53

“That was a stroke of luck, you showing up just then,” I told One-Eye. “I needed to get away.” I relayed what Mother Gota had told me.

“How would she know that?”

I told him about spotting her and Uncle Doj during the night. “Maybe they spotted me, too.”

“Thai Dei could’ve told them.”

“I guess.”

“You think it’s important?”

“They make a special point of making sure I know, I’d better check it out. I didn’t notice anything when I did my routine snooping.”

One-Eye grunted. He looked thoughtful. “Goes to show you. No matter how well set up we are we’re going to miss stuff because we don’t know what to watch for.”

Which was true. Things could be right there in the open and even with the advantage Smoke gave me I could miss them if I did not know to look.

There just was not enough time to look everywhere all the time.

I suggested, “Why don’t you take some of your magic potion over to my in-laws? Screw up their thinking for a while.”

“Thought they didn’t touch the stuff.”

“They’re not supposed to. But I’ve seen Thai Dei take a tummy-warmer a time or three, to be sociable, and his mother would’ve developed a taste for it if Uncle Doj hadn’t been there most of the time we were in Taglios. She’d sneak a few pints whenever he was away. She hasn’t had a chance since we’ve been on the road.”

“Very interesting.” The little black man started rustling around. “Tell you what. I’ll just go over there and keep them company while you’re out. I’ll tell them you’re working.”

He left before I finished my preparations. He lugged a slimy old wooden bucket with him. I muttered, “I got to get him to talk to Swan.” Willow Swan made bad beer, too, but he did know a little about the brewer’s art. Compared to One-Eye’s product Willow’s was ambrosia.

There was very nearly a warmth to Smoke when I took hold of him, as though some part of him sensed that he was no longer alone and was pleased. I took him directly to Overlook, sliding backward in time as we went, avoiding the ruins where the fires burned so I would not see myself. I had to shuffle forward and backward to find Mother Gota’s crows. They were visible only briefly and were never obvious. They streaked in from the north, high above the fortress, then plummeted into Overlook like falling stones. There were no more than a dozen so any message they carried, either direction, would be severely limited. I expected greater numbers from what my mother-in-law had said.

I followed the last one down. The flock did not go near Longshadow’s glowing towertop, where the Shadowmaster labored late over some esoteric text. They plunged into the darkness of a courtyard and entered the fortress through a door standing just a crack ajar. They muttered among themselves, uncomfortable with where they were. A sharp cry, broken off, nearly spooked them.

A voice whispered. I could see nothing but the vaguest shape in the darkness but recognized the Howler’s aborted cry. I did not understand a word he said. I did not understand the crows, who took turns making noises that might have constituted a message. For me the critical piece of information was not included in the body of the message but in the existence of the message.

Soulcatcher and Howler were communicating.

I ran back in time another hour. Howler did nothing but sit there and wait. I jumped forward, planning to bracket him till I found something else interesting.

I had to advance only a few minutes beyond the arrival of the crows.

They stayed only briefly. Then Howler rustled back into the darkness. I drifted along behind him, tracking him by ear and by smell. Even in the ghostworld Howler had an air about him.

He stayed in darkness, away from routes Longshadow might use, till he reached a particular door. He knocked, which surprised me. Howler was the kind of guy who just invited himself in.

Narayan Singh opened the door a crack. Howler fought down a shriek. He was developing a talent for silence. Singh stepped back and allowed him to enter. Howler slipped in like a diminutive Deceiver on a deadly skulk. “It’s time,” he whispered.

Time for what?

Singh knew. He went to the Daughter of Night immediately. The kid was hunched up in front of a small fire, fanatically transcribing that first Book of the Dead. Looked to me like she was almost done. But who knew how long a book it was?

Singh seemed unsure how to approach the girl. He seemed unsure about a lot lately. He was close to superfluous and knew it.

Lady always would have a use for him, though.

He got the girl’s attention. Gods, she was getting spooky! There was an aura about her, something you might call a glow of darkness. In that light her eyes seemed to shimmer like those of a big cat stealing toward your dying campfire. You were drowsing and she was hungry.

“It’s time,” Narayan told her, his whisper barely strong enough to stir the air.

The child nodded curtly. She made a tiny gesture. Narayan bowed, backed away.

There was no doubt who was in charge here, who ruled and who obeyed. Nor any doubt that she was herself controlled by a determined power. She extended her writing hand to Narayan for help rising. It was a claw she could not relax. Her legs were too stiff to unfold on their own. For a moment I pitied her, forgetting she was no true child.

Howler returned to the corridor. He drifted along ahead of Singh and the girl, scouting. Those two insisted on a lamp, which troubled Howler deeply. He muttered and fussed the whole time they were doing their sneak.

By a tortuous route that avoided Longshadow, the garrison and the enclave still held by Lady’s soldiers, Howler led them to an unguarded piece of wall overlooking Kiaulune. Fires were burning down there. I was down there with Thai Dei, cold and disappointed with myself for having been dumb enough to insist on the eyewitness view.

I did not tag along in real time. I skipped forward, compressing events. Howler’s destination was a small carpet concealed atop a domeless tower otherwise not in use. It was a new carpet, smaller than those we had seen before, black as the night around us. More evidence that you cannot know everything that is happening unless you want to spend every minute watching. I had not seen Howler working on this carpet.

With no words exchanged the three lifted it, walked to the edge of the parapet, lockstepped right off into space. They clambered aboard as they fell. Narayan moaned softly, eyes closed. The Daughter of Night was not impressed.

Howler took control in time not to smear them all over the rocks and wreckage below. He began sliding gently along just a few feet above the ground, trying to keep solid objects between himself and Overlook.

I took a quick look at Longshadow.

The Shadowmaster was restless. He had left his studies to stare vaguely toward Kiaulune. He sensed that something was happening but could not determine what.

Howler was playing around behind his ally’s back.

I almost lost the little shit. I had to go back to the moment I left him to pick him up again. Soon afterward he drifted past a band of Mogaba’s guerrillas in the ruins. The guerrillas did not see him but sensed him and panicked, thinking one of the Shadowmaster’s pets was on the prowl. The racket they made drew the attention of nearby Taglians. The soldiers saw something shadowy drifting through the darkness. They wasted no time getting off a volley of fireballs.

Howler changed tactics.

He put on a burst of speed and employed a spell of concealment neither of which he wanted to do that near Overlook. I would have lost him then had not chance favored me.

A wild fireball clipped the corner of the invisible carpet, which began to smolder. The spell of concealment did not include the glow as long as I stayed close.

Howler hauled ass. But he did stay so low that brush scraped the underside of his carpet. At one point he ploughed through some tents and clotheslines in one of the Prahbrindrah Drah’s division camps. He was less concerned about being noticed by our side than by his own.

The race brought on a mild sense of exhilaration. I did not notice it immediately. Then it hit me that I was feeling more emotion than usual. Eventually I realized what I was feeling was some feeble spillover from Smoke.

Sometime during the flight we passed close enough to Uncle Doj and Mother Gota to be noticed but I saw no sign of them. We also swept over my own headquarters close enough to startle the sentries and horses.

I was not entirely surprised when Howler headed for a certain snow-choked canyon. Smoke did not notice until we were close enough to watch Howler land in front of a waiting Soulcatcher amidst an explosion of terrified crows.

In my amusement at the birds I relaxed just a little bit. And Smoke rebelled. She is the darkness.

What?

That was not me. But it did not happen again.

I backed out and up and away, content to go back to my flesh with the knowledge that Howler and Soulcatcher were up to some treachery that included Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night.

The mood Smoke exuded now, if so feeble a thing could be called a mood, was terror.

And terror was out there roving the night, though it was not the terror that haunted my spirit steed.

I caught a whiff of corruption as I moved toward my flesh. I saw nothing. I stopped, experimented, moved in a direction away from the invisible source.

Maybe it caught a whiff of me. The stench grew stronger suddenly. I felt a sensation as of something onrushing. Light flickered in the ghostworld. I saw Kina’s hideous face for an instant, looking directly toward me. But her eyes were blind. Her nostrils flared as though she was trying to catch my wind.

Smoke’s terror might have been what she smelled. He fled in total panic. She is the darkness.

It was more feeble this time but it was there. It was not my imagination.

54

The Old Man did not seem surprised to hear that Soulcatcher might be up to something with Howler. “I wasn’t counting on it but it seemed like a possibility,” he said. “They’ve worked together for ages. We may have Longshadow by the nuts.”

“Somebody better have him by something if he controls the Shadowgate. The other thing is . . . ” How could I put it?

“Other thing?”

“Smoke is showing signs of personality. I think.” I told him what had happened.

“Damn! We don’t want him waking up now.” He thought for a while. “I don’t see how we can stop it if it’s happening.”

“Better see One-Eye about that.”

“Send him over. Wait! Don’t leave. Tell me about the part of the fortress where Singh and the girl hide out.”

It turned out this was more than a passing interest. He wanted maps.

I had that part of the place charted already. All I had to do was get the drawings from One-Eye’s dugout. I brought the little wizard along. He kept grumbling about being wakened in the middle of the night. Once the Old Man had what he needed I shut the curtain to Smoke’s alcove and went off to bed, leaving them to their schemes.

I did not escape Kina just by getting back to my flesh. She was waiting in my dreams. No sooner did I lie down than I found myself in the place of bones. Sahra was waiting.

I had no trouble recalling that she was an illusion. She looked nothing like the Sahra who lived so miserably at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple. This one was too young, too unworn, despite her pallor and the neck crook characteristic of a Deceiver victim.

I had begun to suspect that Kina was slow and unimaginative, although extremely powerful. How had she gotten the angle on Lady?

It was true Lady had not known what she was up against. And ignorance is a chink in the armor a knowledgeable enemy can exploit at will. And, of course, Kina was Queen of the Deceivers.

It no longer mattered how Kina had fooled Lady. What mattered now was that she did not fool me.

That thought left me unable to pretend that I was being deceived. I was not kind to the false Sahra.

Her flesh corrupted and melted right before me. The perfume of Kina, which was the stink of dead bodies, assailed me. A shadow in the grey distance coagulated into a four armed black dancer a hundred feet tall whose pounding feet threw up clouds of bone dust as she stamped and whirled. Her fangs dripped venom. Her eyes burned like dark coals. Her jewelry of bones clattered and rattled. Her breath was the breath of disease.

The Daughter of Night rode upon her shoulder like a small second head. She was excited as a child making her first trip to the county fair.

Kina was not pleased with Murgen.

Armbones lifted out of the litter, grasping with fleshless fingers. Sahra’s skeleton stumbled toward me. I willed myself away and, behold!, I drifted up and backward a few feet. I willed myself again and moved again, not far, amazed that I had control and bewildered because I had not tried to exercise it before.

Kina stopped dancing and stomped toward me. Her fangs grew longer. Her six breasts dripped poison. She put on another pair of arms. The Daughter of Night bounced excitedly on her shoulder, immune to the lure of gravity.

I willed myself away.

I had control but that was not my world. I could not run away faster than the world’s creator. A great gleaming, taloned black hand swooped down. I dodged. A claw brushed me. I spun ass over appetite into darkness.

And I was in the cavern filled with old men caught in spiderwebs of ice. I drifted along past faces I not only knew I knew, I remembered the names that went with them.

I felt a panic like what you would feel if you were closed up in a small place in the dark. A buried-alive panic. I did not let it manage me. I tried, again, to manage myself and found I could move along the cavern if I willed it, like I did when I was walking with Smoke. I moved a whole lot slower here, though. I tried moving out through the walls. Like the real world, and unlike riding Smoke, I was constrained pretty much by physical rules. My only way out of the cavern would be forward or back. Which did not make much sense if I was dreaming and had gotten in there without following any complicated route.

Was it possible physical laws operated only when I was in control? Could it be that I was unable to walk through walls because I never learned the knack in daily life?

I decided to go forward, up the slope of the cavern floor, because that is what I always did in the fragments of dream I remembered. As I did so I became aware of an inchoate anger growing behind me, as of something hunting that was frustrated. I did my best to speed up.

There was more in those ice caves than old men. There were more old men, none of them known to me. There were treasures. There was junk, like everything that ever fell down a crack ended up there. There were books.

Three huge tomes bound in worn, cracked dark leather rested on a large, long stone lectern, as though waiting for three speakers to step up and read at the same time. The first book was open to a page three-quarters of the way through. I caught only a glimpse of the page before some compelling force pushed me away. It was identical to the page the Daughter of Night had been transcribing when Narayan Singh interrupted her so they could go visit Soulcatcher. The calligraphy was superior, more colorful and ornate, but the child had missed nothing important, I was sure.

The anger behind me grew stronger. It seemed to be looking for a focus. I learned early never to volunteer. I moved on as fast as my will would carry me, wondering what sort of nightmare this was. Its most bizarre and fantastic elements were most real. Maybe it was a mirror of the waking world.

The anger kept gaining although I saw nothing when I looked back. It did not catch me. I do not think. But without actually passing through anything suddenly I was in another place. There was a full bowl of stars overhead but not even a sliver of moon. I was high in the air. I could distinguish no features on the ground below.

It was like ghostwalking without the ghost. Only I could not just tell Smoke where to go and get there almost instantly. I could move, it seemed, though it was hard to tell . . . I had to have landmarks, I realized. I pushed back my panic.

I thought. I did have information. I knew up and down. I had a full field of stars overhead, so numerous they almost overwhelmed the outstanding constellations normally used for navigation. Trouble was, I had not studied the southern skies closely. Any astronomical navigation I did would be only slightly better than a guess.

I caught a faint whiff of corrupt flesh. That whipstroke got me moving toward a cluster of stars I vaguely recalled hanging close to the northern horizon during the spring. There were three of them in a flat triangle, all bright. The star at the peak of the triangle waxed and waned. Many legends attended it, most of them unpleasant. I was not intimate with them.

From that altitude I could see a fourth star in the constellation, equally bright, below the other three. I recalled seeing that formation when the Company was still far north of Taglios.

How high was I? Or was I somewhere far north of Ki-aulune?

I stopped moving forward and slanted down toward the earth. I found myself over a region where agriculture was extremely orderly, communal, making the most efficient use of man, animal and equipment, various operations having been laid out in a circle around a central manor with hamlets and single dwellings strung out along the spokes of wheels. Preparations for spring planting had begun although there were no workers in the fields at night.

I passed over circle after circle. The ground between had been left wild. I suppose it supported game and provided timber and charcoal and firewood.

I had heard of the region. It was in the Shadowlands west of Kiaulune. Longshadow had been experimenting with agricultural efficiencies in an effort to produce more with fewer workers so he could free up manpower to work construction on Overlook and serve in his armies.

I was not all that far from my own gang.

I worked my way eastward. After what seemed like hours I spied the glow from fires burning in the ruins of Kiaulune. I found my own part of our encampment, then my own shelter. I was comfortable enough with my condition to do a little experimenting now.

It took only moments to learn that while I could not will myself through a wall, or even the blankets One-Eye had hung for a doorway, or the side of a tent, I could slide my point of view through a crack or hole too small for a mouse or snake.

I could not go back or forth in time. I was confined to the now of my sleeping flesh.

I had control of the dream. It seemed real. What I saw of the camp was exactly what the camp should have been like while I was sleeping. My imagination was not good enough to make up a whole dream world that mimicked the real world exactly. A big question occurred.

Would I be able to do this again? Would getting here always be outside my control, the way it had been when I kept tumbling off the wall of today into the horrors of Dejagore?

If this was going to be one-time I had better use it for all it was worth.

I snaked back out into a cold I did not feel. For a second I thought about heading for the plain but just the thought stirred up an instant, powerful revulsion. Maybe later.

I went toward the mountains instead.

Spying on Soulcatcher would do. Up close. Without disturbing the crows, I discovered. They remained asleep. So did their mistress.

Her company had left. I was not going to find out a damned thing.

I could go over to Overlook and see what everybody was doing . . . I saw the faintest hint of light in the east. Dawn was on its way. And I began to feel a compulsion to head for the safety of my flesh. That drive grew stronger as the light did the same.

I headed for my body wondering if I was a dreaming vampire now.

Mother Gota was awake already. Though Soulcatcher had not been able, Ky Gota seemed to sense me somehow. She turned when I weaseled inside, looked almost directly at me, frowned when she saw nothing, then shuddered the way you do when a chill runs down your spine.

She went back to her cooking. I noted that she was preparing more food than she, Thai Dei and I could possibly eat all day. I supposed she planned to take some out to Uncle Doj.

55

You look like shit,” One-Eye told me over breakfast.

“Thanks for the boost.”

“What’s up?”

“Bad dreams last night.” He did not know what I had been going through. I chose not to share everything now but I did practice my Forsberger long enough to tell him, “It looks like our friend the crow woman is up to something with her old pal Howler, our favorite Deceiver and the kid.”

Both Thai Dei and Mother Gota glanced at me sharply. I had used the Taglian for “Deceiver,” tooga. It was the same in Nyueng Bao.

“And old Longshadow thinks he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah. The Old Man always says even paranoids sometimes got somebody trying to stab them in the back.” Usually when I let him know I thought he was overdoing the paranoia himself.

“That kind of thing is nice to know but how can we use it?”

“Not my problem. I just work here. The Captain gets to make the decisions. That’s why he’s the Captain.” Just for the fun of it I slipped in the Taglian for “captain,” jamadar. Thai Dei and Mother Gota looked me over again. In the context of the Deceivers jamadar means more than just “captain.” It indicates a leader of a band, which is like a small nation of Deceivers. The only Deceiver jamadar now known to be alive was Narayan Singh, who had become jamadar of jamadars before the destruction of his cult.

They would think we were talking about the living legend, the saint who still walked the earth on his goddess’s behalf.

I tucked the last of my breakfast away, thanked Mother Gota, got up and left the dugout. Thai Dei followed me. I told him, “I’m just going to see the Captain. If you want to you can stay and work on the house.” We called our hole in the ground the house now.

Thai Dei shook his head. He had gotten lax about bodyguarding me lately. I did not feel neglected.

Time has a way of blunting the sharpest edge of determination.

I waited a moment for One-Eye to join us but he did not come out. More and more the little shit seemed perfectly willing to invite himself to my family meals rather than go to any trouble on his own.

I should be surprised after all these years?

Croaker looked about as happy as I felt. His night had been no bed of roses, either. He grumbled, “What is it this time?”

“Did a little dreaming last night. Went to hell and came back and then went out roaming without using Smoke at all.” I gave him the unhappy details.

“Could you do that again?”

“I been falling through rabbit holes in space and cracks in time for over a year. Maybe I’m getting the hang of it.”

“We wouldn’t need Smoke.”

“Especially since he’s threatening to wake up.” I must have had a nasty look on my face because he raised an eyebrow. I said, “It’d be fun to watch him try to get used to the new world he’d wake up in.”

Croaker smirked. “You’d want to stand upwind. He’d shit his guts out when he saw how far we’ve come. By the by, as long as you’re here, it’d be handy if you’d go see Lady. I sent her your maps. She’s going to pick off Narayan and catch the girl. If anybody asks you about the maps all you know is that we captured a couple of Mogaba’s officers who used to belong to Overlook’s garrison.”

I grunted, not entirely thrilled. I would not be able to lie to Lady convincingly.

“Experiment with this. I have to know if we can get along without Smoke.”

“I already know about one severe handicap.”

“Uhm?”

“I can’t travel back in time when I’m on my own.”

He sucked a bunch of air in, blew it out. “Wouldn’t you know? There had to be a catch. Smoke’s got job security.”

“You said you’d talk to One-Eye about keeping him from waking up.”

“He wasn’t much help.”

“Is he ever?”

“If you see him, send him over.”

“Right.” I got out of there, paused outside to stare across at the encampment below Overlook’s wall. I said, “The boss wants me to go over there and show Lady how to manage her business.”

It was a bright, sunshiny day. There was enough breeze to carry the smoke and stench away. Thai Dei observed, “Maybe some of the ground will dry up.”

Most of the snow had melted. It was springtime. Around Kiaulune that meant mud season. Mud would mean bugs eventually.

I wondered if melting snows would cause floods that would chase Soulcatcher out of her hideout.

It was time spring came to Kiaulune. It had arrived already everywhere else.

56

“I figured you’d crawl out of the woodwork pretty soon,” Willow Swan grumbled when I joined the crowd around Lady. Her staff were munching rolls one-handed while she told them what she wanted done so she could catch Narayan. “You turn up every time things get nasty.”

Blade showed me a smile. “The man needs a girlfriend.”

“Thought he had one, only she already has a boyfriend.”

“That’s where she was last night, eh?”

“Maybe.” It might explain why Croaker was so damned groggy this morning.

That man just had one adventure after another.

Lady was saying, “There were shadows in there before but Jarwaral says they haven’t been a problem lately. These charts supposedly show us where we can find the shadowweavers if we want. I want. We’ll take them out before we go after the Deceiver. Ah! Murgen.”

“She had to spot me,” I muttered to Blade. I looked for the inevitable crows. They were notable for their scarcity. The couple I did see acted like they were blind drunk.

Lady had employed some spell to diminish the flow of information to her sister.

“You stand out in a crowd,” Swan told me. “The women always notice you.”

Lady continued, “Come here. The Captain sent these charts. What do you know about them?”

“They’re supposed to be reliable.” A hundred percent unless there had been some heavy renovations in the last few hours.

“They aren’t very extensive.”

Bitch and gripe, bitch and gripe. Nobody is ever satisfied. “Want I should go dig the guy up and let you do some kind of necromantic thing on him?”

She gave me such an ugly look that for a moment I was afraid she would call my bluff. But she did not doubt me, she just was not getting the kind of fear and respect she expected. She relaxed, told me, “Except for the locations of the shadowweaver hideouts and where Singh is holing up there isn’t much here we didn’t know already.”

Which stuff was what the exercise was all about, woman. “There’s a little more. Longshadow is almost always locked up in this tower here, doing whatever he does instead of giving us grief. Howler has an apartment somewhere around here. He keeps two carpets on a flat place over here and a little bitty, brand-new one rolled up right beside his bed.”

Lady gave me a piercing look. How could I know that?

I told her, “The day he got here Howler started covering his ass in case his partner turned on him someday.”

“Uhm?” she grunted. “Howler would. Particularly in view of what Longshadow tried to do to his previous associates.” She turned her attention to the charts. But I knew she was not satisfied. She could not be satisfied when somebody else knew anything that she did not.

She beckoned Isi, Ochiba and Sindawe closer. The Nar generals worked well with her. They did not do so with the Old Man. Croaker could not trust them even though they stuck with the Company against Mogaba. “Should we do this in the daytime or at night?”

Ochiba, a man I had heard speak maybe five times in that many years, said, “It won’t matter in there.”

“True. But I prefer by daylight. For the impact on morale.”

“It’s daytime now,” Swan observed.

I told Blade, “You can’t get anything past this guy.”

Lady glanced at Willow. “You want to see how well your Guards can perform in there?”

“I’d love to. But that isn’t their job.”

Their job was to look out for the Prince and Princess, neither of whom he or they had been near in recent times.

Everybody there had that thought at the same time I did. Everybody gave Swan a long look. He reddened.

“Sindawe, you’re my second choice.” Lady stepped aside so the tall Nar could move closer to the charts. I had kept wriggling forward. Now I could see that there was more than one set. Only one was the one I had prepared. The other, structured differently, may have been put together by Lady’s people based on what her soldiers had found inside Overlook.

The Nar officer stared for a while. “We ought to rotate fresh troops in before we do anything else.”

Isi agreed. “The men inside have been there a long time, under a lot of pressure.”

Lady said, “I’ll approve that.”

Sindawe said, “We should add numbers for this. Once we start moving there won’t be any point to pretense. Will there?”

“Probably not. Succeed or fail, going ahead will attract some close scrutiny. And the Captain hasn’t given us the option of not going ahead. Has he, Murgen?”

I shrugged. “He’ll always defer to the commander on the scene. You know that. As long as you can make a good argument.”

“We don’t have an option, then. We’ve been stalling in hopes somebody else would come up with a workable solution to the Longshadow dilemma.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The fact that we can’t kill him. You know that, don’t you?”

I knew that. What I did not know was how they planned to send fresh troops into Overlook.

Sindawe said, “We ought to pursue every phase of the effort at once. Here, here, toward these shadow weaver hideouts. Here, toward the Deceiver’s holeup. And a general raid against the garrison and servant population, too. So they don’t interfere in our other efforts.”

“Go for Longshadow, too,” Lady suggested. “You might get lucky.”

I was missing something. There was a hundred-foot wall over there, not nearly as shiny as it used to be, and absent some of its pretty towers, but not one foot shorter than it ever was. Why were these people not impressed? “You all walk through walls or something?”

“If that’s convenient,” Lady replied.

“We’ll crawl,” Sindawe told me.

Soon enough I discovered something else that I had missed while doing my all-seeing thing in the ghostworld because I had not been looking.

57

They had a tunnel under the wall. Through the foundation, really. But just a wormhole of a thing. A guy my size had to slither on his belly like a snake. I know because I did it.

Fool.

Why did I have to do it in the flesh? I could have gone back and ridden Smoke. I could have seen everything with no claustrophobia, no bruised elbows or knees, no pops in the snot box from the heels of the clown in front of me. No weaseling through the farts and fear smells of the hundred little vegetarians snaking along ahead of me, raising the dead with all the clatter of their weaponry.

Where were the Shadowmaster’s boys? All this racket, they had to be chuckling while they sharpened their swords. They were going to have Tals for their afternoon snack.

The tunnel had been created in part by a liberal application of Lady’s fireball tools. In places its walls were still hot. It was completely new. All I saw when I got to its nether end was a gang of raggedy-ass Taglians who had been on the inside way too long. They looked like they had had a glimpse of heaven but a bunch of assholes like me were blocking the way.

I was the last guy in my string. Number one hundred one. When I crawled out of his way number one of the guys being relieved dove into the hole and slithered away.

Only twenty got to leave for each hundred who came in. The twenty were very enthusiastic. But nobody heard the clatter upstairs.

Ochiba, Isi and Sindawe began choosing up teams to go thump on Longshadow’s guys. Sindawe always was decent to me, even when he worked for Mogaba. He was willing to change his ways, though. “Would you like to lead an attack group, Standardbearer?”

“Obviously you have me confused with somebody who thinks he’s a hero.”

“You could make big points by catching Narayan Singh.”

“I don’t need big points. Talk to Blade or Swan.”

Sindawe chuckled. “You won’t see them in here.”

“Why not?”

“They aren’t Company. Lady wouldn’t trust them in a tight place.”

Interesting. She would trust these Nar.

Croaker did not. Not one hundred percent. Never.

Sindawe read me plain. He smiled. “This place is tight enough.”

“Yeah. I still ain’t going to be a hero. I’ll just come along behind and watch so I can write it down right.”

“Sin,” Isi called. “Got to move. The garrison knows something’s going on.”

The Shadowlanders were slower than I expected. Sindawe and his pals were faster. About as quickly as it took to think it they led three groups off to the attack, going like they were right at home although none of them had been inside Overlook before.

Overlook inside was no shiny white marvel. Wherever we were, it was way down deep in the ground where it was dirty and damp and unpleasant creatures with two, four or six more legs than me lurked in every shadow. Thai Dei did not like it at all.

He had needed several hundred-man shifts just to find nerve enough to come inside.

“Move back,” I growled at the troops waiting to go out. “For now this tunnel only runs one way. Thai Dei, slap that moron up side the head. Then thump that fool sitting in the mouth of the tunnel gawking. Let’s go, people. There’s a war going on in here. We don’t have time for lolligagging.” I was turning into a real top kick. Now if I could get the vocabulary working.

“Lolligagging” does not exist in Taglian. The word got me a lot of dazed looks. The pithier nouns, verbs and adjectives do exist, mostly, with much of the usual impact. Religious insults work real good, too.

“You,” I said to a head being birthed by the tunnel, “pass the word back that we’re engaged. We need people in here as fast as we can get them.”

Sindawe reappeared. He was the commanding officer for this deathdance. He was amused by my barking. But he was politic. He was a big general only where the Taglian troops were concerned. The day might come when I was his boss inside the Company. He told me, “There’s still the attack on Longshadow to launch. You could spearhead that one.”

I recalled the black spear One-Eye made specially for sticking Shadowmasters. Be a handy tool if I was to do something dumb like go after Longshadow. “I’ll let somebody else have that honor. I don’t want to hog everything.”

Tell the truth, the place had me spooked. The smell of damp stone, vermin and old fear, combined with the cold and bad light, recalled too strongly all my nightmares about old men trapped forever in caverns where neverseen spiders spun webs and cocoons of ice.

Coming inside Overlook had been a dumb idea. I suspected that when I made the decision to visit, but I did not listen to the little voice of fear because all those guys like Blade and Swan were hanging around grumbling about how the boys from headquarters never risk their cute and precious butts when the blood and shit start flying.

It was the usual stuff. I started the same sort of crying about an hour after I took the oath. I just did not want to be the guy the troops thought had spent his last thirty years with his head up his butt.

My message reached the other end of the tunnel. People started arriving at double speed.

I had no idea if Longshadow and Howler realized we had a way into Overlook. They did not act like they were desperate to plug an unexpected breach in the wall. Their response was angry and vigorous but only with the power you would expect if they thought the bunch already inside were getting frisky.

Our people did not reach Longshadow. Which was no surprise. The surprise of the century would have been if the crazy son of a bitch had come floating belly up.

Likewise Soulcatcher’s little screaming buddy the Howler. Except that Isi, who was running that try, was clever enough to know he just might not be one hundred percent successful at squashing the little shit. So while he kept Howler dancing saving his ass from fifty guys with bamboo poles, five other guys burned his flying carpets. All but the little one that he kept right beside him. And Isi would have gotten that one, too, if Howler had had the balls to chase Isi’s men the way Isi wanted. What Isi failed to appreciate was that very few men were hung as heavy as him.

However she managed it Lady had a good grasp of events inside the fortress. She recognized the failures where Longshadow and her former employee were concerned. She also knew, somehow, that Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night, by coincidence or the grace of their deity, happened to be away from their quarters when our gang turned up to collect them.

Their servants were not so lucky.

Most of those who had chosen to come into Overlook, either to serve the Shadowmaster or just to be safe from pestilence, hunger, or other terrors of the world, were not as lucky as their master. Ochiba took the garrison completely off guard. He and his men must have had trouble hearing their parents when they were growing up. They never got a grasp on the concepts of mercy or noncombatants.

Which I really did not get a good look at till much later. After I got out of that slaughterhouse. After the casualties started coming in to the tunnel head, for evacuation if the chance came. After Lady stopped sending men in because she thought that would be a waste. After I got me back out of there, in one uncarved piece, dragging one end of a wounded Taglian while Thai Dei pushed the other, with the Taglian complaining all the way and the tunnel about a mile longer going out than it had been coming in. After coming up into free air only to find Willow Swan and Blade there wondering aloud why I was not back inside collecting Longshadow’s ears.

“Didn’t want to steal your chance to count coup. Sindawe’s got you all set up. All you guys got to do is pick up a couple of sharp knives and slide on in there. You can collect Howler’s scalp while you’re at it. You’ll find them waiting for you together, I think. Up by the Shadowmaster’s tower.”

“You ready?” Blade asked Swan. “I got my knife.” Blade had a grin on. He was perfectly willing to give Swan just as much crap as he gave me.

Lady came striding toward us. She was decked out in the complete Lifetaker armor. Threads of red fire slithered over its black, hideous surface faster than the eye could follow. Taglians thought the Lifetaker image matched one of Kina’s Destroyer avatars. Despite what had been done to her and her daughter, plenty of people still thought she was a creature of the dark goddess. Sometimes those people included me.

There was a connection for sure. She would not discuss it.

But I did not tell her about me and Smoke. So we were even.

“Any success to report?” Her voice was a bass boom rolling down a long, cold tunnel. “Anything at all?”

“Lots of dead people. Both sides. A lot of them aren’t people we especially wanted dead. But I’d say they’ve only got one way left to hang on to the place.”

“Which is?”

“Loose the shadows.” I sort of croaked it out. I did not want to be a fortune-teller but that was a future that did not require a lot of divination. “Unless these two get to Longshadow first.” I indicated Swan and Blade.

Lady was not in a mood for banter.

She never was. The woman had about as much humor in her as my mother-in-law.

She did enjoy a good impaling, though.

She did the thing that created the cyclone of light blades and turned it loose among the taller towers. It drifted around on its own, doing plenty of damage and keeping Longshadow and Howler too busy to finish off her troops.

58

“That’s the second time,” the Old Man growled. “I thought I got through to you after the adventure in Kiaulune.” He was pissed off because I had gone inside Overlook. “You take Smoke down there and find out what the Shadowmaster and Howler are doing.”

When Thai Dei and I had gotten back we had found Croaker already barking and snarling at a gang of couriers. Obviously he thought Lady had started something the rest of us were going to regret.

I got the feeling Soulcatcher clued in late and was about as thrilled as the Captain. Crows appeared everywhere. They were unpleasant, even for Catcher’s agents. They swooped around shooting crow shit everywhere.

“When you’re done checking on Longshadow and Howler I want you to start identifying the whereabouts of every man of ours.”

“Ours?”

“The Company. Old Crew. Nar. I want to get everybody together. Real soon now.”

“You got it.”

“Of course. But add in a dab of common sense, Murgen. To get to Khatovar the Company needs a standardbearer. Probably more than it’ll ever need a Captain or Lieutenant.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If anybody had a clue what you were up to it’s just possible they could do the things you want done when you want them done.” I walked away before we squabbled in front of the troops.

Longshadow was taking it out on Howler. And Howler was getting him even more pissed off by not paying a lot of attention. He was witching up some colorful little construct out of thin air. I had to study it a while before I recognized it as a representation of the areas of Overlook that were in our side’s hands. It was a complicated little cyan and magenta mess with a tail that dipped through the foundations of the wall to Lady’s positions outside.

He did nothing to restrain his screams. Several came in quick succession, howls that seemed to have a little extra emotion behind them.

The third howl triggered something inside Longshadow’s head. He shut up. He adjusted his mask, leaned forward to stare at Howler’s construct. He reached out with fingers as skinny as spider legs despite being inside a glove, poked at the tail leading to the outside. “How did she manage that? That should not have been possible.” His lunacy, his rant, vanished like mist in the morning sun. It was almost as if his reason had cleared. “The stone cannot be worked.”

“That’s Senjak out there, if you’ll recall. She’ll work the stone the same way you did.”

Longshadow made a noise like a cat’s growl. I thought his moment of lucidity had passed. I thought he was about to have an all-time fit. He fooled me. “Find the Deceiver and his brat. They need to be here, inside this tower, before midnight. If they want to survive.”

Howler replied with an interrogative grunt.

“I have no use for them anymore. I owe them nothing. They have done nothing for me. But I will give them this opportunity to survive.”

I did not wait around to learn what happened next.

“What’re you doing back already?” Croaker demanded when I sat up. “You haven’t been out long enough—”

“Excuse me, boss. I’ve already got a mother-in-law. Yes, I was out there long enough to hear Longshadow say he’s going to turn the shadows loose tonight.”

Croaker shut his mouth. I hurried through the information. He said, “You’re right. He didn’t say shadows in that many words but it can’t be anything else. Get back to it. I’ll round up One-Eye and get the word out.”

“How long do we have?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what time it is now. Just get going.”

“I’ll need water and food brought in. The water should be sweet.”

“Go.” I went.

59

I came back to flesh every few minutes to report the whereabouts of those Company brothers I could locate. The Old Man sent warnings to those he could, telling them to get over to the division at the Shadowgate.

Wagons were on the move soon, leaving Lady’s crude factories with stocks of bamboo her workers had been able to reload. The supply seemed woeful to me.

I darted everywhere. When I thought it would not hurt I fluttered northward. Swarms of crows came and went from the ravine where Soulcatcher holed up. I skipped backward in time, watched the Old Man and, sure enough, I found a time when he whispered to those two huge crows of his and they promptly flapped off to gossip with the crazy sister. I could not get Smoke anywhere near her, of course, and anytime I pushed even a little I got that tickling she is the darkness sensation.

I got a ghost of the same thing when I swarmed off to see what the Daughter of Night was doing, though Smoke showed no reluctance to move a little closer. The child was writing furiously, her little face contorted in pain. She was working on a different volume. This one she had only just begun.

“Oh, shit!” She finished the first one already? Croaker needed to know that. We might be in deeper shit than I had thought.

Where was the Book? I did not see it anywhere. I had better find out.

I took a dive into the past.

I found the Daughter of Night crying. I found Narayan Singh stunned by that. He had not seen that before and did not know how to comfort her, though he had had children of his own in another time, another world, before the Black Company came to Taglios.

I pushed back farther, to discover the cause of this bizarre circumstance. I could think of a hundred unlikely candidates I expected to see cry before that grim midget broke down.

It started when she and Singh returned to their apartment after having escaped it only a step ahead of Lady’s raiders. Though forewarned the child had been too busy writing to pay close attention and had waited almost too long.

Their exit had been so hasty they had had to leave the Book behind.

So, I thought, some lad from Lady’s gang realized it was important and decided to take it back to the boss. I would have suspected Swan or Blade had they been inside Overlook.

I was surprised again when I did identify the culprit.

Howler. The little snake managed to slither into those quarters while supposedly driving our men back, while Narayan and the girl were suffering the effects of a mild disorientation spell not fifty feet away. He made the Book vanish.

The screaming wizard must have feared that he could be seen from afar because he pulled a bunch of stunts and used a handful of spells, over the next several hours, to make sure the Book got lost to everybody but himself.

He left a blank book behind. It was a twin of the one he took.

Curious. How did Howler know about the Book? I checked my memories against whatever Smoke could find fast. Yep. Neither the kid nor Singh mentioned it to anybody. Longshadow’s people did tell him that they had asked for writing stuff but the Shadowmaster had not passed that on to Howler.

I knew about the Book. I had told Croaker about it. Howler had visited Soulcatcher. The Old Man communicated with Catcher.

Could it be?

If I got a chance to dream my way around there again I might try to find out . . . Shit! I could see only what was happening right now.

I ripped out of there, went back to my flesh. I was starving and thirsty when I came out.

“About time,” One-Eye told me.

I guzzled water. “Where’s Croaker?”

“Out making sure everybody knows they need to keep their shelters buttoned up tight tonight. Trying to get those shadow repellent candles out where we’re thin on bamboo poles.”

“Oh.” I ate for a few minutes. My manners were not upper-class. Then I asked, “You got any idea what’s going on between the Captain and Soulcatcher?”

“I didn’t know anything was.”

I groaned, drank some more water. “You blind?”

He shrugged. “What did I miss?”

“Those two have been swapping information all along. That don’t sound that smart to me.”

“You figure the Old Man ain’t smart enough to deal with her?”

That was exactly what I figured. Soulcatcher was a slippery old fish when Croaker’s grandfather was wetting his diapers. “Me? Doubt the Captain in any way? How could I do such a thing?”

“Not you. You’re a veritable worshipper of the cow flops he walks on. You got a reason to be in a panic? Soon as we get straightened out here I want to get back to my hole. I’ve got some suckers coming over for a game of tonk.”

That was One-Eye. The world was coming to an end and his main interest was cheating somebody at cards. “Tell the boss Howler snatched the copy of the book his kid was writing. He left her a blank so she could start over.” I took a deep drink while One-Eye stared at me dumbly, waiting for me to explain what I meant. I told him, “He’ll understand.”

“Everybody’s got to keep secrets from everybody else. So the only people who know what’s going on are their enemies.”

I grunted as I turned back to Smoke. One-Eye had a point.

As we neared Lady I sensed Smoke’s she is the darkness emotion, not very strongly. He must have a thing about females in general since he seemed to respond the same to all of them.

Lady had received word but she did not seem troubled. Longshadow loosing his pets had been a concern of hers for years. Her men were trained. What needed preparing was kept at a state of near readiness all the time. Her division might succumb but not through their own failings.

That had been Lady’s way from the dawn of time.

I yielded to temptation and sped off to the north. I told myself I wanted to see if I could find Goblin and Mogaba. It would be good to know how exposed they might be in the coming mess. But I wanted to go on, past there, a long way. All the way to the wellsprings of my heart.

I might not get to see her again, ever. This might be the last night of my life.

60

Goblin was almost impossible to find despite there being crows wobbling all over above the south face of the Dandha Presh. His handiwork was obvious, though. Anywhere that the locals were insane enough to cooperate with Mogaba, Goblin’s band had pillaged and burned and made examples. Mogaba’s troops had done the same to everyone dim enough to cooperate with Goblin or any of our allies. From a strictly practical, aftermath sort of viewpoint it was impossible to tell who had provided which instructional display.

The locals did not seem to care who was fighting whom, or why. They knew they did not see any good guys or bad guys anywhere. During the few minutes I took to dip around in time I saw several villages and manors attacked. The nearer the present the violence occurred the more likely its victims were to resist whoever came calling.

The forvalaka participated in some of Goblin’s night raids. Crows came and went when she did, but a few always did so even if the big cat was elsewhere.

They visited Mogaba, too. Apparently. Longshadow had provided Mogaba with an arsenal of mystical objects capable of distracting a seeker like myself, of averting any other watching eye.

But this was not getting me to what I wanted to see.

I did take a moment to check in on Cordy Mather’s party. Old Cordwood was on the south side of the Dandha Presh now, moving slowly and moving at all only because the mountains remained incredibly inhospitable.

Cordy did not have crow trouble. That I could see.

I was startled, though, to discover that a flock of the little monsters had nested amongst the crags and crumbles of the exterior of the Palace at Trogo Taglios. Though that should not have amazed me so, on reflection. Events in the Palace would be of particular interest to Soulcatcher, who liked to push her nose deep into everybody’s business.

I was too eager to visit the swamp to waste time rooting around in the Radisha’s secrets. She is the darkness. She was still holding a lot of meetings with priests and leading men. Our books remained hidden where we had left them.

I was surprised that the Radisha was making no great effort to find Smoke anymore. I did not believe that she had forgotten him.

But I wanted to travel on. Banh Do Trang should have had time to reach Sahra.

Oh, he had. He had! For the sheer power of the self-tantalization I joined him late in his journey and followed him as he approached the Temple of Ghanghesha. Shortly before he reached the place he stepped off the trail, which was just a raised path meandering through swamp converted to rice paddy, and took time to adopt a disguise using materials he had brought along. A little more dirt, a change in the hang of his hair, the quick adoption of a raggedy orange robe, and he became a wandering mendicant of one of the Gunni cults. Their vows-of-poverty missionaries went everywhere. Even the Nyueng Bao tolerated them. Their holiness was beyond question, however mad they might be as individuals.

I have always found the religious tolerance of the southerners amazing and disconcerting, though it was really only an ancient habit predicated on the fact that no religious community was strong enough to show the rest the errors in their thinking at swordspoint.

Trang continued on his way. He did the mendicant part very well. I think he may have played it before, maybe while first visiting Taglios. Nyueng Bao were not welcomed warmly there. They were too arrogant a minority.

No matter. Trang was admitted to the temple. The older priests seemed to know the character he pretended to be.

Trang did not approach Sahra immediately. In fact, he waited till evening before contriving to stumble into her. They had encountered one another several times during the day. Sahra had not recognized him.

He made his apologies in softly whispered Taglian while Sahra was still too rattled by the collision to give herself away by jumping.

I did not hear what Trang said. I did see Sahra’s eyes focus and fill with surprised life. She accepted his profuse apologies and went her way.

That night she left the door to her cubicle unlatched. She indulged in the extravagance of leaving her candle burning.

Trang arrived very late, when the only priests still awake were the three making the regular midnight offering to Ghanghesha in hopes of inspiring the god to grant the world another complete daily cycle free from calamity and despair.

Trang scratched at the door to Sahra’s cell. It was a crude wicker thing that would not have thwarted a determined woodchuck. More a symbol of the thing than the thing itself, really. A rag curtain hung behind it, containing the light. Sahra let Trang inside, gestured him to a seat upon her mat. The old man sat, taking his due. He looked up at Sahra with liquid eyes. I knew he understood the substance of the message he carried even though he was far too honorable a man to have read it.

In that instant I nearly panicked. I had tried some to teach Sarie to read but she had not picked up much. How would she be able to . . . ? She would ask Trang, of course. And then I would find out just how good a friend the old man was. If his secret self sided with Uncle Doj . . . 

Sahra’s manners were perfection, which maddened me.

Even though she could not serve tea or indulge in any of the other ceremonial delays Nyueng Bao use to avoid getting to the point, she managed to delay the crisis of the visit for fifteen minutes.

“I have a message,” Trang said at last, in a whisper that could not have been heard by someone listening outside the door, even had that eavesdropper spoken Taglian. “It was delivered into my hand by a Stone Soldier who carried it north all the way from the last stronghold of the Shadowmasters. He insisted that it be delivered to you. Here.”

Sahra lowered herself to her knees before him. It was difficult for her. She was getting big. She met his eye, frowning slightly. She did not speak. I do not think she trusted herself to open her mouth.

“The Soldier of Darkness knew where you were. He knew what name you were using. This when I myself did not suspect that you had survived the tooga. Your family are cunning in their cruelty.”

Sahra nodded. Still she did not trust herself to speak.

Gods, she was beautiful!

“They knew from half a world away, child. This frightens me. These are terrible times and terrible people walk among us. Some of them we cannot recognize. The Bone Warriors appear no more frightful than any others, yet—”

“A message, Uncle?” She used that word as an honorific. Trang was not related in any way.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I grow so frightened whenever I spend too much time thinking.”

Sahra took my letter, stared at it a moment, reluctant to find out what was inside. But she was happy, too, I could see. Her husband’s brotherhood knew and cared. “Who brought this?”

“He did not give a name. He is very young. He is Jaicuri. Vehdna. Low caste.”

“He has a scar that makes his left eyelid droop so when you see him from that side it looks like he’s having trouble staying awake?”

“Indeed. You know him?”

“I remember him.” She turned my letter over again.

“Do it, child.”

“I’m scared.”

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

Damn! All of a sudden he sounded like Uncle Doj back when he was giving me fencing and fighting lessons. Was old Trang another one of these secret priests?

Sahra opened the message. She stared down at what I had written, in big, careful, clear characters. Finally, she said, “Read it for me, please, Uncle.”

Trang stuck a little finger into his left ear and dug around amongst the tufts. That old man had more hair there than on top of his head. He scanned my message, which he held in his other hand. He took a while to digest and think. Then he looked up at Sahra. He opened his mouth to speak, suffered a thought, looked around as though startled.

It had occurred to him that it was, apparently, somehow, possible for us to see what was happening inside the temple of Ghanghesha. It had occurred to him that this was a moment that would interest us very much. Particularly a Soldier of Darkness name of Murgen.

“It purports to be a letter from your husband.” He hesitated just a fraction of a heartbeat as he decided to leave out the adjective “foreign.”

“It is. I know his hand. What does it say?”

“It says he isn’t dead. That they told him you were dead. That he knows where you are and what your circumstances are because a great magic has been made available to him. That he will come to you as soon as the Shadowmaster is crushed.”

That was actually pretty close to what I had written.

Sahra started to cry.

Sahra? I wanted to hold her. She was always the strong one. The disasters that overtook her could not break her. Always she soldiered on. No tears for Sahra, ever.

I did not like seeing her emotionally distressed.

I drifted nearer Trang. He shuddered, looked around. “That’s not all he said. He said he loves you and he hopes you’ll forgive him for the failure that let this happen.”

Sahra stifled her tears. She nodded. “I know he loves me. The question is, why do the gods hate me? I’ve done nothing to harm them.”

“The gods don’t think the way we do. They scheme schemes in which a life is only a flicker, just a second in a century. They do not ask us if we want to participate, perhaps as an alternative to happiness. They use us as we use the beasts of forest, swamp and field. We’re the clay they sculpt.”

“Uncle Trang, I don’t need a homily. I need my husband. And I need to be free of the machinations of old men . . . ” Sahra started. She gestured, indicating that someone was outside, that Trang should be quiet. I drifted out of Sahra’s cell.

A priest stood a step away from her door, poised in uncertainty. He must have heard something as he was passing. He glanced both ways along the unlighted hall, down at his own small lamp, then moved to Sahra’s door and cocked an ear.

I swooped in close, poured all my anger into my will and tried to butt heads with him.

He spun around. He started to shake. He hurried away. I could scare more than birds if I got mad enough.

I went back inside. Sahra wanted Trang to send a reply. Her speaking the words were all the reply I needed although I would look forward to the note as a physical confirmation of our eternal connection, an icon to carry with me till we saw one another again. Trang agreed but he chose his words carefully. He kept looking around like he thought the place was haunted. He asked, “How is your pregnancy going?”

“That is one thing I do very well, without great effort or trouble, Uncle. I have babies.”

“This one will be bigger than your first two. Your husband is a big man.”

“Do you expect the child to be a devil, too?”

Trang smiled thinly. “Not in the sense others might mean. But in the sense of Hong Tray’s prophecy, probably. Your grandmother was a wise woman. Her prophecies all come to pass—though not always in the manner we imagined when she offered them.”

“She said nothing about any monster.”

“What she said and what your mother and Doj heard were not necessarily the same. There are things people just don’t want to hear.”

He had my interest on several fronts. I might learn something more about Uncle Doj. I might learn something about this prophecy of Hong Tray’s, which, so far, was almost as mysterious as the concerted determination of all Taglians that the Black Company had to be some sort of catastrophe in the making, worse than any flood or earthquake. Trang disappointed me. He said nothing more. In fact, he struck a listening attitude.

I popped into the hallway.

The man I had frightened before was returning. And he was bringing friends.

I swooped at him again, angrier than before. He was no hero. He squealed and took off. His companions yammered among themselves. They decided their friend must have mental problems. They went after him instead of going on to Sahra’s cell. I followed to make sure.

Trang was gone when I got back. A flick through time provided me no useful information.

61

Sahra had moved to her pallet. She was on her knees there, palms atop her thighs, staring straight forward. Waiting.

I drifted into position in front of her.

“You’re here, aren’t you, Mur? I can feel it. You’re what I’ve felt before, aren’t you?”

I tried to answer her. I got she is the darkness! from Smoke and a reeling back. Why now? Sahra had not bothered him before. Had she?

He did not like any female these days. He even tensed up around the Radisha when we were there.

I pushed inward. Smoke pushed back. Sahra sensed something. She said, “I’m too heavy to travel now. I’ll come as soon as our son can travel.”

A son? Me?

I became a different man in that moment. But it lasted only a few seconds. Only until I wondered, how could she know that?

Some people called her a witch. Well, spooky. I never saw it myself.

But maybe she could know.

My world began to shudder and shake. I had enough experience ghostwalking to know that meant somebody back at the shop wanted me to wake up. Reluctantly, I responded. I wished there was some way, any way, to let Sahra know I had gotten her message. “I love you, Sarie,” I thought.

“I love you, Murgen,” Sahra said, as though she had heard me.

The shaking grew more insistent. I turned loose of the temple of Ghanghesha but refused to be managed completely. I tried to drop in on the Radisha for a closer look at her scheming but Smoke shied away with an aversion almost as strong as that he showed for Soulcatcher. She is the darkness.

The earth blurred beneath my point of view. I was low and moving fast. Maybe that helped defeat some of the spells making Goblin and Mogaba so hard to find. I got a clear, if brief, look at both as I whipped past.

They were on the move. Mogaba seemed to be gathering strength. The forvalaka was with Goblin. Both groups moved inside an envelope of crows.

Soulcatcher probably had a better idea of the big picture than I did.

“Don’t you ever learn?” Croaker snarled.

I barely had strength enough to sit up and reach for something to drink. I had spent a lot more time out than I realized while it was happening. Sarie always did make me lose track of time.

“Shit,” I murmured. “That took it out of me. I could eat a cow.”

“You weren’t supposed to be dealing with family things. You keep it up, it’s going to be crow, not cow.”

You could not find an edible cow in this end of the world, anyway.

I grunted. I had a pitcher of something sweet in one hand and a warm loaf of bread in the other. At that moment it did not occur to me to ask why he would accuse me of getting involved in family things.

“It’s dark already. Our people are all climbing into their holes and pulling them in after them. I need you rested and ready because I want you over there watching the Shadowgate. And not sightseeing, either. We need to get a signal up the instant Longshadow cracks the gate.”

I lifted a hand. As soon as I cleared my mouth I asked, “Why don’t I watch Longshadow? Smoke don’t want to get close out there. I might not see the shadows moving till it’s too late. Longshadow I can see while he’s making his summons.” I dumped some sugar water in behind the last bite of bread.

Smoke groaned.

“Shit.” Suddenly, the Old Man looked like he wanted to cry.

“Where’s One-Eye?” I asked. “Better get him in here.”

Smoke had not made a sound in years.

“You find him. I’m the physician here.” He headed for Smoke’s cot.

“Good idea.” I got myself up and stumbled toward the doorway on still feeble legs.

62

It was a great night for all hell to break loose. I had not really noticed the gathering darkness while walking the ghost, so lost in thought had I been. But clouds were moving in to deepen the darkness. “One-Eye!” I bellowed. “Get your dead ass over here now!”

I considered the clouds. My suggestion looked real good now.

Where the hell was that little shit? I climbed on up out of Croaker’s dugout. “One-Eye!” I headed for his hole. Surely he did not intend to spend the night there? He had not done nearly enough work on it to make it a good place to wait out a night when shadows were slithering about, wizard or not.

I was almost there when the little wizard came scuttling from the direction of my shelter. “What do you want, Kid?”

“Where the hell you been? Never mind. We got trouble with the ghost.”

“Uhm?”

“He’s making noise,” I whispered. Then I glanced around. I had forgotten to guard my tongue.

It was my lucky night. There were no crows anywhere around.

One-Eye glanced over his shoulder. “Making noise?” He did not believe me.

“Did I stutter? Get your ass in there. Croaker’s already checking him for physical problems.” I continued to look for listeners. Mice and bats and shadows have little ears, too.

A boreal light rippled between Overlook and the jagged ruins of Kiaulune, reflecting brilliantly off the metal in the fortress wall. It was just a sputter, though, as Lady got tuned up. A moment later the only light visible anywhere came from the surviving chambers of crystal atop Overlook’s towers. Longshadow’s favorite was particularly bright.

“You gonna stand around and gawk or are you gonna get on with business?”

That was One-Eye. Turn everything around so any delays would be my fault.

I took one last look around before I went inside. Still nothing. I dropped the rags covering the doorway, moved a shadow repellent candle on a stand into place between the doorway and the rest of us. I lighted it from the nearest lamp. We ought not to count on Longshadow to keep our timetable. “I wonder if the Shadowmaster isn’t curious about why we aren’t showing any lights and making any noise.”

“Hush,” One-Eye told me. He whispered, “Thought you said Croaker was giving him a physical.”

Croaker was sitting in my chair, slumped. “He was when I left.” I grabbed a pitcher and sucked down a bellyful of sweet water.

“He don’t look real frisky to me,” One-Eye said. He poked Smoke.

“I didn’t say he got up and danced a hornpipe. He groaned. In all the time I’ve been around him the only noises he ever made was when we thought he was coming down with pneumonia. A groan looked like a big thing. Croaker agreed.”

The Old Man made a noise. He returned to flesh. As soon as his head cleared he told us, “It’s going to be interesting. Longshadow just sent for Howler, Singh and the girl. He’s ready to get started.”

One-Eye grumbled, “A thrill a minute around here. Shadows again. I knew I should’ve picked up that farmland and got out. Swizzledick here says the runt’s been getting uppity. Talking back and everything.”

“He made a sound,” Croaker snapped. “Call it a groan. And when I tried to take a look at the girl he shied away and gave off a sort of feeling to do with shadows.”

“ ‘She is the darkness,’ ” I quoted. “Lately he’s done it any time I take him close to anybody female. It’s strongest near Soulcatcher. Sarie and the Radisha tie for number two.”

“Ah,” One-Eye said. “I’d almost forgotten that old witch. How’s she doing, Murgen?”

“You care?”

“I hear Cordy’s on his way. He might want to know.”

“You’re going to tell him we can spy on his bounce baby?”

“Grr. I guess not. But I owe him a couple, three big tweaks.”

Personally, I doubt that anybody has ever gotten ahead of One-Eye anywhere. Except maybe Goblin. One-Eye is the kind of guy who gets even with you first.

One-Eye is also the kind of guy who can still hand out the occasional surprise after two hundred years. “I don’t make it through the night tonight, there’s a will in my bedroll. Most everything goes to Goblin. Couple things, though, I want Gota to have.” He was peeling back Smoke’s eyelids at the time so did not notice when Croaker and I exchanged startled looks.

Croaker said, “You don’t make it, there’s not much chance we’ll still be here, either.”

“The Kid will be. His mother-in-law claims he’s destined. What for, who knows? The only one who ever did is dead.”

Before the Old Man could ask, I said, “He’s talking about something Hong Tray came up with way back in Dejagore. I’m not sure what it was. Sarie and I talked about it but they never made it clear to her, either. Something about the future of the Nyueng Bao. I know it bugged the shit out of Uncle Doj and Mother Gota. Thai Dei’s more neutral but he’s not keen on it, either. I think he’s glad he doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

“I think you’ve pretty well shaped the future of those people already,” Croaker told me. “We’ve still got half the tribe traipsing around behind us. Where’s your pet, One-Eye? I haven’t seen him in a week.”

“JoJo? Damned if I know. Long as he stays out from underfoot . . . Look, I don’t see anything different about this guy. Not from here. Let me take him out, see if there’s any change in him where he’s at.”

I said, “I already told you—”

“Yeah, yeah. Shut up. I got to concentrate here.” But not much. Smoke was so used to being used this way that taking him out required no effort at all.

Croaker said, “He did feel a little different. But it’s been a long time for me.”

“It just occurred to me that I haven’t run into Kina out there lately.”

“How about in your dreams?”

I could not remember. “That’s odd. I don’t remember. But it has to be. I have the same dreams all the time. I’m almost comfortable with them now.”

“Maybe that’s the point. Be careful.”

“Like One-Eye says, careful is my middle name.”

“Stupid is One-Eye’s middle name.”

“I heard that. I’ll turn you into a toad.” The little wizard was back already.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’re not even good at turning food into shit. What’s the word?” I asked.

“We may have to wait for a day when we have more time but you and me are going to have to sit down and see what we can figure out about what you’ve been doing.”

“What?”

“It feels to me like a couple of the walls he’s hiding behind have started to fall down.”

Croaker asked, “Is he going to wake up on us tonight, right in the middle of things?”

“I doubt it. He’s still buried way down deep.” He watched me suck down some more water, then follow that with a leg from a roasted chicken. You do not eat badly if you are the Liberator. “You going to suck down everything in sight, Kid?”

“It’s going to be a long night.”

“You stay here and stick to business,” Croaker told me. “Short trips out only. Let me know what’s happening when it happens.”

“Right. Will do, boss.”

“One-Eye. We need more spells around this place. Something that will keep the shadows away but that will let us come and go if we want to.”

One-Eye put on a big, gap-toothed grin and cocked that ugly hat of his at an uglier angle. “I done come up with the perfect amulet, chief. Figuring we were going to need to have messengers moving around during hard times.”

“How many do you have?”

“Right now, an even baker’s dozen.”

“That’s all?”

“Hey. They’re hard to make.”

And, no doubt, fooling with them took time away from his still and black market projects.

We had been in one place long enough for him to have gotten involved in some sort of black marketing, however feeble its prospects were. Which would take time away from less interesting avocations. Like making amulets that might save lives. I was willing to bet that he had more than the thirteen he was willing to turn over to the Old Man. He would have at least one for each of his own wrists and ankles plus a few socked back to retail to the highest bidders once we saw how well they worked and how badly they were needed.

That little shit really is a villain.

But he was on our side, our villain, the best we had. Unless you counted Lady, which I did not even though she was the Lieutenant. I never have been able to count her part of the Company. She came with too much baggage.

“It’s getting late,” Croaker remarked. “You might take a quick run at Overlook, see what they’re doing now. One-Eye. I want to stash my couriers in your dugout.”

“What? No way, chief. I just got the place cleaned up.”

I took another drink, then sat down beside Smoke.

63

The light in Longshadow’s crystal chamber seemed brilliant enough to hurt fleshly eyes. Magically created, it came from everywhere at once and left no place at all where a wild shadow might lurk. The few furnishings up there were smooth and rounded and left no little pockets or crevasses or corners where even a pinhead of untamed darkness might come to life.

No feral shadow was going to sneak up on him.

Longshadow seemed to have changed clothing and even bathed in preparation for the night’s events. Certainly he wore a new mask, black and silver with inlays of cyan, cardinal, and a particularly intense dark green. The patterns on the mask altered every time I looked. I told myself when I got a minute I ought to go back and have a look at Longshadow making himself over. He had not done anything like this ever before.

Narayan Singh and the girl arrived only moments before I did. I determined that by a quick dip into the past. Longshadow asked, “Where is Howler?”

Singh shrugged. The girl reacted as though Longshadow had not spoken at all. Singh said, “We have not seen him in days.” Which was an outright lie.

“He should be here. I warned him to be here. For his own safety.”

The girl sat down on the floor, cross-legged. She paid the Shadowmaster no mind whatsoever. Singh probably had had to badger her to get her to leave her writing.

Curious, I did a dash back in time. And got surprised. I found the child hurrying Singh. “We must be there in time.”

I went back some more. I found the child in that trancelike state where she claimed to be in touch with Kina. Certainly the odor of Kina was strong. I got out of there before I attracted her attention. She had not paid me much mind lately and I liked that just fine.

I took a couple of quick dips into times nearby and concluded that Narayan and his ward had responded to Longshadow’s summons because Kina had told them to respond. Interesting. But what did it mean?

When I got back to present time I found the Howler puffing his way up the last spiral of stairs to Longshadow’s chamber. The Shadowmaster had sensed his approach and had faced the entrance. The smelly little wizard appeared, let out a shriek before the Shadowmaster could start giving him a hard time. It sounded almost amused.

Longshadow turned away although he had been suffering a bad case of the nags lately. He seemed to be in such a good mood that he was willing to overlook petty transgressions. He said, “Good. We’re all here. Now we go ahead with the game the way I should have played it from the beginning.” He sounded slightly puzzled, as though, suddenly like every man and woman in the army besieging him he wondered why he had done so little for so long. He acted as if a powerful psychic wind had torn away a dense fog that had gripped his mind for ages.

I suspected that was close to the truth. I could not identify the villain but I was sure that one of our nastier female players, most likely Kina, had reached him somehow long ago and had been blunting his sword ever since. If I was right I had to admire the subtlety of it. Longshadow had not worked it out. That might be because the manipulation had been limited to dumbing him down and exaggerating his natural prejudices and bull-headedness.

I recalled that he had had a few sharp spells. Things had not gone well for us during those interludes.

“Close the door, Deceiver.” The Shadowmaster’s voice was strong. “There must be no interruptions.”

Howler seated himself on a tall stool. I gathered that it had been brought in for him specifically, back when he first attached himself to the Shadowmaster. He did not use it often but no one else used it ever. He and Longshadow were not the sort of colleagues who watched over one another’s shoulders, sharing suggestions and expertise.

The Shadowmaster had done some housekeeping. Usually his chamber contained an arsenal of magical gewgaws, all laid out strategically. Most of those were absent tonight. Maybe Longshadow did not want to test the honesty of his guests.

After some nervous shuffling Narayan Singh assumed a protective stance beside the Daughter of Night. I noted a triangle of black silk peeping from the top of his loincloth. He had dressed formally tonight, then. That would be his strangling cloth, his rumel.

“In more normal times,” Longshadow said, “I would go out to the Shadowgate personally and employ the traps there to collect the shadows I want to use. To obtain the best effect they have to be trained. Once they are properly trained they will leave their friends alone. The skrinsa can employ them without troubling me. But these are not normal times.”

No. They were not. And when he mentioned the shadowweavers I began to wonder if he knew just how bad off he was when it came to followers. At no time had he ever had much contact with those who managed the daily business of his fortress. He gave orders. They got executed. Only a handful of his people had survived Lady’s last attack. They continued to care for him. Howler had seen to that.

He no longer had any shadowweavers to manage any trained shadows he might have.

On the other hand . . . 

At one time there had been a crystal chamber atop a tower every seventy feet along Overlook’s southern wall. Inside each was a mirror that could be used to cast the light there in a beam onto the ground surrounding the road down from the Shadowgate. It had taken a couple of men to aim each mirror.

Longshadow did something by moving small figurines in a collection on a table, as though making multiple moves in a board game. He said a single word.

The lights in the surviving tower tops waxed brilliant. Light beams reached out across the night. Like accusing fingers they swung to point in the general area of Croaker’s Old Division. They did not light up the slope nearly as well as they had in former times but I was impressed. They did their jobs without the aid of one human hand.

The others there were impressed, too. Narayan seemed a little troubled, the Howler suddenly restless. Longshadow did not notice. He moved on to his next step. He said, “The lights are unnecessary to coming events. I just thought it would be amusing if our enemies watched one another scream their lives out.”

He giggled.

Howler sat up straight as a spear, suddenly alert. He did not like the way things were going.

Maybe Longshadow was not as big a fool as everyone thought.

I spent a moment too long watching the girl for a reaction. Smoke did his she is the darkness reaction and started to back off. I held him. We were about to witness some excitement.

Longshadow stepped up to the big crystal sphere standing on a pedestal at the center of the chamber. His audience watched carefully, nervously. This was not something he had done in front of witnesses before. I doubted they knew what the sphere was.

The globe was four feet in diameter. What looked like little tunnels followed wormtracks in to a hollow place at its center. As Longshadow stepped closer shimmering light rippled over its surface, like oil on water but much more intense. Snakes of cold fire wriggled through the channels inside. It was a hell of a show.

Longshadow raised his spidery hands. Carefully, he removed his gloves and pushed up his sleeves. The skin he revealed seemed both translucent and pus-colored, with speckles of blue beneath, like cheese. He had a fine crop of liver spots. There was almost no flesh on him at all.

The Shadowmaster rested his hands on the surface of the sphere. The lights inside became excited. The surface shimmer climbed his fingers, covered his hands. His fingers sank into the globe like hot rods slowly melting their way into ice. He grabbed the worms of light and began twisting.

He began to talk in a conversational sort of voice, of course using a language that nobody recognized though the Daughter of Night frowned and leaned forward as though she was able to puzzle out a word here and there.

The Shadowmaster summoned a shadow. I could not see it. It was inside the pedestal supporting the globe. But I felt it. There was not much to it but it was very, very cold.

The Howler dropped to the floor and leaned closer to watch. Narayan and the Daughter of Night stared, bemused. The kid took a few steps forward. Singh moved closer to the door, for a better angle of view.

Longshadow spoke for several minutes, his eyes closed tightly. As he finished the brightness inside the globe began to fade. He opened his eyes and stared out southward as he had done ten thousand times before, watching the area illuminated by the mirrors.

She is the darkness! I was not looking at the brat . . . Not that darkness.

A very special darkness. A surprise darkness that should not have caught me that far off guard, considering. Soulcatcher.

She stepped in through a door opened by Narayan Singh as though she had been about to knock.

Longshadow was not ready for this. Not at all. He was surrounded, totally betrayed, before he realized Catcher had arrived.

I clung there with all the power I had to resist Smoke’s terror. The little shit whined and repeated she is the darkness! like that was some mantra against the fangs of the night.

“The game ends,” Soulcatcher said in the booming, basso voice of a crier in an amphitheater. Then she giggled like a teenaged girl. “It’s been hard work but worth it. I really like my new house.” Both those sentences arrived in the voice of a little old man who keeps account books.

Longshadow was caught, trapped, pinned like a butterfly on a collector’s display board. He was surrounded, outnumbered, and did not have a chance even if he was the greatest wizard who ever lived. Which he was not. Even so, he did not surrender.

He knew his value. His mind was not clouded. She dared not kill him because the Shadowgate would collapse.

I had to give in to Smoke. I had to get this news back fast.

I really needed to get it to Lady fastest but there was no way.

Longshadow moved slowly to pick up his gloves. As he began to pull one on, Soulcatcher said, “I think not.” Her voice was the velvet tenor of a tombstone salesman. “In fact, it’s time . . . ”

Longshadow’s right pinky was crooked, as though it had been broken and badly set a long time ago. The nail looked like a bit of rotten, dried out, blackened spinach leaf.

The Shadowmaster flicked that little finger.

The nail flew off just as Catcher said, “ . . .  time . . . ”

I shook my ghostly head. You never see everything.

In one eyeblink that nail became a shadow filled with hatred for the light.

Smoke’s wriggling became irresistible.

64

I reached for a mug of water even as I sat up. Groggily, it dawned on me that I had been shoved into the cramped little alcove where the Old Man had been keeping Smoke since we sneaked him over from One-Eye’s pesthole. There were voices beyond the ragged hangings concealing me.

I took a long drink, stirred Smoke’s blankets around so he would be hidden, ran my fingers through my hair, stepped out of hiding.

The voices stopped instantly. Croaker looked about as angry as he could get. I told him, “It’s that important.” Which left a baffled look on the faces of Swan and Blade. “Good thing they’re handy. You guys go outside for a minute? Take the candle.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Croaker demanded. He had to make a major effort to keep his voice down.

“Soulcatcher just took over Overlook.”

“Huh?”

“She walked in while Longshadow was cutting the shadows loose. Which he did, by the way. And she and Singh and the kid and Howler all jumped him. You needed to know right now. This changes everything. Lady should hear as soon as possible, too.”

“Uhn!” Croaker was still angry but I could see the changes taking place behind his eyes, see the focus of his anger shifting like a ship changing course. “The bitch. The deceitful, conniving, treacherous bitch.”

“Way she talked, she’s planning on moving into Overlook and making it home.”

“The bitch!”

“I wish I could tell you more. Smoke refused to stay around where she was at. Think you better tell Lady?”

“Of course I’d better tell her. Shut up. Let me think.”

“Hey in there!” Swan yelled from the other side of the hangings keeping the wind out. “You guys better come and see this.”

“Now what?” Croaker snarled.

“I’ll check it out. Write them a message they can take to Lady.”

“Damn it. It may be too late. She was going to try to sneak up on Longshadow herself.”

Shit. We were in the brown stuff deep. Maybe.

I made a wobble-legged dash for the open air. I slipped on the steps going up to ground level. The earth was still soggy, even up here on the hillside.

I did not have to ask Willow what troubled him.

The biggest fireworks show of all time was going on over by the Shadowgate. Maybe the dustup at Lake Tanji was a match but I got to see that one only from the inside. “Gods damn!” I swore. There were so many fireballs flying around that no expletive could do the event justice.

I flung myself back down the muddy steps.

Croaker was wriggling into his Widowmaker costume. I told him, “It’s started at the Shadowgate. You have to see it to believe it. I hope those guys have enough bamboo.”

“Lady gave them everything she could. It’ll be a matter of numbers. Which we’ve known from the beginning. If we have more fireballs than they throw shadows, we win. If we don’t, we end up sorry. But not for long.”

“Longshadow didn’t seem to do much. If that tells you anything positive.”

“It doesn’t. I don’t have any idea what he would or wouldn’t have to do to unleash some or all of the shadows. And there’s no way I can guess how he’d think about it. Except that he wouldn’t want to let go so many that they’d come after him, too. He’d want to be able to control the survivors after he got rid of us.”

“He doesn’t know that he doesn’t have any more shadowweavers. Singh and Howler have been feeding him very selective information lately. The true extent of what Lady accomplished the other day is a complete mystery to him.”

“More treachery from our friend Soulcatcher, no doubt.”

“I’d bet on it.”

“You need to get back out there. She wouldn’t do just that one thing. It would leave her too vulnerable.”

“Huh?” My turn to make funny noises.

“She’s got to know we can get in and out of there whenever we want. She has to cover her sweet little ass. Go see what she’s up to before she really gets going.”

“On my way, boss.”

I drank some sugar water and went out.

Smoke did not want to go back to Overlook. I got my way. I tricked him, sort of, by ducking back to before Catcher pushed her way into his awareness. Then I zipped forward and watched the shadow explode off Longshadow’s pinky.

It went for Howler. It hit Howler. Howler howled. And fought it off somehow. It darted at Narayan Singh, who shrieked as it struck him. Howler and Catcher together forced the animate darkness away from the Deceiver. Singh lapsed into unconsciousness immediately.

The shadow was not whipped yet. It struck at the Daughter of Night.

The instant she screamed the ghostworld began to fill with the stench of Kina. A cyclone of rage roared toward Overlook. Smoke squeaked she is the darkness and away we went, streaking out of there like a shaft from a ballista. We went high and we went north and we went fast. The fireworks at the Shadowgate vanished behind the Dandha Presh. We were north of Dejagore before I could exert any control.

The ghostworld had become one protracted whimper from my steed. He was fleeing somewhere where he expected to be safe. Somewhere that the deepest part of him recalled from days when he was still an ordinary mortal.

He had only just begun to respond to directions when we drifted into the Palace.

The place was a beehive. Priests and Guards and functionaries rushed everywhere. There was excitement out on the city streets, too. Shadar watchmen roamed in packs, making arrests by the score.

This bore closer examination.

I checked the prisoners. A few seemed vaguely familiar. I dipped around in time and discovered that they were being collected in the empty Black Company barracks. I found some definitely familiar faces in the crowd there.

They were all people who had been friendly to the Company.

I zipped around for a look at the Radisha, ran back in time to the beginning . . . Near as I could tell her adventure had been going on for only a short while, though she had spent hours earlier getting her assets positioned. Actual arrests commenced just about the time Soulcatcher strolled into Longshadow’s chamber at Overlook.

Sleepy!

Shit! I sped to Banh Do Trang’s warehouse.

Sleepy had not been arrested. Not yet. Several Shadar were in the neighborhood. They were looking for Sleepy. Their curses left me no doubt that they were after him specifically. But they could not find his hiding place.

I went after the kid. I gave it everything I could. If it worked in the swamp it ought to work in the city. I got right down there in his face and screamed. I tried to mess his hair and pull his ears.

He spooked.

So he did happen to be out of the way when the watchmen arrived, though he was still close enough to overhear and understand.

I did not wait around. He had sense enough to saddle up and get out of town and never mind waiting for an answer from Sarie.

I grabbed Smoke by the ectoplasmic short hairs and headed south. He was not even a little bit eager to go.

I returned to my flesh. The Old Man was waiting for me. “What’s the word?”

“Kina was coming. Smoke spooked. He headed north. I just got back. The shit’s flying up there, too.”

“Oh? How so?”

“The Radisha is rounding up anybody who ever smiled at one of us. She started at almost exactly the same minute that Soulcatcher jumped on Longshadow.”

He did not ponder that. “We’ve got a problem, then. Get back out there. I want to know if anything else is going wrong.”

I sucked some sugar water and went.

What else was going wrong? Right here in Kiaulune the Prahbrindrah Drah was trying to disarm Lady’s troops. She was inside Overlook. She did not know yet. I did not know how to get word to her quickly. I decided to try the same tack I had with Sleepy. Maybe I could startle her into doing something.

I found her already in the stairwell leading up to Longshadow’s crystal chamber. Several of our best Company brothers were with her.

I dropped down in front of her and screeched, “Booga! Booga! Booga! Get your ass back outside!”

She jumped. She squinted into the darkness right about where the eyes of my viewpoint floated. “Murgen?”

“Get your butt out of here, woman. It’s a trap. And the Prince’s troops are trying to disarm your men.”

She turned and barked orders.

Damn! She was a whole lot more sensitive than the others.

I whipped out of there. The stink of Kina had begun to fill the stairwell.

A dark nimbus clutched itself to Longshadow’s crystal tower. Kina had little strength she could project into this world but it was all focused now. I made Smoke move higher so I could look down into the chamber.

The Daughter of Night had recovered from the attack of the shadow. She used the strength lent her by her goddess to drive the thing back at the Shadowmaster.

Longshadow, of course, had been completely mad from the beginning, as paranoid as they come. He never trusted Howler. About all he and the little stinker had in common was their hatred of the Company. Mutual hatred for somebody else never has been sound grounds for a marriage.

The Shadowmaster had planned for a moment like this though he had not anticipated Soulcatcher being there to help the turncoat, nor had he expected the Strangler and his brat to contribute distractions of their own. Nevertheless, he had been thorough. He had overengineered by a large factor. It might be enough. If they had underestimated him.

The towertop chamber became a bizarre pot filled with growls and shrieks, bits of smoke that came and went too fast for the eye to track, changing colors, knives of pure energy that slashed stone and crystal and ricocheted off stubborn protective spells and never considered the loyalty of anyone who got in the way.

Soulcatcher cried out like a child suddenly injured. She dropped to one knee, whimpering, but did not abandon the fight. Howler howled. The Daughter of Night babbled passages from the first Book of the Dead. The stench of Kina was awful in the ghostworld but the child had not finished copying the book before Howler stole it. She could not bring Kina all the way home without all of it.

Longshadow edged toward the doorway. It looked like he might actually get out. Presumably once he did the chamber would implode or in some other fashion destroy everybody still inside. That was the sort of trap I would have set.

They called Singh a living saint. He was, supposedly, the best of his kind of his generation. A dubious distinction in most of our eyes, but every man should be lucky enough to discover the one thing he can do better than anyone else alive.

The Shadowmaster thought no more of Narayan than he did of a mouse. The Deceiver was just there.

He was there one moment and here the next. His strangling cloth encircled the Shadowmaster’s throat like black lightning.

A black rumel man becomes a master Strangler in part by mastering his own fear and excitement in times of stress. Narayan Singh had that knack though he had had little opportunity to exercise it recently. He had done so now. He remained calm enough not to break the Shadowmaster’s neck. He understood the cost.

Strangulation is a slow process. Its victim seldom cooperates. Singh shouted, “I need armholders!” At first he said that in Deceiver cant. Only the child understood. She did not have the strength to restrain the Shadowmaster.

She told Soulcatcher, “You! Take his right arm and pull. You. The smelly one. Take hold of his left arm. Now. In the name of my mother.”

Catcher snapped, “In the name of your real mother, who happens to be my pain-in-the-ass sister, you’re going to get a paddling as soon as we finish with this piece of shit.” The voice she used was a dead ringer for that of somebody I used to know who had been a devout believer in not sparing the rod.

Longshadow was one stubborn fish. He thrashed a lot longer than I thought any human could without air. The kid told the others, “Make sure you don’t kill him.”

“Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, brat.” This time Catcher’s voice was identical to Goblin’s. I felt a sudden fear for the little wizard.

Longshadow collapsed. “Tie him and gag him and put him in that chair of his,” Catcher told Howler. “Fix him good. Then look around for any more surprises he may have here.” The shadow had vanished, either out the cracked door, into hiding or destroyed.

Howler, panting, asked, “And what’ll you be doing, O mighty one?”

“Setting the pecking order straight.” She grabbed the Daughter of Night, dropped to one knee, bent the struggling child over the other, mouthed a spell that flung Narayan Singh across the room hard enough to knock him cold, then yanked the kid’s pants down and proceeded to apply a well-deserved tanning.

The child never cried but tears filled her eyes once Catcher finished. She felt both humiliated and deserted. Again she faced a crisis of faith. The stench of Kina had faded as soon as the kid got too busy to mess with her incomplete summoning.

Catcher said, “You give me any more crap, sweetheart, and next time you get intimately acquainted with a willow switch. You got him tied up good?”

“I’m working on it. You’ve waited this long you don’t need to get in any big damned hurry now.”

“I want to get control of his shadows. They’re not going to sit still—”

“I know the plan. I helped write it.” Howler screeched. There was a world of irritation in his cry.

I had to see the Old Man.

65

“They’re squabbling among themselves already,” I told Croaker after he shooed everybody outside. “But they definitely have Longshadow on the hook. Catcher intends to make him do whatever she wants.”

“She going to do a Taking?”

I had not thought of that. That kind of stuff had happened only way, way back. “Would she know how?”

“She might. But she might not have enough to work with where Longshadow is concerned. She might need to know his true name. We know he’s got that hidden in the Shadowgate spell.”

“What’s going on here?”

“I’ve ordered the New Division to move over to the Shadowgate and relieve the Old Division. If I get them entangled with the shadows before they understand what the Prahbrindrah Drah is doing, they won’t be able to participate. All they’ll have time for is fighting shadows.”

“What excuse did you give them?”

“The Old Division doesn’t have enough bamboo.”

On a night like tonight no general was going to let his men surrender their bamboo to another outfit.

“Also, that I want the Old Division to attack Overlook from the south. Those are the orders I actually sent to get them started. They won’t get their real orders till after they separate.”

We had rehearsed a move from the Shadowgate to the south wall several times. Maybe the Old Man was still thinking way ahead of everybody else.

“I think I was able to warn Lady.” I told him what I had done. “It seemed like the right call in the circumstances. I know she’ll ask questions later.”

“Oh, she will. And she’ll crap bricks when she gets her answers.”

“You don’t seem particularly terrified.”

“I was her prisoner in the Tower at Charm before she learned to love me. I used up my scared then.”

I would not count on her love if I was him. They had not been much of a loving couple lately. Guys like me never stop loving their Saries but other people do fall out of love when there is a lot of stress for a long time. I said, “I have to check on Goblin. I had a really ugly thought while I was watching them fight over there. If Catcher was as thorough as I think she’d be, old One-Eye might be an orphan.”

“Shit,” Croaker said softly. “I overlooked that angle completely. Look, while you’researching for that little shit tell Smoke ‘white wedding’ and ‘white knight’ every little bit. Alternate them. That’ll make Goblin easier to spot.”

“I figured there was something—”

“And any time you see crows, anywhere, panic them. We need to blind Catcher as much as we can.”

“She fooled you, eh?”

“Say I underestimated her ambitions. Obviously, now, she’s up to more than just getting even with Lady. Go on.”

The “white wedding, white knight” mantra worked wonders. Smoke and I found Goblin almost immediately. And he was in deep shit, just as I feared, only it was not nearly as deep as some probably hoped. When Smoke and I got there we found him and his boys lying very quietly amongst some rough rocks feeling very nasty. In a very few minutes somebody was going to get hurt. Bad.

I had to dive into the pool of time to find out why.

Goblin is just a minor wizard but he is one. He comes equipped with a normal Company complement of distrust, too. He could not control shadows or crows, bats or mice, or any other creature well enough to use it to collect information but he could manipulate some creatures some ways. His choice was a miniature owl common on the south side of the Dandha Presh. It did not grow much bigger than your fist.

He kept the critters posted in the bushes around his camp wherever he went to ground. And they always fluttered ahead when he was on the march. He moved only by night except when he chose to attack some of Longshadow’s loyalists.

Goblin suffered no surprises.

He was not surprised when the forvalaka came padding through the darkness and leapt at him with a thunderous growl. Owls using a call unique to that particular danger had cried out as the beastwoman passed.

There were no official plans for her to be anywhere nearby tonight.

There had been a lot of unnecessary, unexplained crow activity in the neighborhood lately, too.

Goblin had become suspicious. He had prepared. Just in case. After a while even a Company man as lazy as One-Eye will react to signs and portents.

The forvalaka attacked but what she sank claws and fangs into was not Goblin. It was only vaguely human in shape, sacking stuffed with leaves and straw. A spell had been put on that so the forvalaka could not let go once it grabbed hold.

That happened at virtually the identical moment that Soulcatcher stepped into Longshadow’s workplace, when all hell broke loose everywhere else.

A little something that did not look like Goblin at all and probably smelled even less like him bounced out of the darkness. It awarded the panther an enthusiastic kick in the ribs. “I knew you were too good to be true. And after I went to all that trouble to try to fix things for you.” Boom! He kicked her again. She roared and thrashed.

A voice from the darkness said, “You make her any madder, she’s going to bust loose and tear you a new asshole.”

“If I didn’t make that spell strong enough to hold four more just like her then I deserve to get my shit chute rerouted.” The forvalaka roared again. “But I do need to do something about all this racket.” It could be heard for miles.

Owls hooted. This time they conveyed no sense of alarm. Nevertheless, only the forvalaka was out in the open when a lone Taglian stepped into the clearing where the beast still struggled to let go of its prey. The newcomer told the darkness, “White wedding, white knight.” I would have laughed had Smoke permitted me that option.

Goblin materialized. “What’s the word, Mowfat?”

“Somebody’s coming. Sneaking. And they know where they’re going.”

“Surprise, surprise.” Goblin gave Lisa Bowalk another kick that would have broken normal ribs. “When they sell you out they sell you all the way. I ever tell you what this bitch was doing first time we met her? She was barely old enough to bleed at the crotch but she was killing people to sell their bodies.”

“We’ve heard it all before, boss,” a voice called from the darkness. “If we’ve got company coming let’s get ready to have a party.”

“I hate this shit,” Goblin told Mowfat. “I hate this country, I hate these people, I hate—”

“I hate to tell you this but they’re less than a mile away.”

“Mogaba with them?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t wait around till they got that close.”

Goblin went to work being a wizard. He cooked up some of his favorite wizard dishes. Those, it was obvious immediately, would include illusions.

One-Eye and Goblin love to make people see things that are not there.

I stole away to take a look at the people approaching.

These events were taking place in rocky, wooded, brushy mountain country in the dark. The seeing was bad even for me. I could not find Mogaba though I did confirm that the folks hunting Goblin were Mogaba’s partisans. They were hard little snots, too, after having spent a winter in the business. They were wary and they were quiet.

I backtracked them. I had to go all the way back to before sunset to get a glimpse of Mogaba. I caught him sitting around with his boys not five miles from Goblin’s camp. He was sharing his venison roast with a big black kitty.

That led me backward again instead of just humping off to see where everybody went. The mantra that cleared the mists around Goblin also helped disperse those around Mogaba. But only for a few seconds at a time.

I found out what I wanted to know, then rejoined Goblin’s bunch in time to watch them ambush the bad boys who were supposed to clean up after sweet Lisa Bowalk.

What looked like a shimmering ghost materialized on the slope opposite the one where Goblin and most of his gang waited. Although the specter grabbed the attention of the Shadowlanders that was not its function. It was a signal meant to warn Goblin’s gang to protect their night vision. Four, three, two, one. Flash!

I had no eyes to close. For an instant I was as blind as Mogaba’s raiders. Then I asked myself why I should be blind and decided I was blind only because I expected to be blind. I could see again as soon as I decided I should. Which was more proof that lots of things really are a matter of viewpoint and expectation.

The flash not only blinded the Shadowlanders for a while, it splashed them with something that left them glowing in the dark. They made good targets.

Goblin’s men were outnumbered. They took the opportunity to rectify that. Life became very unpleasant for the southerners. Short for some of them, too.

Goblin made their situation more unpleasant by conjuring numerous simulacra of brothers present and past. It was an old device and one of his favorites. He did not use it so often anyone figured out how to deal with it. The southerners struggled with spooks and shadows while Goblin’s rangers picked them off. They did not jump on the option of using antiambush tactics because they took too long to comprehend the full scope of what had befallen them.

Mogaba never appeared. I could not find him no matter how hard I looked. Eventually it dawned on his lieutenants that they had taken a bite that was beyond their ability to chew.

They began to withdraw. They flailed at themselves and one another, trying to shed the luminescence that made them easy targets. Some tried to strip, though that meant staying in one place for a length of time definitely not conducive to continued good health.

The spooks and Goblin’s men kept after them. Organized withdrawal collapsed into panic. Goblin kept close contact. He had spun Fortune on her ear and tripped his enemies good. Now he wanted to ride his good luck for all it was worth. He wanted to catch Mogaba while the Nar remained unaware of the scope of the disaster.

I wished him luck.

My fears for Goblin having proven unjustified I headed back to report what looked like the only good thing that had happened all night.

66

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Croaker told me. “Yet.” He watched me suck down a quart of sugar water. “It looks like the Old and New Divisions are swapping places without any problems. And we haven’t seen any evidence that many shadows are getting through. And I think Lady can get her situation under control. So whatever kind of stunt Soulcatcher is pulling it isn’t gonna go all her way.”

There were some unspoken yets in there that were pretty damned big.

Croaker asked, “How are you holding up? Should I have One-Eye come take over?”

“He’s probably more use wherever he is now.”

“I don’t know. He’s being One-Eye. A few minutes ago he was running around waving a fancy black spear and mumbling incoherently. I do believe he was a bit tipsy.”

“Shit.” One-Eye drunk and in a mood to show off his talents seldom bodes well for anyone. “That’s the spear he made while we were trapped in Dejagore. He was drunk the last time he tried to use it.”

“The one he made to kill Shadowspinner?”

“To kill Shadowmasters in general, but yes.”

“We don’t want him killing this Shadowmaster. Not yet.”

“He’s probably worried about the shapeshifter. You can tell him she’s no threat. Goblin’s got her under control.”

“You’re sure you don’t need a break?”

“I’m fine.” I got back into the alcove with Smoke. Croaker called, “Your in-laws understand about the shadows?”

“Thai Dei saw them at Lake Tanji. They’ll keep their heads down.”

Smoke and I went straight up half a mile so I could get an idea of who was doing what to whom, where and when.

Everybody was doing something to somebody. The night was alive with trails of fire down around the Shadowgate. It looked as though some of the Old Division were still there giving their replacements a hand.

There were a few fireballs flying around in Kiaulune and the wastes between the ruins and Overlook, though not so many as I had expected. Maybe I had gotten the warning to Lady too late.

I headed downward. Below me the ruins and surrounding area began to develop a case of measles as ruby dots took life. In moments those gave birth to red threads that slithered through the night in search of other measles.

Whatever it was, Lady was behind it. It encouraged a lot of yelling and running. The people getting excited all proved to belong to the Prince’s division.

Lady’s men were rounding them up and disarming them. Those who chose to remain loyal to her, of course.

The worm had turned real fast.

The Prince himself exercised the better part of valor, accompanied by his staff, his bodyguards and anyone else who could run fast enough to keep up. Lady had impressed them quickly and thoroughly and the survivors fully understood that their futures might be much more pleasant if welcomed somewhere else.

There were a lot of dead people around. Most appeared to be stubborn Taglian loyalists.

The rubies grew larger and brighter. The threads connected, then contracted into straight, rigid lines. Seen up close those hummed and crackled and popped ferociously when some fool touched them. Said fool always fell down stone dead. The red light smelled bad. It took me a moment to recognize the odor because I was not expecting it.

The ruby light exuded the smell of Kina. Lady was drawing upon the goddess to create her sorcery.

The lines of power she laid down carved the area into triangles of isolation that could be escaped but only by using great caution. The lines kept the Prince’s faithful from supporting one another. Consequently, Lady was emerging triumphant although she was outnumbered dramatically. She was a nasty old bitch.

I closed in on her. She had reached a state where she was happy with the way things were going. I presumed. It was hard to read her emotional state when she was buttoned up inside the Lifetaker costume. She told Isi and Ochiba, “That should take care of that. For a while.”

Isi said, “I guess this means no more warm barracks and no more combat pay.” There had been no pay for anybody since the battle at Charandaprash. Not that there was anything to spend pay on. Unless One-Eye’s brewing scheme was more successful than I believed.

“I suspect our contract has been terminated, yes. And the Captain is likely to be put out because all its terms have not yet been met.”

That was true, though the Prince and his sister had been cautioned repeatedly against failing to fulfill their end of the bargain. And right now those warnings had to be weighing heavily on the Prince’s mind. He had cast his fortune with Soulcatcher, for whatever reason, and the snake had turned in his hand. How many times had he heard Croaker tell what had happened to past employers who had turned on the Company?

Plenty. Catcher must have done some strong selling to make him turn on us. She must have been convinced that she could handle Lady.

Might be worth a few minutes trying to find out what kind of a deal they made.

Lady’s bunch had a gang of prisoners seated in neat lines, cross-legged. None seemed inclined to protest their situation.

Willow Swan and Blade were among the captives. They seemed depressed.

I guess Sindawe was right when he said she did not trust them.

I almost wished I was there in person.

“I hear Cordy’s supposed to get here tomorrow,” Swan muttered to Blade. “Nothing like timing.”

Blade grunted.

“Why the hell did the fool go and do something like this?”

It took me a moment to realize that Swan meant the Prahbrindrah Drah, not Cordy Mather.

Blade grunted again. Swan seemed to understand.

“Why the hell didn’t he tell me? I’m supposed to be the goddamned commander of his goddamned bodyguard.”

“Because you’re always over here watching her body instead?”

“So I’m sorry. He don’t appeal to me. You suppose this crap is happening all over? Or did just the Prince go bugfuck?”

“No talking over there,” Lady said, not unkindly. She asked, “Anyone have any thoughts concerning what we can do about our friends in there?”

“Stay out of their way?” Isi asked. He was turning into a real comedian.

“I think we need instructions from the Captain.” Lady turned around slowly, studying the air almost as if she sensed an extra presence.

It was, I suspected, a direct experiment meant to illuminate her suspicions.

Nevertheless, Croaker did need to know her situation.

67

“You smelled the Kina smell? You’re sure?” The Old Man did not seem interested in details of how Lady had visited disaster upon the Prahbrindrah Drah. The fact of her success was enough.

“Yes. But the goddess wasn’t there. I’ve felt her close up often enough to know when she’s been around. Especially tonight.”

“She wants instructions?”

“She may. But she was fishing for a reaction, really. She suspects.”

“She probably knows. Have you been back to the Shadowgate? Are we holding?”

“No, I haven’t. I assume we’re doing all right. There aren’t so many fireballs flying around as there were a while ago. That seems to be because there’s a lack of targets, not a lack of bamboo. Once in a while there’s still a big barrage, though.”

“You need One-Eye to spell you?”

“I’m all right for now.”

“Be careful. And watch out coming back. I’m sending for Lady. She might be here.”

I tried to take Smoke south. He would not go. I tried to get back into Overlook to spy on Catcher and Howler and Longshadow but Smoke refused to get anywhere near them, either. She is the darkness! He would not be fooled and he would not be bullied. He was gaining substance again. And that substance was in keeping with what I knew about his chickenshit character. Which suggested that we might not be getting a lot of use out of the old boy in days to come.

He would go upward. So I took the opportunity to survey the situation from above once more.

The distribution of fireworks suggested our situation was not bad now. The Shadowgate had held. The Prahbrindrah Drah was headed north. He showed good hustle and a fair amount of thought as well. He left messages for his scattered troops, confident that we would be much too busy to chase them hard. He had no actual plan yet, though, other than to get clear and reassemble his division. He was not pleased by the way the tables had turned so suddenly. He had been promised that Lady would be handled. He had taken a major princely step when he had set aside his emotional disinclination to buy that.

If he had thought he had some chance with Lady he might not have pursued his treachery.

Not that his action came as any great surprise, except in its timing.

Longshadow’s pinky nail pet had ruined the whole conspiracy’s timing.

Smoke did not seem keen on getting close to Lady, now, either, though he did let himself be bullied.

We needed to find a way to encourage Smoke to be more cooperative. Maybe red-hot branding irons.

Shadows definitely were leaking through. I arrived about the same time as the first reached the vicinity of Lady’s force. This was no onslaught like the one at Lake Tanji, though. The only evidence was an occasional scream.

Lady’s mood had blackened since my last visit. She stamped around angrily. Pink fires jumped off her Lifetaker armor. They flew around like sparks in a forge. She had become unhappy in a big way but I could not make out why. She looked like she wanted to take it out on Willow Swan and Blade. They received a few choice words each time she passed. But their behavior remained impeccable. They offered her no excuse to strike.

I failed to see why Blade was a prisoner, anyway.

The smell of Kina was strong around Lady but I got no sense that the goddess herself was anywhere close by. I had expected great horrors splattered all over the region after her wild response to Longshadow’s assault on the Daughter of Night.

Lady paused in her pacing. She listened. She cursed.

Horrors were coming but these nightmares were not spewing forth from Kina’s forehead.

The cries of men attacked by shadows became increasingly frequent.

“Idiots!” Lady growled. “They won’t listen and they won’t protect themselves.”

Then the smell of Kina began to grow stronger, too.

I tried to grab Smoke in a spectral hammerlock, to force him back to Longshadow’s crystal chamber.

From the first moment I saw it with ghostly eyes, that chamber had blazed with the intense cold light of a brilliant star. It made a landmark more easily seen than any beacon or lighthouse. But tonight, now, the light was flickering.

Smoke whimpered she is the darkness sheisthedarkness sheisthedarkness! like some protective mantra and fought me tough, but this time I enforced my will upon him. Apparently I could if I worked up a strong enough case of emotion. And sustained it. Smoke never stopped resisting.

He did not seem to need tons of energy, the way I did. Maybe he fed off me like some vampirish spirit.

The crystal chamber was a shambles. In one corner, still tied to his chair, the Shadowmaster lay trapped inside a cocoon of glimmering force, unconscious and in terrible shape. I guessed he had several broken bones. His clothing was torn all to hell. Clotted blood had splashed the inner face of his defensive shell. Must have been some major excitement in my absence. He must have tried another trick or two. And had paid the price for trying. Maybe he was close to death. Maybe that was why there was so much more screaming going on outside Overlook.

I thought the Daughter of Night was gone altogether but then I spotted her hiding inside her own egg of protection. Hers was eggplant black and just barely translucent. She had curled into a fetal ball but she did not appear to be injured.

Howler looked like he had tried to rape a tiger. He was making noise continuously but not of the usual sort. This was more like a continuous whine punctuated by the occasional rattle of air in a punctured lung. Soulcatcher was trying to doctor him but she was in bad shape herself. She looked like she had wrestled the same tiger, with only marginally more positive results. Right now she had no time for anything going on outside the chamber.

The smell of Kina remained strong there.

I dislocated Smoke’s ghostly knuckles and applied pressure till he moved back toward the moment when he had dragged me away. We never got there. Kina arrived first, making a second, surprise visit that caught everyone off guard.

When I got close enough to feel Kina’s presence, to catch glimpses, I became unfocused. Smoke made a run for it. I regained control, dove right back in there.

We bounced in and away, in and away. I caught several more glimpses of an animate darkness that, seen from the corner of my invisible eye, looked like a miniature version of the many-armed goddess. Kina concentrated on enveloping the brat in the dark shell that surrounded her now. Howler and Soulcatcher took their lumps in a minute of vain resistance in which they caught the goddess’s attention about like an annoying yellow jacket buzzing around an outdoor lunch catches the attentions of picnickers.

Longshadow grabbed the chance to employ a ready protective catechism to create the egg enveloping him now. Most of the damage he suffered was accidental and collateral and happened during the scrimmage between Kina and the others.

Narayan Singh appeared to be splashed all over the floor. I could not tell if he was alive.

I let Smoke pull away, drove him toward Lady. She ought to resemble a bouquet of posies on his fear scale now.

I positioned myself right in front of her, at eye level, as I had done before. That took some doing. She would not stand still. She continued to mutter curses about the screaming, which had become more common.

Longshadow had to be teetering on the brink of eternity.

I shrieked.

Lady froze.

I glared into the eyeholes of her ugly black helmet. Those glowed with an unnatural intensity. If something so unnatural initially could become more unnatural. She whispered, “You’re there again.”

I tried to bellow. “Your pal Kina whipped their asses upstairs. They’re all down right now. There’ll never be a better time to get them.”

Lady turned slightly. She stared up at Longshadow’s personal tower. The light in the crystal chamber was feeble, guttering like a spent lamp.

The fate Longshadow feared so much might catch up with him yet.

Lady shouted at Isi and Sindawe.

She did not get my message exactly but she did hit on the notion that right now might be a good time to take one last whack at the Shadowmaster.