Book 1 - Bleak Seasons by Glen Cook Page A

the
relentless Taglian leapfrog into the Shadowlands. Only its
watchtower was complete. The lookout there scanned the southern
horizon intently. There was an electric urgency in the air, a
heaviness like the smell of old death, a premonition.
    The soldiers were all veterans. Not a one considered fleeing his
nerves. Each had developed the habit and expectation of
victory.
    The sentinel began to gaze fixedly. “Captain!”
    A man distinct for his coloring dropped a shovel, looked up. His
true name was Cato Dahlia. The Black Company called him Big Bucket.
Wanted for common theft in his home city, he had become advisor
commander of a battalion of Taglian border rangers. He was a
hardass leader with a reputation for getting his jobs done and
bringing his people back alive.
    Bucket scrambled onto the observation platform, puffing.
“What have you got?”
    The lookout pointed. Bucket squinted. “Help me out here,
son. These eyes ain’t what they used to be.” He could
see nothing but the low humped backs of the Loghra Hills. Scattered
clouds hung above those.
    “Watch.”
    Bucket trusted his soldiers. He selected them carefully. He
watched.
    One small cloud hung lower than the others, dragging a slanting
shadow. This rogue thunderhead did not travel the same direction as
the rest of its family.
    “Headed right for us?”
    “Looks like it, sir.”
    Bucket relied on his intuition. It had served him well during
this war without major battles. And intuition told him that cloud
was dangerous.
    He descended, spread word to expect an attack. The men of the
construction company, although not combat soldiers, did not want to
withdraw. Sometimes Bucket’s reputation worked against him.
His rangers had prospered, freebooting across the frontier. Others
wanted a share.
    Bucket compromised. He sent one platoon north with the animals,
which were too valuable to risk. The other workers stayed. They
overturned their wagons in the gaps in the stockade.
    The cloud advanced steadily. Nothing could be seen inside its
shadow and tail of falling rain. A chill ran before it. The Taglian
soldiers shivered and pranced to keep warm.
    Two hundred yards beyond the ditch, teams of two men shivered in
covered, concealed pits lighted by special candles. One man
maintained a watch.
    Rain and darkness arrived. Behind the initial few yards of
downpour the rain slackened to a drizzle. Men appeared. They looked
old and sad, ragged and pale, vacant and hopeless, hunched against
the chill. They looked as though they had spent their entire lives
in the rain. They bore their rusting weapons without spirit. They
could have been an army raised from the dead.
    Their line passed the pits. Behind them came horsemen of the
same sort, advancing like zombies. Next came massed infantry. Then
came the elephants.
    The men in the pits spied the elephants. They used crossbows to
speed poisoned shafts. The elephants wore no belly armor. The
poison caused intense pain. The maddened beasts rampaged through
their own formations. The Shadowlanders had no idea why the animals
were enraged.
    Little shadows found the pits. They tried to slither inside.
Candlelight drove them back. They left a deeper chill and a smell
of death behind.
    The shadows found a pit where rain had gotten to the candle.
They left shrieking, grimacing death in a grave already dug.
    Lady encountered the northbound laborers. She questioned them,
considered the cloud in the distance. “This may be what
we’re after,” she told her companions.
“Ride!” She urged her stallion to a gallop. Foaled in
sorcerous stables when she was empress of the north, that giant
black outdistanced the rest of her party quickly. Lady studied the
cloud as she galloped. Three similar clouds had been reported near
sites where ranger companies had been overrun. This was exactly
what she had come to investigate. It took only minutes to fathom
how the raids were managed. Lines of dark power had been laid down
long before the