Port of Shadows by Glen Cook
That woman, my wife, had plenty she wanted to say but never said a word. She did not acknowledge my existence once I dragged myself together enough to fake an interest in developments.
Again she ordered the twins to stay on me, tight, but Shin skated out this time, leaving me to the mercy of his sister.
I could have whined and blamed my condition on Mischievous Rain but I held back. Although I might have been provoked, I was the guy who had chosen to take himself two miles past being totally messed up. Sober, Croaker loathed excuse-making when other idiots painted themselves as victims. I would not make an exception for myself.
Firefly told me, “If I could do this my way you wouldn’t get any pain medicine at all, Dad. We can’t fix stupid but we can sure as hell let stupid treat itself to a world of hurt.”
I did not get mad. I must have had me a case of battered-wife syndrome, feeling like maybe I deserved the abuse.
* * *
Enough self-indulgence. There was no way to dress this pig and make her pretty. I held up operations for a day, so, naturally, folks were unhappy. I was not happy. But still I wondered why it all got set back because one moron had a hangover.
So, a day late, Mischievous Rain loaded her carpet and headed east. With her were her kids, her cat, her husband, two sister-hunter girls, and the Company’s entire corps of wizards. The Annalist was on his knees beside the Taken, clutching frame wood with white-knuckled hands. The Taken was not speaking to him yet. In time, though, his wondrous personal charm would weasel its way through her resolve.
Mischievous Rain did not indulge her usual hell-bent approach to flight. She proceeded at a sedate aerial amble, presumably toward the Resurrectionist site that Elmo and Buzz had destroyed.
Once my charm did win through, she asked, “What became of the son of the girl who had a baby?”
“He stayed at the temple where we found his mother, I think. He wasn’t walking yet.”
Her jaw clenched. She was not pleased.
I turned, asked, “Which one of you guys had field duty the time we found the girl that had a baby?”
Nobody remembered. I told Mischievous Rain, “We’re all having bad memory problems lately, I figure on account of the synch.”
She grunted and muttered, “Be careful what you wish for,” not speaking to me. Then she touched me on the temple and snapped an order in a language that I did not understand.
My world went dark. And then I was wide awake again, with a knuckle-cracking grip on the carpet frame, more ferocious than ever before. The Taken had us sweeping through a tight left turn.
I squeaked, “The girl is sixteen, she went to Charm, and I know that only because Sergeant Nwynn told me. Nwynn might know about the baby. You should talk to her.”
“Thank you. You will talk to her when we get back.”
“I have a copy of her … Right. When we get back.”
She eyed me directly, her tattoos showing bold and busy. Her usual good humor was absent. The wind chimes, silent since her return, sang now, but neither musically nor merrily. The midnight yukata had become a fathomless darkness calling hungrily. “You people,” she declared, “are supposed to be the toughest, brightest, most cynical and most ruthless agents of the empire. Having met most of its other operators I stipulate that that may be true—which is a sad truth because the very best men of an elite battalion, specifically engaged to prevent a Resurrectionist exploitation of the Port of Shadows, have failed utterly to show any interest in a male child produced by a girl fully qualified to be the Port of Shadows.”
“Ah, shit!” I muttered, understanding despite her convolution.
The gang of wizards agreed.
I grumbled, “It never occurred to any of you that the coupling might have happened already? Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why were we fixated on keeping it from happening down the road?”
More calmly, the Taken said, “That’s probably my fault. I have been too preoccupied with other troubles even to pay attention to my children.” Just loudly enough for me to hear, she added, “I suffered from that exact forward-focused mind-set until the pregnant girl came to the Tower and I heard Colonel Chodroze and Tides Elba wondering why amongst so many pretty girls only two ever got knocked up.”
Amongst us all somebody ought to have thunk it.
Turned out that the Third had but he had kept his mouth shut because he figured Goblin and One-Eye would mock him.
I would not bet a moldy lump of hardtack that he was wrong about that, either.
* * *
I clung to the leading edge of the carpet frame, on the Taken’s right. Firefly and Ankou were close by, Firefly to my right and so near that she could whisper translations of her mother’s angry mutterings.
Mischievous Rain was unhappy with everyone and everything.
Firefly seemed more sympathetic to me than to her mother.
I asked, “What are we looking for?” Only the master of the carpet knew.
The Company sorcerers had been impressed to provide whatever magical artillery support she desired.
Firefly was not beyond the occasional seditious act if she thought she was being pinched between unreasonable viewpoints. Or, perhaps more precisely, between an unreasonable viewpoint and one owned by a gormless sort who stood around slack-jawed with no clue as to what was happening.
She whispered, “A year from now you won’t remember this. And I’ll cry. But that’s how it’s got to be.” She squeezed my right arm. “You’ll forget me and Shin and Ankou, except maybe in nightmares. And we might not be allowed to remember you, either. But I really do wish that you could. Remember us.”
I gave her a one-arm hug. “No worries, kiddo. No way I could ever forget you.” I owned a secret memory device.
The Taken ignored us. She was fully focused on something else.
We hit some turbulence. One-Eye started moaning about how we were all going to die.
Turbulence or the whine, something stuck a pin in the Taken. She seemed irked because that something had cost her her concentration.
The turbulence persisted. This soldier’s breakfast tried to come back to the light but with ferociously manful grit I kept from humiliating myself.
One-Eye failed to follow my example.
Meantime, the hunter girls strolled around the carpet trying to calm the old men. The wobble and bounce did not bother them even when the bottom fell out and we plunged about six miles, or maybe really a hundred feet, before we smacked into solid air. The carpet frame creaked and groaned. I was sure it was going to come apart.
Firefly said, “That weasel Goblin is…”
He was, yes, milking it, having noted that the hunter pretties would comfort an anxious old man. But his hand roamed a bit too freely. He got a head-rocking slap for his trouble.
The crack of that blow killed One-Eye’s terror. The little turd lapsed into a laughing fit. He never let up on Goblin after that.
I muttered, “The babies are the grown-ups, here.”
We left the troubled air. The transition was a universal smack. Everybody felt it. Everybody relaxed. Wisecrack duels commenced.
Firefly murmured, “We are about to discover the source of the carpet that Slapback saw.”
I had forgotten that, but remembered, now. And immediately wondered why we were headed east instead of north.
Had to have been Whisper, right? “What do you mean?”
Baku did not care if the Taken was listening. “Mom knows all the carpets. She knows where they were and what their riders were doing when Slapback saw what he saw, so she knows that no empire carpet was anywhere near Aloe that day.”
I was tempted to mention that Slapback was a huge drunk and hardly a reliable witness but stifled my treacherous mouth this one time.
Slapback had been sober. I had checked.
Firefly said, “Whisper’s carpet should have been the closest when that happened but on that day she was at the Tower getting reamed because of her crippled campaign strategy.
No. He was not. He was still breathing.
So. Slapback must have treated himself to something that made him see things. Only …
Only my baby girl was sneaking up on an ugly alternate explanation.
If Slapback really saw a flying carpet, that meant that there was a carpet out there that was not a gift of the Lady. Which ought to be completely impossible.
Mischievous Rain’s focus, so determined that she failed to follow the chatter around her, suggested that a rogue carpet did indeed exist. Which meant that a really powerful sorcerer was running around loose, a situation that the Lady would not tolerate.
I got me a case of the chills so harsh that I could not stop shivering. My convictions about the way the world ought to be structured were about to be swept away.
Any flying carpet operating outside the Lady’s grace brayed the existence of an independent power so strong that our worries about the Port of Shadows became of secondary import because a possible opening of the Port might not be our most immediate existential threat.
Firefly snuggled closer. She looked so seriously sad that I choked up despite the horrors rampaging inside my noggin. She could not stop shaking.
I told her, “Slapback is a big drunk. He must’ve been seeing things.”
“Bullshit. He saw what he said he saw.”
How could I weasel out of that? “How do you know?”
“I told you we’re looking for where that carpet came from.” Stated without enthusiasm.
This long adventure, begun as a hunt for a supposed Rebel commander named Tides Elba—who had turned out to be dangerous only because she was so godsdamned attractive—kept writhing in hand like a big-ass shape-shifting snake. Nothing was what it looked like. Nothing stayed the same. Nothing went the way that it should.
Hey, Croaker! Slap a glass-half-full face on it. Focus on the plusses.
Big plus Number One: The Limper was not trying to kill you.
Big plus Number Two: Ditto, Whisper.
For now the Company was golden.
Word had gone out from the Tower, inscribed on hot iron: Do not fuck with the Black Company!
So Two Dead promised, in a private aside, insisting that the Lady had issued that order.
* * *
I studied Mischievous Rain from the edge of my eye. She was determined to pursue this search despite her emotional ambivalence.
I am quite familiar with having to get on with what I have to do despite hating having to do it.
I squeezed Firefly closer. She squeaked.
All right. Maybe she was my kid. Maybe she was an old evil pretending. No matter, right now she was somebody I cared about and feared that I might lose, in accordance with her prediction.
* * *
The wizards were restless. We were way east of the site of Elmo and Buzz’s triumph. Virgin forest sprawled beneath us, vast, wild, and uninhabited. We were not likely to find any girls out here.
The girl-hunter girls were with us, though, so, maybe. If some of their kind had gone feral.
This was unknown country, the region its neighbors knew as the Ghost Country. The popular belief was that no rational being ever went there, though why not was never clear. According to Gurdlief Speak the Ghost Country had gotten its reputation more than a thousand years ago. Even the Domination had let it be—though that could have been because the Domination had not quite reached it before the White Rose’s advent.
Where were we going? It was taking forever to get there.
The forest below became green fur on baby mountains. The mountains got taller. And still we flew on, the sun descending behind us.
The Taken abandoned straight flight, put on speed, began making long sweeps north and south, looking for something.
We got no heads-up as to what.
Firefly stayed snuggled against me, hanging on with both hands. Ankou and Beloved Shin crowded in behind me, part of the cluster hug.
Daylight began to fail. Mischievous Rain dropped into a meadow beside a rushing creek. Majestic pines crowded that on three sides. Poplars and birches skirted the creek. We had not been grounded five minutes before Firefly shouted, “I found some ripe blackberries! Tons of them!”
We made camp, nobody saying much, the labor divvying up without argument. We saw no sign of any human presence, nor did we see anything to support this being called the Ghost Country.
A doe ambled into the meadow, froze, stared, croggled, once she noticed us.
The Taken said, “Leave her be,” before anyone suggested that we have venison for supper.
The meadow seemed idyllic but I suspected that it might be an islet of good cheer lost in a sea of unhappily not.
The wizards were anxious, excepting maybe the Third, who was too raw to be worried about what he could neither see nor smell.
Firefly picked berries. Shin roamed with a lug of shadow pots. Ankou vanished, presumably gone scouting. The Annalist and girl-hunter girls, being otherwise useless, collected the driest deadwood from alongside the creek. We should produce the least smoke possible.
As the light faded it felt ever more like we were in enemy territory.
We would have been more troubled had we not had methodical Shin and his amazing pots. The boy even waded the creek to make sure that we were protected from that direction.
Come morning he would get cold and wet all over again when he recovered his toys.
One-Eye grumbled, “There ain’t nothing alive out here.”
Goblin said, “There was that deer.”
“But not nothing else. This here is a desert with trees.”
He was not wrong. There were animals about, but surprisingly few, and those few were very quiet. Night should have become raucous with frogs and crickets and mosquitoes. I got bit once. I heard one owl hoot one time, way off in the distance. No wolves bothered to declare their presence.
The quiet made everyone nervous. The Ghost Country just plain lacked the kind of background noises that go unnoticed until they are not there.
That night the kids snuggled in so tight that I could not toss and turn. Ankou stayed missing. The Taken, that clever witch, slept aboard her carpet, probably the better to make a quick getaway.
She had herself blankets and a pillow but at no time had ever suggested that the rest of us might maybe provide such comforts for ourselves. That did not feed her popularity, not even with her own family.
The discomfort level soared next morning. Shin could not find one of his pots.
He led me and the Taken to the site. There was a dent in the soil where the pot had been, in amongst some pine saplings, near the corpse of a huge tree that had been down for decades. Some saplings were smashed, uprooted, or broken, but nobody on night watch had heard anything.
“It’s not broken,” Shin said of his pot. “It’s gone. That’s never happened before.”
The Taken tasted the air, studied the broken saplings, examined a spot where something massive had slammed into the fallen tree. She plucked something out of the decaying wood.
“That a scale?” I asked.
“A hard scale. An armor scale, not just a skin scale.”
And a big scale.
I considered Shin. “You didn’t…?”
“I slept all night. I felt nothing.”
The Taken asked, “The other pots weren’t disturbed?”
“They were not.”
Hmm. Maybe I needed to rethink my take on those pots.
Neither Shin nor Baku had been involved in whatever had happened. But how about Ankou? Ankou was not big but he came with a major ration of tomcat nasty.
The Taken said, “Whatever happened, it’s over now. The sun is up. We’re all alive and we’re all still healthy. Let’s take this as evidence that we have to stay alert. Let’s go get breakfast.”
* * *
Somehow, without having been seen doing so, Blessed Baku produced eg
Maybe those kids could stash stuff in shadows and drag it out as it was needed.
Firefly just produced the food. She did not do any actual cooking.
The ever-observant Annalist did note, on that particular morning, in that meadow and in its surrounding forest, and down alongside the gurgling trace, that his world was awash in shadows. Tens of thousands of shadows.
And said Annalist really began to understand, deep down, that with the Taken and her sprats around the noise and sorcery was going to reach levels beyond the imagination of any Company sorcerer.
Shadows. Always shadows. Shadows always. My children were shadow spawn.
I lacked the imagination to encompass what my wife and kids could weave from shadow—which was all like mythical stuff, anyway. Like folklore, not like anything that you could encounter in real life.
Mischievous Rain, Blessed Baku, Beloved Shin, demon cat Ankou, they were all intrusions into my reality, conjured by the Lady in the Tower—perhaps as an abiding curse.
After checking out the missing shadow pot Mischievous Rain turned introspective and inert. Midmorning arrived before she decided to go aloft. I settled into my station, Firefly beside me. Mischievous Rain muttered, “We aren’t going to find what I was hoping.” And, moments later, “It’s twisting out of control.” She turned to the wizards piling aboard. “Change of plan, gentlemen. I need to take a look from as high as I can get. I need to minimize weight. You all need to get back off. Baku and Shin, you too. You’ll be their hostages guaranteeing that I won’t abandon them.”
That was a joke. I think.
She poked me. “You stay. You’ll be my spotter. And you, Kuroneko, Shironeko,” indicating the hunter girls. “Watch out behind and to the sides.”
Those girls were slight but they were heavier than Shin and Baku.
The wizards cleared off, per instructions. Shin went peacefully, too, but Firefly resisted. “I want to stay with Dad.”