“We all do that. In everyday life it’s called making excuses.” True, raw motives are too rough to swallow. By the time most people reach my age, they have glossed their motives so often and so well they fall completely out of touch with them.
I became conscious of a shadow across my lap. I glanced up. Soulcatcher extended a hand, inviting me to take my turn with the bow. Raven had recovered his arrows, and was standing by, waiting for me to step to the mark.
My first three shafts plunked into the rag. “How about that?” I said, and turned to take a bow.
Soulcatcher was reading my little fantasy. He raised his gaze to mine. “Really, Croaker! It wasn’t like that at all. Didn’t you know that she murdered her twin sister when she was fourteen?”
Rats with icy claws scrambled around on my spine. I turned, let a shaft fly. It ripped wide right of the butt. I sprayed a few more around, and did nothing but irritate the pigeons in the background.
Catcher took the bow. “Your nerves are going, Croaker.” In a blur, he snapped three arrows into a circle less than an inch across. “Keep at it. You’ll be under more pressure out there.” He handed the bow back. “The secret is concentration. Pretend you’re doing surgery.”
Pretend I’m doing surgery. Right. I have managed some fancy emergency work in the middle of battlefields. Right. But this was different.
The grand old excuse. Yes, but... This is different.
I calmed down enough to hit the butt with the rest of my shafts. After recovering them, I stood aside for Raven.
Goblin handed me my writing materials. Irritably, I crumpled my little fable.
“Need something for your nerves?” Goblin asked.
“Yeah. The iron filings or whatever it is Raven eats.” My self-esteem was pretty shaky.
“Try this.” Goblin offered me a little six-pointed silver star hanging on a neck chain. At its center was a medusa head in jet.
“An amulet?”
“Yes. We thought you might need it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Nobody was supposed to know what was happening.
“We have eyes, Croaker. This is the Company. Maybe we don’t know what, but we can tell when something is going on.”
“Yeah. I suppose so. Thanks, Goblin.”
“Me and One-Eye and Silent, we all worked on it.”
“Thanks. What about Raven?” When somebody makes a gesture like that, I feel more comfortable shifting the subject.
“Raven doesn’t need one. Raven is his own amulet. Sit down. Let’s talk.”
“I can’t tell you about it.”
“I know. I thought you wanted to know about the Tower.” He had not talked about his visit yet. I had given up on him.
“All right. Tell me.” I stared at Raven. Arrow after arrow skewered the rag.
“Aren’t you going to write it down?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I readied pen and paper. The men are tremendously impressed by the fact that I keep these Annals. Their only immortality will be here. “Glad I didn’t bet him.”
“Bet who?”
“Raven wanted to make a wager on our marksmanship.”
Goblin snorted. “You’re getting too smart to get hooked by a sucker bet? Get your pen ready.” He launched his story.
He did not add much to rumors I had picked up here and there. He described the place he had gone as a big, drafty box of a room, gloomy and dusty. About what I expected of the Tower. Or of any castle.
“What did she look like?” That was the most intriguing part of the puzzle. I had a mental picture of a dark haired, ageless beauty with a sexual presence that hit mere mortals with the impact of a mace. Soulcatcher said she was beautiful, but I had no independent corroboration.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean, you don’t remember? How can you not remember?”
“Don’t get all excited, Croaker. I can’t remember. She was there in front of me, then... Then all I could see was that giant yellow eye that kept getting bigger and bigger and stared right through me, looking at every secret I ever had. That’s all I remember. I still have nightmares about that eye.”
I sighed, exasperated. “I guess I should’ve expected that. You know, she could come walking by right now and nobody would know it was her.”
“I expect that’s the way she wants it, Croaker. If it does all fall apart, the way it looked before you found those papers, she can just walk away. Only the Ten could identify her, and she would make sure of them somehow.”
I doubt it would be that simple. People like the Lady have trouble assuming a lesser role. Deposed princes keep acting like princes.
“Thanks for taking the trouble to tell me about it, Goblin.”
“No trouble. I didn’t have anything to tell. Only reason I put it off was it upset me so much.”
Raven finished retrieving his arrows. He came over and told Goblin, “Why don’t you go put a bug in One-Eye’s bedroll, or something? We’ve got work to do.” He was nervous about my erratic marksmanship.
We had to depend on one another. If either missed, chances were we would die before a second shaft could be sped. I did not want to think about that.
But thinking about it improved my concentration. I got most of my arrows into the rag this time.
It was a pain in the ass damned thing to have to do, night before whatever faced Raven and I, but the Captain refused to part with a tradition three centuries old. He also refused to entertain protests about our having been drafted by Soulcatcher, or demands for the additional knowledge he obviously commanded. I mean, I understood what Catcher wanted done and why, I just could not make sense of why he wanted Raven and I to do it. Having the Captain back him only made it more confusing.
“Why, Croaker?” he finally demanded. “Because I gave you an order, that’s why. Now get out there and do your reading.”
Once each month, in the evening, the entire Company assembles so the Annalist can read from his predecessors. The readings are supposed to put the men in touch with the outfit’s history and traditions, which stretch back centuries and thousands of miles.
I placed my selection on a crude lectern and went with the usual formula. “Good evening, brothers. A reading from the Annals of the Black Company, last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Tonight I’m reading from the Book of Kette, set down early in the Company’s second century by Annalists Lees, Agrip, Holm, and Straw. The Company was in service to the Paingod of Cho’n Delor at that time. That was when the Company really was black.”
“The reading is from Annalist Straw. It concerns the Company’s role in events surrounding the fall of Cho’n Delor.” I began to read, reflecting privately that the Company has served many losing causes.
The Cho’n Delor era bore many resemblances to our own, though then, standing more than six thousand strong, the Company was in a better position to shape its own destiny.
I lost track entirely. Old Straw was hell with a pen. I read for three hours, raving like a mad prophet, and held them spellbound. They gave me an ovation when I finished. I retreated from the lectern feeling as though my life had been fulfilled.
The physical and mental price of my histrionics caught up as I entered my barracks. Being a semi-officer, I rated a small cubicle of my own. I staggered right to it.
Raven was waiting. He sat on my bunk doing something artistic with an arrow. Its shaft had a band of silver around it. He seemed to be engraving something. Had I not been exhausted, I might have been curious.
“You were superb,” Raven told me. “Even I felt it.”
“Eh?”
“You made me understand what it meant to be a brother of the Black Company back then.”
“What it still means to some.”
“Yes. And more. You reached them where they lived.”
“Yeah. Sure. What’re you doing?”
“Fixing an arrow for the Limper. With his true name on it. Catcher gave it to me.”