Uncle Doj and Thai Dei were back from wherever they had gone. They scowled at Sahra and me when we returned but neither said a word. Hong Tray still had her hold on the Kys. Thai Dei took his son. The little guy brightened immediately.
Uncle Doj told me, “My people are not mushrooms, Standardbearer. They cannot endure this much longer. You Stone Soldiers have been generous to a fault and have given no provocation but even so there will be trouble eventually. A wounded animal will strike out at even the most loving master.”
“We’ll be out of here sooner than I planned.” I was not in a good mood. I wanted to drag Lady across my lap and paddle her. “I’ve already given orders to start the process.”
“You sound angry.”
“I am angry.” Lady used me in a political game with Mogaba with never a thought for the Company’s welfare. She was no more real Company than he was.
Longo leaned in the doorway. “You get the word about the catacombs flooding, Murgen?”
“Bucket told me. How soon is it going to be a problem?”
“Four or five days. Maybe more. Unless the leak gets a lot worse.”
“We’ll be gone. Your brothers and One-Eye are up in the big lookout. Go find out what’s up.”
Longo shrugged and went, grumbling about the climb.
I asked, “Who speaks for the Nyueng Bao now?”
“We have not yet chosen,” Uncle Doj replied.
“Could you? Quickly? A Taglian general name of Lanore Bonharj—the guy who’s in charge of the freed slaves and friendly Taglians and Jaicuri right now—is going to come by. We’ll need somebody Nyueng Bao to join us in planning our evacuation.” He started to say something. I rolled on. “It seems that the Shadowmaster isn’t a problem anymore, only nobody bothered to tell us. Our own so-called friends have been jobbing us for political reasons. We could leave any time I don’t know for how long now.”
I put all the blame for our ignorance on Goblin and One-Eye. You can blame a wizard for anything and people will believe you.
Sahra tried to make a meal from what we had. I touched her hand as she passed. She smiled. I told her, “This should be the last time we’ll need to do this.”
I hoped.
I was wrong.
Everything takes time.
Lanore Bonharj followed me down into the warrens. He was both amazed and appalled. He was high-caste Gunni. It was bad up top but this squalor down below was beyond his imagination. We talked. Uncle Doj spoke for the Nyueng Bao. Bargains were struck, agreements agreed, plans quickly laid. Preparations began in earnest.
In the dark of night, in the rain, the Black Company stole forth, crossed a rickety makeshift bridge to stairs to the battlements, joined the Taglians of the al-Khul company. With Goblin at the point we sneaked along the wall, seized the North Gate and barbican from the Nar and their Taglians. Goblin’s sleep spell made that easy. Nobody got hurt. In our gang.
Before the last body splashed into the water outside Goblin and I and the Company cadre headed back to grab the West Gate and its barbican.
With the gates in our hands we could proceed unobserved by Mogaba’s men.
Loftus and his brothers got to work inside the central of the three towers between the gates. While the wall itself was stone with a rubble fill the towers were not solid. They had to be hollow to allow crossbowmen inside to pepper the wall faces with missiles. The boys got to work opening a hole to the outside from the floor nearest the present water level.
The Nyueng Bao brought our remaining food stores to the surface. The women would use the last of the Taglians’ fuel to cook for everyone. I wanted everybody to build strength. A lot of us were little more than stick figures now.
When the sun rose next morning the Nar atop the citadel saw nothing they had not seen the day before, except less rain. They got no signals from the north or west barbicans but did not seem concerned.
“Aren’t many crows around anymore,” Goblin noted as daylight began to fade.
“Maybe we ate them all.”
Night returned. Everybody went back to work. The hammering and pounding and the collapse of masonry into water had to be audible all over town but nobody could see what we were doing and nothing was evident when the sun rose except that several derelict buildings were missing.
The lake continued its slow fall. The weather continued damp.
The rafts the carpenters were building floated outside, against the wall. Everything capable of offering flotation went into their construction. Even the occasional empty beer barrel.
That afternoon we acquired some useful lumber when Mogaba sent three rafts to the North Gate to find out why his signals were not being answered.
We could not keep the ambush from being seen from the citadel. Mogaba wasted no more men or materials.
Loftus and his brothers said the best raft would be built long and thin so more people could paddle against less front-end water resistance. Working in three feet of water the three brothers and a few skilled Taglians assembled one raft after another, each able to carry ten or more adults. By using everything they could find they built forty-one craft. They guessed that fleet could carry seven hundred people, more than five hundred of whom could be put ashore while the rest brought the rafts back, reloaded them and got under way again before dawn.
So about twelve hundred could get away overnight. Enough to establish a modestly solid beachhead on what we did not know for certain would be a friendly shore.
Problem. The numbers we needed to move undetected were greater than I had guessed. I had my forty Old Crew, more than six hundred Nyueng Bao, and a whole lot more Taglians, freed slaves and Jaicuri volunteers than I had thought.
Lanore Bonharj wanted to move nearly a thousand men and dependents. There was no way to get everyone out in one night.
“Here’s what you do,” One-Eye said. “You only take one load across the first night. Draw lots for the spots. That way we don’t get people climbing over each other and nobody getting out in the panic. Figure the draw so a representative percentage goes from each group. Then nobody bitches. Dump the five hundred and some with orders to build a camp. Have the rafts come back and tie up, then finish up with two trips next night.”
“The man is a genius,” I said. “You or Goblin will have to go, just in case.”
“Shouldn’t be necessary.”
“Why not?”
“Things aren’t that dangerous anymore.”
“Then we won’t need to dig in. We can send the Nyueng Bao and dependents out first.”
“That will go down great.”
“Women and children and old people? That will work. I’ll bet you. Include the Taglians’ dependents. Hold up on the Jaicuri, though, or we’ll have the whole damned city lining up. We figure how many that all is, then draw lots for the rest of the positions.”
It worked out that thirty Taglians, five Black Company guys and fifteen Nyueng Bao warriors could be sent with the first group. We would have fifty swords on the beach.
Uncle Doj grumbled about the scheme because for one night he would not be able to keep his whole tribe together. “Clever, Soldier of Darkness.” We were back to that? “You hold us warriors hostage.”
“You want to go, go. There are more of you than there are of us. Take the rafts.”
He scowled, his hand called.
“It’s one night, Unc. And fifteen warriors will go with them. They’ll be drawn by lot so one of them might even be you.”
One-Eye and Goblin did not want to leave. “I’m not going over tonight,” One-Eye told me.
“Me too neither,” Goblin insisted.
They had that weasel look they get when they are dealing off the bottom of the deck. “Why not?” They looked like they could use a straight man.
“It ain’t safe out there,” One-Eye told me, after Goblin failed to convince me of his altruistic desire to protect the world by blunting Mogaba’s wickedness. “That bitch from Juniper. Lisa Daele Bowalk. She’s laying for us out there.”
“Who?” I heard no bells ringing.
“Lisa Bowalk. From Juniper. Nasty little bitch. Ran with Marron Shed. The corpse runner. Shifter took her as his apprentice after the Company went on the run. She was there when we skragged Shifter. The Old Man let her get away. Well, she’s out there, prowling, waiting for a chance to get even. She’s already tried a couple times.”
“And you never bothered to tell me?” A healthy dose of skepticism is in order any time One-Eye waxes passionate on any subject.
“Wasn’t no problem till now.”
Why argue? The truth seemed evident. Those two had plunder stashed and did not want to leave it unguarded. Nor did either want the other left with it alone. I told them, “Take your chances with the rest of us.”
Bonharj and Uncle Doj, Goblin and One-Eye all glowered at me. I told them, “I shouldn’t have to take a turn.”
One-Eye chuckled. “Maybe not. But you said we all had to take our chances.”
I had not yet drawn. Trouble was, the outcome was not in doubt. There was only one stone left in the jar. Five black pebbles had been allocated to the Company and only four had been drawn.
I would go to the mainland with the first wave.
Why did my bitty buddies look so smug? “Pick your rock and pack your shit,” Goblin said. They would not have rigged the draw, would they? Nah. Not those two. Paragons of virtue, they were.
“Anybody want to buy this?” I held up the expected black pebble.
“Stuff it, Kid,” One-Eye said. “We’ll manage without you. Again. What could go wrong in one day, anyway?”
“With you guys in charge?” It did not seem right, me going ashore before the last Black Company brother was out of the city.
“Just get your stuff together and go,” Goblin snapped again. “It’ll be dark in an hour.”
It was still drizzling. Darkness would come early, though not early enough to complete two crossings and get the rafts back unseen. Damn it.
Sahra was burdened down with odds and ends and six pounds of rice and beans. I carried a pack containing a Nyueng Bao tent, blankets, various clutter useful in the field, plus I had To Tan perched on my hip. That kid was the least troublesome baby I ever saw.
Thai Dei had not drawn a black stone.
I meant to enjoy his absence.
We climbed out of the warren, descended steps, crossed to the wall, climbed up, walked the battlements, descended inside the middle tower. And that was about as much exercise as I wanted.
On my raft we were all Nyueng Bao except me and Red Rudy. The Nyueng Bao were patient about waiting their turns. The guys in the tower, operating by feeble lamplight, were patient too. Morale was good.
“Careful,” Clete said as I stepped aboard. I accepted children as he started handing them across. “I picked you a good one, boss, but it will lean over if you don’t keep the weight balanced. Ma’am.” He helped Sahra. She acknowledged his courtesy with a dazzling smile.
“Thanks, Clete. See you tomorrow night.”
“Right. Round up some cattle and dancing girls.”
“I’ll check around.”
“Kneel down. You got to keep the center of gravity low so the damned thing don’t tip.”
I glanced around. We were ready to go.
Six Nyueng Bao men were aboard. They would paddle over. Five would bring the raft back. Other than them, Rudy and I and one gimp Nyueng Bao about fifty were the only adult males aboard. There were fifteen or sixteen kids and half as many women. We were crowded but Nyueng Bao make a light load. I volunteered to help paddle but the men on the job lost their capacity to understand Taglian.
Rudy said, “If they want to be dicks and bust their nuts, no sweat off our asses.”
“You’re right. But keep it down. We’re doing a sneak here.”
It turned out the Nyueng Bao were skilled boatmen. Which should have been no surprise considering their origins.
They remained as quiet as falling feathers. And made rapid headway. The rafts immediately ahead had Taglian paddlers who not only made a lot of noise, they were slow. With just a whispered word my paddlers swung right and began passing.
It was not much of a sneak, overall. Paddles splashed. People bumped, grunted, banged around and occasionally managed to collide with other rafts. But those were noises that came off the water every night and tonight the drizzle was deadening some of the racket. And, of course, we were headed straight away from the city. The light inside the opened tower served as a navigational beacon.
My paddle men maybe did not keep the best watch on the light. We drifted way off line and lost it altogether.
Somebody hissed.
Paddles stopped dipping. Even the murmur of the little ones stilled as mothers placed hands over their mouths or pulled lips to teats.
I heard nothing.
We waited.
Sahra rested her hand lightly upon my arm, sharing reassurance.
Then I heard the clumsy paddling. Somebody was farther off course than we were . . . Only this raft was headed the other way.
It was too early for that.
The sounds grew louder.
The other raft came abreast, so close that it seemed they had to see us despite the darkness and rain.
A voice said something softly, just a few words edged with anger. In the language of Gea-Xle. I had picked up maybe twenty words, none of which I recognized now.
I did not need to know words. I knew the voice.
That was Mogaba.
He had not been spotted leaving during the day. From the north and west barbicans it was possible to watch most of the lake surface.
Which meant that he had been away at least since the previous night. Which, in turn, would explain why there had been no response to our capture of the barbicans.
What business could Mogaba possibly have over there?
The Nar paddled on into darkness. We resumed our journey. I remained lost in thought till the raft ran aground and tossed me forward.
Sahra and I took up To Tan and our burdens and marched ashore. The little guy was sleeping like his aunt’s arms were a palace bed.
In moments I discovered that my companions, although utterly ignorant of the Taglian language, expected me to be in charge on this side, too. Uncle Doj’s idea, no doubt, and in effect only till he arrived.
“Rudy. Take charge of getting camp set.” We had swung back into the general course of the fleet and had made landfall where others joined us in savoring the miracle of life outside Dejagore’s walls.
Hanging around in a rainstorm in the middle of the night did not seem much of an improvement to me.
“Let’s go, people. We can’t just stand here. Start putting up those shelters.” We had the tents the Nyueng Bao had carried on pilgrimage. We had blankets, wrapped inside those same tents so they would stay dry. “Somebody collect some brush and get some fires going.” Maybe easier said than done in this weather. “Bubba-do. Take some men and set a perimeter. You. Joro? That your name, sergeant?” I was talking to one of the Taglian soldiers. “Get patrols out. Come on! Come on! We don’t know that there aren’t people over here who want to kill us.” But it gets hard to care when you are cold and wet and tired.
I was tired to the point of collapse but I made myself an example. Sahra followed and helped. While I barked at people we took turns caring for the baby. I had visions of some major historical asskicker like Khrombak the Terrible ordering his hordes about while he had a smelly baby tucked into the crook of his arm.
To Tan was a good kid but he always needed changing.
Soon everyone was bustling industriously. Shelters went up. Brush got cut. Small fires took life and spawned others until there were enough to heat water to cook rice. The water we gathered using some tents to collect rain into the pots. It was going to be difficult for any of us to get wetter than we were already.
We even sent several small loads of brush over to the city on returning rafts. Our friends might get to do a little cooking, too.
We had known so much misery for so long that night became just another sad chore. And in time there was poor shelter, bad food, and feeble warmth for all. But by then it was getting light and the rain was just an occasional sprinkle. Sahra and To Tan and I crept into our tent and bundled up. For a while I was almost happy.
That To Tan was remarkable. He was almost as quiet as Sahra most of the time, though he could get a good fuss going when he wanted. He was content to sleep right then. For the first time in a week his tummy was full.
Mine, too.
I got four hours of perfectly wonderful sleep before disaster interrupted.
First it took the shape of Ky Gota. I had not seen Sahra’s mother since Uncle Doj cajoled her out of my quarters. I had not missed her, either.
Because I was asleep I did not witness the part where she ripped open the end of the tent. When I awoke she was spitting and howling in a mix of Nyueng Bao and really bad Taglian. Sahra was sitting up already, her mouth open and tears starting.
To Tan began to cry.
Ky Gota was not immune to baby tears. The soul of a granny did lurk behind all the ill temper. Way behind. She said something to the toddler. Gently!
Rudy hurried up. “You want I should throw this one back in the lake, Murgen?”
“What?”
“She crawled out of the water a while ago. Claimed somebody tried to murder her. Supposedly pushed her off the raft she was riding. Looks to me like maybe she asked for it.”
“She probably did.” Sahra looked at me in surprise. Despite her tears. “But I got to be nice. She’s almost family.”
“Man,” Rudy said. He walked off shaking his head. Sahra began gesturing exasperatedly at her mother. To Tan stared at his granny, sucked his thumb. I caught a whiff. “Go to Nana,” I whispered. “Show her how good you can walk.” He did not understand me but she did and held her arms out.
Near as I could tell To Tan was the only person in the world who cared for Ky Gota. He toddled and his granny forgot all about being wet and cold and cranky.
Sahra looked at me hard. I shrugged, grinned, mouthed, “He needs changing again.”
Rudy found me staring at the city. Fresh smoke hung over our part of town. “Bubba-do just ambushed a patrol, Murgen.”
“Shit. When they don’t report . . . ”
“He said they knew we were here. They were sneaking up. That Swan character is with them.”
“One-Eye was right, then. Anybody get hurt?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Good. Did they get a look at the camp?” The Nyueng Bao had done a good job of camouflage, considering. You could tell where the camp was but not its extent.
“I think they just saw the smoke. They were real surprised to get jumped according to Bubba-do.”
“They see him?”
“Yes.”
“Unfortunate. Maybe they didn’t recognize him.” I shrugged. “Some things can’t be helped. I’ll deal with them. Hang on.” I stomped over to Sahra and her mother. “Hush!” I snapped when the old woman opened her mouth to start. “We have trouble. Who can speak for the Nyueng Bao?” I did not know who else to ask. These strange people did what I said when I told them, if that improved our situation, but they did not talk.
The old woman put the baby down and rose. She squinted. Her eyesight was not good. “Tarn Dak!” she barked.
A frail ancient turned. Despite his age he was carrying a huge bundle of brushwood. Ky Gota beckoned imperiously. The oldster headed our way at a high-speed shuffle.
I went to meet him. “Greetings, father. I am the one who dealt with the Speaker.” I spoke both loudly and slowly.
“I’m not deaf yet, boy,” he replied in Taglian better than mine. “And I know who you are.”
“Good. Then I’ll get to the point. The soldiers over here have found us. We don’t know what their attitude toward your people might be. If they’re in a bad temper I can’t help much. Your warriors have scouted. Can you disappear?”
He looked at me for a dozen seconds. I looked back. Sahra came to stand beside me. Behind us, To Tan giggled as he played with his grandmother. The old man shifted his look to Sahra. For a moment he seemed to be staring into yesterday. He shivered. His expression grew more inscrutable. “We can.”
“Good. Do it while I’m with them.” I jerked a thumb uphill. “I’ll get word to Doj. He’ll find you.”
Tarn Dak continued to stare cooly. Not inimically at all, just without comprehension. I was not behaving like a proper foreigner.
“Good luck.” I returned to Rudy. “Here’s the deal. The Nyueng Bao need to take a powder. I’ll go with Swan. I’ll stall around when I get to his camp. You see that the Nyueng Bao get moved out, then make this mess look like we were setting up for the guys coming over tonight.”
The old man overheard every word.
I continued, “As far as anybody around here goes, these people never existed.”
“But . . . ”
“Do it. And let them have most of the food. We can sponge off Lady’s gang.” I hoped.
Rudy looked at Sahra. Everybody seemed to think that she was the key. He shrugged. “You’re the boss. I guess I don’t need to understand. How are you going to explain her?”
“I don’t have to.” I headed toward where Swan’s patrol was surrounded.
Sahra came right along after pausing to grab up To Tan.
“Stay here,” I told her. She looked at me blankly, smitten by sudden deafness. I took a few steps. She matched them. “You need to stay with your own people.”
A little smile teased her lips. She shook her head.
Hong Tray was not the only witch in this family.
“Ky Gota . . . ”
Boom!
“You! Soldier of Darkness! You her ruin, now is not good enough for you? Cruel witch was my mother but . . . ” She became incomprehensible but not the least bit quiet. I checked Tarn Dak. He remained inscrutable but I would have bet my shot at heaven he wanted to laugh.
“Fuck this. Rudy! Find out what belongs to Sahra and see that it stays in our tent. Come on, woman.”
“Holy shit,” Swan murmured when I stepped out where he could see me. “No wonder you went back.”
“Hands off, pretty boy. Ay, Nyueng Bao! If you are out there go see Tarn Dak. It’s important. Taglians. See Rudy from the Company.” I turned back to Swan. “There. We’re down to a few snipers. Just in case.”
He stopped staring at Sahra. “Sorry. You really stumbled into the sweet shit, didn’t you?” He did have the courtesy to make his remarks in Forsberger.
“Yeah. I did. What’s going on? I wake up the other day, after my wizards did an experiment on me, and I find out that somebody has been inside my head, messing with my memories. I find out I’m back over there in hell’s kitchen hunting rats and fighting cannibals when all the time my so-called friends are sitting around out here not even letting me know the Shadowmaster is dead.”
Swan gave me a dumb look. “But . . . You knew that, Murgen. You was over here when we killed the bastard. You was here for a week after that.”
“Killed him?”
It began to dawn. “You didn’t insist on going back? She said you . . . ”
“No. I didn’t. When I found myself headed that way I thought I was escaping from Shadowspinner. I really believed that I hadn’t gotten to you people. I think.” It got more confused as I tried to figure it out.
Somebody called out something in Nyueng Bao. My troops had not followed orders. Someone else, in Taglian, called, “Can you come up here please, Mr. Murgen?”
I told Swan, “I don’t know what’s up. You better stand fast. These guys are real touchy.”
“I got nothing else to do with my life.”
“I mean it. They’re paranoid in a big way. If you had spent the last several months in there you’d understand,” I clambered up a steep slope to where one Taglian knelt in some scraggly brush with a Nyueng Bao about fifteen years old.
The boy pointed, eager to be the first to deliver bad news.
Fresh smoke rose from Dejagore. From, near as I could tell, the north barbican. It looked like there was fighting there.
A mauve flash told me One-Eye or Goblin was involved.
Mogaba must be trying to recover the barbican.
I spied flickers around the west gate, too.
“Damned Mogaba. Thanks, guys. Nothing we can do about it, though.” I hoped One-Eye and Goblin carved Mogaba a new poop chute. “Get on back to camp, will you? There’s stuff that’s got to get done.”
Lady was gone. Blade was in charge and just sitting around collecting refugees from the city, keeping them from reporting back with news about Shadowspinner. He admitted that. “That’s what she wants done.” He seemed indifferent to Sahra, unlike every other man in camp.
“She’s lucky she’s not here,” I grumbled. “I’d turn her over my knee.”
Since there was nothing else going on I sat around with him and Swan and Mather until it started to get dark. Somebody found a puppy for To Tan to play with. When it got late I said, “We’d better get back to our people. They’ll be getting nervous.”
“No can do, buddy,” Mather told me.
Blade agreed. “She said no exceptions.”
The warmth went out of the air. I gave each one what I thought of as the Nyueng Bao look. Swan and Mather averted their eyes. Blade took it but with a twitch.
Sahra seemed untroubled. I suppose, after Dejagore, it was hard to imagine a turn for the worse. She even smiled.
“I assume the prison pen is where I left it?” I remembered that part of my previous visit perfectly.
“We will keep you more comfortably,” Blade promised.
Mather volunteered, “I’ll show you where to bunk.”
We were far enough away not to overhear, Swan thought. He told Blade, “You look at her good? That’s one spooky woman.”
I glanced at Sahra. I assumed she heard, too, but her expression told me nothing.
If Blade answered Swan he spoke more softly.
I continued to study Sahra, wondering what Swan had seen.
The tent was decent. It must have belonged to a middle-grade Shadowlander officer. We were not unhonored guests. And the tent came with a man assigned to make us comfortable and bring us our supper. Blade’s troops were foraging successfully, it seemed. I ate better than I had for a long time.
“What I want more than anything in the world,” I told our man, whose name I never learned, “is a bath.” Sahra hit him with a smile guaranteed to melt armor plate. She was enthusiastic about that idea. “I’m so filthy my fleas have lice,” I said.
Must have been a real ration of guilt going around at high levels. An hour later several soldiers showed up humping a looted stone horse trough. With them came guys lugging buckets of hot water. I told Sahra, “We must of died and come back as princes.”
Our tent was big enough to contain the trough and water with room left over.
Swan turned up. “What do you think of that, eh?”
“If I didn’t have friends over there fighting and dying I’d ask for a life sentence.”
“Take it easy, Murgen. It’ll all work out.”
“I know that, Swan. I know that. But some of us aren’t going to be happy how it does.”
“Yeah, well. Good night.”
It was. Beginning with the bath Sahra made it clear her definition of our relationship was exactly what others feared or suspected. She astounded me with her ability to communicate without spoken words, amazed me that in the midst of such unrelenting hell a flower of such beauty could bloom and defy the night.
I slept longer and better than I had for months. Maybe some part of me just resigned and let go.
Water in the face wakened me.
“What?” I cracked an eyelid. And popped upright. Sahra sat up as I did. “To Tan? What’re you doing, kiddo?” The little guy was leaning over the edge of the horse trough, spanking the water. He looked at me and grinned, said something in Nyueng Bao baby talk that sounded like “Dada.”
“What’s going on?”
Sahra shrugged. To Tan said “Dada” again and headed out of the tent.
Things were happening outside. I grabbed my clothes, climbed in, stuck my head outside. “Holy shit! Where the freak did you guys come from?” Thai Dei and Uncle Doj were seated outside. Their swords lay across their laps. Sheathed, thankfully. Gangs of Taglians were coming by to check them out. I guessed they had not been there long nor had they asked permission to enter camp and assume their posts.
Swan and Mather appeared.
Uncle Doj told me, “Only one group made it out again last night. The black men attacked. Many men were injured. Numerous rafts were damaged. But their soldiers did not want to fight and many asked to join Bonharj.”
“Who the hell are these guys?” Swan demanded. “How did they get here?”
“The rest of the family. I expect they sneaked. They’re good at that. Obviously, your perimeter ain’t what it should be.”
Blade shouted something from the distance. “Crap,” Swan grumbled. “Now what?” He jogged away.
Mather considered Thai Dei and Uncle Doj briefly, shrugged, followed Swan. Uncle Doj said something to Sahra. She nodded. I guess he wanted to know if she was all right.
To Tan climbed around on his father.
Doj told me, “You did well, and more than you were obliged, Standardbearer. Our people are safely away and these men know nothing about them.”
“Yeah? Good. What about mine?”
“They would not come out. The wizards want to pursue their vendetta with Mogaba. They might come tonight.”
They did not come that night. Nor did they come the next though they sent a lot of Taglians and Jaicuri out in place of the Company.
Two mornings later Mather finally let me in on what the excitement had been about when Blade interrupted our discussion over Uncle Doj and Thai Dei. He told me, “Croaker will be here in an hour or two, Murgen. You might put in a good word.”
“What?”
It was not an hour and it was not just the Old Man. Croaker was travelling with the Prahbrindrah Drah himself. He looked like he had seen a lot of hard road. I moved toward him in fits and starts, unsure where we stood after all this time.
He jumped down, said, “It is me. I’m real.”
“But I saw you die.”
“No. You saw me get hit. I was still breathing when you cut out.”
“Yeah? The shape you was in, there wasn’t no way . . . ”
“Shouldn’t have been, either. It’s a long story. We can chew on it over a few beers sometime.” He waved. A soldier trotted up. Croaker grabbed his spear, which was almost long enough to be a pike, shoved it at me. “Here. You left this when you ran off to play Widowmaker.”
I did not believe it. Not at first. It was the lance for the standard.
“You really need to hug it?”
“It’s really it! I was almost sure it was lost.” Despite what I had told Mogaba. “You got no idea how guilty I felt. Although I did think I saw it that one time . . . It’s really you?” I looked at him closely. Having seen what illusions One-Eye and Goblin could conjure I was not quite ready to accept the evidence of my own eyes.
“It’s me. Really. Alive and in a mood to kick some ass. But that’s not what I’ve got on my mind right now. Where’s Lady?”
Poor boy. Blade gave him the bad news. His paramour had left more than a week ago, headed north. They missed each other on the road.
Swan and Mather were impressed by the presence of the Prince, their supposed boss. Why was he out running around, anyway? I noticed Croaker had a hard stare for Sindhu, who had stayed behind when Lady left.
The Old Man snapped, “Quit making love to that damned thing, Murgen. I need to catch up. I’m way out of touch. Will somebody take this damned butt-cruncher?”
A soldier grabbed his mount’s reins.
“Let’s get out of the sun.”
“I want to hear your story,” I said. “While it’s fresh.”
“Going to put it into the Annals? You been keeping them up?”
“I tried. Only I had to leave them in the city.” I did not like that, either. One-Eye could promise the moon about taking care of them but would he deliver?
“I’ll look forward to reading the Book of Murgen. If it’s any good you’ve got the job for life.”
Swan said something about Lady planning to write a book of her own when she got time. Croaker flung a stone at a crow. It was the first of those birds I had spotted since the albino in the night. Maybe he brought it with him. I sketched some of what had been happening in Dejagore.
“Guess it hasn’t been fun for anybody. Seems Mogaba is the main problem. Better get right after him. How many people are still over there?”
“My guess is him and the Nar have a thousand to fifteen hundred men. I don’t know how many people I have. Some come out every night but since I got elected prisoner here I can’t keep track. Goblin and One-Eye and most of the Company are still over there.” I hoped Uncle Doj and Thai Dei were using this distraction to get To Tan and Sahra and themselves on the road.
“Why would they stay?”
“They don’t want to leave. They say they want to wait till Lady gets all her powers back. They say something is out here waiting for them.”
“Powers back?”
“It’s happening,” Blade said.
“Hunh. So what are they afraid of, Murgen?”
“Shapeshifter’s apprentice. That bitch from Juniper. She almost got One-Eye once already once . . . ” How come I believed the little rat now but had not when he had told me?
I had a momentary vision of One-Eye puffing through the night with fanged death closing in. It was as solid as actual memory.
“I remember her. She was a real piece of work. Marron Shed should have taken care of her when he had the chance.”
“Evidently she wants to get even with us for doing Shifter. She may be locked into the forvalaka shape, too. Which would really piss anybody off, I guess. But if you was to ask my personal opinion I think she’s only an excuse. They want to stay where they are because otherwise they might have to leave something behind.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “They’re Goblin and One-Eye. They’ve had months to pilfer and profiteer.”
“Tell me about Mogaba.”
Now we got down to the grim stuff.
Before the discussion ended even nasty Sindhu condemned the Nar.
“I’ll put an end to that. You want to take a message to Mogaba?”
I looked over my shoulder. He could not be asking the guy behind me. There was nobody there. “You shitting me? Not unless it’s an order. And maybe not then. Mogaba wants my head. Not to mention my heart and liver for breakfast. Crazy as he is right now he might go after me with you standing right behind me.”
“I’ll get somebody else.”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll go,” Swan volunteered. Then him and Mather got into an argument about that. Evidently Swan had something to prove to himself and Cordy did not believe he needed to bother.
My status in camp changed sharply. Suddenly I never was a prisoner, never had been unfree to do whatever served the common good.
Only problem was, my tent was cold. All I had left of Sahra and the Nyueng Bao was the jade amulet Sahra had taken from Hong Tray before we had carried the children out of the killing place.
“You done yet?” Croaker demanded, finding me seated in front of my tent, working on the standard.
I showed him what I was doing. “Good enough?”
“Perfect. You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever get.” I touched the jade amulet.
“She pretty special?”
“Very special.”
“I want to hear all about her people.”
“Someday.”
We walked through the hills and down to the shore. A sizable boat was out on the lake already. Blade’s soldiers had transported it overland after having failed to work it along the canal from the nearest river to the lake. Croaker and I took up position on a prominent hummock. I displayed the standard. They would be able to see that from the city even if they did not recognize me and the Old Man.
Mogaba wanted to know where the standard was? He could see for himself, now.
While the boat crossed over and returned Croaker and I speculated as to what made both Mogaba and Lady want to be in charge so badly.
“Looks like Swan is getting results. Can you see what’s going on?”
“Looks like somebody black getting into the boat.”
That somebody turned out to be Sindawe. I told the Old Man, “This guy was always as right with us as having Mogaba for a boss would allow. Ochiba and Isi and some of the others weren’t too bad, either. But they wouldn’t disobey orders.”
Sindawe stepped ashore. Croaker saluted him. He responded uncertainly, looked to me for a clue. I shrugged. He was on his own. I had no idea where this was headed.
Sindawe made sure he was face to face with the real Captain. Once he was satisfied, he suggested, “Let us step out of sight and talk.”
The Old Man made a small gesture that told me I should let them talk in complete privacy. They walked around behind the hummock and sat on a rock. They talked for a long time, voices never rising. Sindawe finally rose and walked back to the boat like a man borne down by an incredibly heavy burden.
“What’s the story?” I asked Croaker. “He looks like he suddenly added twenty years on top of the wear and tear of the siege.”
“Years of the heart, Murgen. Feeling morally compelled to betray somebody who has been your best friend since childhood will do that to you.”
“What?”
He would say nothing more. “We’re going over there. I’m going to meet Mogaba nose to nose.”
I thought of a pile of arguments against. I did not bother. He would not listen. “Not me.” I shuddered. My spine was shivering to that chill they say happens when somebody walks over your grave.
Croaker looked at me hard. I drove the butt of the standard into the earth, vigorously, meaning, “Here I stand.” He grunted, turned and went down to the boat. The creature Sindhu snaked out of nowhere and joined the party. I wondered how much of Sindawe’s and Croaker’s conversation he had overheard. Not a word, probably. The Old Man would have used the Jewel Cities dialect.
Once the boat was well out onto the water I sat down beside the standard, clung to the pole and tried to figure out what made it impossible for me to go back over there.
I had suffered no big seizures for a while. I was not on guard anymore. This one began insidiously, like just losing focus and drifting into a lazy daydream. I stared at Dejagore but no longer really saw it, thought of the women who had entered my life and the ancient one who had left it. Already I missed Sahra and so-serious To Tan.
A white crow landed on the crossbar of the standard, cawed down at me. I paid no attention.
I stood at the edge of a shimmering wheatfield. A twisted, broken black stump rose thirty yards from me, in the field’s center. Bickering crows surrounded it. The fairy towers of Overlook gleamed in the distance, days’ walk away. I recognized them for what they were without understanding how I could know.
Suddenly the crows rose up and wheeled around, flew that direction in an uncrowlike flock. One white crow stayed behind, circling.
The stump shimmered darkly. A glamor faded away.
A woman stood there. She looked very much like Lady but was even more beautiful. She seemed to look right through me. Or at and into me. She smiled wickedly, playfully, seductively, perhaps insanely. In a moment the albino bird settled onto her shoulder.
“You are impossible.”
Her smile shattered into shards of laughter.
Unless I was completely, inescapably mad there was only one person this could be. And she died long before I ever joined the Company.
Soulcatcher.
Croaker was there when she went down.
Soulcatcher.
That would explain a lot. That would illuminate a hundred mysteries. But how could that be?
A huge black beast that looked something like an ebony tiger padded past me, from behind, went and settled on its haunches near the woman. There was nothing servile in its manner.
I was frightened. If Soulcatcher was alive and in this end of the world and inclined to meddle she could become the greatest terror around. She was more powerful than Longshadow, Howler or Lady. But, unless she had changed since the old days, she preferred to use her talents in small ways, for spite or her own amusement.
She winked at me. Then she spun around and just seemed to disappear, leaving more laughter rippling in the air behind her. Her laughter became the mirth of the white crow.
The forvalaka became bored with the show, went off into the distance. And I faded.
A crow cawed overhead. A hand shook my shoulder, not gently. “Are you all right, sir? Is there a problem?”
“What?” I was seated on a stone step, clinging to the edge of a massive wooden door. An albino crow paced back and forth on the door’s top edge. The man who held my shoulder tried to shoo the bird with his free hand and some pithy curses. He was huge and hairy.
It was the middle of the night. What light there was came from a lantern the man had set upon the cobblestones. It set eyes glowing across the street, at a low level. For an instant I thought I saw something huge and catlike slipping past.
The man was one of the Shadar patrolmen the Liberator had employed to roam the streets after dark, maintaining order and keeping a watch for outsiders of dubious provenance.
Laughter came from the darkness across the way. The patrolman was not doing a good job. I was supposed to be one of the good guys here. She was one of the dubious strangers.
I was in Taglios!
I smelled smoke. The lantern?
No. The odor came from the stairwell behind me.
I recalled dropping a lamp. Recalled a confused cacophony of wheres and whens. “I’m all right. Just had a dizzy spell.”
Laughter from across the street.
The Shadar glanced back but otherwise seemed indifferent. He did not want to believe my story. He wanted to find something wrong right here right now. He did not like foreigners. And us northerners were all madmen and drunks. But, unfortunately, we were also very much in favor with the Palace.
I got up. I had to get moving. My mind was clearing. The truth was coming back. I had a desperate need to get to the old familiar entrance to the Palace because I had to get to my apartment in a hurry.
The moon suddenly splashed its light down into the street. It had to be past midnight. I saw the woman watching from across the way. I started to say something to the Shadar but a sharp whistle came from the distance, in the direction the monster had seemed to be moving. Another patrolman needed assistance. He said, “Take care, foreigner.” He jogged away.
I ran too, not pausing to take the elementary step of closing the sally door.
I reached my customary entrance. Something was wrong. Cordy Mather’s Guards should have been on duty there.
I was unarmed except for a belt knife. I drew it, pretending I was a fierce commando. There was no way Mather’s gang would leave an entrance uncovered. You could not bribe those guys to screw up.
I found the sentries in the guard room. They had been strangled.
No need to question the prisoner further, now. But who was the target? The Old Man? Almost certainly. The Radisha? Probably. And anyone else important that they could get.
I fought panic, managed to keep from baring off blindly. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj were up there, anyway.
I stripped the shirt off one dead guard, wrapped my throat. That should afford some protection against a Strangler’s scarf. Then I bounded upstairs like a mountain goat who was long out of practice. I reached my own floor so winded I had to lean against the stairwell wall and strain to keep from puking. My legs were jelly.
Alarms banged everywhere now. It was happening as I stood there. I got some wind back, left the stairwell for the corridor and tripped over a dead man.
He was filthy and undernourished. A blade had laid him open from left shoulder to right hip. His right hand lay ten feet away. It still clutched a black rumel. There was blood everywhere. Some still seeped from the corpse.
I stared at the scarf. The dead man had murdered many times. Now Kina had betrayed him.
Such treachery is one of the goddess’s more endearing qualities.
Only Ash Wand could cut that clean and deep.
Another corpse lay near my apartment door. A third lay in the doorway itself, holding the door open.
All the blood was fresh. The corpses still bled. As yet few flies were in evidence.
Knowing I did not want to do so I entered my quarters ready to sink bare teeth into anything that moved.
I smelled something.
I spun and stabbed as someone skinny and brown and unwashed flew at me, hit me, threw me backwards. A black rumel spun around my neck but failed its function because of the shirt wrapping.
I hurtled backward into my worktable. There was a sharp pain in the back of my head. Inside I screamed, “Not again!”
Darkness closed down.
Pain awakened me. My arm was on fire.
My crash into the table had overturned a lamp. My papers, my Annals, were burning. I was burning. I leaped up shrieking, beating my arm, and when I had that extinguished I began jumping around trying to save the papers, I saw nothing else and thought of nothing else. This was my life, going up in smoke. And beyond the smoke there was only the house of pain, only the bleak seasons.
Way, way over there, like down a long, cruel tunnel, I saw Uncle Doj kneeling beside Thai Dei. Between them and me lay three dead men. The floor was invisible beneath their blood. Two of the dead showed Ash Wand’s characteristic precision cuts. The other had fallen to a cross cut that betrayed a hint of raggedness. The swordsman had been in the grip of an uncontrolled rage.
Uncle Doj held Thai Dei’s head against his chest. Thai Dei’s left arm hung as though broken. His right surrounded To Tan on his lap. The five-year-old’s head was tilted at a bizarre angle. Thai Dei’s face was pale. His mind was not in this world.
Uncle Doj rose, came toward me, stared into my eyes, shook his head, then stepped close and wrapped powerful arms around me. “They were too many and too fast.”
I collapsed.
This was the present. This was today. This was the new hell where I did not want to be.
. . . fragments . . .
. . . just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.
Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their context no longer known.
All that remains of two volumes of Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four years of history. Gone forever.
Uncle Doj wants something. He is going to make me drink some strange Nyueng Bao philtre.
Fragments . . .
. . . all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain, scattered in this bleak season . . .
Darkness. And in the darkness, shards of time.
Hey there! Welcome to the city of the dead . . .
The apartment was overrun with guards. What was going on? I was confused. Another fainting spell?
Smoke. Blood. The present. The hard present that breathed pain like a dragon breathes fire.
I became aware of the Captain’s presence. He came from the back of the apartment shaking his head. He eyed Uncle Doj curiously.
Cordy Mather blew in looking like a man encountering the worst horror show of a long and unhappy lifetime. He went straight to the Old Man. I heard only “ . . . dead men all over the place.”
I could not catch Croaker’s response.
“ . . . were after you?”
Croaker shrugged.
“You just moved out last . . . ”
A Guard rushed in. He whispered to Mather. Mather barked, “Listen up! We’ve still got some live ones out there. Be careful.” He and the Old Man moved a little closer. “They’re lost in the labyrinth. We’ll need One-Eye to find them all.”
“The excitement never ends, does it?” Croaker sounded really tired.
To no one special Uncle Doj announced, “They have only just begun to pay.” His Taglian was excellent considering he had been unable to speak a word the day before.
Mother Gota came from the back, bent and moving slowly. Typically of Nyueng Bao women dealing with disaster she had brewed tea. This was quite possibly the worst day of her life. It would be a good pot.
The Captain gave Uncle Doj another searching look, then knelt beside me. “What happened here, Murgen?”
“I’m not sure. I walked in in the middle of it. Stabbed a guy. That one. Got thrown across a table. Tripped and fell through a hole in time. Maybe. Woke up on fire.” I still had charred pages around me. My arm hurt like hell. “There were dead people all over. I lost it. Next thing I knew it was now.”
Croaker caught Mather’s eye. He used a rocking motion of his right hand to indicate Uncle Doj.
Cordy Mather asked Uncle for his story. He spoke perfect Nyueng Bao.
It was a night of a thousand surprises.
Uncle Doj said, “These Deceivers were skilled. They gave no warning. I wakened just an instant before two fell upon me.” He explained how he had evaded death, breaking a neck and a spine in the process. He described his kills clinically, even critically.
He spoke harshly of both himself and Thai Dei. He was down on himself because he had allowed himself to be tempted into pursuing other Deceivers when they fled. Their flight proved to be a diversion. Thai Dei, who had not been drawn away, received criticism for showing the instant of hesitation that had cost him his broken arm.
“Cheap lesson for him,” Croaker observed. Uncle Doj nodded, missing the Captain’s sarcasm. He had to face the cruel cost of having allowed himself to be deceived.
There were fourteen corpses in my apartment, not including those of butchered Annals. Twelve had been Deceivers. One had been my wife and one my nephew. Six perished by Ash Wand, three at Thai Dei’s hands. Mother Gota gutted two and I pigstuck one when I walked in.
Grasping my shoulder in what was meant to be a comforting gesture, Uncle Doj said, “A warrior does not slay women or children. That is the work of beasts. When beasts kill men all men are constrained to hunt and destroy them.”
“Nice talk,” Croaker said. “But the Deceivers never claimed to be warriors.” He was not impressed by Uncle’s speech.
Neither was Mather. “It’s religion, Old Timer. Their Path. They are the priests of death. The sex or age of their sacrifices doesn’t mean squat. Their victims all go straight to paradise and never have to take another turn around on the wheel of life, no matter how buggered up their karma was.”
Uncle Doj’s mood grew blacker by the minute. “I know tooga,” he muttered. “No more tooga.” Nobody was revealing any mysteries to him.
Cordy smiled wickedly at the swordmaster. “You guys probably won a high spot on their desirable victim list by killing so many of them. If you’re a Deceiver there’s big status to be gained by killing somebody who has killed a lot of people.”
I heard Mather’s blather but it did not register as sense. I muttered, “Tooga ain’t no crazier than any other religion around here.”
That seemed to offend everyone equally. Good.
Mather turned to fuss at his Guards. They had failed their trust. My own disaster was just one of several. Others were still happening.
Numbly, I said, “You can’t defend against this kind of thing, Mather. These guys weren’t commandos.” I swatted the nearest corpse with the charred sheets I was holding. “They came in here expecting to make it to paradise by midnight. Probably didn’t even have an escape plan.” In a softer voice, I said, “Captain, you might better check on Smoke.”
Croaker frowned like I had given away everything but asked only, “You need anything? Want somebody to stay?” He understood what Sarie meant to me.
“This is where I came from. When I kept falling back. I got family with me, Captain. If I start to go bugfuck in the head they’ll cool me down. You really want to help? Fix Thai Dei’s arm. Then go do what you got to do.”
Croaker nodded. He made a small gesture that, in normal times meant “Go!” but which meant a good deal more now. “Narayan Singh is going to wake up some morning and realize that he has reaped the whirlwind. There is no safe place for him anymore.”
I rose. Grimly, I set out for my bedroom. Behind me, Thai Dei groaned as Croaker set his arm. The Old Man paid him no other mind. He was busy issuing orders that meant a major intensification of the war.
Uncle Doj followed me.
The reality hurt less than the anticipation had. I indulged in the pointless gesture of removing the rumel from my wife’s throat. I stood there with the scarf dangling, staring. This Strangler must have been a true master. Her neck was not broken, nor had her throat been bruised. She looked like she was sleeping. There was no pulse when I touched her, though. “Uncle Doj. Can I be alone?”
“Of course. But drink this first. It will help you to rest.” He handed me something that smelled really nasty.
Did we do this already?
He went away. I laid down beside Sarie for the last time. I held her while the medicine began to course through me, calling forth sleep. I thought all the usual thoughts, nurtured the usual hatreds. I thought the unthinkable, that it might be best that this had happened before Sahra learned what it really meant to be Company.
I reminisced the great miracle. Ours was a match that never should have been. A match neither ever regretted for an instant, yet one created by a force so slight as the unspoken whim of an old woman cursed with hysterical, unreliable precognitive visions.
I thought both sanely and crazily and commenced the process of beatification that is inevitable after any untimely death. I slept. But even in Nod I could not escape the pain. I dreamed cruel dreams I could not reclaim when I awakened. It was almost as if Kina herself were mocking me, telling me that triumph was a costly deception.
Sarie was gone when I awakened, my head throbbing with a medicinal hangover. I stumbled around until I ran into Mother Gota. The old woman was fussing over some tea and talking to herself exactly the way she talked to the rest of the world.
“Where is Sahra?” I asked. “Tea. Please. What happened to her?”
Gota looked at me like I was mad. “She is dead.” No pulling punches for her.
“I know that. Her body is gone.”
“They have taken her home.”
“What? Who?” Anger began to rise within me. How dare they . . . ? Who was they?
“Doj. Thai Dei. Her cousins and uncles. They have taken Sahra and To Tan home. I am here to watch over you.”
“She was my wife. I . . . ”
“She was Nyueng Bao before she was your wife. She is Nyueng Bao now. She will be Nyueng Bao tomorrow. Hong Tray’s fantasies cannot change that.”
I gained control before I exploded completely. Gota was right, from a Nyueng Bao point of view.
Also, there was not a lot I could do about it right now. Not without coming up with a lot more ambition than I had this morning. All I really wanted to do was sit around feeling sorry for myself.
I went back to our room with my tea. I settled on our bed, picked up the jade amulet that had belonged to Hong Tray. It seemed very warm this morning, more alive than I. I had not worn it for a long time. I slipped it onto my wrist now.
I could work my anger out on Uncle Doj when he got back.
If he came.
Not one Strangler attack team achieved its tactical objective, but even so their raid was successful psychologically. It stunned the city. It shocked the leadership. It generated terror out of all proportion to actual damages. Croaker grabbed it and turned it around.
Next morning, while most of us were still wrestling with our emotions, he went to the Taglian mob and spoke in his old guise as Liberator. He announced a new and furious era of total, relentless warfare against the Shadowmaster and tooga although he divulged few real facts about the Palace raid. That set rumor running wild through the alleys and byways and fueled fresh anger. For years the war had been a long way away, in the old Shadowland, and so had become emotionally remote to most of the people. The Deceiver raid brought the war back home. The old enthusiasm resurfaced.
The Liberator told the crowd that the years of preparation were over. It was time to carry justice to the wicked.
But moving immediately meant a winter campaign. I asked the Old Man if he really intended that.
“Damned straight. More or less. They have their feet up down there. You know that. You’ve been riding Smoke. I mean, who would be crazy enough to take a crack at the Dandha Presh when the snow is flying?”
Who indeed? “It’ll mean some major hardships for the soldiers.”
“If an old fart like me can take it they all can take it.”
Right. Only some of us can take it better than others. Some of us are obsessed.
Hell. Us Black Company guys have obsessions and hatreds enough for everybody.
Work became my all. I was past the evil time. No longer did I fall back into cruel yesterdays in order to escape crueler todays that I could detect. But I did not sleep well. Hell still lurked beyond sleep’s wall. I lost myself in the Annals, rerecording everything the fire had claimed. I ran away by riding Smoke out into the past, where and when I could, to check my recollections.
One-Eye’s arsenal increased its production. The Old Man drove the ruling class crazy trying to get money to pay for everything.
Word of the new stage spread through the Taglian territories as fast as horses could run.
Lady began gathering her forces and training them to deal with the darknesses that had given the Shadowmasters their name.
I became aware that Goblin had dropped out of sight, completely, but that only weeks after the actual event. I feared that he had been murdered. But Croaker did not seem concerned.
One-Eye was fussed. He was desperate to get his sidekick connected with my mother-in-law but he could not unearth a trace of the little toad.
In the night when the wind no longer licks through its unglazed windows, nor prances along its untenanted halls, nor whispers to its million creeping shadows, the fortress is filled with the silence of stone.
Cold cruel dreams stir within the figure pinned to the throne so ancient that bits have given up to dry rot. A gleam from beyond flickers. The figure sighs, drawing in the light, exhaling a balloon of dream that somehow finds its way through the tortuous passages of the fastness and out into the world in search of a receptive mind. Upon the plain itself the shadows swirl like minnows sensing the passing of a huge predator.
The stars wink down in cold irony.
There is always a way.
House of pain? Mocking laughter. She is beautiful. Yes. Almost as beautiful as I. But she is not for you.
The woman tucked a child in for the night. Her slightest movement bespoke grace.
I . . . There was an I, suddenly. NO! Not for you! She is mine!
Nothing is yours but what I give you. And I give you pain. This is the house of pain. No! Whatever you are . . . GO!
“Ouch!” I opened my eyes. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei crouched beside me, one to either side, looking concerned. I rolled my head, surprised to see them back so soon.
I was on the floor in my workroom. But I was dressed for bed. “What am I doing here?”
“You walked in your sleep,” Doj told me. “Also talked, which alerted us.”
“Talked?” I never talk in my sleep. But I do not walk in my sleep, either. “Gods damn it! I was having another spell!” And this time I remembered. Some. “I have to get this down. Right now. Before I lose it.” I scrambled across the room. In moments I was scratching away.
And when I was done I realized I did not have a clue about anything. I threw my pen down.
Mother Gota appeared. She carried a pot of tea. She poured for me, then for Doj and Thai Dei. Sahra’s death had hurt her deeply. For the moment her normal, contentious character was submerged. She was an automaton.
This had been going on for days.
“What is the trouble?” Uncle Doj asked.
“There’s nothing there. I remembered perfectly but can’t find a clue toward an explanation.”
“Then you must relax. Stop fighting yourself. Thai Dei. Get the practice swords.”
I wanted to scream that this was not the time. But this was his answer to all stress. Come to the swords. Pursue the exercise rituals. Parade the stances. To do it right required total concentration. And it always worked, no matter how much I disbelieved.
Even Gota joined us, though she was less adept than I.
The night that I had tried to find my way back from Smoke’s hideout I had wondered if One-Eye had cast some confusion spells around there. I learned that he had and had scattered random pockets of confusion all through the disused parts of the Palace so the one critical area would not stand out. He gave me an amulet of charmed woolen strings, several colors twisted together, that I was supposed to wear on my wrist. It would let me pass through the spells no more confused than my usual state.
“Be careful,” he told me. “I change these spells every day now that you’re working Smoke regular. I don’t want nobody stumbling in there while you’re out of body. Especially not the Radisha.”
That made sense. There was no calculating Smoke s value. No instrument for espionage this valuable had ever existed before. We did not dare risk compromising him.
The Old Man gave me a list of regular checks he wanted made. These included keeping a close watch on Blade. He did not use that information immediately, though. I supposed he was laying back, letting Blade gain confidence. And, occasionally, letting Blade deal with our religious problem children for us, too.
I did not ask but I am sure the policy was coolly deliberate. The priesthoods provided our main political challenges. Made sense to me, too, to use them up keeping Blade from getting too strong.
I had my personal list of investigations, too, some meant to satisfy my own curiosity, most to get straight events that needed to be recorded in the Annals. I spent about ten hours a day just working on the books.
I rise, write, eat, write, visit Smoke, write, sleep for a little while, then get up and do it all again. I do not sleep long or well because I do not care to tarry in the house of pain.
Uncle Doj has decided not to return to his swamp. Likewise, Mother Gota. They stay out of my way, mostly. But they are always here, always watching. They have expectations.
The new phase of the war is here. They have decided to play a part. They mean the cruelty of the Deceivers to be requited by the cruelty of the Nyueng Bao.
One of the big problems of espionage, I have discovered, is figuring out where to look for the information you want. When I need to know something for the Annals I usually have an idea when things happened, where and who was involved. It is a chance to flit off and double check my memory, which I have found to be astonishingly unreliable.
Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking we have invested.
One-Eye has his ego problems, of course. Maybe they are why he will not let me wander through his arms factory. If it does not have something to do with guarding his ledgers from outside scrutiny. I will spy on him now that he plans to close down soon.
One-Eye carries a lot on his old shoulders. Among the things he does is he acts as a sort of Minister of Armaments. He has a whole fortified section of town where he oversees the manufacture of everything from arrowheads to monster siege engines.
Much of his production gets crated up and sent straight to the docks, to be loaded aboard barges and sent downriver to the delta where, via a series of crude canals, the barges are worked over into the Naghir River, which shares the delta. Then they travel up the Naghir and its tributaries to armories near the frontier. I have no doubt that some of the material fails to reach its destination. I expect that One-Eye somehow profits. I hope he has sense enough not to sell to the enemy. Croaker catches him doing that and One-Eye will think that Blade gets treated like a mischievous kid brother.
My first swoop into the arsenal was a quick psychic raid. One-Eye’s compound consisted of a gaggle of once dissimilar and unrelated structures now interconnected in a mad maze. All windows and most doors had been bricked up. Men selected for their size, bad tempers and lack of imagination infested the few entrances. They allowed no one in and no one out. The street outside the freight entrance was crowded day and night. Files of wagons and carts, drawn by weary oxen, crept forward to be unloaded and loaded by weary workmen watched banefully by the unimaginative men, who foamed at the mouth if carters and laborers so much as made eye contact. Around and amongst the carts swarmed countless runners carrying long poles from which hung dozens of pails filled with hot food for the workers. The guards checked every pail. They even took turns checking on each other.
Taglios has a richly diverse, complex, and deeply specialized labor economy. Folks will make a living one way or another and other folks will give them room. Near the Palace is a bazaar devoted entirely to grooming services, catering mainly to Palace functionaries. One guy does nothing but trim nose hairs. Right beside him, operating in a space less than four feet wide, with oils and silver tools displayed on a tiny inlaid table, is an old character who will clean the wax from your ears. He does nothing else but retail gossip. This business has been in his family for generations. He is sad because he has no son to inherit.
When he goes his family will lose that space in the bazaar.
It is all symptomatic of horrid overpopulation and the desperate difficulty of surviving at the bottom. I would not want to be a Taglian of low caste.
Lucky me, I did not have to check in with One-Eye’s thugs. There seemed to be no provision against magical espionage. I darted inside. I guess One-Eye did not worry because Longshadow could no longer send his pets snooping this far. But what about the Howler? He could sneak up on us any time he wanted.
Trying to track Howler was one of my regular duties.
The arsenal workers were doing ordinary things. Making arrowheads. Sharpening them. Making arrows. Fletching them. Building artillery pieces. Attempting to mass produce a light cotton body armor for the ordinary infantryman who, no doubt, would discard it because it was hot and uncomfortable and a nuisance to lug around.
Only the glassblowers surprised me.
There were two dozen workers in that department and most were employed producing small, thin bottles. A platoon of apprentices tended fires, heated the silicates that became raw glass, carried off trays of bottles once they cooled. Those went to carpenters who placed them into crates with sawdust packing. A few of the crates went aboard big long haul wagons but most went to the waterfront.
What the devil?
There was a big piece of slate in One-Eye’s office. Upon it, in Forsberger, were chalked what appeared to be production targets. Fifty thousand bottles. Three million arrows. Five hundred thousand javelins. Ten thousand cavalry lances. Ten thousand sabers. Eight thousand saddles. One hundred fifty thousand infantry short swords.
Some of those numbers were absurd and there was no way any could be reached by One-Eye’s arsenal alone. But production took place all over the Taglian territories, most often in one-man blacksmith shops. One-Eye’s main job was to keep track. Which looked to me a lot like letting the fox do bedcheck at the chicken house.
The list also included animals and wagons and lumber by the hundred barge loads, much of which I did understand. But five thousand box kites, ready for assembly, twelve feet by three feet? Each with one thousand feet of string? One hundred thousand yards of silk in bolts six feet tall?
He was not going to get that one.
I went roving to see what else was being readied for Mogaba and his friends.
I saw training camps where commando teams prepared for every imaginable terrain and mission. Down south, Lady pursued her own programs, creating forces prepared to operate offensively on the sorcerous battlefield.
She had scoured the Taglian territories for every person possessed of even the slightest magical talent and had schooled them just enough to make them useful in a program I could not fathom no matter how I poked at it. As Longshadow had noted, she was stripping the Taglian territories of bamboo. That got cut into several standard lengths and had red-hot rods run through to burn out the joints. Lady had the resulting tubes packed with little spongy colored marbles created by her squads of hedge wizards.
Another game of baffle the Shadowmaster? Half of what we were doing was smoke and mirrors meant to confuse the opposition and make them waste resources or commit them in the wrong places. But I was more confused than Longshadow could possibly be.
Lady slept less than did the Captain. Croaker seldom slept more than five hours a night. If sheer drive could conquer Mogaba and the Shadowmaster we were surefire winners.
Both Lady and the Old Man hide so much inside themselves that even after all these years I have no sure grasp of how they think. They share a strong love but seldom demonstrate it.
They want to recover their daughter and avenge themselves upon the Deceivers but never speak of the child publicly. Croaker is determined to lead the Company back to mysterious Khatovar, to unearth its origins, but does not talk about that at all anymore.
On the surface it would seem those two live only for the war.
I drifted back to One-Eye’s factory. I was reluctant to leave Smoke. I knew if I delayed much longer I would return to find my body exhausted, starved, and extremely thirsty. The smart way to use Smoke was to take short journeys mixed with lots of times out for snacks and drinks. But that was hard to recall out there, especially when there was so much pain waiting back in my own slice of reality.
This time I discovered a room I had overlooked earlier. In it Vehdna workers moved lazily amongst a dozen ceramic tubs. Some carried buckets from which they scooped fluid into the tubs a cup at a time. The fluid came from a vat a man kept stirring when he was not adding water or some white powder.
I saw little remarkable about those tubs. The solution got added at one end. At the other end fluid trickled down a glass tube into a large earthenware jug. Once filled each jug got stopped and carried carefully to storage on shelves well out of the way. Unlike wines, they were shelved upright. Curiously, the lamps in the room burned unusually bright.
I studied one tub, noted that small bubbles kept rising at the end where the workers added the fluid. At the far end, well below the surface, were dozens of short rods caked with a silvery white substance. On the floor of the tub were several handleless glass cups. Using ceramic tools a gloved worker moved a cup under a rod, scraped stuff off into the cup. Once that settled he used wooden tongs to lift the cup from the tub. He carried it with considerable care but, nevertheless, managed to stumble.
The stuff off the rod blazed fiercely when exposed to the air.
I had to get back to my flesh. I had to eat. Soon enough I would have to pack because real soon all of us would be headed south. The war’s next stage was gathering momentum.
Otto and Hagop were back, after innumerable frustrating delays on the last river leg, which should have been the easiest part of their journey. They were concealed in the same Shadar waterfront warehouse that I had used to hold the captives from the Grove of Doom. One-Eye collected me from my quarters. He and I and my brown shadow headed for the river. The Old Man beat us there. He could drop everything when he really wanted. “You all right, Murgen?”
“I’m handling it.”
“He’s spending too much time with Smoke,” One-Eye said. “That don’t sound healthy. Would you look at these guys?” He meant Otto and Hagop, though the others of their expedition were confined to the warehouse, too, and were not enthusiastic about being kept away from their families. It had been almost three years.
Neither Otto nor Hagop looked much different. I told Hagop, “I’d almost given up on you guys.” We shook hands. I shook with Otto, too. “I thought your luck finally ran out.”
“We came close, Murgen. We used up a lot.”
“So,” the Old Man said. “What took so long?”
“Actually, there ain’t that much to tell.” Hagop looked at Croaker oddly, as though to make sure he was talking to the real Old Man. Croaker was in his Shadar disguise. “We went, we did what we could, we came back.” Like a fourteen-thousand-mile round trip was routine? In the Company we do not brag about the big stuff. “We didn’t do a lot of sightseeing.”
While Hagop talked Otto made a circuit of the doors and windows. He asked, “We need to worry about spies?”
“This is Taglios,” Croaker replied. By which he meant that everyone is always watching everyone else, looking for an edge.
“We figured you guys would have then all squared away by now.”
“That’s a lot of squaring. Shadowlander spies, yeah, they aren’t a problem. Lady and Goblin and One-Eye took care of them.”
I said, “We still have the priesthoods.”
“And we’ve had a little Deceiver trouble lately.”
Something in my face warned Hagop against pursuing that. Not now. “How goes the war, then?”
“Slowly,” Croaker told him. “We can talk about that later. You do us any good up there?”
“Not much, to be honest.”
“Damn!”
“We did get a bunch of stuff for the Annals. Murgen, you might want to work it in. It’s stuff about what other people were doing that will help make better sense of what we did. I figure you could work it in between stuff that Croaker wrote. That way them that comes after us can see both sides. Huhm?”
“Maybe you ought to take over.” Sourly.
“Learn me how to read and write. I’m too old for this other shit.”
“Might do that,” I glanced at Croaker. “Long as you don’t edit me.”
The Old Man grinned.
Hagop chuckled. “The gods forfend, Murgen. Not me. Hey. I found out all about what happened after we left up there, too. You wouldn’t believe the excitement. The Limper came back one more time. Don’t worry. It’s all settled now. The empire is boring these days.”
“Sounds like I wish I was back home.”
Croaker asked, “Did you actually get into the Tower?”
“We spent six months there. Mainly getting the runaround at first.”
“And?”
“We finally convinced them that Lady was getting her powers back. They got cooperative then. Folks in the Tower these days like not having her around.”
“Gee. That’ll break her heart,” I said.
Hagop grinned. “Yeah. They won’t send us any help. Say they don’t want to make any new enemies. I think it’s mostly because they don’t want Lady getting nostalgic for her good old days and heading back north.”
Croaker said, “We figured that. There’s nothing in this for them but keeping Lady away. What did you get?”
“They opened their records. Lent us translators. Even opened graves when we asked.”
“They would have an interest in who was buried there themselves.”
“Damned if they didn’t. They had to change their linens after we told them who all turned up alive down here. See, they had a major scare when the Limper came back and damned near took them apart.”
I said, “That guy had a bigger boner for us than Soulcatcher does.” No way did we need to add the Limper to our list of enemies. “What about my turnip seeds?”
Hagop said, “They made sure of Limper this time. Absolutely sure. I got your seeds. Turnips and parsnips and even some seed potatoes if they haven’t spoiled.”
Croaker said, “They would make sure of Limper.” He watched Otto prowl. Otto was restless, uncomfortable. “So they let you poke around and even gave you some help with it. What did you learn?” That had been the point. To see if they knew anything way up north that we could use here.
“Not much. It don’t seem likely that Longshadow was ever one of the Taken.”
I was confident of that. I was sure he would have betrayed himself to Howler by now if they had been allies in the past. “Those potatoes. Did you get the little kind like I . . . ”
Hagop glowered at me, told the Old Man, “There is the remotest chance that he could be the Faceless Man, Moonbiter, or Nightcrawler although everybody up there was sure those three really did bite the dust. It was just that we couldn’t come up with any bodies.”
“How about one of the later Taken?” Croaker mused.
“Five actually survived. Journey, Whisper, Blister, Creeper and Learned. But Lady stripped all five of their powers. In front of witnesses.”
“But Lady has been getting her powers back,” I argued.
“A point. On the other hand, we know the exact day when the Shadowmasters appeared. Even the hour, I gather. All the later Taken were still in business up north. In fact, most of them weren’t even Taken yet.”
I traded glances with the Old Man. He began pacing. He said, “When Soulcatcher held me captive she told me one of the Shadowmasters who died at Dejagore wasn’t ever one of the Taken.”
I added, “Neither was Shadowspinner.”
Hagop said, “All they could tell us, really, was that they didn’t have a clue if Longshadow used to be one of the old mob. The written record supported them.”
Croaker kept pacing, narrowly avoided a collision with Otto, but stayed well away from the cluster of unhappy Taglians awaiting his blessing upon their desires to go home. After all this time could they recognize him through his Shadar disguise? Probably.
I was sure he was thinking that this war with the Shadowmasters was no ordinary struggle, that the stakes went far beyond simple survival. He said, “We’ve taken three of the bastards down. But Longshadow is the worst. He is the craziest. He’s working on Overlook day and night . . . ”
“Still?”
“Still. The poor idiot is a living testimonial to the fact that everything takes longer and costs more. Even magic can’t get you around that. But he’s a lot closer to being finished than he was when you left. And if he does get done before we get him we can bend over and kiss our butts goodbye. It’ll be the end of the world. His plan is to pull his hole in behind him and loose the dogs of hell then come out later and collect up the pieces of whatever is left.”
I grumbled, “I’ve heard this one before.” I never took it entirely serious despite the characters involved. But it did sound like Croaker believed Longshadow was capable of doing it. Maybe his adventures with Smoke had shown him something I had missed so far.
So the end of the world was imminent, either at the hands of Kina and her Deceivers or at those of Longshadow. Either way, only the Black Company could prevent the tragedy.
Yeah. Sure.
I wanted to tell Croaker, old buddy, we’re only the Black Company. We’re just a gang of misfits who can’t make it in life except as hired swords. Sure, we got ourselves into an asskicking contest with some bizarro creeps now but there ain’t nobody going to care in a hundred years. We are entangled in an affair of honor because of promises we made and stuff like the Stranglers snatching your kid. But don’t try to sell anybody on saving the world.
I was scared the Old Man might be developing a case of the big head, like Longshadow, Mogaba, the Howler, Kina, all the devils of our time. One of the Annalist’s duties is to remind the Captain that he is not a demigod. But I was out of practice. Hell, I could not deflate Uncle Doj when he got going.
“I need an edge, Hagop,” Croaker said. “I need it bad. Tell me you found something. Anything.”
“I found Murgen’s turnip seeds.”
“Damnit . . . ”
“The best suggestion they had was that we might try to trace the survivors of the Circle of Eighteen.” Well. That was interesting.
Croaker stopped pacing. He looked at me as though I might be able to tell him something. I saw his focus fade. He was remembering the Battle at Charm.
The Circle of Eighteen raised huge rebel armies to pull Lady down. The culminating battle at Charm had been the bloodiest in recorded history.
The Circle did not win.
Croaker said, “We killed Harden and Raker. Lady turned Whisper to Taken. That accounts for three.”
“A lot more just got lost when we whipped them,” I observed. My “we” drew smiles from Otto, Hagop and the Old Man. I was maybe twelve at the time and had not yet even heard of the Black Company.
Hagop said, “We were too damned thorough back then, boss. We went out looking for and flat could not find any Rebel veterans to interrogate. We couldn’t even find names for seven of the Eighteen. But there were people at the Tower who were junior officers then who claimed they had witnessed the deaths of all of the Eighteen except one called Trinket, those who became Taken, and one of the ones whose names we couldn’t find out.”
“Trinket.” Croaker resumed pacing. He mused, “I remember Trinket. But just the name. We were at the Stair of Tear. We got word that Trinket was surrounded. In the east. We were busy with Harden. I don’t know if I even mentioned it in the Annals.”
Ha! A chance to show off. “You did. One sentence. That’s it, though. You said Whisper had taken Rust and Trinket was surrounded.”
“Whisper. Yes. She’d been Taken only a little while.” He had been there to help set up the Taking. “That’s one for Lady. She would know if there was anything between those two.”
“Trinket was female,” Hagop told us. “What’s Longshadow?”
Croaker frowned.
I said, “He never gets all the way naked but I’m pretty sure Longshadow is a he. Physically.”
The Old Man offered me a daggers look. Damn! But the Taglians were way off in a corner sulking. None of them caught my slip. Hagop was not on the list of three, either, though. I hastened to amend myself. “But Smoke is the only one who ever saw him in the flesh. And he ain’t talking.”
“He still alive?” Hagop asked.
“Barely,” Croaker said. “We keep him alive. Men have come back from comas before. That’s it, Hagop? All that time and travel. That’s all you got me?”
“That’s the way she goes sometimes, boss.” He grinned. “Oh. I almost forgot. They did give me a coffin full of papers and stuff that night have belonged to some of the people who maybe could have turned into Longshadow if he was ever one of the Eighteen. The stuff is all packaged and labeled in case some wizard decides he wants to use them.”
Croaker’s face lit up like a bonfire. “You shithead.” Grinning, he yelled, “Otto, send them guys home, why don’t you? Bonharj, the rest of you, what the hell are you doing hanging around here? Your people want to see you.” He told me, “Guess we ought to ship that stuff down to Lady. She’ll know what to do with it.”
Otto hustled the Taglians out of the warehouse. They seemed baffled by the Liberator’s sudden generosity. Me too.
Hagop said, “Now how about you guys telling what’s been happening?”
I said, “A whole lot. But nothing big and dramatic. We keep nibbling them to death.”
“Is Mogaba really the head honcho of Longshadow’s army?”
“Absolutely. He’s one kickass sonofabitch, too, only Longshadow won’t let him run loose. He has to mess with us secondhand, mostly, letting Blade do his dirty work.”
“Huh? Blade? Like in Blade of Blade and Mather and Swan?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I glanced at the Old Man, whose expression had gone stony. “Yeah. Blade defected while you were gone.”
“Let’s get back to the Palace, Murgen,” Croaker said. “We have work to do.”
Croaker did not say much as we walked, though he did snarl at people who dared stare at the Shadar and his white-devil companion. We northerners are so few that even after years few of the commoners have yet seen any of us. And, of course, we have done very little to dispel our evil reputation.
Some intellectuals inside the priesthoods have argued that the friendship of today’s Black Company is as deadly to Taglios as was the enmity of its remote forbears.
Their complaint may have merit.
We were coming up to the Palace. Croaker kept grumbling to himself, mostly because so little had come of the expedition. That had been his pet and his expectations had run away with him. He asked, “How long are your in-laws going to hang around?”
I was not going to make him happy. “For the duration. They want their slice of Narayan Singh.” The Old Man still distrusted Uncle Doj.
“They know about Smoke?”
“Of course not! Damnit . . . !”
“Keep it that way. You find his library again yet?”
I had mentioned having stumbled onto that. “Not yet.” Fact was, I had made no more than a token effort. I had too much else on my mind.
“Try a little harder.” He knew. “Don’t spend so much time with Smoke. And I think it might be useful to look at those old Annals before we head south.”
“How come you never looked for the library yourself? You’ve had years.”
“I heard it got destroyed the night that Smoke got mauled. Now it looks like that must have happened in some other room. The Radisha wouldn’t mislead me about something like that. Would she? Nah.”
We paused while a Vehdna cavalry regiment passed in review outside the Palace. It had come from upcountry somewhere and was just paying its respects before taking the field. The robes and turbans of the troopers were clean and gaudy. Their lances were all brightly pennoned. Their spearheads gleamed. Their mounts were beautiful, admirably trained and perfectly groomed.
“Too bad pretty don’t win wars,” I said. The Black Company is not pretty.
Croaker grunted. I glanced at him. And surprised what might have been a teardrop in the corner of his eye.
He knew what awaited all those brave young men.
We crossed behind the horsemen, stepping carefully.
One-Eye met us in the hall way outside Croaker’s apartment. “What’s the word?”
Croaker shook his head. “No magic answers.”
“We always get to do it the hard way.”
I told him, “I’m supposed to look for that library room I found the other night. You got something to help keep me from getting confused?”
He looked at me like that might be a tall order. “I already gave you something.” He indicated the yarn on my wrist.
“That was for your spells. There’s probably still a bunch of Smoke’s left over, too.”
The runt thought about that. “Could be. Give me that.” His gaze fell on my amulet as I removed the yarn. “Jade?” He held my wrist momentarily.
“I think so. It belonged to Sarie’s grandmother, Hong Tray. You never met her. She was the old Speaker’s wife.”
“You been wearing this all these years and I never noticed?”
“I never wore it till Sarie . . . Until the other night. Sarie wore it sometimes, though, when she wanted to dress up.”
“Ah, yes. I recall.” He frowned like he was trying to remember something, then shrugged, went off into a shadow and muttered to the yarn for a while. When he returned he said, “That ought to get you through anybody’s confusion spells. Except maybe your own.”
“What?”
“You had any of your attacks lately?”
“No. Not that I remember.” I offered the amendment because I had had them before without being aware of them. Apparently.
“You had any new ideas about what caused them? Or who you kept running into when you went back to Dejagore?”
“I was escaping from the pain of losing Sarie.”
One-Eye laid one of his more intense stares upon me, just the way he had whenever he helped fish me out of the past. Evidently he was not convinced.
I asked, “Is it suddenly important again?”
“It never stopped being important, Murgen. There just hasn’t been time to pursue it.”
Nor was there now.
He said, “We just have to let you take charge of yourself, to watch out and do the right thing in a crunch.”
One-Eye being totally serious? That was spooky.
Croaker had lost interest. He was back at his charts and figures. But he did reiterate, “I want to see those books before we hit the road.”
I can take a hint, sometimes. “I’m on my way, Boss.”
I stopped in to make sure Smoke was still breathing. I fed him while I was there. Keeping him fed and clean was now my cover for being there should someone like the Radisha ever penetrate One-Eye’s network of spells, much augmented since I had begun working with the old wizard. Then I tried to recall the various twists and turns I had taken the night I found Smoke’s library. My memories were not clear. That had been a time of stress and a lot had happened since.
I did know it was on this same level. I had not gone downstairs or up. And it was in an area apparently undisturbed since Smoke’s own last visit. The dust and cobwebs were heavy and untouched.
It did not take me long to reach desert territory. It was almost as though the deep interior of the Palace became a vast and dusty maze, needing no spells of confusion to protect it.
I found the dead man only minutes after leaving Smoke. I smelled him first, of course, and heard the flies. That told me what would be coming up before I saw anything. Only the who was a mystery until the Strangler appeared at the limit of my lamplight. He had fled here to die of his wounds, trapped by darkness and confusing spells.
I shuddered. That touched my deepest fears, the wellspring of my nightmares, my crushing dread of tight, dark places underground.
I wondered if his fickle goddess had taken delight in his unhappy end.
I moved around the corpse carefully, averting my eyes and pinching my nose. In death he continued to serve Kina’s corruption avatar.
Soon afterward I discovered evidence that at least one more Strangler had become entangled in the confusion of the Palace. I nearly stepped in it, being alerted only when my approach startled the attendant flies.
I paused. “Uh-oh.” That looked fairly fresh. Maybe there was still a madman in here willing to dance for his goddess.
I started moving much slower and more carefully, one hand at my throat. I started imagining noises. All the ghost stories I ever heard came back to haunt me. Each few steps I paused, turned around completely, searching for the gleam of eyes betrayed by my lamp. Why did I decide to do this alone?
I began to see signs of recent traffic. I knelt, discovered what appeared to be my own previous footprints in the dust. Someone had been through since, armed with a battery of candles.
Drops of wax had fallen into the disturbed dust. And somebody had been through after that, possibly crawling, perhaps even eating what wax drops he could find.
I listened to the silence. This deep within the Palace even vermin were scarce. They could only eat each other.
Still cautious, I followed the trails of those who had come after me. My heart thumped like it was about to explode.
I started sneezing. And once I did the sneezes just kept coming. I could hold off for half a minute sometimes, but that only made the next sneeze worse.
Then I started hearing all sorts of sounds. And could not still myself long enough to reassure me that I was imagining these noises, too, or to get a fix on their source if they were genuine. Maybe it would be better to do this some other time. Then the broken door loomed out of the darkness. I stopped and studied it. I had a notion it was hanging a little differently. Disturbances in the dust suggested that someone had visited since I had done so myself.
Cautiously, touching nothing, I rounded the door, stepped into the room. “Shit!”
It had been torn apart. Few of the books, bound or scroll, remained on their shelves or in their cubbies. The undisturbed items, where I could decipher titles, were prosaic inventories or tax records or irregular city histories of little interest. I wondered why Smoke would bother with those. Maybe just to hide the good stuff? Maybe because he was fire marshall as well as court wizard?
Whatever, the good stuff was gone. And by that I mean not only any long missing volumes of the Annals that might have been lying around but also a number of what I had suspected to be magical texts when last I looked in.
“Damn it! Damn it!” I wanted to throw things, to break things, to bounce rocks off villains’ heads, Even before I found the single fallen feather I had a good idea of what had happened.
I collected that feather.
On the way back I definitely heard sounds that did not spring from my imagination. I did not bother to investigate. The man tried to follow my light but could not keep up.
Croaker looked up, puzzled, when I laid the white feather in front of him and said, “The books are gone. And there are Deceivers lost in there. At least one dead one and one still alive.”
“Gone?” He plucked the feather off the document he was studying.
“Somebody took them.”
His distress was apparent only because his hand began to shake. “How?”
“They just walked in off the street and carried them away.” I did not for a moment consider the possibility that someone inside the Palace had visited Smoke’s books.
He said nothing for a while. “What perfect timing.” Another silence. “What’s this feather?”
“Maybe a message. Maybe just a lost feather. I found one like it when I discovered that the Widowmaker armor had disappeared from hiding in Dejagore.”
“A white feather?”
“From an albino crow.” I ran through my catalog of encounters, real and possibly imagined.
His hand shook again. “You never actually met her. But you recognized her? She was here the night the Deceivers struck? And you never said anything?”
“I forgot that. That was the worst night of my life, Captain. That night has twisted everything else around me . . . ”
He gestured for silence. He thought. I stared. He was nothing like the Croaker who had been Company physician and Annalist when I joined up. After a while, he muttered, “That must be it.”
“What?”
“The voice you encountered whenever you were pulled back to Dejagore. Think. Was it inconsistent?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“Did it seem like it might be different people talking all the time?”
Now I got it. “I don’t think so. It did seem to have different attitudes and styles sometimes.”
“The bitch. The sneaking bitch. Always playing another game. I won’t swear this for sure, Murgen, but I think the root mystery behind you tumbling all over time must have been Soulcatcher playing.”
Not a wholly original theory to me. Soulcatcher rated high on my own suspects list. Motive was my big stumbling block. I could not figure a “why Murgen?” for anybody, Soulcatcher included.
“Where is she now?” Croaker asked.
“I don’t have the foggiest.”
“Can you find out?”
“Smoke balks every time I try to head her way.”
Croaker considered that. “Try again.”
“You’re the boss.”
“As long as it suits everybody’s convenience. You sure your in-laws won’t go home?”
“They’re going wherever I go.”
“Tell them we’ll be on the road before the end of the week.”
“I look forward to that like a case of the piles.” I took my white feather and stomped off for a session with the fire marshall.
To track Goblin I went back to the last time I saw the runt myself, then followed him forward in time. Soon after having helped me out of one of my plunges into yesterday Goblin walked out of his quarters carrying one modest bag, hiked to the waterfront, boarded a barge manned by trustworthy Taglians who had become professional soldiers, and drifted down the river. Right now—approximately today—he was in the heart of the delta, transferring the barge’s cargo, himself and most of the Taglians, to a deep-sea vessel wearing flags and pennons entirely unknown to me. Off on the sodden shore flocks of Nyueng Bao children and a handful of lazy adults watched as though this business of outsiders was the greatest entertainment they had encountered in years. Despite my familiarity with the tribe they all looked inscrutably alien in their native context, more so than they had in Dejagore where we all had been out of place.
For no reason clear to me I had never visited Sahra’s world. I just welcomed her into mine and savored the miracle.
Goblin’s behavior was less interesting than his whereabouts, which I had now established. So why not see what life was like for the Nyueng Bao? Uncle Doj insisted that the delta was paradise.
Possibly, if you were of the mosquito clan. I swear. The fact that I was a disembodied point of view was all that kept me from being devoured. Goblin was candyass enough to protect himself and his crew with potent spells, augmented by bad smells. But the Nyueng Bao had to deal with bloodsucking buzzards able to carry off small children. I reminded myself that I had seen all the bugs I wanted coming south through One-Eye’s home jungle and it was likely that Sarie’s people could manage excellently without the presence of Sarie’s husband.
I drifted through the area, curious about how she had lived before we met. Hamlet, rice paddies, water buffalo, fishing boats, the same yesterday, last year, last century and tomorrow. Everyone I saw looked like someone I might have met in Dejagore or among the Nyueng Bao serving with the Company now.
What?
I was sweeping along like a darting swallow. I glimpsed a face looking up in a hamlet miles back from the river where Goblin and his crew were sweating their guts out. My heart flipped. For the first time out there with Smoke I enjoyed a really strong emotion. If I had been in my body I would have wept crocodile tears.
Man eating crocs adorn the delta, too.
I whipped back, around, hunting that face so much like Sahra’s that it could have belonged to her twin. Down there somewhere, near that old temple.
No. I guess not. Wishful thinking, Murgen. Plain wishful thinking. Probably just another Nyueng Bao girl newly a woman, endowed with that incredible beauty they have for four or five years between childhood and the steep slope into despair.
I pressed in once more, wanting desperately to find even the simulacrum of Sahra. And, of course, I found nothing. The pain became so great I withdrew from that region entirely and went looking for a place and time where the gods held me in higher favor.
I had to fall backward in time, tumbling smugly toward the one era in my life when I was totally happy, when perfection was the order of the universe. I went to the hour that was my pole star, my center, my altar. I went to the moment every man who ever lived dreams of, that one instant when all wishes and fantasies have the potential to come true and you have only to recognize that and grab it within a heartbeat to make your life complete. For me that moment came almost a year after the end of the siege of Dejagore. And I almost wasted it.
Nyueng Bao were almost always a part of my life then. A scant three weeks following Croaker’s showdown with Mogaba, and Mogaba’s consequent flight, while us survivors were still creeping north toward Taglios, pretending to be triumphant heroes who had liberated a friendly city and rid the world of a bunch of villains, I awakened one morning to find myself under the dubious and permanent protection of Thai Dei. He was no more talkative than ever but in a few words he insisted that he owed me big and he was going to stick to me forever. I thought that was just hyperbole.
Boy, was I thrilled. I was not in a mood to cut his throat so I let him hang on. And he did have a sister I wanted to see a lot more than I wanted to see him, though I never found the nerve to tell him that. Even so . . .
Back in the city, established in the Palace, in my tiny room with my papers and books and Thai Dei sleeping on a reed mat outside my door, him insisting that To Tan was in good hands with his grandmother, I lived a life of confusion, trying to figure out what had happened to us all and to make sense of Lady’s writings. I was not thinking with absolute clarity when I received a gentleman name of Bahn Do Trang, who was a relative of one of the pilgrims of Dejagore. He had a message for me. It was so cryptic it could have qualified as one of the great goof-ball sybilline pronouncements of all time.
“Eleven hills, over the edge, he kissed her,” brother Bahn told me, all splashed up with a huge and un-Nyueng Bao grin. “But the others were not for hire.”
To which I offered this countersign, “Six blue birds in a peppermint tree, warbling limericks of apathy.”
Death of the grin. “What?”
“That’s my line, Pop. You told the guys downstairs you had a critical message for me. Against my better judgment I let you come up here and right away you start spouting nonsense. Tamal!” I yelled at the orderly who assisted me and several others who worked out of rooms nearby. “Show this clown the way to the street.”
Do Trang wanted to argue, looked at my sidekick, thought better of making a fuss. Thai Dei watched the old boy closely but did not look like he wanted the honor of flinging him out on his enigmatic ass personally.
Poor Bahn. It must have been important to him. He seemed stricken.
Tamal was a huge Shadar man-bear, all hair and growl and bad breath. He would have liked nothing better than to pummel a Nyueng Bao all the way to the street and thence to the edge of the city. Bahn went without protest.
Less than a week later I received the identical message as a handwritten note that looked like it had been inscribed by a six-year-old. One of Cordy Mather’s Guards brought it up. I read it, told him, “Give the old fool a beating and tell him not to bother me again.”
The Guard gave me a funny look. He glanced at Thai Dei, then whispered, “Ain’t old, ain’t a him, but probably is a fool, Standardbearer. Was I you I’d take the time.”
I got it. At last. “I’ll just box his ears myself, then. Thai Dei, try to keep the bad guys out. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He did not listen, of course, because he could not bodyguard me from a distance, but I did confuse him long enough to get a headstart. I got down there and got my hands on Sahra before he caught up or got ahead of me. After that he had little say. And my clever lady had brought To Tan to distract him.
Thai Dei did not talk much but that did not make him stupid. He knew he could not win with the cards he held right now. “Clever,” I told Sahra. “I thought I’d never see you again. Hi, kiddo,” I said to To Tan, who did not remember me. “Sahra, honey, you gotta promise me. No more of that cryptic stuff like Grandpa Dam. I’m just a simpleminded soldier.”
I led Sahra inside and up to my little hole in the wall. For the next three years I marvelled every morning when I wakened to find her beside me and almost every time I saw her during the day. She became the center of my life, my anchor, my rock, my goddess, and every damned one of my brothers envied me almost to the borders of hatred though Sahra converted them all into devoted friends. She could give Lady lessons on softening the hearts of hard men.
Not till Uncle Doj and Mother Gota came to visit did I find out that Sahra had done more than just defy the customs of the Nyueng Bao. She had ignored the express orders of her tribal elders to come make herself the wife of a Soldier of Darkness. Confident little witch.
Those toothless old men put no value on the wishes of the “witch” Ky Hong Tray.
I think I have a realistic picture of who and what I am so I am amazed that Sahra ever thought as much of me as I thought of her.
I had to fall backward in time, tumbling smugly toward the one era in my life when I was totally happy, when perfection was the order of the universe. I went to the hour that was my pole star, my center, my altar. I went to the moment every man who ever lived dreams of, that one instant when all wishes and fantasies have the potential to come true and you have only to recognize that and grab it within a heartbeat to make your life complete. For me that moment came almost a year after the end of the siege of Dejagore. And I almost wasted it.
Nyueng Bao were almost always a part of my life then. A scant three weeks following Croaker’s showdown with Mogaba, and Mogaba’s consequent flight, while us survivors were still creeping north toward Taglios, pretending to be triumphant heroes who had liberated a friendly city and rid the world of a bunch of villains, I awakened one morning to find myself under the dubious and permanent protection of Thai Dei. He was no more talkative than ever but in a few words he insisted that he owed me big and he was going to stick to me forever. I thought that was just hyperbole.
Boy, was I thrilled. I was not in a mood to cut his throat so I let him hang on. And he did have a sister I wanted to see a lot more than I wanted to see him, though I never found the nerve to tell him that. Even so . . .
Back in the city, established in the Palace, in my tiny room with my papers and books and Thai Dei sleeping on a reed mat outside my door, him insisting that To Tan was in good hands with his grandmother, I lived a life of confusion, trying to figure out what had happened to us all and to make sense of Lady’s writings. I was not thinking with absolute clarity when I received a gentleman name of Bahn Do Trang, who was a relative of one of the pilgrims of Dejagore. He had a message for me. It was so cryptic it could have qualified as one of the great goof-ball sybilline pronouncements of all time.
“Eleven hills, over the edge, he kissed her,” brother Bahn told me, all splashed up with a huge and un-Nyueng Bao grin. “But the others were not for hire.”
To which I offered this countersign, “Six blue birds in a peppermint tree, warbling limericks of apathy.”
Death of the grin. “What?”
“That’s my line, Pop. You told the guys downstairs you had a critical message for me. Against my better judgment I let you come up here and right away you start spouting nonsense. Tamal!” I yelled at the orderly who assisted me and several others who worked out of rooms nearby. “Show this clown the way to the street.”
Do Trang wanted to argue, looked at my sidekick, thought better of making a fuss. Thai Dei watched the old boy closely but did not look like he wanted the honor of flinging him out on his enigmatic ass personally.
Poor Bahn. It must have been important to him. He seemed stricken.
Tamal was a huge Shadar man-bear, all hair and growl and bad breath. He would have liked nothing better than to pummel a Nyueng Bao all the way to the street and thence to the edge of the city. Bahn went without protest.
Less than a week later I received the identical message as a handwritten note that looked like it had been inscribed by a six-year-old. One of Cordy Mather’s Guards brought it up. I read it, told him, “Give the old fool a beating and tell him not to bother me again.”
The Guard gave me a funny look. He glanced at Thai Dei, then whispered, “Ain’t old, ain’t a him, but probably is a fool, Standardbearer. Was I you I’d take the time.”
I got it. At last. “I’ll just box his ears myself, then. Thai Dei, try to keep the bad guys out. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He did not listen, of course, because he could not bodyguard me from a distance, but I did confuse him long enough to get a headstart. I got down there and got my hands on Sahra before he caught up or got ahead of me. After that he had little say. And my clever lady had brought To Tan to distract him.
Thai Dei did not talk much but that did not make him stupid. He knew he could not win with the cards he held right now. “Clever,” I told Sahra. “I thought I’d never see you again. Hi, kiddo,” I said to To Tan, who did not remember me. “Sahra, honey, you gotta promise me. No more of that cryptic stuff like Grandpa Dam. I’m just a simpleminded soldier.”
I led Sahra inside and up to my little hole in the wall. For the next three years I marvelled every morning when I wakened to find her beside me and almost every time I saw her during the day. She became the center of my life, my anchor, my rock, my goddess, and every damned one of my brothers envied me almost to the borders of hatred though Sahra converted them all into devoted friends. She could give Lady lessons on softening the hearts of hard men.
Not till Uncle Doj and Mother Gota came to visit did I find out that Sahra had done more than just defy the customs of the Nyueng Bao. She had ignored the express orders of her tribal elders to come make herself the wife of a Soldier of Darkness. Confident little witch.
Those toothless old men put no value on the wishes of the “witch” Ky Hong Tray.
I think I have a realistic picture of who and what I am so I am amazed that Sahra ever thought as much of me as I thought of her.
I sipped water, ate, and reflected that this was one time when I had no trouble leaving Smoke’s world. There was no attenuation of the pain if I went out there to see Sarie. What was I doing here?
There was one mystery yet to be illuminated before I allowed Croaker to drag me off into the next fun phase of our great adventure. I wanted to know what had happened between him and Blade.
Smoke and I zigzagged back and forth through time, quartering the temporal reaches, tacking into the winds of time, following a search pattern, looking for anomalies in the relationship between Blade and my boss. I knew about when the blowup happened so, instead, for the time being, I sought contributory evidence.
You can cover a lot of time fast riding Smoke. It did not take long to establish, beyond a doubt, that Blade’s relationship with Lady was never anything but proper, however charged with wishful thinking on his end. Lady never acknowledged Blade’s mooneyes nor those of anyone else. She seemed too accustomed to them to pay them any mind.
So what did happen?
I worried it like a wild dog trying to dig a rodent out of its hole. Smoke was no help at all. There were places, times, angles that he just refused to go see. I tried tricking him several ways, just to find out why he could not or would not go where I wanted him to go. None of that did any good.
Maybe I was baying down the wrong trail.
The actual headbutting had been less than wildly explosive and made only marginal sense when viewed from another point in time. All I could find out that made sense was that Blade and Croaker were sipping some potent home brew before they started getting crazy.
Verbal sniping turned into angry implications which became threats on the Old Man’s part. And the beer continued to flow.
I have to say that Croaker was definitely the bad guy. Or fool. He kept on and on while Blade did his best not to let himself be baited.
That only infuriated Croaker. He spouted threats that left Blade no choice but to run.
I backed away, embarrassed for my Captain. I had not thought that he could be such a complete asshole. I did not understand why he was so insecure about Lady. I felt for Blade, deeply, and had to think less of one of my heroes.
Now that I reflected on it, I recalled occasional bestowals of unpleasantries upon Willow Swan that had not gotten out of hand. And Croaker had even exchanged cross words with the Prahbrindrah Drah once.
I sensed a pattern. It was not one I wanted to see. But it was obvious if you looked for it.
Croaker was obsessed with his woman. He would alienate anyone who offered her too much attention, however costly that might be.
Shit. Why? She was not Sarie.
We had lost Blade already. I do not have a lot of use for Willow Swan, who is much too pretty and too blond, but I would really hate to have the Company on the wrong side of the Prince just because one man could not be sure of his woman.
More scales fell from my eyes, leaving disappointment behind.
I needed to take this up with the brain trust, the oldest of the old, One-Eye, Otto and Hagop. Goblin was too far away and Lady both too far and disqualified by being too intimately involved. A Captain who thought with his balls instead of his brains could get a lot of people killed.
I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of them was ingenious enough to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and female do.
But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from the same dichotomy.
Say, Ky Sahra.
Gods, Murgen. You need to get away from this half-dead old man. You are a hired sword. A soldier. You should not be playing philosophical games. Not even with yourself.
I popped out of contact with Smoke. “It’s time, One-Eye. She’s gone.”
The little wizard tossed a friendly miniature owl into the darkened hallway. Untouched by confusion spells it headed for that part of town where it imagined it nested. It did not look for any particular human. That was not its mission. But plenty of humans looked for it. When it fluttered past them two dozen Black Company veterans and their Nyueng Bao bodyguards rushed a building that had deserved razing a generation before the Shadowmasters entered this quarter of the world.
I had tracked Soulcatcher back to that building from her raid on Smoke’s library. She felt so safe there she was almost contemptuous of security precautions. She had managed to get by undisturbed there for years.
She was going to be one unhappy player when she discovered that she was less in control than she imagined.
I watched, pleased, while Black Company soldiers took the building by the numbers and in a manner so professional that not one Captain ever would have found cause for complaint.
The men now even had the knack of getting their jobs done without stumbling over the Nyueng Bao, who were worse than a herd of cats when it came to getting underfoot. You just had to use them like they were your shadows.
Hardly anyone not directly involved noticed my guys. They got inside, spread out, dug deep, found what I wanted, gathered it up and got back out long before Soulcatcher discovered that she had been outmaneuvered.
Otto and Hagop directed the raid. Putting them in charge was my way of bringing them back into the family. Good soldiers they, they carried out my suggestions, not just cleaning out Soulcatcher’s hideout but grabbing her favorite white crow. They plucked a couple of his feathers and left them in place of the books, tied together with a strand of hair taken from the head of a much younger Soulcatcher, a long time back, and come south with the plunder brought by Otto and Hagop.
That ought to rattle her.
Maybe I should have let Croaker and Lady in on my scheme. In a way, I was making a statement in their names. But this had become personal. I had a statement to make for Murgen. And there was no time for consultations and conferences.
Smoke and I swooped over the guys as they lugged their plunder toward the Palace. I meant to give the books to Croaker as soon as they arrived. He could do whatever he wanted with them. Which probably meant that they would bounce once and land back in my lap, to be disappeared from the ken of all villains and villainesses probably no better than I had hidden the Widowmaker armor.
I wondered if I was going to get too intimate with the meaning of hubris. Soulcatcher would know who done her wrong. She was maybe only a year younger than Lady, which left her an ageless amount trickier and nastier than me.
But what did I have to lose? The only thing I ever loved was gone. I could dance with disaster and grin to the end. Soulcatcher could not do anything that would hurt more than losing Sahra had.
Really?
Sometimes you bullshit yourself.
An hour before sunset four days before the winter solstice, consulting neither the convenience of mortal man, nor sorcerer, nor god or goddess, the earth shifted and shook. In Taglios dishes tumbled off shelves, sleepers awakened in confused panic, dogs howled and cracks appeared in old walls whose foundations had been set with incomplete diligence or without forethought for the possibility of earthquake. It was a half-hour sensation.
In Dejagore structures weakened by former high water or hidden structural defects yielded to the relentless seduction of gravity. Farther south the impact was more severe. Beyond the Dandha Presh, where mountains descended upon valleys with ferocious roars of triumph, the quake left epic horror. Kiaulune was devastated. Even Overlook suffered, though the masonry shrugged off the earth’s worst. Longshadow was in a panic for hours, until it became obvious that the earth’s convulsions had not broken his shadowgates and shadowtraps. Then he began to rage because the destruction and loss of life in Shadowcatch would delay his construction efforts by months. Perhaps even by years.
I had the vague feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, though how anybody could get behind me when I was nothing but a floating viewpoint I did not know. The voice was not there but otherwise the feeling of presence was the same as it was during my earliest plunges into the horrors of Dejagore with the taunting spirit that must have been Soulcatcher. Only a smell accompanied this presence. An odor like . . . Like the smell of the dead Strangler I had found in the deeps of the Palace, like the stench that had become so much a part of life in Dejagore that eventually you noticed it only when it was gone. It was the smell of death.
I had felt a full measure of pain in the delta, imagining that I saw Sahra alive among the Nyueng Bao, despite being out in the numb with Smoke. Now I enjoyed a full measure of terror despite being out there.
I began doing what, in flesh, would have been a full turnaround, slowly. I turned a second time and a third and a fourth, each time faster than the last and each time less in control. And each time around, as I faced what I suspected was southward, I glimpsed something vast and dark and, horribly, each time more clearly, till the last time around I saw a black woman as tall as the sky. She was bare-ass naked. She had four arms and six teats and fangs like a vampire. The stench was her breath. Her eyes burned like windows into hell yet looked into my own and held them and spoke to me with a blistering compulsion and promise a ferocious eroticism beyond anything I had known with Sahra. I screamed.
I popped out of Smoke’s universe.
Smoke had wanted to scream, too. I think he came close to being terrified awake.
One-Eye laughed. “Cold enough, Kid?”
I was soaked. With very cold water. “What the hell?”
“You try staying out there forever again, I’ll freeze your ass for good.”
I began to shake. “Oh, shit, that’s cold.” I did not tell him what I had seen, why I was shaking really. Probably just my imagination running away with me again, anyway. “You dog turd, what the hell are you trying to do, give me a heart attack or something?”
“No. Just trying to keep you from getting lost. You won’t look out for yourself.”
“I think I’m lost already, old timer.”
The stars wink down in cold irony.
There is always a way.
The wind whines and howls with bitter breath, through fangs of ice. Lightning snarls and barks upon the plain of glittering stone. Rage is a red, near-animate force, as bloated with compassion as a starving serpent. Few shadows frisk among the stellae. Many have been summoned, there or yon.
At its heart the plain is disfigured by the scars of cataclysm. A jagged lightning bolt of a fissure has ripped across the face of the plain. Nowhere is that fissure so wide that a child could not step across but it seems bottomless. Trailers of mist drift forth. Some bear a hint of color when they emerge.
Cracks mar the surface of the great grey stronghold. A tower has collapsed across the fissure. From the fastness comes a deep great slow beat like that of a grumbling worldheart, disturbing the silence of stone.
The wooden throne has shifted sideways. It has tilted a little. The figure nailed thereon has changed its sprawl. Its face is drawn in agony. Its eyelids flutter as though it is about to awaken.
This is immortality of a sort but the price is paid in silver of pain.
And even time may have a stop.