Sleepy surprised us all. She was irked about us dealing with Soulcatcher but she made no great fuss. “This situation isn’t the one I prepared for. Tobo. I trust you’re taking steps to prevent the Protector from observing what we’re doing.”
“She sees what we want her to see. Which means she doesn’t see what we’re doing, only what our mutual enemies are doing.”
Which was not much on Booboo’s part. Despite her best effort to vanish during the night after her captors first encountered Soulcatcher’s pickets, she remained a captive. She would be turned over to Soulcatcher herself within a few days.
Goblin, moving faster than the girl’s captors were, had been gaining ground fast and Tobo now placed him only about thirty miles behind. I suggested that he would be more trouble to Soulcatcher than Booboo ever could.
Thinking out loud, I said, “I wonder if this is how myths get started.”
People looked at me like they were not sure they wanted to know what that was all about.
I explained. “Here we’ve got a bunch of people visiting strange places most people couldn’t get to even if they wanted. We’ve got close relatives squabbling and even trying to murder each other.”
“That’s reaching,” Murgen said.
“I like it,” Tobo said. “A thousand years from now they’ll remember me as the god of storms. Or something.”
“Or something?” his father asked. “How about the small god who makes littler rocks out of runty stones?”
Earlier Tobo had gotten caught making stones explode. He had been doing it for the sheer joy of watching them shatter and hearing the fragments ricochet. He was embarrassed. But you have got to have fun once in a while. Today’s Company is not nearly as much fun as it was when I was young.
I snickered. “We marched forty miles every day. Uphill all the way. In the snow. When we weren’t in the swamp.”
“What?”
“Thought I’d start practicing for when I get really old. How do you make rocks explode?”
“Oh. That’s easy. You just kind of feel what they’re like inside. You find the water. You make it hot enough and the rock goes boom.”
Find the water. Inside a rock. And the rock goes boom. Right. I had to ask. I changed the subject. “How are those Voroshk kids doing?” Despite everything he had to do, Tobo found time to spend with our captives.
It was amazing how much the kid could handle in a day.
I could recall when life worked that way for me. Back when we were marching up all those hills. With cold, wet feet.
“Uncle Doj has them speaking Taglian like they were born in the delta, in the shadow of the temple of Ghanghesha.”
“Excellent.” He was poking fun, of course.
“They’re picking up the language. Shukrat and Magadan could get by now. Arkana is having trouble but she’s catching on. None of them are mourning Sedvod. Gromovol, the brother, is being stubborn. He doesn’t like not being the only conduit. He likes to be in control. Of something. But even he is making progress.”
“Gromovol is the pain in the ass, then? Which’re which with the other names? I haven’t heard any names before.”
“That’s because they hadn’t given up hope that their family would rescue them from their own dumb mistake. Even more than the Gunni do, they believe their names can be used against them. There’s a connection with their souls.”
“Which means that Shukrat and Magadan and whatnot won’t actually be real names.”
“They’re real public names. Work names. Just not true names.”
“I’ve never understood the concept but it’s one I’ve learned to live with. Which one is which?”
“Shukrat is the shorter girl. The one who crashed.”
“The one who’s working up a crush on you.”
Tobo ignored me. The ability to ignore seems to be coupled with a talent for sorcery. “Arkana is the ice queen. Which I definitely would not mind melting. Magadan is the quiet guy.”
Magadan, in my estimation, would be the dangerous one. If he so chose. He observed and studied and prepared. He did not bluster or invoke the threat of powers from a world away. “Did you tell them what happened at the shadowgate?”
“They didn’t want to believe me but they did enough to decide to introduce themselves. Enough to conclude that they’re likely to be a part of our world for a long time to come.”
“You did remind them that that’s what they asked for?”
“Sure. Shukrat even managed to joke about it. She has a great sense of humor. For a girl. Who didn’t ask to be here.”
Considering the females in his experience I could see how he might think a feeble sense of humor was a sex-linked characteristic. Only Iqbal Singh’s wife ever smiled and joked. And Suruvhija’s lot was the poorest of all the women associated with the Company.
“But all you can see is long legs, long blonde hair, big blue eyes and a monumental set of gazoombies.” Once we got up into settled country we needed to find the kid a whore. Twenty years old and never been laid.
On the other hand, harnessing all that energy the way we were right now had a lot to recommend it. We were not headed into an era where we could let our most talented wizard be distracted by nature.
Maybe we should find him a traveling companion.
I could just imagine what his mother would say about that.
“The future,” I said, raising my hand as though holding a drink. “We have to get Swan and Blade set up in the brewing business.”
Murgen said, “That’s what I miss most about One-Eye, too.”
“Here’s a thought. Maybe Goblin will get so thirsty he’ll shake Kina off and set up a still.”
I had to mention Goblin. That took the pleasure out of the moment.
Everybody who remembered the old Goblin had to deal with those memories each time the man’s name came up. Those memories were going to be treacherous if ever we confronted the revenant himself. Even if they caused just a moment’s hesitation.
If we had to go after Goblin hard we would be better served to send people from Hsien. They would not be sentimental about him. Their exposure was entirely hearsay.
I did not want to hasten the day.
I asked, “Tobo, now that we’ve slowed down, what are we going to do about the Howler?” An entire infantry company had been saddled with that sleeping sorcerer from the day he and Longshadow had been brought up out of the earth. That company had no other duties but transporting and protecting the Howler. “Something’s got to be. If she don’t wake him up and make a deal we’d better kill him. Before Soulcatcher figures out that we’ve got him and steals him so she can use him herself.”
I was worried that Sleepy was not taking the Howler seriously enough. She had no experience of him. Not enough to understand just how dangerous he could be, which was just as dangerous as Soulcatcher. And he was crazier than she was.
The Howler was no dedicated enemy of ours though he had worked against us far more often than otherwise. His nature seemed to make him a follower. He gravitated toward where the strength seemed to be. He was so powerful I would prefer he was with us rather than not. Or, if not with us, dead.
“There’s a certain amount of debate. Sleepy would rather just leave him for the jackals. Mom would, too, only she keeps having these premonitions. You know how big premonitions are with the women of the Ky family.”
“One got your mom and dad together.”
“No use crying over spilled milk,” Willow Swan said. “How about somebody tells Sleepy if she’s not going anywhere in a hurry why don’t we set down in one place? It’s a pain to set up and tear down every day if we’re not going anywhere.”
Our northward drift did allow for a lot of camp time. I used it to work on these Annals. Lady used it to get several wagon loads of large bamboo poles collected so she could begin manufacturing a new generation of fireball projectors. Tobo used it to teach the Voroshk youngsters. I joined him occasionally. The boy Magadan seemed to have a healing touch. We needed to nurture that.
Arkana remained the ice queen. Shukrat grew more relaxed with us. And Gromovol decided he wanted to become my buddy—in support of whatever scheme was shaping up inside of him.
Although he did not spread it around, Tobo figured out the basics of riding the Voroshk flying post. At least, a particular flying post. I suspect Shukrat helped him. It was her post he sneaked out in the middle of the night, indulging all of a young man’s joy in adventure.
Ten days into the Amble on the Viliwash we had traveled barely forty-five miles. A third of those we covered in a single day when it became apparent, to the amazement of all, that there really were people in the Taglian Territories disinclined to celebrate liberation from the Protector’s reign. A coalition of regional nobles and priests tried to resist, then tried to hole up in a stout manor called Gharhawnes. In the field Tobo used his talents to weaken their will to resist, before the soldiers got a real chance to beat up on them.
We surrounded the manor at dusk. Fires sprouted. The outer wall of the manor house seemed to boil with a dark mist as the Unknown Shadows stormed the place.
Results did not become obvious for hours. Tobo’s friends preferred to be indirect. And preferred the cover of darkness.
We had the place surrounded. Our bonfires sent harmless shadows scampering over the manor walls. I told Sleepy, “This place looks nice and comfy, Captain. We’re in no hurry. We could hang around here for a while. Long enough to learn its name.”
She was underwhelmed by the suggestion. “Gharhawnes.”
“Bless you.”
“Gharhawnes is the name of the place, you idiot.”
“And it’s the best place we’ve seen. Maybe we should set up the prince and his sister here. Sort of get them back into the swing of being royalty.” The gods knew they got no practice with us savages. We just dragged them hither and yon like so much duffel, in case they became useful someday.
“Don’t you have some writing to do? Or a boil to lance?”
“Not at the moment. I’m all yours and full of advice.”
Before she could put together a suitable reply without using profanity, a party of several men slipped out of the manor, bringing women and children with them.
I had a feeling our camp looked pretty impressive.
It was supposed to look like a horde was on the move.
Tobo and his parents materialized. The boy said, “The haunts are working faster than I thought they would.” He extended an arm, hand palm downward, then whispered in what sounded like the language of Hsien. A moment later a cry of rage came from a high manor window where a pair of archers had been about to snipe at the defectors. One somehow managed to fall through the opening.
The Captain said, “Have those things start whispering that anyone who surrenders before dawn will be allowed to take their possessions with them. They’ll even be allowed to go home unharmed if they take an oath to the Prahbrindrah Drah. Captives taken after sunrise tomorrow will be conscripted into our forced labor battalions.”
We did not have forced labor battalions. But those were a part of siege warfare and were often the fate of prisoners of war and peasants who were insufficiently fleet of foot. The threat was plausible. And the Black Company had a long reputation for being unimpressed by caste, noble birth, or priestly status, too.
Once it was clear we would provide covering fire to defectors a flow developed. Usually the soldiers set to keep deserters from using the posterns were the first to come over.
The people engineering the resistance were not popular with their conscripted followers.
So some folks wanted to see the Protectorate continue but the people who had to do the work were not interested. The few I got to talk to had no real convictions in the matter. Who ruled made little difference in their lives. But it was getting on toward harvest time.
One of the great truths was getting some exposure to the light here.
Our men entered the manor early next morning. I was still asleep. Tobo’s pets spread confusion. Our men cleaned up behind them. None of our people died. There were few wounds of any consequence. Sleepy felt magnanimous. She turned most of the men of standing over to the Radisha and her brother for judgment. Only those Tobo identified as irredeemable creatures of the Protector faced the Company justice.
“Spread that around,” Sleepy told Tobo. “Make it sound a lot bigger than it was.”
’Tonight little people will be whispering in the ears of sleepers everywhere within two hundred miles.”
That far Taglian province shared religions with the rest of the Taglian Territories, with the majority being Gunni. It’s language was closely akin to that spoken around Dejagore. Sleepy could manage the dialect with only a little practice.
What I called a manor house was really more like a village completely enclosed within a single blockish structure. The principal building material was an unbaked brick kept carefully plastered so it would not wash away in the rain.
Inside there was an open central square with both cisterns and a good well. Stables and workshops opened on it all around. The rest of the structure was a warren of halls and rooms where people obviously lived and worked and ran shops and lived life as though the place was indeed some sort of city.
“It’s a termite mound,” Murgen told me.
’The Prince and his sis ought to feel right at home. It’s as bad as the Taglian Palace. On a miniature scale.”
“I want to know what they ate. The smell is overpowering.” The odors of spices clogged every hallway. But that was true in every Taglian city and town. These odors were just an alien mix.
Thai Dei caught up. He had actually allowed Murgen out of his sight for several minutes. Maybe he was slowing down, too. He brought a message. “Tobo says to tell you that Sleepy has decided to take a chance on wakening the Howler.”
You could tell Thai Dei was worried because that was one of the longest speeches I ever heard the man make.
Sleepy chose to undertake the awakening with full pomp, ceremony and drama. Following an evening meal we gathered in what had been a temple hall, when everyone was rested, well fed and supposedly relaxed. The place of worship was poorly lit and boasted far too many multiheaded and multiarmed idols in its corners to lead me to consider it strictly benign.
None of the idols represented Khadi but all Gunni deities make me uncomfortable.
I was present in a demigod role myself. I appeared as the creepy armored monster Widowmaker. I do not enjoy the role.
My dearly beloved, on the other hand, just loves any excuse to assume the guise of Lifetaker. For a few hours she can wear the ugly armor and pretend that these are still the good old days when she was something much more wicked than this Lifetaker thing is supposed to be now.
Our role in the proceeding was to sit there in the gloom with colorful worms of sorcery slithering over us. We were supposed to look intimidating while others got the real work done.
Tobo just came as Tobo. Hell, he did not bother putting on a clean shirt and trousers. But he did bring his Voroshk students.
The rest of the audience consisted of senior officers and regional notables who had come in, mainly, to assess the Prahbrindrah Drah and to discover what they would need to do to weather our presence.
Conquerers do come and go.
The hall was crowded. All those bodies produced a lot of heat. And I was inside that armor, sitting motionless on a stool behind the action, One-Eye’s black spear held upright in my right hand. That was supposed to be my entire part.
It mostly involved not fainting in front of witnesses.
Sleepy had set the stage pretty well, with the low lighting and enough advance rumormongering to make the audience understand that the Howler was both foaming-mouth mad and yet a sorcerer who was as powerful as the Protector.
Poor Howler. Despite his part in the Shadowmaster wars he was almost forgotten now.
The Voroshk, I noted, eventually settled right up front. Tobo was treating them as good friends, particularly the well-rounded, freckled little blonde. He chattered with her until Sleepy growled and told him to get on with it.
Even I felt a little let down by the awakening. Tobo indulged in no mumbo jumbo and no showmanship. He felt that his part was no more exciting than working in a stable.
But his effort was more impressive to thoughtful minds. A few people, maybe the right people, understood that Tobo was so good he could make something big look routine.
I thought the boy’s efforts said a lot about his character, too. His ego did not need a lot of feeding.
I noted that three out of four Voroshk got it right away. Gromovol actually got it, too, but he did have an ego disease.
Tobo freed Howler from his long trance in a matter of minutes.
I do not know the whole story. You never do with their kind of people. But I do know that Howler is ages older even than Lady. He was one of the men who helped her first husband, the Dominator, build the Domination, an empire that collapsed into the northern dust about the time the original Black Company crossed over from Khatovar. Howler’s pain and deformity are a legacy of that time. So is the kind of thinking that led Soulcatcher to proclaim herself Protector.
The woman does not have the obsessive focus and drive necessary to create a true replica of that old empire of darkness.
I never have seen Howler outside the layered rags he wears, rags so long unchanged that a whole ecology has developed between the Howler’s skin and the surrounding world. It includes numerous invertebrates, molds, mildews and a variety of small green plants.
The Howler is smaller than Goblin or One-Eye ever were but Lady insists that that was not always the case.
When Tobo finished, the almost shapeless little ragbag sucked in a deep breath, then let out one of the shrieks that had given him his name. It seemed an egalitarian mix of agony and despair. I shivered despite the heat. It had been a long time since I had heard one of those cries. I could have waited a lot longer to hear this one.
The little wizard sat up.
Swords made metallic sounds. Spearheads dropped. Several of the half dozen existing, new-production fireball projectors swung to point Howler’s way.
But he did nothing more. He was at least as disoriented as the worst of the rest of us when he awakened.
Tobo signalled. A man stepped forward with a pitcher of water. Howler would be fiercely thirsty. He would drink as much as he was allowed for the next couple of days. The first few of us to be awakened four years ago had made ourselves sick drinking too much water.
We learned to ration.
Howler wanted water by the gallon, too.
He did not get it.
He opened his mouth. A terrible howl came out. He could not control that frightful habit.
As rationality returned the little wizard looked around and was not pleased with his situation. He did not recognize anyone immediately. He asked, “How long has it been?” He used a tongue of the north so ancient no one but Lady spoke it. She translated into the language of Hsien, adding, “Right now he thinks he’s been resurrected into a whole new age.”
I suggested, “Break his heart fast. We don’t have time to waste.”
Howler asked questions again, in a series of languages, trying to elicit an understandable response.
I watched him wilt as he began to acknowledge the possibility that he had been asleep so long that the nations of his own age had been forgotten. But he was not entirely numb mentally. Though they differed in detail from the originals he soon recognized the armor Lady and I wore. And recalled who was who. He addressed himself to Lifetaker. The language he chose was an old one that they had shared in another age. There had been a time when I could read it, written, but could only guess at the meaning of the spoken words.
Just when everyone started to relax he let rip another bone-chilling shriek.
Lady announced, “Howler sees the general situation. Once he’s had a little more explained I think he’ll be amenable to an alliance.”
I used the language of Hsien to respond. “Howler has been part of my life most of my life. And all that time he’s been one of the people trying to kill me. I don’t think I can be real comfortable having him on my side.”
“Well, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? We don’t have to trust him, darling. The Unknown Shadows will keep him trustworthy.”
Of course. “And you do remember his true name. Which you could pass along to Tobo.”
“If I have to.”
I nodded, thinking it might be a damned good idea for her to tell Tobo right away. Because the Howler was not the sort to be shy, reluctant or slow about eliminating a threat.
Howler let rip another terrible cry.
Sleepy had begun to simmer because she did not know what was going on.
Lady talked to the Howler about our situation while I told the Captain what was going on.
The Howler howled. There was some passion in this cry. He did not like the situation at all. But he had been there before and my sweetie was amply blunt in making it clear that there would be only one other choice available.
One reason the Howler had become the Howler was his powerful aversion to death. Nor did he have any reason to love Soulcatcher, who had buried him in a hope that that would last forever. And who had played him cruelly a time or two farther in the past.
The little sorcerer howled again.
In the language of Hsien I wondered aloud, “Tobo, do you think Shivetya has the power to cure this little shit’s screaming?” It really got distracting after a while.
Tobo shrugged. “Possibly.” He was not paying much attention. “I can find out.” He was trying to hear what Riverwalker was whispering to Sleepy. Riverwalker had been called away a few minutes earlier. He was back now with Suvrin and a cavalry officer named Tea Nung. Nung’s troop was supposed to have picket duty so I supposed something important had happened out there.
Sleepy nodded, said something affirmative. Riverwalker, Suvrin and Tea Nung withdrew. Sleepy started to snap something at them but whatever the thought was, it had come too late. Sleepy shifted her attention back to the matter at hand. She seemed less than totally focused now. She had developed a case of the fidgets. And she seemed to have brightened up.
She leaned over to confide something to Sahra.
Sahra was startled. Then she became smiley and conspiratorial, possibly even teasing.
The Captain did appear to be embarrassed.
Lady coughed indiscretely to cue me that it was Widowmaker’s turn to speak to our leader. So I said, “Captain, the Howler would be honored to throw in his lot with the Black Company. He’ll create flying carpets for us and he’ll help with our weapons program. I wouldn’t trust him a whole hell of a lot, though. And I’d keep him away from the Voroshk.” All this stated in the language of Hsien, so the little sorcerer would not follow.
The youngsters remained in their unhappy clump, trying to understand. Almost perky little Shukrat understood enough Taglian already to keep her companions accurately posted as to what got said in that language.
Riverwalker and Suvrin returned. A tall, handsome man accompanied them. He was dusty and obviously exhausted but he was alert. He ran an inquisitive eye over everyone. He seemed to recognize several people. He even bowed slightly to the Radisha.
Sleepy rose to greet him. There was a deference in her manner I had not seen before, though it was so subtle as to lurk on the border of imagination. Obviously this was someone she knew. But not someone she cared to announce. After a tentative clasping of hands she, Sahra, Riverwalker and a few others, including the Radisha, slipped away.
I wondered immediately if they had not done something stupid by bringing the man into a crowded hall when a meeting with him needed to be private. Yet a glance around showed me nobody buzzing. Excepting Sleepy’s cronies from her years underground in Taglios.
Might the visitor be some Company brother who had been left behind? Or some past ally?
The glance around also showed me all the Gunni idols apparently stirring. That had begun to divert the attention of the audience. Tobo was grim with concentration. He had his spectral allies hard at work.
That pretty boy had to be somebody special.
A moment later Widowmaker moved for the first time during the festivities. He stood up suddenly. The tip of his spear snapped down, pricked the rags surrounding the Howler, who had managed to stifle his screams and was in the process of beginning to ooze away.
Lifetaker’s great black sword fell an instant later, blocking his line of sight.
It was deep in the night when a limping Runmust Singh dragged me out of bed. Out of a real bed. It had been ages. And this one came with a real woman in it. Runmust insisted that she had to get up, too. The Captain wanted us both.
Lady was grumbling something about restructuring the chain of command when we left our cubicle. We ran into Murgen right away. He was waiting for Thai Dei, who had not gotten a personalized wake up call. Sahra was nowhere in sight.
I asked, “When are you two going to work it out so you can go your own ways?” Thai Dei was one of very few Nyueng Bao still dedicating himself to bodyguarding.
“I don’t think that’ll happen,” Murgen said. “He doesn’t have anything else since Narayan died.”
“Ah.” Thai Dei’s son had been slain by Stranglers. Thai Dei was another who had been waiting in line to get some paybacks.
The obligation to protect Murgen had become a convenient fiction for both men. I should have recognized that a long time ago. I who have made such a big deal out of brotherhood for so many years.
Thai Dei bustled up. We set off after Runmust. I said, “Singh, you should let me take a look at that leg. It should’ve healed faster than it has.”
“It’ll mend fine once I get some real rest, sir. And I believe we expect to stay here for some time.”
What good would that do if the man refused to take the opportunity to rest?
I could have Tobo knock him into a coma.
Runmust led us to a room barely big enough to fit a dozen people. Sleepy and Suvrin, the Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister, Tobo and Sahra were there already. So was the handsome stranger.
“Sit,” Sleepy said. Then she got straight to the point. “This is Aridatha Singh.” Beside me, Lady winced, recognizing the name and thinking of her trophies. “Aridatha commands the City Battalions in Taglios. He, the Great General and Ghopal Singh, who commands the Greys, form the triumvirate who’re running Taglios while the Protector is out of town. Aridatha tells me that he and they—the Protector’s top henchmen—have decided they need to get rid of her.”
From one side, in back, Willow Swan grumbled, “Ghopal Singh is a general now? He was a damned sergeant when he worked for me.”
Aridatha responded, “The Protector prides herself on her ability to recognize outstanding talent.”
A joke of sorts had passed between the two. I guess you had to have been part of the situation to follow it.
While we sat around with our mouths hanging open, looking intelligent, Sleepy told the outsider, “These people are here to offer their advice. That’s Croaker. He was the Liberator, once upon a time. That’s Lady. That’s Murgen. They’ve all led the Company at some time. The others you’ll recall from the last time we met.” She passed over Thai Dei, which lent him an air of mystery, nor did she introduce the Prahbrindrah Drah.
I asked, “Did Mogaba send you?”
“I volunteered. Because your Captain knew me. And because your Company has no personal grievance with me.”
Lady stirred. She was willing to invent one.
Sleepy said, “It would seem that there are limits even Mogaba refuses to exceed. And Soulcatcher has managed to discover them.”
Aridatha said, “You have ancient grievances with the Great General.
“I want you to know that he isn’t an evil man. He is an obsessed man, though his obsession has weathered away with age. He’s realized that history won’t record his name on the roll of great conquerers. There’s no longer time. He hasn’t entirely made his peace with that but he does see that it’s his own fault. Because of his untimely defection during the siege of Dejagore he has been forced to serve a procession of deranged and incompetent masters. But that’s of no moment now.
“Between us, he, Ghopal, and I have concluded that Taglios should be spared any more torment by the Protector. She’s like a deadly rot. She’s destroying everything slowly. Even our religions and culture. And the only force able to put an end to that is the Black Company.”
Murgen suggested, “You guys could whack her yourselves. She’s not immortal. And she trusts you. As much as she trusts anybody. That gets you close enough . . . ”
“That plan was in place even before you people resurfaced. But she’s stayed away from the city since the beginning of that crisis. Her messages to the Great General all affirm her determination to keep after you until she’s accounted for every member of the Black Company personally. She was extremely put out because so many people who were supposed to be dead started turning up alive.”
“Believe me, I know how exasperating that is,” Lady said. “For twenty years I chased the Deceiver Narayan Singh. The man had more lives than a cat.”
Aridatha caught the past tense. “Has the living saint of the Deceivers passed to his reward, then?”
“He got away from me through the only exit he had left.” Lady sounded extremely bitter. Like she thought Singh had beaten her by cheating blatantly. Her hatred of Narayan was stronger than I had suspected.
“Then that’s one distraction that no longer needs concern us.”
“Incorrect,” Sleepy said, reclaiming control. “The Daughter of Night is still out there. And Kina still hopes to bring on the Year of the Skulls. Whatever else happens, Kina and her followers still have to be managed. Tell my associates why we should trust anything you tell us, Aridatha.”
“I am, of course, damned to walk in the shadow of a man I met only once in my life, after I was a grown man, and then for only a few minutes, several years ago, in your presence. That’s the legacy of the Deceivers. The cult destroys trust. My answer is, all men should be judged by one standard: their behavior. By the deeds they do. The gesture of good faith I have to make in this instance is, I think, generous.”
Sleepy interrupted. “Aridatha has a brother who lives in Jaicur. Under an assumed name. This brother, real name Sugriva, is going to help us take the city. He’ll scout out the best gate for us to get at in the middle of the night. We’ll use it to prance in and take over before anyone can put up a fight.”
I opened my mouth to argue but stopped before anything stupid came out. Sleepy’s mind was made up. All I could do was my best to make sure everything worked out right. “Soulcatcher has an army between here and there. One that outnumbers us, I hear.”
“And one that’s little better than a rabble, according to Aridatha. Some of the poorer soldiers are armed only with hammers, pitchforks, sickles and such.”
“A guy goes away for a few decades, everything turns to shit,” I said. “I had everybody tall enough to reach his mother’s hand armed up, once upon a time. What happened to all those weapons?”
Riverwalker explained, “When the Protector took over, times got so bad that almost anybody with anything to sell sold it. Weapons were a glut on the market. The steel got forged into other things.”
“And the Protector didn’t care,” Aridatha said. “The Great General finally gave up trying to make her see the point of maintaining arsenals in peacetime. I think it won’t be long now until she understands what he was talking about.”
Sleepy told us, “It isn’t necessary to trust Aridatha or Mogaba to test Jaicur’s defenses. We’re expected to swing west toward the Naghir River. We’ll make a show of doing just that. But Blade, with the light cavalry, will split off the rear of the column and loop back around eastward. The hidden folk will find a route along which the horsemen can approach Jaicur unobserved. In the meantime, the main force will turn again and head for the Rock Road north of Jaicur. That ought to stir up an ant’s nest. And make Soulcatcher forget Jaicur completely for a few days.”
Why had Sleepy bothered calling the rest of us in? She had it all worked out already. And pretty soundly, I thought.
Tobo said, “We do have a more immediate problem than that, Sleepy. You brought General Singh in during the reanimation ceremony. And he’s been seen around camp. It’s inevitable that some of our outside visitors will be Soulcatcher’s creatures. And it’s possible one of them recognized him.”
Sleepy admitted, “I didn’t think fast enough. I’m open to corrective suggestions.”
“I’m already working on it. But I do want to warn you. I don’t think I can be a hundred percent successful in identifying them and cutting them off.”
“Then you’d better consider what would be the best way to warn the other conspirators in Taglios, hadn’t you?”
Aridatha said, “Ghopal and the Great General won’t be taken unawares. The Protector possesses no means of traveling faster than the rumor of her coming. When she heads for Taglios they’ll know before she gets there. And what she brings with her will betray her intentions.”
I nodded. The reasoning seemed sound. And you did have to be really sneaky to outfox Mogaba. Soulcatcher was not sneaky these days. She had developed the habit of just bulling straight ahead because she was the biggest power around.
Sleepy elected to assume a stance which made it look like we were just going to sit and rest. But Tobo scouted the country north of Gharhawnes in ever greater detail, sometimes even going out in person, when he went flying with Shukrat.
The two of them were getting very chummy.
In private I observed, “This is getting distinctly weird. We’re allies with Soulcatcher against our daughter and Kina. We’re allies with the traitor Mogaba against your sister. We’re allies with a demigod whose price for supporting us is that we murder him.”
Lady chuckled weakly. “You did say it has a mythic ring.”
“You know something? It’s got me scared.”
She stared at nothing, waiting for me to explain.
“Scared in a generalized way, not scared like when we’re in a fight. Scared of the shape the future might take.” I had a bad, bad feeling. Because on the surface everything looked just too marvelous for the Black Company.
The Goblin creature proved difficult to catch. What should have taken just a few days took two weeks and, in the end, necessitated Soulcatcher’s personal intervention—with, to her chagrin, considerable coaching from the shadowy cat thing she could never quite see and never quite ambush and bind to her own service.
In the meantime she amused herself with the girl.
The Daughter of Night was imprisoned in a cage inside Soulcatcher’s tent. That was the largest and most ostentatious tent in the midway camp. The girl had been stripped naked, then had been decorated with a variety of chains and charms. She would not be guarded by or even approached by anyone male. Soulcatcher knew only too well how men could be manipulated by the women of her blood.
Though the girl did not seem interested in listening, Soulcatcher said, “To this day I’m not quite sure how you and that old man managed to get away from me. But I have some suspicions. And it won’t happen again. You’re far too important to your mother to be running around loose.” The voice Soulcatcher selected was annoyingly pedantic.
The girl did not respond. She was alone in her own reality. This was not her first time as a prisoner of someone who planned to use her. She could be patient. Her moment would come. Someone would slip up. An impressionable guard would be assigned. Something. Somewhere, sometime, she would have an opportunity to deceive someone into loving her long enough to want to set her free.
The girl’s continued indifference pricked Soulcatcher into trying to hurt her with news she had wanted to reserve. “He’s dead, you know. Your old man. Narayan Singh. He was strangled. They threw his body in a cesspit.”
That blow did strike home. But after an initial flinch and a brief, black look the Daughter of Night lowered her eyes and settled back into her pose of patient indifference.
Soulcatcher laughed. “Your freak Goddess has abandoned you.”
To which the girl offered her only spoken response since her capture. “All their days are numbered.” Which was like a slap in Soulcatcher’s face. It was one of those slogans Black Company-inspired graffitists had used to taunt her for years.
Soulcatcher snatched a whip, flailed away without doing the girl much harm. The cage itself prevented that.
Someone shouted for Soulcatcher’s attention from outside the entrance to her tent. In that respect her soldiers were well-trained. They did not bother her with trivia.
Responding, Soulcatcher found a gaggle of soldiers with a dead man on a crude litter. The corpse was twisted. Its features were severely distorted. Raindrops slid off the ruined face like tears. “You,” she said, picking a man. “Tell it.” A cavalryman covered with mud, he must have been on picket duty.
“This man came up from the south. He gave the proper recognition signs. He told us that he was bringing you important news about traitors but wouldn’t say anything else.”
“He arrived healthy? How did he get this way?”
“Just before we got to camp he stood up in his stirrups and screamed. His horse reared and threw him. After he hit the ground he shuddered and twitched and made gurgling noises trying to scream. And then he died.”
“Traitors?” No doubt there would be many of those to pay off before this played out. These situations brought them out from under every rock and bush.
“That’s all he said, ma’am.”
“Bring him inside. It’s possible I can still get a little something out of him. Be careful where you track your mud.” She stepped aside, even held the flap for the soldiers. Reluctantly, a few found courage enough to bring the body forward. Soulcatcher’s soldiers shared a common opinion that it was not good to catch the Protector’s eye. These stepped carefully, leaving as little mud and moisture as possible.
In a merry young voice Soulcatcher observed, “You must all have mothers.”
Soulcatcher had the corpse partially stripped, disassembling its apparel thread by thread, when there was another disturbance outside the tent entrance. Irked, she responded, hoping this would be the news she had been awaiting so long: that Goblin had been captured at last.
As she was about to open up she caught motion from the corner of her eye. She spun. For an instant she thought she glimpsed a tiny man, maybe eight inches tall, ducking down behind the corpse.
The racket outside remained insistent.
It was not the news she wanted. The soldiers there—they always came in groups—pushed one of their number forward. “A courier just came in, ma’am. The enemy is on the move again. Westward.”
Mogaba had called it right, then. “When did this start?”
“The courier will be with you in a minute, ma’am. With dispatches. He had some physical needs he couldn’t put off before he could see you. But the command staff insisted you get the main news immediately.”
In a casual tone, Soulcatcher observed, “The drizzle seems to be letting up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get that courier here as fast as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The reports from the south did indeed have the rested Black Company forces moving westward but not on the track previously anticipated. Part of their journey would have to be made without the benefits of roads, over rough terrain.
Soulcatcher said, “They must be striking for Balichore by the shortest route. Why? Can anyone tell me what’s special about Balichore?” Soulcatcher controlled a sprawling empire she knew only a little about.
After an extended silence someone tentatively suggested, “That’s the farthest upriver heavy barge traffic travels. Cargos have to be portaged and loaded on smaller boats or onto wagons.”
Someone else recalled, “There’s some kind of problem with rocks in the river. A whatchamacallit. Cataract. The Liberator once ordered a canal built around it but the project was abandoned . . . ”
A couple of pokes in the ribs were necessary before the speaker recalled who was responsible for the neglect of public works in recent times.
Soulcatcher did not respond, however. She concentrated on the transport idea.
A large portion of the Company had barged up the Naghir River after fleeing Taglios five years ago. Could this new Captain be in a rut? Or was she thinking she could catch Taglios by surprise, from the river side, where there were no walls and no defensive works and the peoples of those poorer quarters tended toward nostalgic recollections of the Prahbrindrah Drah, the Radisha and even the Liberator.
Soulcatcher asked, “Does anyone happen to know how long it takes to get a barge down the Naghir, through the delta channels, and upriver to Taglios?” She knew barges manned by veteran crews traveled day and night, unlike soldiers afoot or on horseback.
Another disturbance at the entrance arose before anyone produced a reliable answer.
The drizzle had ended, she discovered. Yet the men demanding attention were covered with mud. And they had brought her a present.
“For me? And it’s not even my birthday.”
Goblin was a present who looked way the worse for use. He was bound and gagged. His head and hands were wrapped in rags as well. His captors had been determined to take no chances.
Soulcatcher gloated. “He stumbled into one of my traps, didn’t he?”
“Yes he did, ma’am.”
There were hundreds of those out there, taking many forms. Soulcatcher had begun to put them out as soon as it had become evident that the new, improved Goblin could evade the best efforts of her soldiers. “He’s still alive, isn’t he?” If he was dead her concern that he might have allowed himself to be caught would slide down her list of worries.
“Your instructions were perfectly clear, ma’am.”
Soulcatcher memorized that man’s face. He was mocking her behind a mask of rectitude. She preferred open defiance. That she could crush without mystifying anyone. “Take the mask and gag off. Set him up over here.” The Daughter of Night, Soulcatcher noted, was interested enough to forget to hide her interest.
She could not know the little wizard’s significance, could she?
No. Impossible. The girl was just doing what she did whenever anything happened inside the tent. She paid attention because she might learn something useful.
Soulcatcher waited until she judged that Goblin was sufficiently recovered. She told him, “Your former brothers really don’t like turncoats, do they?”
Goblin stared at her with eyes colder, deeper and more remote than those of the Daughter of Night. He did not reply.
She stepped closer. Her mask was just a foot from his face. She purred, “They came to me for help settling your account.”
Goblin twitched but remained silent. He did try to look around.
He smiled when he glimpsed the Daughter of Night.
Soulcatcher said, “They told me all about it, little man. They told me what you are now. They expect me to just kill you because of what you did to my foot. They really just want you dead.” She rubbed her gloved hands together. “But I think I’m going to be a lot cruder.” She giggled.
“All their days are numbered,” Goblin said in a whisper. The voice borrowing the taunt only vaguely resembled that of the man who had gone down into the earth to challenge the Dark Mother.
“Some more closely than others.” Soulcatcher’s voice was old and emotionless. Her right hand lashed out, sliced across Goblin’s face. Blades a half inch long on the ends of her fingers destroyed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He shrieked, at first as much in surprise as in pain.
The Protector turned on the men who had brought the prisoner in. “Bring me another cage like the one the brat is in.” The cage did in fact exist already. Such had been her certainty that she would capture Goblin.
The blacksmith had orders to create three more, suitable for housing her sister, her sister’s husband, and that treacherous Willow Swan.
Later, in Taglios, she meant to work with a glassblower to bottle them all so they could be displayed outside the entrance to her palace. They would be kept alive and fed until they drowned in their own ordure.
Such was the fate that the Dominator often bestowed upon his most important enemies, in his time.
The Howler certainly kept busy. He completed his first functional four-passenger flying carpet two days after the soldiers marched westward. Gharhawnes seemed deserted, though there were enough of us around to bloody a bunch of noses the morning the former tenant took a notion to steal his home back.
Sleepy had a dozen carpets on order, from single-rider scouts to a monster she hoped would carry twenty soldiers. I do not know who she expected to fly them. Only Howler and Tobo—and, possibly, the Voroshk—had the power to manage the things.
I insisted that we have a couple of modest-sized carpets first. Those should not take too long to make and would be the size most useful to us right away. And since I was in charge of the left-behinds and the Dejagore strike I got what I wanted. Well, I got the one carpet.
Tobo had the flying post thing figured out, too. Both Shukrat and Arkana seemed eager to get along now. One or the other would allow Tobo to borrow her post when he wanted to run out to visit Sleepy, which he did by night so he would not be seen from the ground. I never felt comfortable when he did that. We had too many potentially unpleasant and unfriendly people back here in the manor. Including a lot of hostages from the leading families of the region.
Both Magadan and Gromovol were increasingly determined not to be won over, each for his own reasons. I told Magadan, “I’d be tempted to send you two home just so I don’t have to worry about what’s going on behind my back,” I was not worried, really. Tobo’s supernatural friends saw everything.
Magadan told me, “I don’t want to go home. Home no longer exists. I want to be free.”
“Sure. You Voroshk showed what you can do when you’re free. I’ve spent my life killing people like you. That’s people who believe it’s their destiny to make slaves out of people like me. I’m in a war with another one of them right now. I’m not about to cut you loose and let you start making peoples’ lives miserable, too.”
None of which was absolutely true but it did sound good. And Magadan bought it. Some. The part that really was true. That I would kill him before I turned him loose on the world.
That was the moment when he decided he might want to go home after all. From then on he brought that possibility up each time we crossed paths. The hidden folk said he was sincere. He was trying to get the other kids to go along with swapping what knowledge they had for an escort back across the place of glittering stone.
Lady did not believe it. She thought we should put him and Gromovol down because of the trouble they could cause.
My sweetie has a very direct approach to problem-solving.
Sometimes I do find what little conscience I retain a damnable handicap.
Howler, though, did successfully work his way out of the top ten on my shit list. Tobo’s appeal to Shivetya had resulted in word from the golem saying he did have the ability to intervene in Howler’s screaming and shrinking problems. Shivetya did not have much of a reputation as a liar so even Howler took him at his word. After which the smelly little wizard became extremely cooperative.
Though we still had no cause to trust his long run intentions. Nor he any call to trust ours, either.
Lady cornered Tobo. “We have a dangerous situation, here. And like a pet cobra it’s going to bite us someday. We have to do something.”
The boy sounded puzzled. “What’re you talking about? Something about what?”
“Those Voroshk. They aren’t as strong or as bright as we first thought but there are four of them and only one of you.”
“But they’re not going to . . . ”
“Pardon me for being an old cynic,” I said. “Magadan keeps telling me, in so many words, that he wants to be anywhere that isn’t here with us. And there’s at least the implication that he’ll do whatever it takes if we don’t help him go home. And Gromovol is going to be trouble eventually because his personality requires it. If you go out to visit Sleepy or just on a flying date the rest of us are stuck here with no better hope than the Howler.”
“And speaking of flying,” Lady said, “don’t you ever go out with both of those girls again. Hush! You’re only familiar with the women you’ve grown up around. I’m telling you right now that Arkana is exactly like Magadan. But she has one more weapon than he does and she means to use it to cloud your mind.”
“But . . . ”
“Shukrat I’m not sure about. There’s a chance Shukrat is exactly what she seems.”
I agreed. The kid was likable. And according to Tobo the hidden folk agreed. They offered no reason not to trust her.
Tobo was not used to arguing with anybody but his mother, even when he thought he was right. He did not want to think ill of Arkana but would not fight us.
Lady demanded, “So how do we make sure of them? You have to think of something before we move against Dejagore. We’ll be scattered, distracted and extremely vulnerable then. And because you spend time with the girls, out amongst the rest of us, all four will know what’s going on. They can plan accordingly.”
Again Tobo did not get a word in before I said, “I would be.”
Lady reminded him, “You’ve never been a prisoner.”
“Now there’s a joke. I was born a prisoner. A prisoner of a prophecy by an old woman who died years before I was born. A prisoner of the expectations of all you people. Gods, I wish Hong Tray was wrong and I could’ve been a normal kid.”
“There aren’t any normal kids, Tobo,” I told him. “Just kids who fake it better than the rest of us do.”
“And that name. Tobo. That was my baby name. Why does everybody still call me that? Why didn’t we ever have a ceremony to give me a grown-up name?”
Nyueng Bao do that. And Tobo was years past the appropriate birthday.
Lady told him, “You’ll have to take that up with Uncle Doj. Meantime, the other thing needs addressing right now. Blade is moving already. In three more days Sleepy will curl back to the northeast and it’ll be too late to stop anything. I want to be sure that we won’t get stabbed in the back just when things get exciting.”
An hour after we nagged him Tobo asked Shukrat to go flying. He borrowed Arkana’s log. Arkana was not pleased. When an hour later she told me Magadan had said he did not mind if she used his post to join Shukrat and Tobo I told her, “But I mind. If you need to talk to Tobo do it when he gets back.”
Arkana was the brightest of the Voroshk. She recognized that things were tightening up.
When Tobo did return he stayed just long enough to round up Magadan. He took Magadan flying. It was the first time Magadan had been aloft since he had entered our keeping. He did not appear excited, which I would have expected.
They returned within a half hour. Magadan’s hand-me-downs, appropriated from Gharhawnes’ former occupants, were ragged. He looked like he had been in a fight and the other guy had kicked his butt. A good long way.
Tobo gave instructions for Magadan to be isolated, then found Arkana and took her for a fly.
The ice queen, I noted, had replaced her confiscated robes with native garb that served her to considerable visual advantage.
“Down, boy!” Lady said.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t run into her before I met you, isn’t it?”
That earned me a not entirely playful swat.
Arkana came back looking rougher than Magadan had. And she was not smiling.
Tobo had Arkana put in with Magadan. He collected Gromovol.
Gromovol was not interested in going anywhere with Tobo. Tobo insisted. They were not gone long. Once they returned Tobo had the Voroshk returned to their quarters. He gathered their flying posts in the main hall. Lady and I joined him.
I asked, “What was that all about?”
“I took them out and dueled with them. Except for Shukrat.”
I stopped Lady before she explained—probably at great length—how unsmart doing that could have proven. Sometimes she could fuss as much as Sahra. I said, “I’m sure there was a reason.”
“I wanted to find out just how much we really do have to fear from them.”
“And?”
“They’re frauds. The only power they really have is what they draw from their post and their clothing. Without those even Shukrat isn’t as powerful as One-Eye was at the end. Gromovol is about Uncle Doj’s equal. Lady, even as weak as you are right now, you could manage any of them but Shukrat.”
I snorted. “I guess that would explain why Gromovol’s pop was anxious to get the kids back. Were most of the Voroshk limited talents? Were most of them carried by a few strong members of the clan?”
“I’d guess that’s likely. The point, though, is that for right now there’s a better chance our Voroshk will attack us with knives than with sorcery.” He looked at us, saw no obvious eagerness to embrace his theory. “Don’t you think that if they had any real power they would’ve used it to try to escape?”
I realized that he was upset. He had believed he was making friends with the Voroshk. Our worries had led him to test that and he had learned that his friends were not as close as he had hoped.
“You’re telling us we don’t have to kill them to be safe,” Lady said.
“That, too.”
“You have the Unknown Shadows at your command and you didn’t figure this out until today?” Lady can find something to suspect in everything. I would suggest we retire and settle down somewhere where we do not have to worry all the time but she would suspect me of ulterior motives.
“I’ve thought it for a long time,” he admitted sullenly. “But the hidden folk can’t report things that they don’t hear. The Voroshk don’t discuss their weaknesses. Or much of anything else, actually. Because of their present situation nobody likes anybody very much anymore.”
I said, “I didn’t want to kill them, anyway. Maybe I’d like to thump Gromovol a little, now and then, but . . . ”
“So that’s settled. Heck, turn them loose if you want. Once they’ve had a dose of the real world they’ll come back. Meantime, let me get to work on these things.”
Lady asked, “You’ve finally found their secret? You can make more?”
“I’ve learned how to change who they recognize as their master. None of the Voroshk know how the posts are made. They’re not even sure of the theory behind them. I know more than they do just because I’ve studied the things. I don’t yet know how they pull their magical power. But I don’t know how I do that, either. Someday I will know. But it’ll be a long, slow, dangerous process, finding out. They’re booby-trapped.”
I told him, “Life is booby-trapped, kid.”
As we left the hallway Lady was speculating on whether the original Voroshk had invented their magics or if they had just stolen them from an ingenious but unwary predecessor. I did not care, so long as no Voroshk made my life more difficult than it already was.
Three flying posts formed the goose flock formation. Tobo had the point with Willow Swan riding pillion. Swan was in the throes of an apparently severe religious relapse, muttering a continuous polysyllabic one-word prayer. With his attitude toward heights he would be bruising Tobo by hanging on so tight. His eyes would be closed so intently that he would have muscle cramps all the way back to his ankles.
Lady and Shukrat flew the other posts. Lady had Aridatha Singh aboard behind her. Shukrat carried Uncle Doj.
Murgen, Thai Dei and I shared the flying carpet with the Howler, whose shrieks were being contained inside a big glass bowl sort of thing Lady had put over his head. It worked well enough to save trouble with people who did not know we were coming.
Murgen and Thai Dei were along only because Sahra had to be placated. She did not want her baby going into harm’s way alone. People everywhere were irked because the boy’s father and uncle had had to be flown back to Gharhawnes before the raid could be launched. But Sahra had been stubborn and loud and Sleepy had given in rather than lose a friend.
Sahra’s recollections of and fears of Dejagore remained abiding and debilitating.
I hoped Murgen and Thai Dei handled it better, though at takeoff time Murgen had been sweaty, pallid, shaking and appeared to be having trouble breathing. And Thai Dei had seemed more self-engrossed than ever.
I had spoken to each alone and had tried telling each that I was counting on him to keep an eye on the other and carry him if the emotional strain became too much. I have found that assigning major external responsibilities like that can get many of my brothers through times of deep emotional stress.
Howler kept the carpet in the pocket of the formation. We moved northward at a pace that created a cold wind strong enough to pull the tears out of my eyes. Murgen and I occupied the carpet’s rear corners. I told him, “I’d forgotten just how much I don’t like this. Why didn’t I send some of those eager young bucks from Hsien?”
“Because you’re just like every other recent Captain of the Company. You’ve got to have your pointy nose right in the middle of things so you can make sure things get done your way.”
Up ahead Tobo lifted the shutter on a red lantern. He winked the light several times. There was an answering signal from the ground, miles off our track and much farther forward than I expected.
Blade and the cavalry had made good time and were already in the ring of hills surrounding Dejagore. The moon would rise in an hour. It would provide the light they needed to filter through the hills and descend the inner slope.
We passed over the rim and discovered the scattered lights of Dejagore. We slowed to a crawl. The flying posts gathered together. Aridatha tried to explain to Tobo where we needed to go.
I told Murgen, “You should’ve gone with Tobo. You know Dejagore better than anyone else.”
“Dejagore twenty-five years ago, maybe. It’s a whole new city since my day. Aridatha belongs with him. It’s only been weeks since he was there.”
Few details could be distinguished by starlight but as we moved closer the walls and main buildings matched my recollections almost exactly.
The logs formed up in line astern with Lady and Aridatha leading. Howler fell in behind. We resumed moving.
Ten minutes later we were on the ground. Five minutes after that Aridatha hustled us into his brother’s shop.
Sugriva Singh seemed to be a shorter and older version of Aridatha. He had done well for himself. He had the whole downstairs of a building for his business and everything above for his family—none of whom were ever in evidence.
Sugriva’s past good fortune assured his deep displeasure at our invasion. All of a sudden he had ten villains in amongst the vegetables and only his brother and the bountiful little blonde did not look willing to roast him for a prank. He had a great deal to lose here. And maybe more to lose if he did not cooperate. The Strangler cult was hated in the extreme in Dejagore. Just a whisper about his relationship to the living saint of the Deceivers would destroy him and just about anyone who had ever spoken to him.
Aridatha dispensed with introductions. Sugriva did not need to know his visitors. Chances were, he recognized a few of us anyway.
Aridatha told his brother, “Our father is dead. He was murdered a few weeks ago. Strangled.”
Sugriva was the elder by a decade. He remembered the Narayan Singh who had sold vegetables and doted on his children before the invasion of the Shadowmasters. He was stricken as Aridatha had not been stricken. “And that should be no surprise, should it? Is that what you mean?” Sugriva said through tears that might have been due as much to rage as to pain.
He needed a few minutes to collect himself.
To his credit Sugriva Singh did not rail against the inevitable. He understood exactly how his arm was being twisted and, though events were not going to proceed quite like Aridatha had led him to expect during his previous visit, he chose to cooperate. He wanted to get it over as fast as he could, then he would pray that the new administration would be as indifferent to him as he was to the one presently in place.
Things were not exactly working out the way Aridatha had hoped they would, either.
Sugriva said, “You haven’t chosen the best night to do this. The moon is going to expose anyone moving toward the city from outside.”
Tobo chuckled. “You might be surprised. The night is our friend, brother Sugriva.”
“I rather expect you’ll find that my father believed the same thing, young man.”
And his father’s son? Sugriva had been unhappy, even angry, when we turned up, but not really surprised. What kind of vegetable dealer was not surprised to be wakened in the night? Inside a city that closed its gates with fanatical devotion when the sun’s lower limb touched the western hilltops?
Could Aridatha’s big brother be some sort of crook?
Aridatha told his brother, “The reason we’re troubling you is that we don’t know how the gatekeeping is managed.”
“You told me before. I looked into it. There’s a company of soldiers assigned to each gate. The west gate is the most closely controlled because it sees more traffic than the other three put together.” One of Dejagore’s quirks was that most of today’s roads to the city joined outside it, to the west, so there was not much traffic elsewhere. The north and south gates were used only by people involved in agriculture and its produce.
“The east gate looks like it should be the easiest to seize and control,” Sugriva said. A true road did connect with the east gate but there was little out that way but a few distant villages. “The guards are slackers, at all levels. None of them are natives. None of them are old enough to remember the last time Jaicur was attacked.” Sugriva had adopted the local accent and the local name for the city when he had assumed a Dejagoran name.
The trouble with the east gate was that Blade was west of Dejagore. But he was well ahead of schedule. There was time, before sunrise, if he hustled.
Tobo suggested, “Lady, why don’t you go tell Blade that it has to be the east gate?”
“Because I’m going to be getting dressed.”
Widowmaker and Lifetaker were coming to the party. They had been away for far too long.
Half a minute later Shukrat said, “I guess it’s time to find out if you can really trust me, Tobo.”
I jumped in before the boy could speak. “I suppose so. Tell Blade not to waste time. We need as much of the night as we can get. And we won’t stay unnoticed long once we start. Tell him we’ll be waiting when he gets to the gate.”
A smile tickled Shukrat’s freckled, almost pudgy face. She bounced up onto her toes and gave Tobo a peck on the cheek. Bold, bold behavior by any standard in this part of the world. They must do things differently among the Voroshk.
She bounced away. Tobo was completely flustered. I grinned till Lady poked me in the ribs. Evidently I was enjoying the bouncing part a little too much.
Murgen said, “I suggest we get to work here, folks. I don’t want to be inside these walls a minute longer than I have to.” He was holding it together but the strain was obvious.
Thai Dei was frazzled, too, and with even better reason. A lot of people very close to him had died here during the siege. No matter how tough a man pretends to be, such losses gnaw at his soul. Unless he is not human at all.
“The man has a point,” I said. “Start getting ready.”
Lady and I had the most to do. We had a big show to put on. We retreated into a small separate room, colder than the main shop. As we strove to turn ourselves into walking nightmares I asked, “Hon, have you really got that post-riding stuff figured out?”
“It isn’t that hard. Except for staying on. Any idiot could do it. There are some little black rods and slidy things you move around. You go up or down, or faster or slower, or whatever, when you do. Why?”
“It occurs to me that it might be better for us and him both if we got Aridatha back to Taglios. He’s been gone a long time. Mogaba needs to have him back where he can show him off before news of tonight’s business gets around.”
She did not stop donning the Lifetaker armor but did look at me in a way that I do not see often. It was like she was looking right through me, at all the secret places inside. It was frightening sometimes.
“All right. We’ll have to move fast if I’m going to be aloft before daylight.”
“Will the log make it that far?” Not knowing how those things worked I did not know what you might have to feed it, like a horse. The posts did seem to work on a different principle than Howler’s flying carpets, which required a strong-willed, powerful sorcerer to drive them. They demanded his undivided attention every moment they were aloft.
“I’m sure it will. What do you want me to tell Mogaba?”
The long-time taunt, “My brother unforgiven,” came to mind, along with, “All their days are numbered.” But this was not the time.
My original intention had been to make a huge show of our invasion. I do like a big ration of drama. Lightning. Thunder. Fireworks. But I waited until we had the gate open to let it start.
Early on there were alarms from the south wall as a tide of darkness and whispers passed by. But no sentry saw a single horsemen. They spied only vague shapes that stirred secret fears of things far darker and crueler than any conquering soldier.
The city was restless and troubled but remained unaware of our presence. It did sense approaching change.
The thunder and lightning came after Blade’s men started coming through the gate, six hundred men in Hsien’s strange armor, under strict orders not to betray their humanity until the city was captured. Most Dejagorans were Gunni. The Gunni believed in demons who could take human shape to make war on men. And most of the people of the outlying Taglian Territories had by now heard that the Company was allied with ghosts and devils.
Each soldier had a bamboo wand carrying a banner affixed to his back. The color of the banner declared the man’s unit affiliation while characters painted on the banner stated that unit’s martial slogan. Widowmaker and Lifetaker rode at the head of the invading column. She carried a burning sword. Widowmaker carried One-Eye’s spear, which was crawling with maggots of light. His shoulders bore a salt-and-pepper set of oversized ravens.
And, even so, much of the city slept on.
Ugly worms of fire crawled over our hideous armor.
Bannermen marched ahead flailing big flags supposed to be our personal ensigns.
Witnesses brought out by the flash and boom and the rattle of horseshoes remembered old stories and ran away weeping.
Yet most of the city slept on.
Doj, Murgen, Thai Dei and Swan remained at the gate, holding the hostages we had taken there. Aridatha stayed out of sight at his brother’s place. Howler, Tobo and Shukrat circled high above. Howler’s glass bowl continued to contain his shrieks. We hoped he would remain a secret for a while.
The real fireworks began when we reached the citadel, where the Protector’s still-sleepy governor deluded himself into thinking he could refuse to surrender and make it stick.
Fireballs flew. The citadel gate exploded. Holes appeared in its walls. People inside began to scream.
Every dark place in the streets had something moving inside it. Hundreds of somethings, many of them vaguely familiar in those instants when anything could be clearly discerned.
Those flooded in through the broken gate of the citadel. They weaseled through the holes in its walls.
Lifetaker and Widowmaker followed moments later.
The terrified inhabitants of the tower put up no fight at all. Our sole injury was a broken arm suffered by a dimwit who tripped over his own big feet and rolled down a stair.
Lady and I stood atop the citadel. The city below still was not fully aware that it had been conquered. I said, “It hurt a lot less getting here tonight than it did last time.”
“That was the night we made Booboo.”
“Which was a real booboo.”
“Not funny.”
“That was the night One-Eye made the enemy that stalked us for twenty years, too.”
“We’ll make new enemies this time. I have to go if I want to have any hope of getting Aridatha into Taglios unnoticed.”
“I don’t think you can, tonight. Not without flying so damned fast the wind rips the skin off your face.”
“I’ll see if Tobo can’t help.”
It was difficult to kiss her good-bye. We still wore all the costume armor.
The Protector’s reconnaissance troops had warned her that something unusual was taking shape. The warning confirmed her suspicions. Her nonhuman spies had been having almost no success keeping track of the enemy. Which meant the enemy was taking pains to be less visible.
Soulcatcher raised the state of alert and stepped up training. She redoubled her own personal preparations.
When word of the disaster at Dejagore reached her—one lone rider managing to get through with the news—she had known for fourteen hours already that the Company main force had left its westward track and had begun hustling up a line that would slice between her Middle Army and the newly orphaned force outside Dejagore.
That would evaporate within days, she presumed. Many of those soldiers came out of the city itself—a disproportionate percentage of them officers—while the rest would now hear the call of the harvest much more loudly.
What the hell had happened down there? The messenger had brought very few details, just word that the city had awakened to find itself occupied. The invaders had been swift and thorough. They seemed to have had outstanding intelligence. Heavy sorcery might have been involved.
“The next fight won’t be so one-sided,” she promised her officers. “Next fight they’ll have to deal with me. Me like they haven’t seen me in a long, long time.” She was angry and awake and no longer handicapped by any shred of boredom. She was feeling more alive and filled with hatred and bitterness than she had for a generation.
Within hours her new mood had electrified those around her.
Officers who failed to become equally electrified quickly suffered permanent replacement.
After losing their base at Dejagore the generals of the fading, confused army nearby ineptly tried to invest the city in a way that would not result in economic disaster. Then, six days after the fall, news came that the enemy main force was rushing straight toward them.
There had been skirmishes with the cavalry occupying Dejagore. Those had not gone well for the locals. And now ten times as many well-disciplined, perfectly-armed, trained killers were about to fall on them.
A third of the army went home under cover of darkness the night after the news arrived. Those who stayed endured almost continuous psychological torments by things they could never see.
The murderous army from the south never materialized. That was never necessary. The Dejagoran soldiers in the Taglian force all deserted. The cavalrymen occupying Dejagore scattered the army’s steadfast core without outside help.
Mogaba’s level of discomfort—he would not think the word “fear”—had risen substantially since Aridatha’s return. The stakes kept rising. The risks kept expanding. Lady had been seen by Palace servants. So far those believed they had seen the Protector, whose comings and goings were secretive and unpredictable. But someday Soulcatcher might overhear some mention and know she could not have been two places at once. Nor would she believe the manifestation to have been one of the haunts now regularly seen in the maze of passageways for which the Palace was famed.
Mogaba told Ghopal and Aridatha, “I’m tempted to drop everything and run.”
Ghopal asked, “Yeah? Where would you go?” It might not be as personal but his doom was every bit as certain as Mogaba’s was if the Black Company reconquered Taglios and restored the ruling family. Life would turn cruel for any Shadar who had belonged to the Greys.
“Exactly.” Mogaba ran his palm over the top of his head. Keeping it shaved required less and less work. “So I remind myself what honor demands.”
Aridatha said little. He had not talked much since his return. Mogaba understood. Singh had seen things he did not want to believe were true. He had learned things about the stakes that left him paralyzed with indecision. There appeared to be no road leading toward the light. Wherever he turned he beheld another face of the darkness.
It was important to Aridatha that he do what he perceived to be the right thing.
Singh’s visit with his brother had fueled him with a determination to offset some of the evil his father had done.
Aridatha was Gunni by faith but his character was much more suited to the Vehdna religion. He thought this was the life where wrongs had to be made right.
Mogaba said, “The news from the south is uniformly disastrous. The Black Company is meeting very little resistance. They have superior sorcery, superior weaponry, superior troops, equipment and leadership. Not to mention intelligence so good we’re wasting our time trying to keep anything secret. So it seems our fates actually depend on how fast those people can get here. The Protector won’t stop them. They’ll pluck the strings of her ego, tickle her pride, and just when she thinks she’s ready to make her kill they’ll hit her in the back of the head with a sledgehammer she’ll never see coming. You have to be more than just powerful to deal with those people. You have to be more than clever and treacherous. You need to be psychic.”
Ghopal asked, “Then why don’t we ride down there and take charge?” He smirked.
“Not funny. Two reasons. First, she doesn’t want me to. She still thinks we can get them into a pocket between us. I don’t know how. And, more importantly, if I got anywhere near her there’d be no way I could hide my thoughts and no opportunity to put them into effect before she could protect herself. You two, you might be a little luckier.”
Ghopal observed, “The city is remarkably calm in spite of the news.”
Tidings of the fall of Dejagore were making the rounds but hardly anyone seemed to feel that the Protector was in any peril herself. There had been no disorders. Graffiti was becoming more common, though. Mostly the same old taunts, though rajadharma was becoming more common. Then there was a new one: You shall lie in the ashes ten thousand years eating only wind. And one not seen for years had reappeared: Thi Kim is coming.
No one knew quite what that meant. Maybe not even its framers. Some people thought “Thi Kim” might be a Nyueng Bao phrase. In which case the name could mean something like Walking Murder.
If it was not Nyueng Bao it made even less sense. Or no sense at all.
Aridatha asked, “If we do nothing to support her and she gets beaten, how do we defend ourselves?”
Mogaba said, “I’m going to tell you right now, you don’t have a problem unless the Protector wins. The Company and the royals have no quarrel with you. You’ve done a good job running the City Battalions. If you just sit on your hands you’ll probably end up inheriting my job.”
Aridatha shrugged. “You must have talked about these things when she was here.”
“Oh, yes. She said nobody would chase me very hard if I had sense enough to take off before they occupied the city.”
Ghopal asked, “They’re that confident? That they can discount your help? What about me?”
“She’s that confident. Which is probably too confident. She didn’t say anything about you. She didn’t know who you were. She suggested that if you think you have reasons to fear the return of the royals you should join me in looting as much treasure as you can before you run away.”
“Shadar don’t abandon their oaths of service.”
Aridatha, with little to fear from defeat, suggested, “Let’s just do our jobs. Like we’ve always done. And see what opportunities Fortune places in our hands.”
Sarcastically, Ghopal responded, “Of course. The Black Company and the Protector could end up destroying each other. Like a couple of rams getting their horns locked.”
A consideration which left all three men thoughtful, with Mogaba in particular reflecting on how fate might write the joke that would end with that unexpected punchline.
Oh, we looked good, ten thousand strong, all lined up as if for a parade. Every man wore his armor. Every man had his personal banner whipping in the breeze. Every battalion wore its own color of armor. Every weapon was perfectly honed and polished. Every horse was groomed and caparisoned as though for review. Every standard was in place and gloriously new. We were a general’s wet dream, pretty and dangerous, too.
The gang opposite us, though they outnumbered us three to one, looked like they would be no challenge. Men over there were still trying to find their assigned places in ranks.
Good as it all looked I had my doubts about the wisdom of offering battle, however confident our guys were and however much confidence the men opposite us lacked. But Sleepy wanted to crush them fast and harry Soulcatcher back to Taglios where, because she would be hard-pressed, she might not be wary enough to elude ambush by Mogaba and his henchmen.
She was assuming too much would go our way. When things are going good is when you really have to watch your back.
But I was not the Captain. I could only advise, then do my part in the show once a decision had been made.
Tobo was more confident than Sleepy was. He believed the enemy only needed a nudge to crack. One vicious shock and they would collapse. He guaranteed it.
Trumpets sounded the ready. Drums began to talk, counting the cadence for the advance. A thousand men would remain in reserve. Well behind them were the recruits we had acquired. Those surrounded the Radisha and her brother, nominally forming the royal lifeguard. They would be used only in desperation.
The trumpets sounded the advance. The ranks stepped out, lines dressed, cadence perfect, weapons exactly on line. Positioned in front of the wings, Lifetaker and Widowmaker lit off in blinding flashes and began to advance themselves. But they halted before they entered missile range.
From that closer vantage I could see that Soulcatcher had formed her troops up in three successive forces with a hundred yards of separation each between them. The frontline unit was the most numerous but looked like the lowest quality. The second formation appeared much more solid.
That was a device I understood, having used a variant myself. But you have to be confident that your real fighters will not catch the panic of the scrubs when they run away.
There were things going on behind Soulcatcher’s third line but they were too far away to be made out clearly.
Then the advancing soldiers made seeing much more difficult. Then the next stage of enchantments surrounded me, concealing me from enemy eyes, making it impossible for me to see anything either.
This is going to be tricky,” Soulcatcher reminded staff officers compelled to take her genius on trust. Her previous demonstration, during the Kiaulune wars, had come before their time.
The enemy trumpets sounded the ready. His drums began to rumble.
Soulcatcher said, “Once they sound the advance they’ll be too busy to spy on us.”
The advance sounded.
“I want the word spread on the second line that the collapse of the first line is part of my plan. Tell them it’s a deliberate ruse. I don’t want anybody running because the first line does. Tell them that anybody who does run is guaranteed worm food. Then tell the third line the same thing about the first and second lines. I want them to believe I’m luring the enemy in where I can use sorcery to destroy them. And I want the reserves backed off to the edge of the wood. Right away.”
“But that means . . . ”
“Forget the camp. If we don’t win this fight the camp won’t matter. I want the reserves spread out along the edge of the woods so they can collect up men who run away and get them organized. But before they do that I want them in here to move my guests back to the north bank of the creek.”
Blank looks stared her way.
Anger began to creep into her voice. Anger they knew to be the sort that soon saw corpses arriving on the cemetery ground outside camp. When Soulcatcher was angry enough she would not let the Gunni burn, and thus purify, the bodies of those she had slain. “Form them at the edge of the woods! Ready to kill any cowards!” Then in a calm, almost beatific voice she added, “If the soldiers fail to rally and throw back the enemy their generals won’t long survive defeat.” Soulcatcher had very strong feelings about how this engagement should proceed. “In fact, the wise general will make plans not to outlive his standard bearer. His passing will be much less painful that way.”
She had been preparing for days. But she was compelled to fight with flawed weapons. The most rigid control had to be exercised.
“Get busy!” She stepped past the officers, left the tent, climbed up a reviewing stand that would let her see the action. As she took her place there the enemy, with the precision of a drill team, collided with her forward deployment.
The slaughter was slighter than she had anticipated. The enemy seemed content to shatter opposing formations. They did not pursue. They halted, removed wounded, dressed their ranks and repaired their equipment. And took their time doing it. Which pleased the Protector. That meant more time for the beaten companies to collect themselves at the edge of the wood.
Soulcatcher glanced back as men carried her prisoners’ cages out of her tent. Goblin, his eyes regenerated already, offered her a little mocking salute. The girl looked straight at her and smiled.
One more time and she would throw the brat to the soldiers for a few hours. That would take the sass out of her.
The soldiers managing the removal seemed calm enough, despite the terrified fugitives beginning to enter the camp.
Soulcatcher was irritated at herself for having overlooked the chance that the fugitives might not flee all the way to the woods. She should have had the palisade demolished.
No matter. Only a few would take refuge here.
She gave orders to seal the gates.
The enemy resumed his advance.
The second line gave a better account of itself but the outcome was identical. The troops broke without doing much real damage to the foe.
This time none of the fleeing soldiers got into the camp.
Once again the enemy stopped to handle his wounded and dress his lines and repair his armor. The cavalry screening the enemy flanks were having trouble holding back. Soulcatcher guessed that discipline would crack once the third Taglian line fell apart.
Those idiots had better be ready back at the wood.
Soulcatcher left her vantage as the enemy sounded the advance again. “Very businesslike, this new Captain. But how well does she think on her feet?”
Very businesslike, Soulcatcher’s personal removal to the wood, where she growled new orders at her officers before she retired to the big tent she had had prepared, as a pretended forest getaway and as a place where she could meet messengers from the allies who were trying to butcher her now. Goblin and the Daughter of Night had been deposited there.
Both prisoners seemed amused by her arrival. As though they had shared some particularly hysterical joke, entirely at her expense, just a moment before she appeared.
Soulcatcher paid them no attention. She was much more concerned about how troubled her sister would have grown because of the absence of sorcery on the battlefield. If no one became too suspicious for another fifteen minutes . . .
Behind the brilliant fog of light masking Widowmaker I climbed down off my horse, then clambered onto the Voroshk flying post I would share with my former understudy, Murgen. The post had Magadan’s name painted on it in his native script. Over on the left, Lifetaker, too, was preparing to soar with that noted devotee of high flying, Willow Swan. All of the flying logs were ready to go up, each surrounded by an absurd wicker and bamboo framework carrying numerous makeshift attachments.
Somewhere back where I could not see them, Tobo and Howler were getting ready to take up a flying carpet creaking under the weight of warlike unpleasantries. The screaming wizard was still muttering under his breath because he had been forced to reveal his flying secrets to Tobo.
A huge volume of raw nastiness would be taken aloft, to be launched either when Soulcatcher betrayed her location or our attack began to bog down.
The latter did not happen. The evaporation of the Taglian front line was a daydream come true. The second line lasted only a little while longer. The third line, evidently comprised of the best and most motivated of the Protector’s troops, was more stubborn. Having spent too much time too close to Soulcatcher myself, I could imagine why the third force might have had a little extra motivation. Soulcatcher was not a thoughtful, forgiving commander.
Give her her due, though. She would not expect love or forgiveness from anyone superior to her, either. In the world where she had come of age that had been the norm. That world, of the Domination, had demanded ruthlessness and cruelty. It had forgiven neither kindness nor compassion.
The third line’s stubbornness failed to withstand the precision and confidence of our men. Fainthearts began to slip away and run toward that distant treeline, where somebody appeared to be rallying survivors.
The rout had only just begun when a dome of cardinal light popped into existence in an instant, straight ahead. It faded in seconds. I was making a clumsy effort to gain altitude when a second dome of light, this time carmine, appeared and faded to my left.
There were a half dozen more flashes, each in the family of reds, before I felt confident that I was high enough and dared to divert attention from the post’s controls long enough to see what Murgen had been babbling about throughout our climb.
The sorcery in progress appeared to have turned the earth a uniform black. Upon that surface something kept painting red flowers that spread from a pinpoint in an eye’s blink, almost black at the center but fading to flame yellow as the circle ended its expansion at perhaps twelve yards in diameter. From on high nothing but the sudden red chrysanthemums, blooming randomly, were readily visible. The earth looked like some bleak gameboard upon which a garden of deathflowers continue to blossom and gradually fade.
Whatever was happening, it was passive. Not coming to us. The sorcery had been in place already and was being tripped by our advancing soldiers. Who were not getting off lightly.
Soulcatcher did not make herself evident anywhere.
Way off to my left Lady and Willow vanished behind smoke as all the bamboo fireball launchers attached to their post sprayed the Taglian camp. Dozens of fires broke out down there but the red circles kept blooming amongst our soldiers.
I pushed my post forward half a mile. I told Murgen, “Saturate the wood. She’s in there somewhere. Where the hell are my crows? They’re never around when I need them.” They had disappeared during my climb to altitude. Maybe they did not like getting too far from the surface of the earth.
There was no sign of the Unknown Shadows anywhere. But I did not expect to see signs. Tobo had sent most of the hidden folk away last night, for their own safety.
You notice strange things in times of stress. I remarked the absence of crows around the battlefield. A rather bizarre lacking which I had not witnessed before, ever. But vultures had begun to circle above the wood.
Murgen shouted something about the enemy taking heart from our misfortune. I said, “Put the fireballs along the tree-line, then.” Which was really my task since I had to point the Voroshk post where I wanted the fireballs to go.
Child Shukrat, better schooled in the use of the post, swept in from the east, low, laying her fire down upon the Taglian line. She wasted hardly a fireball.
Our ground advance halted. Sleepy did not withdraw but neither was she willing to face any more killing sorcery.
I would not see how bad that had been until I was back on the ground. Which was soon enough because once we exhausted our fireball supply there was nothing more Murgen and I could do from above.
I had no trouble imagining Soulcatcher over there in those woods laughing her leathers off at how she had hurt us.
The Taglians launched one uncoordinated, inept counterattack which turned disastrous when they began to run away again. Soulcatcher’s sorceries did not distinguish between friend and foe, only between directions of travel.
We grounded well to the rear. I remounted my horse and went forward. Soulcatcher’s sorcery had been terrible. The site where each flower of light had bloomed remained defined as a red so dark it verged on black. The black itself was fading from around the circles, trampled grass gradually becoming visible like winter wheat sprouting. But weirder crops appeared within the circles.
Men, sunken into the earth, some only ankle deep, some up to their hips and more. Frozen in the advance, still in their lines. All suits of armor no longer tenanted by even a ghost of life.
Somebody had tried opening several suits. Inside there was nothing but charred flesh and bone. A quick calculation suggested we might have lost four or five hundred men to this horror, which had taken place almost faster than it can be told.
“There’s something wrong here,” I said. “Soulcatcher has stopped.”
“What?” Murgen asked. He was probing a deadly circle. He discovered that it was cool now and the visible surface was no thicker than a fingernail. “What’s that?” Later, when we collected the dead, we learned that they had not sunk into the earth. The apparently sunken portion was not there when we dug out around them. Possibly they had melted.
“Soulcatcher stopped playing with us. She had to be controlling those circles somehow. Otherwise they would’ve killed her own soldiers the first time they retreated. But that isn’t working anymore. What’s changed? What’s happened?”
Suddenly, the vultures above the wood all spiralled down rapidly, as though planning to attack something.
I said, “Let’s see what Sleepy is up to.”
Sleepy was sending scouts to explore the limits of the danger. So far no death flower had bloomed on our far flanks.
The vultures stopped their descent just above the treetops but continued to look more like raptors than carrion birds. One suffered an impulse to descend a little farther.
A golden-brown urine-colored strand darted up like a gigantic toad’s tongue. A splatter of light surrounded the bird. It seemed to become a black cutout of a vulture. The cutout shattered into a hundred fragments. Those fluttered down like falling leaves.
The remaining vultures chose to take their business elsewhere.
Nobody but me seemed to notice what was happening.
Where were my damned ravens? I could send them to see what was happening while keeping my own sweet ass high and dry. What was the point of taking on a mythic character if I did not get to do mythic kinds of things?
Moments later Tobo and Howler were above the woods, dropping prosaic firebombs on the Taglian forces.
Lady joined us before Sleepy’s scouts had found out if we could safely slide around the ends of the killing zone. She had a map she presented to the Captain. One glimpse told me my sweetie had not wasted her time aloft. She had charted the deadly circles. And a pattern was apparent. The positions of those not yet tripped were evident. Unless Soulcatcher had been aware of our airborne capacity. Then the death circles would be there solely to herd us into something far more gruesome and cruel.
Sleepy summoned her battalion commanders immediately.
Soulcatcher’s soldiers fought stubbornly for a while, along the edge of the wood, but had been too badly mauled already to last long under determined attack by our professional bloodletters.
Most of the Taglians had no desire to see their wives and children lose their husbands and fathers. Sleepy gave orders to let anyone who abandoned his weapons go.
Any Taglian economy inherited by the Prahbrindrah Drah would be better off if it was not crippled by a great slaughter of the empire’s young men. It was only now recovering from the horrible losses suffered during the Shadowmaster and Kiaulune wars.
“It wasn’t anywhere nearly as eloquent a victory as I’d hoped. But I’ll take it,” Sleepy said. “Despite our casualties. This war may have been won today.”
That earned her a lot of bewildered or disbelieving looks. Soulcatcher was still out there, in a really foul temper now. More unpleasant surprises could be expected.
“But if we keep after her she’ll be distracted when she reaches Taglios.”
Mogaba’s plans were a longshot. I said so. “And whatever sweet nothings his conscience whispered to him a couple months back, he’ll be a whole lot more worried about saving Mogaba’s skin once he has old enemies pounding on his door for real.”
Sleepy started to say something about Aridatha Singh but thought better of it.
A carmine flash appeared on the killing ground. Using Lady’s chart Tobo had triggered a booby trap by bombarding it from the Howler’s flying carpet.
Sleepy told Runmust Singh, “After Tobo’s done I want you to march some prisoners back and forth through there. I don’t want any of those things left active. Some kid might wander in there and get himself killed.” Like the countryside was swarming with stupid children.
I said, “I’d be more pleased if we could grab a few of those things for our own use. If Mogaba had something like that he might stand a chance of killing Soulcatcher.”
Lady ruined the fun. “She’d smell it out. She created those things. There’ll be safeguards so they can’t be thrown back at her.”
A whole lot of shouting started in the woods. Tobo and Shukrat darted that way, in case the soldiers needed help. Moments later Howler’s carpet streaked back our way.
Tobo did not bother to dismount. He just announced, “They’ve found the Daughter of Night. She’s in a cage. Soulcatcher ran off and left her.”
Lady and I exchanged looks. That seemed completely unlikely. Unless the girl was bait in a truly deadly trap. Which might be. Soulcatcher had sown the field of death that had consumed our soldiers without the Unknown Shadows noticing her doing it.
The cage was inside a halfway collapsed tent. Several fireballs had ripped through the fabric but had failed to set it afire. I told everyone, “Be extremely careful here. If there was ever a time when Soulcatcher would try to spring something on us this would be it.”
Sleepy had her henchmen push curious soldiers back. We were already closer to the tent than Lady liked—though that had as much to do with who we expected to meet here as it had to do with concern about sorcerous deadfalls.
Nobody had yet been able to sense anything active in that line.
Lady told Tobo, “Go over everything three more times. Then check it again. Howler, you go over it, too.” Of no one in particular she asked, “Where’s Goblin?” When she got no answer she turned on the men who had found the tent, all of whom were in perfect health despite having taken time to scrounge souvenirs before they reported their find. “Where’s the little man? The one who got away at Nijha.”
Shrugs. They might not know what she was talking about. But one brave soul did say, “There’s another cage under there. It’s tipped over and broken. Maybe he got away.”
Lady and I exchanged glances. Why would Goblin leave without the girl?
He would not.
Tobo called out, “There’s no danger here.”
Howler tried to concur but his voice gurgled off into a scream.
I said, “Something definitely ain’t right. Tobo, send your unseen pals out to scout around. We especially need to know where Goblin and Soulcatcher are. As soon as we can. We have to keep after them.”
Sleepy nodded irritated agreement.
Lady and I approached the tent warily.
Booby traps come in many forms.
As we had been warned, one broken cage was empty. The other lay on its side, door downward. One fine-looking woman lay sort of splattered all over inside, wearing not a stitch.
Lady stunned me by starting to rush forward saying something about her poor baby. I caught her arm. “Easy.” The body looked, to me, like it had been posed. It would excite Soulcatcher’s sense of humor for decades if she could get us to jump to our deaths over a child who had no more feeling for us than she did for the horses, cattle, and whatnot that passed through her life.
Lady paused but would not remain patient long. “What?”
“That isn’t Booboo. I don’t think.” But that naked flesh could not be an illusion, could it? Goblin used to do that sort of thing . . . But Tobo said nothing magical was going on.
I squatted, groaning as my knees creaked, reached through the bars and pulled dark hair away from the woman’s neck, which it had concealed.
I pulled Lady down beside me. Her knees popped as badly as mine had. “Look there. I do pretty good work, don’t I? You can hardly see the scars.” I exaggerated. The scarring was ugly. But not all that ugly for somebody who had had her head sewn back on.
“Check the foot. Which foot got hurt? The right one, wasn’t it?”
I uncovered the woman’s right foot. The injury done by Goblin’s booby trap, and Soulcatcher’s own crude self-repairs, were immediately obvious.
“I hate her even more than I used to,” Lady said. “Except for that heel and her scars she’s still looking just as sleek as she did on her nineteenth birthday. What’s wrong with her?”
I said, “I can’t tell from here. But I’m not getting any closer till I know it’s safe. Where’d Tobo and Howler go? Get them back here.” This remained a potentially explosive situation, even if no sorcery was active. Soulcatcher would be in a foul temper when she regained consciousness.
Lady mused, “The child must have a low opinion of our intelligence if she thought this would fool us.”
I wondered. Maybe we just showed up before the trap could be fully prepared.
When Tobo returned he told us, “Cat Sith just spotted Soulcatcher at the north edge of the woods. She has Goblin on a leash. She’s rallied some soldiers and has them building earthworks.” He became increasingly distracted as he stared at my sister-in-law.
Now was that not an interesting set of developments?
Sleepy blurted, “The Daughter of Night is pretending that she’s the Protector?”
Tobo almost reeled back when he realized that he was lusting after a woman five hundred years his senior.
Lady, always an advocate for swift and decisive action when she had been in command, insisted, “We need to press her. Whoever’s in charge. Every second she gets to pull things together will mean more casualties and difficulties for us later.”
Sleepy did not disagree. It was hard to argue with the truth. She went off to restore order and resume the advance. It was weird that the Taglians, already broken twice and neither well-trained nor motivated, would be rallying. But Tobo insisted that they were doing so and he was not subject to fantasies. Of that sort.
It seemed unlikely that the Taglians would be well-armed. Most of the Taglian soldiers had thrown down their weapons the first time they fled.
Lady gripped my hand for a moment. “Think we’ll ever really get to see her?”
“You begin to wonder if she’s any closer, or any more real, than Khatovar, don’t you?”
Willow Swan came bounding up. “Is it true? Have we caught Soulcatcher again?”
“News spreads fast,” I said. “Yes. That’s her. I’m pretty sure. You’re welcome to join me while I examine her. To make sure.” He had gotten closer to her than I ever had as her one-time physician and surgeon. He would have a better chance of spotting physical evidence that this was one of Soulcatcher’s elaborate tricks. If he remembered anything at all after five years away.
I did not believe this was a trick. There was something badly wrong with my honey’s little sister. I felt that before I got my close-up look.
Swan examined and grumbled. He had no happy recollections of the way Soulcatcher had used him way back when.
But he was not driven by any particular hatred of her, either. Sleepy said, “You keep what this woman did to you firmly in mind, Willow Swan. I don’t want to see it happen again. And if I do get a whiff, you can count on getting kneecapped before you score.”
Swan wanted to rage and protest that there was no damned way that witch was going to get inside his head again. But he did not. He was only flesh and he recognized that that flesh was incapable of rational thought around any female who shared Soulcatcher’s family blood.
His record spoke for itself.
“Then why don’t we just kill her?” he asked. Wounded pride burned through his cool. “Right here. Right now. While we’ve got the best chance we’ll ever get. End it all forever.”
“We won’t because we don’t know what Goblin and Booboo did to her,” I snapped when Lady seemed strangely reluctant to disappoint a fellow whose passion had fixed upon her originally. She would not be developing a sense of compassion at this late date, would she? Or of family? She and her sister were one another’s oldest surviving enemies. “Soulcatcher won’t help us more than she absolutely has to but she will help. For a while.”
Lady nodded. Her sister was insane but her insanity was pragmatic.
Sister Soulcatcher showed no signs of recovering.
I did not say so but my outburst was part whistling past the graveyard. I was increasingly certain that there was something gravely wrong with Soulcatcher. I feared she might be dying. This was the thing that had claimed Sedvod. And nobody else saw it.
The others were all too excited by the prospect of having her at our mercy.
Getting Soulcatcher awake and aware enough to understand and begin suffering because of her circumstances preoccupied Lady and Swan for some time. Murgen and Thai Dei, Sahra and Uncle Doj joined them. In time they meant to strong-arm Soulcatcher into assisting us but first they wanted to fatten up on a feast of gloating.
Soulcatcher did not cooperate. She remained steadfastly unaware, exactly the way Sedvod had done.
The racket of skirmishing rose and fell in the distance, never becoming intense. Our guys did not sound much more ambitious than were our enemies. I did not blame them for a disinclination to get killed when the battle’s outcome had been determined already.
Riverwalker jogged into sight. “The Captain’s compliments and could you all come up and help her? She has a situation. She’d like some advice.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything.”
“What kind of situation?” Murgen asked. He was not distracted by Soulcatcher. He understood that when the word “situation” was used this way it meant that his son was about to be asked to jump into something particularly hot.
“We’re having trouble coming to grips with what’s left of the enemy.”
I suggested, “Why not just leave them the hell alone now? They’re on the run.” Riverwalker ignored me.
“At about a hundred yards the soldiers start losing interest. The few who do manage to go on and get within fifty yards say they find themselves thinking how awful they are for interfering with Her and that they really ought to be helping Her fulfill Her holy destiny. ‘Her’ not being defined but they assume they’re thinking about the Protector because the Protector is the devil they know and the devil they thought they were supposed to be chasing.”
Lady waved me closer. She murmured, “I’ll handle this end. Take the carpet and posts up and bombard the Taglian command from outside spell range.”
“We’re almost out of fireballs again.”
“So drop rocks. Or burning brush. Or anything else that will make her concentrate on staying out of the way. Every time she moves a few more of her troops will drift outside the spell. Whereupon they’ll suddenly get smart and run away.”
Her confident prescription suggested that this was an effect she knew of old.
I told everyone, “First thing we do is load up on arrows. We’ll just drop them from higher than she can reach. From five hundred feet up they ought to be good and deadly.” My gut knotted. I was talking about bombarding my own flesh and blood.
But part of me was certain that the girl would avoid personal damage. And part believed that a confrontation had been inherent in the situation from the moment Narayan Singh had snatched our baby from Lady’s arms.
It did work. The girl, wearing her aunt’s costume, darted around, followed by Goblin. The last few fireballs and firebombs got spent. Their infallible lack of accuracy refreshed my cynical view of our chances of catching a break.
The pair tried to fight back. Whenever a flier descended below a certain level a string of urine-colored lights flung upward. But I kept them too busy skipping out of harm’s way to concentrate on their marksmanship. I could not tell which was the source of the deadly light.
I noted that the girl seemed unaware that the guy overhead in the ugly suit was her doting papa.
Our soldiers grasped the situation quickly and seized those opportunities offered by the shifting perimeter around the Taglian forces.
The Daughter of Night was no soldier but she was quick and decisive and did have a source of advice in a man who had spent more than a century soldiering.
Goblin told her to attack, to get what use she could out of the troops she held in thrall. She did attack. Straight toward Sleepy, ignoring the missiles falling around her. Our people had no choice but to run from her while trying to weaken her from extreme rage. Anybody who got too close underwent a sudden change of heart and took up arms on behalf of the Deceiver messiah, without understanding what was happening.
Because she was indifferent to how many of her helpers perished, Booboo was able to chase around everywhere, breaking up everything before it got organized, gaining a recruit for each two or three men she lost, making it emotionally ever more difficult for our archers to hurl missiles at soldiers who had been comrades not that long before. The girl even came near recapturing Soulcatcher.
Then Tobo screwed up.
He assumed that his strength, combined with that of the Howler, would be enough to overpower an untrained girl if they came at her suddenly, from an unexpected direction. And maybe he was right. But he forget that her companion was not the Goblin he had grown up around. This Goblin was infected with wicked godhood.
That urine-colored light caught the flying carpet a glancing blow just before the Howler and Tobo cut loose with the best they had. A chunk of carpet turned into fluttering black scraps. Howler and Tobo and the rest of the carpet hurtled ahead, safe from spells but not from a brutal beating by the branches of the trees into which they plunged. The Howler got off a couple of heartfelt shrieks.
The urine-colored bar of light did the magical equivalent of jostling the mystical elbows of the young sorcerer and the ancient one alike. Their spells did a lot of damage to Booboo’s defenders. They even managed to stun their intended targets. But because the spellcasters were bouncing around in the branches in the woods, instead of reporting in, the rest of us never got a chance to take advantage.
We had a standoff of sorts. We could not get at Goblin and the Daughter of Night when they were most vulnerable. Their thugs did not know that we had lost our most potent weapons, at least for a time. My ravens, who had returned conveniently only when it was time for them to become Tobo’s mouthpieces, informed me that Howler and Tobo had survived but were hurt. They were hidden in the woods a few dozen yards from where the Daughter of Night and Goblin, barely recovered enough to keep breathing, were hunkered down.
I tried to let Sleepy know quietly but Sahra was too alert. In moments she worked herself into a state that even Murgen could not soften. “You’ve got to do something!” she shrieked.
“The Daughter of Night will hear you,” Murgen growled.
“You’ve got to get him out of there!”
“Be quiet!”
I agreed. Somebody had to do something. That somebody might be me. But the only useful help I had was my two raven assistants. They alternately reported Tobo unconscious or quietly delirious. They could not get reliable orders from him. They refused to let me use them to transmit orders to the other Unknown Shadows. Those were gathering in numbers such that it was impossible not to catch glimpses of them when you turned or moved suddenly.
“We can’t get close to him,” Murgen told Sahra. He shook her. She was not listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths.
Shukrat stepped forward. She told us, “I can bring him out.”
Sahra shut up. Even Sleepy stopped pulling the remains of our army back together and offered her attention for a moment.
“I’ll need my own clothing back,” Shukrat told us. Her accent was slight. “The enchantment won’t touch me if I’m protected by my own clothing.” Her use of Taglian had become conversational.
Sahra’s hysteria faded immediately. I will never understand that woman. I would have bet on it getting worse.
The rest of us exchanged glances. We could not survive without Tobo. Not in this world. Not with our enemies. We had to get him out of there before the Daughter of Night discovered the opportunity that fortune had thrown down at her feet.
Shukrat said, “You’ve got to trust me sometime. This might be a good time to take a chance.”
Maybe she was not as dumb as she put on.
Tobo trusted her.
I looked over her head to where Sleepy had resumed expostulating angrily with Iqbal Singh and an officer in badly dented Hsien style armor. She had heard. She waved a hand and nodded to indicate that the decision was up to me. I knew the Voroshk kids better than she did.
“All right,” I told Shukrat. “But I go with you.”
“How?”
“I’ll put on Gromovol’s . . . ”
She was more amused than alarmed, though she was troubled. She was very worried about Tobo.
Because I have this obsessional thing about loyalties and brotherhood and keeping faith with the past I sometimes have trouble believing that other people respond as flexibly to their situation as they do. I could not have made my peace with such a dramatic shift in circumstances as easily as Shukrat had.
I said, “That won’t work, eh?”
“No. The clothing is created specially for each of us. Individually.” She had only that slight accent, no greater than my own, but she did not yet possess a large vocabulary. Her speech was simpler than it might have been. “Though it can be adjusted by a tailor of sufficient skill. The skill takes twenty years to learn, though.”
“All right. Where’s that stuff stashed? In Tobo’s wagon?” The kid had so much junk he needed his own wagon and teamsters to haul it around. The wagon contained things as diverse as marbles and miracles. He had been indulged all his life and would not leave anything behind. “Let’s go.”
I hoped he had not left any protective spells where they would keep us from getting at the tools we needed to save his scruffy young butt.
Fully attired in her family uniform Shukrat seemed a lot more formidable than the cute little freckle face who hung around with Tobo. Her apparel seemed to be alive, seemed excited to have rejoined her. The black cloth kept stirring around her, restlessly. She resembled an Unknown Shadow who had chosen to let itself be seen. Her blue eyes sparkled. I suspected she might be having fun. I told her, “Tobo’s dad and I will come along as far as we can,” although she did not seem to need reassurance. She did understand that having Murgen along meant Thai Dei would be there, too. And Thai Dei did not trust her at all.
Our sometimes odd personal entanglements did not interest Shukrat. Not that she would ever talk about them with an old fart like me.
Shukrat forgot that she was wearing that same outfit the day she fell into our hands. When she was not alone. She forgot that she was not invincible.
Sorcerers never lack for self-confidence. Especially young sorcerers.
Those whose self-confidence is justified live to become old sorcerers.
A platoon of elite fighters would creep along behind us, far enough back not to irritate Shukrat’s pride but close enough to salvage her cute little behind if her confidence was not completely justified.
For Tobo’s sake I would try to make sure she became an older sorceress, by at least one more day.
Murgen scrounged up fireball projectors for himself and Thai Dei. Uncle Doj scrounged up himself and Ash Wand and invited himself into the game. He might be older than dirt but he was still spryer than me. He and his disciples stole through the battered wood in silence so total I wondered if my hearing was going. My old bones were less cooperative so I ended up as rearguard. Today my whole body insisted on reminding me that I had been critically wounded not all that long ago. Although it did that almost every day.
I wore my Widowmaker armor. Though the Hsien reproduction was quieter than the metal original that Soulcatcher made I still seemed to be all clang and clatter.
I took One-Eye’s spear along, against Lady’s advice.
Shukrat’s flying post trailed behind her. My ravens rode it, one offering directions, the other poised to carry news or unexpected holiday greetings to the rear.
It would be a holiday somewhere in the world. And fate offered me a glimpse of Goblin in the distance, evidently passed out, much as he had done after preferring the holiday excuse for being drunk, half a lifetime ago. I hefted the black spear.
I glimpsed the girl, too. She was moving but doing it like a drunk on the brink of passing out. I recalled another time, long ago, when a brother named Raven and I had ambushed a sorceress called Whisper on Soulcatcher’s behalf. Circles of fortune. The madwoman had been our employer at the time. Now she worked for us. Or would be given the opportunity to work for us if I could keep her alive. That might be a tough assignment.
Seeing the girl and my old friend hurt. I wished I had a weapon I could use to end this here, now. One-Eye’s spear seemed to turn in my hand. I pointed out the view to Murgen and Thai Dei. I breathed, “On the way out. After we have Tobo and Howler.” I indicated their bamboo poles.
Murgen worked to keep a blank face. Thai Dei did not have to work. Thai Dei did not come equipped with facial expressions, so far as I could tell. Uncle Doj nodded. Uncle Doj was old friends with unpleasant necessity.
I told Murgen, “I’ll do it if you can’t.” Sometimes you have to build a wall around your heart.
A few steps onward we encountered the emotional phenomenon the soldiers had reported. But with the girl stunned it did not overcome reason. I just had to concentrate on not giving myself up to love for the Daughter of Night.
I did wonder how much worse it had been when she was in control of all her faculties.
We reached Tobo without incident. Howler lay not ten feet away, miraculously silent. The gods do play amazing games.
I examined Tobo before I let anyone move him. His pulse was strong and regular but he was covered with cuts and abrasions and had suffered a lot of broken bones. He was not going to be much use to anybody for a long time.
Shukrat whispered. “He would have been fine if he had been wearing this.” She indicated her apparel. That seemed spellproof, too. As promised, she was suffering none of the effects of the Daughter of Night’s emanations.
It was a struggle for the rest of us, and getting more difficult as Booboo regained her senses.
We got Tobo aboard a crude litter that we slung underneath the flying post. Howler we hoisted onto the log itself. We tied him into place. He was not badly hurt, just persistently unconscious. His rags had served him better than any armor. He needed to find himself an alley and do some ragpicking. He needed a new outfit desperately. What he was wearing no longer came up to the standard of rags.
I told Thai Dei and Murgen to collect as many scraps of flying carpet as they could without alerting the Taglians to our presence. No telling what could be learned from them. We did not need Goblin and Booboo getting any brilliant notions about improving their mobility.
Howler chose that moment to wake up, stretch and greet the world with a good scream. I clamped an armored hand over the little bastard’s mouth but I moved a beat too late.
Booboo’s men started scrambling around. Goblin woke up and glared around, but in apparent confusion. Somebody eager to hurl himself into the gap between peril and the Daughter of Night smashed into the girl violently enough to knock her off her feet and leave her groggier than she was already.
The “love me” spell weakened significantly. Half a dozen Taglian soldiers materialized. The first two stopped instantly when they got a look at me and Shukrat. Those behind them piled into them.
Doj leaped forward like a man a third his age. Ash Wand glittered in a dance of death.
More soldiers appeared. Lots more. Murgen and Thai Dei emptied the bamboo fireball projectors they carried, then drew swords and joined Doj in weaving a tapestry of steel.
Shukrat told me, “Go. Now. Just push the rheitgeistide. It will go ahead of you.” In a straight line only, I discovered instantly, unless a couple of people pushed and pulled it real hard to get it going in a straight line in some other direction.
I did not have anyone to help me right away. Tobo’s male relatives were busy turning the Taglian army into bite-sized bits of crow food. Shukrat was playing hard to hit with a band of Taglian archers.
When their arrows reached her she seemed to lose definition momentarily. Her cloak swirled around her, almost cloudlike. Nothing touched her.
A cloud of a thousand glittering little obsidian flakes boiled off Shukrat. Despite a breeze blowing into our faces, the cloud headed for the Taglians. In moments enemy soldiers were swearing, slapping themselves, forgetting to be bellicose toward me.
Most excellent.
I had seen One-Eye and Goblin pull similar stunts frequently over the years, usually with bees or hornets. One time one of them stirred up an army of ants to attack the other. Much of their creativity for much of their lives had gone into inventing new ways to harass one another.
I missed the little shits, aggravation and all.
It was not a good time to be a Taglian devotee of the Deceiver messiah, willing or otherwise. Tobo’s family was making the blood fly.
That damned Goblin exploded like a starving vampire popping up out of his grave. He landed amongst his own soldiers. Three or four went down. Doj, Thai Dei and Murgen all got thrown around like they weighed nothing. Their swords seemed incapable of doing any harm. The fiercest blows sounded like they were slamming into a waterlogged tree trunk. And did about as much damage as they would have done to a huge old watersoaked log.
I recalled One-Eye’s last hours. And was in motion already when I did, the black spear extended way out in my right hand, head starting to glow.
The Goblin thing whipped to one side fast enough to avoid getting skewered. It did suffer a cut that would have been enough to require stitches if it had been the true Goblin.
Its flesh felt tougher than an old smoke-cured ham.
The Goblin face betrayed complete astonishment, then horrible pain. The spear flashed and smoked in my hand. Goblin shrieked. For an instant I saw the real Goblin looking out of tormented eyes.
I fought for my balance and tried to get him with a truer thrust.
I did not get him at all. He flung out of there in complete terror of my weapon. His wound looked like it had gone gangrenous already.
All this took only moments. The troops I had asked to tag along behind wasted no time rushing up to help. Still down, Booboo was not radiating enough “love me” to disrupt their ability to fight. They started grabbing the rest of us and dragging us out of there.
“I can walk!” I snarled. Though I had almost no strength left. I got hold of the flying post and started walking it.
The soldiers carried Doj and Thai Dei. Murgen looped an arm over the shoulder of another fighter who had managed to get himself injured already.
This did not look good for the Ky family.
More of our men rushed up.
I leaned into the log. I tried not to worry. Behind me the skirmish got rowdy. More men came up on both sides. Fortunes shifted as the girl found strength or weakened. Evidently using the “love me” enchantment sucked the strength out of her flesh.
“I hate this kind of fight,” I told Sleepy when she came over to see how the survivors were doing. She kept her back to the ranks of the dead.
Howler was up and around already. I had a whole team working on Tobo. Murgen was going to make it. He just needed time. But time had run out for Doj and Thai Dei. Soldiers live.
I kept doing what I could for Soulcatcher, too, mostly when my wife was not watching. “You can lose a lot of men without accomplishing a thing.” I meant that as a subtle suggestion.
“They’ve realized they can’t win. They’ve started moving north. Before we can finish surrounding them.” I heard nothing in her voice expressing disappointment. “How bad is Tobo?”
“Not as bad as his uncle and Doj.”
“Croaker.”
“Sorry. We’re out of business. Maybe for a long time. If Tobo has a bone that isn’t broken I can’t find it.” I exaggerated only a little. The kid had a broken leg, a broken toe, a broken arm (two places), a concussion and a whole rack of crushed or broken ribs. “Unless you’re willing to face Mogaba without him.”
“Outnumbered by the best troops we’ll face, commanded by the only intelligent commander we’re likely to meet?” Meaning a general she had fought during the Kiaulune wars but never had beaten. She eyed Soulcatcher. “Counting on Howler to give us his best? I think not.”
“Then we’d better fall back to Dejagore and get comfortable. Or move up to Ghoja.”
“Ghoja,” she decided instantly. “We want control of that river crossing. And that barrier.”
“Mogaba isn’t likely to come out right away. He’ll want to know exactly what’s going on before he commits himself to any course. Hell, he might not come out at all if we update him on what’s going on with the Daughter of Night.”
She agreed. “If we let him know, he might find a chance to do something beneficial to all of us. See that he gets the appropriate information.”
How was I supposed to do that?
I did not ask.
I knelt beside Soulcatcher. Her breathing was ragged. She seemed to be getting weaker. I did ask, “How’s Sahra?”
“She’ll be all right. She’s lived with this idea for a lot of years. She knows nobody gets out of here alive. Even if they don’t have one of those silver badges. I’ll let you know what she decides about funeral arrangements.”
I grunted.
She left me with a final caution. “Just don’t let her boy die. Things would get unpleasant.”