He talked all the way up the hill. It distracted her till the black castle loomed so large it could no longer be overlooked. Then her eyes got huge. She began to shake, to stink as she lost all control.

"Yes, darling," Shed said, voice pleasantly rational, conversational. "Yes. The black castle. You were going to deliver me to the mercy of your friends. You made a bet and lost. Now I deliver you to mine." He halted, climbed down, went to the gate. It opened immediately.

The tall being met him, wringing spidery hands. "Good," it said. "Very good. Your partner never brought healthy game."

Shed's guts knotted. He wanted to change his mind. He only wanted to hurt and humiliate Sue...But it was too late. He could not turn back. "I'm sorry, Sue. You shouldn't have done it. You and Gilbert. His turn will come. Marron Shed isn't what everybody thinks."

A whining noise came from behind Sue's gag. Shed turned away. He had to get out. He faced the tall creature.

It began counting coins directly into his hand.

As always, Shed did not barter. In fact, he did not look at the money, just kept stuffing his pockets. His attention was on the darkness behind the creature.

More of its kind were back there, hissing, jostling. Shed recognized the short one he'd dealt with once.

The tall being stopped counting. Absently, Shed put the coins into a pocket, returned to his wagon. The things in shadow swept forward, seized Sue, began ripping her clothing. One yanked the gag out of her mouth. Shed started packing his rig.

"For G.o.d's sake, Marron. Don't leave me."

"It's done, woman. It's done." He snapped his traces. "Back up, mules."

She started screaming as he turned toward the gate. He did not look. He did not want to know. "Keep moving, mules."

"Come again soon, Marron Shed," the tall creature called after him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven:.

JUNIPER: BANISHED.

The summons from Whisper caught me unprepared. It was too early for the daily report. I'd barely finished breakfast. I knew it meant trouble. I was not disappointed.

The Taken prowled like a caged animal, radiating tension and anger. I went inside by the numbers, stood at a perfect attention, giving no excuse for the picking of nits-in case whatever it was was not my fault.

She ignored me for several minutes, working off energy. Then she seated herself, stared at her hands thoughtfully. Her gaze rose. And she was in complete control. She actually smiled. Had she been as beautiful as the Lady, that smile would have melted granite. But she was what she was, a scarred old campaigner, so a smile only ameliorated the grimness of her face.

"How were the men disposed last night?" she asked.

Baffled, I responded, "Excuse me? You mean their temper?"

"Where were they stationed?"

"Oh." That was properly Elmo's province, but I knew better than to say so. The Taken do not tolerate excuses, sound though they may be. "The three men on the ship south with Bullock, looking for that man Asa." I worried about her having sent them. When I do not understand the motives of the Taken, I get paranoid. "Five down in the Buskin pretending to be foreign sailors. Three more down there watching people we've found especially interesting. I'd have to double-check with Elmo to be positive, but at least four more were in other parts of the city, trying to pick up something of interest. The rest of us were here in the castle, off duty. Wait. One man would have been down in the Duke's secret police office, and two would have been at the Enclosure, hanging around with the Custodians. I was with the Inquisitors most of the night, picking their brains. We're scattered pretty thin right now. I'll be glad when the Captain gets here. We've got too much going for the available manpower. The occupation planning is way behind."

She sighed, rose, resumed pacing. "My fault as much as anyone's, I suppose." She looked out a window for a long time. Then she beckoned. I joined her.

She indicated the black castle. "Just whiskers short. They're trying to open the way for the Dominator already. It's not yet time, but they're getting hurried. Maybe they've sensed our interest."

This Juniper business was like some giant, tentacled sea beast from a sailor's lie. No matter where we turned or what we did, we got deeper into trouble. By working at cross-purposes with the Taken, trying to cover an increasingly more obvious trail, we were complicating their efforts to deal with the peril of the black castle. If we did cover well, we just might make it possible for the Dominator to emerge into an unprepared world.

I did not want that horror upon my conscience.

Though I fear I tend not to record it that way, we were embroiled in substantial moral quandaries. We are not accustomed to such problems. The lot of the mercenary does not require much moralizing or making of moral decisions. Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The great issues become how well he does his job, how faithfully he carries out his commission, how well he adheres to a standard demanding unswerving loyalties to his comrades. He dehumanizes the world outside the bounds of his outfit. Then anything he does, or witnesses, becomes of minor significance as long as its brunt is borne outside the Company.

We had drifted into a trap where we might have to face the biggest choice in the Company's history. We might have to betray four centuries of Company mythos on behalf of the greater whole.

I knew I could not permit the Dominator to restore himself, if that turned out to be the only way we could keep the Lady from finding out about Darling and Raven.

Yet...The Lady was not much better. We served her, and, till lately, well and faithfully, obliterating the Rebel wherever we found him, but I don't think many of us were indifferent to what she was. She was less evil than the Dominator only because she was less determined about it, more patient in her drive for total and absolute control.

That presented me with another quandary. Was I capable of sacrificing Darling to prevent the Dominator's return? If that became the price?

"You seem very thoughtful," Whisper said.

"Uhm. There're too many angles to this business. The Custodians. The Duke. Us. Bullock, who has axes of his own to grind." I had told her about Bullock's Buskin origins, feeding her seemingly irrelevant information to complicate and distract her thinking.

She pointed again. "Didn't I suggest a close watch be kept on that place?"

"Yes, ma'am. We did for a while, too. But nothing ever happened, and then we were told to do some other things..." I broke off, quaking with a sudden nasty suspicion.

She read my face. "Yes. Last night. And this delivery was still alive."

"Oh boy," I murmured. "Who did it? You know?"

"We just sensed the consequent changes. They tried to open the way. They weren't strong enough yet, but they came very close."

She began to prowl. Mentally, I ticked off the roster for the Buskin last night. I was going to ask some very pointed questions.

"I consulted the Lady directly. She's very worried. Her orders are to let ancillary business slide. We're to prevent any more bodies reaching the castle. Yes, the rest of your Company will be here soon. From six to ten days. And there is much to be done to prepare for their arrival. But, as you observed, there is too much to do and too few to do it. Let your Captain cope when he arrives. The black castle must be isolated."

"Why not fly some men in?"

"The Lady has forbidden that."

I tried to look perplexed. "Buy why?" I had a sweating, fearful suspicion that I knew.

Whisper shrugged. "Because she doesn't want you wasting time making h.e.l.los and briefing newcomers. Go see what can be done about isolating the castle."

"Yes, ma'am."

I departed, thinking it had gone both better and worse than I had antic.i.p.ated. Better, because she did not throw one of her screaming rages. Worse, because she had in effect announced that we who were here already were suspect, that we might have succ.u.mbed to a moral infection the Lady did not want communicated to our brethren.

Scary.

"Yeah," Elmo said when I told him. He did not need it explained. "Which means we got to make contact with the Old Man."

"Messenger?"

"What else? Who can we break loose and cover?"

"One of the men from the Buskin."

Elmo nodded. "I'll handle that. You go ahead and figure how to isolate the castle with the manpower we have."

"Why don't you go scout the castle? I want to find out what those guys were doing last night."

"That's neither here nor there now, Croaker. I'm taking over. Not saying you done a bad job, just you didn't get it done. Which is my fault, really. I'm the soldier."

"Being a soldier won't make any difference, Elmo. This isn't soldier's work. It's spy stuff. And spies need time to worm into the fabric of a society. We haven't had enough of that."

"Time is up now. Isn't that what you said?"

"I guess," I admitted. "All right. I'll scout the castle. But you find out what went on down there last night. Especially around that placed called the Iron Lily. It keeps turning up, just like that guy Asa."

All the while we talked, Elmo was changing. Now he looked like a sailor down on his luck, too old to ship, but still tough enough for dirty work. He would fit right in down in the Buskin. I told him so.

"Yeah. Let's get moving. And don't plan on getting much sleep till the Captain gets here."

We looked at one another, not saying what lay in the backs of our minds. If the Taken did not want us in touch with our brethren, what might they do when the Company hove in sight, coming out of the Wolanders?

Up close, the black castle was both intriguing and unsettling. I took a horse over, circled the place several times, even flipped a cheerful wave at the one movement I detected atop its gla.s.sy ramparts.

There was some difficult ground behind it-steep, rocky, overgrown with scraggly, th.o.r.n.y brush which had a sagey odor. n.o.body lugging a corpse would reach the fortress from that direction. The ground was better along the ridgeline to east and west, but even there an approach was improbable. Men of the sort who sold corpses would do things the easy way. That meant using the road which ran from the Port River waterfront, through the scatter of merchant cla.s.s houses on the middle slopes, and just kept on to the castle gate. Someone had followed that course often, for wheel ruts ran from the end of the road to the castle.

My problem was, there was no place a squad could lie in wait without being seen from the castle wall. It took me till dusk to finalize my plan.

I found an abandoned house a ways down the slope and a little upriver. I would conceal my squad there and post sentries down the road, in the populated area. They could run a message to the rest of us if they saw anything suspicious. We could hustle up and across the slope to intercept potential body-sellers. Wagons would be slow enough to allow us the time needed.

Old Croaker is a brilliant strategist. Yes, sir. I had my troops in place and everything set by midnight. And had two false alarms before breakfast. I learned the embarra.s.sing way that there was legitimate night traffic past my sentry post.

I sat in the old house with my team, alternately playing tonk and worrying, and on rare occasions napping. And wondering a lot about what was happening down in the Buskin and across the valley in Duretile.

I prayed Elmo could keep his fingers on all the strings.

Chapter Twenty-Eight:.

JUNIPER: LISA.

Shed spent an entire day lying in his room, staring at the ceiling, hating himself. He had sunk as low as a man could. There was no deed too foul for him anymore, and nothing more he could do to blacken his soul. A million-leva pa.s.sage fee could not buy him aboard on Pa.s.sage Day. His name had to be written in the Black Book with those of the greatest villains.

"Mr. Shed?" Lisa said from the doorway next morning, as he was contemplating another day of ceiling study and self-pity. "Mr. Shed?"

"Yeah?"

"Bo and Lana are here."

Bo and Lana, with a daughter, were his mother's servants. "What do they want?"

"Their accounts settled for the month, I expect."

"Oh." He got up.

Lisa stopped him at the head of the stair. "I was right about Sue, wasn't I?"

"You were."

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have said anything if we could have afforded it."

"We? What do you mean, we? Oh, h.e.l.l. Never mind. Forget about it. I don't want to hear about it anymore."

"Whatever you say. But I'm going to hold you to your promise."

"What promise?"

"To let me manage the Lily."

"Oh. All right." At that moment he did not care. He collected the monthly accounting from the servants. He had chosen them well. They were not cheating him. He suggested they deserved a small bonus.

He returned upstairs for the money. Lisa watched him go, perplexed. He realized his mistake too late. Now she wondered why he had money today when he'd had none yesterday. He located his dirty clothing, emptied his pockets onto his bed. And gasped.

"Oh, d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n," he muttered. "What the h.e.l.l am I going to do with three gold pieces?"

There was silver, too, and even a fistful of copper, but...It was a gyp! A fortune he could not spend. Juniper law made it illegal for commoners to hold minted gold. Even incoming foreigners had to exchange theirs for silver-though foreign silver was as welcome as local. Lucky, too, for the black castle mintage was a decidedly odd coinage, though in the standard weights.

How could he get rid of the gold? Sell it to some ship captain headed south? That was the usual procedure. He slipped it into his most secret hiding place, with the amulet from the black castle. A useless fortune. He a.s.sessed the remainder.

Twenty-eight pieces of silver, plus several leva in copper. Enough to take care of his mother and Sal. Way short of enough to pry Gilbert off his back. "Still be in the d.a.m.ned money trap," he whined.

He recalled Sue's jewelry, smiled nastily, muttered, "I'll do it." He pocketed everything, returned to the ground floor, paid his mother's servants, told Lisa, "I'm going out for a while."

First he made sure Wally's family was cared for, then ambled down toward Gilbert's place. No one seemed to be around. Gilbert was not like Krage, in that he felt he needed an army on hand, but he did have his bone-breakers. They were all away. But someone was in Gilbert's office because lamplight illuminated the curtains. He smiled thoughtfully, then hustled back to the Lily. He went to a table back in the shadows, near where Raven used to sit. A couple of foreign sailors were seated there. Tough merchandise if he'd ever seen it. They'd been around for some time. They said they and their friends, who came and went, had missed their ship. They were waiting for another. Shed could not recall having heard the name of their home port.

"You men like to pick up some easy money?" he asked.

"Who doesn't?" one responded.

And the other, "What you got in mind?"