Bleak Seasons

Goblin asked, “Don’t that camel’s wife know we’re on to him?”

“Why should he think we might suspect him? He’s got such a tall opinion of his own brain...”

“I think it’s fu

I asked Goblin, “What’s One-Eye up to?” One-Eye looked like he was praying over one of the ballistas with Loftus. Rags lay scattered around their feet. A gruesome black spear lay in the engine’s trough.

“I don’t know.”

I checked the nearest gate. The Nar there could see us. Mogaba would know I was lying if I claimed we were too beat up to send help. I asked, “Anybody think of a reason we should help Mogaba?” To hold my sector, besides the Old Crew itself, I had six hundred Taglian survivors from Lady’s division and an uncertain and changeable number of liberated slaves, former prisoners of war and ambitious Jaicuri.

Everyone replied in the negative. Nobody wanted to help Mogaba. As I approached the engines I asked, “How about if we do it just to save our own butts? If we let Mogaba get stomped we could end up facing the rest of the Shadowlander mob by ourselves.” I glanced at the gate. “And those people over there can see everything we do.”

Goblin looked, too. He shook his head to lessen the beer buzz. “We’ll have to think about that.”

“What are you doing, One-Eye?” I was beside him now. One-Eye indicated the spear proudly. “Little something I’ve been working on in my spare time.”

“It’s ugly enough.” Nice to know he could do something useful without being told.

He had begun with a black wooden pole and had worked it for a lot of hours. It was covered with incredibly ugly miniature scenes along with writing in an unfamiliar alphabet. Its head was as black as its shaft, darkened iron finely traced with silver runes. There was some color on the shaft, too, although so fine as to be almost invisible. “Very nice.”

“Nice? Sigh. You heathen.” He pointed. Loftus looked. So did I.

Shadowspi

One-Eye snickered. “This here is my Shadowmaster blaster, bastar’!” He howled. He must have put away a lot of that beer. “Nothing he couldn’t stop on a lazy afternoon, but this ain’t no lazy afternoon, is it? Loftus shoots, this stick won’t be in the air five seconds. That’s all the time he’ll have to figure out what’s coming and what to do to unravel the spells that are there to keep him from turning it. And look how busy that asshole is already. Loftus, my man, get ready to carve you a big victory notch on this thing.”

As anybody with any sense does, Loftus ignored One-Eye. He laid his weapon with an artist’s care.

One-Eye babbled, “Most of the spells are designed to penetrate his personal protection, counting on him not having time to do anything actively. Because I wanted to concentrate on piercing one point in a passive...”

I shut him out. “Goblin. Any chance this will work? The runt’s not exactly a heavyweight.”

“It’s workable, tactically. If he really worked that hard on it. Say One-Eye is an order of magnitude weaker than Shadowspi

“An order of magnitude?” So that was One-Eye’s problem.

“More like two orders really, probably.”

He lost me. And I didn’t have time to wring an explanation out of him.

Loftus was satisfied he was leading his target perfectly, he had the range, whatever. “Time,” he said.

28

“Loose,” I suggested. The ballista offered its distinctive thump. Silence spread along the wall. The black shaft darted across the night. The occasional spark floated behind it. One-Eye said five seconds of flight. The truth was more like four but they took forever.

There was ample firelight to illuminate the Shadowmaster. Shortly he would disappear behind one of the enfilading towers. He stared back at the hills as he rode. Those bizarre riders out there were on the plain now, daring someone, anyone, to answer their challenge.

I gasped.

Widowmaker carried the Lance. The standard itself was not apparent but that was the lance on which it had ridden from the day the Black Company left Khatovar. Every single A

Later Goblin told me Spi

The spear changed course by scant inches. Instead of striking Shadowspi

I recognized that animal then. It was one of those magically bred monster horses Lady brought south with the Company, out of her old empire. They vanished during the battle.

The horse screamed and screamed.

A normal animal would have perished in moments.

I stared at those two riders out there. They walked toward the city slowly, offering their challenge. Now I could see that they, too, were mounted on Lady’s stallions. I told Goblin, “But I saw them killed.”

One-Eye grumbled, “We got to check this boy’s eyes.”

Goblin said, “I told you before, that’s not Lady. You look real close, you can see differences in the armor.”

The troops were seeing that. There was a stir among the Taglians.

“And you don’t know about the other one? What’re they talking about over there?”

“No. It could be the Old Man.”

Sparkle went to see why the Taglians were excited.

Shadowspi

The sorcerer would have died more slowly and gruesomely still had One-Eye’s shaft struck home.

Sparkle came to say, “They’re all excited because that armor is an exact match for some goddess named Kina in her battle avatar. That’s the way she’s always portrayed in paintings about her war with the demons.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, only that Kina was some sort of death goddess in these parts.

I wondered when the Shadowmaster would snipe back at One-Eye.

“He won’t,” Goblin assured me. “The moment he gave it attention enough to be effective those two out there would cut his legs off.”

I watched Shadowspi

His embarrassment spurred his soldiers to increase their efforts again. Somebody would pay for his indignity in pain. Understandably they preferred that we pick up that tab.

Some of them seemed to recognize the Lifetaker armor, too. I heard the name Kina shouted more than once below the wall.

“Thai Dei. Time for a message to your grandfather. I want to bring part of my force through his area so I can help drive the southerners out of the city.”

The Nyueng Bao stepped out of the shadows just long enough to listen. He stared at those riders, troubled. Then he grunted, descended to the street and trotted off into the night.

“Listen up, people. We’re going to go save our fearless dick-head leader. Bucket...”