Sometime during the excitement the Voroshk kids decided to run away. But before they ran they had to argue about how to manage it and who should be in charge after they succeeded and then they kept bickering until they wasted most of the time when the rest of us were diverted first by Soulcatcher and then by Booboo.
Nothing got decided completely. After sundown they surprised their guards using feeble disorientation spells. Gromovol killed several soldiers, mostly because Magadan cautioned him not to. As soon as they were loose Gromovol started looking for his flying post. Arkana and Magadan believed it was more important to find their clothing. Without that they were almost powerless. They wrote Gromovol off. They knew the Black Company well enough already to want to distance themselves from the doom taking shape in his future.
Arkana told Magadan, “We’ll have to take one of those keys to their shadowgate, too. Otherwise we’ll never get out of this world.”
“If we get the chance, yes. But the main thing we need to do is to get away from these madmen.” Even after several months Magadan still did not understand what was happening in this world. It was too alien. Nothing made any sense. His own world had known no real war since his forbears had come to power.
Two hundred yards away Gromovol did something stupid and betrayed himself as he tried to steal a flying post. An alarm sounded. In minutes rage flooded the camp. The murdered guards had been found.
Arkana swore. “That idiot! We’d better surrender to somebody important right now. If we keep on running the soldiers who catch us won’t listen to any explanations.”
“Shukrat . . . ”
“Shukrat’s gone native. Shukrat’s decided there’s no way she’ll ever get home so she might as well do the best she can for herself over here. It’s probably because of her mother.”
“What?”
“Her mother. Shukrat’s been totally weird ever since the First Father put her mother aside for that woman Saltireva. Besides, she’s infatuated with Tobo.”
“He is gorgeous, isn’t he?”
“Magadan! Well, yes. Exotic, anyway.”
“I hear his mother was one of the great beauties of this world when she was younger. But his father grew up eating nothing but ugly soup.” All the while they talked Magadan kept drifting away from the excitement. He had no destination in mind but no intention of giving himself up. There would be no chance like this ever again.
Arkana said, “Shukrat could be right.”
“What?”
“Suppose she hasn’t really gone native? Suppose she’s just winning their trust? Maybe someday she’ll just stroll off with one of their keys and leave this world.”
“Damn.”
“Shukrat won’t do it. But we could adopt that strategy.” It had not taken Shukrat long to get her post and clothing back. She was becoming an important part of the Black Company. Already.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” Magadan grumbled.
Arkana said, “Because we’re almost as stupid as Gromovol is. As blind to anything that isn’t the way it was at home. Shukrat isn’t bright. But she does see that this isn’t home and never will be. I’m turning back. You do what you want. When the shouting stops I want them to find me right where they left me. I refused to run away. It was all that idiot Gromovol’s fault.”
But, darling ice princess, don’t you know you never do anything alone?
The Voroshk never fully grasped the fact that the Unknown Shadows are with all of us always. If Tobo wanted he could catalog every breath they took. The hidden folk tap emotion. They learn to understand what is being said far faster than even language naturals like myself. The Voroshk could no longer speak secrets.
Sometimes misfortune likes to get into the game.
Magadan told Arkana, “You go ahead. Be friendly. Flirt. Do what Shukrat did. When you get your key come find me. I’ll walk you home.”
“Come back with me.”
“I can’t. They’ll blame me for what Gromovol did.”
The devil named appeared suddenly, running straight toward them, the light of campfires exaggerating the terror distorting his face. Gromovol had expected to fling open the door to freedom but had found it to be the door to hell and no one on the other side cared who he was.
Before it could all be sorted out and the troops calmed down Magadan had been killed, Gromovol had been wounded badly, and Arkana had been raped several times. She brought a broken leg and several cracked ribs into my care as well. In time I heard all the true details from my ravens, who seemed more inclined to be communicative while Tobo was out of action.
Soldiers whose friends have been murdered are not kindly people. In a Company without Lady and a female Captain no discipline would have been assessed at all. As it was, the discipline was light and directed mainly at those who had assaulted Arkana sexually. That could not be overlooked.
Mogaba was not yet aware of the disaster that had befallen the Army of the Middle when he found the two women in his quarters. Lady he recognized. The young blonde he did not. She would, he presumed, be a sorceress, too. Fear cramped his stomach. His heartbeat doubled. But he betrayed nothing outwardly.
He had had to mask his emotions in the presence of madmen and a madwoman for decades. The madmen were gone. With luck the madwoman would follow. And he would persist.
He bowed slightly. “Lady. To what do I owe the unexpected honor?”
“To disasters. Of course.”
The Great General glanced at the younger woman. She was completely exotic, like no woman he had ever seen.
Though white and blonde she did not resemble Willow Swan otherwise. There was an alien feel to her.
She must be from wherever the Black Company had hidden the last several years.
He said, “I’m sure you didn’t come this far just to stand around looking cryptic.”
“The Daughter of Night and the thing inside what used to be Goblin somehow overwhelmed the Protector. The girl put on Soulcatcher’s leathers. She’s pretending to be her. She’s squandered ninety-five percent of your Middle Army. She’s headed this way. We aren’t in any condition to chase her. My husband thought you should know. He wants me to remind you that the Daughter of Night exists only to bring on the Year of the Skulls. I want you to know that Kina is real. Doubt any of the other gods you want but not this one. She’s out there. We’ve seen her. And if she gets loose none of our other squabbles will mean a thing.”
Mogaba did not need to be reminded that the Year of the Skulls would be an atrocity far huger than any of Soulcatcher’s random cruelties. Catcher was mere Chaos. Kina was Destruction.
“We have a plan for handling the Protector. It should work as well against someone pretending to be the Protector. Possibly better.” He did not ask what had become of Soulcatcher. He was content to hope that phase of his life was complete.
“The girl doesn’t have Soulcatcher’s finely honed powers but she does have plenty of raw talent. She’s somehow surrounded herself with an aura that makes anyone within a hundred feet want to love her and do anything to please her. This has manifested itself before, in smaller ways, so I fear we can expect it to grow as she comes to understand it and exercise it.”
“That isn’t good. That’s not good at all. That’ll make sniping difficult. Any way around it?”
From the blonde’s slight start, Mogaba judged Lady’s, “Not that we know of yet,” to be less than honest. But in her place he would have reserved something, too. And what they had obviously was not reliable. Otherwise they would have used it themselves.
The Great General said, “Thank you for the warning. We’ll make use of it. Was there anything more?” Down deep he nurtured the tiniest hope that there could be a reconciliation. A hope he knew was unrealistic. But everyone nurtured impossible dreams. Even the gods were pursuing the impossible.
Mogaba stated the facts as they had been reported to him. He made that point clear. “We aren’t their friends. They just want someone else to assume part of the cost of eliminating the enemies they have to go through in order to get at us.”
Ghopal Singh asked, “What about the truth of the report? Are they just trying to trick us into attacking the Protector? If they could get us to make the attempt and we were to fall at a time when they were close behind the Protector they’d reach the gates just when Taglios was falling into chaos.”
Aridatha groaned. “We went to them, Ghopal. Remember me chasing halfway to the other end of the world to tell them we were going to try to get rid of the Protector? Remember me helping them take over Dejagore as a sign of good faith?”
“Circumstances have changed.”
Mogaba interjected, “Ghopal, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I think it’s true. The Protector is out of the game. Possibly only momentarily. Hell, probably. She’s made unlikely comebacks before. What hurts my feelings, of course, is that those people don’t consider us much worth worrying about in terms of the greater struggle.”
Aridatha grumbled, “Which might not be that unreasonable when you think about it dispassionately.”
Ghopal asked, “And you’re equally sure that the Middle Army has been destroyed?” Even military insiders had not yet fully digested the news about the losses of Dejagore and the Southern Army that had clung to it’s skirts. A lot of people were still waiting to hear how Dejagore responded to it’s change of masters.
The nature of that response would have repercussions throughout the Taglian empire.
Would the return of the royals be celebrated? Or resented? The Dejagoran response was likely to set the fashion for all the cities and towns that came under the Company sway.
“I’m sure of it,” Mogaba told Ghopal. “But I’m less sure of the condition of the invaders afterward. I got the distinct impression that their defeat of the Middle Army was neither cheap nor easy.”
Aridatha said, “We’ve got to have better intelligence.”
Mogaba took a moment to stifle his sarcasm before confessing, “I’m open to ideas. Any ideas.”
No inspirations sprouted immediately.
Aridatha said, “We could always do something mythic. Like damning ourselves by bringing in an ally worse than our enemies. One that will devour us after it finishes doing what we brought it in to do.”
Mogaba and Ghopal recognized the effort but did not get Aridatha’s joke.
“It’s an allusion. Or a parable. Or something,” Aridatha explained. “Like all stories about Kina. The Lords of Light created her or brought her in for the demon plain war. And probably would have been better off if the rakshasas had won, ultimately.”
Mogaba did have a sense of humor. He just had not brought it along tonight. “I guess you had to be there. Anyway, there’s nobody we could bring in. We’re on our own. So suggestions are in demand. Practical suggestions will be particularly welcome.” That was something in the nature of a jest so, perhaps, he had brought part of his sense of humor.
Ghopal said, “All we can do is send out more spies and set up more remount stations so the spies can get their observations to us faster.”
“And we have only one courier battalion.” Mogaba sat quietly for half a minute. Then he asked, “How is our support among the priests and bourgeoisie? They’ve had time to think about the royals coming back. They plan to desert us?”
“We’re the devil as far as they know,” Ghopal replied. “The Protector has been their benefactor. And only a few of the slickest talkers can hope to benefit if we get thrown out. We worked hard to eliminate the Radisha’s friends once we could no longer hide the fact that the princess was gone, not just hiding out feeling sorry for herself.”
The Great General proposed, “Let’s try the same strategy. Make believe we haven’t lost the Protector. Aridatha. You seem to be distracted.”
“I keep thinking about the girl. The Daughter of Night.”
“And?”
“I saw her once. Five years ago. There’s something about her . . . Makes you want to throw her down on her back. And makes you want to worship her at the same time. Makes you feel like you should do anything you can to please her. It’s scary when you step back far enough to realize what happened.”
“She’s all grown-up that way.” Mogaba explained what Lady had told of events to the south. “That girl got hundreds of men killed. We’ll have to assassinate her remotely somehow. See if some mechanical engine can be contrived.”
“I have a question,” Ghopal said.
“Go.”
“What’s that thing you’re fiddling with? You’ve been playing with it ever since you got here.”
“Oh. Some kind of snail shell. They’re all over the Palace. Nobody knows where they come from. Nobody’s ever actually seen one crawling around. They’re sort of relaxing when you roll them around in your fingers.”
Both Singhs eyed the Great General as though thinking his behavior was distinctly odd.
Ghopal said, “Regarding the Daughter of Night. We might consider poison. There’re some talented poisoners in Chor Bagan, the thieves’ market.”
The years had changed Mogaba. He did not immediately reject the suggestion as unworthy of men of honor.
I suggested, “How about a standoff weapon we can launch from outside her influence? Hell, if we take the logs and carpets up high enough we can just keep dropping rocks till we get her.” There was some optimism. We did not have even one carpet since Booboo knocked Howler and Tobo down. What we did have was bits and pieces of half a dozen carpets that Howler had been working on when nothing else took up his time.
Lady glared at me so intensely I began to wonder how soon I would start melting.
Killing Booboo was not yet on her list of options. Her emotions were engaged much more deeply than mine, though the problem of the girl was a torment to me, too.
My entanglement was more with the idea of the child than with the specific daughter.
Lady wanted to fool herself into believing there might be some way that Booboo could be redeemed.
“You’re wasting time,” the Prahbrindrah Drah said. The collapse of Soulcatcher’s Middle Army had brought him to life. Suddenly, he believed his restoration was just a matter of marching to Taglios and yelling, “I’m back!” He had leaped into the embrace of self-delusion.
There was a lot of that going around.
Murgen joined the conference as the Prince began to bicker with Sleepy about her plans, a situation guaranteed not to persist for long. Sleepy would let him know who was running the show. Murgen announced, “I just finished reading a really long message from Baladitya. Who is well and loving every minute of his new life, thank you very much, Sleepy. Which he did not fail to point out several times.”
I asked, “What’re you doing getting mail from that old goofball?”
“He wasn’t writing to me. He doesn’t know me. The message was intended for Tobo.”
Sleepy, who was thoroughly cranky because nothing was going the way she wanted, grumped, “I’m sure you’re going to share every exciting detail with us, too, even though what we all need is some sleep.”
“Since you insist.” Murgen grinned. He had no particular job assignment while he was recuperating so he could do just about anything he pleased. “His letter mostly concerned the prisoners Shivetya is holding up there. The First Father and Gromovol’s dad. Who Shivetya took in originally just to protect them from the shadows. Of which there are hardly any left anymore. Them and the Voroshk have almost wiped each other out. Sorry.” He patted Shukrat’s shoulder. Nobody missed that gesture. Murgen approved of Tobo’s girlfriend—if that was what she was.
I wondered what he was doing bringing Shukrat to a staff meeting.
Sahra, of course, bristled like a hedge hog. There were no eligible Nyueng Bao girls anywhere within two hundred miles and she had married a foreigner, Murgen, for love herself, against the will of most of her family, but what did that have to do with today?
Sahra could restrain herself most of the time, these days. In public. If Murgen was around to calm her and remind her that Tobo was not a four-year-old anymore. But she was under tremendous additional strain now, with all her family dead or wounded. She had not yet pulled herself together well enough to make decisions about funeral arrangements for her brother and Uncle Doj.
He restrained her now, with just a gentle touch.
“You got a point to make?” Sleepy said. “Or can I get back to work figuring out how to get us through this on terms that suit our needs?”
Swan muttered something about the little bit needing a good dose of man to relax her. Sleepy snarled. Swan grumbled, “Did I volunteer? I don’t think so. Not recently. So don’t fuck with me.”
Hurriedly, Murgen told us, “Guys, Shivetya came up with another Kina origin cycle. He got this one from the Voroshk. Evidently they don’t mind talking history if they’re bored. In this version Kina’s husband put her to sleep. When she kept acting up after she won the demon plain war for the gods by sucking the blood out of all the demons. This version of the Goddess has ten arms instead of four. Her husband, known as Chevil in the world of the Voroshk, has four arms and is a lot like the Kina we know. Sometimes he’s called the Destroyer, too. But sometimes he can be cajoled or seduced into going easy. Kina can’t.”
His audience rustled. In some stories Khadi, one of the gentler Gunni forms of Kina, had had a husband, Bhima, who also counted the Destroyer among his many names.
All Gunni Gods have bunches of names. They get a little hard for an outsider to keep straight because when they change their names they also change their attributes. It gets particularly confusing when you have two aspects of the same god getting into an ass-kicking contest with each other.
“And this Chevi has what to do with Kina’s origins?” Sleepy demanded.
“Oh, he’s the one who did all the mean things to her, like chopping her up and scattering the pieces all over. But she also kills him. And brings him back to life.”
“Murgen. I’m considering sending you back to the Taglians for some more rework.”
“All right. Chevi has more than one wife. But there used to be only one. That was Camundamari, who has several other names, naturally. Camundamari was very dark-skinned. The other gods mocked her and called her Blackie.”
Interesting. Both Khadi and Kina can mean black in some Taglian usages, though “syam” is the common and conventional word.
Murgen continued, “When Chevi himself started taunting her she flew into a huge rage, tore her skin off, and turned into Ghowrhi, the Milky One. The shed skin became Kalikausiki, which filled itself up on blood sucked from demons, then became Khat-hi, the Black One.”
“Kina is a skinwalker!” Suvrin cried, startling everyone. Skinwalkers were a demonic terror little known outside Suvrin’s homeland. Skinwalkers killed a man, sucked out his flesh and bones, put on his skin and stole his life. The details are pretty gruesome. Skinwalker folklore strikes me as a way for ignorant people to explain radical and bizarre changes in personality. Shifts I believe are due to poorly understood diseases. Or maybe just due to getting old.
Murgen was startled by Suvrin’s outburst. Which seemed excessive to me, too. “Not a skinwalker in the way you mean,” Murgen said.
Was there something in Suvrin’s background?
The concept of a monster able to steal someone else’s identity that way is particularly grotesque. I have seen a lot of strange and ugly things. Tobo’s hidden folk are only the latest on a long list. But Skinwalkers are one horror that just seems too terrible to be true.
Like the gods themselves of late there have been no manifestations before reliable witnesses. We were talking ancient legends tonight. Suvrin had referenced one of the most obscure.
I said, “Believe me, Suvrin, if there were any real skinwalkers down your way you can bet the Shadowmasters would’ve rooted them out and used them up. What a weapon, eh?”
“I guess,” Suvrin admitted. Reluctantly.
“That’s wonderful,” Sleepy grumped. “Ghost-story time is over, boys. Now we let Murgen finish. He is going to finish, isn’t he? Because I want to get back to what this meeting is supposed to be all about.” She swung a deadly finger. “Don’t you even think about puking up another wisecrack, Willow.”
Swan grimaced. He had live ammunition and no ready target. Then he grinned. A time would come.
I said, “Murgen?”
“There isn’t much more. Baladitya says most of the high points of the mythology agree. There’s more of a death goddess to her nature over there. She’s always referenced as living in a cemetery.”
“She does that here, doesn’t she?” I asked. “When Sleepy and Lady and you, especially, talk about your nightmares, that place you go with all the bones? That could be a Gunni style cemetery.”
The Gunni burn their dead to purify them before their souls line up for reassignment in the next life. But the fires are never hot enough to consume the major bones. If a burning ground is near a major river the leftovers are generally deposited there. But a lot of places are not near a major river. And some are not near a source of firewood. And some families never save up enough to buy wood that is available.
Bones pile up.
These places are not often seen by anyone but the priests who attend them, the men in yellow who revere Majayama but watch over their shoulders because Kina and her pack of pet demons supposedly lived beneath the bone piles. Even though Kina is known to be chained up under the glittering plain until the Year of the Skulls.
I said, “I’ve got a lot of time to think these days. One of the things I’ve been pondering is why there are so many different stories about Kina. And I think I’ve figured it out.”
My ego got a boost. Even Sleepy seemed interested, despite herself. My wife, perhaps less enthralled, suggested, “Do go on,” in a tone implying that she knew there would be no stopping me anyway.
“In those days the Company . . . ”
“Croaker!”
“Sorry. Just seeing if you were listening. What clued me was the fact that there isn’t any uniform Gunni doctrine. There isn’t much of an hierarchy amongst Gunni priests, either, except locally. There’s no central arbiter of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable dogma. Kina isn’t alone in being the subject of a hundred conflicting myths. The whole pantheon is. Pick any god you want. When you travel from village to village you’ll find him wearing different names, different myths, getting mixed up with other gods, and on and on and on. We see the confusion because we’re travelers. But up until the Shadowmaster wars almost nobody in these parts ever went anywhere. Generation after generation, century after century, people were born, lived and died in the same few square miles. You only had a few gem traders and the Strangler bands moving around. Ideas didn’t travel with them. So every myth gradually mutates according to local experience and prejudice. Now first the Shadowmasters and then we land in the middle of all this . . . ”
We? A glance around showed me just three other people who had not grown up in this end of the world. For a moment I felt ancient and out of place and found myself recalling an old piece of poetry that said something to the effect: “Soldiers live. And wonder why.” Meaning, why am I the one, of all those who marched with the Company when I was young, who is still alive and kicking? I do not deserve it any more than any of those men. Maybe less than some.
You always feel a little guilty when you think about it. And a little glad it was somebody else, not you.
“That’s it. We’re travelers. That’s why it all seems alien and contradictory. Wherever we are, most of us are outsiders. Even when we do belong to the majority religion.” A glance around showed me that hardly any of my audience were Gunni, either. “Well, that’s my piece.”
“All right, then,” Sleepy said. “Back to practical problems. How do we deal with the Daughter of Night and the Goblin thing?”
“That’s practically the same thing as a skinwalker,” Suvrin said. “Kina put him on like a suit of clothes.” Suvrin had skinwalkers on the brain tonight.
“The Daughter of Night!” Sleepy snapped. “I want to hear about the Daughter of Night. Not about Kina. Not about skinwalkers. Not about old Voroshk sorcerers, not about old librarians and not about anything else. And, Lady, if you really don’t want the girl killed, then come up with an idea for disarming her that’s better than any idea for taking her out. Because you’re the only one here letting emotion get in the way.”
Goblin and the girl both rode, though their mounts remained skittish and frightened and Goblin’s had to be kept in blinders so that it could not see its rider. Neither animal was allowed to look back. Goblin himself wore a rag to protect his damaged but nearly healing eyes.
The handful of soldiers who joined their flight from the middle ground fell away rapidly. Driven by the “love me” spell they gave it everything they had but eventually every man drifted outside the spell’s influence, then vanished immediately.
Only the two touched by Kina crossed the bridge at Ghoja. They reached the north bank as dawn began to paint the eastern sky. It was still only the morning after the destruction of the Taglian Middle Army. They had killed several post horses but even so had not arrived ahead of rumors of the disaster to Taglian arms.
“Our enemies have been here before us,” the Goblin-thing said. He wanted to be called Khadidas, Slave of Khadi. The girl simply refused to address him by that appellation. “These people have been warned and threatened but they will raise no hand against you because of who they think you are.” Not because of who she was.
The Daughter of Night played Protector with a blend of arrogance and small-mindedness nothing like her aunt’s but the garrison commanders found her sufficiently convincing. And she ached every second because it was clear that these unbelievers would never yield themselves to the service of the Dark Mother. She knew that they would have tried to destroy her had they known she was not her aunt. This world deserved the Year of Skulls.
The aura the girl radiated got her through her brief confrontations.
“I’m exhausted,” she whined to Goblin. “I’m not used to riding.”
“We can’t stop here.”
“I can’t go on.”
“You will go on. Until you are safe.” The Khadidas’s voice left no doubt who it believed to be in charge. “There is a holy place not many leagues further. We’ll go there.”
“The Grove of Doom.” There was no enthusiasm in the girl’s response. “I don’t want to go there. I don’t like that place.”
“We will be stronger there.”
“It’ll be the first place they’ll look for us. If they don’t already have soldiers there waiting.” She knew that was unlikely. Those people were not yet prepared to tell their soldiers that the woman inside the black leather was not the Protector anymore, but they did have the capacity to move their game pieces from afar. They seemed able to thwart the Goddess whenever they liked.
She said, “They already know what we’re going to do. Because we just talked about it.”
“We’re going to the Grove. I will be much stronger there.” No argument would be allowed.
The Daughter of Night was no less devoted to her spiritual mother today but she did not like this creature who bore a fragment of Kina inside him. She found it difficult to articulate even to herself, but she missed Narayan. She missed him because he had loved her. And she, in her self-centered way, had loved him enough in return that now her life was one ongoing trail of loneliness and desolation . . . leading where? This new hand of the Goddess seemed incapable of any emotion but anger. And he refused flatly to indulge her in any way, or even to acknowledge her humanity.
She was a tool. That she was a living thing with wants and emotions all her own was just an annoyance, a nuisance, an inconvenience. There was an ever stronger implication that she should learn to abandon her distractive qualities. Or else.
Goblin said, “We need a place where we can be safe and our power is strong because there is much we need to do before we commence the actual rite of resurrection.” By which the Daughter of Night understood him to mean bringing on the Year of the Skulls.
She became attentive despite her inclination to be rebellious. It sounded like the Khadidas was going to impart some real information at last. Hitherto, the possessed little man had done nothing more than present his bonafides, then tell her what to do. They had been together for only a few days but throughout them he had been completely unforthcoming.
She asked, “How can we possibly bring on the Year of the Skulls? Our cult has been exterminated. I doubt that there are a hundred devout believers left in the entire world.”
“There will be hands enough to undertake the holy task. Narayan Singh did well in his last years. But before we bring them together we must recover the Books of the Dead.”
The Daughter of Night had to pass on the cruel truth that had been used to torment her all the while she had been a captive of the Black Company. “The Books of the Dead no longer exist. The woman who commands our cruelest enemies burned them personally. Not even a scrap survived. The monster that dwells in the place of glittering stone, that prevents my mother from rising, had the ashes scattered throughout all the realms that touch upon the demon plain.”
“That’s true.” The Khadidas grinned evilly. “But books are knowledge. The knowledge contained within the Books of the Dead is not lost. The knowledge also resides within the Goddess herself. And whatsoever there was within her that needed to be brought forth into this world she placed within me before she sent me forth.”
“You know the Books of the Dead by heart?”
“I do. Which is why we must find our one safe place. The scriptures are no good locked up inside me. They must be out, in written form, to assume their full power. They must be there so that the cantor priests can sing from them continuously during the time of resurrection. Come. We must travel faster.”
The Daughter of Night hurried her pace, her exhaustion pushed back briefly by the stunning implications of what she had just heard.
The holy books were not lost!
She was ashamed that she had suffered even a slight wavering of faith.
People began to scurry as though in near panic. I knew the signs. News had come in and it was not good. I suspected the cavalry force sent to probe the defenses at Ghoja had suffered some major misfortune.
I headed for Sleepy’s tent without being summoned. By the time I ducked inside I had overheard a half dozen rumors already, not a one of them reassuring.
Generating rumors is one thing even the most inept armed force does exceedingly well.
Sleepy was heads-together with Suvrin and Runmust, Riverwalker and several brigade commanders from Hsien. Tobo was there but was goofy with painkillers. Howler and Shukrat were not present. Tobo looked a little peeved. My guess was that he had brought the bad news but could not keep himself together well enough to contribute anything beyond his report.
I had given up on him. If he wanted to cruise around on a post trying to do things while he was all busted up and in casts I was not going to nag him anymore. He had a half-crazy mom to handle that.
Sleepy glanced my way, for a second revealed extreme irritation. That turned to resignation as other former Captains let themselves in behind me. Even Willow Swan invited himself to sit in.
Sleepy did face a unique challenge. No other Captain in the Company’s history has had such a cabal of ex-Captains looking over his shoulder. Even though none of us intrude, or even offer much unsolicited advice, Sleepy’s particular insecurities leave her feeling like she is being judged whenever she had to Captain in front of us. And, of course, she is, though like proper old ladies we do it only behind her back.
“Since everybody but the cooks and grooms is here, I suppose I should get on . . . No. Tobo is here. He can tell it better than I.” She deferred to the kid as soon as her gaze fell upon him. I glared at her. She had no business putting him through . . .
Tobo’s eyes focused. He shut them, took a cleansing breath, started talking. “The hidden folk have been tracking Goblin and Booboo the best they can, though it’s hard even when we know what route they have to take.” He was something less than intimidating, strapped into position aboard a Voroshk flying log, so covered with casts and splints that he was able to use only one hand. “They travel inside a fog of, for want of a better description, divine darkness and confusion. By knowing their route, though, I was able to have the Black Hounds seed the way with snail shells . . . I got lucky. One of the hidden folk eavesdropped on an argument between Goblin and the girl.” His words came in a soft, swift gush that forced his audience to stay quiet and lean forward.
Tobo paused. For effect, I would have suspected in normal circumstances. The kid liked his drama.
The boy made the grim announcement, “The thing inside Goblin knows the Books of the Dead by heart. Once the Daughter of Night transcribes them they plan to start the rites associated with initiating the Year of the Skulls.”
Fox in the henhouse, oh, my, oh!
It took Sleepy several minutes to get everyone settled down. In the interim Tobo grabbed the opportunity to relax. When a measure of calm returned he said, “That’s not as bad as it sounds. Remember, there’re only two people involved. Should we kill either one, the resurrection fails. For the rest of our century and beyond. And, as anyone who ever worked on the Annals will tell you at great length, it takes a long time to write a book. Even if you’re just copying. I saw the Books of the Dead before Sleepy destroyed them. They were huge. And the Daughter of Night will have to transcribe them error-free. So we don’t exactly face an immediate crisis even though this is trouble that we never anticipated.”
I jumped in. “If you got one of your critters close enough to find out all that then you probably know right where they are. We can set up some kind of ambush.” Lady and Howler were supposed to have been ransacking the cobwebby cellars of their minds in an effort to recall some ancient device whereby Goblin and the girl might be distracted, disoriented, distressed and destroyed. Or just disarmed, in the case of my missus. Realist and pragmatist though she was, she nevertheless nurtured a blind bit of self-delusion wherein she would turn Booboo around. Though she would never admit that, of course.
Tobo said, “All right, Master Strategist, Architect of the Destruction of the Shadowmaster Evil, tell me how you ambush somebody you fall in love with before they get inside crossbow range.”
“Kid has a point,” Lady said, eyeing me expectantly.
“Your snail-shell lurker didn’t fall in love with her, did it? It just hunkered down there and eavesdropped till it decided to come running to you with its gossip.”
“And?”
“So the Unknown Shadows aren’t affected by the Daughter of Night. Is the opposite true?”
“They couldn’t do her much physical harm.”
“Skryker? Black Shuck? That big old jumping duck thing? You’re shitting me.”
“No, really.”
“Well, they really wouldn’t have to, anyway, would they? They’d just need to haunt her. Keep interfering with her sleep. Driving her crazy. Jogging her elbow whenever she tries to write. Really be guilty of all the annoyances they’re blamed for back in Hsien. They could piss in her inkwell. They could hide her pens. They could spill stuff on whatever she’s trying to write. They could make food go bad and milk turn sour.”
“They could keep her husband from performing on her wedding night,” Sleepy snapped. “You’re roaming a little far into the future, Croaker. And possibly targeting the wrong victim. The Goblin thing is the one who has the Books of the Dead locked up inside his gourd. He might be able to manage without the Daughter of Night. I’m pretty sure she can’t manage without him.”
Points worth considering.
“Both are just ephemeral tools,” Sahra announced in a hollow, oracular voice. “Both can be replaced. In time. So long as Kina herself persists the threat from the glittering plain lives on.”
That took all the cheer right out of the gathering.
Everybody stared at Tobo’s mother, the injured boy himself included. There was a creepy feeling to her, like something had taken control of her, to speak using her mouth.
Murgen later said Sahra had looked and sounded exactly like her grandmother, Hong Tray, when she issued her prophecies, decades ago.
She scared the shit out of Murgen and Tobo both. They used all the energy they could muster to insist that Sleepy’s concern about Goblin and the Daughter of Night was not yet critical.
Sleepy reaffirmed her determination to move north. We limped along, accommodating the injured. We encountered no direct resistance at Ghoja, though forces loyal to the Protector had damaged the main span of the great bridge over the Main. It took our engineers more than a week to restore the bridge. Throughout that week the Prahbrindrah Drah and his sister preached to the people and soldiers of Ghoja. They managed to win the hearts and allegiance of the majority.
The Prince was quite good with people when we let him run around loose. He preached his own restoration with an evangelical passion. He won particular favor amongst old folks nostalgic for the quiet changelessness that had characterized the world of their youth—before the coming of the Shadowmasters and the Black Company.
Except for a small memorial pasture where the fighting had been bloodiest, the battlefield on the north bank, where the Company had won a signal victory in what seemed like another lifetime, was completely built over. Back then there had been a hamlet and watchtower on the south bank, beside a ford that could be crossed only half the year. Now Ghoja threatened to become a city. The bridge, begun at my suggestion ages ago, was a strategic gem both militarily and commercially. There were strong forts and big markets on both banks now.
The girl and the Goblin thing should have done more to keep us from crossing over.
We made camp twelve miles north of the bridge, in rough, bare country still not claimed by peasants. I doubt that it was good for much but pasture. Which meant it was a wasteland amongst vegetarians. But had the ground been better I doubt many farmers would have immigrated. It was too near the high holy place of the Deceivers, the Grove of Doom.
We left the Prince and his sister at Ghoja, along with many native recruits. Sleepy thought it was time the royals got a taste of independence. She was confident that they would not conspire against the Company again. They had been included in our councils often enough to know that Tobo’s hidden folk would always be close by.
Ten hours after we set camp, in the middle of the night, Sleepy changed her mind. She wanted to move a little closer to Taglios, to get between the City and the Grove of Doom.
I was awake when Riverwalker brought the news, writing by lamplight and keeping an eye on our injured. Some of them had not weathered the journey well. I was concerned about Soulcatcher in particular.
The change in plan did not irritate me as deeply as it did Lady. She had to be dragged out of a deep sleep. The way she snarled and threatened great evils left me wondering if she had not begun having nightmares again.
Riverwalker murmured, whispered. “I’m getting me a head start.”
“Run, River, run. You’ll need every yard you can get.”
Lady gave me a look that made me wonder if I should not yell at him to wait up.
We established the new camp near a dense stand of trees which, I learned, surrounded and masked a sprawling Shadowlander cemetery that hailed from the first Shadowmaster invasion of the Taglian Territories. From before the Company’s arrival. Almost no one knew about that. I had not, though I had campaigned in the region. Of the entire host only Suvrin showed any interest. He thought he might have a relative or two tucked away there.
He would have plenty of opportunity to visit tombs and graves. Sleepy planned to stay put, recruiting and training and harrying the edge of the Grove of Doom while Tobo and our other casualties recuperated. The trouble with the cemetery was, time had vandalized most of the Shadowlanders’ slapdash grave markers.
The Goblin-thing and the Daughter of Night settled down, too, and they really did nothing but sit. They did not begin transcribing the Books of the Dead because they had no supplies. They did not consult with Deceivers making pilgrimages into the holy grove. Those men we left alone, every future step to be dogged by Unknown Shadows so we could follow their routines once they returned to their home environments. There were not many Stranglers left alive. This way we could find out who those few were.
Handy as it is, being able to see whatever you want takes a lot of getting used to.
The Grove of Doom was always a cruel and wicked place, filled with ancient darkness. The hidden folk hated it but they endured going in for Tobo’s sake.
Their devotion to the boy gets scary when I think about it too much.
Gromovol and Arkana were mending at a pace equaling Tobo’s, which was amazing but not magical. Gromovol’s arrogance remained undiminished by misfortune. Arkana was understandably withdrawn.
Soulcatcher worried me increasingly. Not only did she show no improvement, she seemed to be growing weaker. She was headed right down the grim trail Sedvod had blazed.
There was a lot of sentiment favoring letting her slide, and for possibly easing Gromovol along the same dark path while he was sleeping. The jury remained out on Arkana even though the hidden folk had exculpated her in all ways but calculation and manipulation. There were random moments, widely separated, when I felt sorry for the girl.
I remembered the loneliness.
I was the only one who would talk to her, excepting Gromovol. She turned her back on him every time he tried to do so. During our reluctant chats I tried to learn more about her homeworld and, especially, Khatovar. But she did not have much to say. She knew nothing. She had a full measure of youth’s indifference to the past.
Shukrat shunned Arkana completely.
Shukrat was almost pathetically eager to fit in. Shukrat really wanted to belong. I have a strong feeling she did not belong before she joined us. And maybe Arkana had, which might illuminate Shukrat’s spite toward her now.
Life is never like a canal, flowing gently through a straightforward and predictable channel. It is more like a mountain brook, zigging and zagging, tearing things up, sometimes going almost dormant before taking an unexpected and turbulent turn.
I was setting out some similar proposition to Lady and Shukrat while examining Tobo to see if he dared put any weight on the broken leg. He thought he was feeling better and was getting extremely restless, which is usually a sign that the patient is, indeed, getting better but is not nearly as far advanced as he wants to believe. We were in my VIP hospital. Soulcatcher and Arkana were present as well. Shukrat was putting on a show, fussing over Tobo while making it clear that Arkana no longer existed. Lady was on her knees beside her sister’s pallet, hands flat on her thighs, motionless. She had stayed that way for almost an hour. For a while I thought she was meditating. Or she had gone into some sort of trance. Now I was starting to worry.
The women looked more like mother and daughter than sisters. Poor Lady. Against the years all men campaign in vain. And of late, time has been particularly unkind to my love.
Now that we were settled and had little to do but wait for people to mend, Lady spent time with Soulcatcher every day. She could not explain it herself.
She finally came around, looked back, asked the question that tormented her. “She’s dying, isn’t she?”
“I think so.” I admitted. “And I don’t know why. It looks like the same thing that got the Voroshk kid. So I don’t know how to turn it around. Howler doesn’t know how, either.” Though the screaming sorcerer never had been renowned for his skills as a healer.
“Goblin must’ve done something to her but it isn’t sorcery.” I added, “Not that anybody recognizes. And it isn’t any of the diseases I see in the field.” In most armies more soldiers die of dysentery than fall to enemy arms. I am proud that that has never been true in my army.
Lady nodded. She resumed staring at her sister. “I wonder what it is. Something Goblin did. We’d have to wake her up to find out, wouldn’t we?” After a heartbeat, “The little bastard was right there when Sedvod took sick, too. Wasn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so.” I passed Tobo to Shukrat. “Take it easy on him, girl. Or we’ll need to get you two a separate tent.”
Tobo blushed. Shukrat grinned. I turned to Arkana. “You think you’re ready to take up your dancing career again?”
“Is nothing ever serious with you?”
She caught me by surprise. Frivolity was not a crime often attached to my name. “Absolutely. None of us are going to get out of this alive so we might as well grab a laugh while we can.” So One-Eye used to claim. “Cranky this morning?” I leaned forward and whispered, “I would be, too. Broken bones are no fun. I know. I’ve had a few. But try to smile. You’re through the worst of it.”
She put on her best scowl. The worst of it was still inside her head. She might never recover emotionally. She had not been brought up in a place and station where it was even conceivable that such horrors could overtake her.
“Look at it this way, child. No matter how bad you think it is right now, it can always get worse. I’ve been in the soldier racket a long time and I promise you, that’s a natural law.”
“How could my life be worse than this?”
“Think about it. You could be back home. Where you’d be dead. And you would’ve gone through hell getting that way. Or you could be a prisoner instead of my guest. Which means that every day could be like your one bad day. There’re plenty of guys out there who think we let you off too easy. Which reminds me of another natural law. Once you’re outside the circle of people who agree that you’re special, you’re just another human body. And that’s hardly ever a good situation for a woman. You’re actually better off here, where we have women running stuff, than you would be almost anywhere else.”
Arkana retreated inside herself, evidently thinking that I was threatening her. I was not. I was just thinking out loud. Maundering. Old men do that.
I told her, “You need to take it out on somebody, put Gromovol’s name at the head of your list.”
Lady said, “She’s the only connection I have left with ninety percent of my life. The only connection with my family.”
The stream takes its wild turns.
“You do anything that saves her, the first thing she’ll do when she gets on her feet is try to cut you off at the knees and make you dance on the stumps.”
Tobo started to say something. I poked him. We had discussed this several times. His opinion was bloody-minded.
“I know. I know. But every time I turn around it seems like someone else is gone and we’re getting to be more and more alien . . . ”
“I understand. I’ve felt completely dislocated in time since One-Eye died. There’s almost nothing left of my past.” The nearest thing was come-lately Murgen. Lady and I had chosen the way—and now we were refugees from our own place and time. Though why should I be surprised at this late date? That was what the Company always was: the gathering of the landless, the hopeless, the fugitive and the outcast.
I sighed. Was I about to start creating another past as an emotional crutch?
I knelt beside Lady. “I don’t think she’ll last more than another week. I’m having trouble getting food down her. And more keeping it there. But I’ve thought of something we can do to stall death. And maybe even get a sound diagnosis.”
Lady turned a gaze on me so intense I shuddered, recalling ancient times, when I was a captive in the Lady’s Tower at Charm and about to face the Eye of Truth. “I’m listening.”
I noted that, even now, she would not touch her sister. There was a strong selfish underpinning to her emotions. She wanted to save this mad devil sister entirely for her own sake.
“We can take her to Shivetya. We know he can cure Howler . . . ”
“He says he can. Telling us what we want to hear.”
What Howler wanted to hear. I had no emotion invested in the runt’s well-being. I thought the world would be improved by his extermination.
Lady’s tone did not support her words. A spark of hope had been struck.
I said, “Let’s have Howler get another carpet put together, then we’ll slip away to the glittering plain, get him fixed up and find out what Shivetya can do for Soulcatcher. Even if he can’t do anything we can stash her in the ice cavern till we have time to research what’s wrong with her. That ought to be a real challenge for Tobo.”
That was the course I preferred. I figured that once we installed Soulcatcher in the cave of the ancients Lady would lose interest eventually. The effect on the world at large would be the same as if we had killed her right away while Lady could sustain her tether to her roots via the pretense that she would jump in and resurrect her sister one day soon.
Lady said, “I like that idea. I’ll see how soon Howler can get a carpet put together.”
“All right.” I peeled back one of Soulcatcher’s eyelids. I saw nothing promising. I got the feeling that her essence might be absent, out wandering, lost. Paybacks, Murgen might say, if that was true.
As soon as she left, Tobo said, “You’re up to something besides what you told her, aren’t you?”
“Me?” I shrugged. “I have some ideas. Some of them I might have to clear with the Captain.”
Shukrat then said something that rained her dumb blonde image for me. “You know the reason that Soulcatcher followed you all down here from the north is the same reason that Lady wants to save her now? I’ll bet that if she really wanted to badly enough she could’ve killed you all just about any time she wanted.”
I stared. I looked at Tobo. I stared some more.
Shukrat reddened. She murmured, “Neither one of them ever learned how to say, ‘I love you.’ ”
I understood. It was the same thing Goblin and One-Eye had had going for all those years, at a somewhat less lethal level. When they were sober. It was the sort of thing I see all the time amongst my brethren, who cannot, or believe that they dare not, express their real feelings. I added, “Only those two don’t even know they need to say it.”
Willow Swan stuck his head into the tent. “Croaker. Murgen. Anybody who’s interested. Sahra’s ready to do her thing with Thai Dei and Uncle Doj.”
About damned time, I thought but did not say. There were moments, lately, when I wanted to have the whole damned Nyueng Bao Community lined up and spanked. They had dragged the two corpses a hundred fifty miles while they argued bitterly about what to do with them. I did manage to keep my mouth shut but kept wanting to scream, “They don’t care anymore! Do something! They smell. Bad!” Not the sort of thing you do with grieving relatives, of course. Not unless you feel like you have developed a shortage of enemies.
The Nyueng Bao had prepared a pair of ghats in a prominent place near the center of the Shadowlander military cemetery. Though only a few swamp folk remained with us those survivors were gathered in cliques, according to the funeral option they believed best honored the dead.
Who would believe a funeral could become savagely political? But people can find reasons to squabble about almost anything.
Thai Dei’s send-off was less controversial, of course. He had not believed in much of anything but his own honor, himself. A ritualistic passage through the purifying flame for a warrior who would not bend, troubled only a couple of conservative old-timers who thought the ceremonies too foreign. Uncle Doj was the great bone of contention.
With Doj the burning group were in dispute with the exposure group, who wanted to lay the corpse out on a high platform and leave it till its bones were clean.
This was supposed to be the proper send-off for a high priest of the Path of the Sword—though no one could say how, why or when that idea had arisen. None of the men from Hsien, some of whom had grown up in Hsien’s martial arts monasteries, had heard of any such practice there. The people of Hsien buried their dead. Doj’s cronies insisted that his predecessors had been exposed exactly the way they wanted to do him now.
As we filed past the ghats, each tossing on an herb packet and a folded piece of paper carrying a prayer the fire would send along with the dead, Suvrin suggested, “They might have acquired the custom when they first passed through my country. Some of the peoples back home, back then, did expose corpses that they were especially afraid would be seized by skinwalkers.”
Skinwalkers again. One of those monsters no one has ever seen, like vampires and werewolves. With all the real monsters loose in the world, seen and suffered often enough, why did so many people trouble themselves about things no reliable witness ever saw? “Wouldn’t fire work just as well?”
“Burning wasn’t acceptable. It isn’t even in modern times, even though so many northerners have come across the Dandha Presh.”
I grunted. It must have to do with religion and religion seldom makes sense to me.
“The common people, the poor, anyone that wouldn’t attract a skinwalker, gets a normal burial. Just like here.” He indicated the graves around us. “People who might attract a skinwalker will be exposed. So there won’t be a good suit of skin to steal.” He gestured. “The above-ground tombs. They must contain priests and captains who were being stored temporarily, until they could be properly exposed. Their army must have been hard-pressed. They never got back to deal with it.”
Actually, I could see several fallen collections of poles with bits of rag and bone beneath that might have been exposure platforms a long time ago. “Looks like your skinwalkers never got here to take advantage, either.”
That earned me a scowl.
I was not quite sure why Suvrin was Sleepy’s favorite and probable designated successor. But I never understood why Murgen picked Sleepy, either. Yet he had chosen well. She had brought the Company through the Kiaulune wars and the era of the Captivity. And there had been a lot of raised eyebrows when I had chosen Murgen to become Annalist. And Murgen had managed despite never having been quite certain of his sanity.
Sleepy saw something.
Suvrin did not agree. Suvrin insisted that he was going to leave us. But I noted that he had passed up several wonderful opportunities to do so already.
As was her right, being Thai Dei’s closest surviving relative, Sahra asked Murgen to join her and Tobo in placing the torches into Thai Dei’s pyre. Fitting, I thought, although the old men grumbled. Murgen and Thai Dei had been as close as brothers for a long, long time.
Sahra asked no one but Tobo to help bring the fire to Doj.
Even I saluted the dead swordmaster, though in life I never trusted him.
Lady leaned against me from my left. “I suppose you’ll have to admit that he was trustworthy now.” Mind reading.
“I don’t have to admit any such thing. He just kicked off before he could screw us over.”
“No fool like an old fool.”
I stopped arguing. She would win every debate by dint of outliving me. I changed the subject. “You still feel like you’re getting stronger?” For an age now she had been able to steal almost no supernatural power from Kina. But long ago she had been able to parasitize enough to come close to being Soulcatcher’s equal. She believed Goblin’s attack on the Goddess was why there was so little power left to steal.
It seemed reasonable to me that Goblin returning as Kina’s tool would mean fresh power available but it had not worked that way. Not until Goblin and the girl had entered the Grove of Doom.
“It’s coming. Little by little.” She sounded like she did not want to wait. “I can do a few parlor tricks now.” The way she thought, that might mean she was limited to destroying small villages with a single wink. “I need to get closer to see what helps.”
I did not follow up. I could feel her excitement. She hid it well but if I got her going she would drive me nuts talking about stuff that was entirely beyond me.
I could do that, too, either going on with my theories about diseases or about the Company’s history.
Definitely a match made in heaven.
I told her, “Soon as we’re done paying our respects, how about you see Howler? Find out if my idea gets him moving on the carpets any faster.”
“If you give him what he wants now he won’t have any incentive to stay with us.”
“Where’s he gonna run to?”
“He’ll find somewhere. He always has.”
And, somehow, that always ended up in our way. “Then I expect we’ll push him hard to get us a couple, three carpets. And you can hang around playing apprentice while he does, sister Shukrat.”
“Yech! No way! He’s creepy. He stinks. And he has more hands than some of those four-armed Gunni gods.”
“He’s little,” Tobo called from the chair we had brought along so he could rest between ceremonial stints. “Spank him.”
“That’s probably what he wants.”
“Get somebody to carry me around and I’ll go with you,” Tobo told Shukrat. “I make the Howler nervous. Croaker. What’ll we call him if Shivetya cures his screaming?”
“Stinky might work. Or the Stinker for formal.”
The flames of the funeral pyres leapt higher. Tobo ignored me now. I let it drop, too. Time to say goodbye, old man. They never took the oath but Thai Dei and Doj were brothers in their hearts. They stories were warp and woof of the Company tapestry.
Sleepy always saw idleness as a vacuum in need of filling. No way was she going to put up with ten thousand men sitting around, maybe spending an hour or two each day training. When they were feeling particularly ambitious.
Just miles away stood a perfectly ugly wood desperately in need of clear-cutting.
You put a whole lot of people to work on a place like that, starting from the outside and working inward, making sure you get even the tiniest twigs and shoots, you can get some great bonfires burning. The evening of the second day the soldiers had one entire horizon hidden behind ramparts of smoke.
Sleepy was daring Goblin and the girl to come show us what they had.
I had doubts about the wisdom of that. Sleepy was not impressed enough with the fact that Goblin had a slice of Kina stuffed inside him. And Kina’s bad-ass reputation was well-deserved.
But I was not the boss. I could advise but I could not make anyone listen. My worries just earned me one of Sleepy’s enigmatic smiles.
“You ready to go for a fly?” Lady asked. “Howler’s got a carpet ready.”
“You in a hurry?”
“You told me Sileth’s only got a week. That was three days ago.”
“I did, didn’t I? How big is that carpet?”
“Big enough.”
“I mean it, hon. It’s got to have room for six people.”
She stared. After several seconds she said, “I don’t think I’m even going to ask. Except maybe who.”
“You and Soulcatcher. Howler. Gromovol. Arkana if she wants to go.”
“Still playing games, Love?”
“No game. Progress. We lost the most promising one of those kids when Magadan got killed. That was a bad career move on his part. Gromovol is as useless as teats on a bull. I’d just as soon kill him. But if we give him back to those two old Voroshk demons Shivetya’s got tied up down there we might score a point or two.”
She frowned.
“Thought you were the master manipulator of the greatest empire . . . ” She pointed a finger. An invisible darning needle began to sew my lips together. She was getting the power back. “I’ll just explain then, shall I?”
“There’s the man I married.”
Bullshit. But I was not going to argue. “We got the top two Voroshk locked up out there on the plain. They’ve got no home anymore, far as we know. As far as Shivetya is letting anybody know. They have no future, nowhere to go. An apparent act of kindness might add a couple of heavyweights to our ranks just when it would be handy to have them.”
“You’re evil.”
“I try. Let me go blow in Arkana’s ear.”
“You do and you’ll wake up in the morning wondering how long before you get your first hot flash.”
Well, well. Maybe that explained some recent crankiness. Hers. Mine was caused by the iron-strapped, rock-headed obtuseness of the people who insisted on tangling my feet. That was a whole different hunk of monkey meat.
I went to blow in Arkana’s ear. Verbally.
“I’m not going to give Gromovol a choice,” I told Arkana. “This is a chance for me to maybe make peace with his old man. Which is the only good that can ever come of the idiot. If I keep him here he’ll eventually do something stupider than anything he’s done already. I’ve told you before, I’ve been in this racket a long time. When you come up with a liability as big as Gromovol you look for a way to use him. Or you kill him. I’ve been getting soft in my twilight years.”
Her skeptical expression told me how well I had sold that fairy tale.
“You, you’re special. You get choices. You can go back if you want. You can tag along for the visit and stay with us when we’re done. Or you can hang around here and not go at all.”
“Oh, I’ll go. I can’t not. I’ll decide what else I need to do after we get there.”
We went aloft by night, under the light of a full moon, with Lady, Soulcatcher, Gromovol and Arkana aboard Howler’s new carpet. Tobo, Shukrat, Murgen and I witched along on flying posts. Despite Sleepy’s objections, and Tobo’s aches and pains, Tobo insisted on coming along because Shukrat was coming. So Murgen rode with me because Sahra refused to fly. The youngsters larked about us fearlessly, engaged in some dragonfly mating ritual.
Murgen and I dropped out briefly at Dejagore. Sleepy insisted we check up on Blade and his occupation force.
Drifting down toward Dejagore’s citadel, I asked, “You think Sahra’s been having visions or something?”
“Huh?” Murgen’s thoughts had been wandering.
“This frantic mother stuff. I swear she keeps getting worse. I thought you might have noticed her having psychic seizures. Or something.”
“She don’t talk about it. If she does.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that if she hasn’t she’s definitely afraid that she might start.”
“Yeah?”
“When we were young she worried about turning into her mother.”
“Sometimes she’s damned crabby.”
“She’s no Gota the Troll, though. Her body doesn’t hurt her enough. So now she’s terrified she’s going to turn into Hong Tray. Her grandmother.”
“And?”
“And maybe she will. She’s started to look like the old woman did. Whenever she starts cranking about it I remind her how calm and accepting Hong Tray always was. Like a solid rock in a wild river.”
“Doesn’t work, does it?”
“Not for a second. Well. Somebody must’ve smelled us coming.”
We had not yet settled to the top of the citadel tower, but Blade and his chief lieutenants were there to meet us. Blade called up, “We were expecting Tobo, the way the shadows were all spooked up.”
“You got lucky. The kid’s hurt so you get the old farts instead. Captain wants us to check up on you. So you give us a couple of good drinks, we’ll tell her you’re doing a kickass job, no need to even think about you guys.”
“I think we can handle that.”
The sharpest-eyed spy can be misdirected or deluded if you know he is watching. Having been of the Company once and having been victimized by the Company more than once, the Great General understood its policy of deception. His understanding had served him well during the Kiaulune wars, where the trickery had gotten the best of him rarely. He and Aridatha Singh were observing large-scale close order drills from the wall of a fortress that bestrode a hill just south of Taglios. The soldiers had begun to show some interest in improving their skills lately. The approach of a powerful enemy was a mighty motivator.
The Great General asked, “They all went?”
“I’ve had the report from two independent sources within the last hour. They went out right after moonrise. A flying carpet and three flying poles. They headed south. They passed close enough to Haband’s tree for him to identify the Howler, Lady, Croaker, Murgen, the boy wizard and three of those white wizard children I saw when I visited. They aren’t worried about us.”
“There’d be more of those.”
“I’m sure the rumor is true. I’ve had it confirmed too many times. They’re dead.”
The Great General refused to take anything at face value where those people were concerned. “Where would they go?”
“Maybe something’s happened at Dejagore. Or farther south.”
Farther south would have to be beyond the Dandha Presh. Support for the Protector had evaporated outside those territories still directly under the Great General’s control, near as his agents could determine, though there had been no outbreaks of enthusiasm for the return of the royals. The mood of the empire was indifferent, excepting amongst those who could profit, one way or another.
Same as it always was, Mogaba reflected.
Mogaba played with a snail shell as he talked. Doing so seemed almost a tick anymore. But he startled Aridatha by popping his arm back suddenly, snapping the shell out as hard as he could throw. “Time for a full-scale field exercise. Let’s find out how good their intelligence is with wonder boy away.”
Aridatha asked a few brisk questions. These days he commanded the division that would form the left wing of Mogaba’s army. It was backboned by his own City Battalions.
The Great General said, “Make all your preparations exactly as you would if we were going down there to fight. Issue appropriate rations. But prepare in a relaxed manner. We just want to see how ready we are. So we know where we need to do more work. Don’t encourage questions. And from now on I want to see our spies personally when they bring in news.”
Aridatha went away wondering what Mogaba really had in mind.
The Great General sent for the rest of his staff and commanders. He spent a particularly long time, in bright midday sun, conferring with his cavalry captains.
Willow Swan stuck his head into Sleepy’s cabin, which had been built for her from the better logs harvested from the Grove of Doom. “Another contact with Mogaba’s cavalry. Three miles west of the Rock Road.”
This happened periodically. It was one way the Great General kept track of his enemies. The probes became more numerous when Mogaba wanted to provoke a response. Sleepy grunted, untroubled.
“I’m a little concerned,” Swan told her. “This time they’re pushing harder. Since we don’t have any good way to get anything out of the hidden folk who didn’t run off after Tobo, we don’t have any idea what Mogaba is doing. We’re as blind as he is.”
“Is his main force maneuvering behind his cavalry screen?”
“I get that impression.”
“Then he’s trying to harass us into another panic.” Twice already Taglian forces had come south and demonstrated until Sleepy responded, whereupon they had retreated rapidly. Mogaba was trying to get his virgins some confidence-building experience under the stress of near-battle. No doubt he would push them a little closer this time. “Run one brigade up behind the pickets and have them make a lot of noise. Keep another brigade in camp. Everyone else can see to their normal business. I think we’re due for a reaction from the Daughter of Night pretty soon.”
Her campaign against the Deceiver messiah and the Goblin-thing was much like the Great General’s against her.
Swan reminded her, “We have official Deceiver titles for those two now.” A fact one of the hidden folk had discovered in far Asharan, of all places, just before Tobo’s departure. Asharan was a small city to the southwest unlikely to have any impact on any events unless through its band of Deceivers. “Khadidas. Khadidasa.” Slave of Khadi. Or Kina. “Is that one or both of them?”
“Those are the male and female forms. One for each.”
“Willow, that girl won’t be called a slave by anybody. She has the same blood as her mother and aunt. Daughter of Night suits her just fine.”
Swan shrugged, departed. Tobo had said that there was no love lost between the girl and the Khadidas. That, in fact, they tended to bicker. That, further, the girl had begun to appear almost disillusioned.
The Great General’s cavalry continued to harass Sleepy’s scouts and pickets. Skirmishes popped up everywhere. Commercial traffic dwindled on the Rock Road. Sizable troops of horse probed the brigade deployed to screen the Company force. They were mostly Vehdna. Vehdna had a tradition of being excellent horsemen. These horsemen showed well against Hsien’s professional infantry. Sleepy brought the other brigade out of camp and handed the backup role off to the native recruits.
“I’m getting worried,” Swan told Sleepy.
“It must be escalating. You were just concerned before.”
“Exactly my point. Why is Mogaba working so hard to make us think he’s working up to a straightforward attack? Why is he trying to force a response?”
“Because he wants to see what we’ll do. Unless he’s trying to distract us from something else. Any chance he could’ve made a deal with the Deceivers?”
“Narayan Singh’s son is one of his cronies.”
That struck a spark. “Aridatha Singh is no Deceiver! Nor is he a Deceiver stooge.”
“All right. Don’t get excited.”
Moments later, though, it became clear that it was time for everybody to get excited about something, fast. The unexpected and deadly happened.
Mogaba’s cavalry faded away. They were replaced by the infantry of Mogaba’s Second Territorial division, as numerous as Sleepy’s whole army. The Taglians drove straight into the defending force, hurling them back, while the cavalry began to leak around the ends of the friendly line.
Sleepy had messengers flying around and horns blaring before it became entirely clear that this time Mogaba was not just teasing. She snapped at Swan, “We have to keep them from getting inside the camp. Whatever that costs.”
“I’ll handle that,” Swan replied, though he was no official member of the heirarchy. “I’ll use the recruits. You grab anyone else you can find.” He sprinted away. If Mogaba captured the camp he would gain control of the treasure that had come down off the glittering plain. That might win his war for him right here, right now.
Swan began sorting the confusion in the camp as soon as he located the Hsien sergeants in charge of training. He announced that the enemy had launched a reconnaissance in force. Some elements might try to reach the camp.
Once he had the recruits assembled facing toward the enemy, Swan sent trusted men to move the treasure into hiding inside the old Shadowlander military cemetery. And well he did, too. Mogaba’s attack was much more vigorous than expected. When it reached the camp the recruits did not long withstand it. They allowed elements of Mogaba’s force to get into the camp itself.
All did not go well for the Great General, though. Soon after his own division caught the attention of his enemies, a second was supposed to rush forward east of the Rock Road, to catch the disorganized troops rushing back from the Grove of Doom to help Sleepy. The commander of that force, not sure if he was being led into a clever trap himself, vacillated until his attack had no chance of attaining success. Shortly he would find himself free to pursue new career opportunities. Many lesser officers would join him.
On the extreme left Aridatha Singh launched his attack exactly on schedule. Its initial goal was to occupy the Grove of Doom. Then it was supposed to carry on southward and westward and cut the enemy’s line of withdrawal. But before Aridatha’s force was well into the maneuver he received a dispatch from Mogaba directing him to pull back. The enemy had collected himself. A counterattack was expected shortly. Mogaba feared that if Sleepy discovered Aridatha she would cut him off and exterminate his division. Aridatha was a novice on the battlefield.
The Daughter of Night was ready to scream with the boredom and psychic oppression of life in the Grove of Doom. Life with Narayan had not been perfect but she had understood it. Life with the Khadidas was intolerable. The possessed little man was insufferable. Every day, all day, there were lessons. Almost always about things she already knew. Unless it was philosophical stuff about how she ought to give herself up completely to the will of Kina. About how she should strive to rid herself of even the most stubborn tatters of personality and become nothing but a vessel for Kina, not the Daughter of Night anymore but the Khadidasa.
The Khadidas droned his arguments at her while she sat with arms around shins, chin on her knees, on the steps of the Deceiver temple. Visiting Deceiver pilgrims came and went, cleaning the temple. She paid no attention. She was recalling more than one other time when she had been right here with Papa Narayan. Looking back, those days seemed almost a normal family life, now.
She began to replay thoughts from times past, immediately became restless, and wondered why. She had not thought of men in that way since she had heard about Narayan’s death.
Someone came down from the temple, passed by her. He set himself to fling a pail of dirty water. There was a solid thump. The bucket man made a startled little squeak and toppled backward. He fell on the steps beside the girl, looking up at his messiah from amazed eyes. She watched the light fade from them.
An arrow stood out of his chest. It had struck him through the heart. The girl did not notice the colorful markings on the shaft, which identified not only the archer’s unit but the bowman as well. She started to look around. Thumps and cries surrounded her. Arrows hissed close and thumped behind her as they found her new companion. She started to dig inside, to release the “love me” effect. A blunt arrow struck her squarely in the breastbone. A second struck her lower. She pitched forward, trying to puke up her ankle-bones.
The first few arrows seemed not to inconvenience the Khadidas at all. But they kept coming. And coming. And then there were Taglian soldiers all over. A high officer shouted, “Cut off the heads. We’ll take them with us. Leave the bodies in the boneyard. For the ravens.”
Another officer strode toward the Daughter of Night. The other Taglians all deferred to him. The girl’s first response was to notice that he was incredibly handsome. Then she recalled having seen him before, years ago, when she had been a captive of the Black Company. He had been brought to see Narayan. “My brother Aridatha,” she gasped out. “It seems my fate is to spend life as a prisoner.” She continued to clutch her stomach. A huge Shadar soldier stood over her, ready to club her at the first hint of anything untoward.
The Taglian officer was startled but only for a moment. He grasped the part about being her brother. “You’re the Daughter of Night. It’s my job to make sure you don’t fulfill your destiny.” He eyed the thing lying beside her, motionless now but not dead. In the conventional sense. He had met Goblin that night, too.
“That is the Khadidas now,” she said. “Not the wizard. It’s not dead. And you can’t kill it. It has the Goddess in it.”
The Taglian made swift gestures. Soldiers bound the Goblin thing, then stuffed it into a hemp sack—after yanking the arrows out of its flesh. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
“Kina is in him.”
“Suppose I chop him into little pieces, Booboo? Then have my men burn the pieces at places separated by a hundred miles. I didn’t know my father and I certainly don’t honor what he was. But, even so, that creature murdered him.”
“What did you call me?”
“Eh? You mean Booboo?”
“Yes. That. Why did you do that?” She forced herself to look away from what was happening to the martyred Deceivers as she forced her mind away from the accusation leveled against the Khadidas.
“Your mother and father and everyone in the Black Company who cares about you calls you Booboo. Because it isn’t as unwieldy as ‘the Daughter of Night.’ Come on. Get up. I have to keep these men moving. No tricks, either. If you misbehave you’ll get hurt. These men are very scared of you.”
A twinge of surprise ran through the girl. They were concerned enough about her to have a pet name for her? Narayan had not dared go that far, though she knew that he had been devoted to her.
Despite Aridatha’s warning she tried to turn on the “love me” effect. It would not come. She could not tell if that was because she was so rattled or because of the Khadidas. The Goblin thing had shown the ability to interfere with her before, usually when she was not conforming to the standards it set.
For an instant she hoped her captors would shred the Khadidas and roast the scraps in a hundred scattered trash pits. Then she forced her personal feelings aside. This was no time. This was the time to concentrate on making sure she and the Khadidas survived until they found their opportunity to begin their great work.
That that chance would come she did not doubt. Kina would find a way. Kina always did. Kina was the darkness. And the darkness always came.
The girl remained completely docile and cooperative. She could not help noticing how restless she became each time the handsome general came near her. But he was too busy to notice her. He had received orders changing his mission.
There’s another division out there, east of the Rock Road somewhere,” Swan told Sleepy and her staff. “My impression is that it was supposed to push past and get behind us. But it suddenly turned back north. Without us taking prisoners or getting help from the hidden folk we’ll never know why.”
The Unknown Shadows became a hot topic. There were a few still around but they would not be bullied into helping. Tobo had not told them to help.
Tempers did not improve during the discussion. Everyone was tired, cranky and impatient. Sleepy in particular. With no solid evidence whatsoever she was beginning to believe that Mogaba had gotten the best of her yet again. And the thing was not over yet.
The Great General had not yet broken contact entirely. He seemed willing to continue skirmishing indefinitely.
Swan told everyone, “I think we did well. The casualty ratio ran in our favor, certainly.”
Sleepy snapped, “But, strategically, Mogaba must be celebrating. He’s pleased with what he accomplished.” She had no way of knowing any such thing, of course. She knew only that she was not pleased. Mogaba had surprised her again.
She overlooked the fact that she had managed to drive off a much superior force once the fighting started, that Mogaba might have been too subtle and clever for his own good.
Willow Swan did not overlook that. He said, “Mogaba may be back. Once he understands that he did surprise us and could’ve rolled over us if he’d just charged in without all the maneuvering.”
Heads bobbed. One brigadier noted that were he in charge on the other side he would attack again even if he thought his enemies expected him. He would do it just to see what would happen. And to build in the minds of the attacked a belief that they had to stay alert. Keeping ready to repel an attack would grind a force down after several days.
Sahra wandered in. Late and uninterested in the discussion. To no one in particular she said, “It’s started to rain.”
Because that was important news that might have a serious impact on operations, Swan stepped out for a look.
The sky was overcast. The smell of rain was in the air. But it was not raining now and did not look likely to start until well after nightfall, which was only a short while away. Swan went back inside shaking his head.
That Sahra might have been speaking figuratively or metaphorically became evident a short while later, when a patrol brought in news that the Grove of Doom had been cleansed of Deceivers.
“Even of the Daughter of Night and the Goblin thing?” Sleepy demanded.
“We didn’t find their bodies, Captain. And there were plenty of bodies there. All with their heads missing. Maybe those two managed to escape.”
“Maybe. I wish Tobo would get the hell back here. I really hate this being blind.”
“You’re totally spoiled,” Swan told her.
“And loving every minute of it. Tso Lien. More work for your recon people. Find out what happened. And find out if we can run anybody down. Keeping in mind that it would please Mogaba no end to lead us into a lethal trap.”
“It shall be done, my Captain.”
Swan sneered at Tso Lien’s flowery response. The man hailed from a province where styles of speech were as important as what was being said. He was another of those fiercely competent professional officers who had wanted to shed the feudal chains of Hsien in hopes of making his fortune.
Swan wondered if the men from the Land of Unknown Shadows might not begin concentrating more on staying alive than on winning a war. Their future fortunes were in Company hands already, hidden in that cemetery.
Oh, so alert the observing eyes when Lady and I opened the shadowgate. I tossed in several unnecessary steps just for drama and confusion. Then we were moving again, flickering southward along the shielded road toward Shivetya’s great wintry fastness.
The entire plain seemed a chill, grey, wintry place, lacking all glitter. The standing stones seemed old and tired and not much interested in making any effort to proclaim the glories of the past. I did not spot any new ones. Not once did the wind grow warmer than the heart of a loan shark. We saw patches of ice and snow.
Tobo suggested the plain was getting its weather from somewhere where the season was less comfortable than our own.
“You think?” I said. “With the Khatovar gate busted completely?” There was no sense of menace to the plain today. Could the shadows have become that few?
Shukrat said, “Only, it would be the heart of summertime at home, now.”
I grunted. I adjusted my flying log to make more speed. The kids had no trouble keeping up. I heard Lady curse in the distance as Howler’s carpet fell behind. Howler could not hurry because his conveyance nearly filled the protected area. He had to be cautious.
As we neared Shivetya’s fortress, Tobo shouted, “It’s safe to go up now!” He and Shukrat shot toward the sun. Or where the sun would have stood had the weather not been vile.
“Don’t you dare!” Murgen barked.
“Too late, buddy. Hang on.” I was rising already, though not with the derring-do of some immortal teenager. When Murgen squawked I said, “You don’t like the ride, get off and walk.”
In moments we had a god’s-eye view of the glittering plain.
It was not a view I had seen before, nor was it one I had heard described. From a half mile up the plain resembled the floor inside the main chamber of the fortress. That did not surprise me. But the plain’s boundaries did.
Each of the sixteen sectors centered on a shadowgate. Each had its own weather, season and time of day, which became obscured and confused approaching the midway points between shadowgates.
“It’s like looking at the rest of the universe from inside a crystal ball,” Murgen said.
“How come you never mentioned that it looks like this?”
“Because I never saw it like this. Maybe from the ghost realm you can’t see this.”
From up there color came to the plain. Never before had I seen so much color in the place of glittering stone.
Tobo and Shukrat shot past us, headed down, whooping with glee. I said, “Fun time is over.” Howler’s carpet had come into view, creeping along the line of the road down from our own world’s shadowgate.
We entered the fortress through a hole in its roof. That seemed the only damage that never repaired itself. Maybe the guardian demon found a hole more useful than a dry floor. Certainly he had no cares about weather.
Although it was daytime outside, our agent on the scene, ancient Baladitya, was napping. These days he probably spent more time snoozing then he spent awake.
By the time Murgen and I set down, Shukrat was involved in a bitter argument with Nashun the Researcher and the First Father. She and the Voroshk sorcerers used their native tongue, of course, but exact words were of no consequence. At heart the squabble was as old as humanity itself, fug-headed antiques locking horns with omniscient youth.
“Smells in here,” Murgen observed.
It flat-out stank. Evidently the Voroshk were waiting for the serving staff to clean up after them. “Guess Shivetya doesn’t have a sense of smell. If I was him I’d stop feeding them till they learned to take care of their chores.” Baladitya, I noted, kept up his share of the housework despite tendencies toward absentmindedness and single-mindedness.
The racket raised by Shukrat and her relatives finally disrupted the copyist’s snores.
Baladitya was a hairy old scarecrow desperately in need of a change of clothing. His ragged apparel was all that he had ever worn in my experience. He was almost as bad as the Howler, although less densely wrapped.
A close encounter with scissors, comb and a tub of warm water would not have been amiss, either. Tangled wisps of fine white hair floated all around his head and face. I thought bits might begin floating away, like seeds from a dandelion.
The inside of the fortress was completely creepy. I never relaxed there. It rubbed me the same way Uncle Doj always had. Wrong. Suspiciously wrong. In a quiet, unobtrusive way. A way that left me incapable of relaxing. Baladitya zeroed in on Murgen, wanting to know all about how Sleepy was doing, about how his old friend Master Santaraksita was doing, about how Tobo was. He had the Annalist bug. Also, though he had chosen his life out here for the intellectual adventure, he did miss people.
I suspect the Voroshk were not excellent company. They probably whined constantly in a language he did not understand, making no effort to communicate other than by yelling louder and slower.
I glanced upward, wondering when the others would get around to showing up. Then I strolled away a few steps, to the outer fringe of the dome of sourceless light that illuminated Baladitya’s work area. I stared at the vast, indistinct bulk of the demon Shivetya.
The darkness around the devil was deeper than I recalled it, deeper than others had recorded it. The great wooden throne was equally ill-defined. The humanoid bulk nailed to the throne by means of silver daggers seemed less substantial than I remembered. I wondered if the golem became more ethereal as he gave of himself to sustain his guests.
Visitors have to eat. Shivetya sustains his guests and allies by exuding large, mushroomlike growths of manna. I recall the taste as slightly sweet and mildly spicy in that way that leaves you trying to figure out exactly what the spice might be. Just a few bites provide immense energy and boost your confidence dramatically. But nobody gets fat eating the stuff. In fact, it is a little repulsive and you do not touch it until you are hungry or hurting.
Obviously, Shivetya himself was not going to remain chubby forever, either.
I realized that big red eyes had opened. Shivetya was regarding me with more interest than I was regarding him.
The golem did not speak aloud. We believed that it could not. When it chose to communicate it did so by speaking directly inside your brain. Some found the experience no problem. I had not endured it myself, to my recollection, so cannot describe it. If Shivetya invaded my dreams during the half generation I lay enchanted in the caverns below I had no recollection of that, either. I have no memories whatsoever of that time.
Murgen and Lady do remember. Some. They will not discuss it. They prefer to let what made it into the Annals speak for itself.
It must not have been pleasant.
The shadows left Shivetya looking like he had a dog or jackal’s head, which sparked a momentary recollection of childhood idols. I guess he was a sort of lord of the underworld. He just did not do much recruiting.
One huge eye closed, then reopened. The demon of glittering stone showing off his sense of humor. Knowing that wink would obsess me for days.
Hands took hold of my arm. I glanced down. My sweetheart had arrived. And in this dim light she looked much younger and happier. I whispered, “You guys finally made it.”
“Howler is turning into a timid little old man. He’s got the idea that he might have a future.”
“Let’s stroll off that direction about half a mile and get lost for half an hour.”
“Well. I’m certainly tempted. But I’m wondering what’s gotten into you.”
I pinched her behind. She squeaked and swatted my arm. I said, “Whoops!”
Both of Shivetya’s eyes were turned our way now.
Lady said, “That sort of takes the edge off the moment, doesn’t it?”
It did. So did several pairs of eyes watching from where the rest of the crowd were gathered. The youngsters in particular were appalled.
“Oh, well. Life’s a bitch.”
The squabbling amongst the Voroshk went on and on, seldom subsiding for long. I suspect there were several occasions when those two old men wanted to punish the rest of us but were held in check by Shivetya. Tobo paid them no mind. He remained busy communing with Baladitya or the golem. The latter seemed to be contributing to the boy’s already excessive arsenal of power.
Whenever it became too much for them, Arkana or Shukrat would retreat to wherever I happened to be, usually ending up seated on the floor, facing away from the family. “They’re afraid of you,” Arkana explained. “They think you’re the real terror and Tobo is all for show. They think you destroyed our world.”
“I didn’t destroy anything.” Curious. Her accent was not nearly as pronounced out here, when she wanted some protection.
“I know that. You know it. Even they probably know. But they don’t want it to be their fault. Inside, they’re almost as bad as Gromovol and Sedvod. For a couple of hundred years now to be Voroshk has meant to be perfect in every way. Without fault.”
“So how come all the arguing?”
“Because Shukrat wants to stay with you. Because Sedvod died without proper rites. Because they don’t want to believe that Gromovol did so many really stupid things, including getting Magadan killed. That’ll really cause terrible Family political trouble when the news gets back home. Magadan’s father is the First Father’s brother and they really hate each other.”
Evidently the surviving Voroshk preferred to pretend that their Family still ruled in a land not wasted by murderous shadows.
“And why are they yelling at you?”
Arkana sighed. She tucked her head down in between her knees, where I could not get a good look at her expression. “I guess because I really kind of said I don’t think I want to go home, either.”
Arkana really used the word “really” a real lot. “Despite what happened?”
“They don’t know that part yet. They don’t need to know about it.”
“They won’t hear about it from me. But Gromovol might . . . ”
“Even Gromovol isn’t stupid enough to talk about it. There’s no way he can talk his way out of that being his fault. By the rules of our own people. If that came out even his own father would desert him.”
Wearing a somewhat dazed expression Shukrat retreated our way. Arkana moved over a few feet but otherwise did not acknowledge her existence. Neither did Shukrat deign to see Arkana. Shukrat settled on the stone floor, arms around her legs and chin upon her knees. There were tearstreaks on her cheeks.
“Well?” I said. “Do I need to go over there and spank somebody for being rude to my little girls?”
Shukrat laughed weakly. “You’d have to hit the other end. About ten thousand times. With a blacksmith’s hammer.”
“Just to get their attention,” Arkana said. Posed as they were now the family resemblance was clear. Only when they were up and moving under the direction of their divergent characters did they seem so different.
The girls had a point. Even the destruction of their world had not been enough to shake those two old boulders loose from their dry riverbed of fixed thought.
I asked, “Arkana, are you pulled together now? Want to come translate for me?” I could use the tongue of Juniper, of course, but this would give her a chance to feel like she was useful.
She thought about that for a moment. She exchanged glances with Shukrat. Both girls looked at me.
I promised, “I’ll only bully them a little.”
The older Voroshk were keeping their fangs sharp by gnawing on Gromovol. If the kid had not fucked up so badly I might have felt sorry for him. He did not have the option of returning to our world. He would have to take whatever those two chose to hand out.
“You’ve been a little hard on my girls,” I told the First Father. “Time to knock it off. Either one of you bothered to go back and see how things turned out at home?”
No response. Other than ugly looks.
“So you don’t really know how things stand . . . ” An epiphany. “Arkana, sweetie. They ran away. Coming after you kids was their excuse. And when they used it up they couldn’t go back. I’ll bet you Shivetya hasn’t been forcing them to stay here at all.” I recalled that once there had been three of them. Somebody must have gone. And maybe did not live to bring back news.
Those old men were cowards? It fit.
For the first time in generations the Voroshk faced something the Family could not overwhelm as easily as stamping a mouse. And the only way some of them could deal with that was to run away.
These two would not want to go back now in case there were survivors.
I said, “I’ll be right back.” I trotted over to Tobo, interrupted, gave him the short version. “How long are you going to be? Do I have time to take a run through the Khatovar gate with those old men so we can find out what the shadows really did do over there?”
The boy’s eyes went blank.
When I was about ready to slap him to get his attention back he refocused, told me, “Shivetya says that would be a huge health risk. Shivetya says you’re right about the Voroshk. They did run away. Shivetya says more courageous members of the clan are still active back there. A lot of shadows are active there, too. Shivetya says the gate is growing closed. With almost every surviving shadow on that side of it. Shivetya says leave it alone. Shivetya says go ahead with your scheme. Shivetya says not to worry about Khatovar. You can’t reach it. Trying will only get you killed. And it will still be there when everything else is done.”
Was that Tobo speaking or was the demon using his lips? “Shivetya, I fear, contains an awful lot of stinky brown stuff. For a guy who never eats.”
“You think it’s unreasonable, him being a little selfish about the order things get done? Considering the scale of his contributions?”
“Humbug.” I stamped back to Arkana. I wondered how anybody was supposed to murder a goddess—and survive it so the Goddess’s jailer could be hustled down the dark path right behind her. “Sweetheart, tell those old farts that I want them to fly out to your homeworld with me. That I want to see what’s happened there. And that I really do want to see what’s left of Khatovar.”
Arkana took several little sideways steps that moved her around in front of me, putting her back to Nashun and the First Father. “You really mean that?”
Softly, because that half-wit Gromovol seemed to have become interested in what was being said, I responded, “As far as they need to know, I do.”
The old men did not do much faking of any reason for avoiding a trip home for a fact-finding tour. They did make it clear that they would not go.
“What do you plan to do with your lives?” I asked. “Shivetya won’t let you loaf around here forever.”
They suspected they were about to be sucked into something. And they were right, of course. I added, “The Company always has room for a few good men.” Or bad men, as the case might be. I was not so sure about chickenshit and mediocre men—though having a couple extra sorcerers sounded worthwhile enough to make the try.
Trouble was, if I did seduce these two, how would I keep them under control?
That sounded like something Lady ought to ponder. It was the sort of question she had dealt with regularly before I stumbled into her life.
I could hear the clockwork kerchunking inside Voroshk craniums. Their thoughts were obvious. Tell Croaker anything. Tell Croaker what he wanted to hear. Get off this cruel and frightful plain. Run away. Find a place where they have not heard of the Voroshk, where they have no major wizards of their own. Set up shop there and slap together a whole new empire.
Just as the Shadowmasters had done before them.
“Tell them I’ll come back after they’ve had a day or two to think it over.”
As she retreated with me Arkana told me, “If they agree to join you they’ll give you more trouble than Gromovol did.”
“Really?” I chose a tone that was supposed to let her know I might not be as dumb as I looked. “How do you suppose we could keep them from doing that?”
She did have some ideas. “Do what you did to us. Make them strip naked. Take their rheitgeistiden and their shefsepoken. Make them stay on the ground where they’re vulnerable. But promise them they’ll get everything back after they show you that you can trust them. Then you stretch it out.”
“I’m going to adopt you. You’d make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?”
Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, “I think she’s right.”
“Excellent! Let’s go ask your wicked future mother’s opinion.”
We found Lady reading what Baladitya was spending his final years recording, which was, more or less, Shivetya’s biography. “Darling, I’ve decided we need to adopt these two marvellous children. They’re turning out every bit as blackhearted as we ever wanted our Booboo to be.”
Lady awarded me a suspicious look, decided I was fooling around but meant what I said. More or less. “Tell me about it.”
I said, “Go to it, girls.”
Expecting the Great General to remain offensive-minded was not enough, Sleepy knew. She had to outguess him. This one time she could not let Mogaba slide around her.
She took a twinned approach to planning, setting up two distinct staffs. The first consisted of Iqbal and Runmust Singh, Riverwalker, Sahra, Willow Swan and others who had been with her since the Kiaulune wars. She even summoned Blade up from Jaicur because Blade actually knew Mogaba personally and, at one time, had been fairly close to him.
The second general staff consisted entirely of officers from Hsien. These men knew Mogaba only as a bugaboo. And they had no knowledge of the surrounding territory beyond what they could learn from maps and scouting on their own.
Sleepy hoped to find something useful in the gap between diverging visions.
She kept her cavalry busy, scouting, chasing Mogaba’s scouts, skirmishing with enemy patrols, trying to locate the bulk of the Great General’s forces.
Mogaba was doing the same. Both sides relied heavily on questioning civilians passing through. Traffic on the Rock Road had slackened but had not stopped entirely.
Each staff proposed several likely enemy campaigns. Sleepy had their opposite numbers play out a counter campaign. And in the end, after two almost sleepless days, she felt no more illuminated than she had at the beginning.
So she chose to go with intuition. That had served her best during previous dances with the Great General, anyway.
The Great General told his commanders, “I’m growing concerned that all this maneuvering helps them more than it does us. It’s obvious that they’re without mystical support. But every hour we maneuver is an hour nearer the time when they get those advantages back.”
Aridatha Singh asked, “Aren’t we still at a disadvantage in a direct confrontation?”
“Soldier for soldier, possibly. But we have three times as many soldiers. And they’re still trying to cover a line running all the way from the Grove of Doom to this stand near their camp. That’s too much to hold with ten thousand men.”
No questions came. No suggestions arose. The Great General seldom solicited advice. When Mogaba gathered his captains he planned to issue instructions. Their job would be to see that those were executed.
“I’m returning to the original plan. I’ll drive straight forward, in the middle, with the Second Territorial. I’ll engage and hold. Singh, you advance along your previous route with your same mission. Once you’re behind them form your division in battle array and advance up the Rock Road. If the rest of us have done our jobs you’ll only have to sweep up fugitives.”
Mogaba rested a hand upon the shoulder of a young officer named Narenda Nath Saraswati, scion of an old aristocratic family, of the third generation of that family to serve under arms since the opening skirmishes of the Shadowmaster wars. Two days earlier Saraswati had been a regimental chief of staff with an aggressive attitude. The Great General having been disappointed by the timid performance of his remaining division, Saraswati’s aggressive nature was about to earn him a chance to shine.
Mogaba said, “Narenda, as soon as I have the enemy engaged, I want you to take your whole force forward on a narrow front, along the edge of this wood.” That division having been shifted to the right since the previous engagement. “Overrun their camp. That shouldn’t be difficult. They appear to be holding it with raw recruits. Once you clear the camp, reform and advance so as to strike the enemy left wing, rear, and reserve. Don’t begin your initial attack until I do have the enemy solidly engaged.
“One more thing. I want you both to leave your main standards with me. If the enemy sees those maybe they’ll think I’m concentrating everything in one place.”
He paused. There were no questions. All this had been planned out before. The necessity now was renewed vigor.
“I’ll go in at midmorning. Behind scouts and skirmishers. Make sure your men are well-provisioned. I’ll personally strangle any officer who fails to see to the welfare of his soldiers.”
The Great General’s attitude was well-known, if not universally applauded by his officers. Corruption was so deeply ingrained in Taglian culture that even after more than a generation of cultural collision and occasional bloody change there were still those who failed to understand that theft from the men you commanded was not an acceptable way to supplement your income.
Whatever their differences, the Black Company, the Protector, the Great General, all the northerners who gained power, strained to increase the efficiency of their regime by rooting out graft and corruption. More than anything else, that made the outsiders incredibly alien.
“Aridatha. Wait. I’ve had a thought. If things go well it’s likely Saraswati will break the enemy before you can get into position behind them.”
“I was thinking of leaving during the night and going into hiding inside the Grove of Doom.”
“Good idea. What I’m thinking, then, is, you should come out in a long line so you can catch most of the fugitives running southward. I’m especially interested in catching the kind of people who go underground and five years later turn up with a whole damned new army.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Mogaba growled. That was a promise he hated. It sounded like an excuse being put into place beforehand. Though Aridatha was never the sort to excuse his own shortcomings. He was more the sort who found good reasons why others failed.
Today’s the day,” Sleepy told her Captains. “I can feel it.” She went on to excoriate Croaker, Tobo and that bunch for taking so long. Then she began telling people what she wanted done. She started getting arguments right away. She snapped, “Mogaba is going to split his force again. For that he’s going to pay. If you want to argue with me I’ll accept your resignations now. There’re officers who’ll do what they’re told and keep their mouths shut.”
A few hours later the Great General appeared almost exactly where she expected him. He was spread out over a lot of ground and had a lot of banners flying. For a time she feared she might have guessed wrong and Mogaba was just going to come straight ahead and roll right over her. But he did not attack as vigorously as he should have if that was the case.
Sleepy did not press in her turn. Not right away. She did not want to make it obvious that she had not concentrated her forces, either. She engaged in skirmishing and harassing tactics but stepped back whenever Mogaba responded in any strength. He came forward both because he had to stay in contact and because Sleepy was pulling back toward the second jaw of his trap. He seemed willing to be led that way.
When the division on the far right rushed from concealment behind a low ridge, it lost all cohesion. The troops had to cover most of a mile. Their commander was more interested in striking before his foes could respond than he was in presenting a pretty picture advancing.
The men in colored armor who came out of the hidden cemetery marched in perfect order. Some carried recently manufactured fireball projects. They began slaughtering the rabble before most of the Taglians were aware that Fortune had dealt them one from the bottom of the deck. They lasted as long as they did only because there were so many of them.
They’ve begun to stiffen on their right,” one of Mogaba’s companions announced. “But they’re falling back on the other wing.”
“There’s something wrong,” Mogaba declared. “There should be more of them.”
“Why don’t we rush them?”
“Do sound a general advance. But at the slow cadence.”
The first confused message arrived just minutes later. Narenda Nath Saraswati’s division was on the run. Saraswati himself was dead. Most of the division officers had been captured or killed.
Before he could make sense of it, Mogaba heard the horns on his right and saw the different colored blocks, every soldier with his own banner on his back, advancing. A flurry of cavalrymen swept stragglers, and fugitives, and foolish resistance out of the infantry’s path.
The Great General needed only a moment to understand that Sleepy was about to kidney-punch the Second Territorial with her best. “Full attack!” he ordered. “Fastest cadence!” If he got the soldiers moving forward before they recognized their peril he could use his numbers to overcome. “The little witch finally caught me.” But there was still Aridatha, moving in behind. It remained to be seen who would have whom in the end.
Mogaba drove straight toward the enemy camp. If he could get inside its palisade . . .
Aridatha learned of the developing disaster from Vehdna horsemen who had been forced to flee in his direction, around the eastern end of the battlefield, because enemy skirmishers had blocked the way north already. Aridatha was able to intuit the truth from the complete confusion of the reports.
He ordered his division to form for battle.
Backboned by his own City Battalions the force was well-drilled, if not veteran. Within two hours Singh had the enemy in sight. The invaders and their traitor native allies were involved in a huge, bloody melee with all of the Taglian troops Mogaba had been able to hold together or who had not been able to run away. Evidently the invaders had not remained sufficiently concerned about Singh’s division.
Aridatha’s advent was close to a complete surprise. As for its effectiveness . . . His soldiers had no experience dealing with the terror. And they all knew that their brothers in the other divisions had lost their battle already and were busily doing their dying.
The exhausted armies disentangled as the day waned. The soldiers on both sides had endured so much horror that, gradually, they just stopped trying to interfere with an enemy who seemed willing to go away without causing trouble.
But who won?
On that day arguments could have been made both ways. Final determination would be in the hands of those historians who examined the effect the battle had on Taglian society and culture. It could be a watershed or it could be nothing important, depending on what followed and how the population responded.
Not even Sleepy had the physical or mental energy left to do anything useful. She slumped against the saddle of a dead horse, let the twilight and exhaustion wash over her. She felt no exhilaration even though she had broken the backbone of the last Taglian army and had, for the first time, been the one who held the field when the fighting ended. Mogaba, if he lived, was the one slinking away this time.
A big contributor to her mood was the fact that this accomplishment, such as it was, was as much Suvrin’s responsibility as her own. Suvrin, alone, had not abandoned all thought of the third Taglian division. He had been able to move his brigade in response, feebly, when the rest of the enemy appeared. But for Suvrin’s cool head, the Great General would be here, holding the field, yet again. Though the numbers of dead and dying, likely, would be much the same.
Suvrin settled beside her. He said nothing for a long time. Neither did she. For the first time in decades she wanted to hold someone, wanted to be held by someone. But she did not act upon that want.
Finally, Suvrin spoke. “Willow Swan is dead. I saw his body a while ago.”
Sleepy grunted. “I have a feeling there’ll be a lot of old friends to mourn once we collect the dead. I saw Iqbal and Riverwalker go down.”
“No. Not Iqbal. Who’ll take care of Suruvhija?” Singh’s wife was not all that bright.
“The Company, Suvrin. Until she chooses to leave.” And Runmust, if he had survived. It was his obligation under Shadar religious law. “She’s one of our own. We take care of our own. Do we have anyone capable of handling picket duty?”
Suvrin responded with an interrogatory grunt.
“That’s the Great General over there. Iron Man Mogaba. If he’s still even a little bit healthy and can pull together some kind of night attack he’ll be back. Maybe even if he has to do it all by himself.”
Suvrin took several deep, thoughtful breaths. “We have quite a few recruits who didn’t do much but hide in the cemetery. I’ve already shamed some of them into picking up the battlefield.”
“It won’t matter if they run away as long as they run toward us.”
“Uhm.”
“Willow? He never did . . . Never found his dream.”
“I always pictured him as your basic everyman. Just drifting wherever the tides of life took him. Showing a flash sometimes but never really getting up and grabbing the reins. He might have been a hopeless romantic, too. According to the Annals. He had a case on Lady once. And a case on the Protector, where he was much more lucky but lived to regret it. He even had it for you for a while, I think.”
“We were friends. Just good friends.”
Suvrin did not argue. But there was a quaver in Sleepy’s voice that made him wonder if, possibly only once or twice, there had not been something to lend substance to rumor.
It was none of his business.
“I should’ve avoided this mess until Tobo and the others got back.”
Suvrin observed, “Mogaba wouldn’t have let you. So don’t beat yourself up. He would’ve chased you hard, trying to take advantage of the fact that they were gone.”
Sleepy knew that was true but truth did not alter her emotional state. A lot of people were dead. Many of them had been comrades of long standing. It was her mission to preserve them, not to waste them. She had failed.
And the full, grim scope of the tragedy remained to be revealed.
She looks so peaceful,” Lady intoned. We stood over her sister, in the cavern of the ancients. Soulcatcher now filled the identical spot that Lady had occupied during the Captivity.
I needed a moment to realize that she was being sarcastic, repeating the inanities you hear at funerals. She was sure Soulcatcher was partially aware of what was happening. And she could not interact with her sister in any more intimate way.
I said, “We’ve done what we came to do. We need to think about getting back to the Company.” Though I remained tempted to hazard a recon run through the Khatovar gate before it healed completely.
And I had a notion to take a gander at the dark thing that had been toying with our lives and destinies since before we ever heard any of her names.
“Yes,” Lady said. “There’s no telling what mischief Booboo and the Khadidas and Mogaba have gotten into without Tobo and Howler there to baby-sit.”
I said, “If Mogaba realizes that Sleepy’s got no wizards, he’ll be all over her like a snake on shit.”
“That was colorful, if nonsensical.” I noted that she did not include herself with Tobo and Howler. Yet I suspected strongly that she was capable of sucking Kina’s power like a queen vampire nowadays. Sometimes I wondered what that augured for the day it came time to pay up to Shivetya. She really hated turning into something old and dumpy and grey that looked way too much like the mother she barely remembered.
“I just remembered a Company sergeant from before your time. A man named Elmo. He had an unusual turn of phrase.”
“You are getting old.”
“I spend my whole life living in the past, darling. Let’s saddle up.” We had come down the long stair to the cavern aboard Voroshk flying posts. What a marvellous way to deal with stairways when you are no longer twenty years old.
Lady started to pat her sister on the shoulder, an ordinary little action. “Don’t!” I barked, with enough urgency to cause a couple of small ice stalactites to fall somewhere back in the depths of the cave.
“Oh. I wasn’t thinking.”
There were frost-encrusted old men all along the sides of the cave. No one knew who they were. Except, possibly, Baladitya. Most of them were still alive. They were, like Soulcatcher, exiles from some unsympathetic power. But a few, including way too many Company brothers from the time of the Captivity, were dead meat. And all it had taken to kill them was a thoughtless, gentle or friendly touch.
Lady pushed past me. I surveyed the local population. As ever, it seemed the open eyes all stared right at me. I met Soulcatcher’s dull gaze. For no reason I understood, I winked. We were old conspirators. We went way back. I knew her before I knew her sister, in olden times of terror.
It may have been a trick of the light or of my imagination but it seemed there was a flicker of response.
When we returned up top we found the others involved in the initial stages of getting ready to leave. Howler was exulting, loudly, to all and sundry, in his new ability to remain silent. He seemed almost grateful. Being an old cynic myself I have strong notions about the true value of human gratitude. It is a currency whose worth plunges by the hour. Though thoroughly confused, the two old Voroshk sorcerers were collecting themselves for the journey, too. Which meant that they had surrendered to Tobo’s blandishments while Lady and I were down below. They had surrendered their flying posts and special clothing rather than be forced to return to their own world.
They must have gotten some really unpleasant news.
“You understand what this means?” I asked Tobo.
“Uh?” The kid was relaxing by flirting with Shukrat. I got the impression that those two might have started sneaking off into dark corners. They had developed that goofy way of looking at each other. And they could not stay away from one another.
That would not instill Sahra with great joy.
“It means we have to stash Gromovol downstairs, too. Or kill him. Which wouldn’t be politic. Because there’s no way I’m going to give him the opportunity to give us any more grief by letting him come back with us.”
“I’ll talk to Nashun and the First Father.” He turned to Shukrat. “Come on, honey.”
Hah. Honey.
A procession of flying posts went down to the cave of the ancients. Oh, that was so much easier than clambering down and up. The elderly Voroshk, in borrowed rags, rode behind Tobo and Shukrat. Gromovol rode behind Arkana. I figured she owed him one. Her cast did not cause her any problems flying. She would be out of that soon.
Gromovol whined and begged until he became an embarrassment to everyone.
I could claim I had no mercy but that would not be true. Had I been appropriately merciless, pieces of Gromovol would have gotten distributed over half a world after I made a few cutting remarks about his character and bad behavior.
I felt like one of the Voroshk now. I looked like one of the Voroshk. So did my beloved. The deal with the old men compelled them to refit their wondrous black costumes for us.
Those would make marvellous complements to our Widowmaker and Lifetaker armor.
Tobo and Shukrat, too, boasted the black and undefined look, Tobo having helped himself to Gromovol’s outfit.
It took only minutes to inter Gromovol, not far from the frozen corpses of several men who had been my friends. His final pleas still echoed when I told Lady, “I’m going down to the bottom of this hole. I want a look at that old bitch who’s been fucking up our lives for the last fifty years.”
“Are you crazy?” Tobo yelled. “I wouldn’t go down there. I’m nervous just being this close.”
“Then go back upstairs. Shukrat. Answer a couple of technical questions for me before you leave. Please?”
The black barrier that had frustrated Blade so was back in place. It put a terrible pressure on my mind. But the flying post did not notice it at all. The post kept moving. The Voroshk costume I wore stirred slightly, enclosing me more securely within its protection.
Although I know the names now I refuse to call post and costume by their proper, clunkily cumbersome Voroshk titles.
I passed through the barrier. Lady made a funny little sound as she came through behind me, like she did when we made love.
The scene was pretty much the way it had been described by others. What seemed to be a vast, open cavern without evident bounds, illuminated by no evident light source, and that extremely feeble. All that could be seen was a huge, ugly sprawl of flesh the color of polished eggplant. It did not move, even to breathe.
Kina looked like Shivetya’s homely big sister. Kina looked like the embodiment of all the dark attributes I had heard assigned her, under all her many names, since first I became aware of her existence. Kina looked like many dark things.
My memories of the next few minutes are completely unreliable.
Almost immediately the great hairless head turned our way. Kina’s mouth was open, exposing ugly dark fangs. She seemed to have a snake or lizard tongue. I did not recall that having been reported before in any of the conflicting myths, though her tongue was supposed to be long, the better to lap up demon blood.
The eyes of the Goddess began to open.
The immensity of her will smashed at me like a tidal wave breaking. The lights went out. For me.
“Looks like you were lucky this time,” Tobo told me. “Your post got you out of there.”
I wanted to tell him luck had nothing to do with it. I planned it that way. I set it up with the help of his girlfriend. But I barely had energy enough to keep breathing.
I did manage to gasp, “Lady?” Had to check on my honey.
“Better off than you are. Sleeping right now. Said to tell you to just rest. Here’s some Shivetya manna. It’ll give you a kick in the ass. If you can keep it down.”
I managed to roll my head until I could see the demon.
Shivetya was looking back at me. A white crow was strutting around on his shoulder. Not my white raven. The demon revealed a few teeth in what he might have thought was a smile. Bizarre. I did not recall him ever having moved before.
He must have seen the inside of my head. Must know I thought I had a notion about how to get to Kina.
I hoped the Goddess could not look inside my head, too.
Someday. Down the road. If I could get all the pieces to fall into place.
The white crow sneered. I believe they can do that, those birds.
Tobo understood that something was happening but did not catch on. I think my new daughters understood better than he did.
I was outside the shadowgate gossiping with Panda Man and Spook, who were telling me that keeping an eye on the gate was the best duty they had ever endured. The work was easy and the locals were friendly. If the damned ugly spooks from the plain did not keep nagging you . . .
Tobo and Shukrat came through.
Almost immediately Tobo let out a cry of despair. He shouted, “There’s been a battle!” A moment later he shot into the air, headed north, black cloth streaming behind him. An instant later still Shukrat shot off in his wake, gaining slowly.
Panting, Lady asked, “Does that mean we should be worried?”
“That would be my guess. The little shit must’ve gotten something from the hidden folk.”
“And it was bad enough to set him off like that.” She looked as troubled as I felt.
No good could come of any battle fought while we were away.
She asked, “Aren’t you going to rush off and see what happened, too?”
“Don’t see the point.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the carpet, which was creaking and sagging under the weight of people we dared not trust. “There isn’t anything I could do, anyway. Look at that.” A ripple, a distortion in the fabric of reality, seemed to be running over the face of the earth, chasing after Tobo and Shukrat. “The hidden folk following their hero.”
“Why were they here?”
“Waiting around for Tobo.”
“But they should’ve been with Sleepy. They don’t do us any good hanging around the shadowgate when . . . oh. They don’t care if they do us any good.”
“Exactly. What they care about is Tobo. Anything they do that benefits the rest of us they do just to please him. Which is why two-thirds of the time I don’t have the two ravens that’re supposed to be my permanent shoulder-ornaments and messengers and far-seeing eyes. They keep forgetting to stick with me. They wander off to find the kid. Bet you they turn up before we catch up with Sleepy, though.”
“Sounds like a sucker bet to me.”
After crossing the Dandha Presh I steered a course mimicking that Sleepy had followed heading north. When Lady asked why I was not heading straight north as fast as we dared push the carpet, I told her, “Because I thought I saw something I shouldn’t have on the way down. I have to check on it. I’m hoping it was my imagination.” But my brief conversation with the guards at the shadowgate suggested that the nightmare might be real.
She was curious but did not ask. At the speeds we could make airborne a bit of circuitous flight would not delay us much.
I found what I was seeking on the path Sleepy had taken from Gharhawnes, at almost exactly the point where she had doubled back to get behind Dejagore. By then my confederates were extremely crabby.
“There!” I told Lady, catching just a glimpse of something moving fast inside a stand of scrubby oaks.
“There what?” She had not seen.
“The Nef.”
“The Nef? The Nef are in the Voroshk world. Trapped there.”
“Not according to Spook and Panda Man. They say the Nef come around every night.”
“All right. But how would they get through the shadowgate?”
“I don’t know.” I was flying in a circle now, giving up altitude. Once down to treetop level I cruised back and forth. I spotted nothing. Nor did I find a sign when I descended lower still and began to glide between the tree trunks.
I never found a thing. Not even a hint of a thing.
People began to yell down at me.
All right. They had a point. There were things we needed to do way north of where we were now.
It had been over for more than a day but the surgeons remained hard at work. Men still lay in long rows awaiting attention, moaning, screaming, some delirious. And some dead. A burial detail walked the rows, picking up those who had gone. Too many of those had died alone amidst the hundreds, without comfort.
The glory of war.
The ultimate fear. Mine, anyway.
I checked quickly to make sure that everyone was conforming to my decrees concerning cleanliness and sepsis. A few of the wounded would stand a better chance if the surgeons and their helpers cleaved to the rules. Even when they were exhausted, as they were now, and the temptation to cut corners became overwhelming.
Beyond our wounded lay those from Mogaba’s army. They were likely to get no treatment at all, except what they could manage for themselves. I was sure that our medical supplies were as strained as our medical staff was. It looked like this was a much bigger fight than I had expected. Or, at least, a more desperate encounter with more casualties than expected in a short time.
Runmust Singh on crutches took me in to see Sleepy.
She appeared disoriented. I knew that look of old, having been there myself. She was on the edge of collapse. She had not done more than catnap since the fighting started. “You can’t do it all yourself, Captain. You’ll be a lot more effective if you just trust the rest of us to get things done and get yourself some rest. If Mogaba comes back now you won’t be able to think fast enough or straight enough to do anybody any good.”
She eyed me irritably but was too exhausted to squabble. “I take it you didn’t come here past the dead.”
“I came through the hospital area.” She knew that I would have to do that. After we talked I would, probably, go back to offer what little help an old man with a bum hand and a bad eye could.
“Then you don’t yet know that there isn’t anybody left for me to trust while I take a nap. Swan is dead, Croaker. Blade is dead. Iqbal Singh is dead. Riverwalker is dead. Add Pham Huu Clee, Li Wan, both the Chun brothers and your old engineers, Cletus and Loftus. There’s going to be a lot of opportunity for advancement. Name a name. Almost everybody is dead or injured. Hell, even Sahra may be dead. We haven’t been able to find her.”
“We’re back,” I said. That ought to take a load off her shoulders. “Successfully, I might add. What about Suvrin?”
“Suvrin made it through. Suvrin saved the day. Suvrin and I have agreed to take turns resting as soon as we’re sure Mogaba isn’t coming back. Right now we’re taking turns holding everything together.”
Based on what I had seen and heard already the Great General would not return any time soon—unless he came on his own. His soldiers had had enough.
Mogaba would have been back already had he had any troops he could use. Caution and procrastination were not sins you could pin on the Great General.
I heard Tobo’s voice outside, overhead. He was addressing the folk of the hidden realm. Before long we would know all we wanted to know about Mogaba’s current situation. In moments thousands of wraithlike things would be involved in the search for Sahra—and everyone else still missing.
The kid was taking charge.
Sleepy mumbled, “I shouldn’t have engaged him till Tobo came back.”
Unwittingly, I repeated comments she had heard from Suvrin already. “Mogaba wouldn’t have given you a choice. He doesn’t have our intelligence resources but he does make use of the tools he has. That was our failing. Not remembering that. We should’ve given at least the appearance of having left a sorcerer in camp.”
Sleepy nodded. “Water down the creek. Which I’ll thank you to remind me whenever I begin to feel sorry for myself and start picking the thing’s bones to indict myself for doing things differently.”
“You’re a strange bird, little girl.”
“What?”
“Sorry. One-Eye’s been on my mind lately.” I did not explain. As long as I kept my genius sealed up inside my head there was a fair chance Kina would not find out anything she would make me regret. I asked. “What about Goblin and the girl? If there was fighting in the grove . . . ”
“We don’t know yet. I assume Tobo will inform us. I assume everything is going to be just peachy now that Tobo is back.” She was striving for sarcasm but it was not working. She did not have strength enough to speak in anything but a monotone.
“Lady and Murgen will be here in a few minutes. Let them manage the little shit while you get your rest.”
I went for an excursion amongst the unburied dead, to make goodbyes. They were laid out in rows, awaiting disposal. The weather was cold and damp so putrefaction was not far advanced but there was stench enough of blood and open bowels. Flies were rare, it being the wrong season. And crows of any sort were a rarity these days. Buzzards circled but dared not come down because the welcome they received from the living tended to be discouraging.
Once someone identified one of the fallen, Taglian prisoners moved the body to the appropriate funeral procedure group. Recruits and additional prisoners were busy building ghats, burning corpses, digging graves and filling them, or erecting exposure platforms for the few whose fate it was to leave the earth that way.
A lot of corpses had been dealt with already but I could see that, despite the season, we were going to have to dig mass graves for the Taglian fallen. There would not be time to get each man a decent funeral. Although civilians who had had men serving with Mogaba had begun to show up already, hoping to reclaim their dead.
I wondered if, in some mystical fashion, new standing stones were materializing on the glittering plain, their faces crawling with golden memorial characters.
A subaltern from the Land of Unknown Shadows approached me. It was obvious he was not pleased about having been assigned to the funeral detail. He must have embarrassed himself during the fighting. The unpleasant duty would be his reward. “Sir,” he said, with a salute so crisp it should have gotten his sentence commuted, “it would be a great help if you could offer me the funerary preferences of your old comrades.” There was a mildly repulsive fawning edge to his otherwise businesslike demeanor.
He led me to a spot where he had isolated non-Taglians who did not hail from Hsien. My former henchmen and a couple of Nyueng Bao occupied that little square.
“Soldiers live,” I murmured. Now there was only Murgen and Lady left from the farther shore of the Sea of Torments. “Bury Swan and the engineer brothers. Inside that cemetery over there. Make sure that their graves are clearly marked. I’ll want to find them later in order to put up a proper memorial. They deserve more than a parting mention in the Annals.” I wondered what Swan would think of lying to rest beside all those Shadowlanders. He and Blade and Cordy Mather had helped put most of them there.
I had no idea what funeral customs obtained amongst Blade’s people. Neither I nor anyone else ever learned who those people actually were. “Lay the black man down in a grave near Swan. Maybe they can be buddies in the next world, too. Maybe they’ll finally get to start that brewery they always wanted.”
The subaltern was puzzled by that but did not comment. The soldiers of the Land of Unknown Shadows were growing accustomed to the religious absurdities of the new world. I walked on, across ground covered by the corpses of men Sleepy had recruited during the time of Captivity. Their number was disturbing. Before long she would be as isolated from her own generation as I was isolated from mine.
A great many excellent soldiers from the Land of Unknown Shadows lay upon that cold, hard ground, too. And, unsurprisingly, so did many men who had joined us recently, locally. Poorest trained, they had stood the least chance during the fighting.
I surveyed all that death and hoped Sleepy had reached a watershed here, that henceforth she would seek solutions that did not require headbutting until somebody staggered away and collapsed from concussion. Not that all this could be blamed on her. Based on information available I could fault none of her decisions. And she was a better tactician than I had been.
Twenty-six hours after his order to break contact Mogaba abandoned all hope of pulling together an attack that would take advantage of the enemy’s despair and disarray. His own men had been too badly mauled to set aside their own despair and disarray. Only Aridatha Singh’s division retained its cohesion. Its reward was the task of screening the retreating army.
Which consisted mainly of survivors of the Second Territorial. Of Saraswati’s former right wing force not one man in ten could be accounted for anymore.
Enemy cavalry remained very active. The Captain seemed disinclined to let him get near her again.
A pair of billowing black shapes passed low overhead. They radiated a chilling psychic scream. Suddenly, instinctually, Mogaba knew that he was being watched by something he could not turn fast enough to catch staring. He knew that his best opportunity had ended. He summoned his latest aide-de-camp, who had been in place only a few hours. The man’s several predecessors were still down there on the field. “Bring me the Deceiver prisoners.”
“Sir?”
“The prisoners General Singh captured in the Grove of Doom. I want to see them.” He thought he could offer them a deal. The girl could pretend to be the Protector for a while. Taglios would be less restive if the Protector appeared publicly sometime soon.
“Those prisoners were sent north, sir. Under special constraint because of the danger General Singh told us they present.”
“And he was right. That was the best thing to do. We don’t want them to fall into unfriendly hands.” Publicly, Mogaba insisted on treating the recent encounter as a triumph. He expected his officers to do the same.
Mogaba spent a moment considering what options he might have. It took only a minute to conclude that withdrawal toward Taglios was the best course.
Oh, but he hated that. No matter the true facts, rumor would call it a defeat and a retreat. That would cost.
The Great General considered his aide. He did not know the man well enough to be aware of his family status. “Ton-jon, is it?”
“Than Jahn, sir. A remote male ancestor is reputed to have been Nyueng Bao. My family is Vehdna.”
“Excellent. Perhaps you can share religious anecdotes with the enemy Captain.”
“Sir?” Sounding both baffled and irked.
“I’m sending you south under a flag of truce. To arrange for an armistice. So we can collect our dead.” If anything the Great General ever did won him favor with the Taglian people, it was his effort to bring back the fallen sons so their families could honor them with all the appropriate last rites.
This time would be a bitch. There was no way he was going to recover all the Taglian dead. “Find me some priests. Every kind we have.” He needed advice about what to do with so many bodies, this close to home.
The Company, Mogaba was sure, would just fling their share of Taglian corpses into one big ugly hole, cover them over and forget about them.
Tobo was distraught. Murgen was distracted. He walked around bumping into things, trapped inside his own interior world. I had not seen him so lost since his Annalist days.
No trace of Sahra had surfaced, even with the Unknown Shadows hunting. So far Tobo had determined only that she had not fallen into enemy hands. The Taglians were not looking. They were unaware, even, that they ought to bear the woman a grudge.
Sahra always had had a knack for going unnoticed.
“She’s dead,” Lady told me. “She was hurt, she crawled in somewhere to hide, and she died there.” Which was plausible enough. Several bodies had been discovered in circumstances that fit the scenario. And Sahra was not alone in being missing. Every company in the force was unable to account for someone. Most, probably, had run away or were prisoners of war. But the hidden folk kept finding others dead in places where no one had yet thought to look.
I hoped Lady’s simple explanation was the correct one. I dreaded the chance that Sahra had been captured by somebody who would use her to manipulate Tobo.
The up side was that there was a paucity of villains who might be interested. Mogaba was exonerated. Soulcatcher was buried. Booboo and the Khadidas were entombed in the big fortress guarding the southern approaches to Taglios, behind a door that could not be opened by any key still within the stronghold. Others who might have tried something sly—say the Howler or the Voroshk—had perfect alibis.
So it came down to Sahra being dead and lost or lost and wandering around in a shock so profound that she could not recall who she was or where she belonged.
Sleepy posted a huge reward for “the capture of an older Nyueng Bao woman wanted for questioning in regard to espionage against agents of the Prahbrindrah Drah.” Murgen provided a description that included the shapes and locations of moles and a birthmark unfamiliar to anyone else.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” my darling whispered to me. “People go at the oddest times and from the oddest causes.”
“Soldiers live,” I murmured.
“You’re turning that into a mantra.”
“You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you’re glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.”
“One soldier lives because the gods know that I still haven’t gotten my fair share of loving. Put that pen away and come on over here.”
“You’ve sure turned into a pushy broad in your old age.”
“Yeah? You should’ve seen me four hundred years ago.”
Tobo announced, “Mogaba’s had the Khadidas and the Daughter of Night moved to the palace. In a remarkable coincidence the Protector was seen publicly for the first time in months only a few hours later. She was extremely angry with the Taglians and brought one of her punishments down on their heads.” He grinned. “Most likely that had something to do with all the graffiti that’s begun appearing. All the good old stuff. ‘Water sleeps.’ ‘My brother unforgiven.’ And even some that aren’t my doing. ‘You shall lie in the ashes ten thousand years, eating only wind.’ I love that one.”
That one caught my attention. I had heard it before, somewhere. But I had heard them all before.
“Rajadharma is everywhere. Anyone who can write seems to put that one up. Then there’s ‘Madhuprlya’ which means ‘A Friend of the Wine’ and is a popular nickname for Ghopal Singh. Seems the lord of the Greys has a taste for the grape. The one I don’t get, and which seems to trouble the Greys more than ‘Madhupriya,’ is, ‘Thi Kim is coming.’ It doesn’t make sense. Everybody assumes Nyueng Bao are involved because Thi Kim is translatable only from Nyueng Bao. As ‘death walk.’ Except that here it’s written as a proper name.”
I said, “If it’s used as a name or title it would more properly come through as ‘Deathwalker’ or ‘Death Walking.’ Not so? In olden times a Deathwalker was a suspected plague carrier.”
“Goblin,” Lady said. “It’s Deceivers announcing the coming of the Khadidas. A dead man still walking around. By the grace or curse of Kina. And a plague carrier, too, if you count the religious side.”
“Maybe.” Tobo did not seem convinced. I did not blame him. I had a feeling it was something more sinister myself. Based on nothing whatsoever, because Lady’s suggestion ought to be true.
I nodded in the general direction of where Sleepy should be. “She said anything about what she’s planning?”
“Not unless you count her complaining about the headbutting she’s been doing with our friends from the Land of Unknown Shadows. Every brigade commander is whining about needing replacements. But none of them want local recruits—because of the language problem more than because of their lack of equipment and training—but none of them wants to see their own brigade disbanded so its soldiers can fill open slots elsewhere.”
But there was no choice and everyone recognized that fact. The best answer was simple enough. And Sleepy found it without consulting me.
Instead of disbanding the hardest hit units she took the one least distressed and distributed its people amongst the others, keeping whole groups together. Being with people you know and trust is critical to a soldier. She made sure the officers got better jobs whenever possible. The displaced brigade commander became her chief of staff, with the assurance that he would be given command of all the native troops we raised, however numerous they might become.
Maximum result with least distress to oversized egos. Only a few men ended up completely disappointed.
Life has turned into a preoccupation with administrative detail.
Is that what happens when you get old? You worry more about people and their interaction than you do about drama and the violence and the wicked deeds those people do?
That is us. The Black Company. Wicked deeds done dirt cheap. But by damn! You had better pony up when payment is due. Otherwise, if we must, we will come back from the grave itself to make sure our accounts are properly balanced.
I said some of that aloud one afternoon. Tobo told me, “You’re mad, old man.”
“As a hatter.” A reflection. “Speaking of which. You know whatever happened to One-Eye’s old hat?” I was going to need that disgusting flea farm one day soon. Desperately. One-Eye had told me I would but I had not listened closely enough. I had listened and understood that One-Eye’s wondrous spear would have to be employed in ways that the little wizard had defined well back into his healthier days. But that hat had been such a commonplace, and so foul, that it had not clung to its place in my mind.
“It may be in my junk wagon,” Tobo told me. “If it’s not there it’ll be with mom’s stuff.” He winced. Sahra remained missing. “We took everything of his and Nana Gota’s when we left Hsien.”
“I need to find it. Fairly soon.”
Tobo wondered why but did not ask. What a good boy. He did say, “If I was you I’d think about getting my stuff together, ready to move.” For this Annalist all the junk and paper and pens and ink and notes and whatnot can build into piles that threaten to swamp. “Sleepy would rather stay here and spend some treasure refitting and recruiting and training and getting stronger but I convinced her that won’t work. Things aren’t going to slow down anywhere else. Right now we have more sorcery available than ever before in the Company’s history.”
“I’ve said so myself.” More than once, in jeremiads about counting too much on powers and skills not part of the traditional Company arsenal.
“Yes, you did. But you didn’t say anything about it fading away.”
“Sure I did.”
“You want it to go away. And it will. Because these aren’t the kind of people who’re likely to be content to do what we’ve got them doing. So we ought to use them up while we can.”
“Meaning?”
“We need to go after Taglios while we have the power to hit it hard.”
Was he starting to sound just the slightest bit bigheaded? Like he might know better than the Captain what we ought to do? Was it going to be squabble on with Sleepy now that his mother was no longer around?
Might better keep an eye on our baby boy. He was overdue to outgrow all that.
I said, “You could be right.”
Ghopal Singh’s report was not reassuring. “The graffiti is everywhere but we just can’t catch anybody doing it. It’s much worse than it was five years ago. Nowadays, with a lot of people on our side, you’d think we’d be able to come up with a clue. All we get is nonsense about ghosts and demons and things you can see only if you’re not looking for them.”
Mogaba steepled long fingers under his chin. “The thing is, Ghopal, I’ve seen both demons and ghosts with my own eyes. When I had just become part of the Black Company one of the Company wizards had a pet demon. It later turned out to be our enemy, but that doesn’t matter. It was a demon. And during the siege of Dejagore ghosts often came and went. We all saw them, though hardly anyone ever talked about them.
“Most people blamed Nyueng Bao conjurers.”
Aridatha Singh observed, “The reality of demons and ghosts doesn’t affect the situation. Whether spooks or clever agitators are writing these messages, the messages are there. And enough people can read that the whole population knows what’s being written.”
“What would you do about it?” Mogaba asked.
“Keep watching for vandals but ignore it otherwise. If the people believe we’re indifferent to the criticism they won’t take it seriously either.”
“A notion I hoped to put forward myself,” Ghopal said. “Because people in the street have no more idea than we do who’s putting that stuff up. Which makes them just as nervous as it makes us.”
Mogaba grimaced, “Approved, then. With this caveat. Some of those slogans don’t fit the traditional mold. ‘Thi Kim is coming.’ We still don’t know what that means.”
“The Walking Death is coming,” Ghopal said. “You have to think that means the Daughter of Night’s companion.”
“You think it’s Deceiver work, then?”
“That’s my guess.”
“But Thi Kim is Nyueng Bao. I’ve never heard of any Nyueng Bao Deceivers.”
Ghopal grunted. That had gotten past him.
Aridatha made a joke of it. “We’ll know him when he gets here. People will start dying.”
“Ha, and one more out of charity, ha,” Mogaba replied. “In the meantime, we need to make a decision about our guests. We’ll have a lot of trouble keeping them under control. Especially the wizard. Goblin. Who insists on being addressed as the Khadidas. He did help cow the mob when we had the girl pretend she was the Protector. But he has no interest in our cause. He’ll devour us the instant he stops seeing us as valuable to his cause. Which is bringing on the end of the world.”
Neither of the Singhs responded. Each understood that there was more to the Great General’s words than he was actually saying. That something particularly delicate would come up had been evident from the moment it had become clear that no one else would participate in the meeting.
“I’m thinking we should get rid of him. Right now. Before he gets too comfortable and sure of himself.”
“And the Daughter of Night?” Aridatha asked.
“She’s not much threat on her own.” Meaning the Daughter of Night could be spared. If that was what Aridatha wanted. “Though my guess is, she’s too set in her ways to be redeemed.”
Aridatha’s coloring was pale enough to betray his embarrassment. “That isn’t what I had in mind.”
Ghopal came to his rescue. Inadvertently, having failed to catch the unspoken. “How do we get close enough to do anything? She’ll make us love her so much we’ll want to chop off our own toes.”
“There must be ways around that.”
“I’d be happy to hear suggestions.”
“Well, it’s obvious she can’t do it all the time, whenever she wants, or Aridatha couldn’t have caught her.”
“Unless she wanted to be caught.”
Mogaba feared there might be something to that suggestion. “And that power doesn’t work on weapons. Or poisons.”
“Sorcery might be a possibility,” Ghopal suggested. “You think anyone knows either of their true names?”
Mogaba shook his head. “I don’t think even our enemies could do much there. The girl hasn’t had any name but the Daughter of Night. The Goblin thing is two creatures in one, with the Kina side ruling. The man who knew the Goblin side’s secrets is dead. So we can focus on treachery and poison right away.”
“I don’t want to harp,” Aridatha said, “but I do have to remind everybody that the girl’s parents aren’t that far away. And right now our prospects don’t look that great.”
Mogaba suspected that to be a subtle invitation to discuss his plans. He did not accept.
He did not accept because these days he no longer had any grand plan. He believed his days were numbered, as some of the graffiti insisted. “All their days are numbered.” But the things that made him Mogaba, positive and negative, compelled him to struggle on.
Lady had been preoccupied since our visit to Shivetya’s fortress. More than usual. A couple of times I walked in on her while she was practicing her sorcery. I did not ask. The answer was plain. Her ability to steal Kina’s power had returned full strength just when the Khadidas had come forward to take control of Goblin.
Lady had herself locked down, under rigid control. Being someone who has crawled all over her for years, I knew she was battling hope.
She was addicted to the power.
She had given it up, not entirely of her own volition, to prevent that old horror, her first husband, the Dominator, from resurrecting himself. Then she had gone away with me, knowing there was no way she could survive, powerless, in the world she had created. But she remembered being the Lady. And as years fled by she missed that more and more. And, I think, she missed that most when misfortune led her to a close encounter with a mirror.
A personable Dejagoran youngster we knew as Mihlos Sedona made the rounds, summoning the insiders to join Tobo and the Captain. The kid was only about sixteen but had charmed himself into a job as Sleepy’s personal gopher. A smile and a winning personality is worth more than genius and sour most any day.
I thought well of Sedona myself. He had remembered to invite me to the party.
The camp was in turmoil. Sleepy had ordered preparations for movement toward Taglios. Those with the necessary expertise were producing parts for artillery pieces or siege engines to be assembled once we reached the fighting zone. Those without expertise were doing the donkey work. I wondered why Sleepy was having the work done when we did not yet know if we would need the equipment. I expect she just wanted everyone kept busy.
Can a bird sneer or smirk? The white crow observed from the arm of an incomplete, mobile stone-thrower. In my eye it seemed to do both. “Long flight for you, eh? You just get in?”
The bird jumped but did not fly away.
“Be good,” I told it. “I know who you are and I know where you live.”
Crow laughter, a little strained. Soldiers who remembered when crows were plentiful and dangerous paused to stare.
The crow winged it toward the cemetery.
I grumbled, “I do believe our old pal Shivetya is hedging his bets.”
The day was chilly but the sky was clear. The Captain seemed to think a meeting out in the fresh air would be good for everybody. I slipped around behind her headquarters tent.
Tobo spoke first. “The Great General and his henchmen plan to keep fighting, despite our advantages. Both Generals Singh think it would be better to recognize the Prahbrindrah Drah and save Taglios the damage from heavy fighting. But loyalty is a matter of pride and honor for them, too. And the Great General isn’t the Protector. They consider him their friend. As long as he’s still standing I’m afraid they’re going to stick with him.”
No surprise there. Not to mention that Ghopal Singh did not have much choice. As director of the Greys he had no friends outside the present establishment. He had committed himself to the Protectorate, not to Taglios.
Aridatha, on the other hand, and despite his participation in the recent fighting, could be considered apolitical and committed to Taglios. The job he had done was the same job that would have been demanded of him by anyone who happened to be in power.
That was the consensus. Maybe we were just making excuses. Everybody who met Aridatha liked the guy and wished him good fortune.
“Enough of that,” Sleepy snapped. “The man’s a paragon. The sort we all want our daughters to marry. Fine. Tobo, get on with it.”
“Last night the generals decided to destroy the Khadidas. He and the Daughter of Night can’t read minds but they did sense trouble. They broke out of their cells. Which means one of them has more power than they’ve been showing. They’re hiding somewhere in the abandoned part of the Palace. The Greys and the Palace Guard haven’t found them yet. The Khadidas did something that distorted reality around them. Even the hidden folk lost them. They haven’t been able to find them again. Not long after their disappearance somebody raided the kitchen. They stole a lot of food. Then somebody broke into the offices of the Inspector General of the Records and stole a shitload of paper and ink.”
Murgen blurted, “They’re going to reconstruct the Books of the Dead!” This was the first real emotion he had shown since Sahra’s disappearance.
“Evidently,” Sleepy said. “Not something they can accomplish quickly but something they’ll manage eventually. If we don’t interfere. And we are going to interfere. Tonight the whole bunch of you are going to fly to Taglios. You’re going to pull the same stunt you did in Jaicur. Using all the power you have available. I want you to capture Ghopal Singh and the Great General. Capture the girl and Goblin. Put Aridatha Singh in charge. Then hunker down. I’ll start the army moving tomorrow. As soon as we’re past the city gate I’ll send for the Prahbrindrah Drah.”
I tried to exchange glances with everyone, anyone around me. Nobody seemed interested. They all seemed embarrassed. Or something. Like maybe they thought Sleepy had turned simpleminded but it was up to somebody else to point that out to her.
I would bet you saw a lot of that around Mogaba. And a whole lot more around Soulcatcher before her forced retirement.
“It shall be done,” Sleepy’s proud new chief of staff intoned. Though he spoke Taglian that formula hailed from the Land of Unknown Shadows.
I miss One-Eye. One-Eye—or Goblin in his time—would have given that officious little asshole a mystic hotfoot. On the spot. Or maybe a case of fleas. The size of tumblebugs.
Those were the days. Except that those guys had not always gotten it right. They had screwed up and gotten me a few times, too.
There was a brief debate about whether or not to include the older Voroshk in the raid. The implication being that Tobo might not have what it took to keep an eye on so many people of dubious loyalty. Arkana appeared to have become one of us, but we did not yet know that. Arkana was the one who had advised Magadan to do whatever it took . . . Our hold on the Howler was weaker now, too. The little sorcerer had become almost invisible since he no longer announced himself every few minutes. The senior Voroshk, of course, were trustworthy only until they figured out a way to mess us over. If that long. They did not seem much smarter than Gromovol had been.
I said only, “Don’t get overconfident because everything’s gone our way so far.” Not only Sleepy but most of the others turned studiedly blank faces my way. “There’re plenty of chances to stumble still ahead of us.”
No doubt I would get an argument but I thought our path had run fairly straight and smooth lately. We might be just hours from our final accounting with the traitor Mogaba and only minutes longer from collecting Booboo and extinguishing the hope of the Deceivers. Events had had a ponderous inevitability almost since our first scares in the Land of Unknown Shadows.
“What?” But the question had been directed at Tobo, not me, by a startled Sleepy.
“We can’t leave till after midnight. Lady is going to walk me through a raising of the dead. So we can find out what happened to Mom.”
Sleepy wanted to argue but instantly understood that this was a battle she could not win. Tobo would do this thing Tobo’s way, with Murgen’s blessing. And it was not good to squabble in front of the troops.
“Don’t take all night.”
The Great General picked up a snail shell, considered it. “More of these things around here all the time. But nobody ever sees a live one.”
Ghopal said, “I’d bear down on my household staff if this was my place.”
A distant crash echoed through the hallways. Greys and Guards had begun demolishing walls at random, to make it more difficult for the Deceivers to hide. And in areas they felt confident were clear they had masons sealing doorways and walling off entire hallways. Additionally, several self-anointed psychics and ghost hunters had joined the hunt.
Mogaba said, “You’re probably right.” He gestured to one of several young men who had been trailing them. That fellow snapped a slight bow and disappeared. Before long every domestic in the palace was involved in a massive housekeeping campaign. Mogaba observed, “We can’t have this place looking a mess when our enemies get here.”
A messenger huffed and puffed into the presence. The search had stumbled onto some corpses. From long ago. Three men wearing nothing but loincloths. They appeared to have gotten lost in the maze of the Palace, but had perished of wounds suffered earlier. The searchers were troubled because the corpses had not suffered much from vermin or normal putrefaction.
“Don’t do anything with them,” Mogaba said. “Don’t even touch them. Just seal them up where they are.” He told Ghopal, “Those would be some of the Deceivers who tried to assassinate the Liberator and the Radisha when you were still wearing diapers.” He sighed. “No matter what we do to hurry this it’s going to take an age.”
“They do have to eat.”
“Eventually, yes. We’ll guard the kitchens at all times.” And, he said aloud to no one, because these days it was more secure to communicate by passing notes, any food easily reached during quiet hours would be poisoned.
“Keep at it here, Ghopal. Day and night. Use as many people as we can spare.” The Great General expected his enemies to come for him and he was making preparations to welcome them.
Mogaba withdrew to his own quarters. There he invested an hour in one of his hobbies before he moved on to the Protector’s quarters to nap. He used her apartment now because no one ever went there. No one but the Great General dared. No one but the Great General could pass through the warding spells the Protector had left in place.
It had become his sanctuary.
Mogaba’s scouts and spies had reported that Croaker and all his mob had rejoined the Company, back from wherever they had gone, with even more tools of deviltry.
The crisis could come any time now.
I had been in the neighborhood of necromantic activities before, and other high-order divining, but never any closer than I got that night. I do not plan to get that close again. If my honey wants somebody handy to save her sweet butt when she gets in trouble, I will tie a long rope to her ankle and attach the other end to a horse. If something goes sour I will swat the horse’s butt.
This séance did not go well. And before it was over I got a much uglier vision of that place of bones that had claimed so many of the dreams of Murgen and my beloved.
The smell was bad but the cold was worse. I have never felt such cold. I roasted myself beside a bonfire for hours after the summoning was over but mortal flames did little to defeat that bitter chill. It was so bad we did not undertake the Captain’s raid that night or even the next and when we did we went only because Her Highness began wondering publicly if us slackers were waiting for summer weather.
Murgen, Sleepy and I were present at the summoning. No one else was invited, not even Shukrat or Suvrin or any of Sahra’s friends. And it started going bad right away. Right after starting Lady raised a hand to massage her right temple. Soon afterward I began to catch fleeting, random impressions of things that were not there. The cold came first, then the smell. Before I saw anything there were several moments when my balance became very iffy.
Lady grew more and more excited as things continued to refuse to go the way she wanted. She started over twice. And when she finally did storm ahead she did not get where she wanted to go. Eventually she gave up. But not before the rest of us had gotten a good strong whiff of Kina’s charnel dreams.
“I’m sorry,” Lady told Tobo. “Kina keeps trying to get at me through our connection. The more power I siphon from her the more easily she can touch me.”
Not good. We could have Lady turn kickass powerful—and be in thrall to the Goddess when she did.
She seemed to read my mind. She gave me a dirty look. “The bitch isn’t going to get a hold on me.”
I considered reminding her of whom we were speaking. The Mother of Deceit. Kina did not need control where she could manipulate. And she could manipulate whole populations. In her sleep. Instead, I asked, “Did we find out anything about Sahra?”
Lady’s temper was not improving. “Certainly not what we would’ve if that old devil-sow hadn’t decided to wreck our game.” Her mind had been affected somehow. She seemed almost drunk. “We couldn’t raise Sahra. Couldn’t even touch her. Which leaves the matter’s resolution ambiguous.” Her speech continued slurred, she was aware of it, yet she persisted in trying to use difficult words. “I think she’s dead. If she was alive Tobo and the hidden folk would’ve found her. Nothing hides from the Black Hounds for long.”
“Soldiers live,” I whispered. “It ain’t right, something like that happening.” But Fortune does not care. Unless Fortune gets a laugh out of human pain. “There has to be more meaning . . . ”
“You going mystical on us at this late date, Croaker?” Sleepy snapped. “You’re the one who always says nothing has any meaning we don’t put into it ourselves.”
“Sure as shit sounds like me, don’t it? Let’s go work out our frustrations by kicking Mogaba’s antique ass.”
Sleepy gave us the once-over, unwilling to send us out while we were in so bleak a mood. We might be dangerous to ourselves.
She was no happier with us later. We did not improve, any of us. Finally, she swallowed her reservations and told us to go.
Howler had completed a large carpet capable of moving twenty passengers. Tonight it carried sixteen of those, plus freight. Amongst the sixteen were both elder Voroshk, a number of commando-trained soldiers from Hsien and Murgen. Murgen had been zombielike since Lady’s failed ritual. He had overheard her saying she thought Sahra was dead.
I had urged him to stay behind but he insisted on joining us.
I should have stood fast. He could not help but be a liability.
Tobo was less distracted. He was too involved with Shukrat to be obsessed about his mother being missing. Still, he would bear watching.
Lady and I dressed up in full costume, with Voroshk apparel over the black Widowmaker and Lifetaker armor. My two ravens tagged along. Arkana flew with us, being tested. Which she understood fully.
Down below, dark things were on the move. They had been since nightfall.
Taglios never sleeps. Tonight those with reasons to be out after dark would have cause to worry about what might be lurking in the shadows. Hey, Mogaba. Look out. Darkness always comes.
We were still climbing away from camp when I eased over next to Lady. We flew knee to knee, our Voroshk apparel whipping in the breeze for twenty yards behind us. First we discussed which of our companions needed watching the closest, then we revisited the failed attempt to contact Sahra’s spirit. For the twentieth time. Lady insisted, “I do believe she’s out there, just as desperate to make contact with us as we were to make contact with her. But the ugly Goddess wants to keep us apart.”
“Is Kina awake?”
“More than she has been for a long, long time. At least since Goblin went down there. Maybe since the days when she sensed her doom afoot and commenced her war on us ere ever we entered this country.”
Ere ever? Wow. “I have a question on another subject. It’s been bothering me for a long time but I’ve never quite been able to put the words together right.”
“Artist.”
“Power junkie.”
“What’s your question, Old Style?”
“What happened to Soulcatcher’s shadows?”
Lady looked at me blankly.
“Come on. The old brain can’t have slowed down that much. She was an accomplished shadowmaster. She didn’t have a lot of shadows left because Tobo’s pets kept picking them off. She stopped trying to use them against us. But she still had some hidden away somewhere. Saved for a rainy day.”
Lady growled, “It couldn’t have gotten any stormier than it did.” But she was not arguing. She had her mind wrapped around the question. “My bet is that the Unknown Shadows finished them all off. There aren’t any killer shadows left. If there were we’d still be hearing reports of unexplained deaths.”
“Maybe.” Probably. If they were out there anywhere the excitement the shadows would cause would be much greater than the numbers justified. The peoples of the Taglian territories had a long history of suffering from killer shadows.
Even so, I moved up until I was flying hip to hip with Tobo, an eventuality Shukrat found distasteful. She drifted away. Rather haughtily adolescent, I thought.
“I don’t plan to take over your life.” I told the boy about my concerns.
He seemed to agree that they were valid. “I’ll find out if there’s any reason to worry.”
I fell back until I rejoined Lady.
She asked, “What did he say?”
“He’ll check it out.”
“You don’t sound real happy about that.”
“He said it the way you do when you agree with somebody just so you don’t have to spend time with them fussing over something that doesn’t bother you.”
Mogaba’s eyelids kept getting heavier. Twice he drifted off completely, to start awake violently, disturbed once by some clamor in the city, once by shouting down below that suggested the guards might have glimpsed the Khadidas. It was the wee hours of the morning, when even the heartbeat of the world had trouble thumping on.
They were not going to come tonight. They had not come last night, nor the night before. Maybe they were waiting for a larger moon.
Something dark blurred the glass in the window whence the Great General watched his own quarters and the best part of the Palace’s northern face. Including all the significant entrances. He did not even breathe.
The Unknown Shadows could not find a way past the glass and the Protector’s permanent wards. Mogaba resumed breathing. Slowly, invisible in the deep darkness of the room, he rose and glided nearer the glass, so that he would have a broader view.
They had come. Not when he had expected but exactly where. The same place their messengers had come every time. That same turret top.
He felt no particular elation. What he felt, in fact, was sorrow. All their lives, his and theirs, had come to no more than this. For a moment there was even the temptation to shout a warning. To cry out that that prideful fool who had made such a stupid choice in Dejagore so long ago had not meant any of them to come to this. But, no. It was too late. Fortune’s die was cast. The cruel game had to be played to its end, no matter what anyone wanted.
Lady led the way, grim as ever when she donned the Lifetaker persona. I was not pleased. Someone with more power ought to have been first down the stair. But Tobo was sure he needed to go last. Otherwise the Howler and the Voroshk might not feel motivated enough to participate. And Howler would not go first because he had to manage his carpet until everybody was off.
The stair was crowded. No one wanted to be there in that darkness, though only Lady, Murgen and I were old enough to remember when darkness was our determined foe. I tried to stay close to Lady, my foolish mind somehow afflicted with the notion that I had to protect her.
There went a joke of cosmic proportion.
We made it down the stairwell without mishap. And, despite a horrendous racket, without causing any alarm. Lady murmured, “Mogaba must be sleeping the sleep of the innocent. All that noise should’ve raised the dead.”
“Uhn?”
“His quarters are straight ahead.”
I knew that. We had rehearsed this raid before we left. In a half-ass sort of way. Which means not thoroughly enough to satisfy me.
“He’s a heavy sleeper,” I said. That was one of the few knocks against him before his defection. That and an intensity even his brother Nar had found oppressive. But I was speaking to the night. She was pulling ahead.
Someone generated a light, a feeble glowball that drifted above our heads. It had an alien feel so I assume one of the Voroshk was responsible. As the light grew so did a sense of relaxation, of confidence.
Maybe one of those cranky old men was not as dim as he let on.
“The light is my familiar,” someone murmured in one of the dialects of Hsien. The phrase possessed the rhythm of ritual. Later I would learn that it was part of an incantation meant to repel the Unknown Shadows, those being disliked by everyone but Tobo.
The hidden realm was there, too, all around us. And so troubled that even I could feel it.
Tobo whispered, “There’s something strange here. I had hundreds of the hidden folk put into the Palace. But none of them are reporting. As far as I can tell they aren’t here anymore.” He whispered to the creepy darkness. Things unseen moved around us, jostling us from directions we were not looking. Some of the stress oppressing me went away.
Lady beckoned soldiers forward. It was time to break into Mogaba’s quarters. Though that implies more force than was needed. His door was not locked. Nor had it ever been before, according to Lady.
She and Shukrat took point. They knew their ways around. Unless clever Mogaba had rearranged his furniture.
Soldiers followed. The Voroshk and Howler crept inside. Murgen followed them. Lady and Shukrat began to argue sharply, in whispers, about who should find a lamp. Somebody stumbled into somebody else. Somebody fell down. Another somebody crashed into something. Then somebody else stated categorically, “Oh, shit!”
Arkana was just sliding into the room, a step ahead of me, when Tobo echoed those sentiments from behind me. He started to push. “Out of the way, damnit!”
A huge crash of breaking pottery. I had not known that Mogaba was a collector, though there were some marvellous craftsmen in this part of the world . . .
A man screamed.
Before his lungs were empty other screams joined his. And fireballs leapt from small projectors. And I knew why so many men were screaming and why they were so panicky they were blowing holes through one another.
Shadows.
The old evil. Killer shadows.
Deadly shadows off the glittering plain. Shadows, the exploitation of which had given the Shadowmasters their name. Shadows of the sort Soulcatcher had used to prop up her Protectorate until the coming of Tobo’s allies from the Land of Unknown Shadows.
I had the answer to the question I had addressed to Lady and Tobo.
People panicked completely. Fireballs flew everywhere, caused far more carnage than mere starving mad shadows. One of those ripped through my Voroshk cloak. The cloak seemed to whine but pulled itself together around me. A shadow hit me. My apparel repelled it, a fact I did not fail to note despite the rising chaos. It also shed the next fireball that found me.
I saw Lady hit several times, rapidly. I saw one of the Voroshk succumb to shadows.
I tried to bellow into the madness, to calm them down, but the panic had them all. Even Howler and Lady caught it.
But Shukrat did keep her wits about her. She crouched in a corner and let her cloak form a barrier impervious to fireballs and shadows alike.
Men fought to get out the door. Howler loosed a spell that flashed so brightly it blinded everyone not in Voroshk protective clothing, including the little sorcerer himself. His effort did not avail. A moment later he screamed with more enthusiasm than ever he had before his cure.
“Get out of my way!” Tobo bellowed. He hurled me aside. His father was inside that room.
Before I regained my feet the tower was creaking under the psychic mass of Tobo’s unseen friends. Their battle with the invisible killers was brief but belated. And, probably, needless, because the fireballs ate shadows alive. Unknown Shadows as well as the traditional lurkers in darkness.
I did not know if I wanted to get off the floor. It was very still in that other room now, except for Arkana crying. But I had to get up. We had to get moving. The rest of the palace was not silent anymore. An alarm had been sounded. People with sharp instruments would be coming to get us.
It was impossible to tell who was dead, who was dying, and who was only mildly injured. For a while it was too dark.
I got Tobo to provide another light. Then I started getting the fallen moved back to the tower top. Arkana and Shukrat and Tobo’s hidden allies kept the Palace Guard at bay. I kept my emotions turned off while I lugged bodies. At the moment I could not afford to indulge.
“How are we going to get these posts and the carpet out of here?” I demanded. Lady, both of the elder Voroshk, Howler, Murgen were all out of action. So were most of the commandos.
“Shukrat and I can handle the carpet. You and Arkana will have to tow the posts.”
“You hear that, new daughter?” Minutes earlier I had been about to slap the girl around to crack her shock. But she had solid stuff inside her. She was dragging the dead and injured now, calmer than most of the others.
“I know. I’ll need something to use for tethers.”
“Find it fast. I’ll lug bodies.”
A crossbow bolt buzzed past without doing any harm. An instant later the section of wall whence it had come was shattered rock and boiling flame.
Tobo was not in a kindly mood.
I told Arkana, “You get those posts out of here right now. All but mine.” She had gotten some rope from aboard the carpet.
Good girl, Arkana. She got busy. Like Shukrat, she focused on the task at hand.
Funny, I thought, how the Company seemed to attract good women.
The Palace Guards and a surprising number of Greys responded to the alarm. And they refused to be intimidated by Tobo’s violence and by Tobo’s half-seen friends. Brave men, they. There are always brave and honorable men amongst one’s enemies. Missiles filled the air. A few found targets.
I began to wonder if this would not be a good time to reconsider my lifelong determination never to leave Company people behind.
But I was incapable of leaving without my wife. And I needed the old Voroshk. Even if they were dead.
Mogaba felt no elation as he watched the disaster unfold, In fact, he became more troubled. He could see that there would be survivors. Those people were still strong enough to hold off the Guards and Greys while they evacuated their casualites. That meant that, unless he enjoyed a gargantuan turn of luck and they were all killed by missiles before they could get away, he still faced a final battle.
He had no tricks left in his bag.
The shadows had not been completely effective. Which proved what he had suspected for some time. The enemy had a similar force at his disposal. And that force had responded in time to save some of the raiders.
He watched crossbow bolts, arrows and even javelins bounce off the creatures in the great seething black cloaks. Only one of those people got hurt.
A fireball’s flare, as the big carpet backed away from the parapet, gave just enough light for Mogaba to distinguish the Lifetaker armor.
“Lady,” he murmured. Awed.
That same flash must have reflected off his eyeballs or teeth, betraying him somehow. Because when he glanced at the post riders he found the one in the Widowmaker armor hurling straight at him, black cape expanding to shut out the sky.
I saw Mogaba behind the window. Rage devoured me. I drove straight at him, accelerating. And even as I did some tiny remnant of rationality wondered if what I had glimpsed was real, not my mind seeing what it wanted because I needed somebody else to hurt as much as I had begun to do.
If the Mogaba I saw was my own creation it vanished before I smashed into the window glazing.
The glass did not break. It did not yield at all. My post stopped dead. I did not. The post rebounded. I smacked into the glass. Then I bounced back. And fell. I had time for one very enthusiastic howl before I reached the end of my tether, then I was flailing around ten feet below my post.
The post kept driving forward, kept rebounding. I tried to climb back up but could get nowhere with only one reliable hand. The motion of the post got me swinging like the weight on a pendulum. One end of each swing brought me into intimate contact with the Palace wall.
The Voroshk cloak protected me well, but unconsciousness eventually came.
I was still dangling when I recovered. The ground was only a few yards below and moving slowly. I seemed to be flying along above the Rock Road, barely clearing the heads of travelers. I tried twisting so I could look up but could not manage. The tether was attached to me in the back, just above my waist. I did not have strength enough to twist around.
I did have a bit of pain when I struggled.
I lost consciousness again.
I was back in mankind’s natural state, on the ground, when I wakened again. A pointy hunk of chert was trying to gouge a hole through my back. Somebody said something in one of the dialects of Hsien, then repeated himself in bad Taglian. Arkana materialized overhead, face somber. “You going to live, Pop?”
“All the aches and pain I’ve got, it’s a sure thing. What happened?”
“You did something stupid.”
“What else is new?” a second voice demanded. Sleepy’s face materialized opposite Arkana. “How soon you going to get off your back, part-time? I need some help. This disaster show you guys engineered is about to put us out of business.”
“Be right with you, Boss. Soon as I get my leg bones unbraided and my feet hooked back onto my ankles.”
The effort of trying to get up, because I wanted to find my wife, pushed me over into the darkness again.
Rain in my face wakened me the next time. My physical pains had turned to dull aches. They had gotten something into me. Cataloging, I decided I had a lot of bruises but nothing was broken or permanently damaged.
Just when I started to make an effort to get up I floated upward. After a momentary panic I realized that I was on a litter, being moved in out of the rain. Being lifted onto the litter was what had interrupted my sleep, not those first few misty raindrops.
I got a better grip this time. I remained rational when Sleepy turned up. “How’s my wife?” I asked, with only a small squeak in my voice.
“She’s still alive. But her situation isn’t good. Though it’s better than it would’ve been if she hadn’t been wearing the Voroshk outfit. I’d guess she might recover. If we can get Tobo to stay focused long enough to help.”
I heard the unspecified offer of a job assignment in there somewhere. “What’s the kid’s problem?”
“His father got killed. Where were you?”
I grunted. “I was afraid of that.” Maybe I had tried to shut it out. It was going to hurt.
Sleepy seemed to think we did not have time for pain.
I had begun to trust her instincts.
“You had it right, Croaker. Soldiers live. Only three people got out of that scrape unhurt. Tobo, Arkana and a very lucky soldier named Tam Do Linh. Howler, the First Father, Nashun the Researcher, Murgen and all the other soldiers, didn’t. The rest of you are hurt. Tobo feels guilty. He thinks he should’ve done more. He thinks he should’ve realized it was a trap.”
“I understand. What about Shukrat?”
“Bruises and abrasions and emotional distress. The Voroshk clothing took good care of her. It knew her so well it adapted faster than Lady’s could. As I understand it.”
“Murgen could’ve worn Voroshk protection.” But he had refused. Damn him.
There had not been much fight in him since Sahra’s disappearance.
“I want you to straighten Tobo out. We need him back. We need the Unknown Shadows. If I was in Mogaba’s boots I’d have another attack force headed our way already.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The man doesn’t wait around, Croaker. His gospel is, seize the initiative.”
I could only make an ass of myself arguing with a woman who had fought the Great General more years than I had known him. Who had lived in Taglios for as many years as I had, much more recently. Evidently I was just another cranky old man raising a fuss for the attention. Except when she needed something. “Then we’d better arrange for it to get really dangerous for him personally if anything happens to any of us.”
I felt stupid before I finished saying that. For Mogaba there was little chance life would ever be more dangerous than it was already.
I had forgotten an early lesson. Try to reason like the enemy. Study him until you can think just like him. Until you can become him.
Sleepy told me, “You need to find yourself an apprentice, too. If you’re going to keep getting involved in lethal stuff.” At your age was implied—until the Captain actually said, “You’re too long in the tooth to be out there right where it’s happening. It’s time you eased up and started passing your secrets along.”
Sleepy went away, leaving me wondering. Who was I supposed to tap? I was inclined to pick her buttboy, Mihlos Sedona, except that the kid had one huge shortcoming. He was totally illiterate. And I did not have any inclination to put in all the hours needed to alter that condition.
Then the man I maybe should have been thinking of turned up on his own, voluntarily.
“Suvrin? What the hell’s gotten into you? You’re going to leave us most any day now.”
“So perhaps I’ve had an epiphany. Maybe I need to learn the Annals because I’ve decided to face my destiny.”
“Is that the fragrance of bullshit wafting on the breeze?” Being an old cynic I thought it was more likely that he thought this would somehow get him laid. But I did not suggest anything. I just accepted him, then groaned upon discovering that Sleepy’s wonderfully educated young man neither wrote nor read a single word of Taglian, which has been the language of these Annals for the last twenty-five years.
Lady’s book was the last written in another language. And Murgen had translated and updated that, along with a couple of my own that had not really needed any polish.
“Think you can learn to read and write Taglian?” I asked. “You might never need to do either . . . ”
“Unless I want to read the Annals. The holy scriptures of the Black Company.”
“Yeah. If I go, you’ll be on your own unless Sleepy makes time or Lady recovers.” I had had time enough now to put together an act of indifference. But I was not convincing anybody.
Suvrin stared, waiting for the punchline.
There was none, really, except that he ought to make an effort to see that I stayed healthy long enough for him to develop the needed skills.
Two days after Suvrin became my understudy Sleepy stage-managed a ceremony that formalized his appointment as Lieutenant of the Black Company and her heir-apparent.
We were outside that big, nameless hilltop stronghold which broods over the Rock Road approach to Taglios. A large plain had been leveled and prepared as a place where troops could camp or could practice the close-order skills necessary for success in battle. Or as a place where forces defending the city could engage an advancing enemy.
No one bothered us there, other than small Vehdna cavalry bands made up of youths who wanted to show off their courage. But I advised both Sleepy and Suvrin against leaving the stronghold unvanquished behind us.
Sleepy was no more interested in advice than ever before but these days she did pretend to listen. Her own approach to conquest had been a disaster mitigated only by the fact that a few of us had survived.
Upon reflection, after we beat back a relief sortie by troops from Taglios, the commander of the fortress offered to surrender on terms. He wanted paroles for himself and damned near everyone who ever bore arms in the three nearest counties. Which was not all that unreasonable, I thought, considering we were going to turn all this over to the Prahbrindrah Drah as soon as the deal closed and the Prince could get his ass up here from Ghoja.
Even after all her years in the real world Sleepy retained some Vehdna notions about right and wrong that had nothing to do with the practicalities of the moment.
“Even if this Lal Mindrat is the worst human monster since the Shadowmasters themselves, you have to consider what your moral rigidity can cost the rest of us,” I told Sleepy. Evidently Lal Mindrat had betrayed some of our allies during the Kiaulune wars. I had not heard of him before Sleepy started getting uppity so it could not have been a major betrayal.
A good many friends of the Company had been turned by the Protector in those days. Soulcatcher had had the power and wealth.
“Be flexible,” I advised. “But treacherous when absolutely necessary.”
She understood. With some half-ass help from Tobo and his friends, and the appropriate promises of parole and safe passage, Sleepy got our enemies to evacuate the stronghold with no more violence than occurred when Lal Mindrat came out with his lifeguard.
Thus the Captain finished her business with a minor traitor from her own era. For the time being.
Mogaba made our approach hell, at least for those of us who pulled the recon, picket and vanguard duties. Horsemen never stopped harassing our forward elements. The Voroshk girls and I went out whenever the enemy’s behavior became overly obnoxious.
Eventually we reached the great South Gate of Taglios, something that had not existed in my time. These days a truly substantial wall stretched into the distance at either hand. The soldiers on the ramparts seemed much too small. The wall reared up like a vast cliff of limestone.
“Wow!” I told Sleepy. ’There’s been some changes made.” The entrance to the city was a fortress in itself, outside the wall but attached to it. I could not tell from the ground for sure but it looked like an equally formidable structure guarded the pass-through from within.
Sleepy grunted. “Been a few since I was here. Methinks the Great General must have inveigled some appropriations out of the Protector somehow. They’ve added several feet to the height of the wall. And that barbican complex . . . ” She shrugged.
As I remembered city politics, public works were particularly vulnerable to graft and corrupt practices. “Somebody in the treasury offices must have been blowing in the Protector’s ear.”
Sleepy grunted again, uninterested in my opinion. She was watching Suvrin spread the troops out facing the city, offering battle. No response was expected. No response was what he got.
I said, “They don’t have to be careful of anybody’s property, at least.” More than the immensity of the wall itself, I was awed by the existence of a thousand-foot-wide band of empty ground lapping the wall’s foot. What had it taken to get people moved off that ground? How did the state keep them off?
“In a few months there’ll be grainfields and vegetable patches as far as you can see. That grid of pathways marks the boundaries of the patches. They started that back right after Sahra and I first came to the city.”
“Tobo’s going to be a busy boy.”
Sleepy examined our forces, left and right. They did not appear threatening against the backdrop of the wall. Nor did anyone atop that wall appear concerned.
“He will. I expect him and the girls to hit hard, with everything they have, right from the start, so people in there will be stunned by the fury of it. Is he going to be able to do it?”
“I can’t guarantee you his heart’ll be in it.”
“What about you? Is your heart going to be in it?”
I heaved a huge sigh.
Sleepy asked, “How is she doing?”
Another major sigh. “Honestly? I’m worried. She just lays there, midway between life and death. She gets no better; she gets no worse. I’m starting to wonder how much the Kina connection has to do with all that.”
It took a major effort to let that out. Because of what the Captain might consider if she grasped all the implications. And she began to see some right away.
I said, “If I can pull Tobo through his grief he may be able to find out if Kina’s gained any control.” I dreaded the possibility that the Dark Mother was setting my wife up as an alternate route of escape from her ancient prison. I could imagine a scenario wherein I struck the sleeping Goddess and freed Shivetya only to see the darkness return through the woman I love.
Not that it would take the Mother of Night to accomplish that. She was entirely willing to welcome in her own breed of darkness.
Aren’t we all.
The Captain said, “I haven’t heard a direct answer. Can I count on you to actually pay attention when the arrows start to fly?”
An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. “I am a soldier.” I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy’s own Dejagoran dialect. “I’ve been distracted before. I’m still alive.”
“Yeah, soldiers live. You only get one mistake, Croaker.”
“Go teach your granny to suck eggs.” Which was a waste of colorful language. The expression had no meaning amongst these peoples.
“What’s that?” Sleepy asked, pointing at something rising above the city.
“Looks like a big-ass kite.”
Damn it! No matter how much I wanted it Mogaba refused to be stupid. Facing potential problems with an infestation of airborne wizards? Take advantage of the season’s almost constant winds. Put up about ten thousand giant box kites with poisoned sharp things hanging on tails made of braided fibers almost too tough to cut.
There would be no zooming about with youthful exuberance over Taglios. Especially not after dark. Those kites would not be able to hurt us in our Voroshk clothing but they could entangle us and knock us off our posts. Whereupon whoever lost their seat would need someone else to come along and bring them out. Unless . . .
Shukrat once fixed me up with a post that would travel on its own when its master could not manage it.
I issued an order.
Just hours later Shukrat’s post brought the girl herself back virtually mummified in cord and deadly sharps that took hours to overcome. But she had cleaned away scores of kites.
I made Tobo untangle her. I was having a real problem getting him engaged with life. But Shukrat was supposed to be important to him.
She certainly thought so. Once he finished freeing her, too slowly to suit her, she popped him in the middle of the forehead with the heel of her right hand. “How about you at least pretend to be interested, Tobe?” And, moments later, “You’re making me wonder just how bright I am.”
Tobo was a real young man. He started to protest. I tried to warn him by shaking my head. No way was he going to break even here. Shukrat cut him off, unwilling to grant him the validity of any excuse. After that I tried not to hear what they were saying.
I mused on Shukrat’s swift, nearly effortless grasp of Taglian. She had almost no accent at all, now. And she appeared equally adaptable regarding strange customs.
Arkana was having more difficulty but she was coming along marvelously, too.
Having allowed the girlfriend time to make her point, I approached Tobo. “Tobo, we need to know about what’s going on behind those walls.”
He did not look like he cared much.
Shukrat punched him.
I told him, “You have to let go.”
He gave me one ugly look.
“You have to let go of the guilt. It wasn’t your fault.”
I doubted that telling him would do any good. These things never are rational. Your mind goes on chasing the irrational even when it knows the truth. If Tobo wanted to feel guilty about his father and mother he would find ways to do that in the face of every argument, of any bit of evidence, and of all the common sense in the universe. I know. I have suffered through that bleak season a few times myself.
I had a little of it going right then, featuring my wife.
Shukrat said, “The Great General did it, Tobe. The Taglian supreme commander. And he’s inside those same walls.”
There you go, girl. Appeal to the darkness within, to the stores of rage and hatred. We really needed to get those emotions cooking inside the most powerful sorcerer left in this part of the world.
The Unknown Shadows told Tobo that Mogaba and his cronies were hunkered down, waiting us out. They thought we might begin to fade away before long, despite our wealth.
They could be right. Though Sleepy had plenty of treasure left, many of the soldiers from Hsien had signed on for only one year in the field. I did not doubt that many would stay as long as their pay was on time but I did not doubt, either, that homesickness would begin to bleed us, too.
We cleared away kites faster than Mogaba could put new ones up. We made a few high altitude raids each night. We dropped firepots on the properties of known allies of the Protector, the Great General, and the Greys. But fire is a cruel and unruly ally. Some that we started spread way beyond their targets. Even more smoke than usual clung to the city.
A second midnight approach to the occupied portion of the palace provided us with some distinctly unwelcome news. We learned that Mogaba’s efforts to seize our encampment beside the Shadowlander cemetery, while tactically disastrous for his loyalists, had not been entirely unprofitable.
Sleepy’s chief of staff decided he needed a firsthand look at the Palace. For planning purposes. He was a thorough man. At Sleepy’s urging he and other selected folk had been getting training using the Voroshk flying posts. We had seven available with only five regularly assigned. And Lady was not using hers these days. Sleepy hated seeing resources going to waste. Sleepy being Sleepy.
The chief of staff had Mihlos Sedona join us. Mihlos was the most competent of the part-time flyers though his only excuse for getting the opportunity was that the Captain liked him. And wanted his observations. No way was she going aloft herself.
I went along to make sure those two had somebody to bail them out if they got in trouble. I made them wear Voroshk apparel, too. If we were seen we could expect missile fire. Mogaba’s people never gave up trying.
You just need one lucky break.
Mihlos Sedona had not yet realized that he was not immortal. He ventured too close to the enemy. Then we all learned how Mogaba had profited from disaster.
A fireball ripped through the darkness. The boy escaped the worst of it by hurling himself to one side. The fireball struck him a glancing blow, which, however, was enough to knock him off his post.
General Chu ignored my shout and went after Sedona. And actually managed to get close enough to get a hold on his post. As fireballs streaked in from half a dozen sources.
One struck Chu’s post dead solid.
The explosion of that post was violent enough to set off the other. And the two in concert were violent enough to smash in an acre of Palace like an invisible giant’s foot stomping on eggshells.
More Palace continued to cave in around the initial collapse.
A wicked wind flung me around like a rogue dandelion seed. Once again I lost my grip and fell off my steed. While dangling I caught rolling glimpses of flames beginning to peek through cracks in the rubble, of panic beginning to prowl amongst the soldiers atop the palace.