She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

the
     animals.
    I believe I did a little grumbling about wishing Goblin was back.
    That little toad of a wizard Goblin is One-Eye’s best friend and worst enemy. He
     was so hard to find I thought, at first, that I was having trouble getting Smoke
     to understand what I wanted to do. Then I tried going back to where I had seen
     him last, in the river delta on the edge of Nyueng Bao country. My plan was to
     follow him forward in time to where he was now. And that worked just fine till
     Goblin’s ship entered a fog bank and never came out again.
    Smoke could not find him.
    It took me a while to comprehend that Smoke might have been primed to shy away
     from what Goblin was doing. Maybe to keep One-Eye from finding out and
     interfering. It would be just like the little shit to blow a whole operation
     because he did not think before pulling some nasty practical joke on his friend.
    I did some experimenting. Sure enough, Smoke had been given some special
     instructions. The Old Man had not given up visiting him completely.
    Once I knew that, I had little difficulty getting past Croaker’s safeguards. I
     fear One-Eye would have had little more trouble.
    I found Goblin standing on a sandy beach far down the uncharted coast of the
     Shindai Kus, a terrible desert that fills a vast chunk of land between the
     northern and southern regions of the Shadowlands. The impassable mountains
     called the Dandha Presh only get shorter out there before they finally wade into
     the ocean.
    Goblin was looking out to sea. A ship rode her anchor inshore. Boats were
     plunging in the surf. Goblin was yammering a litany of complaints. From the
     faces of his companions it was safe to guess that they had heard it all before.
    What the hell was Goblin doing out there on that bleak coast?
    I dropped back in time to listen in from the beginning.
    Goblin was tormented by hatreds. So what does the Captain do? He sends nobody
     else but Goblin himself off to chart the unknown coast. Goblin hated swamps. So
     naturally the first leg of the journey took him downriver through the delta,
    which was one huge swamp two hundred miles across, without one decent channel,
    obviously totally unfit for human habitation because only Nyueng Bao lived
     there.
    Goblin hated sea travel almost as much as One-Eye did. So what did he get after
     cutting through the swamp, damned near building a canal to manage that? A
     goddamn ocean with waves taller than any self respecting tree. He hated deserts.
    So what did he find after he finally got his little fleet past the end of the
     swampy coast? Country so barren scorpions and sand fleas could not make a living
     there. You baked during the day and froze at night and you never got away from
     the sand. The wind blew it into everything. He had sand in his boots right now .
    . .
    “I wasn’t born for this,” Goblin complained. “Nobody deserves this. Me less than
     most. What did I ever do to the Old Man? All right, so maybe me and One-Eye
     drink a little and get rowdy sometimes, but so what? It’s just youthful high
     spirits if Sleepy does it.”
    Naturally he overlooked the fact that when he and One-Eye get drunk they always
     start squabbling and tend to begin throwing sloppily woven spells around,
    busting things up far worse than Sleepy ever could.
    “A man has to cut loose sometimes, you know what I mean? Nobody ever gets hurt,
    do they?” That was not an exaggeration, that was an outright fabrication. “Hell,
    in a world where there was any shred of justice I’d be retired somewhere where
     the wine is sweet and the girls appreciate a man with experience. I gave the
     Company the best centuries of my life.”
    Goblin hated being in charge. That meant having to think and make decisions. And
     it meant taking responsibility. Goblin hated all those things, too. He just
     wanted to cruise through life doing only what was necessary to get by while
     somebody else did the thinking and made the decisions.
    Goblin