"Cook, Glen - The Black Company 04 - The Silver Spike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

The Silver Spike



by
Glen Cook


Book 4 in the Black Company series


I



This here journal is Raven's idea but I got me a feeling he won't be so proud of it if he ever gets to reading it because most of the time I'm going to tell the truth. Even if he is my best buddy.

Talk about your feet of clay. He's got them run all the way up to his noogies, and then some. But he's a right guy even if he is a homicidal, suicidal maniac half the time. Raven decides he's your friend you got a friend for life, with a knife in all three hands.

My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. I've never even told Raven about that. That's why I joined the army. To get away from the kind of potato diggers that would stick a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters and four brothers last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some damned flower.

A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a brother named Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind of people do that do their kids? Where the hell are the Butches and Spikes?

Potato diggers.

People that spend their whole lives grubbing in the dirt, sunup to sundown, to root out potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips, rootabagas. Turnips. I still hate turnips. I wouldn't wish them on a hog. I joined the army as soon as I could sneak off.

They tried to stop me. My father and uncles and brothers and cousins. They didn't get away with it. I'm still amazed how that one old sergeant managed to look so bad the whole clan backed down.

That's what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somebody who could just stand there and look so bad people dribbled down their legs. But I think you got to be born with it.

Raven's got it. He just looks at somebody trying to jack him around and the guy turns white.

So I joined up and went through the training and went out soldiering, sometimes with Feather and Journey, sometimes with Whisper, mostly here in the north. And I found out soldiering wasn't what I thought it would be. I found out I didn't like it a whole lot better than digging potatoes. But I was good at it, even if I kept doing something to get busted every time I made sergeant. I finally got posted to the Guards at the Barrowland. That was supposed to be a big honor but I never believed it.

That's where I met Raven. Only he went by the name of Corbie then. I didn't know he was a spy for the White Rose. 'Course, nobody did or he would have been dead. He was just this quiet old crippled guy who said he used to soldier with the Limper but had to get out after he got his leg hurt so bad. He hung out in an abandoned house he fixed up. He made his living doing things for guys that didn't want to do them for themselves. The Guards got paid good and the Barrowland was a hundred miles into the Great Forest where there wasn't nothing else to spend it on but booze. Corbie got plenty of work polishing boots and swabbing floors and currying horses. He used to come in and do the colonel's office and then play chess with him, which is where I ran into him the first time.

He smelled odd right from the start. Not White Rose odd but you knew he wasn't no runaway farm boy like me or some city kid from the slums that signed up because there wasn't nothing else to do with his life. He had some class when he wanted to show it. He was educated. He talked maybe five or six languages and he could read and I heard him talk with the old man about things that I didn't have a rooster's notion what they meant.

So I got me this idea. I'd get to be his buddy and then get him to teach me how to read and write.

It was the same old thing, see. Join the army and get off the farm and go on adventures and life would be great. Learn to read and write, I could get out of the army and go off on adventures and everything would be great.

Sure.

I don't know if everybody is that way. I'm not the kind that can ask guys about things like that. But I know me enough to know that there ain't nothing ever going to turn out to be exactly what I want and nothing is ever going to satisfy me. I'm the guy with so much ambition I'm living here in a one room walk-up with a wino whose big talent seems to be puking his guts up after scarfing down about three gallons of the cheapest wine he can find.

So anyway I got Raven to start teaching me and we ended up buddies, even if he was weird. And that didn't do me no good when the shit storm hit and he turned out to be a spy. Lucky for me, my bosses and his bosses had to get together to gang up on the monster in the ground up there, that us Guards was getting paid so good to watch.

That's when I found out he was really Raven, the guy that used to run with the Black Company, that took the White Rose away from the Limper when she was a little kid and hid her out and raised her up till she was ready to take on her destiny.