They were back. The Black Company were, with new formations, new allies, new sorceries, and still without a dram of mercy in their hearts. These were not the Company she had known in younger years but they were the spiritual children of the cold killers of the olden days. No matter what you tried, it seemed, you could kill only men. The ideal lived on.

Ha! An end to the boredom of empire stood at hand.

Bravado and pretense did not lessen the inexplicable fear. They had fled onto the plain. And now they were back. That had to mean much more. She needed to interrogate shadows who had existed on the glittering stone during those silent years. When there was time. Before she did anything else she had to do what she always did so well: survive.

She was out here hundreds of miles from any support. She was besieged by things that would not yield to her will or sorcery and which she could detect, it seemed, only through her own shadows or when one of them attacked her directly. They were as fierce as shadows but strange. They were more otherworldly than her spirit slaves and seemed possessed of a higher order of intelligence.

Each one she extinguished personally infected her with both a vast sorrow and with the certainty that she was battling only the most feeble of their kind. Always there was a powerful presentiment of demons or demigods to come.

What she could not comprehend was why all this frightened her so. There was nothing here more deadly or threatening or bizarre than a thousand perils she had faced before. Nothing here matched the sheer dark menace of the Dominator in his time.

There were infrequent moments when she still longed for those dark and ancient times. The Dominator had taken her and all her sisters, had made one of them his wife and another his lover... 

He had been a strong, hard, cruel man, the Dominator. His empire had been one of cruelty and steel. And Soulcatcher had revelled in its pomp and dark glory. And would never forgive her rival, her last surviving sister, for having brought all that to an end. Blame the death of the Dominator on the White Rose if you wanted. Soulcatcher knew the truth. The Dominator never would have gone down if his whining virgin of a wife had not helped his destruction along.

And who had fought and conspired so hard after their resurrection to keep the Dominator in the ground? His loving wife, that was who!

She would be back. She would be out there somewhere, wherever the Black Company had been hiding. She was not here yet but she would be soon. Having been buried alive again would be no impediment to the inevitable, that grim moment when they would settle their differences face-to-face.

Soulcatcher could will herself blind in some quarters, despite centuries of cynical experience. She would not see that fortune could be just as erratic and insane as she was.

Soulcatcher’s powers of recuperation were tremendous. After a few hours of rest she rose and started walking northward, her stride long and confident. Tonight she would gather an army of her own shadows around her. Never again would she be as threatened as she had been the night before.

So she told herself.

By late afternoon her confidence was as high as ever it had been and fragments of her mind were already peeping past today’s crisis to scout out what might be done to sculpt the future.

Soulcatcher had long been intimate with the knowledge that horrible things could and did happen to her but always she had enjoyed the certainty that she would come through everything alive.

“Looks clean,” Swan said. Murgen and Thai Dei grunted agreement. I nodded to the Nyueng Bao. What he had to say meant something here. His eyes were still as sharp as those of a lad of fifteen. I was damned near blind in one and could not see out the other.

“Doj? What do you think? Did they run away? Or did they sneak back just in case we sneaked back?” Element of surprise no longer my ally, I did not want to run into the Voroshk again. Especially not those old men. They would be bitter and in a mood to drag me down to hell with them.

“They went away. They went back to prepare for the onslaught. They know horror and despair are headed their way but they also know they’re strong enough to weather it if they remain calm and work hard.”

I suspect I gaped. “How do you figure all that?”

“It’s just a matter of mental exercise. Take what we know about them, about sorcerers as a whole, and about human beings in general, and the rest follows. They’ve been through this before, in a smaller way. They’ll have worked out what to do if it happened again. All this empty country, from here to the other side of their Dandha Presh, will serve the same function as the cleared ground surrounding a fortress expecting to be besieged.”

“You’ve convinced me. Let’s just hope they’re not so ready that they figure out how to come looking for us after they wrap up their pest problem.” As badly as the shadowgate and nearby barrier had been damaged I doubted the Voroshk would have much energy to spare for generations.

Swan said, “He had me for a minute, too, but here comes the argument that proves what I always knew: Uncle Doj is full of shit.”

A half dozen billowing black forms had emerged from the vegetation down the slope. They were walking very slowly, two by two, hands extended away from their sides, their flying posts tagging along behind at waist height.

I said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on but I want Goblin and Doj ready for anything. Murgen, you and Thai Dei spread out so we can hit them from in front and both sides with fireballs.” Me and my pals had three live poles, literally all our band had left. Lady said there were just six usable fireballs between the three. She hoped.

One for each of the Voroshk.

Swan said, “You sure we really need to round up those spooks? Life would be a lot easier...”

“Right here. Right now. But what happens back home when we’ve got Soulcatcher coming at us and we yell for Tobo to let loose the Black Hounds and there ain’t no Black Hounds? And the rest of the Unknown Shadows say, ‘Fuck that shit! I ain’t getting skragged for these guys who wouldn’t even try to bring the Hounds out of Khatovar.’”

Swan growled. Goblin sneered, “A little passion, Captain? I thought you’d lost it all.”

“When I want shit out of you, runt, I’ll kick it out. What did he just say?” The Voroshk had stopped coming toward us. One had spoken. And, O wonder, his words sounded like something I ought to understand. “Say that again, buddy.”

The sorcerer got the idea. He repeated himself, loudly and slowly, the way you do with the hard of hearing, the dim of wit and foreigners.

“What is that noise?” I asked. “I know there were words in there that I should recognize.”

“Remember Juniper?” Goblin said. “It sounds like he’s trying to speak what they spoke there.”

“Makes sense. Bowalk came from Juniper. So listen close.” Goblin had served in Juniper, too. A long time ago. I have a knack for languages. Could I get enough of this one back fast enough to do us any good? We did not have many hours of daylight left.

Something began to get past the fact that the Voroshk had a horrible accent and his grammar was atrocious. He butchered tenses and inverted his verbs and subjects.

Goblin and I compared notes as we proceeded. The little wizard had never spoken the language well but he had had no trouble understanding it.

“What’s going on?” Swan demanded. He was holding one of the bamboo poles. It was getting heavy.

“Sounds like they want us to take them with us. That they think the end of the world is coming and they don’t want to participate.”

Goblin nodded, agreeing. He added a caveat, “But I wouldn’t trust them for a second. I’d always assume they were sent to spy on us.”