The Return of the Black Company Read Free Page A

looking for a real challenge. But here lightweights Goblin and One-Eye can slide around quickly and treacherously enough to parry Spinner’s every feeble thrust.
    His weakness is a mystery.
    Makes you nervous when an enemy doesn’t do everything you think he can. And a Shadowspinner doesn’t become a top badass being gentle.
    One-Eye sees everything in its wickedest light. He says Spinner is slacking because Longshadow has a hold on him and is weakening him deliberately. Your basic old-time power politics with the Company in the middle.
    Before we came along the Shadowmasters did find their biggest challenges in fighting one another.
    On principle Goblin seldom agrees with One-Eye about anything. He claims Shadowspinner is lulling us while he recovers from wounds that were more serious than we suspected.
    My guess is, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
    Crows circle the Shadowlander camp. Always they circle. Some come, some go, but a baker’s dozen minimum are there all the time. Others haunt us day and night. Wherever I go, whenever, a crow is nearby. Except inside. They don’t get inside. We don’t let them inside. Those that try end up in somebody’s pot.
    Croaker had a thing about crows. I think I understand it now. But the bats bother me more.
    We don’t see the bats as often. The crows get most of them. (These crows are not ashamed to come out at night.) And those that the crows don’t get we do, most of the time. Inevitably, though, a few get away. And that isn’t good.
    They spy for the Shadowmasters. They are the far-ranging eyes of wickedness out here where our enemies cannot always manipulate the living darkness.
    Only two Shadowmasters remain. Spinner has problems. They do not have the reach or control they showed back when they could and did run the shadows into the very heart of the Taglian Territories.
    They are fading from the stage.
    One dreams.
    Dreams too easily become nightmares.

 
    6
    When you look down from the citadel you have to wonder how the Jaicuri manage, all jammed inside Dejagore’s walls. Truth is, they don’t and never did.
    At one time the hills surrounding the plain were covered with farms and orchards and vineyards. After the shadow came enterprises gradually disappeared as the peasant families abandoned the land. And then the anti-shadow, the Black Company, came, ever so hungry after the long sprint south from the victory at Ghoja Ford. And then came the Shadowlander armies which battered us.
    Now the hills bear little but memories of what once was. Vultures never picked bones much cleaner than those hills have been gleaned.
    The wisest peasants were those who fled early. Their children will repopulate the land.
    Later the stupid ones ran here, inside the false safety of Dejagore’s walls. When Mogaba is particularly cranky he drives a few hundred out the gate. They are just mouths crying to be filled. Food must be husbanded for those willing to die defending the walls.
    Locals who fail to contribute, or who demonstrate a weakness for getting sick or seriously injured, go out the gate right behind the peasants.
    Shadowspinner won’t take any in but those willing to help raise his earthworks and dig his burial trenches. The former means laboring under falls of missiles directed by old friends inside, while the latter means making the bed where you will lie as soon as you are useful no longer.
    Hard choices.
    Mogaba cannot fathom why his military genius isn’t universally hailed.
    He doesn’t mess with the Nyueng Bao. Not yet. They haven’t contributed much to Dejagore’s defense but they don’t sap resources, either. Their babies are getting fat while the rest of us tighten our belts.
    You don’t see many dogs or cats now. Horses manage only because they are militarily protected, and then only a handful of them. We’re going to eat hearty when the last fodder is gone.
    Small game like rats and pigeons are becoming scarce. Sometimes you hear the outraged protest of a