82

“Was I right?” Croaker asked.

“About the standard?”

“What else?” He seemed exasperated. Maybe it was a strain, sharing quarters with Lady and the loon crew of Smoke, Singh and Longshadow.

“Probably. You could sure feel it. And nothing got by.” I was worn out. My inner thigh ached again after the long walk over. “But I can’t prove that wasn’t because of Lady’s gimcrackery.”

“The Lance did something, though?”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody felt something. Some probably even decided it had something to do with the standard.” Thai Dei had remained outside, as he always did when I visited the Old Man, so I was not shy about describing the skirmish between Uncle Doj and Mother Gota.

“Which was about this Noose constellation?”

“That started it. I think that was just an excuse. Their conflict runs a lot deeper.”

“And this all just started?” He smiled to himself, like me, probably, jumping straight back to Gota’s business with One-Eye.

“And where is our pet hedge wizard?” I asked. He was not out riding Smoke, which is what I had expected him to do while I was away. Lady had the little fire chief all tied up.

Croaker shrugged. “Out of my hair, which is all I want right now.”

Probably off tending his distillery, which had not been found in his dugout when the rescue crews turned the place inside out, looking more for that than for poor old One-Eye.

I said, “I had a dream. Or maybe I was out of myself. It almost turned into a nightmare.”

“Uhm?”

“Catcher’s figured out how to run the shadows. Just like our boy in the cage, there.” Longshadow, though, was unconscious. More so than Smoke, who insisted on groaning every few minutes.

Croaker sighed. “I’m disappointed but I’m not surprised. It was a logical step for her. And she’s had time to work on it.”

“You going to do something about it?”

“Haven’t I already?”

“You lost me, boss.”

“She’s figured out how to manage a few shadows. Close up. But I control the source of the shadows. And I don’t have to get near her. Though I’m going to.”

“I wouldn’t get overconfident where she’s concerned. You never know with her. Remember how she planted that demon Frogface on us.”

“I take nothing for granted, Murgen.” He glanced at his woman, lying motionless beside Smoke. “But I try not to let paranoia cripple me.”

He would get an argument on that from a lot of people. On the other hand, though, he had overthrown the Shadowmasters and seemed well positioned to have us survive the perfidy of our allies.

But, Soulcatcher? I did not doubt that Smoke had been right every time he insisted She is the darkness!

83

One-Eye caught me outside Croaker’s place. “Her Worship still at it?”

“Uh . . . You mean . . . ?” Thai Dei’s were only one pair of uninitiated ears nearby.

“You know what I mean, Kid.”

“She is.”

“Damn! I can’t get ten minutes at a time now that she’s started playing. Damned woman must be worried about her weight.”

Took me a minute to figure that out. Then I laughed, remembering how hungry I used to get. “That could do it. If she gets totally hooked.”

One-Eye grumbled something and stomped off. He did not go any farther than his dugout, though. He began fussing around the remains like a dog trying to dig a rabbit out of its warren, killing time while he waited to walk the ghost. I went about the business I had, mostly stalling because I had no desire to go back over to the Shadowgate. After ten minutes of slinging mud and trash One-Eye stomped back to me. “I found that little shit Goblin yesterday. Last night. He was just about to jump on the Prahbrindrah Drah. I want to know how that came out.”

“Uhm.” Yes. I hoped he took the Prince prisoner if they had them an asskicking contest. I would rather have his sister scared of us than mad at us. Mad she would be if we sent her little brother to his funeral ghat.

She was not the kind to jump into the flames after him.

“That bastard was getting pretty good when he turned on us,” One-Eye said. “There’s no guarantee the runt can take him.”

“You worried about Goblin? You?”

“Worried? Me? Hell, no. I don’t care what happens to the little shit. But if he croaks the Prahbrindrah Drah we’re gonna be in shit so deep we’ll have to look up to see the horizon.”

“I don’t think we can get in much deeper than we already are. They can only kill us once. And they’ve already let us know they intend to try.”

One-Eye snorted. No way would he admit that he was worried about Goblin though Goblin’s absence obviously made him crazy. He had not been able to feud with anyone for ages. Nobody else would play.

I asked, “Why don’t you play a few tricks on Uncle Doj if you’re suffering some compulsion to mess with somebody who can mess right back?”

Thai Dei developed a sudden interest in our banter. One-Eye did not cheer up. He did ask, “You figure Lady was right about him? He don’t look the part.”

“And you do?” Like a derelict in a slum alley does. “You think she’s ever been wrong about something like that?”

“She’s still healthy,” One-Eye grumped.

Thai Dei wanted to know what we were talking about but could see no way to get anything out of us without giving something away himself. If he’d just been the kind who chatters incessantly he could have asked anything and nobody would have thought anything about it.

I chuckled.

Puzzled, One-Eye asked, “You going back over there?”

“Got to. Boss says.”

One-Eye glared at the distant plateau. “Damned Tals! Just had to stab us in the back. I was all set to retire as soon as we finished Longshadow. But they just had to fuck me up. And now I got to go on up there. Which I’m looking forward to like I’m looking forward to getting a hot poker shoved up my poop chute. Whoa! Here’s my chance.” He scampered toward Croaker’s dugout.

Lady had come up to the light. She looked more haggard than ever. She must have been walking the ghost for all she was worth. She leaned on a post while she spoke softly to one of the messengers waiting for an assignment. He hurried off toward her camp. She looked at me, frowned as though she was having trouble remembering who I was. Maybe she was. I was supposed to be somewhere else.

I decided to go there even though it was no resort for tired professional soldiers.

84

Mother Gota would not talk to Uncle Doj. Mother Gota would not talk to her darling baby boy. But Mother Gota and silence had been strangers for decades. So Mother Gota talked to me.

She was not happy about the way her life was going, though she refused to get specific in front of a Soldier of Darkness, family or not.

I was in a karma-building cycle, apparently. I endured her crabbing, nodding and grunting in the right places while I made notes concerning recent events. I said, “You could always go home. Just pack up and go back to the swamp. Let Uncle boil his own bitterroot.” The root was a recent discovery. Shadowlander fugitives had been caught eating it. It was a common weed that was not completely inedible if you boiled its roots for six or eight hours before you ground them into meal that tasted like soggy white oak sawdust. A lot was getting eaten because there was little else to be found close by. Croaker still had not authorized anyone to begin exploiting Overlook.

Uncle Doj had discovered bitterroot long ago. He had not eaten much else since Charandaprash. How had he found that much time to spend sitting in one place? Maybe he cured twenty pounds of root at a time.

“You, Bone Warrior, you would have me abandon my duty?”

Hell, yes. Anything to get you out of my hair. But I did not say that aloud. I just asked, “What duty is that?”

She opened her mouth to tell me but Nyueng Bao caution took over. She gulped like a fish out of water, then, as always when pressed, told me, “I go get some wood.” That in Taglian instead of Nyueng Bao, which was good enough for me as long as I asked no questions.

“Good idea.”

Thai Dei came to stand by me as I watched her go. I said, “Soon the Company will return to the road to Khatovar. Your people need to decide what to do when that happens.” I reached for a rock.

I thought I made no giveaway motion but the crow was ready. It just hopped over the whistling stone and offered me one mocking caw for my trouble. The black birds remained scarce but there was always one near me and a dozen around Croaker’s headquarters. Catcher was lying low but she had not stopped watching.

A nearby Taglian, maybe thinking he could curry favor, aimed a bamboo pole at the crow. “Save that for a shadow!” I snapped. “We’re not out of this yet.” Interesting. The would-be sniper wore a ragged, crudely drawn Company badge. I saw no one armed with bamboo who did not sport some version of our badge. The management had stopped pretending to be fair.

Red Rudy wandered over, stood leaning on a spear. He stared northward, silently watching something. Nobody else said anything, either. I took advantage of the silence to scribble a few more notes. Finally, Rudy mused, “Ever notice how, when the light is right, you can see where everybody’s going over there?”

“No.” I looked up.

He was right. Just now the light had every piece of metal beyond Overlook reflecting right at us. And a whole lot of metal was headed up the road I had walked with that useless One-Eye . . . ”Oh, no. Whose bright idea was this?”

Somebody wanted to call on Soulcatcher.

“Thought you’d be interested.” Rudy collected his spear and strolled off. Probably to find a deep hole to pull in after him.

“What is happening?” Thai Dei asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe just the end of the world.”

Or maybe not. Maybe somebody in the headquarters bunker was playing mind games with her sister.

The sun moved on. Light no longer glimmered off the moving force. Nobody but Rudy seemed to understand what was happening but everybody sensed that something was. It became very quiet on my far hillside.

Nothing happened for a while. I made notes. I watched Mother Gota dwindle into the distance. Looked like she planned to do her wood gleaning farther afield.

Afternoon shadows crept across the far foothills. “That’s dark,” I said. Especially near where Soulcatcher was last seen. That darkness was swelling . . . 

I gaped. That was no shadow. That was a cloud of darkness. It boiled out of the canyons and forests and masked the foothills . . . 

Crows.

All the crows we had not seen for the past several days!

The darkness rose like a blast from a volcano. It began to spread.

“That’s got to be every crow in the world,” I breathed. The cloud just kept growing. Part seemed headed my way.

Suddenly, lightning sliced inside it. The wind began to blow. I began to lose track of where and when I was and what I was doing. Somebody asked, “What’s happening?”

A second voice asked, “What’s that smell?”

Kina. But I could not explain.

More lightnings ripped through the thunderhead of crows. Most of that darkness rushed my way. The stench of Kina became overpowering. There were sounds around me, heard as though from a great distance. They did not include the panic that seemed appropriate.

The darkness bent over and grabbed me, took me up like a mother lifts a frightened infant. The face of Kina was in the darkness but it was not Kina who possessed me. She was angry. Again. She was disoriented.

She was not alone.

Lady was there, maybe riding Smoke, maybe in some other fashion. The lightning was her doing, evidently. She had Kina in one sorcerous hand while trying to spank her sister with the other.

Catcher was there, too. And she seemed amused, not troubled, although she was caught between a devil goddess and a sister who would roast her happily. Soulcatcher would go to the burning stake chuckling at the fire. The woman was completely mad.

The darkness wrapped me up. It devoured me. It tried to chew me up but found me unpalatable. It spit me out.

I staggered like a drunk. A voice in my head said, There you are, darling. I missed you. You have been away too long. Moonlight glinted off the corpse-strewn black water lapping at Dejagore’s wall. I imagined something stirring in those waters, something that wanted to grab me and pull me deep into the inky darkness, down amongst the naked bones. I looked to my left and there stood the long-dead Speaker of the Nyueng Bao, Ky Dam. His wife Hong Tray was with him. They smiled. The old woman made a finger sign I knew to be a blessing.

Darkness swallowed me.

Darkness had no stomach for me. It puked me up.

I was in a tree. My eyes saw strangely. I had to turn my head this way and that to see out of one or the other. Men of half a dozen races were slaughtering men of several others below me. The trees were repelled. They loved death but hated the shedding of blood.

I was in the Grove of Doom. In a tree?

I raised a hand to feel my eyes. White feathers blocked my vision.

I lost consciousness.

I went a hundred places. A hundred places came to me. I seemed to visit all times and all places of the past several years.

I was on the plain of bones. Darkness had come. A black wind blew the bones about. I tumbled like a leaf. Crows mocked me from the naked trees. I rolled over into a deeper night and in an instant was strolling up the sloped floor of the tunnel where the old men rested in their cocoons of spun ice.

A great deep booming thundered in my head. It was pain incarnate, yet seemed to carry a message. I tried to listen.

Time expanded to encompass the throbbing within me, which became a slow, deep voice that speeded up until it turned into Thai Dei nagging worriedly in Nyueng Bao. “Standardbearer! Speak to me.”

I tried but my jaws would not work. I could do nothing but make inarticulate noises.

“He’s all right.” That was Uncle Doj. I opened my eyes. Doj knelt beside me, fingers against the side of my neck. “What happened, Bone Warrior?”

I sat up. My muscles were watery. I was drained. But it seemed no time had passed. I volleyed the question back. “What happened over there?” Crows still swarmed in the distance, though not in clouds like I had seen.

“Where?” Thai Dei asked.

“There. Where the birds are.”

Thai Dei said. “I do not know. I saw nothing unusual.”

“No cloud of darkness? No lightning?”

After a pause, “None that I saw.”

Uncle Doj considered the distance thoughtfully.

“I need something to eat.” Though I had not been ghost-walking, I was that weak.

The event was troubling.

85

The summons came from Croaker. I went across. Only a few days had passed but already the world had begun to seem peaceful again. The soldiers looked less haggard.

Shadows were not a problem now. For us.

“I’m here,” I told the Old Man. The guard outside had sent me right in.

“Where’s your mother-in-law?”

“Good question. The other day she said she was going after firewood. We haven’t seen her since.”

“One-Eye’s gone, too.”

I gaped. Then I started to snicker. The snicker turned into a guffaw. Before long I was bent double, unable to regain control. “They eloped? Don’t tell me they eloped.”

“I wouldn’t think of it. Knock off the braying. You sound like a jackass giving birth.” A stone impossibility. He indicated the alcove where special people were stored. “Use Smoke. Find them.”

I headed that way, still shivering with restless giggles. “How come I have to do it? You and Lady were already here.”

“We’re busy restructuring the force. We don’t have time.”

“She over being hooked on ghostwalking?”

“She’s gonna have to be. Get busy. I don’t have time to jack my jaw, either.” He pointed. He was not in a playful mood. Must have been getting less sleep than usual.

Smoke was alone behind the curtain. “What happened? You bury the other two?”

“Stashed them in what’s left of your dugout. We needed the room. Get to work.”

I pulled the curtain. He was the boss. He did not have to be a nice guy all the time.

Smoke did not look the same. Lady had done something to keep him under. He seemed more drugged than comatose.

He smelled, too. Bad. Somebody had been letting their chores slide. “You’re the physician, you ought to know about keeping clean. This guy is a mess.”

“I’ll get you a bucket.”

I did not wait for him to tell me. I went to work.

Croaker had made appropriate preparations. There was drinking water and fresh bread. I ate some of the latter immediately. The command types sure lived the good life. I had not had anything but bad bitterroot for the past several days—and not nearly enough of that. A point I ought to make to Rudy.

“Send out for sausages,” I muttered. Maybe when we finally found Khatovar it would be like the Vehdna paradise. Hot and hotter running houris driven by an overwhelming passion for smelly old guys with no social skills, houris who spent the rest of their time whipping up lots of freshly cooked food. Good food.

“Quit stalling around,” Croaker growled a while later. “That little prick is clean enough.”

I was not anxious to go out. “Somebody ought to watch what he eats.” Smoke looked like he was suffering the early stages of dietary disease.

Croaker just gave me a dark look. He did not much care, apparently. “You have a problem doing your job?”

“Cranky, cranky.”

I had a problem with going out. It had been scary getting batted around between Catcher and Kina and the place of the bones the other day. I had tapped a reservoir of fear I did not know I contained.

I especially did not like being a bird. That part I had not understood at all.

Catcher now knew I could walk the ghostworld without her manipulations. Maybe I could because she had opened the way. Now I feared she could hunt me down and snap me up out there whenever the mood took her. I was not inclined to suffer her torments voluntarily.

“Murgen.”

I chomped down a last mouthful of bread, followed it with a slug of water. Bloated, I did what I had to do.

Goblin must have had a notion that he was being watched from afar. Or suspected that he could be. I would not have found him had I had no idea how his mind worked. The clever little shit. The spells he used to camouflage himself and his men were of the simplest sort, almost undetectable. All they did was make the eye wander away from what was probably just a modest boulder lurking in the bushes, gently so as to go unremarked even when you were expecting something. He and his rangers were scattered so no concentration stood out. Mogaba did not appear to be a concern.

I might be wrong but I assumed One-Eye’s first move, if he deserted, would be to find Goblin. They had been best friends before anyone else in the Company was born. If you didn’t count Lady.

A quick, determined search revealed that One-Eye had not joined Goblin yet. A cruise up and down the road from Kiaulune did not turn him up, either. He must be in hiding for the day.

I did not feel Kina or Soulcatcher. More confident, I found Goblin again, rode Smoke backward in time.

Goblin did a good job ambushing the Prahbrindrah Drah’s gang. And no spells concealed the encounter. He’d been too busy with other work.

It was a traditional Black Company-style ambush. The Prince hurried into it at dusk. He was accompanied by several hundred soldiers. They outnumbered Goblin’s force heavily. A few arrows wobbled in from the brush south of the road, striking several Taglians. Ululations went up. Brush rustled. More arrows flew.

The Prahbrindrah Drah had no idea who was attacking. Shadowlander partisans probably seemed more likely than the Company. He did not know about Goblin.

We had taught the Taglians to respond to an ambush by counterattacking immediately. That is what the Prince’s companions did, though not quite instantly.

Better than half charged into the brush, chasing rustlings. A handful of those rustles were created by Goblin’s men but most were contributed by little owls groggily trying to get away from they knew not what without ever rising out of the cover.

Goblin’s second attack, from the opposite hillside, was far more vigorous and included illusory people the Taglians would know could not possibly be there if they just thought. I saw my own doppelganger wading through the brush waving a nicked-up, rusty sword.

A couple of Goblin’s men and a gang of ghosts retreated toward Kiaulune, drawing most of the remainder of the Prince’s band with them. Then the remainder of Goblin’s force jumped in after the Prince. It was a brisk fight. When the dust settled our erstwhile employer was a prisoner, alive but in no shape to trouble anyone. He had collected a dozen wounds.

Goblin faded away. Rangers and illusions harassed and baffled the Taglians till dawn made Goblin’s illusions too obviously illusory.

The Taglians made a valiant effort to find their Prince. They had no luck. Soon after the next sunset a brush with a killer shadow panicked them. They fled north with the news that the Prince might be dead.

I could imagine the effect that would have when it reached Taglios. The capital would fall into chaos if the priesthoods rejected the Radisha’s right to rule. It could mean civil war. The Woman had noncanonical supporters and there was no alternate heir-apparent. The question of the succession had been around for years but always got pushed aside by more immediate crises.

Hee-hee. She would start paying the price of her perfidy before we ever glanced her way.

One-Eye and Gota must still be on the road. Instead of trying to find them there it seemed easier to go all the way back and pick them up as they began their adventure.

That worked. After a fashion. When Gota caught One-Eye alone they held only a brief discussion before the little wizard grunted, dug a pack out of his ruined bunker and joined her in slipping off into the nearest woods. Obviously the matter had been discussed before. Preparations had been made.

They did not talk much, which was hard to credit. One-Eye was not known for his reticence and Mother Gota was worse. He only grunted occasionally. When she said anything at all it was just to complain about the general unfairness of life.

Total silence descended once they entered the shade of the trees. Light and shadow fluttered about as the wind stirred the branches and leaves. They became increasingly hard to track . . . Oh, but the little shit was a wizard, wasn’t he? And one who damned well knew about Smoke.

He made me work at it but I stayed with him till my world began to shake.

Earthquake? Again?

It dawned on me at last. Somebody outside the ghostworld wanted me. Reluctantly, I returned to flesh. “About damned time!” the Old Man snapped when I opened my eyes. “I really thought we lost you this time.”

“Huh?” That came out a dry-throated croak. I tried for a cup but found I had no strength to extend my arm. I was wasted bad. The Captain had to pour water into my mouth for me.

“I really fucked up. How long was I out there?”

“Eleven hours.” That was how tough One-Eye had made it to track him.

“I bet there’s no finding him at all once it gets dark,” I said after I had gotten a little sugar water inside me. I was confused about when I was. I meant after dark the day he fled. He could lose himself thoroughly in the dark.

And darkness always comes.

Croaker wasted a lot of energy cursing.

I said, “I can watch for crows. Wherever there’re crows there’s something they’re watching.” Except around Goblin, who had his owls and confusion spells. Unless they never looked because Catcher did not know he was out there. “Mostly they’re too dim to be fooled by low-grade glamors.” Which had to say something about people and crows both but I am not bright enough to define it.

“I’ll just count him gone. For now. I don’t want you going out there if you’re going to lose track so bad that you forget you’ve got to come back.”

It was my own habit of dreaming that endangered me. I had encountered fewer perils roaming around that way.

Again Croaker said, “I’ll just count him gone.” He smiled grimly. “He’ll be back. Right after he strangles that woman. Which will happen about as soon as the new wears off. You go back over there. Keep a close eye on the standard. And send me whatever writings you’ve got ready for review.”

Ulp. I was not ready for this. He had not shown much interest ever before.

“When are we going to move on? Or are we not going to?”

“Not till we have our crops in. Unless we’re under really heavy pressure. Five months minimum. Enjoy the rest.”

Enjoy the rest. Like I enjoyed all that loafing around when we were bottled up inside Dejagore. He missed all that because he could not turn down the chance to go off and play games with Soulcatcher.

“When you went after Catcher the other day . . . Was there a plan? Did you really expect to accomplish anything?” I retained doubts about the depth of their antagonism even now.

“Check with my dearly beloved. That was her scheme. You’ll probably see it again. She’s got the notion that if she keeps harassing Soulcatcher, Catcher won’t be able to concentrate on giving us grief.”

“Now there’s an idea. Jab sticks into a nest of vipers so they don’t have time to come hunt you down. Why not whack on hornets’ nests and hibernating bears while we’re at it?”

“Find One-Eye or go work on the Annals. I’ve got all the bitching I can handle right here at home.”

“You ought to get some sleep,” I said, heading out. “You’re way too crabby.”

There is color. There is life of a sort. There is light. Without light there can be no darkness.

There is death. The husks of a hundred crows surround the listing throne.

Death will find a way. Darkness will find a way inside.

Darkness always comes.

The thing on the throne sits wide-eyed, blind. Its orbs show no pupils. They are half-fried egg-white blanks, yet the creature does seem to see. Certainly it is aware. Grimacing in agony, its face turns as it tracks each venturesome spy from the world. It concentrates its will on each newcomer, wanting it to land. A twinge of evil humor stirs its features whenever a weak bird fails to carry out its instructions.

The earth quivers.

The throne slides a foot, tilts another inch. Alarm underscores the refreshed pain on the face of the sleeper.

The crack in the earth opens wider. The color wafting up brightens. A breeze whispers out of the bowels of the earth. It is colder than the heart of a starving spider. It carries a black vapor.

The throne jerks another inch.

Death will find a way.

Even the gods must pass.

86

Things went too well for too long. Summer was an idyll. It never got too hot. The rains were perfect for the crops we planted. We were threatened with the sort of harvest for which peasants pray. We made sure the peasants we encountered understood that the wonderful weather was all our fault. Our foragers had liberated draft animals enough to support us if we traveled light, leaving the heavy equipment that had followed us down from friendly territory. There were even a few sheep for those not bound by Gunni strictures against eating flesh.

The old saw is true. An army does travel on its stomach. What we accomplished by projecting the Taglian will the distance we did was a tribute to Croaker’s planning, preparation and devotion. And psychosis. And, of course, it was founded on the four years given us by Longshadow’s utter failure to interfere. Poor boy. Should have listened to Mogaba. He would not be living in a kennel. Not that he could be faulted for having been deceived by the Mother of Deceivers when Kina could spin webs of deception to warp the eyesight of gods as great as she.

We had not yet fattened up from the winter but we were getting set to take the next leap already.

Neither Soulcatcher nor Mogaba, neither lost Taglian loyalists nor the local population seemed further inclined to make our lives miserable. We were getting along with the latter fairly well, now.

After apparently at Lady’s insistence finally sending recon forces to winkle out the secrets of Overlook, the Old Man had discovered that the fortress contained several treasures. Half became the Company treasury, something we have not had for a generation. All pledged brothers received equal shares of the rest. Eventually, Croaker ordered a market established where locals could bring anything they cared to sell.

Results were disappointing at first. But once we demonstrated that we would not rob or murder anybody trade picked up. Peasants are resilient. They are realists. These did not see how our yoke could weigh heavier than Longshadow’s. They had no problems with old or imagined myths of the Black Company despite existing so much closer to Khatovar.

They did not know the name Khatovar, as such, either. Nor were they concerned about Kina, under any of her names. Their Kina was a creator as well as a destroyer, fierce but no unhallowed queen of darkness. The Year of the Skulls was no terror to them. They could imagine no future more grim than their past.

Nobody hailed us as liberators, however. We were but the shadow that displaced the darkness.

I wandered the market occasionally, accompanied by Thai Dei and an interpreter. Thai Dei objected. He was sure my curiosity would get me killed. He was not shy about advising me that curiosity was a lethal curse.

Uncle Doj usually tagged along. Despite pretenses to the contrary, a lot of strain had developed between us. I could not forgive Sarie’s absence, though I controlled my urge to bring my knowledge into the open. What I did to irritate him was ask every southerner I interviewed about the constellation called the Noose.

But nobody knew it.

Except for the devastation that was Kiaulune it would have seemed a good world.

I enjoyed myself, except for missing Sarie. And I saw her in my dreams. There were fewer demands on me lately, though I was in charge at the Shadowgate. Red Rudy and Bucket did most of the real work there, showing me the ropes as they went. Nobody said so but I was getting educated in case I ever had to take over. I did not remind anybody that I managed the Old Crew tolerably during our ordeal in Dejagore. I did not remind them that we had a Lieutenant and she was a whole lot more experienced and hard-edged than me. Anytime you say anything you just get more work piled on.

87

I looked downslope one morning and saw a young army headed my way, twenty-five men and as many jackasses, loaded down with packs and bamboo. I told Thai Dei, “I don’t like the looks of this. That’s Loftus, Longinus and Cletus all at the same time.” Not to mention Otto and Hagop, whom I had not seen for a while. “When them three all clot up together you can bet something is up.”

Thai Dei looked at me like he wondered if I really thought he was dim enough to think they were off for a picnic. He remembered the brothers from Dejagore and probably understood their obsessions better than I did.

Something was in the wind, though.

I went down to meet them.

“Hey!” Clete hollered, waving. “It’s the hermit prince.”

“What’re you guys up to?”

“We heard you set up your own kingdom over here. We come to see its wonders.”

“Looks like you’re here to invade me. What is all this shit?” I couched the question in the language of the Jewel Cities.

“Field trials for a new toy. We been playing with it in the cellars of the castle.”

“Hnh?” Could there be a real reason that the Old Man still kept most of Overlook off limits? “I hope it’s good to eat.”

Longo snickered. “This wouldn’t be too tasty, Murgen. But it’ll be fun to dish out.”

Thai Dei scowled. Left out again. Too bad. He was with the Company but not of the Company. As I lived with Nyueng Bao without being Nyueng Bao.

“The way you guys are grinning I got to figure, whatever it is, it’s got a lot of gears and levers and does something entirely decorative with a reliability quotient of ten percent.”

“O ye of weak faith. Clete, you ever seen a sourball as negative as this guy?”

“He just don’t understand engineering.”

“I understand engineering fine. I don’t understand engineers. What’re we doing?”

“Field tests,” Clete reminded me. “We applied a little engineering to Lady’s fireball flingers.”

“Range, accuracy, power, Murgen,” Loftus enthused. “Velocity. All areas where we thought there was room for improvement.”

Absolutely. The fireball throwers would do a man a lot of damage but you practically had to stick him with your pole to make sure you hit him.

All this foreign yammer brought Uncle Doj around to poke his nose in. Which did him no good. But he would figure it out quickly enough.

Longo said, “You got a nice field of fire here, Murgen.” He waved toward the mountains. Miles of nothing lay between us and the evergreen forest. His arm swung around to indicate Overlook. “And a nice measured range down that way.” Men were out there setting some kind of survey stakes already.

Guys up close started working double-time, dragging stuff off the pack animals. Cletus grabbed a bamboo pole. “Your basic bamboo. The kind Lady turned out until we brought our thoughts to the table.”

Clete popped off a few fireballs in the general direction of a couple of gossiping crows. The crows laughed. The fireballs wobbled into the distance, ran out of momentum, drifted to the ground, faded away. “Can’t hit shit. Except shadows. Unless you walk right up to what you want to burn.”

Longo interjected, “We made her believe that since soldiers would be using the bamboo to work other targets whether she liked that or not they ought to be able to hit whatever they’re aiming at.”

Loftus said, “She’s spent time around soldiers. She understands how they think.”

I sneered. “She’s been screwing one for five years. She ought to have a clue.”

Clete grabbed a bamboo pole with black bands around it. “This’s a cute little number.” He nodded to his brothers. They picked up similar poles. Each brother pointed his in the general direction of a crow. Clete said, “Do it.”

They cranked. Fireballs flew. Black feathers exploded, floated around smoldering. More fireballs darted out. It did not seem to matter whether the guys aimed well or not. The fireballs hunted their targets down however desperately they darted and dodged. Just the way they had hunted down shadows.

Clete leaned on his pole. “That ought to take care of the spy problem.” His brothers remained alert. Longo picked off a clever little devil trying to sneak off at low altitude, whipping between boulders in turns so tight it lost wing feathers every time.

A ball of violet fire closed in at four times the crow’s best speed.

Poof!

“Now there’s a trick I can appreciate,” I said.

Likewise Thai Dei and Uncle Doj and the guys of the thin desperate line at the Shadowgate. Jaws dropped. Rudy swore, “Fugginay! I want me one a them mudsuckers.”

I asked, “You got a special problem with crows?”

Rudy asked, “It only kills crows?”

Cletus averred, “I suppose we could set them to knock down most anything. But the more targets you want to specify the more complicated your logistics is gonna get.”

“That’s not why you’re here,” I guessed.

“That was just to clear the area.”

Longo said, “We wanted something guys like us could appreciate.”

Loftus added, “Considering that we’re not likely to bring in a lot of recruits anytime soon, while Taglios can come up with as many as they want.”

There was a growing faction up north, these days, who wanted Taglios to pretend that the Company had gone its way. We were headed for Khatovar when we came to Taglios. There was nothing to keep us from going there, now. If everybody held real still and stayed real quiet we might lose interest and head on down the road.

While I talked to the engineers Otto and Hagop erected several trestle tables. These acquired decorative vises and tool collection place settings. Racks rose behind the tables. Their companions began stacking bamboo tubes in those. “Big bastards,” I said. Some were fifteen feet long. Some were four inches in diameter.

Clete said, “Big and brutal. Careful where you point that damned thing!” A soldier was trying to get a bead on a crow speeding south. He was not worried about people dumb enough to get between him and his target. “What we wanted most was increased accuracy and velocity. A little extra oomph at the other end would be a nice plus, too. Hagop.”

Hagop took a twelve-footer with a three-inch bore, striped red, locked it into a vise. He sighted down its length. He tapped gently with a hammer, shifting his aim slightly. “That boulder out there that looks like One-Eye’s hat.” He armed a complicated bamboo spring mechanism.

I did not think the boulder looked much like a hat. It was a good four hundred yards away. Three soldiers with standard bamboo launched a dozen fireballs before one got lucky and painted a lime glow along one edge.

“Usual problem. When you finally do get a hit you don’t do much damage. Unless it’s people. Go ahead, Hagop.”

Hagop triggered his pole. There was a frying bacon sound. An intense orange ball crossed to the boulder too fast for me to follow. It hit dead center. A lance of fire blew out of the rock for fifteen seconds. I felt the heat.

The boulder shifted position slightly, pointing its tail of fire farther downhill.

The fireball popped out the other side of the rock like a pimple’s core squirting.

“Shit!” said I. “And double shit! That fucker must be ten feet thick!”

Clete said, “A three-inch ball will run at least fifteen feet into the kind of stone we have around here, Hagop, see the silver character that looks like the rune for Fate?” He pointed at Overlook. There were thousands of characters on the wall. I did not understand which one he meant. Neither did Hagop.

“Tallest line of characters. Middle of the target. Looks like a flagpole trailing two pennons to the right, next to something like a three-lined pitchfork.”

“All right.”

I found it, too.

“Go ahead. Snipe away when you’re ready.”

I protested, “That’s over three thousand yards! Closer to four. He’ll be lucky to hit the wall.”

“Ready.”

“Do it.”

Bacon fried. An orange ball left the bamboo pole. It took less than three seconds to reach Overlook. I would not have been able to follow it had I not been standing behind Hagop. A flash lit up the whole countryside when the fireball hit the spells protecting the wall. It struck right where Hagop aimed it. The target rune appeared slightly discolored once the glare waned.

“Oh, my!” said I. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj yammered at one another. They had no need to understand our quacking to see the potential.

“We figure a ball will run out at least fourteen miles before it loses all its momentum,” Clete said. “By then it won’t have much more energy than a regular ball and won’t be much good for anything but killing shadows and general destruction anymore.” He patted the tube Hagop had used. “This was our prototype. It’s sighted in. We got to do all these others now. Which is why we come up here.”

Hagop and Otto replaced that pole with another not yet marked. Otto gave the back end a half twist. A complete, tray like section came off. Two guys from Lady’s factory packed the tray with something that looked like potter’s clay, then seated a big black rubber marble in that. Hagop put the tray back into his toy, fiddled with the triggering mechanism, asked the engineer brothers, “You guys satisfied with the way this thing is laid?”

All three squatted. They bickered. Hammers tapped. They argued. Then they, Otto, Hagop and the factory people all assumed particular positions and stared at Overlook.

Bacon crackled. An orange fireball hit the air. A thousand yards out it began to drift to the left, then downward. It hit ground short of the wall. Fire gouted into the air for fifteen seconds. So did bits of stone and sod.

All seven observers began combining observations on a chart. Bickering steadily. They took the tray off the pole and peered through. More notes went onto the chart. That eventually passed into the hands of a specialist who used some of the arcane tools to machine the interior of the pole.

The brothers moved to another pole. Their accomplices had a dozen set up for testing. They repeated the process over and over. Some poles put their fireballs on target first try. Some missed badly. The worst got discarded right away. No sense wasting time on those. There was still a need for less accurate shadowslappers.

Once a pole went through its rework it got tested for consistency. An alphabet of arcane marks in various paints went on to tell the soldiers what quirks the weapon retained.

Otto seldom says much but during his lunch break he observed, “Lady’s really got the power back, now.”

Hardly anyone even suspected the truth. Those who did were not prepared to believe it.

“How many of them things you going to work?” My guys had stopped getting any work done. They were hanging around watching the fireworks like a bunch of big kids.

Clete said, “We brought fifty in this batch. We hope we can come up with twenty reliables out of those. Everything goes right, we’ll start work on some really big stuff; boy, will the Tals be surprised.”

I could imagine what these new fireballs would do to men’s bodies. But I suspected that scything through legions was not their purpose. And my suspicion was confirmed next afternoon.

Lady herself came to inspect the twenty-six pieces the brothers had found acceptable.

The woman seemed emotionally drained, yet did show a bounce that said part of her life was going well. She and the Old Man were finding free moments to be something other than Captain and Lieutenant. I was pleased for them. “Excellent,” she said, after she watched every accepted tube smite Overlook’s wall at least once. “What about the crow-specific light arms?”

“You see any crows?” Longo asked. “We got a picket line out. They don’t even get close.”

“Good. Prime all of these things with full loads. I’m going to try my own experiment.”

Hagop told me, “We’re in the chips. We done come up with six more than we even hoped. And half the others are good enough we can use them up close, a mile or less. We’ll kick us some ass, big time.” The whole gang were as thrilled as kids with new toys. And Lady was the worst. She bounced around like she was fifteen again.

The troops shuffled the tables around, began packing tools and loading wagons.

Loftus, Longinus and Otto kept chuckling about something.

I glanced around. I did not like the portents. Even Lady had the look. The look that always showed up on One-Eye and/or Goblin when they were going to pull a stunt the rest of us might regret.

“Just hang on here, everybody!” I yelled, trying to be the responsible one. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but—” This was my fief.

A bunch of them, including Lady, the brothers, Otto and Hagop, all got behind the tables. They started wisecracking as they sighted down the lengths of fully loaded heavyweight poles.

“Don’t even think about it!” I growled.

My in-laws hovered behind me, silently, not understanding anything being said but clear on the fact that yesterday and today added up to something significant. Something beyond the obvious.

“Don’t do it!” I begged.

Twenty-two bamboo tubes discharged within seconds of one another. The villains all watched the orange fireballs streak north-northwest, straight into the area where that storm of crows had exploded in my imagination.

It was not my imagination this time.

Catcher’s hideout had to be more than ten miles away. It did not take the fireballs ten seconds to get there. Maybe not five. I was too shaken to be a good judge of time’s passage.

Fire and smoke and shit flew half a mile high.

Now the whole gang went bugfuck. Every one of them—Lady, too—put fireballs into the air in streams of four and five. The distant woods began to boil. Even from so far away I could make out gigantic trees being hurled a thousand feet into the air.

I recalled some trees there being twice as thick as I was tall. They twisted through the sky like scythes of fire.

A firestorm took life below. It hurled flames and smoke heavenward like an angry volcano.

It was a day when a lot of crows died.

I am sure it was a day when Soulcatcher found not one reason to laugh.

88

There is a lot of ritual in human affairs. The Old Man started me doing sermons from the Annals, the way he had himself in ancient times. He was a firm believer in every man knowing his exact place in our long history. And then most of the older hands were stuck with teaching Taglian to anyone who did not speak it already. Croaker wanted every brother to have a language in common with every other. Sometimes it seemed we had as many native tongues as we had men to speak them. I recalled no instance in the Annais when the Company had become as polyglot as it was now.

Another burden I bore was keeping in shape by hoofing it across to headquarters for staff meetings every few days.

A wonderful aroma wakened me. I shoved my head out of our oft-improved bunker. “What’re you cooking?” I asked Thai Dei.

“Uncle Doj killed a wild pig last night. There will be roast pork today.”

“I hope I can keep it down.”

“It won’t be ready for hours yet. You told me to remind you of your staff meeting this morning.”

“Shit.” It was supposed to be important, too. I did not dare be late. “Better save me some.” I dragged my ass out and made what morning preparations I could. None of us were the sort who spent hours trimming our beards or prettying our hair or taking baths. But you do have to splash a little water in your face sometimes and you do have to get the crud out of your teeth just so you feel like keeping on.

I wondered what would become of our teeth if we did not get One-Eye back. Those tiny little spells he put on them, to protect them, had to be renewed every two years. And we had battalions of new men still lacking their initial exposures.

Thai Dei did not save me diddly. He took the pig off the fire and followed me. There is just no ditching the man.

I was still not riding. Sleepy had not brought my mount back. Sleepy had not come home yet himself, though he had had ample time. He had disappeared while crossing the mountains. No search through the ghostworld nor on site had produced a trace. I feared the worst.

Two sleek crows followed me, gliding from bush to rock to ruin. Otherwise there was no evidence to indicate that Soulcatcher remained alive or was interested in us anymore, despite the vandalism of her home. She was biding her time.

You could say that about the woman. She was crazy but never impatient. Her temper did not control her.

Lady said she had escaped the barrage only because she had taken Howler’s carpet north so she could conspire with the Radisha.

I had orders not to look for Soulcatcher. I had orders to run whenever I sensed her presence. The same with Kina. Smoke was next to useless now. I had become too valuable a resource to risk.

Right.

I glanced back before we started up the far slope. Uncle Doj was trailing us, as he did so often. His step suggested he was ready for anything. One hand rested on Ash Wand always.

Thai Dei and I had resumed training with him, want to or not. He would not explain what was going on inside his head. He just kept whacking away, forcing us to defend ourselves or enjoy painful bruises.

He despaired of my ever reaching what he considered minimal proficiency with a sword. He did not understand the difference between a lone wolf warrior and a soldier who is part of a team of mutually supporting fighters. Or he pretended not to understand.

He expected trouble, no doubt about that. But it was too much trouble to explain.

I have been running with Croaker long enough that I should be used to that.

I reminded Thai Dei, “We’re mushrooms.”

“Huh?”

“Kept in the dark? Fed a diet of horseshit?” You would think that he would remember. But he was not interested in trying. Like most Nyueng Bao attached to the Company. “Never mind.”

Uncle Doj tried to invite himself into the meeting. A couple of hard-eyed guards stepped into his path. He chose to go hang around with the other Nyueng Bao. He never did that before. He seemed to be looking for JoJo, One-Eye’s erstwhile bodyguard. JoJo was never a gregarious sort, even among other Nyueng Bao.

I ducked inside the Old Man’s dugout.

A whole herd of people had gathered in there. They were waiting for me, apparently.

“Let’s get started,” Croaker said. “First, intelligence received. The rumor is true. Mogaba definitely did sign on with the Radisha. He’s started putting together a force somewhere south of Dejagore. The reports didn’t explain where but did say his men have begun evicting the locals from the best croplands so they can support themselves. The leadership in Taglios hasn’t decided exactly what to do yet. There’s actually a lot of sentiment for forgetting us altogether.”

The Captain did not reveal his sources. Some of that came from me and Lady, dreaming and walking the ghost when Smoke was not completely useless. He added, “It seems Mogaba will enjoy the support of several small auxiliary units raised by religious sects with a grudge against us or our friends.”

Blade chuckled.

89

Silence stretched. I found a battered mug left over from Kiaulune’s glory days, helped myself to tea from a pot steeping beside Croaker’s crude hearth. The stuff was more bitter than medicine. That explained why it was still there. I pretended to enjoy it.

“Clete,” Croaker said. “What’s the agricultural situation?” Only in the Black Company would a siege engineer be in charge of farming.

Cletus said, “Nothing new to report. Exceptional crops threatening to mature earlier than the locals predicted. We could do worse than to establish ourselves here.” Cletus and his brothers centered a faction interested in settling down. They felt their new weapons could discourage our most determined enemies. They made no strong representations, though.

The Company had slogged through hell for an age. Now we possessed a rich province and a fine fortress and our only serious enemies were hundreds of miles away and probably disinclined to come after us anytime soon.

I did not listen to the editorializing following a suggestion that the gods loved us because our crops were doing so well. I paid no attention till Longinus started telling us why we no longer needed to be afraid of anyone.

“If the Radisha really traded away half her power so she could keep her position that means the priests are really in charge. I don’t see them, no matter how much they fear us or hate Blade, ever saddling themselves with another real army. The cost and the threat to their power . . . ”

I had heard it all before. The priests would not let the Radisha come after us.

I did not believe it. He was whistling in the dark. But I was a ghostwalker. I could go anywhere and see anything. I had to work harder to mislead myself.

“You’re wrong, Longo,” I said. “We’ll have company here eventually. Probably way sooner than any of us would like.” I even had the Old Man’s attention, suddenly.

“I had a dream.” Most everyone knew that I had visions. The mechanics and reliability remained my secret. To avoid troubling people who might worry about me, I blamed it all on the kinds of seizures I had been having since the siege.

Lady clucked her tongue, an irksome habit she did not know she had acquired. She and Croaker were turning into everybody’s grandparents. The inner circle needed young blood bad. She asked, “Could you tell us about your dream, Murgen? Or do we have to wait for the book?” She was annoyed with me because I had begun making new revisions to her volume of the Annals. Some of our latest class of enlistees had been around back then. Not all of them recalled events the same as she did.

“The high point, like the boss said, is that our old pal Mogaba isn’t unemployed anymore.”

A general susurrus. Had they thought that the Old Man was joking?

“I don’t get much from my dreams. I have no control over them. I get knocked back in time sometimes but I can’t go whenever I want to find out why something happened after we find out that it did happen. I have to wait for news from our friends on the scene just like everybody else.” We do have friends up north who supply us with reliable intelligence. I check up on them whenever I can.

We did not use Smoke much anymore. He wanted to wake up. He was not really in a coma now, anyway. Lady had to struggle to make him useful. She took advantage of the resulting opportunities herself.

I continued, “But Soulcatcher must have been in touch with Mogaba at some point. She recommended him to the Radisha. Bet you the Woman took him on mostly because she didn’t want to get Catcher pissed off at her. Mogaba’s already promising the priests that he’ll catch Blade and Lady for them.” There had been huge bounties on those two from the moment the Radisha turned on the Company.

Mogaba never let failure dent his confidence.

Blade volunteered, “I could go hit them back first. It would be fun to pick them off and watch the live ones squirm . . . ”

“No.” Croaker was in no mood for flights of fancy. “I know who’d pick off who if you went dancing with Mogaba. Sindawe. Talk to me about this.”

“I’m hearing this for the first time. I need to think about it, Captain.”

“Think out loud.”

“Mogaba is alone.” By which Sindawe meant that Mogaba had no Nar adherents anymore. Those who had gone with him when he left the Company were dead. “His sanity will be more strained than ever. He may become obsessed with destroying you, personally, because you took away his birthright.”

Croaker grunted, unsurprised. “Murgen. How long before he can get into our hair? It took four years for us to get where we could make it here still in good enough shape to starve. And we wouldn’t be as happy as we are now if the Radisha had fooled us and stayed faithful. We didn’t lose as many men fighting as I expected and a lot fewer to disease.”

He let slide the fact that we had come during the off season, when, normally, moving an army is next to impossible.

“Speaking of numbers,” Bucket said. “That last bunch who wanted to go home are long gone.”

Lady stated the obvious. “Mogaba won’t have to train the way we did. He can round up men we’ve already trained for him.”

The Old Man asked me, “What does the Radisha want from Mogaba?”

“The priests think he should just maintain control of the territories we overran. Some of them are real excited about their chances to make a killing down there. But the Woman just wants to keep us south of the mountains.” I chuckled. “His job will be the same as it was when he worked for Longshadow. Only he’ll plug the bottle from the other end.”

“Mogaba will come someday,” Isi observed. “As Sindawe said.”

Croaker grunted again.

Bucket said, “If he don’t bring half a shitload of timber, kites, and tons of bamboo, and comes in the summer . . . ”

Longo cracked, “He could have peasants carry his supplies up, then eat the peasants.”

Sindawe, Ochiba and Isi glared.

Croaker said, “Stick to business. There’re changes happening in Taglios. Thanks to Murgen’s spells we know about some of them.”

Everybody waited for him to say something more. He did not. Finally, Lady remarked, “Soulcatcher is still a problem.”

Definitely. She had not responded to Lady’s barrage. Yet. I was not supposed to look for her but I did know she was still around. She was shielding herself with illusions and moving a lot. I had every confidence that she had lost no interest in causing us misery.

No one ever mentioned the child. I knew she had survived and had been rescued, not by the Kina to whom she wept her appeals but by Catcher, to the accompaniment of merry taunts. Lady and Croaker had hardened their hearts. Which was understandable. They had had scarcely more contact with her than some unknown child born the same day at the far end of the world.

I would not say anything. I was supposed to avoid Catcher until I received specific orders otherwise. The Old Man’s tolerance for my improvisations had been exhausted.

Sleepy’s loss remained unforgiven.

Croaker asked, “What about your mother-in-law, Murgen? What about Goblin and One-Eye?”

What could I say? “They’re still missing.” That could not be blamed on me. Not yet. He might find a way.

Our last contact with any of them had come when some of Goblin’s rangers had arrived with the Prahbrindrah Drah in manacles, Lisa Bowalk snarling in a cage on a cart, and no word at all about what Goblin was doing or why he was doing it. I did not think his desertion was part of the Old Man’s master plan. I refused to believe that Croaker could plan that far ahead. The pasty-faced little wizard was out there somewhere, playing out his own scheme.

I did not get many chances to look for him anymore. The dreams did not come as often now. If they did I visited Sarie first. Sarie and my son, that absolutely beautiful drooling lump she nicknamed Tobo because she did not want to pick a real name without me there to talk it over and find out face-to-face what his name would be and why.

She was determined to join me, though by now even the most remote parts of the swamp had heard about the falling-out between the Radisha and the Black Company. That would put Sahra at greater risk if she left the temple. Almost all the Nyueng Bao who had left their swamps in recent times have been associated with the Company somehow.

Sarie’s keepers were alert. They expected her to try something now she was no longer the size of a small house. Clever woman, she was using guerrilla tactics while she regained her strength. Every day in every way she made the priestly population more miserable. That was easy. She just imitated her mother. When the time came they would, probably, lack enthusiasm for the task of her recapture.

Croaker stared at Lady. He was waiting for her to say something else about her sister. The others did the same. Catcher weighed on all our minds. Her luck never stopped running strong. Her grudge list kept getting longer. Though there was no way we could hurt our cause any more. She could not do worse than kill us, could she?

Hell, we all take on a death sentence when we join the Company.

Lady said, “Several soldiers have gone missing the last couple of nights. Some probably deserted. But not all of them.” She waved. Isi and Ochiba, already cued, brought a bundle to the front of the crowd. They dropped it on the dirt floor.

I did not remind the Old Man that we could enjoy real floors and real furniture if he would just move into Overlook.

Lady said, “This may be a little ripe.”

Oh-oh.

Isi and Ochiba spun the dead man out of his wrappings. He did not stink as bad as I expected. He was shriveled like an old mummy. His mouth was open in a scream that would never end. He seemed to have suffered a lot of bruises before he died.

Those would have been self-inflicted during his final struggle. “Shadow got him,” I said. Needlessly.

Croaker eyed me. I shrugged. “No shadows have gotten through since I’ve been on guard.” I was sure. There would have been an uproar.

“They’re under control, then,” he said. “It’s her, using Longshadow’s leftovers.”

Catcher was the new Shadowmaster. Maybe she was honing her skills.

Lady observed, “There’s nothing we can do about this kind of attack except never go anywhere alone and never without bamboo . . . What’s the matter with him?”

The “him” she referred to was the Company Annalist, who had started making weird noises. He jerked around, apparently trying to swallow his own tongue. So they told me later. At the time I was out of touch with my body entirely. I was a fly who never saw the swatter coming.

I went to the place of all the bones for a moment and for that whole eternity seemed to be smeared all over the grim landscape. A white crow mocked me. Then I was the white crow. Then I was out of there but I did not follow my habitual course. I did not get to see all those grumpy old men glowering from their cocoons of ice. I got to wing my way away through curtains of darkness back to those gaunt and wonderful days when first I met my Sarie, then before that, where I met my own ghost and joined it in a tour of the besieged city. None of the words from my invisible beak were my own but the madwoman who manufactured them did not seem to be paying attention to or really directing what was happening. Poor me. I was like a moth caught in an unexpected squall. The hammer of my desperate wings did nothing to daunt a gale indifferent to my existence.

I saw a lot of death and despair. I learned nothing new and saw nothing I had not had a more intimate relationship with in the past.

Catcher maybe just poked at me in passing, because she was bored, or maybe she was unaware that she had bumped me at all. It did not matter. I could not retaliate. All I could do was flap like a son of a bitch and hope I could survive one more storm.

Darkness came.

90

I wakened in the alcove where Smoke used to be stored. It was dark. I had no idea how long I had been out. The meeting was over, that was certain. I did not hear a sound.

I started to clamber out of there, found I was incredibly weak. My legs betrayed me when I tried to stand. I pitched forward through the curtain masking the alcove.

There was a sudden mouselike scurry. I lifted my head. The little bit of light betrayed the rodent.

Thai Dei was stuffing papers back into piles while trying to appear innocent. Maybe he was. He could not read.

“There you are. I got worried.” He helped me up. “What happened?”

My knees were watery. “I had one of those attacks like I used to have when we were in Dejagore and Taglios.”

“Why did they . . . ? They all trooped out of here hours ago. Even the guards went away.”

“What time is it?” The meeting had begun early in the morning.

“Be sunset in an hour.”

“Shit. A whole day shot, then.” Thai Dei helped me stay standing. I did not shake him off. I looked for food. Food always helped after a long ghostwalk with Smoke.

This was not the same. At least cold, tough, burnt mutton did not help. And there was nothing else available.

What I wanted was something alcoholic. A few amateurs had arisen to take One-Eye’s place. Best known were Willow Swan and Cordy Mather, who had stayed around despite being free to go back north. Cordy no longer had that fire in his belly where the Radisha was concerned. But their product was no good. And, if I wanted some, I had to acquire it through intermediaries since we all had to pretend to observe the rules.

But I had a suspicion, of late, about where One-Eye could have hidden his manufacturing equipment. There was a small, reinforced cubby in my old dugout where I had kept the Annals and the odd private item. It had survived disasters unscathed. Mother Gota had helped build it.

We climbed up out of Croaker’s dugout, me still wobble-kneed and griping, “I wish the hell he’d move into the fucking fortress.” The experimentation was all over but our crowd was still scattered through the hills, roughing it. An hour of light remained. “Where is everybody?” I did not see a soul closer than the ruins of Kiaulune. That gave me a little shock of fright. Had I returned to the world I left when the seizure took me? Was I caught in another layer of dream?

“They all went away. Even the guards.” Thai Dei repeated the news as though he was talking to someone both deaf and dense. “Else I could not have entered the Liberator’s shelter.”

It had been a while since anybody called the Old Man that. “I take it Uncle Doj went to keep an eye on them.”

Thai Dei did not reply.

I headed for my former home. “Compared to the bunker we moved to over there this dump was a palace.”

Lady and the Old Man had turned my palace into a prison. The downhill side entrance that we put in for Mother Gota and Uncle Doj now opened into an exercise area fenced with captured spears. Lisa Bowalk lay in a cage there, muzzle on paws, exposed to the elements, dully resigned. The Prahbrindrah Drah paced, avoiding glittering spearpoints and the reach of the shapeshifter’s claws. He seemed patient, counting his condition only a temporary setback.

Neither Longshadow, Howler, nor Narayan Singh were outside. Singh’s absence was not surprising. He was punished if he ventured into the light. But the former Shadowmaster was not and he hated the darkness inside. He feared what might be lurking there.

The poor old boy had lost all his self-confidence. He spent most of his time shivering, rocking and whimpering to himself. He was losing weight. Which was hard to believe.

The stench was awful. Those people had no friends now. They lived worse than animals in the crudest zoo or feedlot. Passersby were encouraged to torment Longshadow and the living saint of the Deceivers.

Howler had not earned his final standing on Lady’s shitlist. He was treated with indifference yet fed the best table scraps.

Smoke would be inside somewhere, too. He and the prince were treated best. Bowalk was fed and otherwise ignored as long as she behaved.

A sign that could be read by only a few actually insisted that the Prahbrindrah Drah was an honored guest. Somebody’s little joke.

“A good storm would help with the smell,” I said. I glanced at the sky. Relief seemed unlikely anytime soon.

Thai Dei grunted. He raised a hand.

Something was up. He was on his toes, nostrils flaring. His head moved in little jerks as he tried to hear something.

I froze. This was his business. His expertise.

I heard it, too, now. Scratching from within the dugout. Months had gone by and still I had no clear idea why Longshadow and Singh remained among the living. They kept farting around, Croaker and Lady would regret not having disposed of them quickly.

Lady thought they might be useful. Someday. Somehow. Somewhere.

“Better find out what it is,” I said. With no enthusiasm whatsoever. This kind of thing always meant trouble. “What happened to Uncle Doj?” He might be handy to have around if something happened. I was not carrying anything but a little three-ball bamboo stick.

Thai Dei stepped over to the headquarters company woodpile now serviced by Shadowlander peasant contractors and selected a yard of kindling with a burly knot at one end. He gestured me forward.

I slipped down and yanked on the door of my former home.

Narayan Singh, the living saint of the Deceivers, tumbled into the twilight. He had been kept inside for a long time. He was naturally dark-skinned but had acquired a pasty, maggoty coloration. Maybe Lady was doing more than just keeping him locked up in his own filth. She could be subtle when she wanted. She just did not want that often.

Thai Dei bopped him on the noggin.

Poor old Narayan. His life had not gone well for a long time. And the son of a bitch had earned every second of pain. Bet his goddess snickered whenever she thought about him.

Half of his torment would be the waiting, knowing that someday Lady would take time to offer him some specialized, personalized, unloving attention.

“Let’s be real careful,” I told Thai Dei.

Thai Dei grunted. He wore the ultimate Nyueng Bao stone face. To Tan had not been forgotten.

“Don’t even think about it, Thai Dei. Lady would roast you. Besides, there’re more of them inside. And they’re all worse than Singh.”

I meant worse trouble but it did not turn out that way. Both Longshadow and Howler wore hobbles and metal gags. Longshadow had not eaten well since his capture. A starved sorcerer is a tame sorcerer, I guess. Covered with filth, Howler and the Shadowmaster barely had the strength to crawl into the light after they thought Narayan had opened the way.

Even famine had not yet tamed them completely. A point worth keeping in mind.

Thai Dei remarked, “They were supposed to seal off the kennel side.”

“Don’t look like anybody bothered. Keep an eye on them. Without breaking anything. Or anybody. I’ll be right back out.”

Thai Dei grunted again. In deep disappointment.

“We’ll get our turn,” I promised.

Smoke was still inside. He had looked so bad for so long he did not look much worse now. His clothing had decayed into rotten rags. He was chained. One chain trailed back into the darkness.

The others had been chained, too. The guys had shown that much sense before they took off wherever they went. Somehow, the villains managed to get loose. I wondered if they would have dragged Smoke any farther had they had the strength and time to manage a successful getaway.

Might have been amusing to watch them return to a world that had changed completely during their holidays.

I stepped over the little wizard, found a small lamp and got it burning. Except for the stink and mess everything was pretty much as we had left it. A ragged shawl belonging to Ky Gota still lay tangled on a three-legged chair liberated from Kiaulune ages ago. There was no evidence that the prisoners had spent any time in this part of the dugout.

Following Smoke’s chain, I discovered that the one side had been walled off. But the carpenters had done a poor job using salvage lumber that had not stood up to someone’s patient ministrations.

I ducked through the hole.

The stench was a lot thicker on the other side. I had seen less filthy pigsties.

The prisoners had not explored their prison thoroughly. They had not found my little cubby. But someone else had and had decided to take advantage of it.

One-Eye’s lost manufacturing equipment and finished product had been stuffed into the hole, along with what looked like a bunch of treasures harvested from the ruined city. Mother Gota had enjoyed collecting junk during her nocturnal rambles.

I dragged out a jug, popped its cork. Damn, that stuff smelled nasty! Some kind of distilled spirits . . . I took a long pull that left my eyes running. The stuff tasted worse than it smelled.

After a second throat burning draught I raised my lamp high, trying to get some light in there past the clutter. I had left a few treasures of my own, though nothing important enough to have dragged on over to the Shadowgate yet. I did not recall what all I had stashed.

“Ah! What’s this?” I snaked an arm in through the junk.

As I closed my fingers on ragged burlap I managed to elbow a stack of earthenware bottles piled on their sides. One-Eye evidently had meant to revisit them long ago because even an ignoramus like me knows you do not leave bottled beer horizontal forever.

It took only that nudge to get the bottles banging against one another, then blasting their contents all over me and the inside of the dugout. I snagged one spewing bottle and got some of its contents inside me. Not bad, but a little yeasty.

“I’m all right!” I shouted in response to Thai Dei’s inquiry from outside. “I found One-Eye’s treasure.” In more ways than one, I discovered. The object wrapped in burlap was that wonderful wizard killer spear he had whittled while we were trapped in Dejagore. The gold and silver inlays alone were worth a fortune.

More evidence that the little wizard had not planned to stay away forever. He did not know I knew but he had continued working on that spear secretly, always improving it, making it ever more his masterwork.

“And what’s this?” There was another object in burlap, behind the spear. Had the little shit been making knockoffs of his own artwork?

No. This was a bow, with arrows. I did not recognize it immediately because I had not seen it in more years than I wanted to count, but it was the weapon Lady had given Croaker way back when she was still The Lady. I thought the boss lost it a long time ago.

Croaker always had another secret.

I had to wonder if he had not had some part in One-Eye’s desertion.

It was always possible that he did not know what had become of the bow.

I collected spear and bow and as many stoneware containers as I could lug. I could send Thai Dei in for more beer and . . . 

I could not carry my lamp and plunder, too. I used to live here. I could find my way around without a lamp. Besides, there was a glimmer of twilight still leaking in through the doorway.

The alcohol was taking effect. As I stepped over him I told Smoke, “I wouldn’t have your luck on a bet, chief.”

Smoke opened his eyes.

I jumped. It had been five or six years . . . And he did not appear to be in a friendly mood.

I discovered that I just wanted to get out and indulge my taste for beer.

Thai Dei helped me with my burdens. Somehow, one bottle of beer stuck to his hand. I noted that his charges were all healthy still, though Narayan Singh might have acquired a fresh crop of bruises.

“Where the hell is everybody?” I grumbled again. “I’ve got stuff to do. But we can’t go off and leave these characters alone. They’re bound to get into some kind of mischief.” Longshadow, Howler and Singh were not volunteering to go back into captivity.

I took another long drink.

The quiet really bothered me. It might indicate yet another less-than-brilliant attempt to subdue Soulcatcher. She had grudges enough against us as it was.

I had seen the ground that had suffered Lady’s barrage. It bore no resemblance to its springtime self. Rocks as big as houses had had holes punched right through them. Most of the busted-up trees had burned. There had been rockslides and cave-ins. In places the rock appeared to have become plastic. It had sagged like candle wax. Catcher’s cave could not be found.

The only bodies found so far were those of crows. There was no evidence that Soulcatcher or her prisoner had suffered any serious discomfiture.

Live crows laughed amongst the tortured rocks.

91

Thai Dei grunted. These days he was positively garrulous, sometimes mouthing as many as two entire sentences in an hour. But this time he needed no words. He just put his beer in his other hand and pointed into the gathering darkness.

The missing folks were returning in a mob, coming from the direction of Catcher’s disaster. Why would they all charge off into the foothills? Because the Old Man realized my seizure must have been caused by Lady’s rascal sister?

No. He would not bother for something that trivial.

But he would go to all that trouble to round up Sleepy.

“Where did you find him?” I asked Sparkle, who was leading the mule dragging the travois onto which Sleepy was strapped. It was obvious that the kid had had it rough. His weight was down. His wardrobe was not much fresher than Narayan Singh’s. Whom I mentioned to the Old Man as soon as I found him. “It was pure luck that we showed up when we did. We got them under control. But you’ve got to do something. Or they’re going to become a major bite in the ass someday. Where did Sleepy come from?”

“A patrol spotted him in the hills not far from Lady’s tear-up. He didn’t know who he was.”

I grunted. I laid a narrow look on the kid as he passed. “It took this whole mob to bring him in?”

“Took them all to hunt him down. You all right now? What happened?”

“I had one of my seizures. Like I used to have when I went back to Dejagore.”

He frowned, tossed off orders right and left. Soldiers scattered to resume chores they should not have abandoned.

“Did you know that One-Eye had your bow?”

“My bow? What bow?”

“The one Lady gave you as a present.”

“No. I didn’t. Though maybe I told him to put it away for me one time. Or something. I haven’t seen it in so long I’d forgotten it.” He sniffed the air. “What else did you find?” I still smelled of beer.

“All kinds of treasures. And circumstantial evidence that One-Eye wasn’t planning to stay away forever.”

Croaker grunted. It was getting too dark to read his expressions well. Was he irked because I had figured something out? Or was he considering the possibilities?

I said, “I can’t believe that finding Sleepy would cause so much excitement.”

“Lady hoped we could catch Catcher all goofed up, too.”

“But we already knew she was all right. She was sending shadows down. She was messing with me.” Maybe she was just tickling me because I was there when her big sister yanked her pigtails.

“We didn’t know. We suspected. If Sleepy had been her prisoner and wandered away, then maybe she wasn’t in control after all. There isn’t anybody around here who wouldn’t love to add Catcher to our zoo. And, too, there was the chance that . . . the girl . . . ”

Yeah. There was the chance they could grab their daughter back. Maybe when nobody was looking. “Where’s Lady?”

“Still out there.” His tone told me I had used my quota of questions in that area.

“Sleepy said anything useful?” I asked.

“He hasn’t said anything. He doesn’t act like he’s all there.”

“Just what this outfit needs. Another goofball.”

“You finding One-Eye’s stash reminds me. You stumbled over either one of our prodigal conjuremen lately?”

“I don’t dream that much, boss. When I do, it’s always in real time. Which means only after dark, when they can hide a lot better. And they do have to be hiding if they’re still in this part of the world. I don’t even find campfire traces anymore.”

“One-Eye would know who was looking and how,” Croaker mused. “Tell you the truth, Murgen, I don’t miss them that much nowadays. It was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself, to split them up. I couldn’t have survived the last couple of years, working twenty-hour days, with them squabbling around me all the time.”

“You’d think if they’d joined forces there would’ve been forest fires and avalanches to mark the occasion.”

“We do keep having earthquakes.”

“I’m worried about them, boss. Because of the spear.”

“Spear? What spear?”

“The black spear. I told you I found it. The one One-Eye made while we were in Dejagore. He didn’t take it with him. But he hasn’t come back for it.”

“And?”

“He would. Using some sneak spell if he had to. It was important to him. He didn’t brag but he considered it his masterpiece. He wouldn’t just throw it away—no matter how many times he’s been through the Company having to cut and run.”

“You saying he’s coming back?”

“I’m saying I think he planned to. He might not have been one hundred percent serious about eloping. Wouldn’t be the first time a man wasn’t completely honest with a woman.”

Croaker looked at me like he was trying to figure out what was really going on inside my head. Then he shrugged, said, “Could be. You men. Take Sleepy into my shelter. Leave him on the examining table.”

“Good idea,” I said. “See how bad he’s been treated.”

Croaker grunted. “You stay out here,” he told Thai Dei, who was standing over his captives with his beer-drinking hand tucked up behind him. “You come with me, Murgen.” Like Thai Dei needed reminding that the Old Man did not want him in his house. “Jamadar Subadir. See that those prisoners are put away properly. And make certain that the rest of our guests haven’t exceeded themselves, too.”

I said, “The Prince never tried anything.” The Prahbrindrah Drah did not have to suffer the indignity of shackles. Our Taglians would not have tolerated that.

I spied Uncle Doj watching from some shadows, arms crossed. I wondered why he stayed with us. Narayan Singh? Hardly. His persistence nudged my paranoia level whenever I thought about him.

Croaker, of course, was more enduringly suspicious than I was.

We descended into the Old Man’s dugout.

He told the men carrying Sleepy, “That’s good. The Standardbearer and I will take care of him now. Hold on, Sparkle. I want you to double-check on those men I told to deal with the prisoners. We haven’t given enough consideration to the possibility of treachery amongst our own people.”

Sparkle asked, “You want I should look for anything in particular?”

“Just keep your eyes open.” Croaker turned to me. “I agree with you. We need to drown the whole bunch of them.”

“But Lady has a use for them.”

“Waste not, want not. She says. I keep reminding myself that she’s supposed to be smarter and more experienced than me. Let’s get him undressed. You start at that end.”

Sleepy was awake but showed no interest in conversation. Or in anything else. I asked, “Where’s my horse, Sleepy?”

Croaker chuckled. “Good question, Murgen. You might want to pursue it. Unless you prefer to walk to Khatovar.”

I asked Sleepy several questions. He answered none of them. His eyes would track me and the Old Man but I could not tell if he understood anything.

Croaker said, “We could use Smoke to backtrack him and find out where he’s been and how he lost the beast.”

I grunted. We could have Lady sock the little shit with a knockout spell and make him useful for a while. The hard part would be getting her to agree not to hog him all for herself. “He was wide awake today. Smoke was. You might better make sure she knows.”

Croaker began poking and prodding Sleepy. “Lot of bruises. Must’ve gotten pounded around good.” Sleepy took it silently, without flinching.

“If he was in Catcher’s cave . . . I saw it happen from ten miles away. It was—”

“I saw enough.” Something was bothering him. He had that air people get when they have something difficult to say and are not morally convinced of their right to say it. Which troubled me. Croaker had no trouble barking at anybody but his old lady. “Been catching up on your Annals, Murgen.”

Oh-oh.

“And I hate to say this, but I don’t like them very much.”

“As I recall, you weren’t going to dictate what I write.”

“That’s right. I’m not going to now. You got the job. You do it. I’m just saying I don’t like what I’ve been reading. Though you have gotten a lot better in some ways. You seen this man naked before?”

“No. Why? Should I have?” I had a feeling he was harboring a big beef with my Annals. Since he was one of probably no more than three people who would read them during my lifetime I supposed I could get into closer touch with the needs of my audience. Or at least pretend to. He could not fire me. Unless he wanted the job back himself. The only candidate lay before us, still untrained, unpolished, unclothed and quite probably unsane. “So what am I doing wrong?”

“You could start by not being so being polite. Look at your pal. What’s missing?”

Sleepy was not a boy.

I forgot about the Annals. “I’ll be damned.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Never suspected. I thought he was kind of short and skinny . . . But he always was. He was barely out of diapers when he latched on to us in Dejagore. I figured him for maybe thirteen. He wasn’t as sane as he is now. I remember Bucket throwing one of his uncles off the wall for raping him.” I kept right on saying “him” because it was hard to think of Sleepy as anything else despite the lack of evidence right there in front of me.

“Good soldier?”

He knew. “The best. Always makes up for his smallness and lack of strength by using his head.” Which was something Croaker particularly appreciated.

“Then let’s just forget we didn’t see something here. Don’t even let Sleepy know you know.” He resumed his examination.

It would not be the first time a woman had been with the Company disguised as a man. The Annals recalled several instances where amazing discoveries had been made about one of our forebrethren, usually after they got themselves killed somehow.

Still . . . It would be uncomfortable, knowing.

“What I don’t like about your Annals is that they’re more about you than they are about the Company.”

“What?” I did not understand.

“I mean you focus everything on yourself. Except for a few chapters you adapted from Lady’s dispatches or Bucket or One-Eye or somebody, you never report anything that doesn’t involve you or that you didn’t see yourself. You’re too self-absorbed. Why should we give a rat’s ass about your recurring nightmares? And, except for Dejagore, your sense of place is usually pretty weak. If I weren’t here myself I’d have a lot of trouble picturing this whole end of the world.”

My first reaction, of course, was to defend my babies from the butcher. But I kept my mouth shut. You gain nothing by arguing with your critics. You get more satisfying results teaching pigs to sing. With fewer ulcers.

You have to trust your own muse. Even if she has a clubfoot and is subject to unpredictable seizures.

I think the Old Man said something like that himself a time or two over the years.

I did not mention it.

“You could work on writing a little more sparely, too.”

“Sparely?”

“You tend to go on a lot longer than you need to. At times.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind. You think we ought to put something on her?”

It was plain he had plenty more to say about my Annals but was uncomfortable about it. He was willing to accept a change of subject. “Yes. There’s no permanent physical damage. Lady’s got some old things stored in that black chest. They’ll be a little big, probably, but—”

“Thought we weren’t going to know anything about Sleepy being a girl.”

“When’s the last time you saw Lady in a dress?”

“Good point.” I opened the chest. “Though there’s still never any doubt.”

Croaker grunted. He was studying Sleepy intently, frowning.

“New wearing off?” I asked.

He smiled weakly. “Sort of. You’ll understand someday.”

I picked some things. “Not what I want to hear, boss.” Always way back there, however much I loved my wife, was a niggle when I recalled that she was the daughter of Ky Gota.

He chuckled. “Get some pants on her before my dearly beloved walks in.”

We finished just in time, too. Lady arrived in a foul humor. “I found nothing useful. Nothing. How is he?”

“Beat up, starved and suffering from extended exposure. Otherwise, he’s fine. Physically.”

“But absent mentally?” Lady stared at the kid. There was nothing in Sleepy’s eyes.

Croaker grunted. “In a coma with his eyes open.”

“Speaking of sleepers,” I said, “our favorite fireman was wide awake today. And the way he looked at me, he’s all home in here.”

I swear Sleepy’s cheek twitched. But maybe it was just a trick of the lamp.

“Not good,” Lady said. “And I was looking forward to a quiet evening at home.”

“What’re we going to do with Sleepy?”

The Captain had an answer all set. “You’re going to take him with you. And get to work teaching him your trade.” For an instant a shadow crossed his face, as though all thoughts of the future brought despair.

“I can’t—” Move a girl into my bunker?

“Yes you can.” Because Sleepy was just one of the guys. Wasn’t he? “And keep me posted on his progress.”

Lady comes home and he starts to give me the rush. How do you figure that? “Get your ass up,” I told Sleepy. “We’re going over to my house. We’re gonna figure out what you did with my horse.”

Sleepy did not respond.

Thai Dei and I ended up lugging him across on a litter, along with the treasures we had exhumed. I would like Sleepy a whole lot less before we got to the other side.

As we passed the prison kennel the shapeshifter began to rumble and growl. She roared a leopardlike challenge as we drew abreast. “Ah, go fuck yourself,” I said. Sleepy was getting heavy already.

The big cat howled and tried to push her claws between the cruel spears confining her. “I think maybe she could use a few drinks,” I told Thai Dei.

“Perhaps she is coming into her season.”

92

The stars were out. The campfire was low. Thai Dei and I and some of my pals were mellow on One-Eye’s beer and filled to the nostrils with roast pig. I flipped a bone into the fire. It began to crackle. “This is living,” Bucket rumbled, punctuating with a belch.

“If you like to camp out,” I said. “The weather’s right. Me, you give me my druthers, I’d be living like we did in Taglios. Without all the work.”

“What work? I never seen you lift a finger.”

“I had to keep Sarie smiling.”

“Rub it in, shithead.”

Rudy asked, “That guy snore like that all the time?”

He meant Thai Dei, who was splashed against the outside wall of our bunker, snorting and roaring, out cold. He had put away a lot, for him. The other Nyueng Bao were shunning him.

“Only when he’s had a good time.”

“First time, huh?”

“That I know about. But I wasn’t there the night he got married.”

Somebody said, “You got the Old Man’s ear. Whyn’t you whisper some sweet nothings about us heading on up the mountain?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“ ’Cause when we get to Khatovar all the travelling and fighting and shit will be over.” Pause. “Won’t it?”

I did not know. “I don’t have a clue. You go twenty feet on up the hill and you’ve gotten to the limit of what I know.”

“I thought everything was in them old books.”

Everything was. But I did not have the right old books. I glanced at Thai Dei. It was starting to look like he had the right idea. “I’ve had all the fun I can stand, guys.” I unfolded sore knees, got up, headed for bed. As I stepped over Thai Dei I said, “Don’t wake me up for anything less than a shadow breakout. And make sure you leave some pig for Uncle.”

It was a good thing the bunker roof was low enough to make me get down on my hands and knees inside. I did not have as far to fall.

I tripped over Sleepy first, then over One-Eye’s spear, which I had no idea why we had brought along but we had and which I had left lying in the middle of the rock floor.

I fell onto my pallet without crippling myself.

I know I went dreamwalking but do not remember where I went. I have vague recollections of Sarie and a trivial brush with a Soulcatcher as eager to avoid me as I was to avoid her. I woke up with a headache, a big thirst, a desperate need to hit the latrine and a very short temper.

“Oh, cut the bullshit, you old fraud,” I told Uncle Doj after I slithered out of the shack. He was giving an indifferent Thai Dei Nyueng Bao hell, using all the buzzwords that get trotted out when somebody cuts loose and makes an ass of himself. “Damn, it’s bright out here. Thai Dei, get your ass up. Drink some water. Shit.” I put away some water myself. I was a little green. If it did not rain soon I would have to have some more carried up.

“Standardbearer.”

“Uh?” I found myself surrounded by Isi and Ochiba. “You guys pop out of the ground or something?”

“We’ve been waiting,” Isi said.

“Your people are stubborn about protecting your rest,” Ochiba added.

Their manner was disturbing, somehow. “Good for them. What’s up?” Obviously, they had not trekked over for the exercise.

Isi had more of the Jewel Cities dialect than Ochiba but even he did not speak it well. Still, he got the message through. “The Captain and Lieutenant want you should know that prisoner Smoke is perished.”

“Perished? Perished like in dead?”

“As a stone,” Ochiba managed.

I recalled some pretty frisky stones, met long before these stiffnecks joined the gang. I did not mention them. Nobody cares about the Plain of Fear nowadays.

“Murdered,” Isi added, because he thought I had missed the point.

My mouth hung open. Finally, I said, “Come on over here where we can talk.” I grabbed a crow killer and led them across the slope far enough that no one could eavesdrop. “Let’s have some details.” The weapon proved needless. The black birds were not out.

“His throat was cut,” Isi said.

How could that happen? “How could that happen? Somebody would have to climb over Singh and Longshadow and Howler . . . he wasn’t out of the kennel somewhere, was he?” I would have been even more shocked if he had been killed in Croaker’s dugout.

“He was imprisoned.”

“I presume we don’t have whoever did it.” My first suspect in any sneak killing would be Narayan Singh or some tag-end member of his brotherhood. But the Deceivers did not spill blood. Narayan certainly would not, even in self-defense.

“No.”

“Do we know who did it?”

“No.”

“I’m coming over.” I headed back into camp, “Shiner! Rudy! Spiff! Kloo! Bucket!” I bellowed and my officers and sergeants reacted like they thought we were about to suffer an unexpected visit from Mogaba and the entire Taglian army. I was loud. My hangover etched my entire universe in uncompromising blacks and whites.

“Sorry,” I said, not meaning it. “It’s not as bad as I sound. A minor emergency across the way. I’m going over. Raise the state of alert a notch. Tell them to drop the tonk games till they get their gear in shape.” I drank another pint of water, then donated an equal quantity to the earth spirits. “Ochiba. Isi. Let’s go.”

Thai Dei shook the embrace of gravity, grabbed a bamboo pole he used as a staff. He stumbled after me, stubbornly keeping pace.

Thai Dei defined who and what he was against a bevy of inflexible standards that ignored his own desires, his likes and dislikes, and his pain.

Uncle Doj cancelled the Mother Gota show, straightened his apparel, touched the hilt of Ash Wand to make sure the sword had not deserted him, then trudged along after us. That morning he looked very tired and very old.

“There was no need for you to come over,” Croaker grumbled. He looked old and tired himself this morning. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I knew Smoke better than anybody. I thought maybe—”

“Wasting time. Unless you were so close you can raise his ghost.”

I wondered. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does. Somebody doesn’t want us to spy on them.” I started to protest that Smoke was a big secret, thought better of that. The Old Man did not want a debate. Instead, I asked, “What did the others have to say?”

Questions would have been asked, perhaps with great vigor. “Nobody saw nothing. Nobody knows nothing. But I think Howler has an idea. And I think he’s scared somebody might find out and come after him.”

“Then the smart thing to do would be for him to tell us what he knows.” Torture would not get it out of the little shit. He was older than Lady and had been screaming in pain before she met him.

“So Lady told him. He’s considering the angles.”

“This might be a chance to get him on our side.”

“Like I said, Murgen. You didn’t need to come over. We’re almost as smart as you. Just takes us a little longer to work these things out.”

“No doubt. Did you hear Bowalk carrying on last night?”

“The changer? No. What’re you talking about?”

“She went bugfuck when Thai Dei and I went past the cage last night.” I told him.

“She does that sometimes. Lady thinks it might be her animal side getting stronger. She might be trying to attract a boyfriend.”

Uncle Doj, I noted, had gone to the cage soon after our arrival, independently, after a few words with JoJo. He did not understand anything Croaker and I were saying.

“Thai Dei said that’s what it sounded like.”

“Guy might not be as dumb as he looks.” The Old Man focused on Uncle Doj while he talked. I was not sure who he meant. He asked, “How is our foundling?”

“Sleepy? Sleeping.”

“Over here we burn comedians for firewood.”

“What? I made a statement. The kid sleeps. He eats if you put stuff in his hands and show him what to do. He stares a lot. But mostly he just sleeps.”

“All right. Go back. Get to work. Start thinking uphill a little more. I don’t know if it’s nerves or premonition or if I’m just getting antsy but I find myself more and more in a mood to travel on whether or not someone pushes us into it.”

“The Radisha will be pleased.”

“I doubt that. All that paranoia about the Company came from somewhere. She didn’t buy it as bad as Smoke did but she bought it and she still believes it. I don’t believe the source that sold her has ceased to exist. I don’t think she really believes Soulcatcher when Catcher tells her she can weasel out of her infernal bargain without getting hurt.” He was thinking of Kina. These days the popular wisdom was that Kina had put the fear of the Company into the minds of the Taglians and their rulers. We always suspected that they did not plan to keep their half of our agreement and help us reach Khatovar once the Shadowmasters had been overcome.

The Kina hypothesis was attractive but I had a nit to pick. If the Mother of Deceptions was determined to bring on the Year of the Skulls why would she keep the Company away? Did she see the Shadowmasters as tools better suited to achieving the necessary level of destruction?

I shrugged, told Thai Dei, “I guess we’re just not wanted here.”

“What the hell?” Croaker barked.

The shapechanger had begun trying to get to Uncle Doj. Uncle poked her with his swordtip till she settled down.

“Dream for me, Murgen,” Croaker said as I started down the hill. “Right now I’m feeling blind and vulnerable. I need to know what’s going on out there.”

93

There was something going around. Everyone we ran into crossing to our camp wanted to know what was going on. It was not a matter of rampant rumor. Nobody had heard anything outrageous. But every man had developed an unfocused case of nerves. I felt it myself. Everything seemed portentous, though of what no one could say. As I entered the squalid village that had sprung up below the Shadowgate I noted that most of my men were seeing to their arms and equipment, just in case. I made a mental note to take advantage of their nerves and begin whipping them into more presentable shape.

It was time to take some raggedy-ass volunteers and begin molding them into brothers.

Counting soldiers and officials and camp followers at least a hundred thousand Taglians had been involved in Croaker’s last crusade against the Shadowmaster. I have not dwelled on it but death did claim most of those folks, some in the fighting, more by way of disease and accident and hardship. Disease and hardship and Taglians probably accounted for even greater numbers of Shadowlanders. The conflict generated a human disaster far greater than the worst of the earthquakes shaking the region.

Disease remains a problem. Always.

The point is, there has not been a lot of fun and glory down here. The few thousand men who remain with us, many of them permanently crippled in some way, are real nervous sorts. They find signs and portents in everything.

Like most who stumble into the mercenary life they were men their society did not cherish. Maybe they had no families to rejoin. Maybe they had things turned a little sideways inside their heads. Maybe they were criminals or fugitives from enemies or wives or debt collectors. It takes a great deal to bring order and discipline to men of that sort. The Company’s concept of itself as home and family had worked pretty well the past few generations but during that time the outfit never got bigger than a few hundred men. Never had it been so big that each man did not know every other.

I realized that I, for one, despite all pretense to the contrary, had not been doing everything I could to pull the family together. I had let a lack of outside pressure lull me into relaxing.

Paranoia is a must. The more so when times seem fat and favorable.

The guys were nervous now. It was time to work them a little harder.

“A reading from the First Book of Croaker,” I told the force assembled. I was a bit bemused. There must have been six hundred of them. Even the worst of the halt and lame had come. “In those days the Company was in service to the Syndics of Beryl . . . ” It should be a good reading. Unless Otto and Hagop came over those times would be safely in the past, yet would still be close enough that the men would know that veterans of those events were still amongst them. They would know that there were forces ranged against us that their predecessors first encountered then. The very emblem on their badges had been chosen by the Company then. It was an easy connection to the past, comprehensible, with current relevance. It was a doorway through which they could be led to accept the belief that they were part of something that has survived everything for over four hundred years.

I got no cheers. I did get passionate enough to make even the most cynical member of my audience suspect that there might be something to what I said.

I made my speech and did my reading from the roof of my bunker. Sleepy sat beside the doorway throughout, showing all the ambition of a protective gargoyle. I wondered if some forced exercise might not help bring him back.

The uproar of Bucket arguing with Thai Dei wakened me. “What the hell is going on?” I yelled.

“Get your ass out here, Murgen!”

I slithered across the rocky floor and into a brilliant night.

I did not need to have anything pointed out. The fireworks were self-explanatory.

Lady’s weapons plant was burning. Fireballs began to fly. It got worse fast. Fires started in the forest, in the ruins of Kiaulune and amongst the shanties of the camps across the way. A few fireballs even reached my neighborhood, though my guys were heads-up enough to dodge them.

I said, “No way I’m going over there.”

“Somebody ain’t afraid,” Bucket said. A glimmer betrayed Uncle Doj loping away, Ash Wand in hand, colorful reflections setting its edge aglitter.

“Thai Dei!” I barked. “What the hell is he doing?”

“I do not know.”

The excitement across the way grew so loud we could make out a general roar of people shouting.

“Shit and double shit,” somebody said. “Can you believe that?”

I reiterated, “I’m not going over there.”

The fireworks continued. Random balls arced across the night. Sometimes a pole would discharge rapidly, hurling a stream of fiery dots into the darkness. Lady’s factory was mostly underground but the earth did not confine the devastation.

For a few minutes the night got lost in the glare.

Back behind me the standard dusk-to-dawn fog of darkness crowding the Shadowgate rippled away uphill, clinging to the deepest washes and gullies. The shadows did not like what was happening.

Neither did I. Again I observed, “I’m not going over there.”

Some wiseass remarked, “Any of you other guys think Murgen maybe ain’t going over there?”

Shithead.

I held out a few hours. I even got some sleep.

94

The ground still burned. The earth had collapsed into Lady’s factory, evidently while so much fireball material was ablaze that the dirt itself could not resist ignition. The burning soil glowed various colors. Little flames pranced close to the ground, randomly, like those on the surface of burning sulfur. A smell of sulfur did hang in the air but it was a memory of fireballs past.

There was just enough light to get around by. Consequently the disaster’s aftermath was more impressive visually.

Hundreds of soldiers and scores of hastily recruited Shadowlanders carried water in any container available. Water killed these fires not by smothering them but by cooling them down.

A column of steam towered thousands of feet above us.

“I think I’m about to get pissed off.”

I glanced back. The Old Man had come up beside me. “This didn’t do us much good,” I agreed.

“It’s maybe not as bad as it looks except for we lost so many of the people who made the poles. The battle-ready pieces were stored somewhere else. Lady didn’t want to keep all her peas in one pod.”

“Smart girl. Was it an accident?”

“No. The survivors say the lamps down there started going out, then people started screaming. The way they describe that makes me sure shadows got in. Right behind those came something or somebody who couldn’t be seen very well. She strolled through the confusion setting off the reactions that caused the blowup.”

“Soulcatcher?”

“That’s my bet. She’s really starting to get up my nose.”

I grunted. Starting? Just now? Then he was more patient than I believed possible.

Somebody yelled my name. I made out a crowd gathering downhill. “My public calls,” I grumbled. “I wonder what gruesome surprise they have for me this time.”

“Gruesome” was a weak word to describe what lay scattered around the collapsed area. Mangled, partial, dismembered and thoroughly cooked corpses abounded. Most were not soldiers. Lady’s workers had gotten a running start but that had not been good enough for most. “Where’s Lady?” I asked as Croaker followed me.

“Trying to get a fix on Catcher. Hoping we can slap back while she’s still tired and feeling smug.”

“Waste of time.”

“Probably. You do any dreaming last night?”

“No. I tossed and turned and tried to talk myself out of coming over here.”

“I would’ve sent for you eventually.”

I saw why in a moment.

He had spotted the body first.

Uncle Doj lay sprawled on his back amidst the crowd. One shoulder had been burned by a fireball. A second fireball had burned part of his hair away. Much of what remained had been bleached white. His face was contorted. His right eye was wrinkled shut and buried beneath a crust of dried blood. His left eye was open. It stared at the sky. Ash Wand lay across his chest. He still gripped it with both hands. Its perpetually sharp blade was discolored as though it had been used to stir a fire, as though the temper had been burned out. Uncle Doj’s clothing looked as though somebody had sprinkled him with small coals after he went down.

A small white feather was stuck in the blood on his cheek.

He shuddered. A sound like a giant fart came out of him. Thai Dei, who had been standing beside me, staring dumbstruck, dove forward.

Croaker snapped, “You men get back. Give us room. Murgen, bring my medical kit and I’ll do what I can.”

I took off. To my amazement Thai Dei bounced up and followed me. He did bark orders at other Nyueng Bao as we went, though. Uncle would be watched over by his own kind.

I dove into Croaker’s shelter, found his bag and popped back up into the gathering light. I asked Thai Dei, “Could you tell anything from looking at Uncle?”

“He went into the mangrove alone.” Which was Nyueng Bao idiom. It derived from the story of an incautious hunter who chased a wild pig into a mangrove stand and ran into a tiger when he got there.

I dropped Croaker’s bag beside him. He grunted acknowledgment, then growled at the Nyueng Bao pressing in around us. Not ten minutes had passed but it seemed every Nyueng Bao following the Old Crew had come to see what was happening. Thai Dei whispered angrily at several. The gist seemed to be that they were shirking their duties by straying from those they were supposed to protect. So strong was the Nyueng Bao concept of debt that the whole bunch scattered immediately.

The Nyueng Bao said little. What they did say I understood perfectly. But I learned nothing.

Thai Dei knelt beside Uncle, on his left side. The Old Man knelt opposite him. Croaker gave Thai Dei a wet cloth. “Here. Sponge the crud off his face so I can see how much real damage there is.” There was light enough now to see the dried blood and oozings crusted on Uncle’s face.

While we were gone Croaker had accumulated several buckets of water and had opened Uncle Doj’s clothing. He concentrated on the damaged shoulder, which still trickled blood. Doj’s scalp wound had cauterized itself, evidently.

Uncle shuddered again. He could see because he looked up at Thai Dei, recognized him, tried to raise his arm, barely got hold of Thai Dei’s right elbow. He whispered, “The Thousand Voices. Watch for the Thousand Voices.”

“Rest, Uncle,” Thai Dei replied.

“You must . . . I have little time left. The Thousand Voices is among us. I struck her down, thinking to reclaim the Key, but my blow was not lethal.” That seemed to amaze him.

Croaker glared at me, silently willing me to listen carefully because it was obvious Uncle was saying something important. I nodded, not only listening and remembering but watching Doj’s lips to make sure he was saying what I thought I was hearing.

Most of the Nyueng Bao had gone back to their charges. But JoJo had no one to protect anymore. His man had gotten away. He stayed. He stepped forward. “Uncle! Your tongue betrays you.”

At least that is what he wanted to say. The instant his mouth opened Croaker made signs to Otto and Hagop, who hovered like angels looking for unbelievers to smite. They wrapped JoJo up, clamped hands over his mouth, carried him away, and managed the whole abduction so slickly that nobody paid any attention.

Uncle Doj thought he was dying. He was trying to stick Thai Dei with some obligation. “Find her before she recovers. Kill her while she is vulnerable. Burn her flesh. Scatter her ashes. Scatter them to the winds.”

Thai Dei did not want the obligation. “I am not the one, Uncle. I have a mission already. Rest. Hold your tongue.” He knew I was listening.

Uncle’s eye shifted my way. He knew I was listening, too, now. But he was convinced he saw Death peering over my shoulder. He kept on talking.

What he said made sense. If you assumed that “the Thousand Voices” was Soulcatcher. That was a good nickname for her particularly where she had not bothered to introduce herself.

Unfortunately, Uncle and Thai Dei did not make illuminating, “As you know” expository speeches to one another so I could only fill the chasms by guesswork. I did get the impression that this Thousand Voices had stolen something from the Nyueng Bao. Uncle called it the Key. Key to what did not come up. Thai Dei had no need to have it explained.

A quest to recover the item might explain why Uncle had been dogging the Company. It might explain his disappearances, both overnight or for as long as after Charandaprash. I suspected I might have been exposed to earlier hints but had been too dense to catch or record them.

Uncle Doj was getting weaker. For a man as strong physically and mentally as he was that hinted that he might be right about having very little time left. I yielded to temptation and gave pettiness a loose rein. I dropped to my haunches, as near Nyueng Bao style as I could manage. “Is there anything you want me to tell Sahra when she gets here?”

His one eye fixed on mine. He winced as Thai Dei peeled a big hunk of scab off his other eye but his gaze did not waver.

“I’ve known for a long time. I also know we have a son. And I can find no forgiveness in my heart.”

Croaker said, “He’s got more wounds than I thought. This arm is broken. His leg might be, too.”

I said, “He ran into Catcher. Probably when she was making her getaway. He might have cut her up some.”

“That would explain the sword. Also him still being in relatively good health. What’s the chatter?” We were, of course, muttering in Jewel Cities dialect.

“He’s sure he’s dying. He’s trying to pass some kind of obligation on to Thai Dei. Thai Dei doesn’t want it. I think Catcher visited the swamp between the time when we broke the siege of Dejagore and when my in-laws moved in with me in Taglios. She snatched something really important to the Nyueng Bao, something apparently considered an object of power in their religion, like a holy relic and Uncle’s quest is to steal it back.”

“He ain’t ready to check out yet,” Croaker told me. “It looks worse than it is. Half this mess isn’t his blood. He’ll be all right if we can beat the infection. But you don’t have to clue him. Let him talk.”

I shifted to Nyueng Bao. “Thai Dei, my Captain expresses a regret that your people have not dealt with us frankly. However, in honor of Sahra, and because I asked for it as family, he will do what he can to ease Uncle Doj’s passage back to the cao gnum.” Cao gnum could be either a place or a state of being that could be described as the universe’s central depository of souls. I was not sure which because the Nyueng Bao did not discuss their religious beliefs. Whatever, cao gnum was where souls waited to return to the world if they had not accumulated enough good karma to get off the Wheel of Life. The Gunni call their similar place Swegah, which for them can be several places at once, including Heaven and Hell, with the soul on standby getting doses of each according to the tally sheet that has been kept of his good deeds and bad.

My comments strained Thai Dei’s honor and loyalty. He was angry with me. “Too much disrepect, my brother.”

I said, “So explain why I should treat him better than some pain-in-the-ass second cousin.”

“Ignorance is your shield,” Thai Dei advised me. “Grant me a boon.”

“Ask away.”

“Say nothing more.”

I had begun to suspect that I had run my mouth too much already so I had no problem granting his wish. “You got it.”

Uncle muttered to Thai Dei several times during the next quarter hour. That was pure delirium. Nothing he said illuminated the situation any better. Then he passed into unconsciousness because Croaker had given him something for his pain. I did not reassure Thai Dei about him waking up. Let him be astounded by the Old Man’s medical magic. Let him feel even more obligation than he already did.

Once Uncle was out and unable to fight us we set his bones and cleansed his wounds. Not much flesh had to be abraded. The fireballs had done a great job of cauterization.

Uncle was going to sport some major scars from now on, though.

He might never have complete use of the right side of his body again, either. His right arm was broken in three places. One break was a compound fracture. His right shinbone was broken as well, six inches below the knee.

It never occurred to Thai Dei to ask why he was helping set the bones of a man who was about to die.

He was in another world. He was communing with his soul, with the thing that made him Thai Dei.

After a while, he said, “I argued against it when they sent Sahra away. My voice was too small to carry any weight.” He did not look at me when he spoke. His body language told me it was not something he would discuss again, ever.

95

The following morning I talked cautiously to several Gunni about Nyueng Bao mythology. They were no help. I ran into a slough of contempt. If the Gunni had possessed any grasp of the concept they would have labeled the Nyueng Bao heretics. They did not. Taglian society was too completely pluralistic religiously. Nobody I spoke to had any idea what the Key might be. I suspected it might not be a religious relic even though I had overheard enough to understand that it had been one of the major treasures kept hidden at the temple where Sahra was confined.

I wondered what the connection might be. If there was any.

“I’m getting really tired of this hike,” I told Thai Dei as we headed across the valley in response to a summons from our Supreme Commander. Not far away from us Shadowlander volunteers were helping take in a grain that was a cousin of barley, working for a share of the harvest. Croaker had a notion that the locals would resent us less if we helped them out. I had a feeling their own crops were not so bad and we ought to be stashing our surpluses inside Overlook. Sure as winter follows summer the day would come when we would need every kernel of reserve.

The Old Man insisted that I had been scarred too deeply by my past, that I would never outgrow Dejagore. Maybe he was right. We are all the sum total of our pasts, good and evil.

Thai Dei said nothing right away. He was more reticent than ever this morning. A mile down the path he said, “You knew Uncle would not die.”

“Yep.”

“You meant to manipulate him.”

“Yep. So tell me. What’s the Key?”

“Something that should have been destroyed long ago.”

Did I say he was not talking anymore? I checked to make sure I was with my sidekick of many years. “Big mojo, eh?”

He understood the word in context. “Big trouble. All prophecies, all articles and tools of prophecy, bring nothing but trouble.”

“This Key wouldn’t tie in to Hong Tray’s prophecy, would it?” I had not gotten that pinned down yet, despite being part of it and married to part of it. Sarie always claimed that she did not know, she was just a woman.

Thai Dei had found his center, his silence, again. He refused to say anything more.

“You been talking about me?” I asked when I pushed into Croaker’s place and found sudden silence and stares my only greeting.

“Perhaps,” Lady said. She eyed me speculatively, evidently wondering what was going on inside me these days.

Otto, Hagop and a couple other Old Crew guys were there. Isi and Sindawe were present. Numerous senior Taglians were noteworthy for their absence, as was Blade. We had not seen much of Blade lately, though he and Lady had worked together for years. There seemed to be a shift in the tides of trust.

“What’s up?”

“What’s your readiness state?” Croaker asked.

“Not bad, actually. A good blowup like the one last night will make guys want to put an edge on.”

“No sign of Catcher?”

“No. You ask me, Uncle got her good and she’s somewhere licking her wounds.” I had not seen a single crow since before Sleepy returned. Talk about your basic good omens.

“Thai Dei talking any more?”

“No. You haven’t said—”

“I’m going to go recon the plain.”

“I thought—”

“Now’s the time. Catcher is weak. I know how she heals. We’ll have a week before she’s strong enough to cause us more grief. We need to dive through that window of opportunity. If we put together a balanced force and pack train and push it hard, we should be able to travel seventy or eighty miles before we have to turn back. That ought to give us a good idea where we stand.”

I did not like the idea but did not argue. Lady was the Lieutenant. It was her job to expose the flaws in the Captain’s reasoning. She said nothing so I supposed their discussion was complete.

“I’m thinking fifty men for the first probe,” Croaker said. “All the old guys who followed us here to get to Khatovar. Plus the best new men. All volunteers.”

Not many recent recruits wanted to go to Khatovar. The old terror still held some power even though now they were part of the Company.

“What’s happening in Taglios?” Croaker asked.

I shrugged. “I’m only having normal dreams these days. In fact, I hardly slept the last couple nights. Sleepy mumbles all night. I tried to get him talking but he didn’t seem to hear me.”

“We’ll take him with us. A good long hike might bring him out of it.”

I sighed. “When do you want to do this?”

“As soon as we can get it together. Catcher’s already getting better.”

I sighed again. “I was getting used to not traveling. I was really getting attached to the idea of staying in one place.” And waiting for my wife. Or maybe even going back to meet her if I could get Sleepy to tell me what he had done with my horse.

Croaker harrumphed. Really. The son of a bitch was turning into my grandfather. He said, “You know what this means? Standardbearer?”

“I got a bad feeling it means some dumb fuck name of Murgen is going to have to go be out front again.”

“With no Goblin or One-Eye to cover your back.”

“Shit. Yeah.” But my back was covered, for now until forever. “I see a problem, boss. The Nyueng Bao will insist on sticking with their guys from Dejagore.”

“I’m counting on it. Every one of them who goes up the mountain is one less Taglian I have to worry about getting behind me and maybe wrapping one of those silk dinguses around my neck.”

“What? We haven’t had any trouble with those characters since last winter. There aren’t any left.”

“Ready to bet your life on that? I mean to take the living saint and the rest of our pals along with us.”

“Why you want to do that?”

“So we don’t get any surprises while our backs are turned. You want Howler getting loose, or Longshadow, when none of us are there to round them up again? You want the Prahbrindrah Drah on the prowl again? Or that panther bitch?”

“No. But if I was running things we’d just kill them and burn their bodies. Then we’d mix what was left up good and throw it all in about six different rivers.”

Lady gave me the sort of look that would have made me shit my knickers a few years back. She did not much scare me anymore.

Croaker ignored my opinion. “Once we’re up there and see what it’s like I might set up staging camps so we can move the whole mob in steps.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for this, boss.”

“Not ready? This is where we’ve been heading for the last ten years.”

“There’s a big fucking difference between being on the road and getting there, chief. You go out in the camp and ask, every guy out there will tell you he’s perfectly happy to be on his way to Khatovar. But I bet you you won’t get the same answer about getting there.” I do not believe Croaker ever understood that nobody was as enthusiastic about our quest as he was.

“What do I got to do?” I asked.

“Pack up and get ready. Get your protege whipped into shape because I expect him to trudge right along with the rest of us.”

There was something there . . . Something that left me on the outside. Something, maybe, that had something to do with the sudden silence that had fallen when I walked in.

“Then I’d better go pack up and get ready, hadn’t I?”

The Old Man glowered at me as I walked out but did not raise a finger to stop me.

Something was going on.

“Another damned wasted trip,” I told Thai Dei. “Only this was the worst one yet.” I was getting mad. I was being used somehow.