Book 2 - She Is The Darkness by Glen Cook Page A

approach as the enemy would.
    Fireballs scattered colored pearls across the night. Torches
speckled distant slopes with islands and snakes of light. The
Shadowlander commanders watched without remark except when Blade
suggested that the Captain was making his force appear more
formidable by burning lots of torches.
    They were not concerned. A lot of the junior officers expected
Longshadow to turn them loose after they stomped us. They saw
themselves heading north in early spring, with the whole summer to
plunder and punish.
    But a few were veterans of armies we had embarrassed in the
past. Those men showed us more respect. And betrayed a more intense
desire to cause us pain. They did not believe it would be easy but
they did believe we would be defeated.
    Mogaba himself seemed more taken with his plans for a
counterinvasion than he was interested in further preparing to
withstand us here.
    I did not like it but I saw no real reason to believe they were
overconfident.
    Still, all those fireballs and torches were heartening.
    That vast mass in motion out there had been inspired by the
Black Company. And I had no trouble recalling when there were just
seven of us, as unprepossessing a bunch of thugs as ever walked the
earth. That was barely more than five years ago. Triumph or
failure, this campaign would survive as a mighty drumbeat in the
Annals.
    I went back to my flesh and slept again. When I awakened our
vanguards were already approaching the Plain of Charandaprash.
Mist had formed in all the low places and gullies.
     
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20
    We stopped amidst a grand hubbub. I leaned out of the wagon.
    The mists had become an all enveloping fog. People with torches
hustled hither and yon, their torches glowing like witch lights.
None came near me. All the forces had come together and now the
world was very crowded.
    Croaker appeared. I told him, “You look totally
beat.”
    “My ass is banging off my heels.” He climbed aboard,
checked Smoke, settled down and closed his eyes.
    “Well?”
    “Uhm?”
    “You’re here. How come? And what about your
goddamned pets? They watching?”
    For a moment I thought he had gone to sleep that quickly. He did
not answer immediately. But: “I’m hiding out. From the
birds, too. One-Eye scared them off.” About two minutes
later, he added, “I don’t like it, Murgen.”
    “What don’t you like?”
    “Being Captain. I wish I could’ve stayed Annalist
and physician. There’s less pressure.”
    “You’re managing all right.”
    “Not the way I hear it. I wasn’t Captain I
wouldn’t have any long-term worries, either.”
    “Hell. And here I thought you were having the time of your
life baffling the shit out of everybody.”
    “All I’ve ever wanted was to take us home. But they
won’t let me.”
    “It’s for sure nobody’s ever going to open any
doors for us. Especially not the Radisha. What to do about us seems
to be on her mind a lot lately.”
    “It ought to be.” He smiled. “And I
haven’t forgotten her.” He paused a moment, then said,
“You’re up on your Annals. What was the bloodiest mess
we ever got ourselves into?”
    “Right here is my guess. Back in the beginning, four
hundred years ago. But that’s only by implication in the
surviving Annals.”
    “History may repeat itself.” He did not sound
thrilled. Not at all. He was not a bloodthirsty man.
    Neither am I, despite the hatreds I obsess over here. But my
scruples do have blind areas. I do want to see several thousand
villains suffer for what happened to Sahra.
    Croaker asked, “Do you know of any way to authenticate the
lost Annals you took back from Soulcatcher?”
    “What?” What a horrible question. It never occurred
to me before. “You saying you think they might not be
real?”
    “I couldn’t read them but I could see that they
weren’t originals. They were copies.”
    “They might not have told the true story?”
    “Smoke believed every word in the ones he had. And oral
history