Four years passed and no one died. Not of violence or hazard of the calling, anyway. Otto and Hagop did pass on within days of each other, of natural causes associated with aging, last year. A few weeks ago one Tam Duc, recruit in training, perished of the overconfident exuberance of youth. He fell into a crevasse while he and his lance brothers were riding their blankets down the long slick slope of the Tien Myuen glacier. There were a few others. But not a one by an unfriendly hand.
Four years has to be a record, though not the sort often recalled in these Annals.
That much peace is impossible to believe.
Peace that prolonged becomes increasingly seductive.
Many of us are old and tired and retain no youthful fire in the belly. But us old farts are not in charge anymore. And though we were prepared to forget horror, horror was not as accomodating toward us.
In those days the Company was in service to its own name. We recognized no master. We counted the warlords of Hsien as our allies. They feared us. We were supernatural, many recalled from the dead, the ultimate Stone Soldiers. They dreaded the chance that we might take sides in their squabbles over the bones of Hsien, that once-mighty empire the Nyueng Bao recall as the Land of Unknown Shadows.
The more idealistic warlords have hopes of us. The mysterious File of Nine provide arms and money and let us recruit because they hope we can be manipulated into helping them restore the golden age that existed before the Shadowmasters enslaved their world so cruelly that its people still call themselves the Children of the Dead.
There is no chance we will participate. But we permit them the hope, the illusion. We have to get strong. We have a mission of our own.
By standing still we have caused the blossoming of a city. A once-chaotic encampment has become ordered and has acquired names, Outpost or the Bridgehead among those who came from beyond the plain and what translates as Abode of Ravens amongst the Children of the Dead. The place keeps growing. It has generated scores of permanent structures. It is in the processing of acquiring a wall. The main street is being paved with cobblestones.
Sleepy likes to keep everyone busy. She cannot stand a loafer. The Children of the Dead will inherit a treasure when we finally go away.
Boom! Boom! Somebody hammered on my door. I glanced at Lady. She had stayed up late last night and so had fallen asleep while studying this evening. She was determined to discover all the secrets of Hsien magic and to help Tobo harness the startlingly plentiful supernatural manifestations of this world. Not that Tobo needed much help anymore.
This world has more real phantoms and marvellous beings hiding in the bushes and behind the rocks and trees and on the edge of night than any twenty generations of our own frightened peasants could imagine. They gravitate toward Tobo as though he is some sort of nightside messiah. Or amusing pet, maybe.
Boom! Boom! I would have to get off my butt myself. That looked like a long, hard trek over there.
Boom! Boom! “Come on, Croaker! Wake up!” The door swung inward as my visitor invited himself inside. The very devil of my thoughts.
“Tobo . . . ”
“Didn’t you hear the baobhas singing?”
“I heard a racket. Your friends are always kicking up a fuss about something. I don’t pay any attention anymore.”
“When the baobhas sing it means somebody is going to die. And there’s been a cold wind off the plain all day and Big Ears and Golden-Eye have been extremely nervous and . . . it’s One-Eye, sir. I just went over to talk to him. He looks like he’d had another stroke.”
“Shit. Let me get my bag.” No surprise, One-Eye suffering a stroke. That old fart has been trying to sneak out on us for years. Most of the vinegar went out of him back when we lost Goblin.
“Hurry!”
The kid loved that old shit-disturber. Sometimes it seemed like One-Eye was what he wanted to be when he grew up. In fact, it seemed Tobo venerated everybody but his own mother, though the friction between them diminished as he aged. He had matured considerably since my latest resurrection.
“I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Your Grace. This old body doesn’t have the spring it did in the olden days.”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
“Believe me, kid, I would if I could. If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years.”
“That wind off the plain. It has Uncle worried, too.”
“Doj is always worried about something. What does your father say?”
“He and Mom are still at Khang Phi visiting Master Santaraksita.”
At a tender twenty Tobo is akeady the most powerful sorcerer in all this world. Lady says he might possibly become a match for her in her prime. Scary. But he has parents he calls Mom and Dad still. He has friends he treats like people, not objects. He accords his teachers respect and honor instead of devouring them just to prove that he is stronger. His mother raised him well, despite having done so in the environment of the Black Company. And despite his innate rebellious streak. I hope he will remain a decent human being once he comes into his full powers.
My wife does not believe that is possible. She is a pessimist about character. She insists that power corrupts. Inevitably. She has only her own history by which to judge. And she sees only the dark side of everything. Even so, she remains one of Tobo’s teachers. Because, despite her bleak outlook, she retains the silly romantic streak that brought her here with me.
I did not try to keep up with the boy. Time definitely has slowed me. And has left me with an ache for every one of the thousands of miles this battered old corpse has trudged. And it has equipped me with an old man’s talent for straying off the subject.
The boy never stopped chattering about the Black Hounds, fees, hobs and hobyahs and other creatures of the night that I have never seen. Which is all right. The few he has brought around have all been ugly, smelly, surly, and all too eager to copulate with humans of any sex or sexuality. The Children of the Dead claim that yielding is not a good idea. So far discipline has held.
The evening was chill. Both moons were up. Little Boy was full. The sky was totally clear except for a circling owl being pestered by what appeared to be a brace of night-flying rooks. One of those, in turn, had some smaller black bird skipping along behind it, darting in and out as it prosecuted reprisals for some corvine trangression. Or just for the hell of it, the way my sister-in-law would do.
Likely none of the flyers were actual birds.
A huge something loomed beyond the nearest house. It made snorting noises and shuffled away. What I made out looked vaguely like the head of a giant duck. The earliest of the conquering Shadowmasters had possessed a bizarre turn of humor. This big, slow, goofy thing was a killer. Among the worst of the others were a giant beaver, a crocodile with eight legs and a pair of arms and many variations of the themes of killer cattle, horses and ponies, most of which spend their daytimes hiding underwater.
The most bizarre beings were created by the nameless Shadowmaster now recalled as the First One or the Master of Time. His raw material had consisted of shadows off the glittering plain, which in Hsien are known as the Host of the Unforgiven Dead. It seems appropriate that Hsien be called the Land of Unknown Shadows.
A long feline roar ripped the night. That would be Big Ears or his sister Cat Sith. By the time I reached One-Eye’s place the Black Hounds had begun to vocalize, too.
One-Eye’s house was scarcely a year old. The little wizard’s friends raised it after they completed their own places. Before that One-Eye and his girlfriend, Tobo’s grandmother Gota, lived in an ugly, smelly little stick-and-mud hut. The new place was of mortared stone. It had a first rate thatch roof above its four large rooms, one of which concealed a still. One-Eye might be too old and feeble to weasel his way into the local black market but I am sure he will continue distilling strong spirits till the moment his own spirit departs his wizened flesh. The man is dedicated.
Gota kept the house spotless via the ancient device of bullying her daughter Sahra into doing the housework. Gota, still called the Troll by the old hands, was as feeble as One-Eye. They were a matched pair in their passion for potent beverages. When One-Eye gave up the ghost he would be drawing a gill of the hard stuff for his honey.
Tobo poked his head back outside. “Hurry up!”
“Know who you’re talking to, boy? The former military dictator of all the Taglias.”
The boy grinned, no more impressed than anyone else is these days. “Used to be” is not worth the breeze on which it is scribbled.
I tend to philosophize about that, probably a little too much. Once upon a time I was nothing and had no ambition to be anything more. Circumstance conspired to put immense power into my hands. I could have ripped the guts out of half a world had that been my inclination. But I let other obsessions drive me. So I am here on the far side of the circle, where I started, scraping wounds, setting bones and scribbling histories nobody is likely to read. Only now I am a lot older and crankier. I have buried all the friends of my youth except One-Eye . . .
I ducked into the old wizard’s house.
The heat was ferocious. One-Eye and Gota had trouble keeping warm even in summer. Though summers in southern Hsien seldom become hot.
I stared. “You sure he’s in trouble?”
Tobo said, “He tried to tell me something. I didn’t understand so I came for you. I was afraid.” Him. Afraid.
One-Eye was seated in a rickety chair he had built for himself. He was motionless but things stirred in the corners of the room, usually only visible at the edge of my eye. Snail shells cluttered the floor. Tobo’s father, Murgen, calls them brownies after little folk recalled from his youth. There had to be twenty different races of them around, from no bigger than a thumb to half a man high. They really did do work when nobody was looking. That drove Sleepy crazy. It meant she had to work harder to think up chores to keep the Company’s villains out of trouble.
An overpowering stench pervaded One-Eye’s house. It came from the mash for his still.
The devil himself looked like a shrunken head the shrinker had not bothered to separate from its body. One-Eye was a little bit of a thing. Even in his prime he had not been big. At two hundred and some years old, with both legs and most of one arm in the grave, he looked more like a shriveled monkey than a human being.
I said, “I hear tell you’re trying to get some attention again, old man.” I knelt. One-Eye’s one eye opened. It focused on me. Time had been kind in that respect. His vision remained good.
He opened his toothless mouth. At first nothing came out. He tried to raise a mahogany spider of a hand. He did not have the strength.
Tobo shuffled his feet and muttered at the things in the corners. There are ten thousand strange things infesting Hsien and he knows every one by name. And they all worship him. For me this intersection with the hidden world has been the most troubling development of our stay in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
I liked them better when they were still unknown.
Outside Skryker or Black Shuck or another Black Hound began raising a racket. Others replied. The uproar moved southward, toward the shadowgate. I willed Tobo to go investigate.
He stayed put, all questions and nags. He was about to become a major pain in the ass. “How’s your grandmother?” I asked. Preemptive strike. “Why don’t you check?” Gota was not in the room. Usually she was, determinedly trying to do for One-Eye even though she had grown as feeble as he was.
One-Eye made a noise, moved his head, tried to raise that hand again. He saw the boy leave the room. His mouth opened. He managed to force out words in little bursts. “Croaker. This is the . . . last . . . She’s done. I feel it. Coming. Finally.”
I did not argue with him, did not question him. My error. We had been through similar scenes a half dozen times. His strokes were never quite fatal. It seemed fate had some last role for him in the grand design.
Whatever, he had to work his way through his standard soliloquy. He had to warn me against hubris because he could not get it into his head that not only am I no longer the Liberator, the military dictator of all the Taglias; I have abdicated claim to captaincy of the Black Company. The Captivity did not leave me rational enough for that task. Nor had my understudy, Murgen, come through sufficiently unscathed. The burden now rests upon Sleepy’s sturdy little shoulders.
And One-Eye had to ask me to look out for Gota and Tobo. Over and over he would remind me to watch out for Goblin’s wicked tricks even though we had lost Goblin years ago.
I suspect that, should there be any afterlife at all, those two will meet up about six seconds after One-Eye croaks and they will pick up their feud right where they left it in life. In fact, I am a little surprised Goblin has not been around haunting One-Eye. He threatened to often enough.
Maybe Goblin just cannot find him. Some of the Nyueng Bao say they feel lost because the shades of their ancestors cannot find them to watch over them and give advice inside their dreams.
Kina cannot find us, either, apparently. Lady has not had a bad dream in years.
Or maybe Goblin killed her.
One-Eye beckoned with one desiccated finger. “Closer.”
Kneeling in front of him, opening my kit, I was about as close as I could get. I took his wrist. His pulse was weak and rapid and irregular. I did not get the impression that he had suffered a stroke.
He murmured, “I am not. A fool. Who doesn’t know. When he is. And what. Has happened. You listen! You watch out. For Goblin. Little Girl. And Tobo. Didn’t see him dead. Left him with. Mother of Deceit.”
“Shit!” That never occurred to me. I was not there. I was still one of the Captured when Goblin stuck the sleeping Goddess with the standard. Only Tobo and Sleepy had witnessed that. And anything they knew had to be suspect. Kina was the Queen of Deceivers. “A good idea, old man. Now, what do I have to do to get you to get up and fetch me a drink?”
Then I started as something that looked like a small black rabbit peeked at me from under One-Eye’s chair. This was a new one. I could call Tobo. He would know what it was. There are uncounted varieties of the things, huge and small, some gentle and many definitely not. They just gravitate toward Tobo. In only a few cases, generally involving the most disagreeable sorts, has he taken Lady’s advice and bound them to his personal service.
The Children of the Dead worry about Tobo. Having suffered a few hundred years under the heels of the Shadowmasters they are paranoid about outsider sorcerers.
So far the warlords have remained reasonable. None of them want to spark the ire of the Soldiers of Darkness. That might cause the Company to align itself with a rival. Status quo and balance of force are cherished and jealously nurtured by the File of Nine. Terrible chaos followed the expulsion of the last Shadowmaster. None of the warlords want the chaos to return, though what Hsien has now resembles nothing so much as lightly organized anarchy. But not a one is willing to yield a minimum of power to another authority, either.
One-Eye grinned, revealing dark gums. “Not going to. Trick me. Captain.”
“I’m not the Captain anymore. I’m retired. I’m just an old man who pushes paper as an excuse to keep hanging around with the living. Sleepy is the boss.”
“Still. Management.”
“I’m about to manage your scruffy old ass . . . ” I trailed off. His eye had closed. He made a statement by beginning to snore.
Another hoot and holler arose outside, some close by, more far away toward the shadowgate. The snail shells creaked and rustled and, though I never saw a one touched by anything, rocked and spun around. Then I heard the distant bray of a horn.
I rose and retreated, not turning my back. One-Eye’s lone remaining pleasure—other than staying drunk—was tripping the unwary with his cane.
Tobo reappeared. He looked ghastly. “Captain . . . Croaker. Sir. I misunderstood what he tried to tell me.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t him. It was Nana Gota.”
Tobo’s grandmother, Ky Gota, had died happy. As happy as the Troll could die, which was drunker than three owls drowned in a wine cask. She had enjoyed a vast quantity of extremely high-potency product before she went. I told the boy, “If it’s any consolation she probably didn’t know a thing.” Although the evidence suggested she knew exactly what was happening.
I did not fool him. “She knew it was coming. The Greylings were here.” Something behind the still chittered softly in reponse to the sound of his voice. Like the baobhas, the greylings are a harbinger of death. One of a great many in Hsien. Some of the things that had been howling in the wilderness earlier would have been, too.
I said the things you say to the young. “It was probably a blessing. She was in constant pain and there was nothing I could do for her anymore.” The old woman’s body had been a torment to her for as long as I had known her. Her last few years had been hell.
For a moment Tobo looked like a sad little boy who wanted to bury his face in his mother’s skirt and shed some tears. Then he was a young man whose control was complete again. “She did live a long life and a fulfilled one, no matter how much she complained. The family owes One-Eye for that.”
Complain she had, often and loudly, to everyone about everything and everyone else. I had been fortunate enough to miss much of the Gota era by having gotten myself buried alive for a decade and a half. Such a clever man am I. “Speaking of family, you’ll have to find Doj. And you’d better send word to your mother. And as soon as you can you’ll need to let us know about funeral arrangements.” Nyueng Bao funerary customs seem almost whimsical. Sometimes they bury their dead, sometimes they burn them, sometimes they wrap them and hang them in trees. The rules are unclear.
“Doj will make the arrangements. I’m sure the Community will demand something traditional. In which case my place is somewhere out of the way.”
The Community consists of those Nyueng Bao associated with the Black Company who have not enlisted formally and who have not yet disappeared into the mysterious reaches of the Land of Unknown Shadows.
“No doubt.” The Community are proud of Tobo but custom demands that they look down on him for his mixed blood and lack of respect for tradition. “Others will need to know, too. This’ll be a time of great ceremony. Your grandmother is the first female from our world to pass away over here. Unless you count the white crow.” Old Gota seemed much less formidable in death.
Tobo’s thoughts were moving obliquely to mine. “There’ll be another crow, Captain. There’ll always be another crow. They feel at home around the Black Company.” Which is why the Children of the Dead call our town the Abode of Ravens. There are always crows, real or unknown.
“They used to stay fat.”
The unknown shadows were all around us now. I could see them easily myself, though seldom clearly and seldom for more than an instant. Moments of intense emotion draw them out of the shells where Tobo taught them to hide.
A renewed racket arose outside. The little darknesses stirred excitedly, then scattered, somehow disappearing without ever revealing what they were. Tobo said, “The dreamwalkers must be hanging around on the other side of the shadowgate again.”
I did not think so. This evening’s racket was different.
An articulate cry came from the room where we had left One-Eye. So the old man had been faking his snooze after all. “I’d better see what he wants. You get Doj.”
“You don’t believe it.” The old man was agitated now. He was angry enough to speak clearly, without much huffing and puffing. He threw up a hand. One wrinkled, twisted ebony digit pointed at something only he could see. “The doom is coming, Croaker. Soon. Maybe even tonight.” Something outside howled as if to strengthen his argument but he did not hear it.
The hand fell. It rested for several seconds. Then it rose again, one digit indicating an ornate black spear resting on pegs above the doorway. “It’s done.” He had been crafting that death tool for a generation. Its magical power was strong enough for me to sense whenever I considered it directly. Normally I am deaf, dumb and blind in that area. I married my own personal consultant. “You run into. Goblin. Give him. The spear.”
“I should just hand it over?”
“My hat, too.” One-Eye showed me a toothless grin. For the entirety of my time with the Company he had worn the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest, most disreputable black felt hat imaginable. “But you got. To do it. Right.” So. He still had one practical joke to pull even though it would be on a dead man and he would be dead himself long before it could happen.
There was a scratch at the door. Someone entered without awaiting invitation. I looked up. Doj, the old swordmaster and priest of the Nyueng Bao Community. Associated with the Company but not of it for twenty-five years now. I do not entirely trust him even after so long. I seem to be the only doubter left, though.
Doj said, “The boy said Gota . . . ”
I gestured. “Back there.”
He nodded understanding. I would focus on One-Eye because I could do nothing for the dead. Nor all that much for One-Eye, I feared. Doj asked, “Where is Thai Dei?”
“At Khang Phi, I assume. With Murgen and Sahra.”
He grunted. “I’ll send someone.”
“Let Tobo send some of his pets.” That would get some of them out from under foot—and have the additional consequence of reminding the File of Nine, the master council of warlords, that the Stone Soldiers enjoy unusual resources. If they could detect those entities at all.
Doj paused at the doorway to the back. “There’s something wrong with those things tonight. They’re like monkeys when there’s a leopard on the prowl.”
Monkeys we know well. The rock apes haunting the ruins lying where Kiaulune stands in our own world are as pesky and numerous as a plague of locusts. They are smart enough and deft enough to get into anything not locked up magically. And they are fearless. And Tobo is too soft of heart to employ his supernatural friends in a swift educational strike.
Doj vanished through the doorway. He remained spry although he was older than Gota. He still ran through his fencing rituals every morning. I knew by direct observation that he could defeat all but a handful of his disciples using practice swords. I suspect the handful would be surprised unpleasantly if the duel ever involved real steel.
Tobo is the only one as talented as Doj. But Tobo can do anything, always with grace and usually with ridiculous ease. Tobo is the child we all think we deserve.
I chuckled.
One-Eye murmured, “What?”
“Just thinking how my baby grew up.”
“That’s funny?”
“Like a broken broom handle pounded up the shit chute.”
“You should. Learn to appreciate. Cosmic. Practical jokes.”
“I . . . ”
The cosmos was spared my rancor. The street door opened to someone even less formal than Uncle Doj. Willow Swan invited himself inside. “Shut it quick!” I snapped. “That moonlight shining off the top of your head is blinding me.” I could not resist. I recalled him when he was a young man with beautiful long blond hair, a pretty face and a poorly disguised lust for my woman.
Swan said, “Sleepy sent me. There’re rumors.”
“Stay with One-Eye. I’ll deliver the news myself.”
Swan bent forward. “He breathing?”
With his eye shut One-Eye looked dead. Which meant he was laying back in the weeds hoping to get somebody with his cane. He would remain a vicious little shit till the moment he did stop breathing.
“He’s fine. For now. Just stay with him. And holler if anything changes.” I put my things back in my bag. My knees creaked as I rose. I could not manage that without putting some of my weight on One-Eye’s chair. The gods are cruel. They should let the flesh age at the rate the spirit does. Sure, some people would die of old age in a week. But the keepers would hang around forever. And I would not have all these aches and pains. Either way.
I limped as I left One-Eye’s house. My feet hurt.
Things scurried everywhere but where I was looking. Moonlight did not help a bit.
The drums had begun at sunset, softly, a dark whispering promise of a shadow of all night falling. Now they roared boldly. True night had come. There was not even a sliver of moon. The flickering light of a hundred fires set shadows dancing. It appeared that the trees had pulled up their roots to participate. A hundred frenzied disciples of the Mother of Night capered with them, their passion building.
A hundred bound prisoners shivered and wept and fouled themselves, fear unmanning some who had believed themselves heroic. Their pleas fell upon unhearing ears.
A looming darkness emerged from the night, dragged by prisoners straining at cables in the hopeless hope that by pleasing their captors they might yet survive. Twenty feet tall, the shape proved to be a statue of a woman as black and glistening as polished ebony. It had four arms. It had rubies for eyes and crystal fangs for teeth. It wore a necklace of skulls. It wore another necklace of severed penises. Each taloned hand clutched a symbol of her power over humanity. The prisoners saw only the noose.
The beat of the drums grew more swift. Their volume rose. The Children of Kina began to sing a dark hymn. Those prisoners who were devout began to pray to their own favored gods.
A skinny old man watched from the steps of the temple at the heart of the Grove of Doom. He was seated. He no longer stood unless he had to. His right leg had been broken and the bone improperly set. Walking was difficult and painful. Even standing was a chore.
A tangle of scaffolding rose behind him. The temple was undergoing restoration. Again.
Standing over him, unable to remain still, was a beautiful young woman. The old man feared her excitement was sensual, almost sexual. That should not be. She was the Daughter of Night. She did not exist to serve her own senses.
“I feel it, Narayan!” she enthused. “The imminence is there. This is going to reconnect me with my mother.”
“Perhaps.” The old man was not convinced. There had been no connection with the Goddess for four years. He was troubled. His faith was being tested. Again. And this child had grown up far too headstrong and independent. “Or it may just bring the wrath of the Protector down on our heads.” He went no farther. The argument had been running from the moment that she had used some of her raw, completely untrained magical talent to blind their keepers for the moments they had needed to escape the Protector’s custody three years ago.
The girl’s face hardened. For a moment it took on the dread implacability apparent on the face of the idol. As she always did when the matter of the Protector came up, she said, “She’ll regret mistreating us, Narayan. Her punishment won’t be forgotten for a thousand years.”
Narayan had grown old being persecuted. It was the natural order of his existence. He sought always to make sure that his cult survived the wrath of its enemies. The Daughter of Night was young and powerful and possessed all of youth’s impetuosity and disbelief in its own mortality. She was the child of a Goddess! That Goddess’s ruling age was about to break upon the world, changing everything. In the new order the Daughter of Night would herself become a Goddess. What reason had she to fear? That madwoman in Taglios was nothing!
Invincibility and caution, they were forever at loggerheads, yet were forever inseparable.
The Daughter of Night did believe with all her heart and soul that she was the spiritual child of a Goddess. She had to. But she had been born of man and woman. A flake of humanity remained as a stain upon her heart. She had to have somebody.
Her movements became more pronounced and more sensual, less controlled. Narayan grimaced. She must not forge an interior connection between pleasure and death. The Goddess was a destroyer in one avatar but lives taken in her name were not taken for reasons so slight. Kina would not countenance her Daughter yielding to hedonism. If she did there would be punishments, no doubt falling heaviest upon Narayan Singh.
The priests were ready. They dragged weeping prisoners forward to fulfill the crowning purpose of their lives, their parts in the rites that would reconsecrate Kina’s temple. The second rite would strive to contact the Goddess, who lay bound in enchanted sleep, so that once again the Daughter of Night would be blessed with the Dark Mother’s wisdom and far-seeing vision.
All things that needed doing. But Narayan Singh, the living saint of the Deceivers, the great hero of the Strangler cult, was not a happy man. Control had drifted too far away. The girl had begun altering the cult to reflect her own inner landscape. He feared the chance that one of their arguments would not heal afterward. That had happened with his real children. He had sworn an oath to Kina that he would bring the girl up right, that they both would see her bring on the Year of the Skulls. But if she continued growing ever more headstrong and self-serving . . .
She could restrain herself no longer. She hurried down the steps. She plucked a strangling scarf from the hands of one of the priests.
What Narayan saw in the girl’s face then he had seen only one place before, in his wife’s face, in her passion, so long ago that it seemed to have happened during an earlier turn around the Wheel of Life.
Saddened, he realized that when the next rite started she would throw herself into the torture of the victims. In her state she might become too involved and spill their blood, which would be an offense the Goddess would never excuse.
He was becoming extremely troubled, was Narayan Singh.
And then he became more troubled still as his wandering eye caught sight of a crow in the crotch of a tree almost directly behind the deadly rite. Worse, that crow noticed him noticing it. It flung itself into the air with a mocking cry. A hundred crow voices immediately answered from all over the grove.
The Protector knew!
Narayan yelled at the girl. Attention much too focused, she did not hear him.
Agony ripped through his leg as he climbed to his feet. How soon would the soldiers arrive? How would he ever run again? How would he keep the Goddess’s hope alive when his flesh had grown so frail and his faith had worn so threadbare?
Outpost was a quiet city of broad lanes and white walls. We had adopted the native custom of whitewashing everything but the thatch and decorative vegetation.
On holidays some locals even painted each other white. White had been a great symbol of resistance to the Shadowmasters in times gone by.
Our city was artificial and military, all straight lines, cleanliness and quiet. Except at night, if Tobo’s friends got to brawling amongst themselves. By day, noise was confined to the training fields where the latest bunch of native would-be adventurers were learning the Black Company way of doing business. I was remote from all that except for patching up training mishaps. No one from my era was involved anymore. Like One-Eye I am a relic of a distant age, a living icon of the history that makes up so much of the unique social adhesive we used to hold the Company together. They rolled me out on special occasions and had me give sermons that began, “In those days the Company was in service to . . . ”
It was a spooky night, the two moons illuminating everything while casting conflicting shadows. And Tobo’s pets were increasingly disturbed about something. I began to catch straightforward glimpses of some when they became too distracted to work at staying out of sight. In most cases I was sorry.
The uproar up toward the shadowgate rose and fell. There were lights up there now, too. A couple of fireballs flew just before I reached my destination. I began to feel uneasy myself.
Headquarters was a two-story sprawl at the center of town. Sleepy had filled it with assistants and associates and functionaries who kept track of every horseshoe nail and every grain of rice. She had turned command into a bureaucratic exercise. And I did not like it. Of course. Because I was a cranky old man who remembered how things used to be in the good old days when we did things the right way. My way.
I do not think I have lost my sense of humor, though. I see the irony in having turned into my own grandfather.
I have stepped aside. I have passed the torch to someone younger, more energetic and tactically brighter than I ever was. But I have not abandoned my right to be involved, to contribute, to criticize and, particularly, to complain. It is a job somebody has to do. So I exasperate the younger people sometimes. Which is good for them. It builds character.
I strode through the ground-floor busywork Sleepy uses to shield herself from the world. Day or night there was a crew on duty, counting those arrowheads and grains of rice. I should remind her to get out into the world once in a while. Putting up barriers will not protect her from her demons because they are all inside her already.
I was almost old enough to get away with talk like that.
Irritation crossed her dry, dusky, almost sexless face when I walked in. She was at her prayers. I do not understand that. Despite everything she has been through, much of which puts the lie to Vehdna doctrine, she persists in her faith.
“I’ll wait till you’re done.”
The fact that I had caught her was what irritated her. The fact that she needed to believe even in the face of the evidence was what embarrassed her.
She rose, folded her prayer rug. “How bad is he this time?”
“Rumor got it wrong. It wasn’t One-Eye. It was Gota. And she’s gone. But One-Eye is in a pickle about something else he thinks is going to happen. About which he was less than vague. Tobo’s friends are being more than normally weird so it’s entirely possible it isn’t One-Eye’s imagination.”
“I’d better send someone after Sahra.”
“Tobo is taking care of it.”
Sleepy considered me steadily. She may be short but she has presence and self-confidence. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’m feeling some of what One-Eye is. Or maybe I just naturally can’t stand a prolonged peace.”
“Lady nagging you about going home again?”
“No. Murgen’s last communion with Shivetya has her worried.” To say the least. Modern history had turned cruel back in our home world. The Deceiver cult has rebounded in our absence, making converts by the hundred. At the same time Soulcatcher tormented the Taglian Territories in a mad and mainly fruitless effort to root out her enemies, most of whom were imaginary until she and Mogaba created them through their zeal. “She hasn’t said so but I’m pretty sure she’s afraid Booboo is manipulating Soulcatcher somehow.”
Sleepy could not stifle a smile. “Booboo?”
“Your fault. I picked it up from something you wrote.”
“She’s your daughter.”
“We have to call her something.”
“I can’t believe you two never picked a name.”
“She was born before . . . ” I like “Ghana.” It was good enough for my grandmother. Lady would have demurred. It sounded too much like Kina.
And although Booboo might be a nightmare stalking, Booboo was Lady’s daughter and in the land where she had grown up mothers always named the daughters. Always. When the time was right.
This time will never be right. This child denies us both. She stipulates that our flesh quickened her flesh but she is animated by an absolute conviction that she is the spiritual daughter of the Goddess Kina. She is the Daughter of Night. Her sole purpose for existing is to precipitate the Year of the Skulls, that great human disaster that will free her slumbering soulmother so she can resume working her wickedness upon the world. Or upon the worlds, actually, as we had discovered once my quest for the Company’s ancient origins had led us to the time-wracked fortress on the plain of glittering stone lying between our world and the Land of Unknown Shadows.
Silence stretched between us. Sleepy had been Annalist a long time. She had come to the Company young. Its traditions meant a great deal to her. Consequently she remained unfailingly courteous to her predecessors. But internally, I am sure, she was impatient with us old farts. Particularly with me. She never knew me well. And I was always taking up time wanting to know what was going on. I have begun putting too much emphasis on detail now that I do not have much to do but write.
I told her, “I don’t offer advice unless you ask.”
That startled her.
“Trick I learned from Soulcatcher. Makes people think you’re reading their minds. She’s much better at it.”
“I’m sure she is. She’s had all that time to practice.” She puffed air out of expanded cheeks. “It’s been a week since we’ve talked. Let’s see. Nothing to report from Shivetya. Murgen’s been at Khang Phi with Sahra so he hasn’t been in touch with the golem. Reports from the men working on the plain say they’re suffering from recurring premonitions of disaster.”
“Really? They said it that way?” She had her pontifical moments.
“Roughly.”
“What’s the traffic situation?”
“There is none.” She looked puzzled. The plain had seen no one cross for generations before the Company managed the passage. The last, before us, had been the Shadowmasters who had fled the Land of Unknown Shadows for our world back before I was born.
“Wrong question. I guess. How’re you coming with preparations for our return?”
“That a personal or professional question?” Everything was business with Sleepy. I do not recall ever having seen her relax. Sometimes that worried me. Something in her past, hinted at in her own Annals, had left her convinced that that was the only way she could be safe.
“Both.” I wished I could tell Lady that we would be going home soon. She had no love for the Land of Unknown Shadows.
I am sure she will not enjoy the future wherever we go. It is an absolute certainty that the times to come will not be good. I do not believe she understands that yet. Not in her heart.
Even she can be naive about some things.
“The short answer is that we can probably put a reinforced company across as early as next month. If we can acquire the shadowgate knowledge.”
Crossing the plain is a major undertaking because you have to carry with you everything you will need for a week. Up there there is nothing to eat but glittering stone. Stone remembers but stone has little nutritional value.
“Are you going too?”
“I’m going to send scouts and spies, no matter what. We can use the home shadowgate as long as we only put through a few men at a time.”
“You won’t take Shivetya’s word?”
“The demon has his own agenda.”
She would know. She had been in direct communion with that Steadfast Guardian.
What I knew of the golem’s designs made me concerned for Lady. Shivetya, that ancient entity, created to manage and watch over the plain—which was an artifact itself—wanted to die. He could not do so while Kina survived. One of his tasks was to ensure that the sleeping Goddess did not awaken and escape her imprisonment.
When Kina ceased to exist, my wife’s tenuous grasp on those magical powers critical to her sense of self-worth and identity would perish with her. What powers Lady boasted, she possessed only because she had found a way to steal from the Goddess. She was a complete parasite.
I said, “And you, believing the Company dictum that we have no friends outside, don’t value his friendship.”
“Oh, he’s perfectly marvelous, Croaker. He saved my life. But he didn’t do it because I’m cute and I jiggle in the right places when I run.”
She was not cute. I could not imagine her jiggling, either. This was a woman who had gotten away with pretending to be a boy for years. There was nothing feminine about her. Nor anything masculine, either. She was not a sexual being at all, though for a while there had been rumors that she and Swan had become a midnight item.
It turned out purely platonic.
“I’ll reserve comment. You’ve surprised me before.”
“Captain!”
Took her a while, sometimes, to understand when someone was joking. Or even being sarcastic, though she had a tongue like a razor herself.
She realized I was ribbing her. “I see. Then let me surprise you one more time by asking your advice.”
“Oh-oh. You’ll have them sharpening their skates in hell.”
“Howler and Longshadow. I’ve got to make decisions.”
“File of Nine nagging you again?” The File of Nine—“File” from military usage—was a council of warlords, their identities kept secret, who formed the nearest thing to a real ruling body in Hsien. The monarchy and aristocracy of record were little more than decorative and, in the main, too intimate with poverty to accomplish much if the inclination existed.
The File of Nine had only limited power. Their existence barely assured that near-anarchy did not devolve into complete chaos. The Nine would have been more effective had they not prized their anonymity more than their implied power.
“Them and the Court of All Seasons. The Noble Judges really want Longshadow.” The imperial court of Hsien—consisting of aristocrats with less real world power than the File of Nine but enjoying more a demonstrative moral authority—were obsessively interested in gaining possession of Longshadow. Being an old cynic I tended to suspect them of less than moral ambitions. But we had few dealings with them. Their seat, Quang Ninh City, was much too far away.
The one thing the peoples of Hsien held in common, every noble and every peasant, every priest and every warlord, was an implacable and ugly thirst for revenge upon the Shadowmaster invaders of yesteryear. Longshadow, still trapped in stasis underneath the glittering plain, represented the last possible opportunity to extract that cathartic vengeance. Longshadow’s value in our dealings with the Children of the Dead was phenomenally disproportionate.
Hatreds seldom are constrained to rational scales.
Sleepy continued, “And hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear from some lesser warlord begging me to bring Longshadow in. The way they all volunteer to take charge of him leaves me nurturing the sneaking suspicion that most of them aren’t quite as idealistically motivated as the File of Nine and the Court of All Seasons.”
“No doubt. He’d be a handy tool for anybody who wanted to adjust the power balance. If anyone was fool enough to believe he could manage a puppet Shadowmaster.” No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don’t believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness. I married one of those. I am not sure she has learned her lesson yet. “Has anyone offered to fix our shadowgate?”
“The Court is actually willing to give us someone. The trouble with that is that they don’t actually have anyone equipped with the skills to make the needed fixes. Chances are, no one has those skills. But the knowledge exists in records stored at Khang Phi.”
“So why don’t we? . . . ”
“We’re working on it. Meantime, the Court do seem to believe in us. And they absolutely do want some kind of revenge before all of Longshadow’s surviving victims have been claimed by age.”
“And what about the Howler?”
“Tobo wants him. Says he can handle him now.”
“Does anybody else think so?” I meant Lady. “Or is he overconfident?”
Sleepy shrugged. “There’s nobody telling me they’ve got anything more they can teach him.” She meant Lady, too, and did not mean that Tobo suffered from a teen attitude. Tobo had no trouble taking advice or instruction when either of those did not originate with his mother.
I asked anyway. “Not even Lady?”
“She, I think, might be holding out on him.”
“You can bet on it.” I married the woman but I don’t have many illusions about her. She would be thrilled to go back to her old wicked ways. Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance. Though we get along well enough. “She can’t be any other way. Get her to tell you about her first husband. You’ll marvel that she came out as sane as she did.” I marveled every day. Right before I gave in to my astonishment that the woman really had given up everything to ride off with me. Well, something. She had not had much at the time and her prospects had been grim. “What the hell is that?”
“Alarm horns.” Sleepy bolted out of her seat. She was spry for a woman treading hard on the heels of middle age. On the other hand, of course, she was so short she did not have a lot of real getting up to do. “I didn’t order any drills.”
She had an ugly habit of doing that. Only the traitor Mogaba, when he had been with us, had had as determined an attitude about preparedness.
Sleepy was too serious about everything.
Tobo’s unknown shadows began raising their biggest uproar yet.
“Come on!” Sleepy snapped. “Why aren’t you armed?” She was. She always was, although I never have seen her use a weapon more substantial than guile.
“I’m retired. I’m a paper pusher these days.”
“I don’t see you wearing a tombstone for a hat.”
“I had an attitude problem once upon a time, myself, but . . . ”
“Speaking of which. I want a reading in the officers’ mess before lights out. Something that tells us all about the wages of indolence and the neglect of readiness. Or about the fate of ordinary mercenaries.” She was in brisk motion, headed for the main exit, overtaking staffers who were not dawdling themselves. “Make a hole, people. Make a hole. Coming through.”
Outside, people were pointing and babbling. The moonlight and a lot of fire betrayed a pillar of black, oily smoke boiling up from just below the gate to the glittering plain. I stated the obvious. “Something’s happened.” Clever me.
“Suvrin’s up there. He has a level head.”
Suvrin was a solid young officer with maybe just a tad of worship for his captain. You could be confident that neither accidents nor stupid mistakes would happen on Suvrin’s watch.
Runners gathered, ready to carry Sleepy’s instructions. She gave the only order she could till we knew more. Be alert. Even though to a man we believed that there was no way major trouble could come at us from off the plain.
The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.
Suvrin did not arrive until after midnight. By then even our dullards understood that there was significance to the agitation of the hidden folk and the crows whose presence gave our settlement its local name. Arms had been issued. Men with fireball poles now perched on every rooftop. Tobo had warned his supernatural friends to stay out of town lest taut human nerves snap and cause them harm.
Everyone of stature available gathered to await Suvrin’s report. A couple of subalterns took turns running up to the headquarters’ roof to check the progress of the torches descending the long scarp from the shadowgate. Local boys, they seemed to feel that their great adventure had begun at last.
They were fools.
An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people.
If the new blood remain blind to reality after we move out I guarantee that their naivete will not long survive their first encounter with my sister-in-law, Soulcatcher.
Suvrin finally arrived, accompanied by the runner Sleepy had sent to meet him. He seemed surprised by the size of the assembly awaiting him.
“Get up front and talk,” Sleepy told him. Always direct and to the point, my successor.
Silence fell. Suvrin looked around nervously. He was short, dark, slightly pudgy. His family had been minor nobility. Sleepy had taken him prisoner of war four years ago, just before the Company climbed onto the glittering plain, headed this way. Now he commanded an infantry battalion and seemed destined for bigger things because the Company was growing. He told us, “Something came through the shadowgate.”
Jabber jabber, question question.
“I don’t know what. One of my men came to tell me he thought he’d seen something sneaking around in the rocks on the other side of the gate. I went to look. After four years of nothing happening I assumed it would be just a shadow or one of the Nef. The dreamwalkers visit us all the time. I was wrong. I never got a good look at the thing but it seemed to be a large animal, black and extremely fast. Not as big as Big Ears or Cat Sith but definitely faster. It was able to pass through the shadowgate without help.”
I felt a chill. I tried to reject my immediate suspicion. It was not possible. Nevertheless, I said, “Forvalaka.”
“Tobo, where are you?” Sleepy demanded.
“Here.” He sat with several Children of the Dead, officers in training.
“Find this thing. Catch it. If it’s what Croaker said, I want you to kill it.”
“That’ll be easier said than done. It’s already squabbled with the Black Hounds. They backed off. They’re just trying to keep track of it now.”
“Then kill it, Tobo.” There was no “try to” or “do whatever you can” with this Captain.
I told him, “Ask Lady to help you. She knows those things. But before anybody does anything, we need to set up some kind of protection for One-Eye.” If it was a shape-shifting, man-eating werepanther from our homeworld, it could be only one monster. And that creature hated One-Eye with the deepest and most abiding passion imaginable because One-Eye had slain the only wizard capable of helping it regain its human form.
“You think it really is Lisa Bowalk?” Sleepy asked.
“I get that feeling. But you told me it escaped from the plain through the Khatovar gate. And it couldn’t get back.”
Sleepy shrugged. “That’s what Shivetya showed me. It’s possible that I just assumed it couldn’t get back onto the plain.”
“Or maybe it made new friends out there.”
The little woman spun, barked, “Suvrin?”
Suvrin understood. “I left them on maximum alert.”
I said, “Tobo will have to check the seals on the gate. We don’t want it leaking shadows because whatever it was broke through.” Though the boy would not be able to do much to stem a real flood. That honor would have to go to his hidden folk friends. Lack of technical knowledge about shadowgates was the main reason we continued to reside in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
“I understand that, Croaker. Can I get to work here?”
I was underfoot. Being considered useless is irksome.
That condition was familiar to most of us whom Soulcatcher had beguiled and captured and managed to leave buried for fifteen years. Our Company had changed during our slumber. Even Lady and Murgen, who had maintained tenuous connections with the outside world, found themselves marginalized now. Murgen did not mind.
The culture of the Company has become quite alien. Almost no northern flavor remains. Just a few little quirkss in how things are done, and my own proud legacy, an interest in hygiene that is completely foreign to these climes.
These southerners did not enjoy a proper terror of the forvalaka. They insisted on picturing it as just another spooky nightstalker like Big Ears or Paddlefoot, which they consider essentially harmless. Near as I can tell they appear harmless only because their victims seldom survive to report any contrary facts.
“A reading from the First Book of Croaker,” I told the assembly. It was after midnight. There had been no uproar for a while. The shadowgate was not leaking the Unforgiven Dead. Tobo was trying to pinpoint the intruder but was having difficulties. It was moving around a lot, scouting, plainly unsure how it should view the fact that it had fallen right in among us. “In those days the Company was in service to the Syndic of Beryl.”
I told them about another forvalaka, long ago and far away and way more cruel than this one ever could be. I wanted them to worry.
Lady and I sat up with One-Eye. Gota had been laid out in the same room. Candles surrounded her. “I see no obvious change in the woman.”
“Croaker! Hush!”
“I hear a difference, though. She hasn’t complained about anything since we got here.”
Playing deaf, One-Eye took a long drink of his product, closed his eye, nodded off. Lady whispered, “It’s probably best if he naps.”
“Not very lively bait.”
“Carrion’s good enough to draw this thing. What it wants to kill really only exists inside itself. One-Eye is just its symbol.” She rubbed her eyes.
I winced. She looked so old, my love. Grey hair. Wrinkles. Jowls developing. Broadening in the beam. The deterioration had been swift since Sleepy rescued us.
Lucky for me there was no mirror handy. I really do not like to look at that fat, old, bald guy who goes around claiming to be Croaker.
The shadows in the room were restless. They made me nervous. From the beginning of our association with Taglios, shadows have been cause for terror. A shadow in motion meant death could have hold of you any moment. Those sad but cruel monsters off the plain had been the lethal instruments by which the Shadowmasters had earned their fame and had enforced their wills. But here, in the Land of Unknown Shadows, the hidden folk who lurked in the dark were shy but not ordinarily unfriendly—if treated with respect. And even those manifestations owning a history of wickedness and malice now worshipped Tobo and harmed no mortal closely associated with the Company. Unless that mortal was dim enough to irk Tobo somehow.
Tobo lived as much in the world of the hidden folk as he did in ours.
In the distance the spectral cat Big Ears again mouthed his unique call. Native legend says only the creature’s prospective victims ever hear that chilling cry. A couple of the Black Hounds bayed. Legend suggests you do not want to hear their voices, either. Interviews with locals lead me to believe that before Tobo arrived only ignorant peasants really believed in most such perils of the night and the wild. Educated folk at Khang Phi and Quang Ninh had been stunned by what the boy had summoned from the shadows.
I glanced at the spear above the door. One-Eye had worked on that for decades. It was as much work of art as weapon. “Hon. Didn’t One-Eye start crafting that spear because of Bowalk?”
She paused in her knitting, stared up at the spear, mused, “Seems to me Murgen wrote that One-Eye intended to use it on one of the Shadowmasters but ended up sticking Bowalk with it instead. During the siege. Or was that? . . . ”
My knees creaked as I rose. “Whatever. Just in case.” I took the spear down. “Damn. It’s heavy.”
“If the monster does get this far, try to keep in mind that we’d rather catch it than kill it.”
“I know. It was my bright idea.” The wisdom of which I had begun to doubt. I thought it might be interesting to see what would happen if we could force it to change back into the woman it had been before it had become fixed in its cat shape. I wanted to ask her questions about Khatovar.
Always assuming that the invader was the dread forvalaka, Lisa Daele Bowalk.
I sat down again. “Sleepy says she’s ready to send spies and scouts across.”
“Uhm?”
“We’ve been avoiding the facts a long time.” This was hard. It had taken me an age to work up to it. “The girl . . . Our child . . . ”
“Booboo?”
“You, too?”
“We have to call her something. The Daughter of Night is so unwieldy. Booboo works without being an emotional calthrop.”
“We have to make some decisions.”
“She’ll . . . ”
Black Hounds, Cat Sith, Big Ears and numerous other hidden folk began to give voice. I said, “That’s inside the wall.”
“Headed this way.” She set her knitting aside.
One-Eye’s head rose.
The door exploded inward before I finished turning to face it.
A plank floated toward me in slow motion, slapped me across the belly hard enough to set me down on the floor on my butt. Something huge and black with blazing angry eyes followed the board but lost interest in me in midleap. Still falling backward onto my back I scored its flank with One-Eye’s spear. Flesh parted. Rib bones appeared. I tried to thrust on into the beast’s belly but did not have enough leverage. It screamed but could not alter its momentum.
Burning pain seared deep into my left shoulder, not three inches from the side of my neck. The forvalaka was not responsible, though. Friendly fire was. My sweet wife had discharged a fireball projector while I was between her and her target. There was plenty of fire left, though, when that ball, its flight path altered, clipped the panther’s tail two inches from its root.
The monster’s scream continued. It flung its head back while still airborne. Its whole frame was in the position heralds call rampant.
It hit One-Eye.
The old man made no obvious effort to defend himself. His chair went over. It shattered into kindling wood. One-Eye skidded along the dirt floor. The forvalaka ploughed into Gota, tipping the table on which she had been laid out. Lady loosed another fireball. It missed. I fought to get around onto my hands and knees, then to get the head of the spear up, between me and the monster. It fought for its footing while trying to turn at the same time. It slammed into the far wall. I got my feet under me, started to stumble around.
Lady missed again.
“No!” I shrieked. My feet tangled. I came close to landing on my face again. I tried to do three things at once and, naturally, did none of them well. I wanted to get hold of One-Eye, I wanted to get my spearhead back up, I wanted to get the hell out of that house.
Lady did not miss again. But this fireball was a puny one, a near dud. It hit the monster right between the eyes. And just ricocheted off, taking a few square inches of skin along with it, leaving a patch of skull bone exposed.
The forvalaka screamed again.
Then One-Eye’s still blew up. Which is what I had expected from the moment Lady’s fireball had gone through the wall.
Mogaba knew there was trouble seconds after he left his rooms, so austerely furnished in shabby regrets. Palace staffers pushed to the sides of the corridors as he passed. Without exception they were scuttling away from the Privy Council Chamber. They must have heard rumors that had not yet reached his ears. Rumors they were sure would displease the Protector, which meant that, soon, someone would be making life unpleasant for someone else and these people hoped to be well out of the way before he started.
“Pride,” he said, in a normal, conversational voice to a young Grey runner trying to ease past without attracting notice. “Pride is what did me in.”
“Yes sir.” Color drained from the young Shadar’s face. He did not yet have a beard to hide behind. “I mean, no sir. I’m sorry . . . ”
Mogaba was gone, indifferent to the apprentice soldier. Similar incidents occurred each time he passed through the Palace. He spoke to almost everyone. Those who had watched the habit develop understood that he was talking to himself and did not expect any reply. He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.” He was no fool, though. He knew he had problems.
He was certain that he had a much more solid grip on reality than did his employer, though.
Soulcatcher, however, took the view that she was a virtual free agent and refused to be wedded to any particular reality. She believed in creating her own by making her imaginings come true.
Some were quite mad. Few, however, lasted beyond the heated moment of conception.
Mogaba heard crows arguing ahead. Crows infested the Palace these days. Soulcatcher was fond of crows. She allowed no one to harass or harm them. Of late bats had made a claim on her affections as well.
When the crows became vocal the few servants still around started moving much faster. Unhappy crows meant unhappy news. Unhappy news was guaranteed to produce an extremely unhappy Protector. When Soulcatcher was unhappy she did not care who suffered the consequences. But someone surely would.
Mogaba stepped into the council chamber and waited. She would talk to him when she was ready. Ghopal Singh of the Greys and Aridatha Singh of the City Battalions—no relation: Singh was the most common surname in Taglios—were there already. Which meant that Soulcatcher must have been haranguing them about their failure to root out enough enemies, again, before the bad news arrived.
Mogaba exchanged glances with both men. As he believed himself to be, they were good men trapped by impossible circumstances. Ghopal had a flair for enforcing the law. Aridatha was equally talented at keeping the peace without enraging the populace. Both men managed despite Soulcatcher, who loved both chaos and despotism and inflicted each with verve and ferocity, driven by the dictates of whimsy.
The woman seemed to materialize suddenly. It was a talent she used to disconcert lesser beings. A lesser man than Mogaba might have been numbed by the sight of her. The woman had a body the wonders of which seemed highlighted rather than concealed by the tight black leather she wore. Nature had blessed her with superb raw materials. Her vanity had driven her, over the centuries, to keep making improvements through cosmetic sorceries.
“I’m not happy,” Soulcatcher announced. Her voice was petulant, that of a spoiled child. Today her look was younger than usual, as though she wanted to spark every young man’s fantasy. Although the preening crow on the tall chair back behind her was a distraction once she settled.
“May I ask why?” Mogaba asked. His voice was calm, untroubled. Life in the Palace at Taglios consisted of a disorganized stumble from crisis to crisis. He no longer became emotionally involved. Soulcatcher would turn on him someday. He had made his peace with that already. He would face it calmly when it came. He deserved no better.
“There is a huge Deceiver festival being celebrated in the Grove of Doom. Right now. Tonight.” This voice was cool, calm, rational. Masculine. You got used to the changes after a while. Mogaba seldom noticed anymore. Aridatha Singh, only recently promoted, still found the unpredictable chorus disconcerting. Singh was a sound officer and good soldier. Mogaba hoped he lasted long enough to become accustomed to the Protector’s quirks. Aridatha deserved better than he was likely to get.
“That’s definitely not good news,” Mogaba agreed. “Seems I recall you wanting to harvest the timber there while obliterating every last trace of the holy place. Selvas Gupta talked you out of it. Said it would set a bad precedent.” Gupta had had secret encouragement from the Great General, who had not cared to waste manpower and time clearing a forest. But Mogaba loathed Selvas Gupta and his smugly holy attitude of superiority.
Gupta was the current Purohita, or official court chaplain and religious adviser. Purohita was a post that had been forced upon the Radisha Drah twenty years earlier by the priesthoods at a time when the princess had been too weak to defy them. Soulcatcher had not yet abolished it. But she had little patience with the men who occupied it.
Selvas Gupta had been Purohita for a year, which incumbency exceeded that of all his predecessors since the establishment of the Protectorate.
Mogaba was confident that slimy little snake Gupta would not last out the week.
Soulcatcher gave him a look which offered the impression that she was peering deep inside him, sorting his secrets and motives. Having paused just long enough to suggest that she was not being fooled, she said, “Get me a new Purohita. Kill the old one if he argues about it.” She had an ancient custom of being unpleasant toward priests who disappointed her. Which ran in the family. Her sister had slain hundreds in a single massacre a generation earlier. The exemplary demonstrations of both sisters, however, never seemed sufficient to convince the survivors that they ought to abandon their scheming. They were stubborn. It seemed likely that Taglios would come up short of priests before it ran short of conspiracies.
The crow hopped down onto Soulcatcher’s shoulder. She lifted gloved fingers to offer it some tidbit.
“Did you have a response in mind? Something involving my colleagues?” Mogaba nodded toward the Singhs in turn. He suffered little jealousy of either man and did respect each for his abilities. Time and persistent adversity had ground the rough edges off of his once potent sense of self-appreciation.
“These gentlemen were here already, regarding another matter, when the news from the Grove arrived.” She offered the crow another morsel.
Mogaba’s eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. He was not to be made privy to that matter?
But he was. Soulcatcher used a cackling crone’s voice. “The Greys found several slogans painted on walls today.” The crow cawed. Elsewhere, other crows began squabbling.
“Not uncommon,” Mogaba replied. “Every idiot with a brush, a pot of paint and enough education to string five characters together seems to be compelled to say something if he discovers a blank piece of wall.”
“These were slogans from the past.” This was the voice the Protector used when she was focused entirely on business. It was a male voice. A voice like Mogaba imagined his own to be. “Three said ‘Rajadharma.’ ”
“I’ve heard the Bhodi cult is making a comeback, too.”
Ghopal Singh added, “Two said ‘Water Sleeps.’ That’s not Bhodi. And they weren’t stray graffiti left over from four years ago.”
A thrill, half fear, half excitement, coursed through Mogaba. He stared at the Protector. She said, “I want to know who’s doing it. I want to know why they’ve decided to do it right now.”
Mogaba thought both Singhs looked cautiously pleased, as though glad to have potential real enemies to chase instead of just irritating people who would otherwise remain indifferent to the Palace.
The Grove of Doom was outside the city. Everything outside was Mogaba’s province. He asked, “Was there some particular action you wished me to take in regard to the Deceivers?”
Soulcatcher smiled. When she did that, just that way, every minute of her many centuries shone through. “Nothing. Not a thing. They’re scattering already. I’ll let you know when. It’ll be when they’re not ready.” This voice was cold but was filled with her evil smile. Mogaba wondered if the Singhs knew how seldom anyone saw the Protector without her mask. It meant that she meant to involve them in her schemes too deeply for them to escape the association.
Mogaba nodded like a dutiful servant. It was all a game to the Protector. Or possibly several games. Maybe making a game of it was how you survived spiritually in a world where everyone else was ephemeral.
Soulcatcher said, “I want you to help catch rats. There’s a shortage of carrion. My babies are going hungry.” She offered her black-winged spy another treat. This one suspiciously resembled a human eyeball.
Am I still alive?” I did not need to ask. I was. Pain was a dead giveaway. Every square inch of me hurt.
“Don’t move.” That was Tobo. “Or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
I already wished I did not have to breathe. “Burns?”
“Lots of burns. Lots of banging around, too.”
Murgen’s voice said, “You look like they whipped your ass with a forty-pound ugly stick, then slow-roasted what was left over an open pit.”
“I thought you were at Khang Phi.”
“We came home.”
Tobo said, “We kept you unconscious for four days.”
“How is Lady?”
Murgen told me, “She’s in the other bed. In a lot better shape than you.”
“She ought to be. I didn’t shoot her. The cat get her tongue?”
“She’s asleep.”
“What about One-Eye?”
Tobo’s response was barely audible. “One-Eye didn’t make it, Croaker.”
After a while, Murgen asked, “You all right?”
“He was the last.”
“Last? Last what?”
“The last one who was here when I joined. The Company.” I was the real Old Man now. “What happened to his spear? I’ve got to have his spear in order to finish this.”
“What spear?” Murgen asked.
Tobo knew what spear. “I have it at my place.”
“Was it damaged by the fire?”
“Not much. Why?”
“I’m going to kill that thing. Like we should have a long time ago. You don’t let that spear out of your sight. I’ve got to have it. But right now I’m going to sleep for a while some more.” I had to go where the pain was not, just for a time. I had known One-Eye would leave us someday. I thought I was ready for that. I was wrong.
His passing meant more than just the end of an old friend. It marked the end of an age.
Tobo said something about the spear. I did not catch it. And the darkness came back before I remembered to ask what had become of the forvalaka. If Lady had caught or killed it I had gotten myself worked up for nothing . . . But I guess I knew it could not be that easy.
There were dreams. I remembered everyone who had gone before me. I remembered the places and times. Cold places, hot places, weird places, always stressful times, swollen with unhappiness, pain and fear. Some died. Some did not. It makes no sense when you try to figure it out. Soldiers live. And wonder why.
Oh, it’s a soldier’s life for me. Oh, the adventure and glory!
It took me longer to recuperate than it had that time I almost got killed outside Dejagore. Even with Tobo applying his own best healing spells, learned from One-Eye, and urging his edge-of-the-eye friends to help as well. Some of those were supposed to be able to bring a fossil back to life. I felt like a fossil, like I had not enjoyed the advantage of the stasis that had frozen the others while we were prisoners under the plain. There was a lot of confusion inside me. I could no longer figure out how old I am. My best guess is fifty-six, give or take a few years, plus all that time underneath the earth. And fifty-six years, brother, was a pretty damned good run—particularly for a guy in my racket. I ought to appreciate every second, including all the misery.
Soldiers live. And wonder why.
Two months had passed. I felt ten years older but I was up and around—and moving like a zombie. I had indeed been roasted well-done by a jet of almost pure alcohol blowing through the hole that had been drilled by Lady’s errant fireball. Everybody kept telling me how much the gods must love me, that I had no business being alive. That had I not been turned the way I was, with the forvalaka positioned perfectly to absorb a lot of the blast, there would not have been much left of me but bones.
I was not entirely convinced that that might not have been the better outcome.
Persistent pain does little to buoy one’s optimism or elevate one’s mood. I began to develop a certain sympathy for Mother Gota’s perspective.
I did manage a smile when Lady began to rub me down with healing unguents. “Silver linings,” she told me.
“Oh, yes indeed. Yes indeed.”
“Would you look at that? Maybe you’re not as old as you think.”
“It’s all your fault, wench.”
“Sleepy’s worried about you wanting to avenge One-Eye.”
“I know.” I did not have to be told. I had had to put up with people like me when I was Captain.
“Maybe you should tone it down.”
“It’s got to be done. It’s going to be done. Sleepy’s got to understand that.” Sleepy is all business. Her world does not include much leeway for emotional indulgence.
She thinks I just want to use One-Eye’s death as an excuse to visit the Khatovar shadowgate, basing her judgment on the fact that I had tramped through Hell for a decade trying to get to that place.
The woman is hard to fool. But she can also get fixed on one idea to the exclusion of other possibilities.
“She doesn’t want to make any more enemies.”
“More? We don’t have any. Not out here. They may not like us much but they all kiss our asses. They’re scared to death of us. And they get more scared every time another White Lady or Blue Man or wichtlin or whatnot lumbers out of folklore and joins Tobo’s entourage.”
“Uhn. Is that the spot? I saw something Tobo called a wowsey with the Black Hounds yesterday.” That is my honey. She can see those things clearly, even over here. “It’s as big as a hippo but looks like a beetle with a lizard’s head. A lizard with big teeth. To quote Swan, ‘It looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down.’ ”
Willow Swan seemed to be cultivating a new image as a churlish but colorful old man.
Somebody has to step in and take One-Eye’s place. Though I was sort of thinking about picking up the stick myself.
“What do we know about the forvalaka?” I asked. I had avoided asking for specifics before. I knew the damned thing got away. That was all I needed to know until I was prepared mentally to start planning the conclusion of its tale.
“It left its tail behind. It suffered severe burns and several deep wounds and I blinded it partially with my last fireball. It lost several teeth. Tobo has created a number of fetishes using those and bits of flesh torn off by the Black Hounds while it was fleeing toward the shadowgate.”
“But it did have what it takes to get back to Khatovar.”
“It did.”
“Then it’s going to be as hard to kill as the Limper was.”
“Not anymore. Not with what Tobo has.”
“He had your help?”
“I’m ancient in the ways of wickedness. Am I not? Didn’t you write something like that a time or two?”
“Especially after I got to know you . . . Ouch! Well . . . as long as you’re a bad girl like you’re being a bad girl right now . . . ” I do not recall if I did write the exact words she claimed but I know I recorded those approximate sentiments many years ago. Without exaggerating. “I’m going to go after it.”
“I know.” She did not argue. They were humoring me. They wanted to keep me quiet. Sleepy was involved in touchy negotiations with the File of Nine. The Court of All Seasons and the monks of Khang Phi were behind us already. The warlords of the File remain unconvinced that it would be wise to give us what we want even though the Company has grown to the point where it has become a serious burden on Hsien’s economy. And poses a threat, if the notion of conquest happens to take root. I, myself, do not see one warlord, or even a cabal of warlords, out there, who would stand much more chance than smoke in a high wind if the notion did take us. Most of the warlords are clear on that, too.
They still want Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha—our Shadowmaster Longshadow—desperately. Their hunger for revenge borders on racial obsession. They are not forthcoming about the evils Longshadow visited upon their forbears but we have our sources inside Khang Phi. Longshadow’s cruelties had been as capricious as any wickedness of Soulcatcher’s but far more terrible for their victims. The need to haul the Shadowmaster up before a tribunal colored every consideration of the warlords, the legal and noble courts, even the several spiritual traditions of Hsien. Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha was the one thing they all agreed upon. Nor did I ever sense a hint of a chance some rogue would try to acquire control of Longshadow in an effort to amplify his own power.
Sleepy did not want a short-tempered, foulmouthed but still influential former Captain stumbling around being sarcastic and opinionated while she was trying to wring the one last concession she wanted out of the File of Nine. She was confident that our years of good behavior would tilt the scale. And if it did not, well, she was the kind of planner who always had a secondary scheme in motion. In fact, she was that wonderful kind of villain for whom the public and obvious scheme might well be only a tertiary effort meant primarily as a smoke screen. Our Sleepy was one wicked little girl.
There are no great sorcerers in the Land of Unknown Shadows. “All Evil Dies There an Endless Death” means that they have persecuted the talented since the flight of the Shadowmasters. But Hsien does not lack or disdain knowledge. There are several huge monasteries—of which Khang Phi is the greatest—dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. The monks do not sort it into good and evil knowledge, nor do they make moral judgments. They take the position that no knowledge is evil until someone chooses to do evil with it.
Even though it has been engineered to wreak havoc upon the human body, a sword is strictly inert metal until someone chooses to pick it up and strike. Or chooses not to do so.
There are, of course, a thousand sophistries spewed by those who wish to deny individuals the opportunity to choose. Which is an arrogant presumption of a divine scale.
This is what happens when you get old. You start thinking. Worse, you start telling everybody what you think.
Sleepy was nervous lest I express an unfortunate opinion to one of the Nine, whereupon, in high dudgeon, the offended party would abandon all sensibility and self-interest and deny to us forever the knowledge we need to repair the shadowgate opening on our native world. She misapprehends my ability to evoke the unfriendly response.
Before the werepanther came I might have stumbled. I might have expressed an actual opinion to a member of the File, some of whom are amongst the most reprehensible generals I have ever encountered. I doubt that, given the opportunity to rule unchallenged, many of them would be more enlightened than the hated Shadowmasters.
People are strange. The Children of the Dead are among the strangest.
I will not upset anyone. I will be diligently supportive of any policy Sleepy sets. I want to leave this Land of Unknown Shadows. I have things to accomplish before I hand these Annals over for the last time. Settling up with Lisa Daele Bowalk is just one. There is the Great General, Mogaba, the darkest traitor ever to stain the Company’s history. There is Narayan Singh. For Lady, there is Narayan and Soulcatcher. For both of us there is our child. Our wicked, wicked child.
I asked, “Is there anything besides Longshadow we could offer the File of Nine? Sweeten it just enough to make them move over beside Khang Phi and the Court of All Seasons?”
My sweetie shrugged. “I can’t imagine what.” She smiled enigmatically. “But it may not matter.”
I did not pay sufficient attention. Sometimes I overlook the new truths. These days my Company is managed by sly children and devious old women, not straightforward stalwarts like myself and the men of my time.
As soon as I healed enough I asked Uncle Doj to let me resume the martial arts exercises I had given up many years ago. “Why are you interested now?” he asked. Sometimes I think he is more suspicious of me than I am of him.
“Because I have time. And the need. I’m as weak as a puppy. I want to get my strength back.”
“You chased me away when I offered.”
“I didn’t have time then. And you were so much more abrasive.”
“Ha.” He smiled. “You’re too kind.”
“You’re right. But I’m a prince.”
“A Prince of Darkness, Stone Soldier.” He knew that would get my goat. “But a lucky prince.” The old fart indulged in a smirk. “Several of your contemporaries have approached me recently, also motivated by anticipation of those hardships that can no longer be that far ahead.”
“Good.” Did he know something I did not? Probably a lot. “When and where?”
His grin became evil, revealing bad teeth. Which made me wonder if Sleepy had found anybody to fill the dentistry vacancy left by One-Eye’s passing. The old fool had not bothered taking on apprentices.
“When” was the crack of dawn and “where” was the unpaved street outside Doj’s small house, which he shared with Tobo’s uncle Thai Dei and several bachelor officers of local origin. My fellow victims were Willow Swan, the brothers Loftus and Cletus, who remain the Company’s principal architects and engineers, and the exiled ruling prince and princess of Taglios, the Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister the Radisha Drah. Those are not names, they are titles. Even after decades I do not know their personal designations. And they show no inclination to share.
“Where’s your pal Blade?” I asked Swan. For a while Blade had been Sleepy’s military envoy to the File of Nine, but I had heard that he had been recalled after One-Eye’s death. I had not seen him around, though.
“Old Blade’s got too much on his plate for anything like this.”
Loftus and Cletus both grumbled under their breaths but did not clarify. I had not seen much of them lately, either. I supposed they were working themselves to death building a city from scratch. Suvrin, who arrived just in time to hear what they mumbled, nodded vigorously. “She’s going to work us all till there’s nothing but grease spots left.” I am not sure about Suvrin. I have no trouble imagining him going around endlessly repeating the silent mantra, “Every day in every way I am going to become a better soldier.”
“Well, old Blade never was real ambitious,” Swan replied. “Except when it came to carving up priests.” He seemed to know what he was talking about even if it was not obvious to me.
Clete said, “If we’re getting the straight shit from Shivetya there’ll be a whole new crop in need of culling when we get home.”
The Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister edged closer, eager for hard news from home. Sleepy took no trouble to keep them posted. She did not have much of a diplomatic streak. I had best remind her that she will need their amity once we are back across the plain.
They were not handsome, those two. And the Radisha looked more like the Prince’s mother than his sister. But he had been under the ground with me while she rode the Taglian tiger and tried not to lose its reins to Soulcatcher. They strove to remain unobtrusive here, the Prince because he had been our active enemy in the field, the Princess because she had turned on us at the very last moment of our victory over the last Shadowmasters.
Sleepy fixed her for that.
Technically, the Radisha was our prisoner. Sleepy had abducted her. She and her brother will become tools of the Company once Sleepy stages our return. Everyone agrees. But I suspect that the royals have reservations.
“Rajadharma.” I said, bowing slightly. I could not resist the taunt, reminding them both that by attempting to betray us they had ended up failing to fulfill their duty to their subjects.
“Liberator.” The Radisha returned a tiny bow. I swear, the woman gets homelier by the month. “You appear to be healing well.”
“I’ve got a knack for coming back. But my bounce sure ain’t as fast or as high as it used to be. Guess it’s old age creeping up.” I lied and told her, “You’re looking well yourself. You both are. What have you been doing? I haven’t seen you for a while.”
The Prahbrindrah Drah said nothing. He remained inscrutable. He had been quiet and unexpressive since our resurrection. We had gotten along well, once. But times change. Neither of us were the men we had been during the Shadowmaster wars.
“You’re lying like a snake’s belly,” the Radisha told me. “I’m old and I’m ugly and I’m still ashamed of myself . . . But you’re telling the lie my soul wants to hear. Forget rajadharma, though. That accusation has no power to hurt me anymore. From outside. I still crucify myself. I know what I did. At the time I thought it was the right thing. The Protector manipulated me using my sense of rajadharma. Once we get back there you’ll see us in a different light.”
Rajadharma means the ruler’s obligation to serve the ruled. When the word is thrown into a ruler’s face, or is used as an epithet, it is a savage accusation of failure.
The Radisha is a hard, stubborn little woman. Unfortunately, she will have to get the better of a hard, stubborn, crazy, almost supremely powerful sorceress if she wants to fulfill her expectations for herself.
I glanced at her brother. The Prince’s expression had not changed but I sensed that he thought he appreciated the difficulties more fully than his sister did.
Uncle Doj whacked something with a practice sword. The loud crack ended our chatter. “Your canes, please. On the count, commence the Crane Kada.” He did not bother to explain what that was to the new guy.
Maybe two decades ago I had observed and briefly joined the Nyueng Bao exercises. Murgen was Annalist then. He had had Gota, Doj and his wife Sahra’s brother, Thai Dei, living with him. Doj expected me to remember.
About all I recalled of the Crane Kada was that it constituted the first and simplest of a dozen slow-motion dances incorporating all the formal steps and strokes of Doj’s school of fencing. The old priest led from up front, his back to his pupils. Although he was the eldest of us all, he moved with a precision and grace that verged on beauty. But when Thai Dei and Tobo joined us briefly, later, both outshone the old man. It was hard not to stop just to appreciate Tobo’s mastery.
The boy made me feel clumsy and inept just standing still.
Everything came so easily for him.
He had all the talents and skills he could possibly need. If any question remained, it concerned his character. A lot of good people had worked hard to make sure that he became a virtuous and upright man. Which he did appear to be. But he was a blade not yet tested. True temptation had not yet whispered in his ear.
I missed a step badly, stumbled. Uncle Doj laid his cane across the seat of my trousers as vigorously as if I had been an adolescent. His face remained bland but I suspected that he had wanted to do that for a long time.
I tried to concentrate.
The being on the huge wooden throne in the heart of the fortress at the center of the stone plain is a construct. Possibly he was created by the gods, who fought their wars upon that plain. Or perhaps his creators were the builders who constructed the plain—if they were not gods themselves. Opinions vary. Stories abound. The demon Shivetya himself is not disposed to be unstinting with the facts, or is, at best, inconsistent in their distribution. He has shown his latest chronicler several conflicting versions of ancient events. Old Baladitya has abandoned all hope of establishing an exact truth and, instead, seeks the deeper range of meaning underpinning what the golem does reveal. Baladitya understands that in addition to being foreign territory the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected people. Symbol and faith serve the rest.
Baladitya’s Company career duplicates his prior life. He writes things down. When he was a copyist at the Taglian Royal Library he wrote things down. Now, nominally, he is a prisoner of war. Chances are he has forgotten that. In reality he is freer today to pursue his own interests than ever he was at the library.
The old scholar lives and works around the demon’s feet. Which has to be as close to personal heaven as a Gunni historian can imagine. If the historian does not remain too determinedly wedded to Gunni religious doctrine.
Shivetya’s motives for refusing categorical declarations may stem from bitterness about his lot. By his own admission he has met most of the gods face-to-face. His recollections concerning them are even less flattering than those spicing most of Gunni mythology, where few of the gods are extolled as role models. Almost without exception the Gunni deities are cruel and selfish and untouched by any celestial sense of rajadharma.
A tall black man stepped into the light cast by Baladitya’s lamps. “Learned anything exciting today, old-timer?” The copyist’s fuel expenses are prodigal. He is indulged.
The old man did not respond. He is almost deaf. He exploits his infirmity to its limits. Not even Blade insists that he share routine camp chores any longer.
Blade asked again but the copyist’s nose remained close to the page on which he was writing. His penmanship is swift and precise. Blade cannot decipher the complicated ecclesiastical alphabet, except for some of those characters it shares with the only slightly simpler common script. Blade looked up into the golem’s eye. That appeared to be about the size of a roc’s egg. The adjective “baleful” fit it well. Not even naive old Baladitya has ever proposed that the demon be delivered from the restraint guaranteed by the daggers nailing its limbs to the throne. Neither has the demon ever encouraged anyone to release it. It has endured for thousands of years. It has the patience of stone.
Blade tried another approach. “I’ve had a runner come from the Abode of Ravens.” He prefers the native name for the Company’s base. It is so much more dramatic than Outpost or Bridgehead and Blade is a dramatic man fond of dramatic gestures. “The Captain says she expects to acquire the needed shadowgate knowledge shortly. Something is about to break loose in Khang Phi. She wants me to get cracking getting more treasure brought up. She wants you to finish finding everything out. She’ll be moving soon.”
The copyist grunted. “He’s easily bored, you know.”
“What?” Blade was startled, then angry. The old man had not heard a word.
“Our host.” The old man did not lift his eyes from the page. It would take them too long to readjust. “He’s easily bored.” Baladitya cared nothing about the Company’s plans. Baladitya was in paradise.
“You’d think we’d be a change that would distract him.”
“He’s been distracted by mortals a thousand times before. He’s still here. None of those people are, except those remembered in stone.” The plain itself, though older and vastly slower than Shivetya, might have a mind of its own. Stone remembers. And stone weeps. “Their very empires have been forgotten. How much chance is there that this time will be different?”
Baladitya sounded a little empty. Not unreasonable, Blade thought, considering the fact that he looked into the time abyss represented by the demon all the time. Talk about vanity and chasing after wind!
“Yet he’s helping us. More or less.”
“Only because he believes we’re the last mayflies he’ll see. Excepting the Children of Night when they raise up their Dark Mother. He’s convinced that we’re his last chance to escape.”
“And all we got to do to get his help is skrag the nasty Goddess, then put his ass away for the long night.” The demon’s gaze seemed to drill right through him. “Nothing to it. Piece of cake, as Goblin used to say. Though the saying doesn’t make any literal sense.” Blade lifted his fingers to his eyebrow in a salute to the demon. Whose eyes seemed to be smouldering now.
“God killing. That should be perfect work for you.”
Blade was unsure if Baladitya had spoken or Shivetya had entered his mind. He did not like what the observation implied. It echoed too closely Sleepy’s thinking, which is why his posh job in Khang Phi is gone and he has charge of operations on the plain, having abandoned banquets and down mattresses for iron rations and a bed of cold and silent stone shared only with unhappy, withered dreams, a crazy scholar, miscellaneous thieves and a house-sized lunatic demon half as old as time.
All his adult life Blade has been driven by a hatred for religion. He has an especial abhorrence for its retailers. Considering his current whereabouts and present occupation it seems likely that he should have restrained his impulse to share his opinions.
Blade could have sworn that, for an instant, a smile played across the demon’s features.
Blade chose not to comment.
He is a man of few words. He believes there is little point to speech. He believes the golem eavesdrops on his thoughts. Unless it has become so bored with ephemerals that it no longer pays attention.
That hint of amusement again. Blade’s speculation is not valid. He should know better. Shivetya is interested in every breath every brother of the Black Company takes. Shivetya has anointed these men as the death-givers.
“You need anything?” Blade asked the old man, resting a hand on his shoulder briefly. “Before I head down below?” The contact is entirely contrived. But Baladitya cares nothing about the touch, genuine or not.
Baladitya lifted his pen from his right hand with his left, flexed his fingers. “I suppose I should eat something. I can’t recall when last I put fuel on the fire.”
“I’ll see that you get something.” The something was sure to be rice and spice and golem manna. If there was anything Blade regretted about his life, it was having lived most of it in a part of the world where a majority of the population include a vegetarian diet within their religion and those who do not mainly eat fish or chicken. Blade is ready to start at whichever end of a spit-roast pig and not stop until he reaches the other.
Blade’s command, the thieves, the Company pathfinders, includes twenty-six of the outfit’s brightest and most trusted youngsters, all Children of the Dead. They need to be both smart and trustworthy because Sleepy wants to exploit the treasures in the caverns beneath the plain and because they really have to understand that the plain itself will not forgive them if they do the wrong thing. Shivetya has extended his favor. Shivetya sees everything and knows everything inside the gates of his universe. Shivetya is the soul of the plain. No one comes or goes without Shivetya’s countenance, or at least his indifference. And in the unlikely event that Shivetya remained indifferent to an unauthorized theft, there was nowhere for a thief to run but back to the shadowgate opening on the Land of Unknown Shadows. That was the only shadowgate under control and functioning properly. That was the only shadowgate not certain to kill the thief.
It was a long stroll across the great circle surrounding the crude throne. That floor is anything but crude. It is an exact one-eightieth scale representation of the plain outside, less the memorial pillars that were added in a later age by men who failed to possess even mythologized recollections of the builders. Hundreds of manhours have gone into clearing the accumulated dirt and dust off its surface so Shivetya can more clearly discern every detail of his kingdom. Shivetya’s throne rests upon a raised wheel one-eightieth the size of this.
Decades ago, Soulcatcher’s tampering triggered an earthquake that battered the fortress and split its floor into a vast crevasse. Outside the plain the disaster destroyed cities and killed thousands. Today the only memorial of what had been a gap in the floor a dozen yards wide and thousands of feet deep is a red stripe meandering past the throne. It dwindles every day. As does Shivetya, the mechanism ruling the plain heals itself.
The great circular model of the plain rises half a yard above the rest of the floor, which exists at the level of the plain outside.
Blade dropped off the edge of the wheel. He strode to a hole in the floor, the head of stairs leading down. They descend for miles, through caverns natural and created. The sleeping Goddess Kina lies at the deepest level, patiently awaiting the Year of the Skulls and the beginning of the Khadi Cycle, the destruction of the world. The wounded Goddess Kina.
Shadows stirred along the nearby wall. Blade froze. Who? No way that could be his people. Or, what?
Fear speared through Blade. Shadows in motion often presaged cruel, screaming death. Had those things found a way into the fortress? Their merciless feasting was not a horror he cared to witness ever again. And in particular he did not want to be the main course.
“The Nef,” Blade told himself as three humanoid shapes emerged from the darkness. He recognized them despite never having seen them before. Hardly anyone did, outside of dreams. Or maybe nightmares. The Nef were incredibly ugly. Though they might have been wearing masks. The several descriptions available did not agree except as to ugliness. He counted them off. “The Washane. The Washene. The Washone.” Names Shivetya had given Sleepy years ago. What did they mean? Did they mean anything at all? “How did they get in here?” The answer might be critical. Killer shadows might exploit the same opening.
As the Nef always did, they tried to communicate something. In the past their efforts inevitably failed. But this time their appeal seemed obvious. They did not want Blade to go down those stairs.
Sleepy, Master Santaraksita, and others who have been in contact with Shivetya believe that the Nef are artificial reproductions of the beings who created the plain. Shivetya brought them into existence because he longed for a connection with something approximating those whose artifice had wrought the great engine and its pathways between the worlds, because he was lonely.
Shivetya has lost his will to live. If he should perish, whatever he has created himself will go with him. The Nef are not yet prepared to embrace oblivion, despite the endless horror and tedium existence upon the plain imposes.
Blade spread his hands at his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “You guys need to polish your communication skills.” Not a sound came from the Nef but their growing frustration became palpable. Which had been a constant from the first time anyone had dreamt of them.
Blade stared. He did try to understand. He considered the ironies of the Black Company’s adventure across the glittering plain. He was an atheist himself. His journey had brought him face-to-face with a complete ecology of supernatural entities. And Tobo and Sleepy, whom he considered reliable witnesses otherwise, claimed actually to have seen the grim Goddess Kina who, myth suggested, lay imprisoned a mile beneath his feet.
Sleepy, of course, faced her crises of faith. A devout Vehdna monotheist, she never, ever encountered any worldly sustenance for her beliefs. Though supportive evidence is thin, the Gunni religion only creaks badly under the burden of the knowledge we have unearthed. The Gunni are polytheists accustomed to having their gods assume countless aspects and avatars, shapes and disguises. So much so that, in some myths, those gods seem to be murdering or cuckolding themselves. The Gunni have the flexibility to look at every discovery, as Master Santaraksita has, and declare new information to be just another way of proclaiming the same old divine truths.
God is god, whatever his name. Blade has seen those sentiments inlaid in the wall tiles in several places in Khang Phi.
Whenever anyone strays far from Shivetya, a ball of earthy brown glow tags along. It hovers above and behind one shoulder or another. The ball does not shed much light but in what otherwise would be utter darkness they are sufficient. They are the golem’s doing. Shivetya has powers he has forgotten how to use. He might be a small god himself if he was not nailed to his ancient throne.
Blade descended nearly a thousand steps before he encountered anyone headed upward. This soldier carried a heavy pack. “Sergeant Vanh.”
The soldier grunted. Already he was winded. No one made more than one trip a day. Blade gave Vanh the bad news because he might not run into him again for days. “Had a message from the Captain. We have to step it up. She’s almost ready to move.”
Vanh mumbled the sorts of things soldiers always do. He continued his climb. Blade wondered how Sleepy planned to haul off the mountain of treasure already accumulated up top. It was, for sure, enough to finance a pretty good war.
Another thousand steps downward, repeating his message several times. He left the stair at the level everyone called the Cave of the Ancients because of the old men interred there. Blade always stopped to visit his friend Cordy Mather. It was a ritual of respect. Cordy was dead. Most of the others confined in the cave remained alive, enmeshed in stasis spells. Somehow, during the long Captivity, Mather had shed the spells confining him. And success had cost him his life. He had not been able to find his way out.
Most of the old men in the cave meant nothing to Blade or the Company. Only Shivetya knew who they were or why they had been interred. Certainly they had irked someone armed with the power to confine them. Several corpses, though, had been Company brothers when still alive. Several others had been captives before Soulcatcher buried the Company. Death had found them because, evidently, Cordy Mather had tried to wake them up. Touching the Captured without sorcerous precautions inevitably caused the death of the touched.
Blade resisted the urge to kick the sorcerer Longshadow. That madman was a commodity of incalculable worth in the Land of Unknown Shadows. The Company had grown strong and wealthy because of him. It continued to prosper. “How you doing, Shadowmaster? Looks like you’ll be here a while yet.” Blade assumed the sorcerer could not hear him. He could not recall having heard anything when he was under the enchantment himself. He could not recall having been aware in any way, though Murgen said there were times when it looked like the Captured were aware of their surroundings. “They haven’t pushed the bidding high enough yet. I hate to admit it but you really are a popular guy. In your own special way.” Not a generous or forgiving or even empathetic man, Blade stood with hands on hips staring down at Longshadow. The sorcerer looked like a skeleton barely covered by diseased skin. His face was locked into a scream. Blade told him, “They still say, ‘All Evil Dies There an Endless Death.’ Especially when they’re talking about you.”
Not far from Longshadow is the Company’s other insane sorcerer prisoner, the Howler. This one presents a greater temptation. Blade saw no value whatsoever to keeping Howler alive. The little shit has a history of treachery that goes way, way back and a character unlikely to change because of this confinement. He survived a similar Captivity before. That one endured for centuries.
Tobo did not need to learn any of the Howler’s evil crap. And Tobo’s education was the only excuse Blade had heard for letting the little ragbag live.
Blade paid his deepest respects to Mather. Cordy was a good friend for a long time. Blade owes Cordy his life. He wished the evil fortune had befallen him. Cordy wanted to live. Blade believes he is proceeding on inertia.
Blade continued his descent into the earth, past the treasure caverns that were being looted to finance the Company’s homegoing, it was hoped on a spectacularly memorable scale.
Blade is not much given to emotional vapors or seizures of fear. He has a cool enough head to have survived for years as a Company agent inside Longshadow’s camp. But as he moved deeper into the earth he began to twitch and sweat. His pace slackened. He passed the last known cavern. Nothing lay below that but the ultimate enemy, the Mother of Night herself. She was the enemy who would still be waiting once all the other, lesser adversaries had been brushed aside or extinguished.
To Kina, the Black Company is an annoying buzz in the ear, a mosquito that has gotten away with taking a sip or two of blood and has not had the good sense to get the hell away.
Blade slowed again. The light following him kept weakening. Where once he could see clearly twenty steps ahead now he could see only ten, the farther four seeming to be behind the face of a thickening black fog. Here the darkness seemed almost alive. Here the darkness felt as though it was under much greater pressure, the way water seemed to exert more as you swam deeper beneath its surface.
Blade found it harder to breathe. He forced himself to do so, deeply and rapidly, then went on, against the insistence of instinct. A silver chalice took form in the fog, just five steps below. It stood about a foot tall, a simple tall cup made of noble metal. Blade had placed it there. It marked the lowest step he had yet been able to reach.
Now each step downward seemed to take place against the resistance of liquid tar. Each step brought the darkness crushing in harder. The light from behind was too weak to reach even one step beyond the chalice.
Blade makes this effort frequently. He accounts it exercise for his will and courage. Each descent he manages to make it as far as the chalice mostly by being angry that he cannot push past it.
This time he tried something different. He threw a handful of coins collected from one of the treasure caves. His arm had no strength but gravity had not lost its power nor had sound been devoured by the darkness. The coins tinkled away down the stairwell. But not for long. After a moment it sounded like they were rolling around on a floor. Then they were silent. Then a tiny little voice from far, far away cried, “Help.”
The physical geography of the Land of Unknown Shadows closely recollects that of our own world. The essential differences stem from the impact of man.
The moral and cultural topographies of the worlds are completely different, though. Even the Nyueng Bao still have trouble making any real connection here—despite the fact that they and the Children of the Dead share common ancestors. But the Nyueng Bao escaped Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha and his kin centuries ago, then developed as a cultural island constantly washed by alien waves.
Hsien proper spans roughly the same territories as what were known as the Shadowlands at home when things were going well for the Shadowmasters. The farther reaches of Hsien, that none of us have visited, are more heavily populated than our own. In olden times every town here boasted its kernel of resistance to the Shadowmasters. Few of those groups communicated because of travel restrictions imposed by the master race. Still, when the uprising did come there were local champions enough to ensure success.
The flight of the last Shadowmasters left a power vacuum. The resistance chieftains anointed themselves to fill it. Hsien remains in the custody of their descendants, scores of warlords in constant conflict, few of whom ever get any stronger. Any who appear to be gaining strength are torn apart by their neighbors.
The File of Nine is an anonymous, loose assembly of senior warlords, supposedly drawn one each from the nine provinces of Hsien. This is not true and never has been—though few outside the Nine know it. That is just one more fiction helping keep the current state of chaos alive.
Popularly, the File of Nine is seen as a cabal of secret masters who control everything. The File of Nine would love that to be true but, in reality, they have very little power. Their situation leaves them with few tools they can use to enforce their will. Any real effort to impose anything would betray their identities. So they mostly issue bulls and pretend to speak for Hsien. Sometimes people listen. And sometimes they listen to the monks of Khang Phi. Or to the Court of All Seasons. So each must be wooed.
The Black Company is feared mainly because it is a joker in the warlord deck. It has no local allegiance. It could jump any direction for any alien reason. Worse, it is reputed to include powerful wizards assisting skilled soldiers led by competent commanders and sergeants, none of whom are at all handicapped by excesses of empathy or compassion.
What popularity the Company enjoys essentially arises from its capacity to deliver the last Shadowmaster to the justice of Hsien. And among peasants, from the fact that nervous warlords have reined in their squabbles amongst themselves considerably while they have this unpredictable monster crouched, growing rapidly, to their south.
All the lords and leaders of Hsien, in the last, would prefer that the Company went away. Our presence places too much strain on the state of things as they are and always have been.
I attached myself to the deputation headed for Khang Phi even though I was not yet completely recovered. I would never be one-hundred percent again. I had some blurring in my right eye. I had acquired some truly intimidating burn scars. I would never regain the full range of motion in the fingers of my right hand. But I was convinced that I could be an asset in our negotiations for the shadowgate secrets.
Only Sahra agreed with me. But Sahra is our foreign minister. Only she has the patience and tact to deal with such fractious folk as the File of Nine—part of whose problem with us is that our women do more than cook and lie on their backs.
Of course, of Lady, Sleepy, Sahra and the Radisha I suspect only Sahra can heat water without burning it. And she may have forgotten how by now.
The Company on the move, bound for the intellectual heart of Hsien, was a terror to behold, judging by the response of peasants along the way. And that despite the fact that our party, guards included, numbered just twenty-one. Human souls.
Tobo’s shadowy friends surrounded and paced us, in such numbers that it was impossible for them to remain unseen all the time. Old fears and superstitions exploded in our wake, then terror ran ahead far faster than we could travel. People scattered when we approached. It made no difference that Tobo’s night pals were well-behaved. Superstition completely outweighed any practical evidence.
Had we been more numerous we would not have gotten past Khang Phi’s gate. Even there, among supposed intellectuals, the fear of the Unknown Shadows was thick enough to slice.
Sahra had had to agree, long ago, that neither Lady nor One-Eye nor Tobo would enter the Repose of Knowledge. The monks were particularly paranoid about sorcerers. Hitherto it had suited Sleepy to comply with their wishes. And none of those three were part of our party when we arrived at the Lower Gate of Khang Phi.
There was a strange young woman in our midst. She used the name Shikhandini, Shiki for short. She could easily arouse almost any man who did not know she was Tobo in disguise. Nobody bothered to tell me what or why but Sahra was up to something. Tobo was, obviously, an extra card she wanted tucked up her sleeve. Moreover, she suspected several of the Nine of harboring evil ambitions which would soon flower.
What? Men of power possessed of secret agendas? No! That does not seem possible.
Khang Phi is a center of learning and spirituality. It is a repository for knowledge and wisdom. It is extremely ancient. It survived the Shadowmasters. It commands the respect of all the Children of the Dead, throughout the Land of Unknown Shadows. It is neutral ground, a part of no warlord’s demesne. Travelers bound toward Khang Phi, or returning home therefrom, are in theory immune.
Theory and practice are sometimes at variance. Therefore we never let Sahra travel without obvious protection.
Khang Phi is built against the face of a mountain. It rises a thousand whitewashed feet into the bellies of permanent clouds. The topmost structures cannot be seen from below.
At the same site in our world a barren cliff broods over the southern entrance to the only good pass through the mountains known as the Dandha Presh.
A life misspent making war left me wondering if the place had not begun its existence as a fortress. It certainly commanded that end of the pass. I looked for the fields necessary to sustain its population. And they were there, clinging to the sides of the mountains in terraces like stairsteps for splay-legged giants. Ancient peoples carried the soil in from leagues away, a basket at a time, generation after generation. No doubt the work goes on today.
Master Santaraksita, Murgen and Thai Dei met us outside the ornate Lower Gate. I had not seen them for a long time, though Murgen and Thai Dei attended the funeral ceremonies for Gota and One-Eye. I missed them because I was unconscious at the time. Fat old Master Santaraksita never went anywhere anymore. That elderly scholar was content to end his days in Khang Phi, pretending to be the Company’s agent. Here he was among his own kind. Here he had found a thousand intellectual challenges. Here he had found people as eager to learn from him as he was eager to learn from them. He was a man who had come home.
He welcomed Sleepy with open arms. “Dorabee! At last.” He insisted on calling her Dorabee because it was the first name he had known her by. “You must let me show you the master library while you’re here! It absolutely beggars that pimple we managed in Taglios.” He surveyed the rest of us. Merriment deserted him. Sleepy had brought the ugly boys along. The kind of guys he believed would use books for firewood on a chilly night. Guys like me, who bore scars and were missing fingers and teeth and had skin colors the likes of which were never seen in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
Sleepy told him, “I didn’t come for a holiday back in the stacks, Sri. One way or another I’ve got to get that shadowgate information. The news I’m getting from the other side isn’t encouraging. I need to get the Company back into action before it’s too late.”
Santaraksita nodded, looked around for eavesdroppers, winked and nodded again.
Willow Swan leaned back, looked up, asked me, “Think you can make it to the top?”
“Give me a few days.” Actually, I am in better shape now than I was that evil night. I have lost a lot of weight and have put on muscle.
I still get winded easily, though.
Swan said, “Lie all you want, old man.” He dismounted, handed his reins to one of the youngsters beginning to swarm around. They were all boys between eight and twelve, all as silent as if they had had their vocal cords cut. They all wore identical pale brown robes. Parents unable to provide for them had donated them to Khang Phi as infants. These had surpassed a particular milestone on their path to becoming monks. We were unlikely to see anyone younger.
Swan picked up a stone two inches in diameter. “I’m going to throw this when we get up top. I want to watch it fall.”
Parts of Swan never grew up. He still skips stones across ponds and rivers. He tried to teach me the art coming to Khang Phi. My hand and fingers will no longer conform to the shape of a proper skipping stone. There is a lot they cannot accomplish anymore. Managing a pen while writing is chore enough.
I miss One-Eye.
“Just don’t bomp some asshole warlord on the noggin. Most of them don’t like us much already.” They were afraid of us. And they could find no way to manipulate us. They kept giving us provisions and letting us recruit in hopes we will go away eventually. Leaving Longshadow behind. We did not inform them that local financing would not be needed to underwrite our campaign beyond the plain.
After four hundred years it has become a given: You keep everybody outside just a little bit nervous. And you do not tell them anything they do not need to know.
Longshadow. Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha. He has several other names here as well. None indicate popularity. As long as we have the ability to deliver him in chains the warlords will tolerate almost anything. Twenty generations of ancestors cry out for justice.
I suspect Longshadow’s wickedness has grown with the retelling, thereby making giants of the heroes who drove him out.
Though they are soldiers themselves the warlords do not understand us. They fail to recognize the fact that they are soldiers of a different breed, drawn on by a smaller destiny.
Swan and I stood looking out a window outside the conference hall where we would engage the File of Nine in negotiations. Eventually. It took them a while to sneak into Khang Phi, then change their disguises so their identities would remain unknown. We saw nothing below but mist. Swan did not waste his stone. I said, “I thought I was back in shape. I was wrong. I ache all over.”
Swan said, “They say some people here go their whole lives without ever moving more than a floor or two after they finish their apprenticeship and get their assignments.”
“Kind of people that balance out you and me,” I said. Swan had not traveled as far as I had but at a world’s remove an extra few thousand miles does not seem important. I tried to make out the rocky ground we had traversed approaching Khang Phi. The mist just seemed darker when I looked down.
“Thinking about taking the easy way back down?” Swan asked.
“No. I’m thinking being isolated like this might leave you with a very limited worldview.” Not to mention the impact of the scarcity of females in Khang Phi. The few there are belong to an order of celibate nuns who care for the donated infants, the very old and the very sick. The rest of the population consists of monks, all of whom were donated and all of whom are sworn to chastity, too. The more fanatic brothers render themselves physically incapable of yielding to temptation. Which makes most of my brothers shudder and consider them more bizarre than Tobo’s shadowy friends. No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.
“A narrow view can be as much a strength as a weakness, Liberator,” a voice observed from behind us. We turned. Sleepy’s friend, Surendranath Santaraksita, was joining us. The scholar has gone native, adopting local garb and assuming the Khang Phi haircut—which is no hair at all—but only a deaf and blind man would take him for a local monk. His skin is more brown and less translucent than that of any native and his features are shaped more like mine and Swan’s. “That mist and their narrowness of vision allows the monks to avoid forming worldly attachments. Thus their neutrality remains beyond reproach.”
I did not mention Khang Phi’s one-time role as an apologist for and collaborator with the reign of the Shadowmasters. That embarrassing dab of history was being expunged by the acids of time and relentless lie.
Santaraksita was happy. He was convinced that in this place learned men did not have to prostitute themselves to temporal powers in order to remain scholars. He believed even the File of Nine deferred to the wisdom of the eldest monks. He was unable to see that if the Nine acquired more power Khang Phi’s relationship to the File would soon lapse into subservience. Master Santaraksita is brilliant but naive.
“How’s that?” I asked him.
“These monks are so innocent of the world that they don’t try to impose anything on it.”
“Yet the File of Nine presume to speak from here.” The File enjoy issuing bulls which are, more often than not, ignored by the population and warlords.
“They will, yes. The Elders want them to. In hopes that a little wisdom will rub off before their power becomes more than symbolic.”
I said nothing about leading horses to water. I made no observations concerning the wisdom of backing a cabal of secret masters in preference to one strongman or the remnant aristocracy of the Court of All Seasons. I did admit, “It does look like they’re trying to do what’s best for Hsien. But I don’t trust anybody who’ll bet their pot on guys who hide behind masks.” No need to tell him the File have no secrets from us. Little that they do or discuss goes unremarked by Tobo’s familiars. None of their identities are secrets to us.
We operate on the assumption that both the File and the other warlords have placed spies among our recruits. Which explains why there is little resistance to our recruiting amongst the Children of the Dead.
It is not difficult to identify most of the spies. Sleepy shows them what she wants them to see. Being a spiteful, vengeful little witch, I am sure she plans to use those spies cruelly at some later time.
She worries me. She has her own old hatreds to redress but their objects escaped life unpunished a long time ago. But there is always the chance she might choose somebody else to take the heat, which would not be to the Company’s advantage.
I asked Santaraksita, “What did you want?”
“Nothing special.” His face went coolly neutral. He is Sleepy’s friend. I make him uncomfortable. He has read my Annals. Despite what Sleepy has dragged him through he cannot yet come to grips with the cruel realities of our sort of life. I am sure that he will not go home with us. “I did hope to see Dorabee again before you went into conference. It could be important.”
“I don’t know what happened to her. Shiki’s missing, too. They were supposed to meet us here.” Local mores made it impossible for women to share quarters with men. Even Sahra has to room separately from Murgen, though they are legally married. And Shikhandini’s presence saddled Sahra with special obligations. She wanted the holy men distracted but not to the point where they went berserk. Just enough, maybe, so they would give way on a subtle point or two. Though distraction would not be Shiki’s principal mission.
Master Santaraksita wrung his hands briefly, then folded his arms. His hands disappeared into the sleeves of his robe. He was worried. I looked closer. He knew something. I glanced at Swan. Swan shrugged.
Murgen and Thai Dei puffed into the room. Murgen demanded, “Where are they?” Thai Dei looked worried but said nothing. He would not. The man seldom says anything. It was a pity his sister could not learn from his example.
Thai Dei knew something, too.
“Haven’t shown yet,” Swan said.
“The File of Nine will be angry,” I added. “Are Sleepy and Sahra dealing some kind of game?”
Santaraksita backed away nervously. “The Unknowns aren’t here yet, either.”
My companions were a diverse bunch. Once Sleepy arrived we would include five races. Six counting Santaraksita as one of us. Sleepy believes our sheer diversity intimidates the File of Nine.
Sleepy entertains other notions even more strange.
I do not know why she thought cowing them would mean anything. All we needed from them was their permission to research the knowledge needed to mend and manipulate shadowgates. The monks of Khang Phi were willing to share that knowledge. The stronger we grow the more eagerly the monks want us gone. They are more frightened of the heresies we propagate than they are of any armies we might bring back later.
The latter dread keeps the warlords awake at night. But they do want us gone, too, because the stronger we grow here the more real and immediate a threat do they perceive. And I do not blame them for thinking that way. I would do so myself, in their boots. The entirety of human experiences argues on behalf of suspicion of strangers laden with weapons.
The womenfolk made their advent. Willow Swan spread his arms wide and declaimed dramatically, “Where have you been?” He struck a second pose and tried the line another way. Then he went with a third. Making fun.
Sahra told Thai Dei, “Your daughter kept flirting with the acolytes we encountered along the way.”
I glanced at Shiki, frowned. The girl seemed almost ethereal, not at all vampish. I blinked but the fuzzy quality did not go away. I blamed my damaged eye. The girl seemed more a distracted ghost than a boy in disguise having fun with a role.
In Hsien’s eyes Thai Dei passed as Shiki’s father because it was well known that Sahra had just the one son. Her brother, Thai Dei, has managed to remain so obscure that even at the Abode of Ravens the locals never raise a question about the fact that the seldom-seen Shikhandini would have had to have been born while her father was buried beneath the plain. Nor did anyone seem much inclined to ask what had become of the girl’s mother. She could be dismissed with a few vague, angry mutters.
Shiki was always empty-headed, always in minor trouble, always considered a threat only to the equilibrium of young men’s minds.
Shiki solidified. She pouted. She said, “I wasn’t flirting, Father. I was just talking.” Her words should have been argumentative but just sounded flat, rote.
“You were told not to speak to the monks. That’s the law here.”
“But Father . . . ”
The act never stopped once it started. There might be watchers. But it was an act. And a pretty good one, at least to those of us unaccustomed to dealing with very young women.
Master Santaraksita kept whispering to Sleepy. He must have said something she wanted to hear because her face lit up like a beacon. She did not bother to report to the Annalist, though. These Captains are all alike. Always playing their hands close to their chest. Except for me, of course. I was a paragon of openness in my time.
Thai Dei and his daughter continued to squabble till he issued some loud diktat in heated Nyueng Bao that left her sulking and silent.
An old, old monk opened the door to the meeting chamber. The task was a great chore for him. He beckoned with one frail hand.
This was my first visit to Khang Phi but I knew him by his robes, which were dark orange edged with black. They distinguished him as one of the four or five eldest of Khang Phi. His presence made it clear that Khang Phi’s monks were deeply interested in this meeting’s outcome. Otherwise some midlevel sixty-year-old would have handled the door and then would have hung on to manage the acolytes who were supposed to attend to the comfort of both us and the Nine. Master Santaraksita smiled. Maybe he had had something to do with this meeting having been invested with importance.
Sahra approached the old man. She bowed, murmured a few words. He responded. They knew one another and he did not disdain her for her sex. The monks might be wiser than I had thought.
We soon learned that she had asked if everyone could reduce the ceremony that attends all functions of the Children of the Dead. Formalities imbue every occasion with elaborate ritual. People must not have had much that was practical to do during the reign of the Shadowmasters.
We barbarians do not know the proper forms. The Children of the Dead hoist their noses around us—then sigh in relief because uncomfortable business gets handled quickly when the Black Company is on the far side of the carpet.
Our host scowled at Shikhandini. He was old and bitter and narrow. But! Behold! Not so old and bitter and narrow that a shimmering smile from a beautiful girl would not put a momentary twinkle in his eye. Never that old.
From earliest times our enemies have accused us of fighting dirty, of dealing in trickery and treachery. And they are right. Absolutely right. We are shameless. And this was about as dirty as we could get, having Tobo vamp these old men. They knew women only in the most academic fashion. It was easier than plinking blind men with arrows.
It was all so effortless. Shiki just seemed to float around, not quite all there, not paying much attention, showing none of the enjoyment I expected of Tobo. I mean, what man his age does not enjoy making fools of wise old men? Everything I knew about Tobo suggested he would enjoy that more than most.
I was getting curious. What was going on? Sleepy claimed the kid was along because she wanted a wizard handy. Just in case. Being paranoid. Having been made that way by lifetimes of treachery from outside. And Khang Phi law would keep Tobo out if he came as himself. She wanted me to believe.
There would be more. Much, much more. I understand the sneaky little witch better than she suspects. And I approve, thoroughly.
“Move,” Sleepy said. She was uncomfortable in Khang Phi. The place is infested with the trappings of strange religions.
The chamber we entered undoubtedly served some high ceremonial purpose when not on loan to the File of Nine. That end where the warlords waited could pass for an altar and its associated clutter. The warlords had seated themselves above us, in front of the possible altar, where five large stone seats were in place permanently. Seven of the Nine were on hand. Chairs had been dragged in for the surplus pair, presumably the junior members of the quorum. All seven wore masks and disguises, which seems to be customary with secret masters—and here possibly a legacy of the Shadowmasters who had found masks and disguises very fashionable. In this case that was a waste of effort. But they did not need to know that. Not right away.
Lady has a talent for rooting out true names and identities. She learned in a deadly school. She has taught Tobo some of her tricks. He unearthed the identities of the members of the File, using his supernatural friends. Knowing who we might find, in the event we developed a corporate inclination to surprise somebody, should prove to be a valuable bargaining tool.
Sahra had dealt with the File before. They were accustomed to her impatience with ceremony. They paid attention when she stepped forward.
Master Santaraksita trailed her by three paces. He would serve as a specialist translator. Though the Children of the Dead and the Nyueng Bao spoke the same language in times past, separation and circumstance have conspired to make misunderstandings common. Santaraksita would have to point out those instances when the parties were using the same word with different meanings.
Sleepy moved a few steps forward but stayed closer to the rest of us than to the warlords.
Sleepy started humming. She was determined to appear cheerful despite being surrounded by unrepentant heathens.
Sahra stepped forward again. She asked, “Are the File ready to stop objecting to the Company gaining the knowledge we need to repair shadowgates? You have to understand that we won’t leave Hsien without it. We’re still prepared to turn over the criminal Dhumraksha.” The same offer had been before the File all along. They wanted something more but never articulated it—though supernatural espionage revealed that they hoped to gain our support in establishing a much stronger File position. Only they did not dare suggest that themselves before the witnesses that always exist when negotiations take place in Khang Phi.
The masks faced Sahra’s way. None of the Unknowns responded. You could sense their exasperation. Lately they had begun to believe, on no creditable evidence, that they had some power over us. Probably because we had not gotten into the sort of pissing contest with any of our neighbors that would have demonstrated the lethal inequalities between their forces and ours. We would devour most of the local armies.
Sleepy stepped past Santaraksita, took position beside Sahra. In passible local dialect she said, “I am Captain of the Black Company. I will speak.” Facing a warlord wearing a mask surmounted by a crane’s head, she continued, “Tran Thi Kim-Thoa, you are Last Entered of the File.” The warlords stirred. “You are young. Possibly you know no one whose life and pain would regain meaning if Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha came back here to atone for his sins. I understand that. Youth is always impatient with the pasts of its elders—seven when that past crushes down upon youth’s shoulders.”
She paused.
Seven silk-clad butts shifted nervously, filling an extended silence with soft rustles. All us Company people grinned, baring our fangs. Exactly like those rock apes around Outpost, trying to intimidate one another.
Sleepy had named the newest of the Nine. His identity would be no secret to the other eight. They had chosen him when last there was an opening in their circle. He would be ignorant of their identities—unless some of the older warlords had chosen to reveal themselves. Each warlord normally knew only those elected to the File after themselves. By naming the Last Entered, Sleepy offered another threat while endangering just the one Unknown.
Sleepy beckoned. “Croaker.” I stepped forward. “This is Croaker. He was Captain before me and Dictator to All the Taglias. Croaker, before us we have Tran Huu Dung and six others of the File of Nine.” She did not specify this Tran’s position in the File. His name caused another stir, though.
She beckoned Swan. “This is Willow Swan, a longtime associate of the Black Company. Willow, I present Tran Huu Nhan and six others of the File of Nine. Tran is a common patronym in Hsien. There are a lot of Trans among the Nine, none of them related by blood.”
The next name she offered, after introducing Willow Swan, was Tran Huu Nhang. I began to wonder how they kept themselves sorted out. Maybe by weight. Several of the File carried some surplus poundage.
When Sleepy named the last of the Trans of the File, Tran Lan-Anh, their spokesman, the First, interrupted her with a request for time to confer. Sleepy bowed, offered him no further provocation. We knew that he was Pham Thi Ly of Ghu Phi, an excellent general with a good reputation among his troops, a believer in a unified Hsien, but old enough to have lost his zest for struggle. By the slightest of nods Sleepy let him know that his identity was no secret, either.
Sleepy announced, “We have no interest in coming back to Hsien once we return to the plain.” As though that was some dear secret we had held clutched close to our hearts forever. Any spy among us would have reported that we just wanted to go home. “Like the Nyueng Bao who fled to our world, we came here only because we had no choice.” Doj would not have accepted her assessment of Nyueng Bao history, brief as it might be. In his eye his immigrant ancestors had been a band of adventurers similar to the forebrethren of the Black Company, who had gone forth from Khatovar. “We’re strong now. We’re ready to go home. Our enemies there will cringe, unmanned by the news of our coming.”
I did not believe that for an instant. Soulcatcher would be pleased to see us. A good squabble would relieve the tedium of her daily grind. Being an all-powerful ruler actually takes most of the fun out of life. In the heyday of her dark empire, my wife had made that discovery, too. Management trivia consumes you.
Lady hated it enough to walk away. But misses it now.
Sleepy said, “We lack only the knowledge to repair our shadowgate, so that our world isn’t overrun by the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.”
Our spokespeople never fail to harp on that point. It remains central to every statement of our purpose. We would wear the Nine down. They would give in so they would not have to hear about it anymore. They were, however, extremely paranoid about the risk of another otherworld invasion.
If they were hard asses they could try to outstubborn us, hoping we would give up, go home, and have our shadowgate fall apart behind us. That would end our threat permanently.
The power of the File lies in the anonymity of its members. When warlords get together to plot they are restrained by the possibility that among them is one of the Nine. The File publishes any schemes it uncovers, thereby focusing the wrath of warlords not included in the plan. It is a clumsy system but it has kept conflict limited for generations by making it difficult to forge alliances.
Sleepy could expose the File. If they were betrayed, chaos would come baying right behind. Few warlords like having their ambitions held in check—though restraints had to be imposed on all those other villains.
The Unknowns did not like being bullied, either. Those whose names had been betrayed soon grew so angry the elder monk placed himself between parties as a reminder of where we were.
Being an old soldier, I began a swift inventory of resources available for a fight if some warlord was dim enough to force one. I was not reassured. Our greatest asset was missing.
Where did Shiki go? When did she go? Why?
I needed to keep a closer eye on my surroundings. An oversight this big could turn fatal.
One masked warlord bounded out of his chair. He yipped and slapped his buttocks. We gaped. Silence fell. The man began to gather his dignity. A trill of faint high-pitched laughter sparkled in the silence. Something with humming diamond wings darted about too fast to be made out clearly. It left the room before anybody could react.
Sahra observed, “Most of the Hidden Realm will follow us when we leave. Possibly so much of it that Hsien will no longer be the Land of Unknown Shadows.”
Master Santaraksita murmured in her ear. That irked the warlords and the old referee elder, too. The monk was particularly unhappy because the ladies kept spinning those implied threats. But he was cautious. The Company was up to something new. This was frightening. Had the outsiders run out of patience? All Hsien nurtures some fears of the sleeping tiger of the Abode of Ravens. And we make a point of encouraging them.
When I looked around again there was Shikhandini. How? . . .
I studied her, expecting to see some deviltry suggested by her stance or expression. There was nothing there. The kid was stone cold indifferent.
Sahra waved Santaraksita away. He scurried over to Sleepy, murmured some more. Sleepy nodded but did not do anything else. That left the old scholar looking like he was about to panic.
Shiki’s disappearance and reappearance made it more obvious than ever that there was something going on. Obvious to the former Captain, anyway. And the former Captain had been told nothing beforehand.
The ladies were into one of their schemes. And that would be the real reason they wanted Shiki along. Shiki brought an awesome array of weapons into the game.
And they had had me convinced that they just wanted the magic handy in case somebody suffered an impulse to be unpleasant, which happens all too frequently when we are around.
The Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah still mourn their treacherous impulses.
I told Swan, “This business was a lot more fun when I was the one scheming and being mysterious.”
The First of the File said, “Will you do us the courtesy of withdrawing for a moment, Captain? Ambassador? I believe a consensus may be within reach.”
While we waited in the antechamber, Swan asked, “Why did he bother asking us to leave? After what happened? Does he really think we won’t know what’s going on in there?” Things moved in the corners of my vision. Strings of shadow snaked over the walls until I tried to look at them directly. Then, of course, nothing was visible.
“Possibly he didn’t catch all the implications.” Like the fact that something would be eavesdropping on every word he spoke until the Black Company left the Land of Unknown Shadows. At this late date anything he tried to pull together would be a complete wasted effort.
“Let’s go,” Sleepy said. “Move out. Croaker. Swan. Quit jacking your jaws and get moving.”
“Moving where?” I asked.
“Downstairs. Home. Get going.”
“But . . . ” This was not what I expected. A good Black Company trick ends up with lots of fire and bloodshed, the vast majority of both not inflicted upon us.
Sleepy growled. It was a pure animal sound. “If I’m going to be Captain I’m going to be Captain. I’m not going to discuss or debate or request preapproval from the old folks. Get moving.”
She had a point. I had made it a few times myself, in my day. I had to set an example. I went.
“Good luck,” Sleepy told Sahra. She strode toward the nearest stairwell. I followed. Presumably better trained by Sleepy’s predecessor, the others were clattering down those ancient stairs already. Only Sahra and Master Santaraksita remained behind, though Shiki did hover around Sahra briefly, as though interested in a parting hug.
“Interesting,” Sleepy observed. “It’s such a good mimic that it almost forgets itself.”
She was talking to herself, not to the Captain-Emeritus. He no longer needed an explanation. He had seen this stuff before. The ladies were going to take the information that we needed. Santaraksita had located it and had tagged it and now our own people were in the process of collecting it. Tobo was somewhere else, hard at work. One of his spooky friends was masquerading as Shikhandini.
All of which meant that Sleepy was better prepared to travel than I had supposed. You miss so much when you are laid up. Things continued to stir in the corners. Movements persisted at the edge of my vision. Always there was nothing to be seen when I looked directly. Nevertheless . . .
Khang Phi had been conquered. That unvanquishable fortress of enlightenment had been taken and its occupants did not yet know. Most might never find out—assuming the real Shikhandini successfully completed the real mission given to Tobo by Sleepy and Sahra. Hard to imagine becoming badly winded by running downhill. I managed. Those stairs went down forever, much farther than when I had gone up at a more leisurely pace. I began to develop cramps. Behind me Sahra and Sleepy kept right on barking and mocking and pushing like they were not almost as old as me.
I spent a lot of time wondering what had compelled me to come along. I was too old for this shit. The Annals did not need to record every little detail. I could have done this One-Eye’s way. “They went to Khang Phi and got the knowledge we needed to fix the shadowgates.”
Some deep-voiced bell bonged far above. No one had enough breath to explain but no explanation was needed. An alarm was being sounded.
Our fault?
Who else? Though I could imagine scenarios where the File of Nine might be guilty of trying to snuff the Company brain trust.
It did not matter. I reminded myself that Khang Phi is bereft of arms. That the monks abhor violence. That they always yield to strength, then seduce it with reason and wisdom.
Yes, sometimes it does take a while.
I did not feel reassured. I spend too much time hanging around with guys like me.
The air began to whisper and rustle, like a gentle breeze in a time of falling leaves. The sound started in the dimness far below. It rose toward us, met and passed us before I had any real chance to become afraid. I had a brief impression of passing two-dimensional, black, transparent forms accompanied by a touch of cold and a whiff of old mold, then autumn was gone on to adventures far above.
At times the stairway passed behind the outer face of Khang Phi. Windows presented themselves then. Each was filled with an exquisite view of grey mist. Shapes moved within the greyness, never defined. They did not need definition for me to know that I had no interest in making the acquaintance of anything that did not mind having a thousand feet of wet air beneath its toes.
Several times I saw Shikhandini drift downward or rise through the fog. Once she saw me watching, paused, smiled and showed three slim fingers in a delicate wave.
The genuine Tobo was not shy any digits.
What I did not see during our entire descent was even one member of the Khang Phi community. They all had business elsewhere when we passed by.
“How much farther?” I panted, thinking it was a good thing I had lost all that weight while I was recuperating.
I got no answer. No one wanted to waste the breath.
It proved to be much farther than I had hoped. It always is when you are running away.
Ten Finger Shikhandini was waiting with the horses and the rest of our gang when we stumbled out of the unguarded Lower Gate. Animals and escort were ready to travel. All we had to do was mount up and go.
Tobo would sustain the Shiki role till we were home again. The Children of the Dead did not need to know that he was she.
Tobo told his mother, “Sri Santaraksita refused to come.”
“I didn’t think he would. That’s all right. He did his part. He’ll be happier here after we’re gone.”
Sleepy agreed. “He’s found his paradise.”
“Excuse me,” I gasped. It had taken me three tries and a boost from a helpful escort to get myself into the saddle. “What did we just do?”
“We committed robbery,” Sleepy told me. “We went in there pretending we were going to appeal to the File of Nine yet one more time. We got them all twisted out of shape by naming some of their names, so they had nothing else on their minds while we stole the books containing the information we need to get home safely.”
“They still don’t know,” Tobo said. “They’re still looking the other way. But that won’t last. The doppelgangers I left behind will fall apart before long. Those things can’t keep their minds on business.”
“Quit jawing and ride, then,” Sleepy grumbled. I swear. The woman was Annalist for fifteen years. She ought to have a better appreciation of the Annalist’s needs.
The mist surrounded us and seemed to move with us, unnaturally dense. Tobo’s work, probably. Shapes moved out there but did not come too close. Until I looked back.
Khang Phi had vanished already. It might be a thousand miles away or might never have existed at all. Instead I saw things I would rather not, including several of the Black Hounds, big as ponies, with high, massive shoulders like those of hyenas. For an instant, as they began to lose color and focus, an even larger beast with a head like a leopard’s, but green, loomed out of the mist between them. Cat Sith. It, too, wobbled away from reality, like an exaggerated case of heat shimmer fading. The gleam of its exposed teeth was the last to go.
With Tobo’s help we evaporated into the landscape ourselves.
Narayan Singh released his grip on his rumel, the consecrated killing scarf of a Strangler. His hands had become two aching, arthritic claws. Tears filled his eyes. He was glad the darkness hid them from the girl. “I never took an animal before,” he whispered, drawing away from the cooling carcass of the dog.
The Daughter of Night did not respond. She had to concentrate hard to use her crude talents to misdirect the bats and owls searching for them. The hunt had been on for weeks. Scores of converts had been taken. The rest had scattered in time-honored fashion. They would come together again after the hunters lost interest. And the hunters did lose interest in them before long. But this time the Witch of Taglios seemed determined to collar the Daughter of Night and the living saint of the Deceivers.
The girl relaxed, sighed. “I think they’ve moved off to the south.” Her whisper contained no note of triumph.
&ldsquo;This should be the last dog.” Narayan felt no sense of accomplishment, either. He reached out, touched the girl lightly. She didn’t shake him off. “They’ve never used dogs before.” He was tired. Tired of running, tired of pain.
“What’s happened, Narayan? What’s changed? Why won’t my mother answer me? I did everything right. But I still can’t feel her out there.”
Maybe she was not there anymore, the heretical side of Narayan thought. “Maybe she can’t. She has enemies among the gods as well as among men. One of those may be . . . ”
The girl’s hand covered his mouth. He held his breath. Some owls had hearing acute enough to catch his wheezing—should they catch the girl off guard.
The hand withdrew. “It’s turned away. How do we reach her, Narayan?”
“I wish I knew, child. I wish I knew. I’m worn out. I need someone to tell me what to do. When you were little I thought you’d be queen of the world by now. That we would’ve passed through the Year of the Skulls and Kina’s triumph and I would be enjoying the rewards of my persistent faith.”
“Don’t you start, too.”
“Start?”
“Wavering. Doubting. I need you to be my rock, Narayan. Always, when everything else turns to filth in my hands, there’s been the granite of Papa Narayan.” For once she seemed not to be manipulating him. They huddled, prisoners of despair. The night, once Kina’s own, now belonged to the Protector and her minions. Yet they were compelled to travel under cloak of darkness. By day they were too easily recognized, she with her pale, pale skin and he with his physical impairments. The reward for their capture was great and the country folk were always poor.
Their flight had led them southward, toward the uninhabited wastelands clinging to the northern foothills of the Dandha Presh. Peopled lands were far too dangerous right now. Every hand was against them there. Yet there was no promise the wastelands would be any friendlier. Out there it might be easier for the hunters to track them.
Narayan mused, “Perhaps we should go into exile until the Protector forgets us.” She would. Her passions were furiously intense but never lasted.
The girl did not reply. She stared at the stars, possibly looking for a sign. Narayan’s proposition was impossible and they both knew it. They had been touched by the Goddess. They must do her work. They must fulfill their destinies, however unhappy the road. They must bring on the Year of the Skulls, however much suffering they must endure themselves. Paradise lay beyond the pale of affliction.
“Narayan. Look. The sky in the south.”
The old Deceiver raised his eyes. He saw what she meant immediately. One small patch of sky, due south, very low, rippled and shimmered. When that stopped for half a minute an alien constellation shone through.
“The Noose,” Singh whispered. “It isn’t possible.”
“What?”
“The constellation is called the Noose. We shouldn’t be able to see it.” Not from this world. Narayan knew of it only because he had been a prisoner of the Black Company at a time when the constellation had been the subject of intense discussion. It had some connection with the glittering plain. Beneath which Kina lay imprisoned. “Maybe that’s our sign.” He was ready to grasp any straw. He dragged his weary frame upright, tucked his crutch under his arm. “South it is, then. Where we can travel by day because there’ll be no one to spot us.”
The girl said, “I don’t want to travel anymore, Narayan.” But she got up, too. Travel was what they did, day after month after year, because only by remaining in motion could they evade the evils that would prevent them from fulfilling their holy destinies.
An owl called from somewhere far away. Narayan ignored it. He was, for the thousandth time, reflecting on the change of fortune that had befallen them so swiftly, after life had gone so well for several years. His whole life had been that way, one wild swing after another. If he could cling to the tatters of his faith, if he could persevere, soon enough fortune would smile on him again. He was the living saint. His tests and trials had to be measured accordingly.
But he was so tired. And he hurt so much.
He tried not to wonder why there was no sense whatsoever of Kina’s presence in the world anymore. He tried to concentrate his whole will upon covering the next painful hundred yards. With that victory in hand he could concentrate on conquering the hundred yards that followed.
It took Tobo ten days to teach himself everything he needed to become a master shadowgate tinkerer. Those ten days seemed much longer for some of us because the File of Nine, defying the express wishes of the Elders of Khang Phi and the lords of the Court of All Seasons, issued a bull declaring the Black Company to be the enemy of the Children of the Dead. It encouraged all warlords to gather their forces and march against us.
That trouble was slow developing. The warlords who were our neighbors knew too much about us to try anything. Those who were farther away were willing to wait until someone else moved first. Most never bothered to call in their troops. And, characteristic of Hsien’s politics, the stream of volunteers, of money and materials helping us become an ever greater threat to the Children of the Dead, never slackened.
Tobo finished work on the Hsien-end shadowgate fourteen days after our return from Khang Phi. Despite the war clouds, Sleepy was in no hurry. Sahra assured her that it would be months before anyone got started our way—if they ever did at all. She claimed the warlords could not possibly agree that quickly and move that fast. No need to hurry. Haste causes mistakes. Mistakes come back to haunt you every time.
“You do a good job, you’re guaranteed gonna have to pay for it,” I told Suvrin. The young Shadowlander had just been informed of his latest honor: He was going to cross the glittering plain to scout and to repair our home shadowgate. Right after Tobo trained him. Tobo would not go himself because he did not want to be separated from his pets. Filled with low cunning, I asked, “How are your writing skills?”
He stared at me for several seconds, eyes big and brown and round in a big round, brown face. “No. I don’t think so. I like it in the Company. But I don’t plan to spend my life here. This is a learning experience. This is training. But I won’t become a lord of mercenaries.”
He surprised me, in several ways. I never heard anyone describe their Company time quite that way, though many do join up fully intending to desert just as soon as they are safely away from the trouble that had them on the run. Nor had I noticed, ever, anyone grasp so quickly what it could mean, in the long run, to be approached about becoming the apprentice Annalist.
A stint as Annalist could be a step toward becoming Captain someday.
I was teasing, mostly, but Sleepy did think a lot of Suvrin. The suggestion might not be a joke to her.
“Have fun on the other side. And be careful. You can’t be careful enough where Soulcatcher is involved.” I went on and on. His patient blank expression and glazed eyes told me he had heard it all before. I stopped. “And you’ll hear it all a hundred times more before you go. The Old Woman’ll probably write it all down in a scroll you’ll have to take along and read before breakfast every morning.”
Suvrin put on a feeble, insincere smile. “The Old Woman?”
“Thought I’d try it out. I have a feeling it isn’t going to work.”
“I think you can count on that.”
I didn’t expect to cross paths with Suvrin again this side of the plain. I was wrong. Only minutes after we parted it occurred to me that it might be useful if I sat in on the shadowgate training.
It occurred to me that I ought to ask the Captain’s permission. I was able to resist the temptation.
Lady decided it might be good if she extended her own education, too.