The Black Company: The First Novel of 'The Chronicles of The Black Company' Read Free Page B

eyes adjusted.
    There were bones everywhere. Bones in heaps, bones in stacks, bones sorted neatly by something insane. Strange bones they were, similar to those of men, but of weird proportion to my physician’s eye. There must have been fifty bodies originally. They’d really packed them in, back when. Forvalaka for sure, then, because Beryl buries its villains uncremated.
    There were fresh corpses too. I counted seven dead soldiers before the sneezing started. They wore the colors of a mutinous cohort.
    I dragged a body outside, let go, stumbled a few steps, was noisily sick. When I regained control, I turned back to examine 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 milienium 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