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a quarter mile down the road. They think a demon attacked them. They don’t want to come back. Their officers are telling them they can’t survive if they don’t recover their camp and animals.”
    That was true. Maybe another glimpse of the demon would encourage them to stay away.
    I got the men into a ragged line, advanced to the edge of the wood. Narayan and Sindhu sneaked ahead. I wanted warning if the southerners were inclined to fight. I’d back off.
    They fled again. Narayan said they killed those officers who tried to rally them.
    “Fortune smiles,” I recall murmuring. I’d have to take a closer look at this demon Kina. She must have some reputation. I wondered why I’d never heard of her.
    I withdrew to the captured encampment. We’d come into a lot of useful material. “Ram, get the rest of the band. Have them bring the stakes from the embankment. Narayan, think about which men are least deserving of receiving arms.” There would be enough to go around now, almost.
    Arms would be a trust and honor to be earned.
    *   *   *
    The change was dramatic. You’d have thought it was another Ghoja triumph. Even those who hadn’t participated gained confidence. I saw it everywhere. These men had a new feeling of self-worth. They were proud to be part of a desperate enterprise and they gave me my due place in it. I walked through the camp dropping hints that soon they would be part of something with power.
    That had to be nurtured, and continually fertilized with suspicion and distrust of everyone outside the band.
    It takes time to forge a hammer. More time than I would get, probably. It takes years, even decades, to create a force like the Black Company, which had been carried forward on the crest of a wave of tradition.
    Here I was trying to magic up a Golden Hammer, something gaudy but with no real substance, deadly only to the ignorant and unprepared.
    It was time for a ceremony alienating them from the rest of the world. Time for a blood rite that would bind them to one another and me.
    I had the stakes from the embankment planted along the road south of the wood. Then I had all the dead southerners decapitated and their heads placed atop the stakes, facing southward, ostensibly warning travellers who shared their ambitions.
    Narayan and Sindhu were delighted. They hacked off heads with great enthusiasm. No horror touched them.
    None touched me, either. I’d seen everything in my time.

Chapter Ten
    Swan lay in the shade on the bank of the Main, lazily watching his bobber float on a still, deep pool. The air was warm, the shade was cool, the bugs were too lazy to bother him. He was half asleep. What more could a man ask?
    Blade sat down. “Catch anything?”
    “Nope. Don’t know what I’d do if I did. What’s up?”
    “The Woman wants us.” He meant the Radisha, whom they had found waiting when they’d reached Ghoja—much to Smoke’s dismay. “She’s got a job for us.”
    “Don’t she always? You tell her to stick it in her ear?”
    “Thought I’d save you that pleasure.”
    “I’d rather you’d saved me the walk. I’m comfortable.”
    “She wants us to drag Smoke somewhere he don’t want to go.”
    “Why didn’t you say so?” Swan pulled his line out of the water. There was no bait on his hook. “And I thought there weren’t any fish in that crick.” He left his pole against a tree, a statement of sorts. “Where’s Cordy?”
    “Probably there waiting. He was watching Jah. I told him already.”
    Swan looked across the river. “I’d kill for a pint of beer.” They’d been in the brewery business in Taglios before the excitement swept them up.
    Blade snorted, headed for the fortress overlooking Ghoja ford.
    *   *   *
    The fort stood on the south bank of the Main. It had been built by the Shadowmasters after their invasion of Taglios had been repulsed, to defend their conquests south of the river. The fortress had been overwhelmed by the Black Company after the