. Something did something weird to something. There was a flash and a roar that left us too deaf to hear one another whine, “What the hell?”

Elmo arrived. Whittle used sign to explain the nothing we knew. Elmo grunted. He waited. We waited. Hearing returned. The boys in the blockhouse caterwauled. The night reeked of Taken rage and despair.

“OVERTURNED ANTHILL OVER there,” Zeb explained. There was just enough light to show it.

The kids from the blockhouse headed home at an uninspired pace.

There was no sign of the Taken.

Elmo looked rough. He had not gotten much sleep. “Damn! There’s a thousand people out there. Maybe even two thousand. And half of them got split tails. That’s gonna mean trouble.”

Few of our not-so-nice brothers had seen a woman lately. Though Elmo did not favor men he did own an abiding conviction of the innate wickedness of women. He knew all the ills of the world could be traced to the ear-whisperings of evil-minded females.

I sometimes remind him that his mother was probably a woman. He says that proves his point.

“WHAT’S THAT?” ZEB asked. “What the hell is that?”

‘That’ was the Taken blossoming atop the bailey.

I was right about the scarlet, only it was a deeper red still, like cardinal. Once the bloody petals settled I could not distinguish her from the other figures on the stronghold’s catwalk lookout.

The internal screams had been nominal before the bloom. Now they promised headaches.

A long column of mules began to emerge from the town around the artificial hill. They headed our way.

Elmo decided, “Time to go, troops!”

It was. Oh, it was.

The Taken blossomed again, took to the air. How did the mules endure her?

So. We had a Taken headed west on a road where the Company was strung out for miles, supposedly making a miracle escape.

“We need to warn them,” Elmo announced, like that was something only he would realize. “Move faster!” He set a ferocious pace. It was soon evident that the Company doctor could not keep up.

Elmo and I went back a long way. He did not let sentiment hamstring him. “You’re still moving faster than she is. Keep plugging.” Smug ass saw a teachable moment. Croaker would learn about pushing in where he was neither wanted nor needed.

I dawdled, alone, revisiting my arsenal of obscenities, till I felt the Taken gaining.

SNAPPER’S PATROL PICKED me up. Seven riders with eight horses. Timely. The strain of trying to keep the Taken out had exhausted me.

Her sad history kept leaking over. I had my time as a prisoner of the Lady to thank. That lovely horror had burrowed never healed channels into my mind. To the grand good fortune of the world she never found anything useful there.

I observed, “Elmo isn’t a complete dickhead.”

The nearest horseman snorted. Elmo was a sergeant. That made him a dick by definition.

Soon we ran into other Company people. They were not withdrawing. They were preparing hiding places.

The hell? What about the wagons and artillery and animals? Even if you hid up every other trace you would still have the reek of animals and unwashed men hanging in air that would not stir.

I asked. My companions shrugged. Nobody cared but me.

THE SHACK HAD become a clinic. My medicine wagon was cunningly hidden in the woods behind. I had patients waiting, and the lieutenant. He did not care that I was tired and hungry.

“I’m considering lopping off one of your feet so you can’t pull this shit. You pick.”

“There wasn’t anybody who couldn’t get along without me…” Dumbass Croaker, arguing with the boss.

“There are now. See me when you’re caught up.”

Little actually required my attention. Ticks were the big issue. That was an educational matter, really. The same for blisters, common because nobody had decent footwear anymore.

I wrapped up, washed up, went to see the lieutenant for my reaming.

He and his staff were watching limping men appear over the Rip, on the bridge. This Company flight was no precision manoeuvre.

He will let slide lesser things situationally. His recollection of them is eidetic, however. They ripen. They come back. He looked at me like he was reviewing every indiscretion of mine across the last two decades. “Are the Annals up to date?”

I am Company historian as well as lead physician.

“Up to the day before I went on patrol.”

“There’s a shitstorm coming. We’ll talk job obligation afterward.”

“I reckon. We are in a narrow passage. Whisper behind us and this new Taken on the road ahead.”

“Not a Taken, Croaker. But definitely new to us.”

“Sir?”

“The road.”

Oh, the laconic treatment! “What about it?”

“It runs two directions.”

“That’s kind of in the rules for roads.”

That crack brought in a crop of dark looks. Some folks do not appreciate Croaker the Annalist. He has a nasty habit of recording flaws and fuckups as well as triumphs. Plus, as he ages he speaks his mind more.

The lieutenant made a mark in the notebook of his mind. “This road could go back to before the Domination. You went east. We went west. We found a ruined fortress that was the nightmare of someone worse than the Dominator.”

So. Once he knew there was a secret bridge and hidden road he went to see where it started.

“The new Taken hails from there?”

“She does. Reminding you, she isn’t Taken. Yes. It’s only eight miles. It was uglier than that place in Juniper was. Bones everywhere, some of them human.”

I was not overwhelmed. Some of that had leaked across from the Taken. “There’s more?”

“We found people there, living in squalor you wouldn’t believe. Servants, sort of, and livestock in lean times. They don’t speak a modern language. We couldn’t have communicated without Goblin and Silent.” Those two being senior Company wizards.

“Your new Taken is Blind Emon. She is blind. She’s the slave of something called the Master, which sounds more intimidating in their language. He was human once. He made himself immortal. Now he just lays around and eats, too bloated to move. No one has seen him for ages except Blind Emon. Anyone else gets that close, they end up on the menu.”

Ours is an ugly and challenging world.

“So Blind Emon is a Taken, just not the Lady’s Taken.”

Much that had leaked to me from her now made more sense.

“If that’s how you want to see it. It doesn’t matter. What does is, we need her not to notice us.”

Hmm. The hiding off the road now made sense. He wanted Blind Emon’s caravan to slide by rather than us falling back toward Whisper.

He said, “You know what you need to do. Go do it.”

Blind Emon’s mules would not be long arriving. Time to get the clinic hidden inside a glamour.

LIKELY THE BRIDGE and road had been built to connect the settlement and the Master’s hangout. I could not imagine why, though.

Everybody hid in the best glamour.

Warning came. The mule train was close. I needed no word of mouth. I felt Blind Emon’s pain. I was more sensitive to her than was anyone else. Bless my happy days as a prisoner in the Tower!

This contact was the worst yet. It wormed inside more deeply. I became disoriented and distraught. I suffered fifteen minutes of condensed torment, reliving Blind Emon’s Taking.

There had been others like Emon, once. She was the sole survivor of the Master’s ancient collision with the Domination. He actually antedated the Domination era. He had repulsed the bilious sorcerer-tyrant known as the Dominator, at the cost of becoming the darkness-bound buried horror that he was now.

Emon had started out as a brilliant mage known for her clever mining of ancient mysteries. She was beautiful, she was young, she was in love… Then she unearthed something foul that had faded to a dreadful rumor and should have been left to fade even further.

Blinding was the first of a thousand atrocities she suffered.

Too much of her torment leaked over. I was so bowels-voiding scared that I was leaking back.

SHE WAS PAST. She had become an intermittently visible scarlet lily blossoming over the improbable bridge. Countless mules and men crossed that dispiritedly, making an art of their absence of enthusiasm. Blind Emon barely kept them moving.

Shit. Toss it in a hot iron skillet and fry it up, shit!

Distracted, I thoughtlessly moved to get a better look at Blind Emon. Now I had a frozen muleteer staring at me, mouth agape.

I froze, too, hoping to disappear into the glamour.

He dropped his mule’s lead tether and oozed away, never breaking eye contact and never showing expression. As I began to have trouble keeping him in focus he stepped out briskly toward home. He never said a word to the mule driver behind him.

Him just taking off was as good as doing some yelling. He was too near Blind Emon to exit unnoticed.

Emon was a ruddy shimmer amidst the high foliage of illusory trees when the muleskinner began his heel and toe dance toward home. She solidified as she moved my way.

I tried becoming one with the forest. That worked, some. She failed to pick me out of the mast but she for sure did sense someone who could be touched, mind to mind.

She searched but never pinned me down.

Kill me!

She knew I would hear her.

Kill me, I beg you!

Her dash round the sky turned frantic. My head felt ready to explode. Normal men ground their knuckles into their temples. Mules brayed.

The plea for surcease from pain, Kill me! eventually knocked me out.

ELMO AND THE original patrol, with my apprentices, surrounded me. I mumbled, “Shouldn’t have tapped that last keg.” My head throbbed, worst hangover ever. There was a foul taste in my mouth. “I puked?”

“You did, sir,” my apprentice Joro admitted. “In record fashion.”

I was dizzy. The dizzy was getting worse.

Elmo added, “You yelled a lot, too, in some language nobody knows.”

“That was only for a minute,” Joro added. “Then you were out and the thing in the sky shrieked in tongues.”

Dizziness morphed into disorientation. I fought to focus. “What about her?”

Elmo said, “She went away. She gave up looking for you.”

No. Even unconscious she had left me with news enough to know that she had been summoned by the Master.

The lieutenant appeared. “He going to make it?”

“Yes, sir,” Joro replied. “The problem is mostly in his head.”

“Always the case with him, isn’t it? Move out now, Elmo. Let him get his shit together on the road.”

THEY PLANTED ME on a captured mule. The old jenny had been loaded with produce that was in Company bellies now. Other captured mules had carried kegs of salt pork, salt and pepper color granules, or sacks of what looked like copper beads. Elmo thought the beads were ore. Others said it was too light. I felt too lousy to work up a good case of give a shit.

Prisoners had been taken but were almost useless. Nobody understood their turkey gobble.

“What the hell?” I blurted when I realized Elmo was headed across the bridge.

“Super shitstorm about to hit. Our guys will be in it. They need you there.”

A fight? I was headed for a fight? Feeling like this?

A lone crow, notably ragged, watched us pass from a perch on the rail of the bridge. It offered no comment.

THE EARTH TREMBLED. My mule shied. She had been skittish for a while, now.

We were two hours west of the bridge, near where our guys were operating. Twice we heard distant horns.

I was lost. Nobody else had a clue, either. Some thought that the lieutenant hoped to engineer a collision between Whisper and the Master. If that happened Whisper would have to consult the Lady, who might recall the Master from back when she was the Dominator’s wife. She might want to get in the game herself. All that would cost time. The lieutenant could build a bigger head start.

The road west of the bridge was better hidden. The farther we went the healthier the glamours became. The earth trembled again. There was noise ahead, muted by the forest and the hill we were climbing.

We found a gang of mules and mule drivers hiding beside the road, just short of the crest. They were unarmed and disinclined to resist. They were terrified. I did not blame them. Blind Emon was not happy.

Some heavy-duty shit was shaking beyond that ridge.

I urged my mule forward. I had friends involved. Some might need help.

Came an epic flash. An invisible scythe topped every tree rising above the ridgeline. Whittle observed, “First news you know, de weader be gettin’ parlous roun’ dese parts.”

Rusty did a credible job of managing his fear. This would be his first experience with battlefield sorcery. A little real terror might be just the specific to purge his soul.

We clambered through fallen limbs that had been shredded like cabbage for kraut, reached a tree line, looked out on a bowl-shaped clearing more than a mile across. It had been farmland once but most was going to scrub, now. A natural rock up-thrust centered it. Ruins topped that. They were ugly and, though it sounds ridiculous, they felt abidingly evil… probably because Emon had prejudiced me.

Emon was a roiling storm of cardinal strands above the ruin, filling far more sky than she had over the bridge. Three Taken on flying carpets circled at a respectful distance. A fourth carpet lay mangled in a field, smoldering while someone dragging a damaged leg crawled away.

Imperial soldiers crept toward the downed Taken. Local people were fleeing the invaders.

Elmo nudged me. “Whisper,” indicating one of the airborne Taken.

“Where are our guys?” They were nowhere to be seen.

Mule drivers gobbled and pointed.

Some of their gang had reached the ruins before the excitement started.

Elmo said, “We’re exposed here. We need to take cover.” And that was the moment when ill fortune noticed its opportunity.

Whisper sensed me… for the same reason that Blind Emon had: my one-time exposure to the Lady’s Eye.

Meantime, Emon grew inside my head, trying to gain control of my eyes. She knew who I was, now. She could pull on me as strongly as I could read her. She was more powerful here, near the Master.

She riffled through my memories, trying to gain a better handle on a situation for which she and the Master had been preparing for weeks.

Whisper probed. One sniff of Croaker had her convinced that this incident had been crafted by the Company to inconvenience her personally.

I felt both Taken. Blind Emon had a fine read on my emotions. She pilfered random thoughts while depositing disturbing notions. Whisper drifted our way. Meantime men, mules, and that sentinel crow all oozed into concealment. I refused to give up my view completely.

A keg of the sort that had been aboard so many mules flew up out of the ruin. Blind Emon jinked, did something to shift its course and add velocity. Wisps of smoke trailed it. It exploded thirty feet from Whisper. The fireball enveloped her.

Elmo offered up a soft prayer. “Holy shit. That’s gotta hurt.”

Whisper wobbled out, trailing flames. She headed down toward someplace where she would not have to fall any farther.

“It was stupid to come here,” Rusty grumped. “Ain’t our fight.”

Even Robin glowered at that. Still, the man was close to making a point. He told Elmo, “We should get the hell gone while that bitch is cleaning the crap out of her drawers.”

“Right.” Elmo stared past where Whisper had hit hard enough to fling smoking chunks of everything but her fifty yards in a dozen directions. A second keg had sailed out of the ruin.

Blind Emon repeated her manoeuvre, her aim direly precise. A Taken distracted by Whisper’s calamity took a direct hit, but this keg did not explode. It fell, shattered, ignited belatedly, created a foul gray miasma.

The impact did overturn the Taken’s carpet and left that dread entity hanging on desperately with one hand.

My companions were more interested in travel than observing sorcery spectaculars. Rusty poked me with the dull end of a javelin. “What part of we need to get the fuck out of here are you not getting?” He added, sarcastically, “Sir.”

Elmo barked foul agreement from the shredded woods. I moved reluctantly. Our crow friend watched from an oak stump, head cocked.

I felt a sudden urge to put distance between me and what was bound to turn uglier than I could imagine. Emon guaranteed it.

I cannot deliver an account of the evil versus evil sorcery duel of the decade. The desire to see the sun rise again quashed the compulsion to watch. But I do have to report that Emon and the Master engaged in an action they had been preparing for since soon after we invaded their forest.

We clotted up getting out of there, our patrol, mules, gobbling foreigners, local refugees, and the troops and wizards the lieutenant had sent to stir the pot before.

THE MOB KEPT moving, less panicked but jockeying and jostling. Everybody wanted across the bridge. Our wizards tried to nurse information out of the gaunt serfs but they were little help.

The road was about to tilt down into the Rip. There would be no leaving it then. A demand of nature haunted me. I would not last till we crossed the bridge. I flitted into the woods, found a useful log, dropped my trousers, began my business buzzed by flies, plagued by mosquitoes, and watched by a curious crow.

I heard a rustle. I looked down. A rattlesnake looked back, equally surprised. I froze. It coiled but reserved its warning rattle.

The crow made a leap and single flap, took station behind the snake. Its eyes shone oddly golden. One began to glow. The glow expanded into a ball an inch in diameter, a foot, a yard. The rattler decided to take its business elsewhere. It took off at maximum snake speed.

My bowels released, explosively and rankly, as I saw exactly what I dreaded: the Lady in the golden light, sweetly beautiful, the most alluring, lovely evil ever. She had not aged a moment in a decade.

The air all round whispered, “There you are. I was afraid I’d lost you. Come home.”

Gods! Temptation, Lady is thy name! Suddenly, treason seemed entirely reasonable. I forgot most of what made me me, including recollections of suffering in the Tower. She infiltrated channels into my soul already chafed by Blind Emon, scraping up informational residue left by Emon while she explored.

The Lady was not pleased.

She abandoned me suddenly, no explanation, leaving me convinced that she regretted not being able to linger.

I tried pretending that I was not disappointed. It gets harder to fool myself as I get older.

ONE-EYE ASKED, “YOU see a ghost?” He was repairing that ugly hat.

“Worse.” I told him.

The lieutenant arrived before I finished. He had a special assignment for Elmo’s patrol. We had impressed him that much. Goblin got to join us.

Heads together with the boss, Elmo looked less happy by the second. Meantime, the lieutenant’s staff cut mules out of the passing mob. Each carried kegs or sacks of coppery beads.

Elmo rejoined us. “Great news. We’ve been entrusted with cutting the bridge once everybody gets across. And you get to help, Goblin.”

That little wizard’s toad face twisted up nasty. He had come around just to check on how we were. Elmo thumped him atop the head before he started bitching. “And we get to do it in the dark, using those kegs that go boom when sorcerers toss them around.”

One-Eye got all positive, told Goblin, “There’ll be plenty of moonlight later.” He grinned wickedly.

“Dey’s still light now, some,” Whittle noted.

“Yeah. I can still see my wife if I squint,” Rusty countered, waving his hand in front of his face.

“We got to do it so let’s get doing,” Elmo said. “No farting around. Whisper’s gang shows before we’re done, the lieutenant blows it with us still out there.”

A true motivator, our Elmo.

He said, “Robin, you head back up to that last straight stretch and keep a lookout. Somebody comes, you get your ass down here fast.”

The complaining commenced.

“Did somebody declare this a democracy?”

One-Eye grumbled, “You can rob a soldier of his choices but you can’t take his right to bitch.”

Goblin giggled.

Elmo told Robin, “Grab your gear and get. And be careful.”

Rusty started getting his stuff together, too.

Elmo shook his head, pointed at the bridge.

SO THERE WE were, clambering through the trestlework, operating on guesses based on what we thought we had gotten from the mule people, plus what we saw happen between Blind Emon and the Taken. If it went the lieutenant’s way he would look like an improv genius. If not, he could become the fabled Commander Dumbass.

It did not start well.

Rusty fell. He survived only because Elmo had bullied him into wearing a rope safety harness. I dropped a keg, almost fell trying to save it. It rattled around in the rocks below, never breaking up. A keg Goblin was wrestling came apart. Its contents caught fire, sparked by his gear clanking together. For a while we were enveloped by ghastly sulfurous smoke.

There were lesser mishaps too numerous to recount. We accumulated bruises, bloody abrasions, splinters, and mashed fingers. The moon was no help when it rose. We were down in the Rip, under the bridge deck. We did catch a break when a cold breeze rose and dispersed the smoke.

Robin swung over the rail and came down. “Blind Emon is coming.” Somewhere, a mule brayed.

Soon we heard chatter and clatter approaching. Blind Emon began to leak over.

Had she won? No. No final winner yet. Whisper and the Taken had gotten mauled, bad. But they had broken the command link between the Master and Emon. A tactical success for them. Emon ran the moment the connection went. No loyalty at all, that gal. She was wiped out, now, barely able to keep up with the people she was trying to protect.

All of the Lady’s Taken had suffered grievously.

Emon seemed unaware that the Lady had become interested herself.

The Lady, I was sure, would deal with the Master permanently.

I knew the exact instant that Blind Emon sensed my proximity.

Right away she wanted me to know things. I needed the information. She was hurt bad. She did not expect to see the dawn.

I monkeyed through the trestlework, reported to Elmo. He asked, “You able to communicate?”

“Sort of. She’s getting most of my thoughts, now. I think.”

“You being a wiseass?”

“No. I feel her emotions. She’s excited about being free, down on herself about not being strong enough to refuse to do the evil he made her do, and open about how they planned to use us the way we meant to use them.”

“What?”

“They knew we were in the forest from the start. They knew they couldn’t avoid a collision with the Taken. There’s bad blood from olden times. The mule people serve them, raising most of the food for the people at the ruin. They have been making bang stuff for over a month. They never thought we’d find the road and the bridge. They thought those were hidden too well. They didn’t know we had One-Eye in our trick bag.”

Elmo muttered something about adding a hundred bricks and chucking that bag into a handy river. Then, “Am I wrong, guessing your new girlfriend wouldn’t be running loose if the Lady hadn’t been interested?”

I had abandoned all hope of ever clarifying my relationship with the Lady. “Probably.”

“So even if Whisper and them are dead and half their troops besides, them that survived will come after us as fast as they can stagger. This shit ain’t going near as fast as I hoped. See if you can get her to help.”

“How? Doing what?”

“How the fuck do I know? Somehow. Anything. Don’t look at me. I’m day labor. I don’t get paid to think. I been told that plenty.”

A WAY TO make kegs bang bigger slithered into my head. I told Elmo. One-Eye disagreed. “One of them gobble jockeys told me, knock a hole…”

“I got it from Blind Emon. The inventor. We pack those sacks of beads around each keg. She sends a curse and the Bam! is way bigger.”

Blind Emon was feeling vindictive. She hoped people would be on the bridge when she made her wish. She did not much care who.

One-Eye wanted to use burning rope fuses. I wondered where he would get them. Elmo said, “They’d smell the smoke.”

“If we do it like Croaker and his new honey want, we have to start all over to pack the stuff the way she wants.”

“Then you better not waste time complaining.”

I demonstrated the way Emon wanted the bead sacks installed. “And stop asking why. I just know there’ll be more bang.”

Later, One-Eye announced, “Time to get quiet. Company is coming.”

For sure. The enemy, neither sneaking nor hurrying. They had no one pushing them. Their command authority remained engaged with the Master. Chatter suggested that two Taken were gone forever.

I hoped Whisper was one. She had been a pain in the ass for ages.

The Imperials reached the bridge. In moonlight it seemed ephemeral. It caused a lot of awed chatter. Underneath, there was angry muttering bearing on the name of Blind Emon’s new boyfriend.

The Imperials were not looking for us. They had been sent to secure a bridge they had not believed existed. They did mention a bounty that had been offered for me.

Some of my brethren probably wondered how they could collect.

The bridge became crowded. The Lady had sent a lot of men. We kept on working underneath, slowly and quietly, me enduring a drizzle of catty whispers. We would have been long gone if that asshole Croaker had not insisted that the kegs and sacks be rearranged.

Even Elmo had an unhappy remark or seven.

The lieutenant did not blow us up, possibly only because he lacked the means.

WE WERE ABOUT done. Only Whittle, One-Eye, and I were still under the bridge. Clever Goblin had charted a pearl string of potent glamours that could be used to slink off to the forest unnoticed. Whittle was shaving a bit off a last keg so it would fit where Emon wanted it. One-Eye was doing a whole lot of nothing but being disgruntled. I was trying to manage two sacks of beads while trying not to be distracted by Emon nagging me to hurry. The bridge creaked and rattled as a heavy infantry battalion crossed leisurely. Those not troubled by heights paused to gawk at the spectacular moonlit Rip, where exposed granite looked like splotches of silver.

One-Eye muttered, “Marvelous! And now it’s raining!”

Whittle was quickest. He cursed so loud a couple guys up top wondered what they had heard. We were, for once, blessed by Whittle’s fierce dialect.

What it was, was, those guys were pissing off the bridge to watch the liquid fall. The breeze broke that up and pushed it under the deck.

Naturally, them amusing themselves that way was all my fault.

One-Eye offered to throw me overboard. He did not do so only because he figured I would glom on and take him with me. All the screaming during the fall might alert the Imperials that something was up.

Finished work, we weaseled carefully out of the trestle into a glamour patch just yards from a clutch of officers debating what to do next. A break for supper and sleep was the more popular proposition. The bridge was secure. The old bitch was busy elsewhere. She would never notice.

A crow squawked angrily.

Crows do not, usually, jabber much after nightfall.

I WAS BEHIND some brush, inside a glamour reinforced by Blind Emon. She lurked beside me, like a heap of dirty rags, emotion and agony held in check. Most of Elmo’s patrol were close, plus the lieutenant and some henchmen. One-Eye never stopped muttering. He could not let the golden rain go. He would have to take a bath. He had not suffered through one for years. Baths were not healthy. Everyone knew that.

One nocturnal crow nagged on, almost conversationally. Hell! It was conversational. One-sided conversational. Listening closely, I could make out most of it.

A generous ass-chewing was in progress. The Lady was not pleased with the day’s outcome. She was almost displeased enough to come out her own physical self instead of just relying on a spiritual messenger.

Commanders fell over one another assuring her that a personal visit would be unnecessary.

The lieutenant asked, “What now, Croaker?” He, Elmo, One-Eye, and a dozen others looked at me like the future was mine to design.

Blind Emon sent, There is only one way. To her surprise and mine, she had been regaining strength, probably at my expense.

“Huh?” A rejoinder scintillating in its Croakeresqueness.

The conversation between the Imperials and crow drifted our way. I had not paid close attention for several seconds.

“They are here!” the crow insisted. “I smell them!”

“Oh, shit! Get the hell out of here!” I said, having a hard time keeping my voice down. “Run!”

Most of the gawkers had recognized the wisdom of that action already. The lieutenant said, “Whatever the hell the plan is, Croaker, it’s time to do it.”

“Run.”

Then there was just Emon and me, with a hostile horde bearing down and me unable to get my feet to move. Then Blind Emon bloomed.

Petals waving like tentacles, she rose and swept toward our enemies. They produced squeals of awe and fear. Dumbass Croaker got his feet unstuck. He stumbled along after Emon.

Several petals extended. One thirty yards long snapped a fleeing crow from the air with a vicious crack! Others snatched at officers’ throats.

Get down. Cling to the earth like it is your mother’s teat if you want to live.

I did so. That Blind Emon was one smooth talker.

I could still see her and the bridge. She soared over the Rip. Petals reached into the trestlework.

Flash! And then a parade of flashes, with rolling thunder. The middle of the bridge humped up eight feet like the back of a sea serpent surfacing. The rest of the deck rose off its supports. The roar deafened me. I did not hear the screams of the hundreds falling into the gorge.

Nasty smoke masked everything. It swallowed Blind Emon. I never saw her again. She sent no farewells.

In time the breeze pushed the smoke away.

And there stood that gods-be-damned bridge, singed, but... The gods-be-damned deck had dropped back exactly where it was before it flew up. Imperials lighted torches and started checking its stability.

Shee-it! Oh holy fecal fall!

Time to run!

Run, Croaker, run. Run like hell is on your ass, because it is for sure going to be, real soon now, and it will be very, very hungry.

The miracle in this latest miracle escape had just turned out to have a great big old hairy-assed shaggy dog story ending.