93
There was something going around. Everyone we ran into crossing to our camp wanted to know what was going on. It was not a matter of rampant rumor. Nobody had heard anything outrageous. But every man had developed an unfocused case of nerves. I felt it myself. Everything seemed portentous, though of what no one could say. As I entered the squalid village that had sprung up below the Shadowgate I noted that most of my men were seeing to their arms and equipment, just in case. I made a mental note to take advantage of their nerves and begin whipping them into more presentable shape.
It was time to take some raggedy-ass volunteers and begin molding them into brothers.
Counting soldiers and officials and camp followers at least a hundred thousand Taglians had been involved in Croaker’s last crusade against the Shadowmaster. I have not dwelled on it but death did claim most of those folks, some in the fighting, more by way of disease and accident and hardship. Disease and hardship and Taglians probably accounted for even greater numbers of Shadowlanders. The conflict generated a human disaster far greater than the worst of the earthquakes shaking the region.
Disease remains a problem. Always.
The point is, there has not been a lot of fun and glory down here. The few thousand men who remain with us, many of them permanently crippled in some way, are real nervous sorts. They find signs and portents in everything.
Like most who stumble into the mercenary life they were men their society did not cherish. Maybe they had no families to rejoin. Maybe they had things turned a little sideways inside their heads. Maybe they were criminals or fugitives from enemies or wives or debt collectors. It takes a great deal to bring order and discipline to men of that sort. The Company’s concept of itself as home and family had worked pretty well the past few generations but during that time the outfit never got bigger than a few hundred men. Never had it been so big that each man did not know every other.
I realized that I, for one, despite all pretense to the contrary, had not been doing everything I could to pull the family together. I had let a lack of outside pressure lull me into relaxing.
Paranoia is a must. The more so when times seem fat and favorable.
The guys were nervous now. It was time to work them a little harder.
“A reading from the First Book of Croaker,” I told the force assembled. I was a bit bemused. There must have been six hundred of them. Even the worst of the halt and lame had come. “In those days the Company was in service to the Syndics of Beryl . . . ” It should be a good reading. Unless Otto and Hagop came over those times would be safely in the past, yet would still be close enough that the men would know that veterans of those events were still amongst them. They would know that there were forces ranged against us that their predecessors first encountered then. The very emblem on their badges had been chosen by the Company then. It was an easy connection to the past, comprehensible, with current relevance. It was a doorway through which they could be led to accept the belief that they were part of something that has survived everything for over four hundred years.
I got no cheers. I did get passionate enough to make even the most cynical member of my audience suspect that there might be something to what I said.
I made my speech and did my reading from the roof of my bunker. Sleepy sat beside the doorway throughout, showing all the ambition of a protective gargoyle. I wondered if some forced exercise might not help bring him back.
The uproar of Bucket arguing with Thai Dei wakened me. “What the hell is going on?” I yelled.
“Get your ass out here, Murgen!”
I slithered across the rocky floor and into a brilliant night.
I did not need to have anything pointed out. The fireworks were self-explanatory.
Lady’s weapons plant was burning. Fireballs began to fly. It got worse fast. Fires started in the forest, in the ruins of Kiaulune and amongst the shanties of the camps across the way. A few fireballs even reached my neighborhood, though my guys were heads-up enough to dodge them.
I said, “No way I’m going over there.”
“Somebody ain’t afraid,” Bucket said. A glimmer betrayed Uncle Doj loping away, Ash Wand in hand, colorful reflections setting its edge aglitter.
“Thai Dei!” I barked. “What the hell is he doing?”
“I do not know.”
The excitement across the way grew so loud we could make out a general roar of people shouting.
“Shit and double shit,” somebody said. “Can you believe that?”
I reiterated, “I’m not going over there.”
The fireworks continued. Random balls arced across the night. Sometimes a pole would discharge rapidly, hurling a stream of fiery dots into the darkness. Lady’s factory was mostly underground but the earth did not confine the devastation.
For a few minutes the night got lost in the glare.
Back behind me the standard dusk-to-dawn fog of darkness crowding the Shadowgate rippled away uphill, clinging to the deepest washes and gullies. The shadows did not like what was happening.
Neither did I. Again I observed, “I’m not going over there.”
Some wiseass remarked, “Any of you other guys think Murgen maybe ain’t going over there?”
Shithead.
I held out a few hours. I even got some sleep.