Shadow Games

Oh, well. I was ahead of the game.

Books available charted our future almost to the edge of the maps owned by the monks, and those ran all the way to Here There Be Dragons. Another century and a half of a journey into our yesterdays. By the time we retraced our route that far I hoped we would stand at the heart of a map that encompassed our destination.

As soon as it was clear that we had struck gold I obtained writing materials and a virgin volume of the A

Time fled. A monk brought candles. Then a hand settled on my shoulder. Lady said, “Do you want to take a break? I could do that for a while.”

For half a minute I just sat there turning red. That, after I practically ditched her outside. After I never even thought of her all day.

She told me, “I understand.”

Maybe she did. She had read the various Books of Croaker-or, as posterity might recall them, the Books of the North-several times.

With Murgen and Lady spelling me the translation went quickly. The only practical limit was One-Eye’s endurance.

It was not all one way. I had to trade my later A

One-Eye is a tough old buzzard. He held up. Four days after he made his great discovery the job was done.

I let Murgen into the game but he did all right. And I had to beg/buy four blank journals in order to get everything transcribed.

Lady and I resumed our stroll about where we had broken it, but with me a little down.

“What’s the matter?” she chided, and to my astonishment wanted to know if it was a postcoital depression. Just the faintest of digs there, I think.

“No. I’ve just found out a ton about the Company’s history. But I didn’t learn anything that’s really new.”

She understood but she kept quiet and let me articulate my dissatisfaction.

“It’s told a hundred ways, poorly and well, according to the skill of the particular A

“Gea-Xle.” She got her mouth around it like she had had practice.

“Yeah, there. Where the contract lasted so long the Company almost lost its identity, intermarrying with the population and all that, becoming a sort of hereditary bodyguard, with arms handed down from father to son. But as it always will, the essential moral destitution of those would-be princes made itself evident and somebody decided to cheat us. He got his throat cut and the Company moved on.”

“You certainly read selectively, Croaker.”

I looked at her. She was laughing at me quietly.

“Yeah, well.” I’d stated it pretty baldly. A prince did try to cheat our forebrethren and did get his throat cut. But the Company installed a new, friendly, beholden dynasty and did hang around a few years before that Captain got a wild hair and decided to go treasure hunting.

“You have no reservations about commanding a band of hired killers?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” I admitted, sliding past the trap nimbly. “But we never cheated a sponsor.” Not exactly. “Sooner or later, every sponsor cheated us.”

“Including yours truly?”

“One of your satraps beat you to it. But given time we would have become less than indispensable and you would have started looking around for a way to shaft us instead of doing the honorable thing and paying us off and simply terminating our commission.”

“That’s what I love about you, Croaker. Your unflagging faith in humanity.”

“Absolutely. Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent,” I grumped.

“You really know how to melt a woman, you know that, Croaker?”

“Huh?” I come armed with a whole arsenal of such brilliant repartee.

“I came out here with some feebleminded notion of seducing you. For some reason I’m not in the mood to try anymore.”

Well. Some of them you screw up royal.

There was an observation catwalk along some parts of the monastery wall. I went up into the northeast corner, leaned on the adobe and stared back the way we had come. Busy feeling sorry for myself. Every couple hundred years that sort of thing leads to a productive insight.

The damned crows were thicker than ever. Must have been twenty of them now. I cursed them and, I swear, they mocked me. When I threw a loose piece of adobe they all jumped up and fled toward...

“Goblin!” I think he was out keeping an eye on me in case I got suicidal.

“Yeah?”

“Get One-Eye and Lady and come up here. Fast.” I turned and stared up the slope at the thing that had caught my eye.

It stopped moving but was unmistakably a human figure in robes so black looking at them was like looking at a rent in the fabric of existence. It carried something under its right arm, about the size of a hatbox, held in place by the natural fall of the limb. The crows swarmed around it, twenty or thirty of them, squabbling over the right to perch upon its shoulders. It was a good quarter mile from where I stood but I felt the gaze from its hooded, unseen face beating upon me like the heat from a furnace.

The crowd turned up with Goblin and One-Eye as quarrelsome as ever. Lady asked, “What is it?”

“Take a look out there.”

They looked. Goblin squeaked, “So?”

“So? What do you mean, so?”

“What’s so interesting about an old tree stump and a flock of birds?”

I looked. Damn! A stump ... But as I stared there was an instant’s shimmer and I saw the black figure again. I shuddered.

“Croaker?” Lady asked. She was still mad at me but concerned even so.

“Nothing. My eyes were playing tricks on me. I thought I saw the damned thing moving. Forget it.”

They took me at my word, stomped off to whatever they had been doing. I watched them go and for another moment doubted my own senses.

But then I looked again.

The crows were flying off in a crowd, except for two headed straight toward me. And the stump was hiking off across the hillside as though intent on circling the monastery. I mumbled a little to myself but it did not do any good.

I tried giving the Temple a few more days to work its magic but the next one hundred fifty years of our journey drummed on in my mind. There was no repose now. I was too itchy to sit. I a

What was this?

I sat up and came out of myself, where I had been spending a lot of time reexamining the familiar old furniture. I had not been paying attention to the others.

They were restless, too.

There was something in the air. Something that told us all it was time to hit the road. Even the monks seemed eager to see us move out. Curious.

Them that stays alive in the soldiering business are them that listens to such feelings even when they make no sense. You feel like you got to move, you move. You stay put and get stomped, it is too late to whine about all that work for nothing.