"Get the little bastard!" Murgen said, and started after him.
Goblin bounced up and squeaked, "Croaker!"
"Where you been, runt? Sitting here drinking toddies while we're out stomping in the mud trying to save your butt from the baddies, eh?"
Murgen got him cornered. "Hey! No! I just got here myself."
"Where's your horse? The stable was one short when we put ours in."
"It's pretty miserable out there. I left it out back and came straight inside."
"It's not miserable for a horse? Murgen, throw him out and don't let him back inside till he takes care of his horse."
Not that we had done all that decent a job ourselves. But we'd at least gotten them in out of the wet.
"Cordy, when the old gal finishes fussing over Lady ask her how far it is to the Main."
"The Main? You're not still—"
"I'm still. As soon as I get some chow inside me and a couple hours of sleep. It's what I came down for and it's what I'm going to do. Your pals have been running a game on us, whatever their reasons, and I don't like it. If I can take the Company on without getting drafted into somebody's fight, I'm going to do it."
He sort of smiled. "All right. If you have to see for yourself, see for yourself. But be careful."
Goblin came in looking sheepish and conciliatory and wet. "Where are you going now, Croaker?"
"Where we were going in the first place. The river."
"Maybe I can save you the trouble."
"I doubt it. But let's hear it. You find out something while you were adventuring on your own?"
His eyes narrowed.
"Sorry. It wasn't one of my all-time best nights."
"You're having a lot of not-so-good times in recent years, Croaker. Being Captain gives you a sour stomach."
"Yeah."
We exchanged stares. I won the lookdown. He said, "After Lady and I split up I only got about half a mile before I realized them brown guys weren't being fooled. I knew I did a good job with the illusion. If they didn't all come after me, then they had some mojo of their own somewhere. I already suspected they did on account of how they stuck all the time even when we outran them. So I figured if I couldn't get back to Lady I'd do the next best thing and go after whoever was controlling and guiding them. When I started sniffing around for it it was damned easy to find. And they gave me no trouble. I guess they figured if I would go away from Lady they'd leave me alone. Only a few stuck with me. I turned on them and uncorked a few specials I was saving for the next time One-Eye got out of line, and after they all stopped kicking I buzzed over there and sneaked up and there was this hilltop that had been sort of hollowed out, like a bowl, and down in the bowl there was these six guys all facing a little fire. Only there was something weird. You couldn't see them right. It was like you was looking at them through a fog. Only the fog was black. Sort of. Lots of little shadows, I'd guess you'd call them. Some of them no bigger than a mouse's shadow. All buzzing around like bees."
He was talking as fast as his mouth would go, yet I knew he was having trouble telling what he had seen. That words for what he wanted to convey did not exist, at least in any languages us mundanes would understand.
"I think they were seeing what we were doing in the flames, then sending those shadows out to tell their boys what to do to us and how to get into our way."
"Hunh?"
"Maybe you were lucky, not dealing with them so much in the daytime."
"Right." I figured I'd had troubles enough chasing a walking treestump around the countryside. "See any crows while you were at it?"
He looked at me funny. "Yeah. As a matter of fact. See, I was laying there in the mud looking at these guys, trying to figure what I had in the trick bag that I could smack them with, and all of a sudden there's about twenty crows swooping around. The whole thing blew up like it was raining naptha instead of water. Cooked those brown guys good. Only those crows maybe weren't crows. You know what I mean?"
"Not till you tell me."
"I only saw them for a second, but it seemed like I could see right through them."
"You always do," I muttered, and he looked at me weird again. "So you figure any of the brown guys who're still out there are wandering around lost now? Like puppies without their masters?"
"I wouldn't say that. I figure they're as smart as you or me. Well, as smart as you, anyway. They just don't have their advantage anymore."
The old woman was still fussing over Lady. She had taken her somewhere to get bathed and patched up. As if she needed patching.
"How does this save me a trip to the Main?"
"I'm not finished yet, Your Grand Impatience. Right after the blowup here came one of the guys I thought I'd finished, tracking me down, all on his lonesome, and he's stumbling around holding his head like something got ripped out. I grabbed him. And I grabbed a couple loose shadows that were hanging around and I slapped one of them around a little and sent it off to tell One-Eye I needed to borrow his little beast. I taught another shadow how to make a guy talk and when the little monster showed up we asked the brown guy a few hundred questions."
"Frogface is here?"
"He went back. Mogaba's got them working their butts off up there."
"Good for him. You asked questions. You got answers?"
"Not that made much sense. These little brown guys come from a berg called Shadowcatch. Specifically, out of some kind of superfortress called Overlook. Their boss is one of the Shadowmasters; Longshadow, they call him. He gave the shadows to the six guys that was in the bowl place. These were just wimpy little shadows not good for much but carrying messages. They supposedly got bad ones they can turn loose, too."
"We're having some fun now, aren't we? You find out what's going on?"
"This Longshadow is up to something. He's in with the whole bunch trying to keep the Company away—the brown guys didn't know why they're worried—but he's running a game on his own, too. The impression I got was he wanted them to capture you and Lady and have you dragged down to his castle, where he was going to make some kind of deal, maybe. And that's about it."
I had five hundred questions and I started asking them, but Goblin didn't have the answers. The man he had interrogated hadn't had them. Most of the questions had occurred to him.
He asked, "So, are you going down to the Main?"
"You haven't changed my mind. Neither have those brown runts. If they don't have their mojo men anymore, they won't give me much trouble. Will they?"
Goblin groaned. "Probably not."
"So what's the matter?"
"You think I'm going to let you ride out there without some kind of cover? I'm groaning about the state of my butt." He grinned his big frog grin. I grinned back.
According to our hosts it was a four-hour ride to the Ghoja ford, the nearest and best crossing over the Main. Swan said there were four along an eighty-mile stretch of the Main: Theri, Numa, Ghoja, and Vehdna-Bota. Theri being the farthest upriver. Above Theri the Main coursed through rugged canyons too steep and bleak for military operations—though Goblin said our little brown friends had come that way, to evade the attention of the other Shadowmasters. They had lost a third of their number making the journey.
Vehdna-Bota lay nearest the sea and was useful only during the driest months of the year. The eighty miles of river between Vehdna-Bota and the sea were always impassable. Both Vehdna-Bota and Theri fords took their names from Taglian villages that had been abandoned when the Shadowmasters had invaded last year. They remained empty.
Numa and Ghoja were villages below the Main, formerly Taglian, now occupied. Ghoja appeared to be the critical crossing, and Swan, Mather, and Blade had all seen it. They told me what they could. I asked about the other fords and made an amusing discovery. Each was unfamiliar with at least one. Ha!