Goblin was unsettled by what he had learned. He did not play the usual game and try to make me guess what was going on. He blurted, "Asa says him and Raven had a run-in with Bullock. Raven is dead. He lit out. Darling is on her own down there."

Excitement? Better believe it. I was ready to put the little man to the question, then and there. But I controlled myself.

Elmo was a while showing up. Goblin and I got d.a.m.ned antsy before he did, while Asa worked himself up for a stroke.

The wait proved worthwhile. Elmo did not come alone.

The first hint was a faint but sour odor that seemed to come from the fireplace, where I'd had a small fire lighted. Just in case, you know. With a few iron rods set by, ready to be heated, so Asa could look them over and think, and maybe convince himself he ought not to leave anything out.

"What's that smell?" somebody asked. "Croaker, you let that cat in again?"

"I kicked him out after he sprayed my boots," I said.

"Like halfway down the hill. Maybe he got the firewood before he left."

The odor grew stronger. It wasn't really obnoxious, just mildly irritating. We took turns examining the firewood. Nothing.

I was in the middle of a third search for the source when the fire caught my eye. For a second I saw a face in the flames.

My heart nearly stopped. For half a minute I was in a panic, nothing but the face's presence having registered. I considered every evil that could happen: Taken watching, the Lady watching, the things from the black castle, maybe the Dominator himself peeking through our fire...Then something calm, back in the far marches of mind, reiterated something I hadn't noticed because I had no reason to expect it. The face in the flames had had only one eye.

"One-Eye," I said without thinking. "That little b.a.s.t.a.r.d is in Juniper."

Goblin spun toward me, eyes wide. He sniffed the air. His famous grin split his face. "You're right, Croaker. Absolutely right. That stink is the little skunk himself. Should have recognized it straight off."

I glanced at the fire. The face did not reappear.

Goblin mused, "What would be a suitable welcome?"

"Figure the Captain sent him?"

"Probably. Be logical to send him or Silent ahead."

"Do me a favor, Goblin."

"What?"

"Don't give him no special welcome."

Goblin looked deflated. It had been a long time. He did not want to miss an opportunity to refresh his acquaintance with One-Eye with a flash and a bang.

"Look," I said. "He's here on the sneak. We don't want the Taken to know. Why give them anything to sniff out?"

Bad choice of words. The smell was about to drive us outside.

"Yeah," Goblin grumbled. "Wish the Captain had sent Silent. I was all worked up for this. Had him the biggest surprise of his life."

"So get him later. Meantime, why not clear this smell out? Why not get his goat by just ignoring him?"

He thought about it. His eyes gleamed. "Yeah," he said, and I knew he had shaped my suggestion to his own warped sense of humor.

A fist hammered on the door. It startled me even though I was expecting it. One of the men let Elmo in.

One-Eye came in behind Elmo, grinning like a little black mongoose about to eat snake. We paid him no heed. Because the Captain came in behind him.

The Captain! The last man I expected to reach Juniper before the Company itself.

"Sir?" I blurted. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?" He lumbered to the fire, extended his hands. Summer had begun to fade, but it was not that cold. He was as bear-like as ever, though he had lost weight and aged. It had been a hard march indeed. "Stork," he replied.

I frowned, looked at Elmo. Elmo shrugged, said, "I sent Stork with the message."

The Captain expanded, "Stork didn't make any sense. What's this about Raven?"

Raven, of course, had been his closest friend before deserting. I began to get a glimmer.

I indicated Asa. "This guy was in the thick of it from the beginning. Been Raven's sidekick. He says Raven is dead, down... What's the name of that place, Asa?"

Asa stared at the Captain and One-Eye and swallowed about six times without being able to say anything. I told the Captain, "Raven told stories about us that turned his hair grey."

"Let's hear the story," the Captain said. He was looking at Asa.

So Asa told his tale for the third time, while Goblin hovered, listening for the clunk of untruth. He ignored One-Eye in the most masterful show of ignoring I've ever seen. And all for naught.

The Captain dropped Asa completely the moment he finished his tale. A matter of style, I think. He wanted the information to percolate before he trotted it out for reexamination. He had me review everything I had experienced since arriving in Juniper. I presumed he had gotten Elmo's story already.

I finished. He observed, "You're too suspicious of the Taken. The Limper has been with us all along. He doesn't act like there's anything up." If anyone had a cause for malice toward us, the Limper did.

"Nevertheless," I said, "there're wheels within wheels within wheels with the Lady and the Taken. Maybe they didn't tell him anything because they figured he couldn't keep it secret."

"Maybe," the Captain admitted. He shuffled around, occasionally gave Asa a puzzled look. "Whatever, let's not get Whisper wondering any more than she is. Play it close. Pretend you're not suspicious. Do your job. One-Eye and his boys will be around to back you up."

Sure, I thought. Against the Taken? "If the Limper is with the Company, how did you get away? If he knows you're gone, the word will be out to the Lady, won't it?"

"He shouldn't find out. We haven't spoken in months. He stays to himself. Bored, I think."

"What about the Barrowland?" I was primed to find out everything that had happened during the Company's long trek, for I had nothing in the Annals concerning the majority of my comrades. But it was not yet time to exhume details. Just to feel for high points.

"We never saw it," the Captain said. "According to the Limper, Journey and the Lady are working that end. We can expect a major move as soon as we have Juniper under control."

"We haven't done squat to prepare," I said. "The Taken kept us busy fussing about the black castle."

"Ugly place, isn't it?" He looked us over. "I think you might've gotten more done had you not been so paranoid."

"Sir?"

"Most of your trail-covering strikes me as needless and a waste of time. The problem was Raven's, not yours. And he solved it in typical fashion. Without help." He glared at Asa. "In fact, the problem seems solved for all time."

He had not been here and had not felt the pressures, but I did not mention that. Instead, I asked, "Goblin, you figure Asa is telling the truth?" warily. Goblin nodded.

"How about you, One-Eye? You catch any false notes?"

The little black man responded with a cautious negative. "Asa. Raven should have had a bunch of papers with him. He ever mention them?"

Asa looked puzzled. He shook his head.

"He have a trunk or something that he wouldn't let anybody near?"

Asa seemed baffled by the direction my questions had taken. The others did too. Only Silent knew about those papers. Silent, and maybe Whisper, who had possessed them once herself.

"Asa? Anything he treated unusually?"

A light dawned in the little man's mind. "There was a crate. About the size of a coffin. I remember making a joke about it. He said something cryptic about it being somebody's ticket to the grave."

I grinned. The papers still existed. "What did he do with that crate down there?"

"I don't know."

"Asa..."

"Honest. I only saw it a couple times on the ship. I never thought anything about it."

"What are you getting at, Croaker?" the Captain asked.

"I have a theory. Just based on what I know about Raven and Asa."

Everyone frowned.

"Generally, what we know about Asa suggests he's a character Raven wouldn't take up with on a bet. He's chicken. Unreliable. Too talkative. But Raven did take up with him. Took him south and made him part of the team. Why? Maybe that don't bother you guys, but it does me."

"I don't follow you," the Captain said.

"Suppose Raven wanted to disappear so people wouldn't even bother looking for him? He tried to vanish once, by coming to Juniper. But we turned up. Looking for him, he thought. So what next? How about he dies? In front of a witness. People don't hunt for dead men."

Elmo interrupted. "You saying he staged his death and used Asa to report it so n.o.body would come looking?"

"I'm saying we ought to consider the possibility." The Captain's sole response was a thoughtful, "Uhm." Goblin said, "But Asa did see him die."

"Maybe. And maybe he only thinks he did." We all looked at Asa. He cowered. The Captain said, "Take him through his story again, One-Eye. Step-by-step." For two hours One-Eye dragged the little man through again and again. And we could not spot one flaw. Asa insisted he had seen Raven die, devoured from within by something snake-like. And the more my theory sprung leaks, the more I was sure it was valid.

"My case depends on Raven's character," I insisted, when everybody ganged up on me. "There's the crate, and there's Darling. Her and a d.a.m.ned expensive ship that he, for G.o.dsakes, had built. He left a trail going out of here, and he knew it. Why sail a few hundred miles and tie up to a dock when somebody is going to come looking? Why leave Shed alive behind you, to tell about you being in on the raid on the Catacombs? And there's no way in h.e.l.l he'd leave Darling twisting in the wind. Not for a minute. He would have had arrangements made for her. You know that." My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion. "But Asa says they just left her hanging around some inn. I tell you, Raven had a plan. I bet, if you went down there now, you'd find Darling gone without a trace. And if the ship is still there, that crate wouldn't be aboard."

"What is this with the crate?" One-Eye demanded. I ignored him.

"I think you have too much imagination, Croaker," the Captain said. "But, on the other hand, Raven is crafty enough to pull something like that. Soon as I can spring you, figure on going down to check."

"If Raven's crafty enough, how about the Taken being villainous enough to try something against us?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." He faced One-Eye. "I want you and Goblin to save the games. Understand? Too much clowning around and the Taken will get curious. Croaker. Hang on to this Asa character. You'll want him to show you where Raven died. I'm heading back to the outfit. Elmo. Come ride with me part way."

So. A little private business. Bet it had to do with my suspicions about the Taken. After a while you get so used to some people you can almost read their minds.

Chapter Thirty-Three:.

JUNIPER: THE ENCOUNTER.

Things changed after the Captain's visit. The men became more alert. Elmo's influence waxed while mine waned. A less wishy-washy, more inflexible tone characterized the Company deputation. Every man became ready to move at an instant's notice.

Communications improved dramatically while time available for sleep declined painfully. None of us were ever out of touch more than two hours. And Elmo found excuses to get everyone but himself out of Duretile, into places where the Taken would have trouble finding them. Asa became my ward out on the black castle slope.

Tension mounted. I felt like one of a flock of chickens poised to scatter the moment a fox landed among us. I tried to bleed off my shakiness by updating the Annals. I had let them slide sadly, seldom having done more than keep notes.

When the tension became too much for me, I walked uphill to stare at the black castle.

It was an intentional risk-taking, like that of a child who crawls out a tree branch overhanging a deadly fall. The closer I approached the castle, the more narrow my concentration. At two hundred yards all other cares vanished. I felt the dread of that place down to my ankle bones and the shallows of my soul. At two hundred yards I felt what it meant to have the shadow of the Dominator overhanging the world. I felt what the Lady felt when she considered her husband's potential resurrection. Every emotion became edged with a hint of despair. In a way, the black castle was more than a gateway through which the world's great old evil might reappear. It was a concretization of metaphorical concepts, and a living symbol. It did things a great cathedral does. Like a cathedral, it was far more than an edifice.

I could stare at its obsidian walls and grotesque decoration, recall Shed's stories, and never avoid dipping into the cesspool of my own soul, never avoid searching myself for the essential decency shelved through most of my adult life. That castle was, if you like, a moral landmark. If you had a brain. If you had any sensitivity at all.

There were times when One-Eye, Goblin, Elmo or another of the men accompanied me. Not one of them went away untouched. They could stand there with me, talking trivialities about its construction or, weightily, about its significance in the Company's future, and all the while something would be happening inside.

I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific elsewhere in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my tenure as Annalist. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another. In our war with the Rebel, eight and nine years ago, we served the side perceived as the shadow. Yet we saw far more wickedness practiced by the adherents of the White Rose than by those of the Lady. The villains of the piece were at least straightforward.

The world knows where it stands with the Lady. It is the Rebel whose ideals and morals conflict with fact, becoming as changeable as the weather and as flexible as a snake.

But I digress. The black castle has that effect. Makes you amble off into all the byways and cul-de-sacs and false trails you have laid down during your life. It makes you rea.s.sess. Makes you want to take a stand somewhere, even if on the black side. Leaves you impatient with your own malleable morality.

I suspect that is why Juniper decided to pretend the place did not exist. It is an absolute demanding absolutes in a world with a preference for relatives.

Darling was in my thoughts often while I stood below those black, glossy walls, for she was the castle's antipode when I was up there. The white pole, and absolute in opposition to what the black castle symbolized. I had not been much in her presence since realizing what she was, but I could recall being morally unnerved by her, too. I wondered how she would affect me now, after having had years to grow.

From what Shed said, she did not reek the way the castle did. His main interest in her had been hustling her upstairs. And Raven had not been driven into puritanical channels. If anything, he had slipped farther into the darkness-though for the highest of motives.

Possibly there was a message there. An observation upon means to ends. Here was Raven who had acted with the pragmatic amorality of a prince of h.e.l.l, all so he could save the child who represented the best hope of the world against the Lady and the Dominator.

Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.

Even Asa and Shed could be made to feel the aura of the castle if you took them up during the daytime and made them stand there looking at those fell walls.

Shed especially.

Shed had achieved a position where he could afford conscience and uncertainty. I mean, he had none of the financial troubles that had plagued him earlier, and no prospect of digging himself a hole with us watching him, so he could reflect upon his place in things and become disgusted with himself. More than once I took him up and watched as that deep spark of hidden decency flared, twisted him upon a rack of inner torment.