The Taken called the Limper met the Company at Frost. We’d
spent a hundred and forty-six days on the march. They were long
days and hard, grinding, men and animals going on more by habit
than desire. An outfit in good shape, like ours, is capable of
covering fifty or even a hundred miles in a day, pushing hell out
of it, but not day after week after month, upon incredibly
miserable roads. A smart commander does not push on a long march.
The days add up, each leaving its residue of fatigue, till men
begin collapsing if the pace is too desperate.
Considering the territories we crossed, we made damned good
time. Between Tome and Frost lie mountains where we were lucky to
make five miles a day, deserts we had to wander in search of water,
rivers that took days to cross using makeshift rafts. We were
fortunate to reach Frost having lost only two men.
The Captain shone with a glow of accomplishment—till the
military governor summoned him.
He assembled the officers and senior noncoms when he returned.
“Bad news,” he told us. “The Lady is sending the
Limper to lead us across the Plain of Fear. Us and the caravan
we’ll escort.”
Our response was surly. There was bad blood between the Company
and the Limper. Elmo asked, “How soon will we leave,
sir?” We needed rest. None had been promised, of course, and
the Lady and the Taken seem unconscious of human frailties, but
still . . .
“No time specified. Don’t get lazy. He’s not
here now, but he could turn up tomorrow.”
Sure. With the flying carpets the Taken use, they can turn up
anywhere within days. I muttered, “Let’s hope other
business keeps him away a while.”
I did not want to encounter him again. We had done him wrong,
frequently, way back. Before Charm we worked closely with a Taken
called Soulcatcher. Catcher used us in several schemes to discredit
Limper, both out of old enmity and because Catcher was secretly
working on behalf of the Dominator. The Lady was taken in. She
nearly destroyed the Limper, but rehabilitated him instead, and
brought him back for the final battle.
Way, way back, when the Domination was aborning, centuries
before the foundation of the Lady’s empire, the Dominator
overpowered his greatest rivals and compelled them into his
service. He accumulated ten villains that way, soon known as the
Ten Who Were Taken. When the White Rose raised the world against
the Dominator’s wickedness, the Ten were buried with him. She
could destroy none of them outright.
Centuries of peace sapped the will of the world to guard itself.
A curious wizard tried to contact the Lady. The Lady manipulated
him, effected her release. The Ten rose with her. Within a
generation she and they forged a new dark empire. Within two they
were embattled with the Rebel, whose prophets agreed the White Rose
would be reincarnated to lead them to a final victory.
For a while it looked like they would win. Our armies collapsed.
Provinces fell. Taken feuded and destroyed one another. Nine of the
Ten perished. The Lady managed to Take three Rebel chieftains to
replace a portion of her losses: Feather, Journey, and
Whisper—likely the best general since the White Rose. She gave us a
terrible time before her Taking.
The Rebel prophets were correct in their prophecies, except
about the last battle. They expected a reincarnated White Rose to
lead them. She did not. They did not find her in time.
She was alive then. But she was living on our side of the
battleline, unaware of what she was. I learned who she was. It is
that knowledge which makes my life worthless should I be put to the
question.
“Croaker!” the Captain snapped. “Wake
up!” Everybody looked at me, wondering how I could daydream
through whatever he’d said.
“What?”
“You didn’t hear me?”
“No, sir.”
He glowered his best bear glower. “Listen up, then. Be
ready to travel by carpet when the Taken arrive. Fifty pounds of
gear is your limit.”
Carpet? Taken? What the hell? I looked around. Some of the men
grinned. Some pitied me. Carpet flight? “What for?”
Patiently, the Captain explained, “The Lady wants ten men
sent to help Whisper and Feather in the Barrowland. Doing what I
don’t know. You’re one of the ones she
picked.”
Flutter of fear. “Why me?” It was rough, back when I
was her pet.
“Maybe she still loves you. After all these
years.”
“Captain . . . ”
“Because she said so, Croaker.”
“I guess that’s good enough. Sure can’t argue
with it. Who else?”
“Pay attention and you’d know these things. Worry
about it later. We have other fish to fry now.”
Whisper came to Frost before the Limper. I found myself tossing
a pack aboard her flying carpet. Fifty pounds. The rest I had left
with One-Eye and Silent.
The carpet was a carpet only by courtesy, because tradition
calls it that. Actually, it is a piece of heavy fabric stretched on
a wooden frame a foot high when grounded. My fellow passengers were
Elmo, who would command our team, and Kingpin. Kingpin is a lazy
bastard, but he swings a mean blade.
Our gear, and another hundred pounds belonging to men who would
follow us later, rested at the center of the carpet. Shaking, Elmo
and Kingpin tied themselves in place at the carpet’s two rear
corners. My spot was the left front. Whisper sat at the right. We
were heavily bundled, almost to immobility. We would be flying fast
and high, Whisper said. The temperature upstairs would be low.
I shook as much as Elmo and Kingpin, though I had been aboard
carpets before. I loved the view and dreaded the anticipation of
falling that came with flight. I also dreaded the Plain of Fear,
where strange, fell things cruise the upper air.
Whisper queried, “You all use the latrine? It’s
going to be a long flight.” She did not mention us voiding
ourselves in fear, which some men do up there. Her voice was cool
and melodious, like those of the women who populate your last dream
before waking. Her appearance belied that voice. She looked every
bit the tough old campaigner she was. She eyed me, evidently
recalling our previous encounter in the Forest of Cloud.
Raven and I had lain in wait where she was expected to meet the
Limper and lead him over to the Rebel side. The ambush was
successful. Raven took the Limper. I captured Whisper. Soulcatcher
and the Lady came and finished up. Whisper became the first new
Taken since the Domination.
She winked.
Taut fabric smacked my butt. We went up fast.
Crossing the Plain of Fear was faster by air, but still
harrowing. Windwhales quartered across our path. We zipped around
them. They were too slow to keep pace. Turquoise manta things rose
from their backs, flapped clumsily, caught updrafts, rose above us,
then dived past like plunging eagles, challenging our presence in
their airspace. We could not outrun them, but outclimbed them
easily. However, we could not climb higher than the windwhales. So
high, and the air becomes too rare for human beings. The whales
could rise another mile, becoming diving platforms for the
mantas.
There were other flying things, smaller and less dangerous, but
determinedly obnoxious. Nevertheless, we got through. When a manta
did attack, Whisper defeated it with her thaumaturgic craft.
To do so, she gave up control of the carpet. We fell, out of
control, till she drove the manta away. I got through without
losing my breakfast, but just barely. I never asked Elmo and
Kingpin, figuring they might not want their dignity betrayed.
Whisper would not attack first. That is the prime rule for
surviving the Plain of Fear. Don’t hit first. If you do, you
buy more than a duel. Every monster out there will go after
you.
We crossed without harm, as carpets usually do, and raced on,
all day long, into the night. We turned north. The air became
cooler. Whisper dropped to lower altitudes and slower speeds.
Morning found us over Forsberg, where the Company had served when
new in the Lady’s service. Elmo and I gawked over the
side.
Once I pointed, shouted, “There’s Deal.” We
had held that fortress briefly. Then Elmo pointed the other way.
There lay Oar, where we had pulled some fine, bloody tricks on the
Rebel, and earned the enmity of the Limper. Whisper flew so low we
could distinguish faces in the streets. Oar looked no more friendly
than it had eight years ago.
We passed on, rolled along above the treetops of the Great
Forest, ancient and virgin wilderness from which the White Rose had
conducted her campaigns against the Dominator. Whisper slowed
around noon. We drifted down into a wide sprawl that once had been
cleared land. A cluster of mounds in its middle betrayed the
handiwork of man, though now the barrows are scarcely
recognizable.
Whisper landed in the street of a town that was mostly ruin. I
presumed it to be the town occupied by the Eternal Guard, whose
task it is to prevent tampering with the Barrowland. They were
effective till betrayed by apathy elsewhere.
It took the Resurrectionists three hundred seventy years to open
the Barrowland, and then they did not get what they wanted. The
Lady returned, with the Taken, but the Dominator remained
chained.
The Lady obliterated the Resurrectionist movement root and
branch. Some reward, eh?
A handful of men left a building still in good repair. I
eavesdropped on their exchange with Whisper, understood a few
words. “Recall your Forsberger?” I asked Elmo, while
trying to shake the stiffness out of my muscles.
“It’ll come back. Want to give Kingpin a look? He
don’t seem right.”
He wasn’t bad off. Just scared. Took a while to convince
him we were back on the ground.
The locals, descendants of the Guards who had watched the
Barrowland for centuries, showed us to our quarters. The town was
being restored. We were the forerunners of a horde of new
blood.
Goblin and two of our best soldiers came in on Whisper’s
next flight, three days later. They said the Company had left
Frost.
I asked if it looked like the Limper was holding a grudge.
“Not that I could see,” Goblin said. “But that
don’t mean anything.”
No, it didn’t.
The last four men arrived three days later. Whisper moved into
our barracks. We formed a sort of bodyguard cum police force.
Besides protecting her, we were supposed to help make sure
unauthorized persons did not get near the Barrowland.
The Taken called Feather appeared, bringing her own bodyguard.
Specialists determined to investigate the Barrowland came up with a
battalion of laborers hired in Oar. The laborers cleared the trash
and brush, up to the Barrowland proper. Entry there, without
appropriate protection, meant a slow, painful death. The protective
spells the White Rose left hadn’t faded with the Lady’s
resurrection. And she had added her own. I guess she is terrified
he will break loose.
The Taken Journey arrived, bringing troops of his own. He
established outposts in the Great Forest. The Taken took turns
making airborne patrols. We minions watched one another as closely
as we watched the rest of the world. Something big was afoot.
Nobody was saying so, but that much was obvious. The Lady
definitely anticipated a breakout attempt.
I spent my free time reviewing the Guard’s records,
especially for the period when Bomanz lived here. He spent forty
years in the garrison town, disguised as an antique digger, before
he tried to contact the Lady and unintentionally freed her. He
interested me. But there was little to dig out, and that little was
colored.
Once I’d had his personal papers, having stumbled onto
them shortly before Whisper’s Taking. But I passed them on to
our then mentor Soulcatcher for transportation to the Tower.
Soulcatcher kept them for her own reasons, and they fell into my
hands again, during the battle at Charm, as the Lady and I pursued
the renegade Taken. I didn’t mention the papers to anyone but
a friend, Raven. The Raven who deserted to protect a child he
believed to be the reincarnation of the White Rose. When I got a
chance to pick up the papers from where I hid them, they were gone.
I guess Raven took them with him.
I often wonder what became of him. His declared intent was to
flee so far no one could find him again. He did not care about
politics. He just wanted to protect a child he loved. He was
capable of doing anything to protect Darling. I guess he thought
the papers might turn into insurance someday.
In the Guard headquarters there are a dozen landscapes painted
by past members of the garrison. Most portray the Barrowland. It
was magnificent in its day. It had consisted of a central Great
Barrow on a north-south axis, containing the Dominator and his
Lady. Surrounding the Great Barrow was a star of earth raised above
the plain, outlined by a deep, water-filled moat. At the points of
that star stood lesser barrows containing five of The Ten Who Were
Taken. A circle rising above the star connected its inward points,
and there, at each, stood another barrow containing another Taken.
Every barrow was surrounded by spells and fetishes. Within the
inner ring, around the Great Barrow, were rank on rank of
additional defenses. The last was a dragon curled around the Great
Barrow, its tail in its mouth. A later painting by an eyewitness
shows the dragon belching fire on the countryside the night of the
Lady’s resurrection. Bomanz is walking into the fire.
He was caught between Resurrectionists and the Lady, all of whom
were manipulating him. His accident was their premeditated event.
The records say his wife survived. She said he went into the
Barrowland to stop what was happening. No one believed her at the
time. She claimed he carried the Lady’s true name and wanted
to reach her with it before she could wriggle free.
Silent, One-Eye and Goblin will tell you the direst fear of any
sorcerer is that knowledge of his true name will fall to some
outsider. Bomanz’s wife claimed the Lady’s was encoded
in papers her husband possessed. Papers that vanished that night.
Papers that I recovered decades later. What Raven snatched may
contain the only lever capable of dumping the empire.
Back to the Barrowland in its youth. Impressive construction.
Its weather faces were sheathed in limestone. The moat was broad
and blue. The surrounding countryside was
park-like . . . But fear of the Dominator
faded, and so did appropriations. A later painting, contemporary
with Bomanz, shows the countryside gone to seed, the limestone
facings in disrepair, and the moat becoming a swamp. Today you
can’t tell where the moat was. The limestone has disappeared
beneath brush. The elevations and barrows are nothing but humps.
That part of the Great Barrow where the Dominator lies remains in
fair shape, though it, too, is heavily overgrown. Some of the
fetishes anchoring the spells keeping his friends away still stand,
but weather has devoured their features.
The edge of the Barrowland is now marked by stakes trailing red
flags, put there when the Lady announced she was sending outsiders
to investigate. The Guards themselves, having lived there always,
need no markers to warn them off. I enjoyed my month and a half
there. I indulged my curiosities, and found Feather and Whisper
remarkably accessible.
That hadn’t been true of the old Taken. Too, the commander
of the Guard, called the Monitor, bragged up his command’s
past, which stretches back as far as the Company’s. We
swapped lies and tales over many a gallon of beer.
During the fifth week someone discovered something. We peons
were not told what. But the Taken got excited. Whisper started
lifting in more of the Company. The reinforcements told harrowing
fables about the Plain of Fear and the Empty Hills. The Company was
at Lords now, only five hundred miles distant.
At the end of the sixth week Whisper assembled us and announced
another move. “The Lady wants me to take some of you out
west. A force of twenty-five. Elmo, you’ll be in command.
Feather and I, some experts, and several language specialists will
join you. Yes, Croaker. You’re on the list. She
wouldn’t deny her favorite amateur historian, would
she?”
A thrill of fear. I didn’t want her getting interested
again.
“Where’re we headed?” Elmo asked. Professional
to the core, the son-of-a-bitch. Not a single complaint.
“A city called Juniper. Way beyond the western bounds of
the empire. It’s connected with the Barrowland somehow.
It’s a ways north, too. Expect it to be cold and prepare
accordingly.”
Juniper? Never heard of it. Neither had anyone else. Not even
the Monitor. I scrounged through his maps till I found one showing
the western coast. Juniper was way up north, near where the ice
persists all year long. It was a big city. I wondered how it could
exist there, where it should be frozen all the time. I asked
Whisper. She seemed to know something about the place. She said
Juniper benefits from an ocean current that brings warm water
north. She said the city is very strange—according to Feather,
who’d actually been there.
I approached Feather next, only hours before our departure. She
couldn’t tell me much more, except that Juniper is the
demense of a Duke Zimerlan, and he appealed to the Lady a year ago
(just a while before the Captain’s courier letter would have
left Charm) for help solving a local problem. That someone had
approached the Lady, when the world’s desire is to keep her
far away, argued that we faced interesting times. I wondered about
the connection with the Barrowland.
The negative was that Juniper was so far away. I was pleased
that I would be there when the Captain learned he was expected to
head there after resting in Oar, though.
Could be I’d hear his howl of outrage even from that far.
I knew he wouldn’t be happy.
The Taken called the Limper met the Company at Frost. We’d
spent a hundred and forty-six days on the march. They were long
days and hard, grinding, men and animals going on more by habit
than desire. An outfit in good shape, like ours, is capable of
covering fifty or even a hundred miles in a day, pushing hell out
of it, but not day after week after month, upon incredibly
miserable roads. A smart commander does not push on a long march.
The days add up, each leaving its residue of fatigue, till men
begin collapsing if the pace is too desperate.
Considering the territories we crossed, we made damned good
time. Between Tome and Frost lie mountains where we were lucky to
make five miles a day, deserts we had to wander in search of water,
rivers that took days to cross using makeshift rafts. We were
fortunate to reach Frost having lost only two men.
The Captain shone with a glow of accomplishment—till the
military governor summoned him.
He assembled the officers and senior noncoms when he returned.
“Bad news,” he told us. “The Lady is sending the
Limper to lead us across the Plain of Fear. Us and the caravan
we’ll escort.”
Our response was surly. There was bad blood between the Company
and the Limper. Elmo asked, “How soon will we leave,
sir?” We needed rest. None had been promised, of course, and
the Lady and the Taken seem unconscious of human frailties, but
still . . .
“No time specified. Don’t get lazy. He’s not
here now, but he could turn up tomorrow.”
Sure. With the flying carpets the Taken use, they can turn up
anywhere within days. I muttered, “Let’s hope other
business keeps him away a while.”
I did not want to encounter him again. We had done him wrong,
frequently, way back. Before Charm we worked closely with a Taken
called Soulcatcher. Catcher used us in several schemes to discredit
Limper, both out of old enmity and because Catcher was secretly
working on behalf of the Dominator. The Lady was taken in. She
nearly destroyed the Limper, but rehabilitated him instead, and
brought him back for the final battle.
Way, way back, when the Domination was aborning, centuries
before the foundation of the Lady’s empire, the Dominator
overpowered his greatest rivals and compelled them into his
service. He accumulated ten villains that way, soon known as the
Ten Who Were Taken. When the White Rose raised the world against
the Dominator’s wickedness, the Ten were buried with him. She
could destroy none of them outright.
Centuries of peace sapped the will of the world to guard itself.
A curious wizard tried to contact the Lady. The Lady manipulated
him, effected her release. The Ten rose with her. Within a
generation she and they forged a new dark empire. Within two they
were embattled with the Rebel, whose prophets agreed the White Rose
would be reincarnated to lead them to a final victory.
For a while it looked like they would win. Our armies collapsed.
Provinces fell. Taken feuded and destroyed one another. Nine of the
Ten perished. The Lady managed to Take three Rebel chieftains to
replace a portion of her losses: Feather, Journey, and
Whisper—likely the best general since the White Rose. She gave us a
terrible time before her Taking.
The Rebel prophets were correct in their prophecies, except
about the last battle. They expected a reincarnated White Rose to
lead them. She did not. They did not find her in time.
She was alive then. But she was living on our side of the
battleline, unaware of what she was. I learned who she was. It is
that knowledge which makes my life worthless should I be put to the
question.
“Croaker!” the Captain snapped. “Wake
up!” Everybody looked at me, wondering how I could daydream
through whatever he’d said.
“What?”
“You didn’t hear me?”
“No, sir.”
He glowered his best bear glower. “Listen up, then. Be
ready to travel by carpet when the Taken arrive. Fifty pounds of
gear is your limit.”
Carpet? Taken? What the hell? I looked around. Some of the men
grinned. Some pitied me. Carpet flight? “What for?”
Patiently, the Captain explained, “The Lady wants ten men
sent to help Whisper and Feather in the Barrowland. Doing what I
don’t know. You’re one of the ones she
picked.”
Flutter of fear. “Why me?” It was rough, back when I
was her pet.
“Maybe she still loves you. After all these
years.”
“Captain . . . ”
“Because she said so, Croaker.”
“I guess that’s good enough. Sure can’t argue
with it. Who else?”
“Pay attention and you’d know these things. Worry
about it later. We have other fish to fry now.”
Whisper came to Frost before the Limper. I found myself tossing
a pack aboard her flying carpet. Fifty pounds. The rest I had left
with One-Eye and Silent.
The carpet was a carpet only by courtesy, because tradition
calls it that. Actually, it is a piece of heavy fabric stretched on
a wooden frame a foot high when grounded. My fellow passengers were
Elmo, who would command our team, and Kingpin. Kingpin is a lazy
bastard, but he swings a mean blade.
Our gear, and another hundred pounds belonging to men who would
follow us later, rested at the center of the carpet. Shaking, Elmo
and Kingpin tied themselves in place at the carpet’s two rear
corners. My spot was the left front. Whisper sat at the right. We
were heavily bundled, almost to immobility. We would be flying fast
and high, Whisper said. The temperature upstairs would be low.
I shook as much as Elmo and Kingpin, though I had been aboard
carpets before. I loved the view and dreaded the anticipation of
falling that came with flight. I also dreaded the Plain of Fear,
where strange, fell things cruise the upper air.
Whisper queried, “You all use the latrine? It’s
going to be a long flight.” She did not mention us voiding
ourselves in fear, which some men do up there. Her voice was cool
and melodious, like those of the women who populate your last dream
before waking. Her appearance belied that voice. She looked every
bit the tough old campaigner she was. She eyed me, evidently
recalling our previous encounter in the Forest of Cloud.
Raven and I had lain in wait where she was expected to meet the
Limper and lead him over to the Rebel side. The ambush was
successful. Raven took the Limper. I captured Whisper. Soulcatcher
and the Lady came and finished up. Whisper became the first new
Taken since the Domination.
She winked.
Taut fabric smacked my butt. We went up fast.
Crossing the Plain of Fear was faster by air, but still
harrowing. Windwhales quartered across our path. We zipped around
them. They were too slow to keep pace. Turquoise manta things rose
from their backs, flapped clumsily, caught updrafts, rose above us,
then dived past like plunging eagles, challenging our presence in
their airspace. We could not outrun them, but outclimbed them
easily. However, we could not climb higher than the windwhales. So
high, and the air becomes too rare for human beings. The whales
could rise another mile, becoming diving platforms for the
mantas.
There were other flying things, smaller and less dangerous, but
determinedly obnoxious. Nevertheless, we got through. When a manta
did attack, Whisper defeated it with her thaumaturgic craft.
To do so, she gave up control of the carpet. We fell, out of
control, till she drove the manta away. I got through without
losing my breakfast, but just barely. I never asked Elmo and
Kingpin, figuring they might not want their dignity betrayed.
Whisper would not attack first. That is the prime rule for
surviving the Plain of Fear. Don’t hit first. If you do, you
buy more than a duel. Every monster out there will go after
you.
We crossed without harm, as carpets usually do, and raced on,
all day long, into the night. We turned north. The air became
cooler. Whisper dropped to lower altitudes and slower speeds.
Morning found us over Forsberg, where the Company had served when
new in the Lady’s service. Elmo and I gawked over the
side.
Once I pointed, shouted, “There’s Deal.” We
had held that fortress briefly. Then Elmo pointed the other way.
There lay Oar, where we had pulled some fine, bloody tricks on the
Rebel, and earned the enmity of the Limper. Whisper flew so low we
could distinguish faces in the streets. Oar looked no more friendly
than it had eight years ago.
We passed on, rolled along above the treetops of the Great
Forest, ancient and virgin wilderness from which the White Rose had
conducted her campaigns against the Dominator. Whisper slowed
around noon. We drifted down into a wide sprawl that once had been
cleared land. A cluster of mounds in its middle betrayed the
handiwork of man, though now the barrows are scarcely
recognizable.
Whisper landed in the street of a town that was mostly ruin. I
presumed it to be the town occupied by the Eternal Guard, whose
task it is to prevent tampering with the Barrowland. They were
effective till betrayed by apathy elsewhere.
It took the Resurrectionists three hundred seventy years to open
the Barrowland, and then they did not get what they wanted. The
Lady returned, with the Taken, but the Dominator remained
chained.
The Lady obliterated the Resurrectionist movement root and
branch. Some reward, eh?
A handful of men left a building still in good repair. I
eavesdropped on their exchange with Whisper, understood a few
words. “Recall your Forsberger?” I asked Elmo, while
trying to shake the stiffness out of my muscles.
“It’ll come back. Want to give Kingpin a look? He
don’t seem right.”
He wasn’t bad off. Just scared. Took a while to convince
him we were back on the ground.
The locals, descendants of the Guards who had watched the
Barrowland for centuries, showed us to our quarters. The town was
being restored. We were the forerunners of a horde of new
blood.
Goblin and two of our best soldiers came in on Whisper’s
next flight, three days later. They said the Company had left
Frost.
I asked if it looked like the Limper was holding a grudge.
“Not that I could see,” Goblin said. “But that
don’t mean anything.”
No, it didn’t.
The last four men arrived three days later. Whisper moved into
our barracks. We formed a sort of bodyguard cum police force.
Besides protecting her, we were supposed to help make sure
unauthorized persons did not get near the Barrowland.
The Taken called Feather appeared, bringing her own bodyguard.
Specialists determined to investigate the Barrowland came up with a
battalion of laborers hired in Oar. The laborers cleared the trash
and brush, up to the Barrowland proper. Entry there, without
appropriate protection, meant a slow, painful death. The protective
spells the White Rose left hadn’t faded with the Lady’s
resurrection. And she had added her own. I guess she is terrified
he will break loose.
The Taken Journey arrived, bringing troops of his own. He
established outposts in the Great Forest. The Taken took turns
making airborne patrols. We minions watched one another as closely
as we watched the rest of the world. Something big was afoot.
Nobody was saying so, but that much was obvious. The Lady
definitely anticipated a breakout attempt.
I spent my free time reviewing the Guard’s records,
especially for the period when Bomanz lived here. He spent forty
years in the garrison town, disguised as an antique digger, before
he tried to contact the Lady and unintentionally freed her. He
interested me. But there was little to dig out, and that little was
colored.
Once I’d had his personal papers, having stumbled onto
them shortly before Whisper’s Taking. But I passed them on to
our then mentor Soulcatcher for transportation to the Tower.
Soulcatcher kept them for her own reasons, and they fell into my
hands again, during the battle at Charm, as the Lady and I pursued
the renegade Taken. I didn’t mention the papers to anyone but
a friend, Raven. The Raven who deserted to protect a child he
believed to be the reincarnation of the White Rose. When I got a
chance to pick up the papers from where I hid them, they were gone.
I guess Raven took them with him.
I often wonder what became of him. His declared intent was to
flee so far no one could find him again. He did not care about
politics. He just wanted to protect a child he loved. He was
capable of doing anything to protect Darling. I guess he thought
the papers might turn into insurance someday.
In the Guard headquarters there are a dozen landscapes painted
by past members of the garrison. Most portray the Barrowland. It
was magnificent in its day. It had consisted of a central Great
Barrow on a north-south axis, containing the Dominator and his
Lady. Surrounding the Great Barrow was a star of earth raised above
the plain, outlined by a deep, water-filled moat. At the points of
that star stood lesser barrows containing five of The Ten Who Were
Taken. A circle rising above the star connected its inward points,
and there, at each, stood another barrow containing another Taken.
Every barrow was surrounded by spells and fetishes. Within the
inner ring, around the Great Barrow, were rank on rank of
additional defenses. The last was a dragon curled around the Great
Barrow, its tail in its mouth. A later painting by an eyewitness
shows the dragon belching fire on the countryside the night of the
Lady’s resurrection. Bomanz is walking into the fire.
He was caught between Resurrectionists and the Lady, all of whom
were manipulating him. His accident was their premeditated event.
The records say his wife survived. She said he went into the
Barrowland to stop what was happening. No one believed her at the
time. She claimed he carried the Lady’s true name and wanted
to reach her with it before she could wriggle free.
Silent, One-Eye and Goblin will tell you the direst fear of any
sorcerer is that knowledge of his true name will fall to some
outsider. Bomanz’s wife claimed the Lady’s was encoded
in papers her husband possessed. Papers that vanished that night.
Papers that I recovered decades later. What Raven snatched may
contain the only lever capable of dumping the empire.
Back to the Barrowland in its youth. Impressive construction.
Its weather faces were sheathed in limestone. The moat was broad
and blue. The surrounding countryside was
park-like . . . But fear of the Dominator
faded, and so did appropriations. A later painting, contemporary
with Bomanz, shows the countryside gone to seed, the limestone
facings in disrepair, and the moat becoming a swamp. Today you
can’t tell where the moat was. The limestone has disappeared
beneath brush. The elevations and barrows are nothing but humps.
That part of the Great Barrow where the Dominator lies remains in
fair shape, though it, too, is heavily overgrown. Some of the
fetishes anchoring the spells keeping his friends away still stand,
but weather has devoured their features.
The edge of the Barrowland is now marked by stakes trailing red
flags, put there when the Lady announced she was sending outsiders
to investigate. The Guards themselves, having lived there always,
need no markers to warn them off. I enjoyed my month and a half
there. I indulged my curiosities, and found Feather and Whisper
remarkably accessible.
That hadn’t been true of the old Taken. Too, the commander
of the Guard, called the Monitor, bragged up his command’s
past, which stretches back as far as the Company’s. We
swapped lies and tales over many a gallon of beer.
During the fifth week someone discovered something. We peons
were not told what. But the Taken got excited. Whisper started
lifting in more of the Company. The reinforcements told harrowing
fables about the Plain of Fear and the Empty Hills. The Company was
at Lords now, only five hundred miles distant.
At the end of the sixth week Whisper assembled us and announced
another move. “The Lady wants me to take some of you out
west. A force of twenty-five. Elmo, you’ll be in command.
Feather and I, some experts, and several language specialists will
join you. Yes, Croaker. You’re on the list. She
wouldn’t deny her favorite amateur historian, would
she?”
A thrill of fear. I didn’t want her getting interested
again.
“Where’re we headed?” Elmo asked. Professional
to the core, the son-of-a-bitch. Not a single complaint.
“A city called Juniper. Way beyond the western bounds of
the empire. It’s connected with the Barrowland somehow.
It’s a ways north, too. Expect it to be cold and prepare
accordingly.”
Juniper? Never heard of it. Neither had anyone else. Not even
the Monitor. I scrounged through his maps till I found one showing
the western coast. Juniper was way up north, near where the ice
persists all year long. It was a big city. I wondered how it could
exist there, where it should be frozen all the time. I asked
Whisper. She seemed to know something about the place. She said
Juniper benefits from an ocean current that brings warm water
north. She said the city is very strange—according to Feather,
who’d actually been there.
I approached Feather next, only hours before our departure. She
couldn’t tell me much more, except that Juniper is the
demense of a Duke Zimerlan, and he appealed to the Lady a year ago
(just a while before the Captain’s courier letter would have
left Charm) for help solving a local problem. That someone had
approached the Lady, when the world’s desire is to keep her
far away, argued that we faced interesting times. I wondered about
the connection with the Barrowland.
The negative was that Juniper was so far away. I was pleased
that I would be there when the Captain learned he was expected to
head there after resting in Oar, though.
Could be I’d hear his howl of outrage even from that far.
I knew he wouldn’t be happy.