Book 1 - The Black Company Read Free Page B

my
booty.
    The others stood around looking green. "No phantom did that,"
Goblin said. Tom-Tom bobbed his head. He was more shaken than
anyone. More shaken than the sight demanded, I thought.
    Silent got on with business, somehow conjuring a brisk, small
maid of a breeze that scurried in through the mausoleum door and
bustled out again, skirts laden with dust and the smell of
death.
    "You all right?" I asked Tom-Tom.
    He eyed my medical kit and waved me off. "I'll be okay. I was
just remembering."
    I gave him a minute, then prodded, "Remembering?"
    "We were boys, One-Eye and me. They'd just sold us to N'Gamo, to
become his apprentices. A messenger came from a village back in the
hills." He knelt beside the dead soldier. "The wounds are
identical."
    I was rattled. Nothing human killed that way, yet the damage
seemed deliberate, calculated, the work of a malign intelligence.
That made it more horrible.
    I swallowed, knelt, began my examination. Silent and Goblin
eased into the tomb. Goblin had a little amber ball of light
rolling around his cupped hands. "No bleeding," I observed.
    "It takes the blood," Tom-Tom said. Silent dragged another
corpse out. "And the organs when it has time." The second body had
been split from groin to gullet. Heart and liver were missing.
    Silent went back inside. Goblin came out. He settled on a broken
grave marker and shook his head. "Well?" Tom-Tom demanded.
    "Definitely the real thing. No prank by our friend." He pointed.
The northerner continued its patrol amidst a swarm of fishermen and
coasters. "There were fifty-four of them sealed up here. They ate
each other. This was the last one left."
    Tom-Tom jumped as if slapped. "What's the matter?" I asked.
    "That means the thing was the nastiest, cunningest, cruelest, and craziest of the lot."
    "Vampires," I muttered. "In this day."
    Tom-Tom said, "Not
strictly a vampire. This is the wereleopard, the man-leopard who
walks on two legs by day and on four by night."
    I'd heard of werewolves and werebears. The peasants around my
home city tell such tales. I'd never heard of a wereleopard. I told
Tom-Tom as much.
    "The man-leopard is from the far south. The jungle." He stared
out to sea. "They have to be buried alive." Silent deposited
another corpse.
    Blood-drinking, liver-eating wereleopards. Ancient,
darkness-wise, filled with a millenium of hatred and hunger. The
stuff of nightmare all right. "Can you handle it?"
    "N'Gamo couldn't. I'll never be his match, and he lost an arm
and a foot trying to destroy a young male. What we have here is an
old female. Bitter, cruel, and clever. The four of us might hold
her off. Conquer her, no."
    "But if you and One-Eye know this
thing . . . "
    "No." He had the shakes. He
gripped his drum so tight it creaked. "We can't."
     
     
    Chaos died. Beryl's streets remained as starkly silent as those
of a city overthrown. Even the mutineers concealed themselves till
hunger drove them to the city granaries.
    The Syndic tried to tighten the screws on the Captain. The
Captain ignored him. Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye tracked the
monster. The thing functioned on a purely animal level, feeding the
hunger of an age. The factions besieged the Syndic with demands for
protection.
    The Lieutenant again summoned us to the officers' mess. The
Captain wasted no time. "Men, our situation is grim." He paced.
"Beryl is demanding a new Syndic. Every faction has asked the Black
Company to stand aside." The moral dilemma escalated with the
stakes. "We aren't heroes," the Captain continued. "We're tough.
We're stubborn. We try to honor our commitments. But we don't die
for lost causes."
    I protested, the voice of tradition questioning his unspoken
proposition.
    "The question on the table is the survival of the Company,
Croaker."
    "We have taken the gold. Captain. Honor is the question on the
table. For four centuries the Black Company has met the letter of
its commissions. Consider the Book of Set, recorded by Annalist
Coral while the Company