Mounted, ready to ride, waiting for Blade and Smoke, Swan asked, Cordy, you get the feeling youre out in the woods in the middle of the night and everybodys doing their damnedest to hide the light?

Uhm. Mather was more the thinker than Willow or Blade. Theyre afraid if we know the whole story well desert. Theyre desperate. Theyve lost the Black Company. Were all thats left.

Like the old days.

Uhm.

The old days. Before the coming of the professionals. When their adopted homeland had made them reluctant captains because the feuding cults couldnt tolerate taking orders from native nonbelievers. A year in the field, playing blind lead the blind, overcoming political shenanigans daily, had convinced Swan that Blade had a point, that it wouldnt hurt the world a bit if you rid it of a few hundred thousand selected priests.

You buy that Kina stuff?

I dont think she told any lies. She just forgot to tell the whole truth.

Maybe when we get Smoke out there forty miles from nowhere we can squeeze it out of him.

Maybe. As long as we dont forget what he is. We scare him too much and hes liable to show us what kind of wizard he is. Button it. Theyre coming.

Smoke looked like he was headed for the gallows. Blade looked as unhappy as ever. But Swan knew he was pleased. Blade figured he was going to get a chance to kick some deserving asses.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

The wounded man thought he was trapped in a drug dream. Hed been a physician. He knew drugs did strange things to the mind. Dreams were strange enough.... He couldnt wake up.

Some fractured shard of rationality lodged in a corner of his brain watched, sensed, wondered vaguely as he drifted eternally a few feet above a landscape he seldom saw. Sometimes branches passed overhead. Sometimes there were hills in the corners of his eyes. Once he wakened while drifting through tall grass. Once he felt he was passing over a broad expanse of water.

Occasionally a huge black horse looked down at him. He thought he knew the beast but couldnt assemble the pieces in his mind.

Sometimes a figure in shapeless robing bestrode the beast, stared down out of an empty cowl.

These things were all real, he suspected. But they fell into no meaningful pattern. Only the horse seemed familiar.

Hell. He couldnt recall who he was. His thoughts wouldnt sequence. Probable pasts kept intruding on the apparent now, often as real.

Those intrusions were shards of battle, uncertain on the jagged edges, bright as blood in the center. Great slaughters, all. Sometimes names attached themselves. Lords. Charm. Beryl. Roses. Horse. Dejagore. Juniper. The Barrowland. Queens Bridge. Dejagore again. Dejagore often.