She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company (38 page)

I looked downslope one morning and saw a young army headed my way, twenty-five
men and as many jackasses, loaded down with packs and bamboo. I told Thai Dei,

“I don’t like the looks of this. That’s Loftus, Longinus and Cletus all at the
same time.” Not to mention Otto and Hagop, whom I had not seen for a while.

“When them three all clot up together you can bet something is up.”

Thai Dei looked at me like he wondered if I really thought he was dim enough to
think they were off for a picnic. He remembered the brothers from Dejagore and
probably understood their obsessions better than I did.

Something was in the wind, though.

I went down to meet them.

“Hey!” Clete hollered, waving. “It’s the hermit prince.”

“What’re you guys up to?”

“We heard you set up your own kingdom over here. We come to see its wonders.”

“Looks like you’re here to invade me. What is all this shit?” I couched the
question in the language of the Jewel Cities.

“Field trials for a new toy. We been playing with it in the cellars of the
castle.”

“Hnh?” Could there be a real reason that the Old Man still kept most of Overlook
off limits? “I hope it’s good to eat.”

Longo snickered. “This wouldn’t be too tasty, Murgen. But it’ll be fun to dish
out.”

Thai Dei scowled. Left out again. Too bad. He was with the Company but not of
the Company. As I lived with Nyueng Bao without being Nyueng Bao.

“The way you guys are grinning I got to figure, whatever it is, it’s got a lot
of gears and levers and does something entirely decorative with a reliability
quotient of ten percent.”

“O ye of weak faith. Clete, you ever seen a sourball as negative as this guy?”

“He just don’t understand engineering.”

“I understand engineering fine. I don’t understand engineers. What’re we doing?”

“Field tests,” Clete reminded me. “We applied a little engineering to Lady’s
fireball flingers.”

“Range, accuracy, power, Murgen,” Loftus enthused. “Velocity. All areas where we
thought there was room for improvement.”

Absolutely. The fireball throwers would do a man a lot of damage but you
practically had to stick him with your pole to make sure you hit him.

All this foreign yammer brought Uncle Doj around to poke his nose in. Which did
him no good. But he would figure it out quickly enough.

Longo said, “You got a nice field of fire here, Murgen.” He waved toward the
mountains. Miles of nothing lay between us and the evergreen forest. His arm
swung around to indicate Overlook. “And a nice measured range down that way.”

Men were out there setting some kind of survey stakes already.

Guys up close started working double-time, dragging stuff off the pack animals.

Cletus grabbed a bamboo pole. “Your basic bamboo. The kind Lady turned out until
we brought our thoughts to the table.”

Clete popped off a few fireballs in the general direction of a couple of
gossiping crows. The crows laughed. The fireballs wobbled into the distance, ran
out of momentum, drifted to the ground, faded away. “Can’t hit shit. Except
shadows. Unless you walk right up to what you want to burn.”

Longo interjected, “We made her believe that since soldiers would be using the
bamboo to work other targets whether she liked that or not they ought to be able
to hit whatever they’re aiming at.”

Loftus said, “She’s spent time around soldiers. She understands how they think.”

I sneered. “She’s been screwing one for five years. She ought to have a clue.”

Clete grabbed a bamboo pole with black bands around it. “This’s a cute little
number.” He nodded to his brothers. They picked up similar poles. Each brother
pointed his in the general direction of a crow. Clete said, “Do it.”

They cranked. Fireballs flew. Black feathers exploded, floated around
smoldering. More fireballs darted out. It did not seem to matter whether the
guys aimed well or not. The fireballs hunted their targets down however
desperately they darted and dodged. Just the way they had hunted down shadows.

Clete leaned on his pole. “That ought to take care of the spy problem.” His
brothers remained alert. Longo picked off a clever little devil trying to sneak
off at low altitude, whipping between boulders in turns so tight it lost wing
feathers every time.

A ball of violet fire closed in at four times the crow’s best speed.

Poof!

“Now there’s a trick I can appreciate,” I said.

Likewise Thai Dei and Uncle Doj and the guys of the thin desperate line at the
Shadowgate. Jaws dropped. Rudy swore, “Fugginay! I want me one a them
mudsuckers.”

I asked, “You got a special problem with crows?”

Rudy asked, “It only kills crows?”

Cletus averred, “I suppose we could set them to knock down most anything. But
the more targets you want to specify the more complicated your logistics is
gonna get.”

“That’s not why you’re here,” I guessed.

“That was just to clear the area.”

Longo said, “We wanted something guys like us could appreciate.”

Loftus added, “Considering that we’re not likely to bring in a lot of recruits
anytime soon, while Taglios can come up with as many as they want.”

There was a growing faction up north, these days, who wanted Taglios to pretend
that the Company had gone its way. We were headed for Khatovar when we came to
Taglios. There was nothing to keep us from going there, now. If everybody held
real still and stayed real quiet we might lose interest and head on down the
road.

While I talked to the engineers Otto and Hagop erected several trestle tables.

These acquired decorative vises and tool collection place settings. Racks rose
behind the tables. Their companions began stacking bamboo tubes in those. “Big
bastards,” I said. Some were fifteen feet long. Some were four inches in
diameter.

Clete said, “Big and brutal. Careful where you point that damned thing!” A
soldier was trying to get a bead on a crow speeding south. He was not worried
about people dumb enough to get between him and his target. “What we wanted most
was increased accuracy and velocity. A little extra oomph at the other end would
be a nice plus, too. Hagop.”

Hagop took a twelve-footer with a three-inch bore, striped red, locked it into a
vise. He sighted down its length. He tapped gently with a hammer, shifting his
aim slightly. “That boulder out there that looks like One-Eye’s hat.” He armed a
complicated bamboo spring mechanism.

I did not think the boulder looked much like a hat. It was a good four hundred
yards away. Three soldiers with standard bamboo launched a dozen fireballs
before one got lucky and painted a lime glow along one edge.

“Usual problem. When you finally do get a hit you don’t do much damage. Unless
it’s people. Go ahead, Hagop.”

Hagop triggered his pole. There was a frying bacon sound. An intense orange ball
crossed to the boulder too fast for me to follow. It hit dead center. A lance of
fire blew out of the rock for fifteen seconds. I felt the heat.

The boulder shifted position slightly, pointing its tail of fire farther
downhill.

The fireball popped out the other side of the rock like a pimple’s core
squirting.

“Shit!” said I. “And double shit! That fucker must be ten feet thick!”

Clete said, “A three-inch ball will run at least fifteen feet into the kind of
stone we have around here, Hagop, see the silver character that looks like the
rune for Fate?” He pointed at Overlook. There were thousands of characters on
the wall. I did not understand which one he meant. Neither did Hagop.

“Tallest line of characters. Middle of the target. Looks like a flagpole
trailing two pennons to the right, next to something like a three-lined
pitchfork.”

“All right.”

I found it, too.

“Go ahead. Snipe away when you’re ready.”

I protested, “That’s over three thousand yards! Closer to four. He’ll be lucky
to hit the wall.”

“Ready.”

“Do it.”

Bacon fried. An orange ball left the bamboo pole. It took less than three
seconds to reach Overlook. I would not have been able to follow it had I not
been standing behind Hagop. A flash lit up the whole countryside when the
fireball hit the spells protecting the wall. It struck right where Hagop aimed
it. The target rune appeared slightly discolored once the glare waned.

“Oh, my!” said I. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj yammered at one another. They had no
need to understand our quacking to see the potential.

“We figure a ball will run out at least fourteen miles before it loses all its
momentum,” Clete said. “By then it won’t have much more energy than a regular
ball and won’t be much good for anything but killing shadows and general
destruction anymore.” He patted the tube Hagop had used. “This was our
prototype. It’s sighted in. We got to do all these others now. Which is why we
come up here.”

Hagop and Otto replaced that pole with another not yet marked. Otto gave the
back end a half twist. A complete, tray like section came off. Two guys from
Lady’s factory packed the tray with something that looked like potter’s clay,

then seated a big black rubber marble in that. Hagop put the tray back into his
toy, fiddled with the triggering mechanism, asked the engineer brothers, “You
guys satisfied with the way this thing is laid?”

All three squatted. They bickered. Hammers tapped. They argued. Then they, Otto,

Hagop and the factory people all assumed particular positions and stared at
Overlook.

Bacon crackled. An orange fireball hit the air. A thousand yards out it began to
drift to the left, then downward. It hit ground short of the wall. Fire gouted
into the air for fifteen seconds. So did bits of stone and sod.

All seven observers began combining observations on a chart. Bickering steadily.

They took the tray off the pole and peered through. More notes went onto the
chart. That eventually passed into the hands of a specialist who used some of
the arcane tools to machine the interior of the pole.

The brothers moved to another pole. Their accomplices had a dozen set up for
testing. They repeated the process over and over. Some poles put their fireballs
on target first try. Some missed badly. The worst got discarded right away. No
sense wasting time on those. There was still a need for less accurate
shadowslappers.

Once a pole went through its rework it got tested for consistency. An alphabet
of arcane marks in various paints went on to tell the soldiers what quirks the
weapon retained.

Otto seldom says much but during his lunch break he observed, “Lady’s really got
the power back, now.”

Hardly anyone even suspected the truth. Those who did were not prepared to
believe it.

“How many of them things you going to work?” My guys had stopped getting any
work done. They were hanging around watching the fireworks like a bunch of big
kids.

Clete said, “We brought fifty in this batch. We hope we can come up with twenty
reliables out of those. Everything goes right, we’ll start work on some really
big stuff; boy, will the Tals be surprised.”

I could imagine what these new fireballs would do to men’s bodies. But I
suspected that scything through legions was not their purpose. And my suspicion
was confirmed next afternoon.

Lady herself came to inspect the twenty-six pieces the brothers had found
acceptable.

The woman seemed emotionally drained, yet did show a bounce that said part of
her life was going well. She and the Old Man were finding free moments to be
something other than Captain and Lieutenant. I was pleased for them.

“Excellent,” she said, after she watched every accepted tube smite Overlook’s
wall at least once. “What about the crow-specific light arms?”

“You see any crows?” Longo asked. “We got a picket line out. They don’t even get
close.”

“Good. Prime all of these things with full loads. I’m going to try my own
experiment.”

Hagop told me, “We’re in the chips. We done come up with six more than we even
hoped. And half the others are good enough we can use them up close, a mile or
less. We’ll kick us some ass, big time.” The whole gang were as thrilled as kids
with new toys. And Lady was the worst. She bounced around like she was fifteen
again.

The troops shuffled the tables around, began packing tools and loading wagons.

Loftus, Longinus and Otto kept chuckling about something.

I glanced around. I did not like the portents. Even Lady had the look. The look
that always showed up on One-Eye and/or Goblin when they were going to pull a
stunt the rest of us might regret.

“Just hang on here, everybody!” I yelled, trying to be the responsible one. “I
don’t know what you’re up to, but—” This was my fief.

A bunch of them, including Lady, the brothers, Otto and Hagop, all got behind
the tables. They started wisecracking as they sighted down the lengths of fully
loaded heavyweight poles.

“Don’t even think about it!” I growled.

My in-laws hovered behind me, silently, not understanding anything being said
but clear on the fact that yesterday and today added up to something
significant. Something beyond the obvious.

“Don’t do it!” I begged.

Twenty-two bamboo tubes discharged within seconds of one another. The villains
all watched the orange fireballs streak north-northwest, straight into the area
where that storm of crows had exploded in my imagination.

It was not my imagination this time.

Catcher’s hideout had to be more than ten miles away. It did not take the
fireballs ten seconds to get there. Maybe not five. I was too shaken to be a
good judge of time’s passage.

Fire and smoke and shit flew half a mile high.

Now the whole gang went bugfuck. Every one of them—Lady, too—put fireballs into
the air in streams of four and five. The distant woods began to boil. Even from
so far away I could make out gigantic trees being hurled a thousand feet into
the air.