Shadow Games: The Fourth Chronicles of the Black Company: First Book of the South by Glen Cook Page A

through town and leave them thinking me a
     foul-tempered, contemptuous, arrogant Taken legate southward bound on a mission
     that was no business of the procurators of Beryl.
    The gangway slammed down. One-Eye let loose the hell-horn howl I wanted. My mob
     surged forward. Gawkers and the privileged alike scattered before our
     fire-and-darkness apparition. We thundered through Beryl as we had thundered
     through Opal, our passage spreading terror. Behind us, The Dark Wings put out
     with the evening tide, under orders to proceed to the Garnet Roads and begin an
     extended patrol against pirates and smugglers. We exited the Rubbish Gate.
    Though the normal animals were exhausted, we carried on till darkness lent us
     its mask.
    Despite our haste to get away from the city, we did not camp far enough out to
     escape its attention entirely. When I wakened in the morning I found Murgen
     waiting on me with three brothers who wanted to join up. Their names were
     Cletus, Longinus, and Loftus. They had been kids when we were in Beryl before.
    How they recognized us during our wild ride I do not know. They claimed to have
     deserted the Urban Cohorts in order to join us. I did not feel much like dealing
     with an extensive interrogation, so took Murgen’s word that they seemed all
     right. “They’re fools enough to want to jump in with us without knowing what’s
     going on, let them. Give them to Hagop.”
    I now had two feeble squads, Otto and the four from Opal, and Hagop and the
     three from Beryl. Such was the Company’s history. Pick up a man here, enlist two
     there, keep on keeping on.
    Southward and southward. Through Rebosa, where the Company had seen service
     briefly, and where Otto and Hagop had enlisted. They found their city changed
     immensely and yet not at all. They had no trouble leaving it behind. They
     brought in another man there, a nephew, who quickly earned the name Smiley
     because of his consistent sullenness and sarcastic turn of phrase.
    Then Padora, and on, to that great crossroads of trade routes where I was born
     and where I enlisted just before the Company ended its service there. I was
     young and foolish when I did. Yes. But I did get to see the far reaches of the
     world.
    I ordered a day of rest at the vast caravan camp outside the city wall, along
     the westward road, while I went into town and indulged myself, walking streets I
     had run as a kid. Like Otto said about Rebosa, the same and yet dramatically
     changed. The difference, of course, was inside me.
    I stalked through the old neighborhood, past the old tenement. I saw no one I
     knew—unless a woman glimpsed briefly, who looked like my grandmother, was my
     sister. I did not confront her, nor ask. To those people I am dead.
    A return as imperial legate would not change that.
    We stood before the last imperial mile marker. Lady was trying to convince the
     lieutenant commanding our guards that his mission was complete, that imperial
     soldiers crossing the frontier might be construed as an unacceptable
     provocation.
    Sometimes her people are too loyal.
    A half-dozen border militiamen, equally divided between sides, clad identically
     and obviously old friends, stood around a short distance away, discussing us in
     murmurs of awe. The rest of us fidgeted.
    It seemed ages since I had been beyond imperial frontiers. I found the prospect
     vaguely unsettling.
    “You know what we’re doing, Croaker?” Goblin asked.
    “What’s that?”
    “We’re travelling backward in time.”
    Backward in time. Backward into our own history. A simple enough statement, but
     an important thought.
    “Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Let me go stir the pot. Else we’ll never get moving.”
    I joined Lady, who gave me a nasty look. I pasted on my sweetest smile and said,
    “Look here. I’m over on the other side of the line. You got a problem,
    Lieutenant?”
    He bobbed his head. He was more in awe of my rank and title, unearned though
     they were,