Port of Shadows by Glen Cook
The outsiders were fugitives and brigands desperate enough to hide in the Ghost Country. Their camps featured wards against baneful spirits. How effective those might be Precious could only conjecture—but, he suspected, a practical test would not be long in coming.
The olden fallen were stirring. Soon they would leave their graves and barrows to hunt.
Precious and his girls never interacted with the haunts and revenants but sometimes they did spy a lonely lich considering their castle by moonlight, sadly, longingly, not at all in hatred.
Precious recalled a copy girl reminding him, “You’re a necromancer.”
Could he really do that?
* * *
Precious took some girls out and put them down near the camps. They scattered and scouted and learned nothing more useful than numbers and descriptions. They could not understand a word the outsiders said.
Those men were just barely surviving … and were more horrible than imagination had made them.
They caught one of the girls. They could not get her to say anything that they understood. They abused her until she died. She was just fourteen. Her trial left her sisters with a diminished hunger for adventure.
Precious restrained his lust for revenge. Instead, he pursued the course suggested by his girls.
He started in a meadow outside the fortress’s protective spells. The girls helped. They meant to waken a few terrors and send them to play with the outsiders.
They succeeded.
Up from deep time rose spirits, specters, ghosts, liches, terrors in platoons. They went hunting outsiders. They hated everything living.
Precious never understood that he and his girls were not alive in the estimation of the undead.
A few invaders commanded sorceries adequate to deal with the Ghost Country’s spawn. They were worshippers of the Domination, hiding from a terrible doom seeking them from out west, whence they had fled.
The Ghost Country demonstrated its wrath haphazardly and randomly, creating carnage without actually eliminating the outsiders or even driving them away. The survivors paid attention, gathered intelligence, and came to an interesting conclusion.
A truly heavyweight power must be resident at the heart of the Ghost Country, a power that had its own flying carpet.
The good guys sometimes fail to understand that the bad guys (interchangeable or arguable depending on where the observer stands) are as clever as they are.
* * *
In the centuries between the creation of the Barrowland and its breaking, and across the decades since, western peoples separated into factions like disparate lobes of a mutant four-leaf clover. Some tied their fortunes to the revenant Lady. More chose to resist her. A few maintained the struggle to free her husband, the great evil, the Dominator, from his Barrowland grave. But the outsize lobe, greater than the others together, were the folks who just wanted their kingdoms, their principalities, their free city-states, to be left the hell alone. That had been the way of the world since the Domination’s fall, and just a lot of people wanted that to continue.
The interplay between factions made for a kaleidoscopically shifting political landscape.
The Lady lost battles all the time. She never lost a war. Her sway was a stain ever expanding upon the continental map. Kings, princes, prelates and syndics, all bent the knee eventually, or they perished.
The Lady’s partisans strove ferociously to exterminate those of her husband, with all of their wives and children, all of their cousins and parents. They meant to expunge even the idea of resurrection.
Rebel and Resurrectionist alike suffered terribly during the Battle at Charm. Tens of thousands, even more than a hundred thousand, perished. The odor of putrefaction would persist for generations.
But there were survivors.
There are always survivors, be they ever so few.
Those who had fled beyond the Plain of Fear after the Domination’s fall were the First Wave. The Second Wave were Resurrectionists who ran when the Lady emerged from the Barrowland. The Third Wave were the survivors from Charm. Few of those retained any will to fight.
The first two waves squabbled constantly. They were welcome nowhere. Most became brigands. They had no other way to support themselves.
Although they would resist the Lady later the native peoples entertained no sympathy for the Resurrectionist cause. Their cultures retained collective memories of the horrors of the Domination’s brief rule, ages gone.
* * *
The supernatural skirmishing in the Ghost Country began decades before the Battle at Charm. Terrible things delivered terrible deaths to numerous unwelcome outsiders—who then sometimes returned as allies of their murderers.
Therein lay the core horror of the Ghost Country. There were numerous bits of folklore, come down from ages past, about finding friends or family among the relentless dead.
The uncommitted fled or dropped out of sight, not just of their enemies but of fanatical friends who would stalk traitors even while they themselves were being exterminated by the unrelenting dead.
The Ghost Country conflict was never one-sided. There were agile and accomplished sorcerers among the invaders, driven by a compulsion to raise up their own undead master. Remote descendants of long-dead servants of the Dominator, they disdained the ugly stories about the old days, though their dreams were haunted by whispers from afar, by tastes of the nightmares of him that they wanted to bring back.
Their effort to cleanse the Ghost Country did not go well. Their numbers dwindled to a few score. The survivors soldiered on, sure that capture of the granite fortress would guarantee ultimate success.
They knew the granite castle existed because they spent innumerable lives finding out what the Ghost Country was protecting. They spent many more lives trying to attain the castle, until they were down to those final few, most of whom were old men who considered themselves too important to be risked in the direct struggle.
Then a dark miracle happened—so it would seem.
* * *
The Resurrectionists kept records haphazardly, never reliably, never in detail, always ideologically blighted. Those began soon after the Domination’s collapse and continued until the near extinction in the Ghost Country. At that time, apparently, there was no one left to keep records, even of the tainted sort found in the captured Earth Spirit facility.
* * *
There was no record of how, nor any echo in oral history, but the granite castle changed hands.
Most probably Precious did something ill-advised and got caught by enemies who forced him to take them through the castle’s defenses.
Or possibly some copy girl managed to compromise Precious’s control of the carpet, took it out and got caught.
Or perhaps …
History becomes its most problematic at exactly its most critical moments.
29
In Modern Times: No Peace, No Rest
No rest for the wicked? I lend that saying little credit, yet it is a fact of life, in a sense. A natural law. Even the good guys have to run to keep from losing ground.
I did not see much of my kids once we got back to the compound. I saw my wife not at all. She disappeared into her quarters, where she did this and that and whatever else for days on end, then at oh dark thirty one morning she piled her carpet with pretties and Two Dead and headed west.
Meantime, I consulted Sergeant Nwynn about the only child thus far produced by one of the Tides Elba girls. Nwynn did know where the kid was. Silent took a gang to collect him.
The child was a him. Of course. And, blessed be, he was right where he was supposed to be when Silent got there.
It did not take long to find out what the Taken had been up to during her shut-in time. She had been gone barely two hours when Whisper arrived, her carpet straining under the weight of her staff sorcerer crew. Never known for her beauty, her charm, or her winning smile, the woman looked way more grim than usual. Hell, she looked flat-out scared. Her compa
There had been a come-to-god conversation between Whisper and the Lady, with the Lady doing all the talking. As a result Whisper would be the empire’s most exemplary subject for a while, and her people would strive to outshine her.
Elmo and I shared grumbled hopes that the rest of the Taken had gotten the same word, though we had no problems with any but the Limper.
Whisper spent the night, then headed west with a girl posse and Buzzard Neck along as wrangler. That seemed sketchy, considering, despite Beloved Shin’s guarantee that Whisper would cease to exist if she stuck her tongue out at Buzz.
During a rainy, blustery day two days later the Limper slipped his carpet into his usual place beside Admin. The damp brought the little shit’s horrific ripeness fully to life.
Hagop told me, “It don’t look like he got him a fresh ride.” Snickering.
True, that. With pieces and parts tied and glued together, with webs of crude stitching keeping the ragged fabric fixed, Limper’s carpet was the punch line to a very bad joke. He would have had to collect every fragment and fit them back together while keeping the monsters of the Plain of Fear at bay.
“I reckon that’s to remind him that he’s in this pickle because of his own behavioral choices.”
Hagop and I saw the Limper early but within minutes every swinging dick in the compound came for a look and a chuckle.
Meantime, Limper vanished into some shadow space that the Old Man had set aside.
Like Whisper, Limper was on his best behavior.
So. The situation smelled nastier by the hour.
Did we now face an existential crisis not focused on pretty girls but on a pile of granite in the Ghost Country instead?
Could be. Could be.
Even idiots like Goblin and One-Eye soon lost the ability to remain upbeat.
Evidently we did not need clowders of pretty girls synching to spin us off into despair’s darker deeps.
Every Taken blessed with a carpet found his, her, or its way to us before Whisper and Mischievous Rain came back from the Tower. Mischievous Rain showed up looking so dour that the kids and I decided not to welcome her.
Being a mushroom man I got no word at all as to why those dreadful people were all so grim.
The other mushroom men knew nothing, either.
I theorized that the Company remained involved only to provide logistical support for an operation that would involve most every sorcerer serving the empire.
So, hey, Annalist boy. You figure that granite pile out yonder might interest the Lady?
* * *
Silent brought the baby boy in—and the brat barely got a glance. He was just your ordinary, workaday love child, a biological misfortune with no significance in the grand mad scheme to resurrect an insane tyrant of old.
Sad and amazing. Or amazing and sad.
The boy moved on to the temple of Occupoa, of no interest now to anyone but himself. Poor tyke.
There is no excess of empathy in this world. When it does raise its head it is usually seen as a deadly weakness.
Elmo told me, “Stop whining. You know that if we didn’t scoop him up he would’ve been the one.”
“That would be the way it works.”
The Taken swarm and their henchfolk were busy bees, round the clock doing stuff that none of them bothered to explain. The Company remained uninvolved, and, as mushroom men, had no need to know.
The twins kept mum, too. Beloved Shin did inform me that, “When Mom wants you to know she’ll tell you.”
The good news, sort of, came when Firefly told me, “You don’t need to worry about Gurdlief. He’s doing great at the Tower.”
Good to hear, although I was not entirely reassured.
The Old Man kept our guys out of mischief by burying them in agricultural and civil engineering work, by having the horses and oxen exercised, and, finally, by having the fields and pastures that would begin serving the compound prepped for future planting.
Aloe was going to become a permanent imperial outpost.
Because of an improbable castle in the Ghost Country?
The Rebel was almost extinct in our province. Those still breathing had burrowed deeper than seventeen-year locusts or had run.
Markeg Zhorab said most of the survivors had abandoned their ideology and would not take up arms again. They had had enough.
I glanced at his scars. Perhaps he knew whereof he spoke.
I treated no battle casualties, just agricultural injuries. Hardly anyone, Company, townie, or even any of the reinforcements camped on our fallow ground, got sick, either. So I had time free for mischief. I used it to study on how we had gotten ourselves into our current predicament.
Something was not right. Something smelled. Maybe it was something so big that I just could not see it, something that might swallow us whole and never so much as burp.
I reread the Annals starting with the day that we got orders to move to Aloe. I reviewed my medical logs and other random scribblings. I discovered that I had done so several times before. I did not remember having done that.
What I read felt like it belonged to a life lived by somebody else.
I began to entertain paranoid fantasies that did not entertain me.
I became skittish around shadows. I could not shake the feeling that I was being watched, though the kids were not so much underfoot lately and I had not seen Ankou in an age.
I conscripted the Third and several literate troopers, put them to work making copies. “It don’t have to be calligraphy, boys, it just has to be legible. Fast is more important than pretty.”
Somebody delivered the inevitable wisecrack about somebody else being a champion at too soon and too ugly.
“Don’t waste time on cut-lows, gentlemen. At least be copying while you’re running your mouths. And, listen! Company privilege. This is top secret. Don’t talk about it. Somebody keeps making us forget stuff somehow. We don’t want them to know that we’re trying to outfox them.”
Oh, damn me! I should not have said that. Now every damned one of those bastards would put on a show of “I’ve got a secret!”
Too late. But I had to push on. Whatever we were into would loom large in Company history—a history that somebody wanted to take away.
I had a suspicion who but hardly a notion why.
I finished my reread in just more than a day. I started over immediately. I was amazed by the changes I had undergone in a single year. I had become focused almost entirely upon myself. I had stopped being an objective reporter. I had become a self-indulgent whiner lacking all interest in anything that did not feature me.
All right. It might not be quite that bad but it was true that my recent writing was not objective.
Whatever, my conscripts copied quickly, making severe time sacrifices and enduring hand cramps. The moment we had a complete copy I hustled off to the Dark Horse and engaged Markeg Zhorab to have his forger acquaintance produce more copies and hide them.
“How many do you want?
“Keep going until I yell ‘Stop!’”
“Secret stuff in there?”
“No. Just stuff that I don’t want us to forget. It’s in Forsberger so he’ll only be able to copy it, not to read it.”
I lied. I do not use Forsberger to record these Annals.
I handed him some silver harvested during Elmo’s great raid, enough to keep his associate scribbling for a month. His eyes got big. He nodded, then nodded some more, then followed up with a shallow bow.
The bastard was sure to skim. He had a Companyless future to worry about.
I did not let him see that naive Croaker had calculated corruption into the equation.
* * *
Taken came and Taken went randomly and desultorily, not a one pleased to be a guest of the Company. I had to give up my new apartment so important guests could be housed in the best quarters available.
I tended to agree with her, though. Quietly.
Firefly enjoyed roughing it in my old shack so, naturally, Shin insisted that he was suffering the ultimate in disrespect and degradation.
I visited Sergeant Nwynn, indifferent to the pretty girls and their children. I talked. Nwynn listened. She nodded. She agreed. It might be useful to make secret copies of her records, too.
* * *
Whisper returned within the week and made a pain in the ass of herself, spinning off unwelcome orders like she had a right to tell the Company what to do. The Old Man put on a strained smile and nodded enough that the cranky witch never bloated up any worse. But then she called a meeting of the hierarchy of the Company and its sorcerers, people she had brought out with her, and a few folks from Aloe and the temple. She launched a rant that made everybody wonder if she had not fallen off the edge.
Then, like hitting a wall, she went stone silent and bug-eyed. Stroke? Could she possibly be that overheated?
A tiny golden sun formed a yard in front of her. It floated there for several seconds, then expanded into a light wreath with a woman’s face inside.
Not a woman, not any woman, but the woman, insofar as all of us were concerned, the Lady herself. She gave Whisper a sad, disappointed look, like a mother might give a daughter acting out in public. Then she spoke.
I do not recall what she said other than suggesting that I carry on with my routine. After talking to others I concluded that she had done the same with everyone individually. Few could recall what she had said.