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

but she kept quiet and let me articulate my dissatisfaction.
    “It’s told a hundred ways, poorly and well, according to the skill of the
     particular Annalist, but, except for the occasional interesting detail, it was
     the same old march, countermarch, fight, celebrate or run away, record the dead,
    and, sooner or later, get even with the sponsor for betraying us. Even at that
     place with the unpronounceable name, where the Company was in service for
     fifty-six years.”
    “Gea-Xle.” She got her mouth around it like she had had practice.
    “Yeah, there. Where the contract lasted so long the Company almost lost its
     identity, intermarrying with the population and all that, becoming a sort of
     hereditary bodyguard, with arms handed down from father to son. But as it always
     will, the essential moral destitution of those would-be princes made itself
     evident and somebody decided to cheat us. He got his throat cut and the Company
     moved on.”
    “You certainly read selectively, Croaker.”
    I looked at her. She was laughing at me quietly.
    “Yeah, well.” I’d stated it pretty baldly. A prince did try to cheat our
     forebrethren and did get his throat cut. But the Company installed a new,
    friendly, beholden dynasty and did hang around a few years before that Captain
     got a wild hair and decided to go treasure hunting.
    “You have no reservations about commanding a band of hired killers?” she asked.
    “Sometimes,” I admitted, sliding past the trap nimbly. “But we never cheated a
     sponsor.” Not exactly. “Sooner or later, every sponsor cheated us.”
    “Including yours truly?”
    “One of your satraps beat you to it. But given time we would have become less
     than indispensable and you would have started looking around for a way to shaft
     us instead of doing the honorable thing and paying us off and simply terminating
     our commission.”
    “That’s what I love about you, Croaker. Your unflagging faith in humanity.”
    “Absolutely. Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent,” I
     grumped.
    “You really know how to melt a woman, you know that, Croaker?”
    “Huh?” I come armed with a whole arsenal of such brilliant repartee.
    “I came out here with some feebleminded notion of seducing you. For some reason
     I’m not in the mood to try anymore.”
    Well. Some of them you screw up royal.
    There was an observation catwalk along some parts of the monastery wall. I went
     up into the northeast corner, leaned on the adobe and stared back the way we had
     come. Busy feeling sorry for myself. Every couple hundred years that sort of
     thing leads to a productive insight.
    The damned crows were thicker than ever. Must have been twenty of them now. I
     cursed them and, I swear, they mocked me. When I threw a loose piece of adobe
     they all jumped up and fled toward . . .
    “Goblin!” I think he was out keeping an eye on me in case I got suicidal.
    “Yeah?”
    “Get One-Eye and Lady and come up here. Fast.” I turned and stared up the slope
     at the thing that had caught my eye.
    It stopped moving but was unmistakably a human figure in robes so black looking
     at them was like looking at a rent in the fabric of existence. It carried
     something under its right arm, about the size of a hatbox, held in place by the
     natural fall of the limb. The crows swarmed around it, twenty or thirty of them,
    squabbling over the right to perch upon its shoulders. It was a good quarter
     mile from where I stood but I felt the gaze from its hooded, unseen face beating
     upon me like the heat from a furnace.
    The crowd turned up with Goblin and One-Eye as quarrelsome as ever. Lady asked,
    “What is it?”
    “Take a look out there.”
    They looked. Goblin squeaked, “So?”
    “So? What do you mean, so?”
    “What’s so interesting about an old tree stump and a flock of birds?”
    I looked. Damn! A stump . . . But as I stared there was an instant’s shimmer and
     I saw the black