Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It mutters across grey pavements that sweepfrom horizon to horizon. It sings around scattered black pillars, a chorus ofghosts. It tumbles leaves and scatters dust come from afar. It teases the hairof a corpse that has lain undisturbed for a generation, mummifying. Impishly,the gale tosses a leaf into the cadaver's silently screaming mouth, tugs itaway again. The wind carries the breath of winter. Lightning leaps from pillarto ebon pillar like a child skittering from base to base in a game of tag. Fora moment there is color on that spectral plain. The pillars might be mistakenfor relics of a fallen city. They are not. They are too few and too randomlyplaced. Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have been gnawed deeply by theteeth of the hungry wind.Chapter 1. . . fragments . . .. . . just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, theircontext no longer known.All that remains of two volumes of the Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Fouryears of history. Gone forever.Or are they? I do not want to go back. I do not want to relive the horror. Ido not want to reclaim the pain. There is pain too deep to withstand righthere, right now. There is no way to recapture the totality of that awfulness,anyway. The mind and heart, safely over to the farther shore, simply refuse toencompass the enormity of the voyage.And there is no time. There is a war on.Always there is a war on.Uncle Doj wants something. Just as well to stop now. Teardrops make the inkrun.He is going to make me drink some strange philtre.Fragments . . .. . . all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain,scattered in this bleak season . . .And in the darkness, shards of time.Chapter 2Hey, there! Welcome to the city of the dead. Don't mind those guys staring.Ghosts don't see a lot of strangers, at least of a friendly persuasion. You'reright. They do look hungry. That happens during these siege things.Try not to look too much like a lamb roast.Think that's a joke? Stay away from the Nar.Welcome to Dejagore, what the Taglians call this deathtrap. The teeny brownShadowlanders the Black Company grabbed it from call it Stormgard. People whoactually live here always called it Jaicur even when that was a crime. And whoknows what the Nyueng Bao call it. And who cares, eh? They aren't talking andthey aren't part of the equation anyway.That's one of them. That rascal there, no meat on him and a skull face.Everybody around here is some shade of brown but theirs is different. It has agrey cast to it. Almost deathly. You won't mistake a Nyueng Bao for anythingelse.Their eyes are like polished coal no fire will ever warm.That noise?Sounds like Mogaba, the Nar and the First Legion rooting out Shadowlandersagain. Some get inside almost every night. They are like field mice. You justcan't get rid of them all.Found some the other day that had been in hiding since the Company took thecity.How about that smell out there? It was worse before the Shadowlanders startedburying the bodies. Maybe a shovel was a little too complicated a machine.
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