Bleak Seasons

14

The goddamned wind had teeth. We huddled in our blankets, shivering, as unmotivated as guys get without hanging it up. Weren't many of us wanted to be in that haunted grove in the first place.

Yet something I could not quite catch, some elusive emotion deep inside me, told me this was critical, that this had to be done just right. That more than I could imagine hinged upon that.

Unseen trees creaked and cracked. The wind groaned and whined. It was easy to let your imagination get away and brood on the fact that thousands had been tortured and murdered there. You might hear their moans inside the wind, their pleas for mercy ignored even now. You might expect to see broken corpses rising up to demand vengeance on the living.

I faked being a hero. I could not stop shaking, though. I pulled my blanket tighter. That did not help, either.

"Candyass!" One-Eye sneered. Like the little shit wasn't about to have a seizure himself. "That bonehead Goblin don't quit farting around and get his dead ass back here I'm gonna go strip him barebutt and nail him to a chunk of ice."

"That's creative."

"Don't be no wiseass, Kid. I'll... "

An especially exuberant gust took off with what he would.

It wasn't just the cold making us shake, though nobody would admit that. It was the place and the mission and the fact that heavy cloud cover robbed us of even the meager comradeship of starlight.

It was goddamned dark. And these Stranglers might now be friends with the man who ran shadows. A little bird said. Actually, a big black bird said.

"We spend too much time in town," I grumbled. One-Eye didn't respond. Thai Dei did, though, with a grunt. But that was a speech for this particular Nyueng Bao.

The wind brought the creak of a stealthy footfall. One-Eye barked, "Goddamnit, Goblin! Quit stomping around. You want the whole damned world to know we're here?" Never mind that Goblin could not be heard five feet away, dancing. One-Eye refuses to be constrained by mundane reason or consistency.

Goblin drifted into place in front of me, squatted. His little yellow teeth chattered. "All set," he murmured. "Whenever you're ready."

"We'd better do it, then. Before I break out in a case of common sense." I grunted as I rose. My knees crackled. My muscles did not want to stretch any more. I swore. I was getting too damned old for this shit, though at thirty-four I was the baby of the bunch. "Move out," I said, loudly enough to be heard by most everyone. You couldn't use hand signals in that darkness.

We were downwind and Goblin had done his stuff. Noise was not a worry.

The men drifted away, mostly so quietly that I had trouble believing I was alone suddenly except for my bodyguard. We moved, too. Thai Dei covered my back. The night didn't bother him. Maybe he has eyes like a cat.

I had plenty of mixed feelings. This was the first time I had run a raid. I was not sure I was over Dejagore enough to handle it. I shied at shadows and remained crazy suspicious of everybody outside the Company, for no reason I could understand. But Croaker insisted, so here I was sneaking around in a dark and evil forest with icicles hanging off my butt, directing the first purely Company op in years. Only it wasn't so purely Company when you considered the fact that all my guys had bodyguards with them.

I got over the self-confidence hurdle just by getting myself moving. Hell, it was too late to stop anything.

I stopped worrying about me and went to work worrying about how we would look after the raid was over. If we blew it we could not blame that on Taglian treachery or factionalism or incompetence, the usual sand in the machine.

I reached the crest of a low ridge. My hands were frozen but my body was wet inside my clothing. Light wavered ahead. The Deceivers, those lucky bastards, had a bonfire to keep them warm. I paused to listen. I heard nothing.

How did the Old Man know the leaders of the Strangler bands would gather for this particular festival? It was downright spooky the way he knew stuff sometimes. Maybe Lady was rubbing off. Maybe he had some magical talent he never mentioned.

I observed, "We're about to find out if Goblin still has that talent."

Thai Dei did not spend a precious grunt. Silence was comment enough.

There were supposed to be thirty to forty top Deceivers over there. We hunt them relentlessly and have done so since Narayan snatched Lady and Croaker's baby. The Old Man has eliminated mercy from the Company vocabulary. And that fits Deceiver philosophy perfectly, though I would bet those guys up ahead would not think that way in a minute.

Goblin still had the knack. The sentries were napping. Still, inevitably, all did not go as planned.

I was fifty feet from the bonfire, sneaking along beside this especially big, ugly shelter when somebody went heeling and toeing out its end like all the devils in Hell were after him. He bent under the weight of a big bundle. That bundle wriggled and whimpered.

"Narayan Singh!" I knew him instantly. "Stop!"

Right, Murgen. Freeze him with your voice.

The rest of the guys recognized him too. A yell went up. We could not believe our luck, though I had been warned that the big prize might be there to grab. Singh was the number one Deceiver, the villain Lady and the Captain want to spend long years killing, an inch at a time.

The bundle had to be their daughter.

I yelled orders. Instead of responding the men did whatever they thought of. Mostly they went after Singh. The racket wakened the rest of the Deceivers. The quickest tried to run.

Luckily, some of the guys stayed on the job.

"You warm now?" Goblin asked. I puffed heartily as I watched Thai Dei shove a skinny blade into the eye of a sleep befuddled Strangler. Thai Dei doesn't cut throats. He doesn't like the mess.

It was over. "How many did we get? How many got away?" I stared the direction Singh had fled. The silence there was not promising. The guys would have raised a real hoorah had they caught him.

Damn! I was excited for a while there. If only I could have dragged him back to Taglios. If wishes were fishes. "Keep some alive. We'll want somebody to tell us bedtime stories. One-Eye. How the hell did Singh all of a sudden know we were here?"

The runt shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe his goddess goosed him and told him to haul ass."

"Give me a break. Kina didn't have anything to do with it." But I wasn't that sure. Sometimes it is hard to disbelieve.

Thai Dei gestured.

"Right," I said. "Just what I was thinking myself."

One-Eye looked puzzled. Goblin grumbled, "What?" My wizards. Right on top of everything.

"Sometimes I wonder if you guys could find your dicks without a map. The shelter, old-timers. The shelter. Don't it seem like that's an awful lot of shack for one runt killer and a kid barely tall enough to bite you on the kneecap? A bit big even for a living saint and the daughter of a goddess?"

One-Eye developed a nasty grin. "Nobody else came out, did they? Yeah. You want I should start a fire?"

Before I could answer him Goblin squealed. I whirled. A shapeless darkness, visible only because of the bonfire, reared out of the shelter entrance then I slammed into the ground, felled by Thai Dei. Fire blasted over my head. Lights crackled. Balls of flame darted in from all around.

The killing darkness took on a moth-eaten look. Then it came apart.

That darkness was why so many of us had been shivering before the attack. But we won this round.

I sat up, crooked a finger. "Let's see what we've caught. It ought to be interesting." My guys knocked the shelter apart. Sure enough, they turned up a half dozen wrinkled little old men, brown as chestnuts. "Shadowweavers. Running with the Stranglers. Now isn't that interesting?"

The geezers gobbled their willingness to surrender.

We had run into their kind before. They never were big on personal heroics.

A soldier called Wishbone said, "These Shadowlanders are getting good at this ‘I surrender' stuff." He sneered. "Everybody down there must be practicing their handy Taglian phrases."

"Except Longshadow," I reminded. I told Thai Dei, "Thanks."

He shrugged, a gesture foreign to the Nyueng Bao. The world did touch him occasionally. "Sahra would expect it."

And that was very Nyueng Bao. He would blame his actions on his sister's expectations rather than on any notion of duty or obligation or even friendship.

"What are we supposed to do with these guys?" Wishbone asked. "We got any use for them?"

"Save a couple. The oldest and one other. Goblin. You never said how many got away."

"Three. That counts Singh but not the kid. But we're going to get one of them three back on account of he's hiding in the bushes right over there."

"Collect him. I'll give him to the Old Man."

Sarky One-Eye cracked, "Give them a little authority, they turn into field marshals. I remember this kid when he was so green he still had sheep shit between his toes. He didn't know what shoes were for." But the humor wasn't in his eye. Every move I made he watched like a hawk. Like a crow, in fact, although we had no crows hanging around tonight. Whatever experiment Goblin and One-Eye had going in that area was a complete success during this outing.

Goblin suggested, "Ease up, Murgen. We'll get the job done. How about some of you lazy asses toss a couple logs on the fire?" He began to circle the hidden Deceiver in the direction opposite that taken by One-Eye.

They were right. I get too serious under stress. I was a thousand years old already. Surviving Dejagore had not been easy. But all the rest of these guys had come through that, too. They had seen Mogaba's slaughters of innocents. They had suffered the pestilences and plagues. They had seen the cannibalism and human sacrifices, the treacheries and betrayals and all the rest. And they had come away without letting the nightmares rule them.

I have to get a handle on it. I have to get some emotional distance and perspective. But there is something going on inside me that is beyond my control or understanding. Sometimes I feel like there are several of me in there, all mixed up, sometimes sitting behind the real me watching, watching. There may be no chance for me to recover complete sanity and stability.

Goblin came strutting back. He and One-Eye accompanied a man who was not much more than skin and bones. Few Deceivers are in good shape these days. They have no friends anywhere. They are hunted like vermin. Huge bounties ride on their shoulders.

Goblin flashed his toadlike grin. "We've got us a red-hand man here, Murgen. A genuine black rumel guy with the red palm. What do you think of that?"

The thought lightened my heart. The prisoner was truly a top Strangler. The red hand meant that he had been there when Narayan Singh tricked Lady into thinking she was being inducted into the Strangler cult when in fact the Deceivers were really consecrating her unborn child as daughter of their goddess Kina.

But Lady had employed a trick of her own, marking every Strangler there with the red hand that could not be denied later. Nothing they tried would take the color away, short of amputation. And a one-handed Strangler could not manage the rumel, the strangling scarf, that was the tool of the Deceivers' holy trade.

"The Old Man will be pleased." A red-hand man would know what was going on inside his cult.

I crowded closer to the fire. Thai Dei, done helping dispose of redundant shadowweavers, eased in beside me. How much had Dejagore changed him? I could not imagine him ever being anything but dour, taciturn, remorseless and pitiless, even as a toddler.

Goblin, I noted, was doing that thing he did lately where he watched me from the corner of his eye while pretending to do something else. What were he and One-Eye looking for?

The runt held his hands out. "Fire feels good."