The one snorted again, then spoke. “The swamps would be a very good place for them to die. Take care of it. You may impress the one who rules them with the majesty and terror of my Name.” He began to drift away.

The others stared hard. The anger in the place became palpable.

The other ceased his drift. “You know what sleeps so restlessly upon my southern border. I dare not relax my vigilance.”

“Unless to stab another of us in the back. I note that the threat becomes secondary whenever you care to try.”

“You have my pledge. Upon my Name. The peace will not be broken by me while those who bring danger from the north survive. You may speak of me as one with you when you extend your hands beyond the shadows. I cannot, I dare not, give you more.” He resumed his drift.

“So be it, then,” said the woman. The triangle rearranged itself so as to exclude him. “He spoke one truth, certainly. The swamps would be a very good place for them to die. If Fate does not take them in hand sooner.”

One of the others began to chuckle. The shadows scurried about, frantic, as growing laughter tormented them.

“A very good place for them to die.”

At first the names were echoes from my childhood. Kale. Fratter. Grey. Weeks. Some the Company had served, some had been its foes. The world changed and became warmer and the cities became more scattered. Their names faded to legend and memories from the Annals. Tire. Raxle. Slight. Nab and Nod. We passed beyond any map I had ever seen, to cities known to me only through the Annals and visited only by One-Eye previously. Boros. Teries. Viege. Ha-jah.

And still we headed south, still making the first long leg of our journey. Crows followed. We gathered another four recruits, professional caravan guards from a nomad tribe called the roi, who deserted to join us. I started a squad for Murgen. He was not thrilled. He was content being standard bearer and had developed hopes of taking over the Annalist’s chores from me because I had so much to do as Captain and medic. I dared not discourage him. The only alternative substitute was One-Eye. He was not reliable.

And south some more, and still we were not back to One-Eye’s origin, the jungles of D’loc-Aloc.

One-Eye swore that never in his life, outside the Company, had he heard the name Khatovar. It had to lie far beyond the waist of the world.

There are limits to what frail flesh can endure.

Those long leagues were not easy. The black iron coach and Lady’s wagon drew the eye of bandits and princes and princes who were bandits. Most times Goblin and One-Eye bluffed us through. The rest of the time we forced them to back down with a little applied terror. There was one long stretch where the magic had gone away.

If those two had learned anything during their years with the Company, it was showmanship. When they conjured an illusion you could smell its bad breath from seventy feet away.

I wished they would refrain from wasting that flash upon one another.

I decided it was time we laid up for a few days. We needed to regain our youthful bounce.

One-Eye suggested, “There’s a place down the road called the Temple of Travellers’ Repose. They take in wanderers. They have for two thousand years. It would be a good place to lay up and do some research.”

“Research?”

“Two thousand years of travellers’ tales makes a hell of a library, Croaker. And a tale is the only donative they ever require.”

He had me. He grinned cockily. The old scoundrel knew me too well. Nothing else could have stilled my determination to reach Khatovar so thoroughly.

I passed the word. And gave One-Eye the fish-eye. “That means you’re going to do some honest work.”

“What?”

“Who do you think is going to translate?”

He groaned and rolled his eye. “When am I going to learn to keep my big damned mouth shut?”

The Temple was a lightly fortified monastery sprawled atop a low hill. It looked golden in the light of a late afternoon sun. The forest beyond and the fields before were as intense a dark green as ever I have seen. The place looked restful.

As we entered, a wave of well-being cleansed us. A feeling of I have come home washed over us. I looked at Lady. The things I felt glowed in her face, and touched my heart.

“I could retire here,” I told Lady two days into our stay. Clean for the first time in months, we stalked a garden never disturbed by conflicts more weighty than the squabbles of sparrows.

She gave me a thin smile and did me the courtesy of saying nothing about the delusive nature of dreams.

The place had everything I thought I wanted. Comfort. Quiet. Isolation from the ills of the earth. Purpose. Challenging historical studies to soothe my lust to know what had gone on before.

Most of all, it provided a respite from responsibility. Each man added to the Company seemed to double my burden as I worried about keeping them fed, keeping them healthy, and out of trouble.

“Crows,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Everywhere we go there’re crows. Maybe I only started noticing them the past couple months. But everywhere we go I see crows. And I can’t shake the feeling they’re watching us.”

Lady gave me a puzzled look.

“Look. Right over there in that acacia tree. Two of them squatting there like black omens.”

She glanced at the tree, gave me another look. “I see a couple of doves.”

“But...” One of the crows launched itself, flapped away over the monastery wall. “That wasn’t any-”

“Croaker!” One-Eye charged through the garden, scattering the birds and squirrels, ignoring all propriety. “Hey! Croaker! Guess what I found! Copies of the Annals from when we came past here headed north!”

Well. And well. This tired old mind cannot find words adequate. Excitement? Certainly. Ecstasy? You’d better believe. The moment was almost sexually intense. My mind focused the way one’s does when an especially desirable woman suddenly seems attainable.

Several older volumes of the Annals had become lost or damaged during the years. There were some I’d never seen, and never had known a hope of seeing.

“Where?” I breathed.

“In the library. One of the monks thought you might be interested. When we were here heading north I don’t remember leaving them, but I wasn’t much interested in that kind of thing then. Me and Tom-Tom was too busy looking over our shoulders.”

“I might be interested,” I said. “I might.” My manners deserted me. I deserted Lady without so much as an “Excuse me.”

Maybe that obsession was not as powerful as I’d worked it up to be.

I felt like an ass when I realized what I had done.

Reading those copies required teamwork. They had been recorded in a language no longer used by anyone but the temple monks. None of them spoke any language I understood. So our reader translated into One-Eye’s native tongue, then One-Eye translated for me.

What filtered through was damned interesting.

They had the Book of Choe, which had been destroyed fifty years before I enlisted and only poorly reconstructed. And the Book of Te-Lare, known to me only through a cryptic reference in a later volume. The Book of Skete, previously unknown. They had a half dozen more, equally precious. But no Book of the Company. No First or Second Book of Odrick. Those were the legendary first three volumes of the Annals, containing our origin myths, referenced in later works but not mentioned as having been seen after the first century of the Company’s existence.

The Book of Te-Lare tells why.

There was a battle.

Always, there was a battle in any explanation.

Movement; a clash of arms; another punctuation mark in the long tale of the Black Company.

In this one the people who had hired our forebrethren had bolted at the first shock of the enemy’s charge. They had broken so fast they were gone before the Company realized what was happening. The outfit beat a fighting retreat into its fortified encampment. During the ensuing siege the enemy penetrated the camp several times. During one such penetration the volumes in question vanished. Both the Annalist and his understudy were slain. The Books could not be reconstructed from memory.