Cordy had overheard most of what had been said. He came over. "I'm not that bad off, Willow. I don't object to soldiering when the cause is right. I just was with the wrong bunch up there. I'm with Blade. I like Taglios. I like the people. I'm willing to do what I can to see they don't get worked over by the Shadowmasters."
"You heard what he said? The Black Company?"
"I heard. I also heard him say they want to talk about it. I think we ought to go find out what's going on before we run our mouths and say what we're not going to do."
"All right. I'm going to change. Hold the fort, and all that, Blade. Keep your mitts off the one in the red. I got first dibs." He stalked off.
Cordy Mather grinned. "You're catching on how to handle Willow, Blade."
"If this's going down the way I think, he don't need handling. He'll be the guy out front when they try to stop the Shadowmasters. You could roast him in coals and he'd never admit it, but he's got a thing for Taglios."
Cordy Mather chuckled. "You're right. He's finally found him a home. And no one is going to move him out. Not the Shadowmasters or the Black Company."
"They as bad as he lets on?"
"Worse. Lots worse. You take all the legends you ever heard back home, and everything you heard tell around here, and anything you can imagine, and double it, and maybe you're getting close. They're mean and they're tough and they're good. And maybe the worst thing about them is that they're tricky like you can't imagine tricky. They've been around four, five hundred years, and no outfit lasts that long without being so damned nasty even the gods don't screw with them."
"Mothers, hide your babies," Blade said. "Smoke had him a dream."
Cordy's face darkened. "Yeah. I've heard tell wizards maybe make things come true by dreaming them first. Maybe we ought to cut Smoke's throat."
Willow was back. He said, "Maybe we ought to find out what's going on before we do anything."
Cordy chuckled. Blade grinned. Then they began shooing the marks out of the tavern—each making sure an appointment was understood by one or more of the young ladies.
Chapter Four: THE DARK TOWER
I piddled around another five days before working myself up to a little after-breakfast skull session. I introduced the subject in a golden-tongued blurt: "Our next stopover will be the Tower."
"What?"
"Are you crazy, Croaker?"
"Knew we should have kept an eye on him after the sun went down." Knowing glances Lady's way. She stayed out of it.
"I thought she was going with us. Not the other way around."
Only Murgen did not snap up a membership in the bitch-of-the-minute club. Good lad, that Murgen.
Lady, of course, already knew a stopover was needed.
"I'm serious, guys," I said.
If I wanted to be serious, One-Eye would be, too. "Why?" he asked.
I sort of shrank. "To pick up the Annals I left behind at Queen's Bridge." We got caught good, there. Only because we were the best, and desperate, and sneaky, had we been able to crack the imperial encirclement. At the cost of half the Company. There were more important concerns at the time than books.
"I thought you already got them."
"I asked for them and was told I could have them. But we were busy at the time. Remember? The Dominator? The Limper? Toadkiller Dog? All that lot? There wasn't any chance to actually lay hands on them."
Lady supported me with a nod. Getting really into the spirit, there.
Goblin pasted on his most ferocious face. Made him look like a saber-toothed toad. "Then you knew about this clean back before we ever left the Barrowland."
I admitted that that was true.
"You goatfu-lover. I bet you've spent all this time concocting some half-assed off-the-wall plan that's guaranteed to get us all killed."
I confessed that that was mostly true, too. "We're going to ride up there like we own the Tower. You're going to make the garrison think Lady is still number one."
One-Eye snorted, stomped off to the horses. Goblin got up and stared down at me. And stared some more. And sneered. "We're just going to strut in and snatch them, eh? Like the Old Man used to say, audacity and more audacity." He did not ask his real question.
Lady answered it for him, anyway. "I gave my word."
Goblin did not mouth the next question, either. No one did. And Lady left it hanging.
It would be easy for her to job us. She could keep her word and have us for breakfast afterward. If she wanted.
My plan (sic), boiled down, depended entirely on my trust in her. It was a trust my comrades did not share.
But they do, however foolishly, trust me.
The Tower at Charm is the largest single construction in the world, a featureless black cube five hundred feet to the dimension. It was the first project undertaken by the Lady and the Taken after their return from the grave, so many lifetimes ago. From the Tower the Taken had marched forth, and raised their armies, and conquered half the world. Its shadow still fell upon half the earth, for few knew that the heart and blood of the empire had been sacrificed to buy victory over a power older and darker still.
There is but one ground-level entrance to the Tower. The road leading to it runs as straight as a geometrician's dream. It passes through parklike grounds that only someone who had been there could believe was the site of history's bloodiest battle.
I had been there. I remembered.
Goblin and One-Eye and Hagop and Otto remembered, too. Most of all, One-Eye remembered. It was on this plain that he destroyed the monster that had murdered his brother.
I recalled the crash and tumult, the screams and terrors, the horrors wrought by wizards at war, and not for the first time I wondered, "Did they really all die here? They went so easily."
"Who you talking about?" One-Eye demanded. He did not need to concentrate on keeping Lady englamored.
"The Taken. Sometimes I think about how hard it was to get rid of the Limper. Then I wonder how so many Taken could have gone down so easy, a whole bunch in a couple days, almost never where I could see it. So sometimes I get to suspecting there was maybe some faking and two or three are still around somewhere."
Goblin squeaked, "But they had six different plots going, Croaker. They was all backstabbing each other."
"But I only saw a couple of them check out. None of you guys saw the others go. You heard about it. Maybe there was one more plot behind all the other plots. Maybe... "
Lady gave me an odd, almost speculative look, like maybe she had not thought much about it herself and did not like the ideas I stirred now.
"They died dead enough for me, Croaker," One-Eye said. "I saw plenty of bodies. Look over there. Their graves are marked."
"That don't mean there's anybody in them. Raven died on us twice. Turn around and there he was again. On the hoof."
Lady said, "You have my permission to dig them up if you like, Croaker."
A glance showed me she was chiding me gently. Maybe even teasing. "That's all right. Maybe someday when I'm good and bored and got nothing better to do than look at rotten corpses."
"Gah!" Murgen said. "Can't you guys talk about something else?" Which was a mistake.
Otto laughed. Hagop started humming. To his tune Otto sang, "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the ants play the bagpipes on your snout." Goblin and One-Eye joined in. Murgen threatened to ride over and puke on somebody.
We were distracting ourselves from the dark promise looming ahead.
One-Eye stopped singing to say, "None of the Taken were the sort who could lie low all these years, Croaker. If any survived we would have seen the fireworks. Me and Goblin would have heard something, anyway."