The Black Company

The crowd froze, stared at our shields and bared blades, at snatches of grim faces barely visible through gaps in our face guards. “Verus!” Mercy shouted. “Get your butt out here!”

The grandfather of the managing family appeared. He sidled toward us like a mutt expecting a kick. The customers began buzzing. “Silence!” Mercy thundered. He could get a big roar out of his small body.

“How may we help you, honored sirs?” the old man asked.

“You can get your sons and grandsons out here, Blue.” Chairs squeaked. A soldier slammed his blade into a tabletop.

“Sit still,” Mercy said. “You’re just having lunch, fine. You’ll be loose in an hour.”

The old man began shaking. “I don’t understand, sir. What have we done?”

Mercy gri

Mercy wasn’t one of my favorite people. He never slopped being the boy who pulled wings off flies.

The punishment of slaves meant being left up for scavenger birds after public crucifixion. In Beryl only criminals are buried uncremated, or not buried at all.

An uproar rose in the kitchen. Somebody was trying to get out the back door. Our men were objecting.

The public room exploded. A wave of dagger-brandishing humanity hit us.

They forced us back to the door. Those who were not guilty obviously feared they would be condemned with those who were. Beryl’s justice is fast, crude, and harsh, and seldom gives a defendant opportunity to clear himself. A dagger slipped past a shield. One of our men went down, I am not much as a fighter, but I stepped into his place. Mercy said something snide that I did not catch.

“That’s your chance at heaven wasted,” I countered. “You’re out of the A

“Crap. You don’t leave out anything.”

A dozen citizens went down. Blood pooled in low places on the floor. Spectators gathered outside. Soon some adventurer would hit us from behind.

A dagger nicked Mercy. He lost patience. “Silent!”

Silent was on the job already, but he was Silent. That meant no sound, and very little flash or fury.

Mole patrons began slapping their faces and pawing the air, forsaking us. They hopped and danced, grabbed their backs and behinds, squealed and howled piteously. Several collapsed.

“What the hell did you do?” I asked.

Silent gri

The bag he had lugged in from out of town proved to be one of those hornets’ nests you can, if you’re unlucky, run into in the woods south of Beryl. Its tenants were the bumblebee-looking monsters peasants call bald-faced hornets. They have a foul temper unrivalled anywhere in Nature. They cowed the Mole crowd fast, without bothering our lads. “Fine work, Silent,” Mercy said, after having vented his fury on several hapless patrons. He herded the survivors into the street.

I examined our injured brother while the unharmed soldier finished the wounded. Saving the Syndic the cost of a trial and a hangman, Mercy called that. Silent looked on, still gri

We took more prisoners than expected. “Was a bunch of them.” Mercy’s eyes twinkled. “Thanks, Silent.” The line stretched a block.

Fate is a fickle bitch. She’d led us to Mole Tavern at a critical moment. Poking around, our witch man had unearthed a prize, a crowd concealed in a hideout beneath the wine cellar. Among them were some of the best known Blues.

Mercy chattered, wondering aloud how large a reward our informant deserved. No such informant existed. The yammer was meant to save our tame wizards from becoming prime targets. Our enemies would scurry around looking for phantom spies.

“Move them out,” Mercy ordered. Still gri

We wound through mazelike streets half as old as the world, our prisoners shuffling listlessly. I gawked. My comrades are indifferent to the past, but I ca

Mercy called an unexpected halt. We had come to the Avenue of the Syndics’, which winds from the Customs House uptown to the Bastion’s main gate. There was a procession on the Avenue. Though we reached the intersection first, Mercy yielded the right-of-way.

The procession consisted of a hundred armed men. They looked tougher than anyone in Beryl but us. At their head rode a dark figure on the biggest black stallion I’ve ever seen. The rider was small, effeminately slim, and clad in worn black leather. He wore a black morion which concealed his head entirely. Black gloves concealed his hands. He seemed to be unarmed.

“Damn me,” Mercy whispered.

I was disturbed. That rider chilled me. Something primitive deep inside me wanted to run. But curiosity plagued me more. Who was he? Had he come off that strange ship in the harbor? Why was he here?

The eyeless gaze of the rider swept across us indifferently, as though passing over a flock of sheep. Then it jerked back, fixing on Silent.

Silent met stare for stare, and showed no fear. And still he seemed somehow diminished.

The column passed on, hardened, disciplined. Shaken, Mercy got our mob moving again. We entered the Bastion only yards behind the strangers.

We had arrested most of the more conservative Blue leadership. When word of the raid spread, the volatile types decided to flex their muscles. They sparked something monstrous.

The perpetually abrasive weather does things to men’s reason. The Beryl mob is savage. Riots occur almost without provocation. When things go bad the dead number in the thousands. This was one of the worst times.

The army is half the problem. A parade of weak, short-term Syndics let discipline lapse-. The troops are beyond control now. Generally, though, they will act against rioters. They see riot suppression as license to loot.

The worst happened. Several cohorts from the Fork Barracks demanded a special donative before they would respond to a directive to restore order. The Syndic refused to pay.

The cohorts mutinied.

Mercy’s platoon hastily established a strongpoint near the Rubbish Gate and held off all three cohorts. Most of our men were killed, but none ran. Mercy himself lost an eye, a finger, was wounded in shoulder and hip, and had more than a hundred holes in his shield when help arrived. He came to me more dead than alive.

In the end, the mutineers scattered rather than face the rest of the Black Company.

The riots were the worst in memory. We lost almost a hundred brethren trying to suppress them. We could ill afford the loss of one. In the Groan the streets were carpet led with corpses. The rats grew fat. Clouds of vultures and ravens migrated from the countryside.

The Captain ordered the Company into the Bastion. “Let it run its course,” he said. “We’ve done enough.” His disposition had gone beyond sour, disgusted. “Our commission doesn’t require us to commit suicide.”

Somebody made a crack about us falling on our swords.

“Seems to be what the Syndic expects.”

Beryl had ground our spirits down, but had left none so disillusioned as the Captain. He blamed himself for our losses. He did, in fact, try to resign.

The mob had fallen into a sullen, grudging, desultory effort to sustain chaos, interfering with any attempt to fight fires or prevent looting, but otherwise just roamed. The mutinous cohorts, fattened by deserters from other units, were systematizing the murder and plunder.

The third night I stood a watch on Trejan’s Wall, beneath the carping stars, a fool of a volunteer sentinel. The city was strangely quiet. I might have been more anxious had I not been so tired. It was all I could do to stay awake.