Campfires burned on the far slopes, opposite Outpost. Those pesky rock apes had emigrated. The flocks of crows were expanding. Choosers of the slain, I heard them called somewhere. The File of Nine had pulled a half-ass army together far faster than our bemused foreign minister had believed possible.
“At last,” I said to Murgen, as he and I shared a newly discovered jar of skullbuster. “To One-Eye.” The stuff just kept turning up. We were doing our best to make sure it did not fall into the hands of the soldiers. In their hands strong drink was likely to cause indiscipline. “Your old lady talked like it’d be next year before they tried anything. If they ever got anything going at all.”
The advent of unfriendly forces had been no surprise, of course. Not with Tobo handling intelligence.
“To One-Eye. She has been known to err, Captain.” He was starting to slur already. The boy could not hold his liquor. “Upon rare occasions.”
“Rare occasions.”
Murgen hoisted his cup in a salute. “To One-Eye.” Then he shook his head. “I do love that woman, Captain.”
“Uhm.” Oh-oh. I hoped we did not get maudlin here. But I understood his problem. She got old. We spent fifteen years in stasis, not aging a minute. A little payoff from the gods for doing us so dirty the rest of the time, maybe. But Sahra, who meant more to Murgen than life itself, who was the mother of his son, had not been one of the Captured.
Which had been lucky for us. Because she had dedicated herself to freeing Murgen. And eventually she succeeded. And freed me and my wife and most of the Captured as well. But Sahra had grown and had changed and had aged more than those fifteen years. And their son had grown up. And even now, four years after our resurrection, Murgen still had not adjusted completely.
“You can get by,” I told him. “Bless One-Eye. Put it all out of your mind. Exist in the now. Don’t worry about the then. That’s what I do.” In terms of experience my wife had been ancient centuries before I was born. “You did get to be the ghost that rode around with her and shared her life, even if you couldn’t touch her.” I live with ten thousand ghosts from my wife’s past, few of whom ever got discussed. She just did not want to talk about her olden days.
Murgen grunted, mumbled something about One-Eye. He was having trouble understanding me even though I was articulating with especial precision. He asked, “You never were much of a drinker, were you, Captain?”
“No. But I’ve always been a good soldier. I’ve always done what’s got to be done.”
“I gotcha.”
We were outside, of course, watching shooting stars and the constellations of fires that marked the enemy encampment. There seemed to be an awful lot of those fires. More than the reported numbers deserved. Some genius of a warlord was playing games.
“They’re not going to come,” Murgen said. “They’re just going to sit there. It’s all for the benefit of the Nine. It’s showmanship.”
I blessed One-Eye and took another drink, wondered if Murgen was repeating his wife’s assumption or his son’s. I cocked my head in favor of my left eye. My night vision is questionable even when I am sober.
Murgen said, “I don’t think you can imagine the level of fear over there right now. The boy does something to terrorize them every night. He hasn’t hurt a louse on one of their heads yet but they’re not stupid. They get the message.”
You got the Black Hounds strolling through your camp, eating out of your cookpots, or maybe pissing in them, and you have dozens of lesser night things pulling up tent pegs and starting fires and stealing your boots and treasures, you have troubles that will effect morale for sure. The soldiers will not believe the stories you tell to soothe them, however clever you think you are.
“The thing is, if the leadership decides there’ll be war, they’ll come.” I knew. I have been with the Company forever. I have seen men fight under incredibly bad conditions. And, admittedly, I have seen men lose heart when conditions seemed ideal. “To One-Eye. He was a big part of the glue that held us together.”
“One-Eye. You know the Fourth Battalion’s going up tonight?”
“Up?”
’To the plain. They’re probably moving out right now.”
“Suvrin can’t possibly have the shadowgate ready to go yet.”
Murgen shrugged. “I’m just saying what I heard. Sahra telling Tobo. She got it from Sleepy.”
Once again the Annalist had not been included in the planning and decision-making. The Annalist was irked. In a former life he had gained a lot of experience planning campaigns and managing large groups of fractious people. The Annalist can contribute still.
In a moment of clarity I understood why I was being left out. Because of the thing that killed One-Eye. Its punishment was unimportant to Sleepy. She did not want to waste time and resources on it. Particularly the time needed to argue with me and those who felt the way I do.
I mused. “Maybe I shouldn’t try to avenge One-Eye.”
Murgen didn’t mind an unexplained shift in topic. He was listening more closely to his own soul, anyway. He did say, “What’re you talking about? It’s got to be done.”
So he agreed with me. It occurred to me that he had known One-Eye longer than anyone else but me. I still thought of him as the new kid sometimes because he was almost the last man to join us while we were still in service to the Lady, in that other world so far away and so long ago that there were moments when I almost waxed nostalgic for those bad old days.
“Here’s one more to One-Eye. And I want to know when we’re going to start racking up some good old days.”
“They’re in there, Captain. Here and there. They just don’t stick out.”
I remembered one or two. But that only got me started thinking about what might have been. About Booboo. And when I mix strong spirits with thoughts of my daughter the weather turns maudlin every time. And we see more and more of that weather as I get older.
“You got any idea what Sleepy’s strategy is?” I asked. She would have one. Scheming and planning is supposedly her long suit. Long enough for her to have outwitted the Radisha and my sister-in-law.
“Not a clue. I knew more about what was going on when I was a ghost.”
“You don’t go out of body anymore?”
“I’m cured. At least in this world.”
Not good, I feared. His loose attachment to his flesh had been the Company’s most potent weapon for years. What would we do if we could no longer see what was happening in places we were not at?
You do get spoiled fast.
Something chittered in the darkness. For a moment I thought it was mocking me. But then a huge fireball rolled up into the night across the valley. The unseen thing’s amusement was at the expense of the soldiers over there.
“This jar’s gone empty,” I grumbled, leaning back and shaking a last drop into the back of my mouth. “I’m going to go see if I can’t make another one turn up where we found this one.”
Doj nodded slightly as Lady and I rode past his place. When I glanced back a minute later he was in the street with several Nyueng Bao henchmen. He was wearing his sword, Ash Wand. Up ahead, Thai Dei, Murgen’s brother-in-law and bodyguard, strolled along the street. He was armed, too. If he was moving, Murgen would be, too.
I kept a wary watch behind. This had to be done before Sleepy caught on. Before she could issue orders forbidding it. I would not defy direct orders.
She and Sahra were down in the valley. Tran Huu Nhang had come out under a flag of truce. I had a feeling he would announce that the File of Nine had decided to accept reality. They would never admit it but their army had been defeated without stepping onto the field of battle. It was evaporating. The private soldiers were unwilling to endure the persistent attentions of the Unknown Shadows.
It was all pretty amusing—unless you were one of the Nine determined to make a reputation for the File, or you were a crow with hopes of getting fat. Amusing but handy. I was tired of waiting for a chance to slip away. My need to settle with the Bowalk monster had grown pretty powerful, though I hid it well. I have a number of obsessions that I do not let show.
Officially, the Eleventh Battalion was rotating up to guard the shadowgate. In reality, the Eleventh would be started through to the fortress at the heart of the plain, after nightfall. My gang would be up there much earlier, swiftly moving beyond any hope of Sleepy turning us around. Tobo would cover our backtrail.
I made a sign I hoped would be seen and passed along. We needed to move faster. Sleepy is a resourceful little witch. If there was any way to beat me out of this she might have it figured out already.
It did seem like she was out there by herself on the Bowalk question. One-Eye had a lot more friends dead than he had had while he was alive.
Tobo was at the shadowgate. But he was supposed to be keeping an eye on his mother and the Captain. Before I could say anything, though, he told me, “They’re safe. The meet is a face-saving scheme by the Nine. They’ve realized what they did was stupid. There’ll be a lot of ceremony but no admission of anything, like even that they’ve got an army over there that wanted to do us evil, and before they’re done they’ll give Mom a bull that grants the Company permission to find and use the shadowgate secrets.” He grinned, a kid excited. “I don’t think they’ve been getting enough sleep.”
“And why are you here?”
“I have family going through. Don’t I?”
Of course he did. I was on edge. “Let’s keep moving, people.” With Nyueng Bao, old Company hands, my wife and whatnot, I would have just over forty people joining my hunt. For a while. If it dragged on I might not be able to hold them together.
Tobo told me, “Make camp at the first circle. Even if it seems like you can cover a lot more ground before it gets dark.” He told Lady, “It’s important. Keep him in check. The first circle. So I can catch up when I get away.”
Willow Swan called, “Hey, Croaker. If you stand right here and look just right out of the side of your eye, you can see the Nef. In broad daylight.”
Swan was on the other side of the Hsien shadowgate. His voice had a dampened, distant quality.
I gave him my best scowl. “Don’t forget plain discipline.” Shivetya might be our ally and the soul of the plain but there were perils up there even he could not master. The Unforgiven Dead were as hungry for life as ever. Only the roads and circles were safe. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid piercing the protective boundaries. Their master spells would repair them if you did. But you would not be alive to enjoy the result. All that would be left of you was a desiccated husk that had taken a while dying, screaming all the way.
Lately there seemed to be less shadow activity than in the past. Possibly Shivetya had found a way to control them. Maybe even to destroy them. They were a later accretion. He had no use for them. He would love to be rid of them.
Which would be as wonderful for those sad but deadly monsters as it would be for us. They would achieve the release of death at least. A release Shivetya understood. It was a release he yearned for himself.
I started barking at people. “Let’s get that equipment out and moving! Where are those mules? I thought I sent them up here last week.” When a lot of people agree with you, you can move a lot of material without drawing much attention. I started work on this as soon as I was sure Sleepy did not intend to pursue it herself.
“Calm down,” Tobo told me. And I did. Stunned. Because a kid was saying it to a veteran. And was right. “Come here. Lady, you too.” He stepped away from the road, to a rudely made wooden box balanced precariously atop a jagged boulder.
“This same rock is over on the home side,” I said. “Your father had a bunker right over there where that bush is. What have you got?”
The box contained what looked like four black glass cylinders a foot long, two inches in diameter, equipped with a metal handle on one end.
“These are keys. Like the Lance of Passion was. The kind you need to get on and off the plain. I made new ones. It’s not hard if you have the specifications. Blade has one key. Suvrin has two. One is in place in this gate here. We’ll take it away when we leave. Two more are with a couple of the battalion commanders who went up already. You’re going to take two with you. Just in case.”
He handed me one cylinder and gave the other to Lady. Mine seemed heavier than an object its size ought to be. The handle was silver. I asked, “You just drop it into the hole in the plain, right?”
“Exactly. Remember your repair lessons?” He faced Lady when he asked that. I did sit in on the classes but my wife had gotten a lot better understanding of the process. It would have to be a major emergency before we counted on me doing anything even vaguely related to sorcery.
A stream of mules and men passed through the shadowgate. Each got checked by a sergeant who must have spent his formative years at Sleepy’s headquarters. He wanted to make note of every man, every animal, every fireball thrower and other major item of equipment or weaponry. The Nyueng Bao, not really belonging to the Company, were rude to him. I went over and was rude myself. “You’re gumming up the works, Sergeant. Go away. Or I’ll ask Tobo to sic one of the Black Hounds on you.”
The pack was not far off. Nobody could see them, of course, but they made plenty of racket when they quarreled among themselves. And that never stopped.
My threat had the desired effect. The keeper of inventories departed so fast there was almost a whoosh. He would file an official complaint. But that would end up far down the list of my delinquencies.
Tobo overtook me. Most of my gang were through now. The kid bowed to his father, formally polite. He and Murgen had a mutual problem. Neither knew quite how to bridge the gap left by Murgen having been buried during most of the years Tobo was growing up.
The boy told me, in a voice his father was intended to hear, “You’d better push it now. Mom just got word of what you’re doing. She’ll keep her mouth shut for Gota’s sake. For now. But when she hears that Dad is in on it she’s going to boil over and head straight for the Captain.”
I gave Murgen an ugly look. Didn’t tell the old lady you were going out with the guys, eh? How did Tobo know what his mother had just found out? The kid snapped his fingers, made a series of hand gestures, said something obscure, apparently to empty air.
A pair of shadows raced across the slope, slanting down from the southwest. They headed straight toward us. I saw nothing to cast them. Then, suddenly, I had a face full of flapping wings, weights on my shoulders and what felt like dragon’s talons trying to rip the meat off my collarbones. Ravens.
“They only look like crows,” Tobo said. “Don’t ever forget that they’re not.” I shuddered. I have lived with this stuff all around me, decade after decade, but being exposed to it has not made it any less creepy.
Tobo told me. “At my request they’ve agreed to assume this shape. They’ll be your eyes and ears wherever you have to operate without me. They won’t have the strategic range you were used to with Dad but they can cover a few hundred miles, fast, and they’ll give you a strong tactical advantage. Besides scouting they can carry messages. Be sure to frame those carefully, clearly, without ambiguity, and try to keep them short. Give them an absolutely crystal clear address. Name names and make sure they know who the names belong to.”
I turned my head right and left, caught glimpses from the sides of my eyes. It was disconcerting, having those cruel beaks so close. The eyes are the first things the Choosers of the Slain go for on the battlefield.
One bird was black, the other white. They were bigger than the local breed of raven. And the white one had not gotten the shape quite right. It looked like one of its parents had been a startled pigeon instead of a crow.
“If it turns out that I can’t catch up and you need to get in touch, they can find me easily.”
I am sure I looked grim.
Grinning, Tobo told me, “And I thought they’d go great with your costume. Mom told me you always had ravens on your shoulders when you did Widowmaker, years ago.”
I sighed. “Those were real crows. And they belonged to Soulcatcher. The two of us had a sort of understanding in those days. Enemy of my enemy kind of thing.”
“You did bring the Widowmaker armor with you, didn’t you? And One-Eye’s spear? You know you won’t be able to come back for anything you leave behind.”
“Yes, yes. I have it.” This Widowmaker costume armor was not the same outfit that I had worn decades ago. That had gotten lost during Sleepy and Sahra’s Kiaulune wars. Soulcatcher probably had it in her trophy chamber. This armor, though mainly for show, came from Hsien’s finest armories and had a distinct native flavor. Its black, chitinous lacquer surface boasted inlays of gold and silver symbols that Hsien associated with sorcery and evil and darkness. Some reproduced arcane characters of power once associated with the Shadowmasters. Others went back to an age when Hsien’s now-extinct Kina cult was sending out Deceiver companies on crusade. All those symbols were scary, at least in the world where first they had been imagined.
Lady’s reconstituted Lifetaker armor was uglier than mine. The stuff on its exterior was less clearly defined and much more creepy because she had insisted on being involved in its design and creation. The inside of her head is filled with spiders.
She did not get any pretend-to-be Choosers of the Slain. She got several ornate little teak boxes and a thin stack of sheets of the strange rice paper preferred by the monks of Khang Phi.
“You have to go. I’ll see that they don’t send a messenger to order you back.”
I grunted. Except for Uncle Doj, who paused to murmur with Tobo, I was the last of my gang through the Hsien shadowgate. Lady squeezed my hand when I joined her on the risky side. She said, “We’re off, darling. Again.” She seemed excited.
“Again.” I could not recall ever being excited by moving out.
Murgen asked, “You want to show the standard now?”
“Not until we’re on the plain itself. We’re renegades here. Let’s don’t make Sleepy look small.” I had an idea, then. If I could come up with some material . . . we could run up the old Company standard. From before we adopted Soulcatcher’s firebreathing skull.
“Good,” Doj told me, stepping through the gate. “A bit of wisdom. That’s really good.”
I began the climb to the plain somewhat numbed by the realization that I was the only living member of the company who recalled our original banner. It had been no more cheerful than today’s was but it had been a lot busier. A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.
There was nothing in the Annals to suggest when or why that banner had been adopted.
Different stars tonight,” Willow Swan said, lying back, staring at the sky.
“Different everything,” Murgen replied. “Find me Little Boy or the Dragon’s Eye.”
There was no moon. There is always a moon up in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
The sky on the plain . . . is changeable. It may not boast the same constellation two nights running.
The weather is usually benign. Cold, of course. But seldom rainy, or worse. In my experience. But I was not concerned about rain or snow. Shadow weather worried me.
The sixteen shadowgates are equally spaced around the perimeter of the plain. From each a road of stone of a different color from the plain runs inward to the nameless fortress like a spoke in a wagon wheel. I had seen only two of the roads. One was darker than the surrounding plain, the other slightly lighter. At six-mile intervals along the spokes there were large circles of appropriately shaded material. Those got used as campgrounds though that might not have been their original function. The plain has changed with the ages. Man cannot leave anything alone. The roads were once just mystical routes between worlds. Now they are the only safety out there when the sun sets. When darkness falls the killer shadows leave their hiding places. As we gagged down our rough supper the little light glowing from charcoal fires revealed dozens of black stains oozing over the invisible dome protecting the circle.
“The Slugs of Doom,” Murgen said through a mouthful of bread, waving at a nearby shadow. “Much better than the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.”
“The man’s suddenly developing a sense of humor,” Cletus said. “This worries me.”
His brother Loftus said, “Be afraid, people. Very afraid. The End Days are upon us.”
“You saying it’s bad jokes going to bring on the Year of the Skulls?”
I observed, “If that was the case we’d’ve been dead twenty years ago and the only thing you’d see up there is Kina’s ugly face.”
“Speaking of ugly.” Lady pointed.
We had staked our few square feet of turf at the edge of the circle, where the road to the heart of the plain departed it. I had placed the key given to me by Tobo in the socket in the stone where circle and road came together. Every circle had the sockets. The key sealed the road off. It would keep shadows who got past the protective barriers anywhere else from being able to get us.
“The Nef,” Murgen said.
The three creatures at the barrier were plain for everyone to see. They were bipedal but their heads were dissimilar masses of ugliness other Annalists have said they hoped were masks. I could see why—though, seeing them, I got a powerful sense of déjà vu. Maybe I ran into them in a dream. I must have had a few while I was buried. I said, “You know these guys, Murgen. See if you can talk to them.”
“Yeah. And after I do that I’ll fly off to the sun.” No one had yet managed to communicate with the Nef, though it was obvious the creatures desperately wanted to talk. We were so alien to each other that communication was impossible.
“We must be getting a better grasp. We’re seeing them when we’re awake. We are awake, aren’t we?” Historically, the Nef appeared only in dreams. Only in the past year did guards at the shadowgate report catching glimpses the way troops elsewhere made sightings of Tobo’s pets.
Murgen ambled over warily. I observed. But I also started keeping an eye on my ravens. Until nightfall they had been almost somnolent, entirely indifferent to the world. The appearance of shadows on the barrier turned them restless, even bellicose. They hissed and coughed and produced a whole range of uncorvine noises. Some form of communication was going on because the shadows responded—though, clearly, not the way the ravens wanted.
The Unknown Shadows of Hsien did share a common ancestry with the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.
Murgen marveled, “I think I’m actually getting what they’re trying to tell me.”
“What’s that?” My wife, I noticed, was watching the Nef intently. Could they be making sense to her, too? But she had no previous experience with the dreamwalkers. Unless while she was a sort of dreamwalker herself, while we were buried.
No, it had to be those three. They had studied us long enough to figure out how to get through. Maybe.
Murgen said, “They want us not to keep heading toward the center of the plain. They’re saying we should take the other road.”
“Based on what’s in the Annals, I’d say they’ve been trying to get us to do something besides what we want from the first time anybody dreamed them. They’re just never able to make themselves clear.”
“That would’ve been me,” Murgen said. “And you’re right. What I’ve never figured out, though, is whether they’re trying to save us trouble or are pushing their own agenda. It seems to work out both ways.”
The tiniest hiss escaped my black raven. A warning. I turned. Uncle Doj had appeared behind Murgen, two steps back, fully armed, staring at the Nef. After watching them for a minute he drifted around the circle to the right, not quite a quarter of the way. Then he shuffled back and forth, squatted, rose up on his toes.
Then Lady went over there. She checked the view from multiple angles herself. “There is a ghost of a road, Croaker.” She came back, dug out the key Tobo had given her. I walked back with her. A socket for the key had appeared in the stone surface when no one was watching. It was not there earlier. I had done a one-hundred percent walkaround of the perimeter before we settled down.
Doj said, “The boy told me not to let you waste time trying to make time. Perhaps this is why.”
“Murgen. You know about shortcuts and side roads on the plain?”
“They’re supposed to exist. Sleepy saw them.”
Vaguely, now, I recalled something from my own first passage across the plain.
Lady wanted to plug in her key. I held her back. I said, “All right. If you feel comfortable. Doj? What do you think? Is it safe?” He was as near a real wizard as we had here.
“It doesn’t feel wrong.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But good enough.
Lady lowered the key into place. In moments the ghost road became more substantial, began to give the impression of a golden glow that was not quite there when you tried to see it. My shoulder ornaments were not pleased. They hissed and spat and retreated to the far side of the circle, where they got into a squabble with something large and dark oozing across the surface of our protection.
Murgen said, “I think they want to enter the circle, Captain. I think they want to cut across.”
“Yeah?” The auxiliary road was now more plainly seen than the main way. I mused, “We could hike straight across to the first circle right behind the Khatovar shadowgate.” I went and started getting my gear together.
Doj told me, “Not before morning. Tobo told you that we have to stay here overnight.”
I glanced around. Obviously, the only way I would get anybody moving again tonight would be by making myself extremely unpopular.
Khatovar had been there for ages. It would be there after the sun came up. My interest in Lisa Daele Bowalk went back farther than my interest in that place, to a city called Juniper, before she made the acquaintance of a Taken known as Shapeshifter. Justice delayed a few hours more would not set the universe wobbling.
I sighed, dropped my stuff. I shrugged. “After breakfast, then.”
“Let them go through,” Lady said.
“The Nef? You kidding?”
“Doj and I can handle them.”
Interesting, her confidence. But it was misplaced. She knew nothing about the Nef. Unless she had met them in her dreams.
I moved people away from potential trouble, creating a clear path. “Everyone ready? Pull the key, then, Murgen.” It would be intriguing to see if the plain would let him.
Doj swung Ash Wand around in front of him, exposed eight inches of blade.
The key came out of its seat. Murgen jumped back. The Nef leapt into the circle. And streaked straight across, to the side road. They hit it and never looked back.
“That’s definitely weird,” Willow Swan said. The dream-walkers were in a hurry but nobody dwindles that fast. Nor, normally, do they grow transparent as they go. “Slid right back into dreamland.”
I wondered, “You suppose I would’ve slid into dreamland if I’d tried that road?” The road itself began to fade.
Nobody disagreed. Doj mused, “Tobo did say to stay put.”
Middle of the night. Something wakened me. Felt like a tiny earthquake. The stars above were dancing. After another jiggle they settled down. And were no longer the stars that had been up there when I laid down. This was a different sky altogether.
“That way!” Doj insisted. It was morning, we were up and Doj insisted on heading back the way we had come.
“The fortress is that way.”
“We don’t want to go to the fortress,” Lady reminded me. “We want to go to Khatovar.”
“Which isn’t back that way . . . is it?” Tobo had not caught up. I was not thrilled about that.
Willow Swan suggested, “You can go look, Croaker. It wouldn’t take that long.”
I was tired of arguing, particularly in front of a crowd. I did not want my right to lead to become more questionable than it was already. We all possessed guilty hearts. Me more than any because I bought the Company mystique more than any. “I’ll take Swan’s advice.” I pointed here, there, choosing companions. “You guys get to go with me. Mount up. Let’s go.”
So we were off to the mule races.
“I don’t believe it.” I did not. Could not. My eyes had to be liars.
Lying at the rim of the glittering plain I stared down at another landscape with topography resembling that at Kiaulune and at the Abode of Ravens. But here there was no bustling, recovering Kiaulune. There was no fallen castle Overlook, formerly equipped with towers from which Longshadow could look down onto the glittering plain and see what was coming to get him. Nor was there a whitewashed army town with neat ranks of fields on the slopes below it. This country was feral. This country was much more damp than the other two. Wild brush and scraggly trees advanced to within yards of the crippled shadowgate. The works around that were the only recognizable human handiwork visible, and they were in ruins.
“Stay low,” Doj advised when I started to rise, which would silhouette me above the skyline. I knew better than that. People who do know better generally get skragged that one time they forget or let something slide. Which is why we pound it in and pound it in and pound it in. “That jungle doesn’t mean that there aren’t eyes watching.”
“You’re right. I almost did a stupid. Anybody want to guess how old that scrub down there is? I’d say between fifteen and twenty with a bet that it’s a lot closer to twenty.”
Murgen wondered, “What difference does it make?”
“The forvalaka broke through this shadowgate about nineteen years ago. She got away. Soulcatcher was too busy burying our asses to chase her, shadows did get after her . . . ”
“Oh. Yeah. She didn’t go out alone when she went.”
“That’s my guess. Shadows got out behind her and wiped out everything we can see from here.”
Murgen grunted. Lady nodded, as did Doj. They saw it the same.
Khatovar. My destination for an age. My obsession. Destroyed because we had not had the good sense to cut a young woman’s throat in a place now long ago and far away.
The quality of mercy has left me a great, sour role in the theater of my own despair.
Though it is true that it had not seemed important at the time, and we were real busy trying to get out of there with our asses still attached.
Mogaba leaned back, smiling. “I can’t help wishing Narayan Singh continued luck.” Relaxed, content, for the first time in years, he found life good. The Protector was in the provinces indulging her passion for religious persecution. Therefore, she was not around the Palace making life miserable for those who actually hauled on the reins, riding the tiger whilst trying to keep the mundane work of government simmering.
His mention of the living saint made Aridatha Singh flinch. It was subtle but the reaction was there. And it was unique. Other Singhs did not react to the name, other than with an obligatory curse, perhaps. This demanded further examination.
Mogaba asked, “Any trouble out there?”
Aridatha said, “It’s quiet. You have the Protector out of town, making no ridiculous demands, things settle down. People get too busy making a living to act up.”
Ghopal was less upbeat. The Greys were out in the streets and alleys every day. “Graffiti keeps turning up more and more. ‘Water Sleeps’ most often.”
“And?” Murgen asked. His voice was soft but intense, his eyes narrow.
“The other traditional taunts are all there. ‘All Their Days Are Numbered.’ ‘Rajadharma.’ ”
“And?” Mogaba seemed to have shifted characters the way Soulcatcher did. Perhaps he was aping her style.
“That one, too. ‘My Brother Unforgiven.’ ”
That harsh indictment again. That accusation which always disturbed the incomplete slumber of the part of him guilty about betraying the Black Company to advance his own ambitions. No good had come of it. His life had become enslaved by it. His punishment was to move from one villain to another, always serving wickedness, like a loose woman passing from man to man down a long decline.
Aridatha Singh, eager to move away from talk about Narayan Singh and the Deceivers, interjected, “One of my officers reported a new one yesterday. ‘Thi Kim is coming.’ ”
“Thi Kim? What is that? Or who?”
Ghopal observed, “It sounds Nyueng Bao.”
“We don’t see much of those people these days.”
“Since somebody snatched the Radisha right out of the Palace . . . ” Ghopal stopped. Mogaba had begun to darken again, though that failure belonged to the Greys, not to the army. He had been in the territories at the time.
“So. All the old slogans. But the Company all fled through the shadowgate. And perished on the other side because they never came back.”
Ghopal knew little about the world outside his own narrow, filthy streets. “Maybe some of them did survive and we just don’t know about it.”
“No. They didn’t. We would’ve heard. The Protector’s had people down there harvesting shadows since they left.” People who had been lured into her service by cruelly false promises to teach them her ways and make them captains in her great, unrevealed enterprise.
None of those collaborators survived long. Shadows were clever and persistent. Quite a few found ways to escape from novices long enough to destroy their tormenters and be destroyed themselves.
Soulcatcher made sure conditions for disaster remained ripe.
Mogaba closed his eyes, leaned back again, steepled his dark fingers. “I’ve enjoyed not having the Protector around.” Getting those words out casually was difficult. His throat was tight. His chest felt like a huge weight was pressing in on it. He was afraid. Soulcatcher terrified him. And for that he hated her. And for that he loathed himself. He was Mogaba, the Great General, the purest, smartest, strongest of the Nar warriors produced by Gea-Xle. For him fear was supposed to be a tool by which he managed the weak. He was not supposed to know it personally.
Silently, within, Mogaba repeated his warrior’s mantras, knowing habits ingrained since birth would hold the fear at bay.
Ghopal Singh was a functionary. Very good at managing the Greys but not a natural conspirator. That was one attribute that had recommended him to the Protector. He did not apprehend the message lurking on the edges of the Great General’s statement. Aridatha Singh, in some ways, was as naive as he was handsome. But he did understand that Mogaba was sneaking up on something that could be a great watershed in all their lives.
Mogaba had championed Aridatha’s elevation because of his naivete concerning the complex motives of others and because of his enthusiastic idealism. Rajadharma was a lever that Mogaba was sure would move Aridatha Singh.
Aridatha peered around nervously. He had heard the old saying that in the Palace the very walls have ears.
Mogaba leaned forward, lit a cheap tallow candle from a lamp and took the fire to a stoneware bowl filled with a dark liquid. Ghopal held his tongue even though the animal product offended him religiously.
The bowl’s contents proved to be flammable, though they produced more unpleasant black smoke than they did flame or light. The smoke spread out across the ceiling, then crept down the walls and flowed out the doors. Its progress was marked by squeaks and chitterings and an occasional complaint from an unseen crow.
Mogaba said, “We may have to get down on the floor for a few minutes, till the smoke thins Out.”
Aridatha whispered, “Are you really proposing what I think you’re proposing?”
Mogaba murmured, “You may not have the same reasons I do but I think we’d all be better off if the Protector no longer held her position. Particularly the Taglian people. What do you think?”
Mogaba had expected Aridatha to agree easily. The soldier believed in his obligation to the people he served. And he did nod.
Ghopal Singh was his main worry. Ghopal had no obvious reason to want change. The Greys were all members of the Shadar religion, traditionally with little influence in government. Their alliance with the Protector had given them power out of proportion to their numbers. They would be reluctant to lose that power.
Ghopal glanced around nervously, completely failing to note Mogaba’s intense examination. He blurted, though in a whisper, “She has to go. The Greys have believed that for a long time. The Year of the Skulls couldn’t be much more terrible than what we’ve suffered from her. But we don’t know how to get rid of her. She’s too powerful. And too smart.”
Mogaba relaxed. So the Greys were not enamored of their benefactor. Interesting. Excellent.
“But we’ll never get rid of her. She always knows what everyone around her is thinking. And we’ll never be able not to think about it because we’ll be so scared. She’ll sniff it out in about ten seconds. Really, we’re walking dead men now, just for having considered it.”
“Then get your family out of town now,” Mogaba told him. It was Soulcatcher’s habit to exterminate her enemies root and branch. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I think that the only way it could be managed would be to have everything in place and strike before she has a chance to look around and pick up clues. We might engineer it so that she arrives exhausted. That might give us the edge we need.”
Aridatha mused, “Whatever it is, it will have to be sudden and massive and a complete surprise.”
“She’ll begin to suspect,” Ghopal said. “There are too many people loyal to her, because without her they’ll be dead themselves. They’ll warn her.”
“Not if we don’t get carried away. If just us three know what’s happening. We’re in charge. We can give any orders we want. People won’t question us. There’s trouble on the streets and it’s getting worse. People will expect us to do something about it. Plenty of others hate the Protector. They’ll feel free to act up while she’s away. That gives us an excuse to do almost anything we want. If we mainly use people whose loyalty to the Protector is absolute, letting them do most of the work and carry the messages, there’s no reason she should suspect anything until it’s too late.”
Ghopal looked at him like he was whistling in the dark. Maybe he was. Mogaba said, “I’ve opened my mouth here. I’ve committed myself. And I have nowhere to run.” They were natives. They could vanish into the territories. There was nowhere he could hide. And a return to Gea-Xle had been out of the question for twenty-five years. The Nar back home knew all about what he had done.
Aridatha mused, “Then every day in every way we should do our jobs to the utmost on the Protector’s behalf—until we create a rattrap we can close like this.” He clapped his hands.
“We’ll only get one chance,” Mogaba said. “Five seconds after we fail we’ll all be praying for death.” He waited a moment during which he checked the smoke. Its usefulness was almost exhausted. “Are you in?”
Both Singhs nodded but neither showed an unbound eagerness. The truth was, it was a poor bet that any of them would survive this adventure.
Mogaba sat in his quarters staring out at a full moon. He wondered if it had been too easy. Were the Singhs genuinely interested in ridding Taglios of the Protector? Or had they just played along, sensing that he was the more deadly threat at the moment?
If they were not committed he would learn the truth only when Soulcatcher sank her teeth into his throat.
He was going to be an intimate acquaintance of fear for a long time to come.
Swan volunteered to slither down to the shadowgate with me. I demurred. “I think I’ll take my sweetheart. We don’t get many chances to get away together.” And she would have a steadier hand than I would when it came to working on the shadowgate. Which, even from the head of the slope, could be seen to need restoration.
After examining the shadowgate from a closer vantage, I told my beloved, “Bowalk really tore it up getting through.”
“She had shadows gnawing on her. According to what Sleepy says Shivetya showed her. Tell me you’d be gentle and not slam the door if you had those things after you.”
“I don’t even want to think about it. Are we safe? Is anything out there watching?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I have a little power here on the plain. A dim one-hundredth of what used to be. But outside the shadowgates I might as well be deaf, dumb and blind. All I can do is pretend.”
“So Kina is alive, then?”
“Possibly. If I’m not just tapping Shivetya or some residual, ambient power. The plain is a place of many strange energies. They leak in from the different worlds.”
“But you believe you’re bleeding Kina again. Don’t you?”
“If I am, she’s not just sleeping, she’s in a coma.”
“There!”
“There what?”
“I thought I saw something move.”
“That was just the breeze stirring the branches.”
“You think so? I’m not inclined to take chances.”
The sarky witch said, “You stand guard. I’ll work on the gate.”
If she did I could not tell. She was less active than I would have been.
We were through. Into Khatovar. I did not feel like I had found my way into paradise. I did not feel like I had come home. I felt the letdown I had expected almost from the moment I had become aware that my lust to find Khatovar had been imposed upon me from without. Khadi’s Gate was a wasteland.
Clete and Loftus started laying out a camp close enough to the gate that we could make a quick getaway if that became necessary. I was still at the gate itself, surveying this world where the Black Company had been born.
Definitely the disappointment I had anticipated. Maybe even worse.
Something stirred the hair on the back of my neck. I turned. I saw nothing but had a distinct feeling that something had just come through the shadowgate.
I caught movement in the edge of my vision. Something dark. A shape both large and ugly.
One of the Black Hounds.
The back of my neck went cool again. Then again.
Maybe Tobo was coming after all.
The darker of my two ravens settled onto a nearby boulder. After a shower of hisses directed nowhere in particular, it cocked a big yellow eye my way and said, “There are no occupied human dwellings within fifty miles. The ruins of a city lie under the trees below the rocky prominence to the northeast. There are signs that humans visit it occasionally.”
I gaped. That damned bird was better-spoken than most of my companions. But before I could strike up a conversation, it took to the air again.
So there were people in this world. But the closest were at least three days away.
The promontory the bird mentioned was the place where the fortress Overlook had stood in our own world. The ruins likely occupied the same site as Kiaulune.
Another chill on the neck. The Unknown Shadows continued to come through.
I went down to camp. The engineer brothers were old but efficient. It was livable right now—as long as we got no rain.
The rain would be along before long. It was clear it rained often here.
Fires were burning. Somebody had killed a wild pig. It smelled heavenly, roasting. Shelters were going up. Sentries were out. Uncle Doj had appointed himself sergeant of the guard and was making a circuit of the four guardposts.
I waited till Murgen found something to occupy him, beckoned Swan and Lady. “Let’s think about what we do now.” I looked my wife in the eye. She understood what I wanted to know. She shook her head.
There was no Khatovaran source of magical power she could parasitize.
I grumped, “I didn’t expect towers of pearl and ruby beside streets of gold, but this is ridiculous.” I checked Doj and Murgen. They showed no interest in us yet.
“Sour grapes.” Swan sneered, heading straight for the critical point. “That’s a whole world out there. Damned near empty, it looks like. How do you expect to find one insane killer monster?”
“I got to thinking about that while I was standing up there looking at all this. Amongst other things. And I think I’ve had an evil epiphany.”
Lady contributed to the Annals and tried to keep up with her successors. She shook her head, said, “There isn’t much in what she wrote.”
Swan glanced around. Nobody was close. In a soft voice he said, “She hasn’t been writing the histories since you came back, has she?”
I asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Over the years Tobo and Suvrin and some of their cronies have visited most of the shadowgates. They visited the Khatovar gate several times.”
“How do you know?”
“I sneak around. I listen when I’m not supposed to hear. I know Suvrin and Tobo came out here while you were wounded. Just the two of them. And later, while we were in Khang Phi, Suvrin went out again. Alone.”
“Then I’m right. We’ve been jobbed. How come you didn’t mention this before?”
“It had to do with Khatovar. I figured you were behind whatever was going on.”
Lady made a growling, chuckling sound that told me she had a handle on the truth. “That devious little witch. You really think so?”
Swan asked, “What am I missing?”
I told him, “I think we’re out here raiding Khatovar not because I’m so damned clever but because Sleepy wants us old farts out from under foot when she breaks out into the homeworld. I’ll bet the whole damned force is moving right now. And Sleepy won’t have a single one of us asking questions or giving advice or trying to do things our own way.”
Swan took a while to think about it. Then he took a while to look around at the gang who had elected to defy the command authority to pursue revenge on One-Eye’s killer. He said, “Either she is really an astute little bitch or we’ve been around so many sneaky people so long that we see machinations everywhere we look.”
“Tobo knew,” I said. Tobo had to be part of it. He let his father and Uncle Doj come out here . . . “You know, I’m so paranoid I’m going to put a guard on the gate from the other side. And I’ll fill them up with lies about how a demon in the guise of one of our people might try to sabotage the gate so we can’t get back out of Khatovar.”
Neither Lady nor Swan argued. Swan did remark. “You are paranoid. You think Sahra would let Sleepy get away with leaving Thai Dei, Murgen and Doj trapped out here?”
“I think it’s a mad universe. I think almost anything somebody can imagine happening can happen. Even the cruelest, blackest sin.”
Lady asked, “And what do you intend to do about it?”
“I’m going to kill the forvalaka.”
Swan said, “Murgen’s noticed that something’s going on. He’s headed this way.”
“I’m going to play the game. Tobo sent a bunch of his pets through after us. Let’s make sure they can’t get back out unless we let them go. We’ll use them to find Bowalk. Then we’ll kill her.”
Sleepy reached the fortress at the heart of the plain by the expedient of refusing to be steered elsewhere. Shivetya’s helpful shortcuts were not going to divert her from examining the root of her scheme for conquest.
There was one temporal power greater than the greatest sorcery. Greed. And she owned the wellspring of a flood of what the greedy held most dear: gold. Not to mention silver and gems and pearls.
For thousands of years fugitives from many worlds had hidden their treasures in the caverns beneath Shivetya’s throne. Who knew why? Possibly Shivetya. But Shivetya would not tell tales—unless they advanced his cause. Shivetya had the mind and soul of an immortal spider. Shivetya had no remorse, no compassion, knew only his task and his will to end it. He was the Company’s ally but he was not the Company’s friend. He would destroy the Company instantly if that suited an altered purpose and he was in a position to do so.
Sleepy meant to cover her back. She approached Baladitya. “Where’s Blade?” Baladitya had begun gushing discoveries he had made since being handed his mission. Sleepy felt a twinge of guilt. She remembered Baladitya’s kind of excitement, long ago and far away. But being responsible for thousands of people, pursuing a timetable with very little slippage built in, left no opportunity for simple pleasures. That made her cranky and curt, sometimes.
“He’s down below. He doesn’t come up much anymore.” Irked, Sleepy looked around for someone young enough to gallop a mile down into the earth. She spied Tobo and Sahra arguing. Not exactly unusual. But not so frequently lately. They had been butting heads since Tobo entered puberty.
One of Tobo’s djinn could get down there faster than the youngest pair of legs. “Tobo!” Sleepy beckoned.
Exasperation flashed across the boy’s face. Everyone wanted something from him.
He did respond. He showed no defiance. He never did. His calm half-caste face settled into perfect nonexpression. Nor did his stance in any way betray what he might be thinking. Sleepy seldom saw anyone so inscrutable. And yet he was so young.
He just stood waiting for her to tell him what she wanted. “Blade is down below somewhere. Send one of your messengers to tell him I want him up here.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have any here. I’ve explained before. The Unknown Shadows hate the plain. It’s very difficult to get them to come up here. Most of those who do come refuse to have anything to do with people. I don’t want them to have anything to do with people. It puts them in a bad temper every time. You have a whole regiment cluttering up the place. There must be a man somewhere who doesn’t have something else to do.”
Sarcastic infidel. There were twelve hundred men cooling their heels around the fortress, waiting to lead the treasure train, doing nothing useful in the interim. “I was looking for something a little faster.” Once the Company was on the barren plain, even with Shivetya working wonders, there was little time to waste.
There had been no good news from Suvrin, either. Tobo should have gone with him. Or Doj or Lady, at the very least. Someone better equipped to deal with the Unknown Shadows. But at the very least there should have been word that a bridgehead had been established.
Baladitya said, “Then you’d better go down there yourself. Because he isn’t going to respond to any lesser authority.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he hears voices calling him. He’s trying to figure out what to answer them.”
“Darn!” Sleepy broke out in what, for her, was a blistering blue streak. “That wrangle-franging mudsucker! I’m going to . . . ”
Tobo and Baladitya grinned. Sleepy shut up. She remembered times when her Company brothers would get her going to see just how creative she would be in avoiding use of common profanity. She muttered, “I should’ve written you people the way you really are. Not you, Baladitya. You’re actually a human being.” She glared at Tobo. “You I’m beginning to wonder about.”
“For a nonbeliever,” Baladitya said, of himself.
“Yes. Well. There’re more of you lost souls than there are those of us who know the Truth. I must be God’s Beacon in the Land of Our Sorrows.”
Baladitya frowned, then caught on. Sleepy was actually poking fun at her religion’s attitude toward those outside it, all the unbelievers who made up the population of the Land of Our Sorrows. Which, in an earlier age, when the Vehdna were more numerous and more enthusiastic about rescuing the infidel from damnation, had been called the Realm of War.
Only Believers lived inside the Realm of Peace.
Sleepy snapped, “Tobo, stop trying to sneak away. You’re going down there with me. Just in case he really is hearing voices.”
“That sounds to me like a real good reason for everybody else to stay away.”
“Tobo.”
“Right behind you, Captain. Ain’t nobody gonna sneak up on your back.”
Sleepy growled. She never got used to the informality and irreverence, though it had been a firm fixture of Company culture since long before her advent.
The soldiers mocked everything and bitched about the rest. Yet the work got done.
Sleepy conscripted a half dozen more companions while hurrying to the stairway down. All from Hsien. She marveled at the results of her relentless training regimen. Many who had joined the Company had been the dregs of the Land of Unknown Shadows, criminals and fugitives, bandits and deserters from the forces of the warlords, and fools who thought a turn with the Soldiers of Darkness would be a great adventure. Sleek, strong and confident, they put on a show now, after months of intense preparation. The clash of steel, probably closer than they anticipated, would be their final tempering.
Sleepy’s descent led her past dozens of men still carrying treasure toward the surface. From behind her Tobo asked, “You sure you aren’t overdoing the tomb robbing? We’ve already got enough to make the whole mob rich.” A fact not lost on some recruits of less than unstained provenance. But temptation was easy to resist when you knew only your Captain could get you off the plain alive and that the Unknown Shadows would hound you pitilessly if you tried anything after you were off.
“We can’t beat the Protector with eight thousand men, Tobo. We need secret weapons and force multipliers. Gold fills both roles.”
Sometimes Tobo was troubled by his Captain. At some point, during her copious free time, she had gotten too close to a library centered around military theory. At times she tended to regurgitate notions like “strategic center of gravity” and “force multipliers” just when that would leave her listeners uncomfortable and concerned.
Tobo was also concerned because the old folks, the veterans, Croaker and Lady and the others, approved. That meant that he was not getting it.
“We’ll take time out here,” Sleepy said when they reached the level of the ice caverns where the Captured had been held. “You men,” she said to those she had had follow, “I want four of you to take a couple of sleepers up top. Longshadow and the Howler. Howler is going to travel with us. With Tobo. A work party will take Longshadow to Hsien for trial. You two. Stay with us.”
The ice caverns seemed timeless, changeless. Frost soon obscured the smaller signs of any traffic. The dead could not be told from the enchanted except on close examination by someone who was knowledgeable.
Sleepy continued, “You men don’t go in there until we call you. You even breathe on those things sometimes, somebody dies.” Which, upon close examination, could be seen to have happened before. The corpses included several of the Captured as well as a handful of the mystery ancients whose presence Shivetya had yet to explain.
There was a great deal the demon would not share.
Sleepy told Tobo, “We want these two to go upstairs without them waking up.”
“I have to break stasis. Otherwise they’ll die as soon as we touch them.”
“I understand that. But I want them kept in a condition where they can’t cause trouble. There won’t be anybody there to control Longshadow if he wakes up all the way.”
“Let me do my job.”
Touchy. Sleepy posted herself between the boy wizard and the cavern entrance in case curiosity overcame the good sense of the soldiers. She marveled at how quickly the ice reasserted itself, at how delicately cobweblike were some of the structures around the sleeping old men. Beyond Howler, now, there was little evidence of the trampling the place had taken when the Captured were released. The cavern floor tilted upward back there, turned, and the cave itself got tight enough to force an explorer to crawl. If you went back far enough you reached a place where the most holy relics of the Deceiver cult had been hidden during an ancient persecution. The Company had destroyed them, giving particular attention to the powerful Books of the Dead.
Sleepy was quiet for a long time after she sent the two sleeping sorcerers to the surface. She and Tobo and two young Bone Warriors resumed their descent into the earth. Sleepy had two things on her mind: The first was the identity of the source of the pale blue light leaking through the ice of the cavern of the old men, to illuminate the human hoard, and second, “What is the center of gravity of the Taglian empire?” She was more interested in the latter. The former was just a curiosity. It did not matter. Probably just the light of another world.
“Soulcatcher,” Tobo replied. “You don’t have to think about that. If you kill the Protector you’re left facing a big snake with no head. The Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah step up and announce themselves and the whole thing is over with.” He made it sound simple.
“Except for hunting down the Great General.”
“And Narayan Singh. And the Daughter of Night. But the Protector is the only part we can’t manage using the Black Hounds.”
Sleepy did not miss the way his voice went hollow when he mentioned the Daughter of Night. He had met the witch when she was the Company’s prisoner, before the flight to the Land of Unknown Shadows. Sleepy had not failed to notice the impact the girl had had then.
The Captain missed very little. And forgot nothing. And seldom made an error.
But setting up the old folks to put themselves out of the way, so they would not be peering over her shoulder, proved to be an error of the first order.
The Captain found Blade standing in front of a wall of blackness, rigid, a lantern dangling from his left hand. It was obvious that he had spent a lot of time there. Empty fuel containers littered the steps. The contents of those containers had been meant for Baladitya and the rangers mining the treasure hoards.
The Captain was irked. “Blade! What? . . . ”
Blade gestured for silence. He whispered, “Listen.”
“For what?”
“Just listen.” And when Sleepy had just about exhausted her store of patience, he added, “For that.”
She heard it plainly, though remote, weak, echoing. A cry of, “Help.”
Tobo heard it, too. He jumped. “Captain . . . ”
“Summon your Cat Sith. Or one of the Black Hounds.”
“I can’t do that.” He would not tell her that he had exceeded his instructions by sending most of the Unknown Shadows to help Croaker and Lady.
“Why not?”
“They’d refuse to come down here.”
“Compel them.”
“I can’t. They’re partners, not slaves.”
Sleepy grumbled to herself about damnation and consorting with demons.
“You can’t go any farther than this,” Blade said, answering a question that had not been asked. “I’ve tried a thousand times. There isn’t enough willpower in the Company to move another step downward. I can’t even throw one of these oil jars.”
Sleepy asked, “Are any of them full?”
“Over there.”
Sleepy picked up three full pots. She dropped two at Blade’s feet, told him, “Step back.” The oil from the broken jars could not be intimidated by a supernatural darkness. “Now light it.”
“What?”
“Set it on fire.”
With considerable reluctance Blade tilted his lantern and let a few drops of burning oil spill.
The stairwell filled with flame.
“Damn!” Tobo squealed. “What did you do that for?”
“Can you see now?” Sleepy had an arm up to shield her face from the heat.
The blackness had not been able to overpower the flames.
Tobo told her, “Just two more steps down there’s a floor. With coins scattered around on it.”
Sleepy lowered her arm. She stepped past Blade. Tobo followed. Stunned, Blade again tried to push forward. He staggered. There was none of the resistance he expected.
Why not, suddenly?
Blade was sure there would have been no change had he started a fire himself. “Captain, I’d be very careful.”
The darkness had been waiting.
“Help!”
The voice was louder and more insistent. And clear enough to be recognized.
Tobo echoed Blade. “Captain, be very careful indeed. This isn’t possible. The man has to be dead.”
“Help!”
Goblin’s plaints sounded increasingly urgent.
We had been in the holy land of my imagination for four days. Nothing had been gained. Something had been lost. An old Company hand named Spiff was dead. Likewise, Cho Dai Cho, alias JoJo, the Nyueng Bao who had been One-Eye’s indifferent bodyguard for so long.
Shadows had gotten them the first night. Killer shadows that had escaped the glittering plain after the forvalaka’s breakout had damaged the Khatovar shadowgate. Shadows that had depopulated this part of Khatovar.
Once we knew they were there we had little trouble luring and destroying them. We had had plenty of experience. But the alarm method was awfully unpleasant.
It could have been worse. The fact of regional devastation had inspired everyone to a higher state of readiness.
During subsequent nights we eliminated a total of nine shadows. I hoped that augured well for the rest of this world. I hoped they were now that uncommon.
The Black Hounds helped destroy the shadows. They hated their undomesticated cousins from the plain. And feared them greatly. Though these shadows seemed much less aggressive than those we had encountered in the past.
They ranged afar, too, and found no living people south of Khatovar’s equivalent of the Dandha Presh. Of the forvalaka they found little sign, either. Its trail, though, they were able to uncover. Apparently it was so plain my ravens suspected that it had been left that way on purpose.
“You really want to cross those mountains again?” Swan asked.
Lady remarked, “He looks exhausted already, doesn’t he? And we haven’t walked a foot.”
I admitted, “This would be a great time to have one of those flying carpets.”
“There’re a lot of things we could use. Several of the black stallions from Charm would be handy. So would a hundred more fireball throwers. You wouldn’t steal Sleepy’s horse.”
“Well, I couldn’t, could I? It’s the last one left. She’d notice it was missing.”
“But she isn’t missing you and me and the rest of these droppings beneath the roost of the rooks of dim wittedness.”
“That’s a cute image,” Swan said. “Here come the lead birds of the flock.” Murgen. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj were approaching. Like the rest of the band they wanted to know, “What now?” and I had promised to tell them this afternoon.
Murgen asked, “So what’re we going to do, boss?”
“Go get it. We can’t stay here. The shadows wiped out almost all the game.”
They just kill. They will kill bugs if the passion takes them. Large animals they overlook only when they have the opportunity to suck the life out of something human.
Murgen asked, “You think that’s why she didn’t hang around here?”
Only part of it. “She does have to eat.” A glance around told me the fire in their bellies for revenge no longer burned so hot.
Doj said, “But there is food here. And it’s not that hard to find. I’ve seen wild pigs and a species of miniature deer that I didn’t recognize. I’ve seen rabbits and several kinds of smaller rodents. I’d say there was food enough if she wanted it. I’d also say the shadows haven’t been active here for a long time. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen the animals I have. The monster had to be rejoining her allies. And the shadows had to be sent. To spy on us.”
I said, “Do go on.”
“I’ve considered several alternate frames for the evidence. Maybe it does add up to nothing more than the surface picture. A raid by an insane monstrosity. But I think that is just too simple. I feel there has to be more. Insanity and revenge as motives don’t seem adequate. But if she’s working with someone local . . . ”
I had been supposing almost from the moment I broke out of my coma. I did not have enough information to support my guesswork, though.
I grunted.
“The monster had to know she would be pursued. The Soldiers of Darkness have that reputation. And they’ve tried to kill her before, with much weaker provocation.”
“And Goblin also tried to help her, as I recall. Which she repaid by turning on him before he could do her any good.”
Doj continued, “She had to get through two shadowgates to reach Hsien. Which she knew, somehow, was where One-Eye could be found. Both shadowgates, as far as she knew, were damaged. So even if she was safe on the roads she could expect to be vulnerable at the gates. But she didn’t get hurt. And then the distance between the gates would be a long one if she got no help from Shivetya. We have no reason to believe he helped her. On its face it looks like it would’ve been too long and too dangerous and too hungry a journey if One-Eye’s murder was all she hoped to accomplish and could expect no help managing it.”
I turned to Lady, then looked back to Doj. He was as smart as I was. “I see. Of course she couldn’t have managed without help. With the shadows and, especially, with food. She had no chance to feed while she was in Hsien. The Hounds were after her all the time.”
Lady chipped in, “Then she had help from helpers who expected a sizable payback. What might that be?”
“How about the same thing we worked for four years to dig out of the Land of Unknown Shadows?” Murgen said. “The secrets of the shadowgates.”
Heads nodded. I asked, “How would they know? And why would they want it? To stop this gate from leaking? Didn’t Shivetya say they always repair themselves to that level? Tobo and Suvrin never found any that were open, did they?” I assumed Doj would be familiar with Tobo’s adventures.
All eyes were on me. Murgen suggested, “This is Khatovar. Source of the Free Companies.”
“More than four hundred years ago. Closer to five, now. They might not even remember.”
“Probably not.”
“And they must have some knowledge of shadowgates. They got Bowalk through this one, in and out of Hsien, then back through here again. Without destroying anything.”
Lady said, “Another thing we can infer is that someone here knows something about controlling shadows.”
“We can?”
“Implicit in the fact that Bowalk made it to Hsien and back again. As well as in the fact that we should’ve had more shadows to deal with here if a horde did break out and devastate the world when Bowalk came through the gate the first time. There’s game, Doj says. If those were feral shadows we destroyed they would’ve killed all the game. Those things were here to watch us.”
I growled. “Damn! Murgen. All that time at Khang Phi. You ever hear tell of any Shadowmasters that never were accounted for? We’re not going to have to butt heads with Longshadow’s long-lost mom, are we?”
“They’re accounted for. Any that turn up here would have to be home grown.” Which was possible. Two of the three we had destroyed in our world were exactly that. One had been one of the Lady’s henchwomen believed dead but gone fugitive instead.
Continued talk led to the notion that we might have been lured to Khatovar specifically so we could be stripped of whatever knowledge we might possess.
Even now Lady remained a tremendous repository of arcane information.
I went off alone with my raven companions. One I told to take the Unknown Shadows out scouting, ranging as far as necessary to find the nearest natives. The other I sent to find Tobo. It carried a detailed and honest report, just as if Sleepy had sent us to Khatovar and expected regular communiques.
I hoped Tobo might have some useful suggestions. I hoped he knew more about Khatovar than he had pretended.
Neither Lady nor I could sleep. The white raven had not taken long to find people. An army was headed our way, though it was still on the far side of the mountains. The forvalaka was there, accompanying a family of wizards who, according to reports from Tobo, were the uncontested overlords of modern Khatovar.
Tobo’s source was indirect. He had consulted the scholar Baladitya, who took our questions to the demon Shivetya. Shivetya then tacitly acknowledged his ability to monitor events in the worlds connected to the glittering plain.
The rulers of Khatovar were a sprawling, brawling, turbulent clan of wizards known as the Voroshk, which was simply their family name. The founding father’s talented blood had bred true. And often. He had been a man of immense appetites. There were several hundred Voroshk today. Their regime was cruel. Its sole purpose was to further enrich and empower the Family. Following the disaster caused by the forvalaka’s breakthrough into Khatovar, the Voroshk had learned to manage the shadows. It would be the Voroshk who had sent the shadows we had destroyed.
Kina, or Khadi, was no longer worshipped in the world bearing the name that meant Khadi’s Gate. The Voroshk had exterminated the Children of Kina.
Nevertheless, once each year, sometime during the time when the Deceivers would have celebrated their Festival of Lights, somebody managed to strangle a member of the Family and get away.
Chances were good that the Voroshk knew their history well enough to recall that the Free Companies of Khatovar had gone out as missionaries on behalf of the Mother of Night. They might well dread the Queen of Darkness’s return.
My own supernatural allies were under instruction to avoid notice except in instances where Khatovar’s shadows could be picked off without risk of our secret strength being revealed.
Her face against my chest, Lady murmured, “These Voroshk sound like bad people, hon. As bad as any you’ve run into before.”
“Including you?”
“Nobody’s as bad as me. But you need to worry about this. There’s a whole family of them. And they don’t squabble amongst themselves. Much. Even when I had the Ten on their shortest rein they were always trying to stab each other in the back.”
There was a message there, under her teasing. I held her and told her, “I’ll retreat to the plain rather than risk the confrontation. We can always sneak back here some other time.” But I would not be happy if I had to let Bowalk get away yet again.
I drifted off wondering about the minds of the Voroshk. Wondering about this mysterious world that had sent our forbrethren out so long ago, on a crusade that had gotten lost. Were the Voroshk unwitting pawns of Kina? Could they be yet another device by which the Dark Mother might try to bring on the Year of the Skulls?
“No,” Lady said when I suggested it aloud. “We know whose role that is.”
“Don’t want to think about Booboo, hon. Just want to go to sleep.”
Goblin denied nothing. “She kept me alive somehow. She intended to use me. But she never did anything to me. I spent most of the time sleeping. Dreaming ugly dreams. Probably her dreams.”
The little wizard’s voice was barely a whisper. It husked. He seemed permanently on the verge of tears. The irrepressible spirit that had made him the Goblin of old seemed to have fled.
His audience did nothing to make him welcome or feel wanted. He was not welcome or wanted. He had spent four years sleeping with the Queen of Night, the Mother of Deceivers.
“She lives in the bleakest place you can imagine. It’s all death and corruption.”
“And madness,” Sahra added without looking up from the trousers she was mending.
Tobo asked, “Where’s the Lance?” Goblin had been asked before. The Lance of Passion was the soul of the Company. As much as the Annals did, it tied past and present together. It went all the way back to the Company’s departure from Khatovar. It had symbolic power and real power. It was a shadowgate key. And it was capable of causing a Goddess terrible pain.
Goblin sighed. “There’s nothing but the head left. Inside her, from when I stabbed her. She made it migrate through her flesh. She’s taken it into her womb.”
The Captain, obviously uncomfortable with this heathen talk, snapped, “Would any of you infidels care to explain that? Tobo?”
“I don’t know anything about religion, Captain. Not the practical stuff, anyway.”
“Anybody?”
None of the infidels had a thought.
Sleepy had a few. One was that Kina was not a real Goddess. Kina was just an incredibly powerful monster. All the Gunni Gods and Goddesses were nothing but powerful monsters. There was only one God . . . She continued staring at Goblin, wondering if he was worth believing, wondering if the best course was just to kill him. The silence stretched. Goblin remained immensely uncomfortable. As he should be, considering the circumstances and his limited ability to explain what had happened to him.
There was no way anyone would ever trust him.
The Captain said, “I have a thought, Tobo.”
Silence stretched again as the boy waited on her and she waited for him to ask what her thought was. Grown-up silliness.
Sahra said, “Why don’t we have Goblin go help Croaker with Khatovar? He’ll be more comfortable with his old friends, anyway.”
Sleepy gave her a dirty look. Then Tobo did the same. Sahra smiled, bit the thread she was using, put her needle away. “That’s done, then.”
Goblin’s froglike face had lost the little color that had survived his time underground. It lost all expression. The man within was trying hard to remain unreadable. In trying he gave away the fact that he did not want to join the expedition to Khatovar.
Maybe he just dreaded facing the forvalaka again.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” the Captain said. Coldly. “Croaker sent a raven whining for help. He has all those unpredictable soldiers and sorcerers headed his way. Goblin. You can still cut it, can’t you? Sorcery-wise? You haven’t lost the knack?”
The sad little wizard shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’d have to try. Not that I would be any good against a real talent even on my best day. I never was.”
“It’s decided. You’ll take the Khatovar road. Everyone else. We’re done here. We’re moving out. Tobo, find the Chu Ming brothers. They’re going to go with Goblin.”
The news that movement was imminent spread quickly. The remaining troops were glad to hear it. They had stayed here in this uncomfortable, frightening place far too long while the higher-ups fussed about nothing. Rations were growing short, despite all the years of preparation.
I returned from consultations with the white raven. “They’ve reached the downhill side of the pass.”
Lady observed, “They’re moving fast, then.”
“They’ve begun to wonder if we suspect something. They’ve begun to wonder why so few of their shadow scouts come back and why the few that do never came close to us. So they left their infantry and heavy cavalry and artillery behind in an effort to get here before we can do a lot to get ready if we do expect trouble. The bird tells me they’re also preparing some sort of surprise but it couldn’t get close enough to find out what.”
Swan grumbled, “I don’t understand why they weren’t just sitting here waiting for us.”
“Probably because there’s not much here to eat, it’s a long way from where things are happening and they couldn’t know when we’d arrive. Or even if we would. They have an empire up north to keep in line. And if they were camped out here, chances are we’d just not bother to come off the plain. Also, I would imagine that they really expected us to follow the forvalaka once we understood what had happened here. So they could trap us north of the Dandha Presh. In familiar territory, closer to home. Which I would’ve run into if I didn’t have the Black Hounds and whatnot to go scouting.
“On top of the distance for them, there’re a raft of superstitions about this country. Plus there’s just been a change in the head of the Voroshk family. Somebody called the Old One died unexpectedly about the time we climbed onto the plain. His replacement seems to be more action-oriented.”
“And you got all that by talking to crows?”
“They’re smart birds, Swan. Smarter than a lot of people. They make wonderful scouts.”
Doj asked, “What is our strategy now?”
“We sit tight. We wait. We let the Black Hounds play. They like to tease horses.”
Everybody looked at me with that exasperated expression I recalled from those days when I was the Captain and played my cards close to my chest. I shuddered, forced myself to open up further.
“They’ve separated a small light cavalry force in order to make more speed. The Unknown Shadows will start tormenting the horses after nightfall. Subtly, of course. We don’t want to lose them. The bigger ones are going to work on the forvalaka by letting her see them as One-Eye’s ghost. I’m hoping she’ll rush on down here ahead of her friends. So we can kill her and get out before they get here.” There. I had shared.
I felt lousy. I felt like something was sure to go wrong now that I had talked about it.
Silence. Which stretched. Until Murgen finally asked, “Will it work?”
“How the fuck should I know? Ask me again this time tomorrow.”
Lady asked, “What’re we going to do about Goblin?”
“Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him get near One-Eye’s spear.” That all seemed self-evident to me.
Silence stretched again. Then Swan said, “Here’s a thought. Why don’t we leave Goblin here when we pull out?”
I grumped, “I thought he was your friend.”
“Goblin was. But we’ve already decided that this can’t be the Goblin we knew. Right?”
“But there’s a chance the Goblin we knew might still be inside him waiting to be let back out. Like the rest of us when we were buried under the plain.”
“And us guys who weren’t aren’t so sure about you.”
“Just say I’ve developed a soft streak. We’ll treat the guy like Goblin till he does something that makes us want to hang him. Then we’ll string him up.” I had to posture some. It was expected of me.
Murgen observed, “The Captain is still solving her personnel problems by exiling the questionables to Khatovar.”
“And that’s funny?” Because he was smiling.
“Of course it is. In the sense that neither you nor I nor Lady would’ve considered doing anything like that while we were in charge.”
“Everybody’s a sarcastic social critic,” I told Lady. “Don’t you let on that you can’t kick Goblin’s ass all the way to Hsien when he gets here. I’ll try to keep him so busy he doesn’t have time to get into trouble. But it’ll help if he believes he has to walk a narrow line, too.”
“He won’t have to be convinced of that. He isn’t stupid.”
“How much longer you going to need us?” Swan asked He had begun shuffling a deck of cards. Murgen and Thai Dei seemed eager to join him in a pastime that had made a comeback during our sojourn in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
“Go ahead. There’s not much to do now but wait. And watch Uncle Doj sneak around with all those snail shells like he can’t even conceive of the idea that anybody would be alert enough to notice.” That was how the Unknown Shadows had crossed the plain and gotten here. So who on my team was in cahoots with Tobo and the Captain?
I could not wait forever, though. Nor did I have any intention of facing any Voroshk soldiers. My only quarrel with the Voroshk sprang from their presumption that the Company existed only as an as yet untapped resource.
I deplore that attitude wherever I encounter it.
There was a full moon in Khatovar that night. I went strolling in the moonlight. My ravens came and went. They traveled like lightning as long as I did not try to watch them do it.
The Unknown Shadows are every bit as wicked and dangerous as Hsien folklore indicates. It was almost too easy for them to taunt and lure the forvalaka away from the umbrella of protection offered by the Voroshk sorcerers.
The Captain slithered up beside Suvrin, lifted her head just enough to be able to see the shadowgate separating the plain from home. “We’re only thirty miles from where you were born, Suvrin.” She had tried for years now to think of a better nickname than Suvrin, which meant Junior in Sangel, his native tongue. She had not found anything more exotic that fit.
“Less. I wonder if anybody’ll remember me.”
Behind them thousands waited anxiously. Hungrily. Way too much time had gotten wasted crossing the plain. Sleepy brushed aside a twinge of guilt.
“How many of them are there?” she asked. A camp lay just below the shadowgate. Built on the remains of old Company camps, it looked to have been there a long time. Its shelters had a makeshift but permanent appearance. They were part of a squalor which characterized all things military under the Protector’s rule.
“There are fifty-six people. Including nine women and twenty-four children.”
“That isn’t exactly enough to stop a breakout attempt.”
“We aren’t why they’re there. They’re armed but they aren’t real soldiers. They don’t pay any attention to the road or the gate. During the day most of them just work their fields.” Several feeble examples of primitive agriculture lay scattered along the banks of the creek at the bottom of the hill. “I thought about jumping them but decided I’d better wait till Tobo could look them over. I think they’re really here because of the shadows.”
“We’ll send commandos down after sunset. Roll them up before they know what hit them.” The Captain was not pleased with her protege’s indecision.
Suvrin said, “Better have Tobo check them out first. Really. They’re always more active after dark.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s almost twilight now. Hang on. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Don’t make me wait all night, Suvrin.” Sleepy eased back. Once she could rise without being seen from below she did so, strode to her waiting staff. “There’s a garrison in our way. Not a large one. Shouldn’t be any trouble because they don’t appear to be expecting anything. I want to make sure none of them get away once we move. Runmust. Iqbal. Head back up the road. Have everybody fall out. Maintaining plain discipline. Tell them to eat. To get their weapons ready. No fires permitted, though. We don’t want to show any smoke or light. We might not go in till after midnight but I want everyone ready to go when I say it’s time to go.”
Relays of messengers carried word back along the column.
“There. Watch. That’s what I mean,” Suvrin said, pointing. Tobo and the Captain lay to either side of him. The garrison below had begun an exhaustive examination of the area around the shadowgate, illuminating the area from several directions using a variety of sources of light. “They’re obviously looking for leaks right now. It’ll get more interesting in a minute.”
Soon afterward a three-man team brought up a thin-necked earthenware jar of about a gallon’s capacity mounted in a wooden rack which they crowded right up against the sorcerous boundary that prevented the shadows, the Unforgiven Dead, from leaving the plain.
The lighting was bright but still not good enough for even Tobo’s sharp young eyes to discern clearly what was going on but, whatever they were up to, those people were being extremely cautious.
“I’ve got it!” Tobo said after watching intently for about ten minutes. “They’re trying to catch shadows. They’ve got a tiny little hole bored through the barrier there and they’re hoping an overeager shadow will pop through it into their jar.”
“They work for Soulcatcher,” Sleepy said, maybe just to dampen the boy’s enthusiasm. She now understood why Suvrin had been so cautious.
“Of course they do. Who else? We need to think this over. If she has a whole bunch of shadows under her control . . . ”
“It’s too late to turn back.” As though he had suggested anything of the sort. Sleepy rolled onto her back, rubbed her forehead with her left hand. The stars above were the stars of her childhood. She had not seen them for far too long. “I missed our stars.”
Suvrin replied, “I did, too. I’ve spent a lot of time here just enjoying them.”
“You haven’t sent even one scout through yet?”
“I really haven’t had the chance. I didn’t want to commit you to anything by taking everything into my own hands. Anyway, I had to fix the gate before I could do anything else and I’ve gotten maybe an hour a night when I could get down there to work on that.”
“It’s ready, now, though. Isn’t it? I’ve got twelve thousand men up here. Don’t tell me we have to wait some more.”
“You can go through any time.”
Tobo grunted. “The Nef.”
Sleepy rolled back onto her stomach. Sure enough, the dreamwalkers had appeared down by the locals. They remained transparent. They jumped and gestured. The workers beyond the barrier ignored them.
“They can’t see them,” Tobo said.
The Nef abandoned their effort to communicate with the shadowcatchers and swept upslope to harangue the watchers on the lip of the plain.
“What’re they trying to tell us?” Sleepy asked.
Tobo replied, “I don’t know. I can actually hear a whisper sometimes but I still can’t understand them. If Dad was here . . . He was almost a dreamwalker. I think he might understand them a little bit.”
“It’s probably safe to assume that there’s something they don’t want us to do. That’s what it always has been once somebody does figure it out. But doing what we want hasn’t ever led to trouble for us. Has it?”
The wait stretched. Suvrin said, “It’s always like this.” He rolled over. “Why don’t we watch for shooting stars?”
Tobo said, “I’m going down there. I want to hear what they’re saying.”
“Ignoring the fact that they’ll see you, when did you learn to speak Sangel?” Sleepy asked.
“I’ve picked up a few words from Suvrin. We had to do something during those tedious journeys to the shadowgates. Although I don’t think these guys will be speaking anything but Taglian. They have to be people the Protector trusts. Meaning people whose families are where she can eat them up if she’s disappointed with anybody’s behavior. They aren’t going to see me.”
Doj had taught him well. He was all but invisible descending that slope, using no magic at all. The shadowcatchers noticed nothing. But the dreamwalkers did. They became agitated. Then the few shadows in the vicinity, not swarming beside the road with all their kin, hoping some soldier would stupidly break the protective barrier, also began to scoot from hiding place to hiding place erratically. One darted up and through the pinhole into the earthenware jar.
The shadowcatchers congratulated one another. In a moment they had both jar and barrier sealed, the latter with an almost invisible bit of bamboo. Tobo sensed powerful spells in its wood. Soulcatcher did not want the more potent shadows pushing through that valve.
The capture of a single shadow satisfied the shadowcatchers. They packed up for the night.
“That’s it?” Sleepy asked.
“That’s the first time I’ve actually seen them catch one,” Suvrin replied. “I guess it doesn’t happen very often.”
Moments after the shadowcatchers left, Tobo stepped through the shadowgate into the world of his birth. Suvrin had made his repairs correctly.
The boy took a deep breath. He listened to the soft noises made by the commandos already coming down from the plain. There had been no alarm as he had passed through the shadowgate and there was none when the commandos began to ease through. Plainly, the Protector did not fear the south. Though she had leapt up from the grave a few times herself, she did not anticipate that kind of refractory behavior on the part of her enemies.
“Water sleeps,” Tobo told the night, and began to cast a spell that would send the shadowcatcher crew into a deep sleep. He had learned the spell from One-Eye, who had stolen it from Goblin over a hundred years ago.
Always his thoughts found their way back to Goblin.
Kina was the Mother of Deceivers. Suppose she had done nothing whatsoever to the little wizard? Nobody would believe that. And nobody would ever trust him again. Tons of time and resources would be wasted keeping an eye on him.
Was that it? Was Goblin just a diversion? Was there any way to find out?
He was supposed to be on fire with the creative brilliance of youth. He ought to be able to devise something workable.
The prisoners looked on in wide-eyed amazement as battalion after battalion marched down off the plain. An army this size had not been seen since the Kiaulune wars. Soulcatcher had won the laurels in that round because the Company had been hopelessly outclassed in matters of sorcery.
The Radisha Drah and the Prahbrindrah Drah had prominent places in that parade. Clad in imperial finery, accompanied by dozens of Taglian royal banners, their presence was a declaration Sleepy wanted made early and often.
It was a declaration that was wasted here, of course, because none of these witnesses would be allowed to carry the news out ahead of the advance of the invasion force. But Sleepy thought it would be a good idea for the Prince and Princess to begin practicing to reassume their historic roles.
Suvrin was gone already. As were scores more pickets and scouts and recon soldiers. The Soldiers of Darkness were loose. Poor Suvrin was having to run ahead again, now tasked to close the southern end of the pass through the Dandha Presh. A job for which he needed no special training. It was the one he had held at the time when Sleepy had taken him prisoner, while on her way to release us poor old Captured from our durance beneath the plain.
Once Suvrin was sure the pass could not be used by rumor-mongers from the south side he was supposed to go on through and seize the military works at Charandaprash. Which were likely to have no garrison at all, considering Soulcatcher’s attitude toward her armed forces.
Suvrin would know that layout well before he got there. Tobo had brought sack after sack of old snail shells off the plain once the way was open. An unseen flood had begun to spread across the region once known as the Shadowlands. Tobo would know everything his creatures knew. Tobo would have those creatures carry the news to anyone else who needed to know it.
Tension ran high and continued to rise. Those who knew Soulcatcher knew she would hear of the invasion eventually. Her response was sure to be violent and showy, swift and unpredictable and nothing anyone wanted to endure.
Narayan groaned when the girl wakened him. He regained control quickly, however. The Protector was out there somewhere, never closer than she had been these past two days. The Daughter of Night’s valiant efforts, using talents she did not understand, had been just enough to prevent their capture. But it was a close thing every day. And the game might not last much longer. He and the girl had nothing left. If the Protector brought in some of the shadows she controlled . . .
“What is it?” he breathed. He fought the pain that was with him always nowadays.
“Something’s happened. Something big. I can feel it. It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s like my mother woke up, took a look around, then went back to sleep.”
Narayan did not understand. He said so.
“It was her. I know. She touched me.” From confusion the girl moved swiftly toward assurance and confidence. “She wanted me to know that she’s still there. She wanted me to hang on. She wanted me to know things will be getting better soon.”
Narayan, who had known the girl’s birth mother well, suspected the child took after her aunt, the Protector, far more. The Protector was changeable. The Daughter of Night’s moods could shift with a change in the breeze. He wished she were more stable, like her mother. Although Lady could become obsessively focused. For example, she was determined to even scores with him and the Deceiver cult. She had been Kina’s tool but had no love or respect whatsoever for the Goddess.
“Did you hear me, Narayan? She’s there! She’s not going to lay low much longer.”
“I heard. And I really am as excited as you are. But there are wonders and wonders. We still have to get away from the Protector.” He indicated the sky to their west. Crows swarmed not half a mile down the long, scrubby slope.
Soulcatcher had her obsessions, too. This chase had gone on forever, successfully for neither party thereto. Did the Protector have no other work to do? Who was managing Taglios and its territories? Deviltry was sure to flourish in her absence.
From the beginning of the chase Narayan had been confident that Soulcatcher would get bored and would turn to something else. She always did.
But not this time. This time she was dogged.
Why?
No telling with the Protector. She might have had a vision of the future. She might be unable to think of a more amusing hobby. She was twisted inside. Her motives might not always make sense even to her.
The crows began to fan out to the north of what must be Soulcatcher’s position. They seemed to be interested in a slice of pie arc. They drifted on the breeze, not working hard, slowly moving away. Narayan and the Daughter of Night watched without moving. Crows were sharp of eye. If the two most holy Deceivers could see them, the crows could see the Deceivers in turn—if the girl’s erratic talent failed for even a moment.
A single bird glided to the southeast, rather drunkenly, Narayan thought. Soon no black bird could be seen in any direction.
Narayan said, “Let’s move on now. While we can. You know, I think that haze down south might be the Dandha Presh. We’ll be in the mountains in another week. She won’t have a hope of catching us there.”
He was whistling in the dark. And they both knew it.
The Daughter of Night led the way. She was far more mobile than Narayan. Frequently she grew impatient with Narayan’s inability to keep up. Sometimes she cursed him and hit him. He suspected that she would desert him if she had any other resource. But her horizons never did extend far beyond the boundaries of their cult and she understood that the living saint had far more influence with the Deceivers than did any ill-schooled female messiah whose status as such was accepted only because it bore the living saint’s chop of authenticity.
Narayan’s lagging actually saved them. The girl was squatting in brush, looking back with ill-concealed irritation. “There’s a clearing. It’s big. Not much cover. Shall we wait until dark? Or should we work our way around?” It was much too difficult for her to keep them invisible when they were in the open.
Narayan sometimes wondered what she might have become had she grown up with her birth mother. Lady would have turned her into a dark terror by now, he was certain. Not for the first or even the hundredth time he wished Kina had allowed him to sacrifice Lady the day he had claimed the newly born Daughter of Night. His life since would have been much easier had the woman died then. “Let me look.”
Narayan crouched. Pain clawed his bad leg as though someone was slashing him with a dull knife. He peered out at a stony waste almost devoid of life—except for a stunted, twisted stump of a tree smack in the middle. It stood just over five feet tall. There was a familiar feeling to it. He had not seen it before but knew he should recognize it. “Don’t move,” he told the Daughter of Night. “Don’t even breathe fast. There’s something not quite right out there.”
He froze. The girl froze. She never questioned him in these things. He was right every time.
It came to him eventually. He whispered. “That’s the Protector, that stump. Wrapped inside an illusion. She’s used the trick before. I heard about it when I was a prisoner of the Black Company. It was one of the devices she used when she was stalking them and they kept telling each other to look out for it. Look carefully at the root of that branch that twists around twice and ends in a cluster of little twigs. See the crow hiding there?”
“Yes.”
“Back away carefully. Slowly. What? . . . Freeze!”
The girl froze. She remained unmoving for many minutes, until Narayan began to relax. She murmured, “What was it?” Neither the stump nor the crow had done anything alarming.
“There was something . . . ” But he was no longer sure. It had been there in the corner of his eye for an instant but not there when he looked directly. “Over by that big red boulder.”
“Hush!” The girl stared in another direction. “I think . . . There. Something . . . I can’t see anything but I can feel it. I think it’s watching the tree . . . ”
Grrr!
Both felt rather than heard the growl from behind them.
Such was their self-discipline, after years on the run, that neither so much as flinched. Something large and dark and not quite there trotted past. The living saint’s mouth opened wide but no scream came forth. The girl drifted closer to him without making any sudden movement.
What seemed like a series of large black cutouts of an unfamiliar animal flickered across the open ground. It looked nothing like a dog. It had too many limbs. But in its brief moment beside the stump it lifted a hind leg and loosed a river.
And then, of course, it was not there anymore. But Soulcatcher was, in her own form. And she was in a towering rage.
“Something has changed,” Narayan gasped through his pain.
“Something more than Mother.”
Something more than the Mother of Night.
Something that, from that moment onward, left them feeling as though they were being watched every moment—even when they could see nothing around them anywhere.
My ravens worked hard. Within the same hour I learned that Sleepy had broken out into our homeworld and that the forvalaka had left the Voroshk and was rushing our way. I began issuing orders immediately. Bowalk could not possibly arrive for hours but I wanted to make sure that each of my companions was exactly positioned and that all of my resources could be brought to bear almost instantly. Willow Swan followed me around reminding me that most of the fussing I was doing was exactly the sort of half-ass officiousness I resented from Sleepy.
“You want to make your future home in Khatovar, Swan?”
“Hey, don’t kill the messenger.”
I grunted unhappily, went and collected my sweetheart. “It’s time we got dressed up. Get ready for the show.”
“Ooh!” she said. “I’ve always had a weakness for men in black with birds on their shoulders.”
Our preparations were complete. Our dozen surviving fireball projectors were positioned, I felt, to perfection to bring the forvalaka under saturating fire as she attacked me. If that did not destroy her itself it would drive her to me, directly onto One-Eye’s black spear. I looked forward to our confrontation. That was unusual for me. I am not one of those men who enjoys the killing side of this business.
The ravens had the monster just an hour away. People were having a last meal so we could get the fires all put out before it arrived. There was a pig that Doj had killed. It went fast. Not many vegetarians in my crew.
Murgen joined Lady and me where we were playing paper, rock, knife with Willow Swan. “Goblin’s here. He just came over the rim of the plain. There’s two guys with him. That’s a good look for you.” He had not yet seen the new Widowmaker armor in action.
“Bless the Captain and her infinite wisdom,” I grumbled. “That was quick. Let’s keep an eye on the little shit.” Like that needed repeating. I asked Lady, “Should I put him to work?”
“Absolutely. Right out front. One-Eye was his best friend, wasn’t he?”
“Murgen, when he gets down here, after we talk to him, I want him positioned down there where I put the pair of two-inchers. We don’t know if either of those has anything left in them. Then have those guys fall back to cover the approach to the shadowgate. You and Thai Dei stay with Goblin.”
Murgen offered me a carefully blank look.
“If you have to, stick him. Or bop him over the head. If he gives you a reason.”
“Which might be?”
“I don’t know. You’re an intelligent adult. Don’t you think you can tell if he needs smacking around?”
“Don’t you think that that’s what those guys with him are there for?”
I had not thought of that. It did seem probable. “Are they men we know well enough to trust completely?”
“I couldn’t make out who they were yet when I came over here.”
“Then the instruction stands.”
I studied Goblin intently. I had not seen him since before I had gone underground. He had aged a lot. “Last I knew of you, you’d deserted.”
“I’m sure One-Eye explained all that.” The voice was the same but there was an indefinable difference in the man that, probably, had more to do with time and the betrayals of memory than it did with any evil new within him, but I have never gone far wrong by being suspicious.
Goblin’s stature approached the extreme low altitude end of normal humanity. And he was wide, despite not having eaten well in recent years. And he had almost no hair at all anymore. Nor did he smile readily. He seemed infinitely tired, as though he labored under a weight of weariness that stretched all the way back into antiquity.
My long nap in the cave of the ancients had not been all that restful, either.
“One-Eye was a notorious liar. The way I heard it—fifteen years after the fact—was that it was all your idea and he just got dragged along.”
“The Captain was satisfied.” He did not argue and he did not make light. And that was the last clue I needed. There was no humor left in this Goblin. That was the big change.
“Good for her. You’ve arrived just in time. The forvalaka is only minutes away. We’re going to kill it this time. You didn’t lose any of your skills while you were trapped, did you?”
Something stirred in the deeps of his eyes. It seemed cold and angry but might have been just his irritation because so many pairs of eyes peered at him so intently, so suddenly.
“Captain?”
That had to be one of the real old hands. Everyone else was out of the habit, though many still called Lady “Lieutenant” because Sleepy never filled that position officially. Sahra did much of the work despite her official status as an outsider.
Why did we set such store by these tiny distinctions?
“What?”
“There’s movement out there. Probably the Black Hounds coursing the forvalaka. Which means the monster is getting close.”
“Full alert. Murgen, show Goblin his post.” I clattered and clanked. The armor was mainly costume but it was real and it was heavy.
“Captain!” From farther away. “Down there!” A man stood out of his concealment, pointing.
I gawked.
“Shit!” Lady exploded. “Why the hell didn’t your crows tell us about that?” She dove for cover.
Three flying things were headed toward us from the west, in a V formation. My man had spotted them so far away that, despite their speed, we had time to observe their approach. Eagle-eye there was a guy who deserved a bonus.
The flyers had made the mistake of approaching at an altitude calculated to avoid the notice of the Unknown Shadows. That left them completely vulnerable to detection by the naked eye because it silhouetted them against the clear blue sky on the one day the weather chose to be neither overcast nor rainy.
Lady snapped. “You concentrate on the shape changer, darling. This is a diversion. I’ll deal with it.” She shouted orders. I boomed a few of my own.
She was wrong, of course. The forvalaka was the diversion for those flying Voroshk—though Bowalk would be convinced that the reverse was true. Once they moved closer the airborne sorcerers appeared to be rippling lumps clinging to long fenceposts. They were wrapped in and trailed acres of something resembling black silk cloth.
They must have had some reason to believe that we would not be able to see them. They made no effort not to be noticed.
When they slowed their approach I suspected immediately they wanted to coordinate timing with the forvalaka—and I was right.
A burst of screams and dark fury erupted a scant hundred yards from our most forward post. Unknown Shadows were all over the forvalaka. Exactly as they were supposed to be, suddenly and briefly, at that point.
The moment Bowalk stopped charging to rip at the spooks they faded away.
For that moment she made a wonderful target.
The fireball projectors opened up.
Unfortunately, most that worked sped their blazing, unpredictable missiles toward the Khatovaran sorcerers. Only two light bamboo pieces remained trained on the monster. And one of those gave up the ghost after projecting just one bilous green ball that flew in erractic skips and jerks but did graze the beast along the flank scars she had gained during our previous encounter. She took a solid hit in the shoulder from the other projector.
She could scream.
I did not look away. Lady kept talking, keeping me informed. She told me the flyers had been surprised completely. That made me suspect that there had been little honesty between Lisa Daele Bowalk and the Voroshk sorcerers.
They should have known. All of them.
The Voroshk were not entirely unprepared for trouble. They had surrounded themselves with protective spells which did shunt the lightest fireballs aside—usually from the path of the leader into those of the trailing two. But those spells could not turn everything and they weakened quickly.
I was bracing to receive the charge of the forvalaka when one of the flyers streaked across in front of me, behind Bowalk, tumbling, all that silk aflame. A scream ended abruptly as the sorcerer impacted somewhere to my right.
My strategy was to channel the forvalaka toward me and One-Eye’s spear, hurting it as much as possible as it approached. I had mounted the black spear in the end of a twelve foot bamboo pole to give myself a little added reach. Once Bowalk was pinned, the people with the fireballs could finish her off. Assuming One-Eye’s spear had not lost its potency with his death.
And assuming the people with the fireballs were not busy with the distraction overhead. I risked a glance. The lead flyer was circling back. Whatever he had intended to do he had not, because he had been forced to concentrate on his defenses instead. The remaining Voroshk had come to a halt several hundred yards east of us, smoldering, drifting on the breeze, evidently still alive but just barely. Before I shifted my attention back to the forvalaka I noted that that flyer was gaining altitude very slowly.
A swarm of javelins and arrows buzzed around the werepanther. The darts were all poisoned. Just in case a few did penetrate her skin.
Wonder of wonders! A lot of arrows were sticking. A sort of black haze seemed to cover the monster, making the boundary between her and the rest of the universe appear poorly defined.
Lady was yelling. A lot. Fire discipline was critical. We would be able to create no new fireball-spitting bamboo poles until we were safely back in our own world. Half of those we started this fight with were out of action already. The guys had not been in a real fight for years but they did remember what was what. The fireballs stopped going up even before my wife started yelling again. Several men did take the opportunity to put fireballs into the forvalaka, though. Poor Lisa had no friends.
She was not as invulnerable as I had expected. She began to stagger drunkenly well before I had hoped she would respond to the poisons. The endurance and stamina of her kind were legendary and in our experience were exceeded only by the ferocious vitality of the sorcerers who had belonged to the circle that had been known as the Ten Who Were Taken. Of whom Soulcatcher and the Howler were the last. Of whom there would be no survivors much longer.
I was determined. I had a whole list of people who were going to blaze the way to hell for me.
Now the monster was up again, evidently shaking off the effects of missiles and fireballs and chemicals. She was gathering herself for the charge that would get her in amongst us and render her safe from our most dangerous weapons just when she could start using her jaws and claws.
I do not know what the Voroshk tried to do. I know the fireballs flew again, there was a shudder in the ground like somebody had hit it a few yards away with a ten-thousand-pound hammer, then the forvalaka launched herself my way in a sort of weak, half-hearted leap, one hind paw dragging in the dust. Smoke came off her at a dozen points. The stench of burnt flesh preceded her.
I glimpsed the last Voroshk streaking across the sky behind the monster. He was tumbling.
Bowalk batted at my makeshift pike as she flew toward me. Her effort was weak and slow. The head of One-Eye’s spear entered and passed through the flesh of her right shoulder, which had been injured badly already. I felt it bounce off bone. She screamed. Her weight ripped my weapon out of my hand even though I had the butt of the bamboo pole set firmly against the ground.
Her momentum spun her around. She managed to slap me with a paw and send me ass over appetite before she landed and became preoccupied with the black spear. My armor withstood her claws. I barely knew up from down for a moment but I did keep my head attached to the end of my neck.
I regained possession of my bamboo pole but not of the spear. The forvalaka was writhing around, screaming and snarling and snapping at the spear while my comrades were careful to stay out of her way. The occasional arrow or javelin continued to dart in, when there was no risk of a miss.
The Voroshk remained out of the struggle. One burned on the slope east of us. One rose higher and higher, now yielding streamers of smoke. The last circled cautiously, either looking for an opening or just observing. Each time he started to dart in, a score of bamboo poles pointed his way, offering to welcome him. I suspect most were dead. But he could find out the truth of that only the hard way.
A huge black sword of a design similar to Doj’s Ash Wand came with the Widowmaker costume. I drew it as the forvalaka tried to come at me. I felt almost foolish behind the excitement and fear. It had been decades since I had used a sword anywhere but in practice sessions with Doj. I did not know this one at all. It might be little more than a showpiece. It might snap the first time I struck a blow.
The shapeshifter staggered forward a few steps. Someone hit it a glancing shot with a fireball. Javelins and arrows continued to arrive. It snapped at the wound where One-Eye’s spear stood forth, again. The arrows and javelins all fell out eventually but not that black spear. It was working its way slowly deeper.
I stepped in, struck. The tip of my blade bit several inches into the big cat’s left shoulder. She barely stumbled. The wound bled for seconds only, then closed, healing before my eyes.
I struck again, near the same site. Then again. Not despairing. Her vitality was no surprise. But her wounds were not healing as fast as once they had. And that spear was worming its way deeper. And she seemed to be losing the will to fight.
Shouts!
The healthy Voroshk was boring in on me, coming fast, his protection turning first the fireballs rising to meet him, then the arrows and bolts. I pranced around and braced myself to flail away when he got close enough. He raised one hand as if to throw something. But before he could, my white crow appeared out of nowhere and hit him from behind. In the head. His chin slammed against his chest.
I doubt he suffered any damage but he did forget me for the moment. He flailed at the raven. The ghost bird had secured a perch on his shoulder and was trying to peck his eyes.
Even up close I could see no face. That was hidden by wraps of the same cloth enshrouding everything else.
I swung away but misjudged the Voroshk’s speed. My blade chopped into the post he was riding a foot behind his butt and tore itself from my hands. Then he hit ground. Then, howling, he bounced into the air and streaked away in a lazy curve that tended northward, all the while spinning round and round the axis of his flying post. His robes or cape or whatever billowed all over the sky. Tatters tore loose and fluttered down.
The forvalaka continued to weaken. Cautiously, some men left cover and surrounded the beast. Lady and Doj joined me within striking distance. Each carried one of the debilitating fetishes Tobo had created using the tail and bits of skin Bowalk had left behind when she killed One-Eye. Lady had shown him what to do. The fetishes were particularly effective because Lady and Tobo had had Lisa Daele Bowalk’s true name to work with.
I said, “Swan, take a squad to check out the one that’s burning over there. Be careful. Murgen, keep an eye on the other two.” The Voroshk who had streaked off rolling was under control again and headed our way at a crawl, gaining altitude, moving toward the Voroshk who remained airborne and still rising slowly. That one had begun drifting with the breeze and showing some evidence of actual flames.
I asked my darling, “Darling, is there any chance you’re keeping an eye on Goblin?” Our mysteriously resurrected brother had remained extremely quiet during the exchange of greetings between the Voroshk family and the Black Company. Unless I had missed something while I was preoccupied.
“There are two guaranteed-good bamboo poles aimed at him right now.”
“Excellent. You are going to be able to make more of those things once we get back home, aren’t you? They’re the best weapons we’ve ever had.”
“I’ll make some. If there’s time. Once my sister knows we’re back we’re going to get extremely busy.”
Egg-yolk light suddenly drenched the world. It faded before I looked up and saw a thousand-armed starfish of a cloud blossoming where the smoldering Voroshk sorcerer had been drifting.
The other Voroshk was headed north again, this time end over end. And someone was falling directly toward us, vast expanses of black cloth fluttering behind, smoke boiling off that. There was no sign of the log the Voroshk had been riding. Its fall seemed terribly slow.
Meantime, undistracted from his task, Willow Swan was bellowing across the slope. He wanted a stretcher.
Lady observed, “That one is still alive.”
“We have a hostage. Somebody poke that thing with a pike. It’s probably playing possum.” The forvalaka had stopped struggling. It lay on its back, tilted slightly to one side, both hands grasping the shaft of One-Eye’s spear.
“Hands,” Murgen said as Thai Dei prodded the monster with one of the longer fireball projectors.
“Hands,” I said, too. The change was coming over her. The change she had longed for ever since we had murdered her lover-master Shapeshifter, way back during our first assault on Dejagore.
Lady said, “She’s dying.” She sounded both puzzled and a little disappointed.
Arising shriek rushed us from above. The falling, flailing Voroshk smashed through the leaf roof of a shelter. The shrieking stopped. Bits of roof flew upward. I said, “Murgen, go check that out.”
When I looked back to the forvalaka, I discovered that Goblin had joined us. He pushed through the crowd and stood over the monster, staring down. She was about halfway changed, her arms and legs having become a badly scarred, naked woman. She was aware enough to recognize Goblin.
The frog-faced little man said, “We tried to help you and you wouldn’t let us. We could’ve saved you but you turned on us. So now you pay. You mess with the Company, you pay.” He started to reach for One-Eye’s spear.
Men jumped every which way. Half a dozen bamboo poles swung toward Goblin. Crossbows came off shoulders.
The little wizard’s mouth opened and closed several times. Then his hand slowly withdrew.
I guess news of One-Eye’s dying words had gotten around.
Goblin squeaked, “Maybe you shouldn’t have rescued me.”
Lady told him, “We didn’t,” but did not expand upon her remark. She drew me away. “He has something to do with Bowalk dying so easily.”
I glanced over there. “She isn’t dead yet.”
“She should have been much tougher.”
“Even considering the fetishes and One-Eye’s spear?”
She thought about that. “Maybe. When she’s done dying you’d better make sure that thing is hard to reach. I don’t like the look in Goblin’s eye when he stares at it.”
That look was there now, though the little wizard showed no inclination to do anything certain to inspire a swift and violent response.
Swan and his gang were approaching, four of the men at the corners of a makeshift litter. Trotting ahead, Swan puffed, “Wait’ll you get a look at this, Croaker. You ain’t going to believe it.”
At the same moment Murgen called for another stretcher. So the other Voroshk had survived, too.
Swan was on the mark. The girl on the stretcher was impossible to believe. Maybe sixteen, blonde, as gorgeous as every boy’s fantasy. I asked my wife, “Darling, is this for real?” And to Swan, “Good job, Willow.” He had bound and gagged the girl so as to disarm most of a sorcerer’s simpler tricks.
Lady said, “You men get back.” There was not much left of what the girl had been wearing. And more than a few of the guys were the sort who would count her fair game for having tried to attack us. Some were the sort who would dish out the same treatment to a male captive. They might be my brethren but that did not make them less cruel men.
Lady told Swan, “Take Doj back over there and collect anything you can find that belonged to her. Her clothing and that thing she was riding in particular.” And to me she said, “Yes, dear, she’s the real thing. Except for just a touch of makeup. I hate her already. Goblin! You come over here and stand where I can see you.”
I stared down at the Voroshk girl, not focusing on the lushness and freshness of her but on the blondness and whiteness. I have read all the Annals, all the way back to the first volume—albeit, admittedly, a several-generations-removed-from-original copy—that had been begun before our forebrethren ever left Khatovar. Those men had not been tall and white and blond. Could the Voroshk be another out-world scourge like the Shadowmasters of my own world and Hsien?
At that moment Lady removed her helmet, the better to menace me for staring. And I realized she was quite white herself, even if not blonde.
Why expect the peoples of Khatovar to be any more homogeneous than the peoples of my own world?
Murgen and his crew came jogging up, carrying another body on another crude litter. The first had escaped most of the effects of impact and fire. This one had been less fortunate.
“Another girl,” I observed. That fact was hard to ignore. She was more obvious than the first.
“Younger than the other one.”
“But just as well put together.”
“Better, from where I’m standing.”
“They’re sisters,” Lady growled. “You have an idea what this means?”
“Probably that the Voroshk had so little respect for us that they sent out some kids so they could get in some practice. But after what’s happened, Daddy and Grandpa will take a closer interest.” I beckoned. “Gather round, gentlemen.” Once everyone not doing something closed in, I said, “In a short time we’re probably going to have a sky full of unfriendly company. I want you to start pulling up stakes and getting the animals and equipment back through the gate. Right now.”
Lady asked, “You think that third one will make it back to the Voroshk army?”
“No way will I bet against it. My mother’s optimistic children have all been dead for fifty years.” I glanced at the forvalaka. It was almost entirely Lisa Bowalk now. Except for the head. “Looks like some mythological beast, don’t she?”
She was not dead yet. Her eyes were open. They were no longer cat’s eyes. They begged. She did not want to die.
I told Lady, “She doesn’t look any older than the last time I saw her.” She was still a young and attractive woman—for one whose formative years had been spent surviving the worst slum of a truly ugly city. “Hey, Cratch. Grab Slobo. I want you guys to bring all the firewood over here and pile it on this thing.”
Goblin said, “I’ll help.”
“I’ll tell you what, runt. You want a job, you can build me a couple of good litters so we can take our new girlfriends with us.”
Lady asked, “Are they fit to travel?”
“The older one could probably get up and limp along on her own if she was conscious. I’ll need a closer look here before I can tell how bad this one’s hurt, though.”
“You watch what you’re poking and squeezing, old man.”
“You’d think that, at your age, you’d have developed a little better sense of humor, old woman. Don’t you understand that every profession has its perks? A surgeon gets to poke and squeeze.”
“So does a wife.”
“I knew I forgot something when we did that ceremony thing. Shoulda brung a lawyer. Cratch! Nobody touches that spear till we start the fire. And I’ll do any touching that gets done. Where are my birds? I’ve got to get the Black Hounds called in.” We could not leave them here. They were going to be critical weapons in the war with Soulcatcher. Sleepy was, probably, missing them desperately already.
Swan and three others approached, straining to carry the post the older girl had ridden. Swan puffed. “This goddamned thing weighs a ton!” The four of them started to drop it.
“No!” Lady barked. “Gently! You recall what happened to the other one? Up there?” She pointed. Smoke or dust or whatever still smeared the sky. There was still an occasional crackle of toy lightning inside the cloud, too. “That’s better. Goblin! Doj! Come and take a look at this thing.”
“Check this cloth,” Swan said, offering me a bit of black rag.
It felt like silk and seemed almost weightless. It stretched when I pulled it without tearing or getting any thinner. Or so it seemed.
“Now watch this.” Swan stabbed the cloth with his knife. The knife did not penetrate. It did not cut when he slashed, either.
I said, “Now isn’t that a handy little trick? We’re lucky we had the bamboo. Honey, check this out. Show her, Swan. You, men. Get the post thing on the other side of the gate. Let’s get moving, people! These folks can fly. And the next bunch that shows up aren’t likely to be as friendly.” No one really needed my encouragement, though. A solid line of men, animals and equipment was moving upslope already. The older Voroshk girl was headed uphill already, too, bound to Goblin’s first litter.
When Swan finished showing that cloth to Lady, I told him, “See if you can’t find a log or post in one of the huts that might look like that flying thing from a distance.”
Lady, Goblin and Swan all stared at me. This time I stood on my command right and did not explain. I had a hunch the Voroshk would not want to lose the post. Which my comrades might understand but if I said so they would just ask for further explanations.
I said, “This one has broken bones, bad burns, punctures, cuts and abrasions and probably internal injuries.”
“And?” Lady asked.
“And so I think she won’t be much use to us. Probably die on us. So I’m going to do the best I can for her, then leave her for her own people.”
“Going soft in your old age?”
“Like I said, she’d be more trouble than she’s worth. Plus, the sister ought to be up and around in no time. So if I do right by the one I leave here, the Voroshk might be less inclined to run around behind us trying to get vicious.”
“What’re they going to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to find out. I just take into account the fact that they were able to get Bowalk onto the plain and off again, once each way, without wrecking any shadowgates. I’m hoping they don’t have what it takes to move an army the same way.”
“They wouldn’t need to grab us if they did. Odds are, Bowalk’s trip was possible because of what she was and the fact that she’d bulled through it all once before.”
I looked at the forvalaka. Even its head was Lisa Daele Bowalk now. The same Lisa Bowalk who ruined Marron Shed a thousand subjective years ago. Her eyes were shut but she was still breathing.
We would have to fix that.
Lady told me, “Cut off her head first. Then start the fire.”
The Voroshk were not sneaks. They came out of the northwest in an angry swarm, eager to get at us. There were at least twenty-five in the first wave.
My people were all on the uphill side of the shadowgate but many of the Unknown Shadows had not made it back. I had left snail shells scattered around the woods so they would have somewhere to hide. I would get them out later, once the excitement was over.
The swarm streaked in, vast flutters of black cloth billowing. Even though they could see that we were beyond the shadowgate and our main body was already on the plain they dropped down and streaked over our empty camp, shedding a rain of small objects which turned little patches of ground into puddles of lava and caused vegetation to combust almost explosively. None of our shelters or corrals survived. But nothing touched the injured girl or the forvalaka’s funeral pyre.
“Glad I don’t have to run between those raindrops,” I said. A couple of the Voroshk had tried to award me that experience but the barrier between Khatovar and the plain repelled their missiles easily. And ate their magic right up. They did not activate, even when they dribbled to the ground.
Lady said, “They’re all kids, too.”
The members of the swarm all seemed to do whatever they wanted, going their own ways, yet none of them collided. Once their assault failed to produce results most of them settled to earth around the injured girl.
On my side of the shadowgate we leaned on bamboo poles and watched.
A trio of latecomers formed the second wave. They appeared several minutes after the first flood. “These will be the leaders,” Lady said. “Being a little more cautious than the youngsters.” Even more black fabric billowed around these three.
“The highest ranking members of the Family making the journey,” I conceded. “There sure are a lot of these people. Considering the size of the army they brought.” Not counting the Voroshk themselves, my spies numbered the approaching force at about eight hundred. The light cavalry hurrying ahead numbered fewer than fifty men. There was a good chance we could have beat them up if they had not had all those post riders in the sky looking out for them.
When they grounded, the Voroshk flyers did stand their conveyances on end, like fenceposts that would not tip over without a push from a human hand.
The elders circled a few times before they set down. Then they took time to examine the unconscious child before paying any more attention to us.
I gave a small hand signal as soon as we were on. Men on the slope who had been hanging around gawking resumed moving. The Voroshk chieftains were allowed to see the other girl being led away and what looked like four men lugging a captured flying fencepost. While the heart of my heart and I posed just behind the gate in our best killer costumes. I know there was a huge smirk hanging around inside my helmet.
Out there among the Voroshk, so far ignored but not unnoticed, the headless corpse of our ancient enemy crackled and popped inside a roaring fire. I wished we still had the Lance of Passion to show those guys, too. My ravens had not been able to tell if the Voroshk were aware of who we really were.
I said, “The past always comes back.” I waved. Then I told Lady, “I think it might be a real good idea if we got going now. Their good feelings about us having taken care of that kid just aren’t going to last.”
“You’ve probably stretched it too long already, showing off.” She started up the slope. She did not look at all bad in that armor. She set a brisk pace for such an old gal, too.
Soon all the flying sorcerers were staring uphill, pointing and jabbering at one another. They seemed to be much more excited about us carrying off their flying log than they were about us taking the girl. Maybe she was not anyone important. Or maybe they figured she was old enough to look out for herself.
One of the elders stepped away from that fluttering black crowd. He had a small book in his hand. He turned a couple of pages, found the one he wanted, ran a finger along a few lines as he read. A second elder nodded and apparently repeated what he had to say, with gestured accompaniment. After a moment the third elder took it up, his gestures similar but not in step with those of the other two.
“It’s a round,” I told Lady. We had overtaken the slowest of our people. “Row row row.” I made some gestures myself. “You do anything you’re going to be sorry.”
The Voroshk all spun, presenting their backs to us.
The flash was so bright it blinded me for a moment. When my sight returned another of those hundred-legged starfish of brownish-grey smoke had materialized. This one was not upstairs. This one was right where the shadowgate had been. Centered right where I had hidden the captured flying post under some “abandoned” tenting.
“Warned you,” I murmured.
“How did you know?” Lady asked.
“I’m not sure. A hunch, I guess. Uninhibited intuition.”
“They’ve just killed themselves.” There was almost a hint of compassion in her voice. “They’ll never stop the shadows from flooding through that.”
Some of the Voroshk already recognized the magnitude of the disaster still unfolding. Black fluttering shapes scattered like roaches suddenly exposed to the light. Flying posts took to the air, streaked northward so violently that bits of black cloth ripped off and fluttered down like dark autumn leaves.
The three elders held their positions. They stared our way. I wondered what was happening inside their heads. Almost certainly not any recognition of the fact that the disaster was a direct result of the magnitude of Voroshk arrogance. I have never met one of their kind who would admit any fallibility whatsoever.
I was sure there would be some grand squabbles over where to fix the blame during the time they had left. Human nature at work.
“What are you thinking?” Lady asked.
I realized that I was no longer moving, that I was just watching the Voroshk watch me. “Just looking around inside me, trying to figure out why this doesn’t bother me the way it would have years ago. Why I recognize the pain more easily now but am not touched by it nearly so much.”
“You know what One-Eye used to say about you? You think too much. He was right. You don’t have any more obligation to him. Let’s go back to our own world, see about spanking our little girl and getting my baby sister straightened up.” Her voice changed severely as her thoughts turned. “One thing I demand. Still. Narayan Singh. I want him. He’s mine.”
I winced inside my helmet. Poor Narayan. I said, “I still have one thing to do here.”
“What?” she snapped.
“After those three leave. I have to get Tobo’s friends back.”
She grunted and resumed walking. She had to make sure the road across the plain could be closed behind us, so that we would not become victims of the explosion, too.
Soulcatcher’s survival instincts had been honed to a razor’s edge by centuries of adventures among peoples who considered her continued good health a liability. She sensed a change in the world long before she had any idea what that change might be, good or ill or indifferent, and ages before she dared hazard a guess as to its cause.
At first it was just that sense. Then, gradually, it became the pressure of a thousand eyes. But she could discover nothing. Her crows could find nothing either, other than the occasional, unpredictable, flickering glimpse of their quarry, the two Deceivers. That was ancient news.
Soulcatcher abandoned the hunt immediately. It would not be difficult to get close to the Deceivers again.
She learned nothing more before nightfall—except that her crows were extremely unsettled, getting more and more nervous, less and less tractable and increasingly inclined to jump at shadows. They could not make clear the nature of their malaise because they did not understand it themselves.
That began to grow clearer as the twilight gathered. Messengers interrupted Soulcatcher’s meditations to inform her that several of the murder had fallen prey to a sudden illness. “Show me.”
She made no effort to disguise herself as she followed her birds to the nearest feathered corpse. She picked it up, rolled it carefully in her gloved hands.
It was obvious what had killed the crow. Not illness but a killer shadow. No cadaver looked like one did after a shadow finished with it. But that could not be. It was still light out. Her tame shadows were all in hiding and there were no rogue shadows around anymore. Nor would wild shadows have wasted themselves on a crow when there was human game in the vicinity. She should have heard Narayan Singh and that wretched niece of hers screaming long before any crow . . . There had been no sound from the bird whatsoever. Nor had there been from any of a half dozen others the murder knew to be gone. The survivors had plenty to say. Including stating plainly that they were not about to stray away from her protection.
“How can I fight this if I don’t know what it is? If you won’t find out for me?”
The crows would not be bullied or cajoled. They were geniuses for birds. Which meant they were just bright enough to have noticed that every one of the dead had been completely alone when evil had befallen them.
Soulcatcher cursed them, then calmed herself and convinced the most valiant birds that they had to, therefore, do their scouting in threes and fours until darkness closed in completely. At that point she would have bats and owls and her own shadows available to take over.
Darkness came. As the Deceivers correctly observe, the darkness always comes.
With nightfall came a silent but horribly vicious warfare with Soulcatcher poised at the eye of the storm.
Initially she had to hold on desperately against unknown assailants until her own shadows could bring in enough swift reinforcements. Then, spending shadows profligately, she took the offensive. And when dawn came, and she was almost without supernatural allies because of the cost of the struggle, she gave way to exhaustion, having gained a knowledge of a portion of the truth.
They were back. The Black Company were, with new formations, new allies, new sorceries, and still without a dram of mercy in their hearts. These were not the Company she had known in younger years but they were the spiritual children of the cold killers of the olden days. No matter what you tried, it seemed, you could kill only men. The ideal lived on.
Ha! An end to the boredom of empire stood at hand.
Bravado and pretense did not lessen the inexplicable fear. They had fled onto the plain. And now they were back. That had to mean much more. She needed to interrogate shadows who had existed on the glittering stone during those silent years. When there was time. Before she did anything else she had to do what she always did so well: survive.
She was out here hundreds of miles from any support. She was besieged by things that would not yield to her will or sorcery and which she could detect, it seemed, only through her own shadows or when one of them attacked her directly. They were as fierce as shadows but strange. They were more otherworldly than her spirit slaves and seemed possessed of a higher order of intelligence.
Each one she extinguished personally infected her with both a vast sorrow and with the certainty that she was battling only the most feeble of their kind. Always there was a powerful presentiment of demons or demigods to come.
What she could not comprehend was why all this frightened her so. There was nothing here more deadly or threatening or bizarre than a thousand perils she had faced before. Nothing here matched the sheer dark menace of the Dominator in his time.
There were infrequent moments when she still longed for those dark and ancient times. The Dominator had taken her and all her sisters, had made one of them his wife and another his lover . . .
He had been a strong, hard, cruel man, the Dominator. His empire had been one of cruelty and steel. And Soulcatcher had revelled in its pomp and dark glory. And would never forgive her rival, her last surviving sister, for having brought all that to an end. Blame the death of the Dominator on the White Rose if you wanted. Soulcatcher knew the truth. The Dominator never would have gone down if his whining virgin of a wife had not helped his destruction along.
And who had fought and conspired so hard after their resurrection to keep the Dominator in the ground? His loving wife, that was who!
She would be back. She would be out there somewhere, wherever the Black Company had been hiding. She was not here yet but she would be soon. Having been buried alive again would be no impediment to the inevitable, that grim moment when they would settle their differences face-to-face.
Soulcatcher could will herself blind in some quarters, despite centuries of cynical experience. She would not see that fortune could be just as erratic and insane as she was.
Soulcatcher’s powers of recuperation were tremendous. After a few hours of rest she rose and started walking northward, her stride long and confident. Tonight she would gather an army of her own shadows around her. Never again would she be as threatened as she had been the night before.
So she told herself.
By late afternoon her confidence was as high as ever it had been and fragments of her mind were already peeping past today’s crisis to scout out what might be done to sculpt the future.
Soulcatcher had long been intimate with the knowledge that horrible things could and did happen to her but always she had enjoyed the certainty that she would come through everything alive.
Looks clean,” Swan said. Murgen and Thai Dei grunted agreement. I nodded to the Nyueng Bao. What he had to say meant something here. His eyes were still as sharp as those of a lad of fifteen. I was damned near blind in one and could not see out the other.
“Doj? What do you think? Did they run away? Or did they sneak back just in case we sneaked back?” Element of surprise no longer my ally, I did not want to run into the Voroshk again. Especially not those old men. They would be bitter and in a mood to drag me down to hell with them.
“They went away. They went back to prepare for the onslaught. They know horror and despair are headed their way but they also know they’re strong enough to weather it if they remain calm and work hard.”
I suspect I gaped. “How do you figure all that?”
“It’s just a matter of mental exercise. Take what we know about them, about sorcerers as a whole, and about human beings in general, and the rest follows. They’ve been through this before, in a smaller way. They’ll have worked out what to do if it happened again. All this empty country, from here to the other side of their Dandha Presh, will serve the same function as the cleared ground surrounding a fortress expecting to be besieged.”
“You’ve convinced me. Let’s just hope they’re not so ready that they figure out how to come looking for us after they wrap up their pest problem.” As badly as the shadowgate and nearby barrier had been damaged I doubted the Voroshk would have much energy to spare for generations.
Swan said, “He had me for a minute, too, but here comes the argument that proves what I always knew: Uncle Doj is full of shit.”
A half dozen billowing black forms had emerged from the vegetation down the slope. They were walking very slowly, two by two, hands extended away from their sides, their flying posts tagging along behind at waist height.
I said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on but I want Goblin and Doj ready for anything. Murgen, you and Thai Dei spread out so we can hit them from in front and both sides with fireballs.” Me and my pals had three live poles, literally all our band had left. Lady said there were just six usable fireballs between the three. She hoped.
One for each of the Voroshk.
Swan said, “You sure we really need to round up those spooks? Life would be a lot easier . . . ”
“Right here. Right now. But what happens back home when we’ve got Soulcatcher coming at us and we yell for Tobo to let loose the Black Hounds and there ain’t no Black Hounds? And the rest of the Unknown Shadows say, ‘Fuck that shit! I ain’t getting skragged for these guys who wouldn’t even try to bring the Hounds out of Khatovar.’ ”
Swan growled. Goblin sneered, “A little passion, Captain? I thought you’d lost it all.”
“When I want shit out of you, runt, I’ll kick it out. What did he just say?” The Voroshk had stopped coming toward us. One had spoken. And, O wonder, his words sounded like something I ought to understand. “Say that again, buddy.”
The sorcerer got the idea. He repeated himself, loudly and slowly, the way you do with the hard of hearing, the dim of wit and foreigners.
“What is that noise?” I asked. “I know there were words in there that I should recognize.”
“Remember Juniper?” Goblin said. “It sounds like he’s trying to speak what they spoke there.”
“Makes sense. Bowalk came from Juniper. So listen close.” Goblin had served in Juniper, too. A long time ago. I have a knack for languages. Could I get enough of this one back fast enough to do us any good? We did not have many hours of daylight left.
Something began to get past the fact that the Voroshk had a horrible accent and his grammar was atrocious. He butchered tenses and inverted his verbs and subjects.
Goblin and I compared notes as we proceeded. The little wizard had never spoken the language well but he had had no trouble understanding it.
“What’s going on?” Swan demanded. He was holding one of the bamboo poles. It was getting heavy.
“Sounds like they want us to take them with us. That they think the end of the world is coming and they don’t want to participate.”
Goblin nodded, agreeing. He added a caveat, “But I wouldn’t trust them for a second. I’d always assume they were sent to spy on us.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d do that with just about anybody.”
Goblin ignored the jibe. “Make them strip. Bone naked. Doj I and I can go over their clothes like we’re looking for nits.”
“All right. Only I’m taking Doj with me to help collect my snail shells.” I began telling the Voroshk what they had to do if they really wanted to go with us. They were not pleased. They wanted to argue. I did not argue even though I hoped to get my hands on a flying post or two so Lady and Tobo could study them. Damn, having a few of those sure would be handy.
I told the Voroshk, “If I don’t see naked bodies I’d better see the backs of people getting away. Anybody who isn’t doing one or the other by a count of fifty will die where he’s standing on his dignity.” The language came back to me quite well, though I did not really make my statement that clearly. The two Voroshk who were probably the brightest began disrobing almost immediately. They proved to be as pale and blond as the girls we had seen already, though red with embarrassment and shaking with fury. I watched carefully, not with much interest in their flesh. How much determination they put into something humiliating would give me a hint or two about their sincerity.
It was too much for one young woman. She got just far enough for her true sex to become evident before she found that she could not finish.
“Better run, girl,” I said. And she did. She hopped aboard her flying log and scooted.
Her desertion had a definite impact on one of the young men. He changed his mind even though he was already naked. I did not hurry him as he dressed.
That left four, three boys and a girl, all in their early to middle-teens.
I waved uphill, confident that by now Lady would be watching and could guess what I needed. She is clever that way. And shortly a couple of guys were headed downhill lugging bundles of odds and ends with which to dress our prisoners.
They did not yet quite understand their new status. I brought them through the shadowgate one at a time, watching carefully. I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely. I asked, “Anybody got any reason to think whoever goes out the gate is going to get into trouble?” To their further humiliation the Voroshk kids found themselves with their hands bound behind them as soon as they were dressed.
The fellow with the feeble command of Juniper’s lingo protested the indignity. “It’s only temporary,” I assured him. “Just while us few are on the outside.” I shifted to Taglian. “Murgen, Swan, Thai Dei, you keep these guys on a short leash.”
Bamboo poles lashed the air. Despite age and its attendant cynicism, those guys could put on a show of enthusiasm. Mainly faked. Swan promised me, “Anything happens to you, there won’t be anything left of them but grease stains and toenails.”
“You’re a good man, Swan. Doj, you go through first.” The elderly Nyueng Bao drew the sword Ash Wand and stepped through the damaged shadowgate into Khatovar. He positioned himself. I said, “Your turn, Goblin.” By hand sign I told Murgen not to be shy about flinging a fireball at surprise targets outside.
What followed was anticlimactic. I took a sack around to all the places I remembered seeding earlier and collected snail shells. Those in which something had hidden itself had a distinct feel.
My ravens returned while I was involved in the harvest. They reported the Voroshk feverishly preparing for nightfall. They believed our defectors were genuine. Terror and panic were spreading across the world as fast as Voroshk messengers could fly.
The birds made the recovery of our shadow companions much easier. They let me know which shells were a waste of time and where to find the ones I had forgotten. We were all back through the shadowgate an hour before sunset.
Goblin was still examining the clothing removed from the Voroshk kids. The little wizard piped. “This is some truly amazing material, Croaker. I think it might be sensitive to the thoughts of whoever is wearing it.”
“Is it safe?”
“I think it’s completely inert as long as it isn’t in contact with whoever is keyed to wear it.”
“A little something more for Tobo to play with during all the spare time he’s going to have in the middle of a war. Bundle it up. Put it on a mule at the front of the column. We need to get going.” I shifted languages, told the unhappy youngsters, “I’m releasing you now. I’m going to bring you back out here, one at a time, so you can get your posts. You won’t be allowed to ride them. You’ll travel at the rear of our column.” I went on to tell them about the dangers of the plain while they were following instructions. Their fear of the shadows gave me a good chance to retain their attention. I tried to impress them that a screw-up on the plain would kill not just the fuck-up but the whole crew, so they should not expect my people to be gentle if their behavior was unacceptable.
I was the last of the Company to leave Khatovar’s soil. Before I departed I indulged in a little personal ceremony of farewell, or perhaps of exorcism.
The youngster capable of some communication wanted to know, “What is the meaning of what you just did?”
I tried to explain. He did not get it. In time I determined that he had never heard of the Free Companies of Khatovar. That he knew almost nothing of the history of his world before his ancestors had taken power. That, furthermore, he did not care.
He seemed a shallow young man, overall. No doubt his companions were much the same.
The Company was going to be a revelation for them.
Lady and I stayed at the end of the road, waiting to make sure we had sealed it successfully against shadow incursions. The sun set. The sense of presence that comes when a large number of killer shadows are gathering grew powerful as darkness came. A rising excitement informed that presence, as though the Host of the Unforgiven Dead knew that some change had taken place even though they could not come out and scout around in the daytime.
The skies remained clear over Khatovar. The moon rose just before sunset, so there was ample silvery light to reveal the opening stage of the shadow invasion. A trickle of small explorers gradually slithered through the shattered boundary. The scream of a dying pig reached us. More shadows descended the slope. Though they did not appear to be communicating with one another, somehow more and more and bigger and bigger shadows became aware of the opportunity.
“Look there,” Lady said. A line of Voroshk flyers had begun passing near the moon. Before long little balls of light were bubbling into existence within the dense vegetation down the slope. “Maybe something like our fireballs.”
The fireballs had been created, originally, to destroy the floods of darkness the Shadowmasters insisted on throwing against us.
“They’re going to put up a fight, anyway. Will you look at that?” That being the Nef.
“The dreamwalkers are going out? I wonder why.”
“Too bad we couldn’t let the shadows all get out, then slam the gate shut behind them.”
Even Shivetya would agree, I supposed. He was not pleased with some of the improvements made on his plain during recent millennia.
Lady said, “We should get moving. And you might want to put some thought into what to do with our new children once we get to the other end and they become tempted to run away.”
Yes. I should. We did not need any more psychotic sorcerers getting under foot.
Tobo finished interviewing the black raven that was not really a bird, sent it racing back to Croaker. He found his mother and Sleepy with Sleepy’s usual fellow travelers studying a map of the territories north of the Dandha Presh. They were trying to determine the most favorable route northward, once the force finished crossing the mountains. Little colored patches represented the last known positions of the Protector and of Narayan Singh.
Sleepy asked, “News from Croaker?”
“He’s finished it. He’s on his way. But it turned stranger than he expected.” He relayed the full report.
Sleepy told him, “You’ll have to go back. We can’t risk the chance of another gang of sorcerers getting loose over here.”
“I suppose.” Tobo had no enthusiasm for that. “I don’t like it. Why didn’t he just kill them after he had their flying things and that remarkable clothing?”
“Because he doesn’t do things like that.” Not to mention the fact that dead people are not real cooperative when it comes time for them to share their knowledge.
“No. He lets people get away with stuff, then hunts them down thirty years later.” She made a growling noise. “How can I keep moving if I don’t have you here?”
“If Croaker is on this side all the Unknown Shadows will be on this side, too. The Black Hounds will be running out front in no time. A day or two later we’ll be able to see what’s going on anywhere we want to look.” Sleepy needed that reassurance. She was worried about everything going on out where she had no ability to see. Reminding her that most people, including most captains, went through whole lives far more blind than she had ever been, did nothing to improve her temper.
Sleepy was spoiled. Throughout her association with the Company, one way or another, we had owned some ability to find out what was happening far away from us. You let anybody have something for a little while, they soon consider it their birthright. Sleepy was very much no exception to that rule.
Goblin crabbed, “I understand that you need Tobo here before you can let the prisoners leave the plain. But why shouldn’t the rest of us go ahead? We aren’t getting anything useful done just sitting here.”
“You’re getting done what I want you to get done. Now be quiet. Before I gag you.”
I became impatient myself before Tobo finally appeared. He was subject to the constraints of normal travel. We had no flying carpets anymore, though there was hope that the Howler might create some once he was reawakened. (Nobody had yet tried.) And now there was the possibility we might gain the secrets of the Voroshk flying posts.
Tobo came in astride the superhorse that had attached itself to Sleepy. Bred originally to serve the Lady of the Tower up north, a number had come south with the Company. This was the last known survivor.
“How long do those things live, hon?” I asked Lady as Tobo approached.
“Maybe forty years. At the extreme. This one is pushing the limit.”
“Looks pretty spry.” Despite having run forty miles the animal looked almost fresh.
“I did good work in those days.”
“And you miss them now?”
“Yes.” She would not lie to me. She did not love me any less for missing being what once she had been, either. Near as I can tell, she never regrets anything she does, good or evil. I wish I could be that way.
Tobo dismounted right outside the shadowgate. I passed him through. He got straight to business, though he smiled and waved to his father and uncle and Doj. “You have five prisoners? All major wizards?”
“I don’t know about that. They could be complete no-talents, far as I can tell. But they did go flying around on fenceposts wearing a kind of super-fabric that Goblin says can be manipulated by thoughts. This comes across as a ‘You’d better be careful, Croaker’ kind of sign.”
“We can communicate with them?”
“We have two brothers whose father studied and managed Bowalk while she was in Khatovar. The father could force Bowalk to resume human shape for an hour or two sometimes, but he couldn’t keep her there. He thought the problem was a deadman-loop Shapeshifter built into the shape-changing spells. Shifter didn’t trust her. The loop activated when One-Eye killed him.
“Anyway, this Voroshk’s kids picked up some of Bowalk’s native tongue from being around her, which has been for all of their lives. When the Voroshk blew up the shadowgate one of them got the bright idea that he could talk us into taking them to safety somewhere else. He rounded up some friends who were just as scared and came to us. He assumed we all spoke the same language as the forvalaka. He had some strange notion that we would recognize the innate superiority of the Voroshk and take his bunch in as honored guests. He couldn’t imagine it being any other way because that’s the only way it could be in Khatovar. He’s vain, stupid and arrogant. They all seem to be. The other brother more so. He won’t even talk.”
Tobo smiled a little unpleasantly, perhaps recalling similar attitudes amongst Hsien’s warlords. “I expect they’ve all suffered one disappointment after another.”
“Absodamnlutely. Life has become an unimaginable hell for these kids. I have to remind them over and over that they’re still alive.”
“Let’s go meet them, shall we?” The kid looked like he was excited by the challenge.
As we approached the refugees I warned Tobo, “They’re all gorgeous but I really don’t think they have a brain between them. At least they show every sign of being slow learners.”
We stopped several yards from Khatovar’s forlorn children. They huddled together beside the road as Black Company men and mules began to move out through the shadowgate. Only one of the girls had ambition enough to look up. The little one. The one we had taken prisoner.
She stared at Tobo for half a minute. Then she murmured something to her companions. They looked up, too. Only the ringleader and his brother betrayed their native arrogance. And it had not been that long or arduous a journey.
They seemed to sense something in Tobo that was not apparent to me. It awakened hope. Several babbled questions in their own language.
“When they stop yammering tell them who I am. Don’t feel like you have to be entirely honest, either.”
“A little exaggeration couldn’t hurt?”
“Hardly ever.”
The interview lasted longer than I anticipated. Tobo was remarkably patient for his age. He worked hard to make the Voroshk understand that they were no longer in the land of their fathers, that here it did not matter who they were or who their parents had been. In our world they were going to have to sing for their supper.
We broke for a snack. The Voroshk and their guards were the only people left on the plain side of the shadowgate. I told Tobo, “I admire your patience.”
“Me, too. Already I want to kick some of them. And it’s not really all patience, anyway. I’m trying to learn more about them by reading what they don’t say and what they do let slip. You’re right. They don’t seem very bright. Though I’m guessing that’s as much because of the way they were educated as it is any natural stupidity. They have no idea whatsoever of their own past. None! Never heard of the Free Companies. Never heard of the Lance of Passion. Didn’t know that some really great wizards from Khatovar erected the standing stones that are all over the plain, at great peril to themselves from shadows. Didn’t even recognize the name Khatovar, though they do know Khadi as some vague, old-time demon that nobody cares about anymore.”
“How do you know that? About the memorial stones.”
“Baladitya got it from Shivetya. You did notice that the runes on the flying logs are almost identical to the ones on the standing stones?”
“I didn’t notice that, no. Mostly I’ve kept busy watching Goblin. The little shit speaks a bit of the language. He’s been sneaking around talking to them.”
Tobo chewed and nodded and looked thoughtful. “You ask him about it?”
“Hardly. I don’t trust that guy, Tobo. One-Eye told me not to just before he passed.”
“Nobody is going to trust Goblin for a long time, Croaker. And he knows that as well as anybody else does. He’ll be the carefulest Goblin you ever saw. You won’t even recognize him.”
“We’re talking about Goblin here. He can’t help himself.”
“He got into most of what he got into because One-Eye dragged him along. Think about it, Croaker. If he’s somehow turned into Kina’s tool, his assignment will be a long-term one. ‘Bring on the Year of the Skulls’ kind of stuff. He won’t get himself killed trying something trivial.”
I grunted. That made perfect sense on a rational level but I remained unconvinced. Goblin was Goblin. I had known him for a long time. The things he did did not always make sense, even to him. I asked, “What’ll we do with the Voroshk?”
“I’m going to educate them.”
Damn! I did not like the way he said that.
He replaced my guards with his own cronies, Taglians led by a senior sergeant called Riverwalker. All these guards were fluent in the language of Hsien and possessed a working knowledge of Nyueng Bao, which was a close cousin of the language spoken in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
Tobo instructed the guards, then the prisoners. Through me. Explaining the facts of life. “These men will be your teachers. They will teach you languages and the skills you will need to get along in this world. They will expose you to our religions and laws and the ways we have for getting along with one another.”
The boy doing the translating started to protest.
Riverwalker smacked him in the back of the head hard enough to knock him down.
Tobo continued, “You have to understand that you’re guests. You bought passage out of Khatovar with your knowledge. Your lives will be as comfortable as we can make them so long as you cooperate. But we are at war with ancient and powerful enemies. We won’t be inclined toward patience with anyone who doesn’t cooperate. Our patience will be especially short with people we consider dangerous. Do you understand?”
Tobo waited for me to finish translating. I asked an extra time to make sure the kids really grasped the gravity of the situation. Youngsters have a hard time getting it when the cruel and deadly applies to them personally. They also tend to agree to almost anything just to stop hearing about it.
Tobo had me tell them, “The rest of today and tonight you can rest. Tomorrow you’ll begin an intensive education in Taglian. While we’re hurrying to catch up with the rest of our army. I’ll travel with you and will help you as much as I can.”
The leader boy wanted to argue again. He had not listened closely enough to what he was translating. Riverwalker knocked him down again. Tobo told me, “That one’s going to be trouble.”
“There’s a good chance they all will be. They couldn’t get along at home.” They had to be misfits. Shifting languages, I told the kids, “If you make yourselves more trouble than you’re worth these people will kill you. Come on. I think I see some chow waiting to make our acquaintance.”
One of the girls said something in her own language. The captive, not the one who had come along with the boys.
I responded to the whine. “Tell her she can’t go home. It’s too late for that.”
Meantime, Tobo remarked, “But everybody here is running away from something.”
“Some,” I stipulated. “How soon do you think we’ll get a chance to sit down somewhere? I’ve got a lot of writing to catch up on.”
Tobo laughed. “You’d better stage a coup, you want a chance to sit down. Sleepy won’t take time off until the corpses are piled high enough to make fences.”
The Voroshk seemed to enjoy their evening meal. They were hungry enough to appreciate anything. We started teaching them Taglian nouns. Tobo studied both them and the wonders they had brought with them. He seemed less impressed by their flying posts than he was by the clothing they were no longer permitted to wear.
He told me, “Those posts look like a variation on the same sorcery Howler uses to operate his flying carpets. I should be able to work it out eventually. If I can get around some spells that’re meant to make the posts destroy themselves if they fall into the wrong hands.”
I told him about the two I had seen explode.
“Pretty potent self-destruct, then. I’ll be careful.”
“Be careful of those girls, too. I think the little one’s already staked you out.”
Come morning the leader kid could not be wakened. He was alive, all right, but no one could rouse him. “What did you do?” I asked Tobo, whispering, having leapt to a conclusion involving Tobo wanting the potential troublemaker out of the way without us losing access to his post and clothing.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
Lady examined the boy after I did. She said, “This looks a lot like the coma Smoke went into for so long.”
I agreed. But Soulcatcher had been responsible for that, we believed. And there was no way this could be her doing. The Unknown Shadows knew every move she made. And would turn aside any monsters she sent against us. I wondered aloud, “Were any of your invisible friends around here last night? Maybe they saw something.”
“I’ll check.”
By dint of ferocity I got the unconscious kid’s brother to admit that he could communicate. I made him understand that they needed to bind his brother onto one of their posts. Otherwise he would get left behind when we moved out.
The kids were terrified.
“Handy disaster,” Lady remarked.
“Yeah. But for whom?”
Mogaba swore softly but virulenty, foully and steadily. Crows had been arriving for over an hour, each bird carrying a fragment of a long message from the Protector. Being birdbrained, no one crow could carry much of the whole. And because they were vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes, every fragment had to be sent again and again.
The Great General hated putting these puzzles together and this one was the worst ever, by an order of magnitude. There should not be this many crows in the whole world.
He had twenty scribes working on the message already.
Some points became clear quickly.
He sent for Aridatha Singh and Ghopal Singh. This message would affect all of them.
By the time the others arrived, enough of the puzzle had come clear for Mogaba to reveal what, for him, was the most critical detail. “They’re back.”
Aridatha jumped, startled by Mogaba’s intensity. “Back? Who’s back?”
“The Black Company. The Protector destroyed them. Right? Root and branch. Right? But now she says they’re back. They’re patching her message together in the next room right now.”
Ghopal asked, “What are you talking about?”
“There’s a huge message coming in from our employer. She’s given up her quest. She’s on the run, headed home. The Black Company is pouring through the shadowgate. Thousands strong. Well-armed, well-clad, well-trained. With the Radisha Drah and Prahbrindrah Drah in their train and blessing them. And we have nothing much in their way for hundreds of miles. She’s headed back here. She expects to lose her ability to watch them shortly. They have some unfamiliar kind of supernatural help coming off the plain with them. Evidently something like the shadows but more dangerous because they’re smarter.”
Aridatha observed, “Sounds like pretty good intelligence gathering for somebody who’s on the run from an enemy who knows her capabilities.” Singh’s handsome face had lost some of its color. His voice had gone husky.
“A thought which did not escape me. She is Soulcatcher, after all. On the other hand, though, she can’t learn anything when there isn’t anything to see.”
Aridatha and Ghopal nodded. In all ways, except in their hearts, they remained dedicated servants of the Protector.
Mogaba said, “The enemy being familiar with the Protector’s capabilities means they’ll try to take them away from her. We don’t know who’s in charge but doctrine is doctrine. They’ll try to blind her first, then they’ll try to take away her capacity to communicate. They couldn’t have come at a better time for them. She’s a hundred miles from nowhere. She can’t spread the word much faster than rumors will spread. And you know the news that the Radisha and her brother are coming back will spread like the plague.”
Ghopal said, “I’ll seal this part of the Palace off, then. We don’t want those people in there running to their temples or whatever and telling too much of the truth to someone who’d use it as a tool against us.”
“Do that.” That would look good to the Protector’s invisible spies. But, on the other hand it might be very useful to have some of the news get out. Taglios might fall into a state of chaos. A state in which there would be opportunities. Chaos could be very useful. Chaos could make wonderful camouflage.
Perhaps when the Protector was nearer Taglios.
Right now it was necessary to prepare for the advent of the Company. That would be expected from all quarters.
Where did they find so many men? Or shadows of their own? What other surprise cards did they have in their hand?
Some, surely. That was their nature.
Mogaba said, “We’ve got to leak some of the news. Like it or not. We have to get ready for war. We’re headed for a fight. Unless we give up without a struggle. I don’t plan to do that myself. I couldn’t live with the consequences.”
The Singhs exchanged glances. The Great General showing a sense of humor? Remarkable.
Ghopal said, “People are afraid of the Black Company.”
“Of course they are. But when was the last time they won? We beat them over and over during the Kiaulune wars.” Mogaba was proud of his work back then. His thinking and planning had contributed to every Taglian triumph.
“But we didn’t wipe them all the way out. The trouble with the Black Company is that if you leave even one of them alive, before long they’re coming right back at you again.”
“My brother unforgiven.” That slogan haunted Mogaba’s nightmares. He had his regrets.
“How soon can we expect the Protector?” Ghopal asked. “I’ll have preparations to make.”
Mogaba said, “She was on foot when she started sending her message. But she’ll get to a courier station eventually. Then she’ll start making good time. I wouldn’t count on having more than another two or three days if she gets in a real hurry.”
Ghopal grunted unhappily.
Mogaba nodded. Nothing ever went easily.
Aridatha asked, “Did she catch the Deceivers?”
Once again Mogaba thought the man betrayed a curiously skewed interest. Possibly a personal interest. “No. I told you, she said she was breaking off the chase. Enough. We all pretty much know what we need to do. Aridatha, I want the entire courier battalion here as soon as possible. The garrison commanders will need to be advised. I’ll let you know right away if any critical news comes in.”
Watching the message continue to approach final form, the Great General reviewed his unit commanders and the readiness and reliability of their commands. He was troubled. At first glance it would seem he could call up the resources of an empire. But the Protector had not concerned herself with the upkeep of her armed forces when she was not directly and immediately threatened. And she was not remotely popular, never had been and never wanted to be. She preferred rule by raw strength.
The Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister returning was particularly troubling. They had been popular in their era and in time’s crucible had gone through the first stages of sanctification already. Some would hail them as liberators. Hell, if Croaker was still alive they might give him his old title back.
There would be desertions, both at high levels and among the soldiers. Mogaba was more concerned about the troops. The nobility and senior priests, who owed their positions to the Protector, would play it carefully. Taglios had received several painful lessons regarding the price to be paid for betraying the Protector.
Where would it be best to bring the Company to battle? And how could he force battle upon them if they were reluctant to hazard a major encounter?
He was sure that his best chance lay in forcing an early confrontation, before what forces he did have began to evaporate.