Read The Black Company: The First Novel of 'The Chronicles of The Black Company' for Free Online Page A

fill.
    We were not pursued, of course. No one came besieging the camp we established on the Pillar of Anguish. Which was what it was all about. That and the release of several years of pent-up anger.
    *   *   *
    Elmo and I stood at the tip of the headland, watching the afternoon sun play around the edges of a storm far out to sea. It had danced in and swamped our encampment with its cool deluge, then had rolled off across the water again. It was beautiful, though not especially colorful.
    Elmo had not had much to say recently. “Something eating you, Elmo?” The storm moved in front of the light, giving the sea the look of rusted iron. I wondered if the cool had reached Beryl.
    “Reckon you can guess, Croaker.”
    “Reckon I can.” The Paper Tower. The Fork Barracks. Our ignoble treatment of our commission. “What do you think it will be like, north of the sea?”
    “Think the black witch will come, eh?”
    “He’ll come, Elmo. He’s just having trouble getting his puppets to jig to his tune.” As who did not, trying to tame that insane city?
    “Uhm.” And, “Look there.”
    A pod of whales plunged past rocks lying off the headland. I tried to appear unimpressed, and failed. The beasts were magnificent, dancing in the iron sea.
    We sat down with our backs toward the lighthouse. It seemed we looked at a world never defiled by Man. Sometimes I suspect it would be better for our absence.
    “Ship out there,” Elmo said.
    I didn’t see it till its sail caught the fire of the afternoon sun, becoming an orange triangle edged with gold, rocking and bobbing with the rise and fall of the sea. “Coaster. Maybe a twenty tonner.”
    “That big?”
    “For a coaster. Deep water ships sometimes run eighty tons.”
    Time pranced along, fickle and faggoty. We watched ship and whales. I began to daydream. For the hundredth time I tried to imagine the new land, building upon traders’ tales heard secondhand. We would likely cross to Opal. Opal was a reflection of Beryl, they said, though a younger city.…
    “That fool is going to pile onto the rocks.”
    I woke up. The coaster was perilously near said danger. She shifted course a point and eluded disaster by a hundred yards, resumed her original course.
    “That put some excitement into our day,” I observed.
    “One of these first days you’re going to say something without getting sarcastic and I’ll curl up and die, Croaker.”
    “Keeps me sane, friend.”
    “That’s debatable, Croaker. Debatable.”
    I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask.
    “She’s coming around,” Elmo said.
    “What? Oh.” The coaster wallowed in the swell, barely making way, while her bows swung toward the strand below our camp.
    “Want to tell the Captain?”
    “I expect he knows. The men in the lighthouse.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Keep an eye out in case anything else turns up.”
    The storm was sliding to the west now, obscuring that horizon and blanketing the sea with its shadow. The cold grey sea. Suddenly, I was terrified of the crossing.
    *   *   *
    That coaster brought news from smuggler friends of Tom-Tom and One-Eye. One-Eye became even more dour and surly after he received them, and he had reached all time lows already. He even eschewed squabbling with Goblin, which he made a second career. Tom-Tom’s death had hit him hard, and would not turn loose. He would not tell us what his friends had to say.
    The Captain was little better. His temper was an abomination. I think he both longed for and dreaded the new land. The commission meant potential rebirth for the Company, with our sins left behind, yet he had an intimation of the service we were entering. He suspected the Syndic had been right about the northern empire.
    The day following the smuggler’s visit brought cool northern breezes. Fog nuzzled the skirts of the headland early in the evening. Shortly after nightfall, coming out of that fog,