I should be used to this. I have been with the Company a long time. And it does bother me less than it used to. I have hung armor plate over my moral soft spots. But I still try to avoid looking at the worst.
You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.
Raven laughs when he reads my accounts. “Sugar and spice,” he calls them, and threatens to take the Annals away and write the stories the way he sees them happen.
Hardass Raven. Mocking me. And who was that out there roaming around the camp, breaking it up wherever the men were amusing themselves with a little torture? Who had a ten year old girl trailing him on an old jack mule? Not Croaker, brothers. Not Croaker. Croaker isn’t no romantic. That is a passion reserved for the Captain and Raven.
Naturally, Raven has become the Captain’s best friend. They sit around together like a couple of rocks, talking about the same things boulders do. They are content just to share one another’s company.
Elmo was leading the arsonists. They were older Company men who had sated their less intense hungers for flesh. Those still mauling the ladies were mostly our young regular hangers-on.
They had given the Rebel a good fight at Roses, but he had been too strong. Half the Circle of Eighteen had ranged themselves against us there. We had had only the Limper and Shapeshifter on our side. Those two spent more time trying to sabotage one another than trying to repel the Circle. Result, a debacle. The Lady’s most humiliating defeat in a decade.
The Circle pulls together most of the time. They do not spend more energy abusing one another than they spend on their enemies.
“Hey! Croaker!” One-Eye called. “Join the fun.” He tossed a burning brand through a barracks doorway. The building promptly exploded. Heavy oaken shutters blew off the windows. A gout of flame enveloped One-Eye. He came charging out, kinky hair smoldering below the band of his weird, floppy hat. I wrestled him down, used that hat to slap his hair. “All right. All right,” he growled. “You don’t have to enjoy yourself so damned much.”
Unable to stifle a grin, I helped him up. “You all right?”
“Singed,” he said, assuming that air of phony dignity cats adopt after some particularly inept performance. Something like, “That’s what I meant to do all along.”
The fire roared. Pieces of thatch soared and bobbed over the building. I observed, “The Captain sent me to make sure you clowns didn’t start a forest fire.” Just then Goblin ambled around the side of the flaming building. His broad mouth stretched in a smirk.
One-Eye took one look and shrieked. “You maggot brain! You set me up for that.” He let out a spine-tingling howl and started dancing. The roar of the flames deepened, became rhythmic. Soon it seemed I could see something prancing among the flames behind the windows.
Goblin saw it too. His smirk vanished. He gulped, went white, began a little dance of his own. He and One-Eye howled and squawked and virtually ignored one another.
A watering trough disgorged its contents, which arced through the air and splashed the flames. The contents of a water barrel followed. The roar of the fire dwindled.
One-Eye pranced over and took a poke at Goblin, trying to break his concentration. Goblin weaved and bobbed and squeaked and kept on dancing. More water hit the fire.
“What a pair.”
I turned. Elmo had come over to watch. “A pair indeed,” I replied. Fussing, feuding, whining, they could be an allegory of their bigger brethren in the trade. Except their conflict does not run half to the bone, like that between Shifter and the Limper, When you slice through the fog, you find that these two are friends. There are no friends among the Taken.
“Got something to show you,” Elmo said. He would not say anything more. I nodded and followed him.
Goblin and One-Eye kept at it. Goblin appeared to be ahead. I stopped worrying about the fire.
“You figured how to read these northern chicken tracks?” Elmo asked. He had led me into what must have been the headquarters for the whole camp. He indicated a mountain of papers his men had piled on the floor, evidently as tinder for another fire.
“I think I can puzzle it out.”
“Thought you might find something in this stuff.”
I selected a paper at random. It was a copy of an order directing a specific Rebel mainforce battalion to filter into Lords and disappear into the homes of local sympathizers till called to strike at Lords’ defenders from within. It was signed Whisper. A list of contacts was appended.
“I’ll say,” I said, suddenly short of breath. That one order betrayed a half-dozen Rebel secrets, and implied several more. “I’ll say.” I grabbed another. Like the first, it was a directive to a specific unit. Like the first, it was a window into the heart of current Rebel strategy. “Get the Captain,” I told Elmo. “Get Goblin and One-Eye and the Lieutenant and anybody else who maybe ought to be...”
I must have looked weird. Elmo wore a strange, nervous expression when he interrupted. “What the hell is it, Croaker?”
“All the orders and plans for the campaign against Lords. The complete order of battle.” But that was not the bottom line. That I was going to save for the Captain himself. “And hurry. Minutes might be critical. And stop them from burning anything like this. For Hell’s sake, stop them. We’ve hit paydirt. Don’t send it up in smoke.”
Elmo slammed through the door. I heard his bellows fade into the distance. A good sergeant, Elmo. He does not waste time asking questions. Grunting, I settled myself on the floor and began scanning documents.
The door creaked. I did not look up. I was in a fever, glancing at documents as fast as I could yank them off the pile, sorting them into smaller stacks. Muddy boots appeared at the edge of my vision. “Can you read these, Raven?” I had recognized his step.
“Can I? Yes.”
“Help me see what we’ve got here.”
Raven settled himself opposite me. The pile lay between us, nearly blocking our view of one another. Darling positioned herself behind him, out of his way but well within the shadow of his protection. Her quiet, dull eyes still reflected the horror of that far village.
In some ways Raven is a paradigm for the Company. The difference between him and the rest of us is that he is a little more of everything, a little bigger than life. Maybe, by being the newcomer, the only brother from the north, he is symbolic of our life in the Lady’s service. His moral agonies have become our moral agonies. His silent refusal to howl and beat his breast in adversity is ours as well. We prefer to speak with the metallic voice of our arms.
Enough. Why venture into the meaning of it all? Elmo had struck paydirt. Raven and I went sifting for nuggets.
Goblin and One-Eye drifted in. Neither could read the northern script. They started to amuse themselves by sending sourceless shadows chasing one another around the walls. Raven gave them a nasty look. Their ceaseless clowning and bickering can be tiresome when you have something on your mind.
They looked at him, dropped the game, sat down quietly, almost like children admonished. Raven has that knack, that energy, that impact of personality, to make men, more dangerous than he, shudder in his cold dark wind.
The Captain arrived, accompanied by Elmo and Silent. Through the doorway I glimpsed several men hanging around. Funny the way they smell things shaping up.