Night on the river. A moon splattering the dark mirror of water. A stillness at times almost supernatural, then the cacophony of a festival in hell: crocodiles grunting, fifty kinds of frogs singing, birds hooting and squawking, hippos snorting; the gods only knew what all.
And bugs buzzing. The bugs were almost as bad as they had been in the jungle. They would get worse once we entered the wetlands farther south. The river was said to flow imperceptibly through a swamp ten to eighty miles wide and three hundred miles long. Here the west bank was still tame. The east was three-quarters wild. The people we saw watching from boats in the mouths of sloughs and creeks were as poorly tamed as their land.
I was assured that they, living in the shadow of the city, were harmless. When they came whooping out it was to hawk crocodile hides and parrot-feather cloaks. On impulse I bought one of the cloaks, the biggest and most outrageously colorful one available. It must have weighed sixty pounds. Wearing it I became the very image of a savage chieftain.
Mogaba examined the cloak and pronounced it a wise buy. He told me it would shed darts and arrows better than armor of steel.
Some of the Nar bought croc hides to toughen their shields.
Goblin got a wild hair and bought him a couple of preserved croc heads. One was so big it looked like it had been lopped off a dragon. While I was seated up top contemplating the nighttime river, wondering about crows, he was up forward mounting his monster purchase as a figurehead. I supposed he had some drama up his sleeve.
He came to me with the smaller head. “I want to fit you out to wear this.”
“You what?”
“I want to fit you out to wear this. So when the pirates come you can strut around up here in your feather coat breathing fire like some mythological beast.”
“That’s a great gimmick. I really like it. In fact, I love it. Why don’t we see if we can’t get some dope like Big Bucket to try it.”
“But—”
“You don’t think I’m going to stand up there and let people snipe at me, do you?”
“You’ll have plenty of protection from me and One-Eye.”
“Yeah? Then my prayers are answered at last. For years I’ve wanted nothing more than protection from you and One-Eye. ‘Preserve me, O sainted fathers of the Company!’ I’ve cried a thousand times. Yea, ten thousand times have I called—”
Sputtering, he cut me off and changed the subject. He squeaked, “Those people your girlfriend brought aboard—”
“Next fool who calls Lady my girlfriend gets to throw a saddle on a croc and see if they can be broken. You get my drift?”
“Yeah. You got your feelings hurt on account of reality is catching up with you.”
I kept my mouth shut, but just barely.
“Bad news, those two are, Croaker.” He whispered in the no-breath whisper we use when we are creeping past enemy sentries. “There’s big mojo brewing down in their cabin.”
He was trying to make himself useful. He had been overshadowed since the appearance of Frogface. So I did not tell him I was on to that already and had had me a thought or two about what could be done.
A fish jumped up and skipped across the water to get away from some predator. For his effort he got his reward: some night bird snagged him on the bounce.
I grunted. Should I let Goblin know how much I knew and suspected? Or should I just go on looking dumb while setting the moment up? Building a mystique had become important now that the Company was on the grow. It should work for a while. The old hands should not suspect me of taking as cynical and pragmatic an approach to command as I planned.
I listened to Goblin’s outpouring of fact, suspicion, and speculation. Little that he said was new. What was new only more thoroughly framed the picture I had. I told him, “I think it’s time you came up with the masterpiece of your life, Goblin. Something plain, direct, and powerful, that you can cut loose in a second.”
He turned on the famous Goblin grin. “I’m way ahead of you, Croaker. I’ve got a couple of things in the works that are going to amaze people when I use them.”
“Good.” I had a feeling One-Eye was in for a shock somewhere down the line.
The journey to the Third Cataract takes a minimum two weeks because the current does not exceed a slow walk. Adding pirate trouble could make the trip last forever.
By the end of our fourth day the barge was as defensible as possible. Timber shields protected the main deck. Their lower ends projected over the water to make boarding from boats difficult. None of the embrasures in that shielding were big enough for a man to weasel through. The guys had put together four ballistae for each side. Thanks to One-Eye’s foresight we had the makings for firebombs by the score, and ready bombs in well-protected nests atop the deckhouse. The three brothers from Beryl built us a dolphin, which is a fish-shaped weight attached to a long chain. It is swung out on a boom and dropped through the bottoms of boats. My favorite engine, though, was thought up by Patience, a former caravan guard.
A springboard would slap the base of a cartridge filled with poisonous darts, throwing a hail of missiles. The poison needed only the tiniest cut to cause quick paralysis. The engine’s one shortcoming was that it was immobile. You had to wait for your target to cross your aim.
Once construction was finished I treated everyone to a rich diet of my own pet peeves from my days as a follower instead of chieftain. Drills and exercises. And intense language study. I kept One-Eye and his pet in a sweat trying to establish at least one common tongue among the men. There was plenty of grumbling. Only the Nar were impressed favorably.
Lady did not appear. She might not have existed for all we could tell.
We entered the wetlands, mostly cypress swamp, early the sixth morning. Everyone became more alert.
There was no sign of pirates for another two days. When they did come we had plenty of warning from One-Eye and Goblin.
We were passing through a place where the cypress crowded the channel. The attackers, in twenty boats, came at us head-on, around a bend. I could bring only two ballistae to bear. Those stopped just one boat. Arrows from those of us atop the deckhouse—which ran most of the length and width of the barge—did no good. The boats had canopies of crocodile hide.
They rushed in alongside. Grapnels on chains not easily cut caught on the top of the shielding. Pirates began clambering up.
I had them where I wanted them.
The shields were perforated with small holes. Mogaba’s Nar stabbed through those at legs. The few pirates reaching the top had to balance on a four-inch width of timber before leaping to the deckhouse roof.
It was a turkey shoot. None survived to make the jump.
Goblin and One-Eye did not lift a sorcerous finger. They amused themselves throwing firebombs. The pirates had not encountered those before. They fled sooner than they would have had the boys not gotten into the game.
My guess is the pirates lost fifty to sixty men. Not a small hurt, but smaller than it could have been, and the good merchants of Gea-Xle hoped we would break the pirates.
The bargemaster appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost, as the pirates hauled ass. Neither he nor his crew had been visible during the skirmish. We had been drifting free, at the whim of the river.
Frogface appeared coincidentally. I used him to give the man nine kinds of hell. My rage took the edge off the complaining he did about us letting so many pirates get away.
“You’ll have to fight them again, now. Next time they’ll know what to expect.”
“The way I heard, the first attack is just a probe. What the hell is going on out there?” The river had begun to foam with underwater excitement. Something began thumping against the barge’s hull.
“Needleteeth.” The bargemaster shuddered. Even Frogface seemed unsettled. “A fish as long as your arm. Heads for blood in the water. When there’s a lot they go mad and attack everything. They can devour a hippo, bones and all, in a minute.”
“Is that so?”
The river grew wilder. The dead pirates, and the wounded who had not gotten aboard boats and away, vanished. Broken and burning boats and driftwood went down piscine gullets. At least the needleteeth gave it the heroic try.
Once I was convinced the crew would participate in wreaking their own salvation next time, I went and had me a powwow with my tame wizards.
The second attack came at night. This time those guys were serious.
Their earlier asskicking had them feeling no-prisoners mean.
We had plenty of warning, of course. Goblin and One-Eye were on the job.
It was in another narrow place and this time they had a boom across to catch and hold us. I screwed them up by having anchors dropped when Goblin detected the boom. We stopped two hundred yards above the heart of the trap. We waited.
“Goblin? One-Eye? You guys set?” We had our surprises.
“Ready, Mom.”
“Cletus. You on the dolphin?”
“Yes sir.”
We had not used that before. “Otto. I don’t hear that goddamned pump. What the hell is going on back there?”
“I’m looking for the crew guys now, Croaker.”
All right. They wanted to chicken out again, eh? Hoped they could buy off the pirates by not resisting? “Murgen, dig that barge boss out of his hiding hole.” I knew where he was. “I want him up here. One-Eye. I need your pet.”
“Soon as he gets back from scouting.”
Frogface showed first. He was telling me that every adult male in the swamp was out there when Murgen brought the bargemaster to me whimpering in a hammerlock. As the first pirate arrows fell I said, “Tell him he goes over the side if his people aren’t on the job in two minutes. And that I’ll keep throwing guys out till I get what I want.” I meant what I said.
The message got through. I heard the pumps begin squeaking and clinking when Murgen and I were getting set to see how far we could throw a man.
The arrow fall picked up. It was ill-directed and did no harm, but its only purpose was to keep our heads down.
There was a big outbreak of cussing and caterwauling yonder when Goblin tested a favorite gimmick from his White Rose days, a spell that started every insect in a small area noshing on the nearest human flesh.
The whoop and holler died quickly. Test fulfilled, question answered. They had somebody capable of undoing trivial witcheries.
One-Eye was supposed to sneak along to spot the guy responsible, if one turned up, so he and Goblin could gang up and nail his hide to the nearest cypress.
The arrow fall stopped. And speak of the devil, here came One-Eye. “Big trouble, Croaker. That guy over there is a heavyweight. I don’t know what we can do about him.”
“Do what you can. Blindside him. Did you notice? The arrows stopped?” There was a lot of carrying on in the swamp, to cover the sounds of oars.
“Right.” One-Eye ran to his place. A point of pink light soared upward. I donned the crocodile head Goblin had fixed. It was time for the show.
Half of winning a battle is showmanship.
The pink point grew up fast and shed light on the river.
There must have been forty boats sneaking toward us. They had extended their croc-hide protection in hopes of shedding firebombs.
I was glowing and breathing fire. Bet I made a hell of a sight from over there.
The nearest boats were ten feet away. I saw the ladder boxes and grinned behind my croc teeth. I had guessed right.
I threw my hands up, then down.
A single firebomb arced out to shatter upon a boat.
“Stop pumping, you goddamned idiots!” I yelled.
The bomb was a dud.
I did my act again.
Second time had the charm. Fire splattered. In seconds the river was aflame except for a narrow strip around the barge.
The trap was almost too good. The fire sucked most of the air away and heated what was left till it was almost unbearable. But the burning did not last long, thanks to the lack of enthusiasm of the oil pumpers.
Fewer than half the attack wave succumbed, but the survivors had no stomach left for combat. Especially after the dolphin and ballistae started knocking their boats apart. They headed for cover. Slowly. Painfully. The ballistae and dart throwers left their sting.
A big, big howl went up over there. It took them a while to get the anger worked out.
A rattle, clank, and slap of oars against water announced a second wave.
I was laying for these guys, too. It was the third wave that would be the bitch, if they did not get it out of their systems right away. The third wave and that unknown quantity that One-Eye had discovered were what worried me.
The pirate boats were a hundred feet from the barge when Goblin gave me the high sign.
He had the needleteeth gathering in baffled thousands.
The lead boats got close enough. I went into my dance.
The dolphin went down, shattering a large wooden swamp boat. Every engine cut loose. Fire bombs and javelins flew.
The idea was to get some wounded pirates into the water with the needleteeth.
Some got.
The river went mad.
Half the pirate boats were hides stretched on wooden frames. Those did not last at all. Wooden boats fared better, but only the heaviest withstood repeated strikes. And even they were at the mercy of the panic of the men aboard.
The smartest and quickest pirates charged the barge. If they could get aboard and take control . . . But that was the chance I wanted them to see.
They had come prepared with ladders that had planks fixed to their backs. Thrown up on our mantlets and nailed into place the ladder backing would protect pirate arms and legs from the stabbing Nar.
Except that I had had the Nar driving spikes and sharpened wooden slats through the cracks between the mantlet timbers. Those made it hard to put the ladders up. Cletus and his brothers smashed several boats before the pirates discovered what wonderful hand and foot holds the spikes made.
The Nar had instructions to leave them alone as long as they did nothing but hang there. Their presence would discourage sniping by their brothers and fathers and cousins.
It took a while, but silence came to the night and stillness to the river. The wreckage drifted off to pile up against the boom. My men sat down to rest. One-Eye pulled his pink lights out of the sky. He, Goblin, Frogface, my squad leaders, Mogaba, and, lo!, the barge’s master, joined me for a powwow. The latter suggested we up anchor and roll.
“How long have we been here?” I asked.
“Two hours,” Goblin said.
“We’ll let it rest a while.” The convoy was supposed to have fallen back till it was an estimated eight hours behind, the theory being that if they overtook us because we were in action, they would arrive with the pirates in a state of exhaustion and would be able to overcome them if we had been wiped out. “One-Eye. What’s the situation with the sorcerer over there?”
He did not sound well when he replied, “We could be in big trouble, Croaker. He’s even more potent than we guessed at first.”
“You tried getting him?”
“Twice. I don’t think he even noticed.”
“If he’s that bad why’s he laying off instead of stomping us?”
“We don’t know.”
“Should we take the initiative? Should we bait him and try to draw him out?”
Murgen asked, “Why don’t we just break the boom and go? We got enough of them to keep the swamp in mourning for a year.”
“They won’t let us, that’s why. They can’t. One-Eye. Can you find that wizard?”
“Yeah. Why should I? I agree with the kid. Break the boom. They might surprise us.”
“They’d surprise us, all right. What the hell do you think the boom is there for, dummy? Why do you think I stopped us up here? Can you put one of your little pink balls in his hair?”
“If I have to. For maybe half a minute.”
“You have to. When I tell you.” I had been trying to find unusual parameters to the situation and thought I had one. I was set for an interesting, if potentially fatal, experiment. “Hagop. You and Otto get all the ballistae around to the east side. Take forty percent of the tension off them so they can throw firebombs without breaking them in the trough.” With Frogface’s help I told Mogaba I wanted his archers on the deckhouse roof. “When One-Eye spots our target I want half high-angle, plunging fire, half flat trajectory. And I want firebombs flying like we’re trying to burn the swamp down.”
A pirate let out a cry of despair as he lost his grip and fell from the shielding. A riot in the water told us the needleteeth knew a good thing and had hung around.
“Let’s get at it.”
Goblin hung on till the others had gone. “I think I know what you’re trying to do, Croaker. I hope you don’t regret it.”
“You hope? I blow it and we’re all dead.”
I gave the command. One-Eye’s rangefinder squirted across the water. The moment it blossomed everyone cut loose.
For a minute I thought we had the sucker.
Suddenly, Lady materialized on the deckhouse roof. I removed my crocodile head. “Heck of a show there, eh?” Cypress and moss will burn, liberally primed.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“You finally deign to report for duty, soldier?”
Her left cheek twitched. My tactic had not been deployed against the pirate sorcerer at all.
An arrow burred between us, not six inches from either of our noses. Lady jumped.
Then the pirates clinging to the shielding finally tried coming on up and over to the deckhouse roof. The half dozen not swept away by the archers just threw themselves into a hedgehog of spears set to receive them.
“I think I’ve fixed it so there’s only one way they can take us.” I gave her a moment to think. “They have a sorcerer who’s a heavy hitter. So far he’s laid low. I’ve just told him I know he’s there and I’m going to get him if I can.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Croaker.”
“Wrong. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
She spat an epithet of disbelief, stamped away.
“Frogface!” I called.
He materialized. “Better put that croc hat back on, chief. The spell won’t keep the arrows off if you don’t.” One whimpered past as he spoke.
I grabbed the head. “You do the job on her stuff?”
“All taken care of, chief. I rolled it over into a place that isn’t this place. You’ll hear them howling in a minute.”
The fires among the cypress winked out like snuffed candles. Several of One-Eye’s pink fireflies sailed across and simply vanished. The night began to fill with an oppressive and dreadful sense of presence.
The only light left flickered around me and around the mouth of the croc head mounted on the bow.
Lady came at a run. “Croaker! What did you do?”
“I told you I knew what I was doing.”
“But—”
“All gone all your little toys from the Tower? Call it intuition, love. Reaching a conclusion from inadequate and scattered information. Though I think it helped being familiar with the people I’m playing with.”
The darkness grew deeper. The stars vanished. But the night had a gleam on, like a polished piece of coal. You could see glimmers though there was no light at all—not even from the figurehead.
“You’re going to get us killed.”
“That possibility has existed since I was elected Captain. It existed when we left the Barrowland. It existed when we walked away from the Tower. It existed when we sailed from Opal. It existed when you swore your oath to the Black Company. It became highly probable when I accepted this hasty and misrepresented commission from the merchants of Gea-Xle. Nothing new there, friend.”
Something like a large, flat black stone came skipping across the water, throwing up sprays of silver. Goblin and One-Eye scuttled it.
“What do you want, Croaker?” Her voice was taut, maybe even edged with fear.
“I want to know who runs the Black Company. I want to know who makes the decisions about who travels with us and who doesn’t. I want to know who gives members of the Company permission to wander off for days at a time, and who gives out the right to hide out for a week, shirking all duties. Most of all, I want to know who decides which adventures and intrigues will involve the Company.”
The skipping stones kept coming, leaving their sprays and ripples of silver. Each came nearer the barge.
“Who’s going to run things, Lady? You or me? Whose game are we going to play? Yours or mine? If not mine, all your treasures stay where you can’t get at them. And we go to the needleteeth. Now.”
“You’re not bluffing, are you?”
“You don’t bluff when you’re sitting across the table from somebody like you. You bet everything you’ve got and wait to see if you’re called.”
She knew me. She had had her looks inside me. She knew I could do it if I had to. She said, “You’ve changed. Gone hard.”
“To be the Captain you have to be the Captain, not the Annalist or the Company physician. Though the romantic is still alive back in there somewhere. You might have pulled it off if you’d gone through with it that night on that hill.”
One of the skipping stones nudged the barge.
I said, “You had me going for a while.”
“You idiot. That night didn’t have anything to do with this. Back then I didn’t think there was a chance this would work. That was a woman on that hill with a man she cared about and wanted, Croaker. And she thought that was a man who—”
The next stone whamm’d home. The barge shuddered. Goblin yelled, “Croaker!”
“Are we going to make a move?” I asked. “Or should I shuck down so I can try to outswim the needleteeth?”
“Damn you! You win.”
“Your promise good this time? For them, too?”
“Yes, damnit.”
I took a chance. “Frogface. Roll it over. Bring the stuff back.”
A stone hit the barge. Timbers groaned. I staggered and Goblin yelled again.
I said, “Your stuff is back, Lady. Get Shifter and his girlfriend up here.”
“You knew?”
“I told you. I figured it out. Move.”
The old man called Eldron the Seer appeared, but now he wore his true guise. He was the supposedly slain Taken called Shapeshifter, half as tall as a house and half as wide, a monster of a man in scarlet. Wild, stringy hair whipped around his head. His jungle of a beard was matted and filthy. He leaned upon a glowing staff that was an elongated, improbably thin female body, perfect in its detail. It had been among Lady’s things and had been the final clue that had convinced me when Frogface reported its presence. He pointed that staff across the river.
A hundred-foot splash of oily fire boiled up amidst the cypress.
The barge reeled at the kiss of another flat stone. Timbers flew. Below, the horses shrieked in panic. Some of the crew sang with them. My companions looked grim in the light of the fires.
Shapeshifter kept laying down splash after splash, till the swamp was immersed in a holocaust that beggared both of mine put together. The screams of the pirates became lost in the roar of the flames.
I won my bet.
And Shifter kept laying it down.
A great howling rose within the fire. It faded into the distance.
Goblin looked at me. I looked at him. “Two of them in ten days,” I muttered. We had heard that howling last during the Battle at Charm. “And not friends anymore. Lady, what would I have found if I had opened those graves?”
“I don’t know, Croaker. Anymore, I don’t. I never expected to see the Howler again. That’s for sure.” She sounded like a frightened, troubled child.
I believed her.
A shadow passed the light. A night-flying crow? What next?
Shifter’s companion saw it, too. Her eyes were tight and intense.
I took Lady’s hand. I liked her a lot better now that she had her vulnerability back.