Free Soldiers Live by Glen Cook Page B

being looted to finance the Company’s homegoing, it was hoped on a spectacularly
     memorable scale.
    Blade is not much given to emotional vapors or seizures of fear. He has a cool
     enough head to have survived for years as a Company agent inside Longshadow’s
     camp. But as he moved deeper into the earth he began to twitch and sweat. His
     pace slackened. He passed the last known cavern. Nothing lay below that but the
     ultimate enemy, the Mother of Night herself. She was the enemy who would still
     be waiting once all the other, lesser adversaries had been brushed aside or
     extinguished.
    To Kina, the Black Company is an annoying buzz in the ear, a mosquito that has
     gotten away with taking a sip or two of blood and has not had the good sense to
     get the hell away.
    Blade slowed again. The light following him kept weakening. Where once he could
     see clearly twenty steps ahead now he could see only ten, the farther four
     seeming to be behind the face of a thickening black fog. Here the darkness
     seemed almost alive. Here the darkness felt as though it was under much greater
     pressure, the way water seemed to exert more as you swam deeper beneath its
     surface.
    Blade found it harder to breathe. He forced himself to do so, deeply and
     rapidly, then went on, against the insistence of instinct. A silver chalice took
     form in the fog, just five steps below. It stood about a foot tall, a simple
     tall cup made of noble metal. Blade had placed it there. It marked the lowest
     step he had yet been able to reach.
    Now each step downward seemed to take place against the resistance of liquid
     tar. Each step brought the darkness crushing in harder. The light from behind
     was too weak to reach even one step beyond the chalice.
    Blade makes this effort frequently. He accounts it exercise for his will and
     courage. Each descent he manages to make it as far as the chalice mostly by
     being angry that he cannot push past it.
    This time he tried something different. He threw a handful of coins collected
     from one of the treasure caves. His arm had no strength but gravity had not lost
     its power nor had sound been devoured by the darkness. The coins tinkled away
     down the stairwell. But not for long. After a moment it sounded like they were
     rolling around on a floor. Then they were silent. Then a tiny little voice from
     far, far away cried, “Help.”

Black Company GS 9 - Soldiers Live
    13
    The Land of Unknown Shadows:
    Traveling Hsien
     The physical geography of the Land of Unknown Shadows closely recollects that of
     our own world. The essential differences stem from the impact of man.
    The moral and cultural topographies of the worlds are completely different,
    though. Even the Nyueng Bao still have trouble making any real connection
     here—despite the fact that they and the Children of the Dead share common
     ancestors. But the Nyueng Bao escaped Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha and his kin
     centuries ago, then developed as a cultural island constantly washed by alien
     waves.
    Hsien proper spans roughly the same territories as what were known as the
     Shadowlands at home when things were going well for the Shadowmasters. The
     farther reaches of Hsien, that none of us have visited, are more heavily
     populated than our own. In olden times every town here boasted its kernel of
     resistance to the Shadowmasters. Few of those groups communicated because of
     travel restrictions imposed by the master race. Still, when the uprising did
     come there were local champions enough to ensure success.
    The flight of the last Shadowmasters left a power vacuum. The resistance
     chieftains anointed themselves to fill it. Hsien remains in the custody of their
     descendants, scores of warlords in constant conflict, few of whom ever get any
     stronger. Any who appear to be gaining strength are torn apart by their
     neighbors.
    The File of Nine is an anonymous, loose assembly of senior warlords, supposedly
     drawn one each from the nine