Tobo was there to help when I wakened my old friend Goblin, who had become the unwilling vessel of the Khadidas.
It was not that difficult once Tobo’s controlling spells had been cancelled. Tobo shook Goblin while I stood by. And once the little shit began to stir Tobo stood by while I nagged.
The little man’s eyelids snapped open. The eyes behind them were not the eyes of the hedge wizard Goblin. I was looking straight into large chips of the darkness. Those eyes seemed to want to suck me in.
The mouth of the Khadidas opened, preparing to vent some infamy or blasphemy. I interposed One-Eye’s ragged old hat between Kina’s slave and myself. The effect was electric. The Goblin body convulsed as though I had whacked it with a hot poker. I slapped the hat down on its head.
“Lift,” I told Tobo, who had placed himself at the head of Goblin’s cot, out of the Khadidas’s field of vision. I held the hat in place while Tobo raised Goblin into a sitting position. “It works. Better than I hoped.”
“Better than I thought it would, for sure.”
“One-Eye always did underplay it when he did something right.” The wicked light had left Goblin’s eyes. Now he just looked empty. Not even a thousand-yard stare, there. More like nobody at home at all.
“Do the spear.”
I did the spear. But, man, was I reluctant to trust the wisdom of a dead man when it came to putting that potent a tool into the hands of a devil.
I stood it up in front of Goblin, its butt between his heels. I wrapped his hands around the black shaft. Then I shoved One-Eye’s filthy felt relic down onto his head even more solidly. Then I gripped his hands hard, squeezing them onto the silver-and-black wood.
Life began to enter his eyes.
I told Tobo, “Not as dramatic as watching a baby being born but dramatic enough.” Even a dummy like me did not need a map to see that we were conjuring up the real Goblin.
A Goblin in pain so deep I was aware immediately that only Lady could begin to understand.
I settled myself on a stool. Tobo eased Goblin onto a chair with an upright back, then planted himself on the edge of the cot. Goblin kept turning from one of us to the other, tears streaming but unable to speak, however hard he tried. He reached out to Tobo in a silent plea for contact.
“Careful of that hat,” I said. “I’m already thinking about nailing it to his head.” And thinking about how wonderful a friend One-Eye had been, too. Because he had foreseen some possibility like this and had invested his final years in making a rescue feasible.
I choked up for a moment, thinking I never had a friend who would go that far for me. Then I recalled that Sleepy had spent fifteen years working to exhume the Captured. And now, barely five years later, all those people but Lady and I were gone. Belly up. Up in smoke. Finished.
Soldiers live.
Not once had Sleepy ever behaved like she believed that she had wasted her life. But I am sure she had thought it sometimes. Regarding some individuals.
I said, “You ought to keep at least one hand on the spear, Goblin.” We had done nothing to rid him of the Khadidas. The monster had been pushed back into the pit where it had lain till it had sprung forward to seize control, but now behind feeble barriers. The monster was much stronger than Goblin. We would have to work hard to keep it suppressed.
“What’re we going to do with you?” I asked. And felt a twinge of guilt. Because I had plans for him already. Plans that might change the world.
“What do you think, Goblin? You going to help us help you hang on?”
Goblin was getting some muscle control back. He managed a weak, “Yeah,” as he nodded his head, too.
“I’m going to leave everything in the hands of you two gentlemen,” Suvrin said. He nodded politely to Goblin. “I scarcely knew this man. And then mainly from the perspective of being the butt of practical jokes he and One-Eye played. Meaning I might not be disinterested even if I tried. What is that stuff around the bottom of that thing on his head?”
“Glue. That thing is a hat. You must’ve seen One-Eye wearing it. The old fart rigged it up with some spells, planning for something like what did happen.”
“You told me.”
“All right. The glue is because we don’t want the hat to come off. Ever. If we could come up with a way that would leave him free to feed himself and scratch his butt we’d glue his hands to One-Eye’s spear, too.”
There is something about becoming Captain that takes the humor out of a man. It had gotten to Suvrin already. He never cracked a smile. He asked, “You gotten any useful information out of him? Not yet? When?”
“I don’t know. He’s coming around. Really. Remember, in practical terms he’s been dead for six years. He’s having trouble figuring out how to use his body again. Especially his tongue. Meanwhile, the Khadidas is still inside of him trying to take over again.”
“And Lady?”
I was more concerned about my wife than I was about Goblin. She was acting strange. It did not seem like I knew her anymore. I had resurrected all my earlier worries about her connection with Kina. Kina was the master manipulator and planner. Kina schemed schemes ages long and many layers deep.
But Kina was slow. Very slow. Which was why she favored plots that required years to ripen. She could not handle swiftly changing fortunes.
“Lady is a puzzle right now,” I confessed. “But a benign one.”
Goblin made a gurgling sound. The Khadidas was working hard to keep him from talking.
Suvrin asked, “Do you know anything about the leading men of Taglios?”
“Not the current crop. Except for types. My advice would just be, don’t ever turn your back on any of them. You could talk to Runmust Singh. If he survived the latest fighting.” I had a feeling he might have been with Sleepy in that ambush. “Or you could just ask Aridatha to loan you a couple of advisors.”
Suvrin seemed unusually amenable to consulting for a Captain of the Company.
He told me, “We need to resume our lessons. So I can study the Annals.”
I responded, “We need some peace for that. Maybe a few years. We could build a new Company while we’re at it.”
Goblin gurgled again and nodded.
The little creature was like a puppy in some ways.
I told Suvrin, “I need to talk to Goblin a while.” Once our hesitant new commander stepped out, I said, “We need to work out ways around the Khadidas’s interference.”
Nod.
“And that’s how we’ll do it, I guess. Unless it can control more than your speech.” I peered at the little man. He did not respond. I realized that I had not posed a yes or no question. “Can it do that?”
No.
“All right, then. The most critical question of all. Is the Khadidas in direct contact with Kina?”
No. And yes. And a shrug. So we proceeded to play a game of a thousand questions during which I seemed to go the wrong direction, no matter where I went, making him gurgle in frustration. His best efforts to speak seldom produced more than one recognizable syllable.
Eventually, despite my density, I got it. The Khadidas could communicate with the Goddess only when it was in control of the Goblin flesh. It could not do so when it was not in control.
That made sense. Some. Though I had been cautioned to remember that the Goblin I was interviewing was actually a ghost that had not been able to leave when its body died and had been reanimated by the breath of the Goddess.
“That is exciting news, Goblin. Look, I have a plan.” Difficult as it was, I dredged a form of it up from its hidden place deep down inside me, hoping the Goddess had no way of listening in. My plan depended entirely on my understanding of the Goblin I had known for so long, hoping he had not altered drastically during the past two decades. A man might change a lot in that much time—if he had to spend part of it dead and enslaved by the Mother of Deceivers.
On the surface Goblin seemed to like my plan, as I presented it. Seemed willing to participate. Even seemed enthusiastic about plunging One-Eye’s spear into the blackest of hearts.
I told him, “I don’t want to waste one minute I don’t have to. You understand?”
Nod. Even a gurgled, “Yes!” With enthusiasm. With outright eagerness.
“I’ll be back soon.” I felt almost bad, not telling a dead man all of the truth.
I found Arkana and asked if she wanted to go flying, nodding to indicate that she really did want to make a tour of the upper air. For the benefit of the curious I mentioned wanting to check rumors that troops loyal to the Protectorate were headed toward the city. One force had crossed the Main at Vehdna-Bota. Another was gathering out east, near Mukhra in Ajitsthan, where Mogaba had enjoyed considerable popularity among the tribes. Since those rumors were beginning to make a lot of people nervous nobody would be surprised that I would want to take a look.
And that is what we did while we were aloft, because it was work that had to be done. Doing the work, though, gave me time to talk to Arkana.
She replied, “I can see one big problem with your plan. Maybe. What happens to the plain and the shadowgates? You asked me if I wanted to go home. The answer is yes. I don’t think to stay, though. Just to see what happened there. To bury my dead, I guess you could say. But I don’t see how that could keep from complicating everything else if I had to do it first because there wouldn’t be any way later.”
“You’re right. And I need to do what I’ve got to do as soon as I can. Before Kina catches on.” If she had not foreseen the possibilities already. Or learned of them from Goblin. Or Shivetya. Or from Lady, who was smart enough to guess what I was thinking. Sometimes. “Particularly before my wife catches on. Or starts thinking I’m chasing around.”
We were approaching the River Main, heading for Vehdna-Bota. There were pillars of smoke north of the ford, away from the small settlement. But not many.
Arkana told me, “That’s not much of an army.”
“Not in any hurry to get into harm’s way, either, looks like. There’s plenty of daylight left they could use for traveling.”
Not in any hurry. When we went down for a closer look we found men scattering like startled roaches.
“Somebody covering his ass,” I said. “Making a show of honoring his obligations. That bunch will never actually get to Taglios.”
We went back up. We talked, not just about what had to be accomplished. Arkana seemed able to relax, now. Seemed to have made peace with the bad times. Some manage that with comparative ease. Others remain crippled for life. Those are not the sort who remain soldiers. They become ex-soldiers and get intimate with wine or poppies.
I asked about her leg.
She laughed. “I can be one of the old folks now. I can use it to predict the weather.”
“It’s all right otherwise?”
“Yes.”
“I do good work.”
“Lots of practice.”
“You get that in this racket.”
We flew back toward Taglios, chatting in a relaxed way, me thinking that this was what it would have been like had Booboo grown up with her parents. Me fooling myself. Lying to myself. No child would grow up even as normal as Arkana if they had Lady for a mother and me for a father.
Maybe I had found the way. Adopt them after they have gotten through their formative years.
We were passing south of Taglios, going to scout the forces gathering in Ajitsthan, when Arkana spotted a billowing figure climbing toward us. “That’s Shukrat.”
“Have you two made peace? Real peace?”
“Sort of. Mainly because we’ve only got each other. From back home. If it wasn’t for that we wouldn’t even be talking. Partly it’s because of family stuff. Things our parents did to each other. And partly it’s us. She’s too cute and too sweet and dumb as a bucket of rocks. But all she’s ever had to do is make big eyes or bounce a little and look helpless.”
“And you were the smart one. Always expected to figure it out for yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re growing up to be the prettier one, too. Shukrat’s going to be all freckles and frump before long.”
We slowed so Shukrat could catch up. She came up on my other side. I asked, “What’s up, other daughter?”
“Croaker, I wanted to talk about what happened to those men on that island. That scares me. Really bad. I really like Tobo. A lot.” I was sure she was bright red behind her facial wraps. She did blush easily. “But I don’t think I want to be involved with anyone capable of doing that.”
“We’re all capable of that, Shukrat. Put in the right place at the right time and given a motive. It’s the people around us that keep us from doing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Tobo cares about you. Probably a lot more than he’s willing to admit. He’s a passionate kid.
“Because he’s what he is he’s always had the capacity for huge evil, Shukrat. You know, nobody starts out to be a villain. Not the Shadowmasters. Not my wife or her sister. Not even the Voroshk. But being powerful can turn you villainous. Because there’s nothing to stop you from doing whatever you want to do. Except for something inside you. For Tobo, for a long time, that something was his love and respect for his parents. He fought with Sahra every day but there was no way he was ever going to do something that would disappoint her. While she was alive. After she disappeared the brake on his dark side became his father. But now Murgen is gone, too. So there’s only one more person whose good opinion is important enough to him to keep him from letting himself go.”
Shukrat had to think about that for a while. She was nowhere as dim as Arkana claimed but there were times when it took her a while to get her mind wrapped all the way around complex issues.
“You’re saying me caring about him is what will keep him from doing that stuff again?”
“Yes. I think that. But I also think you have to confront him with your knowledge and make him understand that you won’t accept any excuses for behavior like that. Don’t nag. Don’t carp. State your case firmly and clearly, then shut up. Don’t negotiate. You have to mark out an absolute limit he’ll always know is there. And stick with it. You always have to know it’s there, too.”
Shukrat nodded.
While I waited to see if she got it I told Arkana, “I might turn out to be pretty good at this fatherly advice stuff.”
“You’re definitely long-winded enough.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“For the record, I think you’re right. What you said to her.”
“You know what she’s talking about?”
“She warned me. In case I wanted to watch out for General Singh. Not long after you warned me about it. I had to go see what you were excited about, didn’t I?”
The girl rose in my estimation every damned day.
The force gathering at Mukhra was much more of a threat than that at Vehdna-Bota. It would mean major new trouble if Aridatha, as the new Great General, was unable to sell the concept of peace to Mogaba’s old allies.
Lady was sitting beside Booboo again. Or still. I pulled up a stool opposite her. “Want me to take over for a while? Give you a chance to get out and about and stretch your legs? The Green Dragon Banner Company have a wicked lamb stew going. Don’t ask me where they found sheep in this madhouse.”
She lifted her face. There were tear tracks on her cheeks. “Help me, Croaker. I can’t stop thinking about how much was taken away from me when Narayan Singh stole her. How much that one event changed my life.”
It changed all our lives. It affected everyone in this end of this world and hundreds of thousands in at least two others. But she was completely self-involved right now.
“Get up and get out of here,” I told her. “Go get something to eat. Go flying. It’s a beautiful, cool day. There’re signs that things are going to start greening up soon. Go take it in. I want you to get hold of yourself before I go. I don’t want to leave you here if you don’t think you’re all right.”
“Go? Where are you going?”
“It’s almost time to release the first contingent of the Children of the Dead. Some of us are going to scout the way south and across the plain. And get the guys at the shadowgate busy collecting supplies. Why don’t you come along? It’ll get your mind off things.”
“No. I couldn’t. There isn’t anyone here who can take care of her.”
Damn! Now I saw where she was vulnerable. I saw the door the darkness would use to get in. If it had not done so already.
Clever me, though. I knew how to close that door. Forever. And I had just set myself up to take care of it without interference.
“Go get some stew. Strut around. Make the soldiers hate me for being lucky enough to have you.” There was a time when every man did. When every man responded to Lady the way women did to Aridatha Singh. But those days were gone. And so were all those men but me.
I glanced down at Booboo, then up at the silent white crow standing in the open window. It certainly seemed to run in the blood.
The white crow was around a lot now, but was quiet about it. So far I had not forgotten to look around before I said anything I did not want overheard. I needed to keep my fingers crossed for the future, though.
Lady dithered.
I said, “If you don’t get going I’ll call some guys in here and have them hold you down while I paddle you.”
For a moment the Lady I love peeked out of the dark place. She flashed a smile, said, “Promise? That might be fun.”
Once she left I collected Booboo’s hand and indulged in a little of the same despair. The girl’s fingers were cold as death. But she was breathing.
The white crow found it all amusing. “You’ve become sickeningly domestic, lover.”
I growled something.
“Ah, I know. You were so stubborn when I had you. But it might be fun to see what happened if somebody said you weren’t, after all these years.”
I grumbled.
“Well, maybe not fun for you.” And, after a moment, in a different, sorrowful, almost little girl voice, “It could have been something amazing.”
No doubt. And fatal besides, probably.
Only four of us flew south. Five if you counted that ragged-ass lazy crow riding the tip of Goblin’s flying post. The little man was flying independently but his movements were limited by a tow rope and a safety harness, each of which connected him to a different companion. We told him it was for his safety while he was learning to manage the post but even dead he was smart enough to see through that. We did not want him haring off if the Khadidas regained control.
Goblin was much stronger now. He could manage most self care without assistance and many other uncomplicated tasks as well. He had a vocabulary of maybe thirty words. He could lay One-Eye’s spear down for minutes at a time without risk of wakening the demon within.
We were blazing along through blue skies, cloaks streaming thirty yards behind, at an altitude low enough to panic livestock and send children running to tell skeptical parents. The girls whooped and shrieked, having a wonderful time. Whomever’s turn it was not to mind Goblin soared and dove.
Spring was going to spring soon. With these kids that might become an adventurous season.
With spring would come the rainy season, too. Lots of wet and lots of ferocious weather.
I made a couple of brief side trips. The main one was a brief look at Dejagore, where life had settled into a semblance of normalcy and nobody was mourning the passing of one of the city’s most famous daughters. Probably not one in a thousand people outside the garrison knew that Sleepy called Dejagore home.
The other side trips involved looking for evidence of the Nef in places where I thought I might have seen them before. I found nothing.
Since there had been no sign of those ghosts of the glittering stone, outside my own glimpses, I was pretty sure what I had seen had not been the genuine articles.
Tobo had expressed a suspicion that, had I not been imagining things, what I had seen were some of his hidden folk trying out disguises.
He believed some would do that just for the hell of it. The folklore of the Land of Unknown Shadows supported his contention. In fact, that sort of prank was a huge favorite.
So, probably, the Nef were less of a problem than I had feared. But a problem even so. Unless they were trapped in the Voroshk world.
Panda Man, at the shadowgate, robbed me of that foolish hope. “They’re out there begging and whining every night, Captain.”
“Looks like you guys have made yourselves right at home.” They had built themselves a tiny hamlet, complete with women and livestock, most of both showing signs of gravidity.
“Best duty we ever had, Captain.”
“Well, now is when it starts getting tough.” I spun out a gaggle of orders. Then me and my daughters, my pal the white crow and my dead friend, passed through the shadowgate. Though I could see nothing I thought I could sense the pressure of the Nef inside.
The plain boasted a thousand patches of dirty snow. Old snow lay drifted against the standing stones on their west sides. The air was bitterly cold. The place was getting its weather from somewhere other than my native world. And it had an air of neglect. As though the residents had given up housekeeping and maintenance.
The neglect was less evident inside the nameless stronghold. The stench of human waste was gone. Evidently Baladitya had cleaned up after Shivetya’s Voroshk guests. But there was a taint of wasted human.
“We need some light,” I told the girls. Still competing with one another in some ways, both hastened to create those little will-o’-the-wisp glowing balls that seem to be the first trick any sorcerer learns.
The source of the odor was obvious instantly. Baladitya had fallen asleep at his worktable and had not yet awakened. The chill, dry air had done a lot to preserve him.
I was unhappy but not surprised. Baladitya must have been an antique when I was born.
Arkana and Shukrat made appropriate noises expressing sorrow.
“This isn’t good,” I muttered, staring at the copyist’s remains. “I was counting on him to help me talk to Shivetya.”
From somewhere in the darkness the white crow said, “Hi, there, soldier. Looking for a good time?”
Fumbling around after oil with which to refill Baladitya’s empty lamps, I said, “Ah, yes. You. All is not lost. But neither is it found.”
“What?” That voice was a high-pitched squeak. I wondered how she managed to produce so many of those, even when using a bird to do her talking.
“Trust.” I recalled a time when anything she said scared the shit out of me. I guess familiarity does breed . . . something. I was almost comfortable with her. “Why on earth would you expect me to trust anything you say?”
It helped my courage, knowing she was buried and in a sort of undying coma.
“Shivetya won’t let me lie.”
Right. Call me a cynic. But I had a notion that the golem might have been with us more than Kina had, over the years. A notion that it would be impossible to untangle his manipulations from hers. A suspicion that he might be just as much a deceiver as she was when it came to maneuvering toward the end of the world.
“Right, then. Got your word, do we? I’m comfortable with that. Let’s get started. Does the Goddess know we’re here? Does she know what’s in my mind?”
“Her attention is elsewhere.”
The girls took over filling and lighting the lamps. They were good girls. They had learned to do for themselves. And they watched their daddy at work with respect and awe. Or, at least, they wondered what I was doing, talking to a crow that looked diseased. And having the crow talk back, like it was intelligent.
I told Arkana, “If you could read and write Taglian you’d understand all about this because you’d be able to keep up with the Annals.”
“No thanks, Pop. Not even a good try. I said no yesterday, I’m telling you no today, and all you’re going to hear is no again tomorrow. I’m not going to get pulled any deeper into your mob than I already am.”
Which is what Suvrin used to say. Suvrin, who started out as a prisoner of war.
Shukrat said, “Don’t even even bother to look over here.”
I had not considered Shukrat. I would not. But I did think Arkana might work out. If she would give it a chance. She had a personality suitable to be one of the gang.
“Recruiting season over?” the crow demanded.
“For now.” I peered into the darkness, trying to make out more details of the golem. There was not enough light. But the demon seemed to be asleep.
Or at least uninterested. Which puzzled me, since I was there to set him free.
I shrugged. His indifference would not slow me down.
I collected Goblin. I led him well out onto the floor of Shivetya’s vast hall, away from other ears. Had I brought a lamp along I would have been able to see how lovingly the floor detailed the features of the plain outside.
I reviewed for the little man. “Kina is a very slow thinker. We need to get this done before she understands that we’re already here, that we intend to strike, and that we do have a weapon puissant enough to do the job.” One-Eye’s spear shimmered all the time here. Filaments of fire slithered over it in unpredictable patterns, excitedly. The edges of its head groaned as they sliced the air itself. It seemed to sense that it had come home.
No one could argue that the spear was not a masterpiece of a peculiar sort of art. No one could deny that in creating his masterwork One-Eye had reached a level of inspiration seen nowhere else in his long but rather pathetic life.
Many an artistic masterpiece has fallen into that same category: the sole triumph of the genius of its creator.
“Once we reach the black veil across the stairwell she’ll start to realize her danger. You’ll have to move fast. Get up as much speed as you can so you can drive the spear as deep as you can. The Lance of Passion wasn’t potent enough. But it wasn’t made for godslaying. One-Eye’s spear is. You could name it Godslayer. You know. You were there during most of the years he worked on it. When we were in Hsien it became his whole career.”
Goblin had been there. But that Goblin had been alive, not a ghost still trapped in the flesh it had worn in life. At least part of the time this Goblin was an agent of the very monster this Goblin was going to kill. Or maim. Or just irritate.
As the doubts began to circle round me like Tobo’s hidden realm friends I kept right on talking, explaining yet again why he was the only one of us who could make the strike. And he really did find my arguments compelling. Or else his mind was made up and the hopes and wishes of others no longer mattered.
The Goblin thing climbed back aboard his flying post.
I pushed my own forward, so I could see the tip of his and make doubly sure I knew which one he was riding. “Let’s go downstairs, then,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you. Your post is spelled to come back on its own if you’re unconscious.” He knew. He had been there when Shukrat fixed it to do that. “If that doesn’t work I’ll swoop in and grab you, drag your ass away. If you want, I even brought an extra hundred yards of line to hook onto your safety harness. We can tie it to your belt.”
The little man looked at me like he thought I was trying too hard. He had been working himself up for a suicide mission, convinced that the destruction of his flesh was the only way he could rid himself of his parasite and find rest himself.
I played the whole scam by ear. I had no real idea what Goblin really wanted or what he hoped to achieve with the false life he had been given. I had not been able to guess much about him when he was alive. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was working crippled. Doing without One-Eye was, for him, like doing without one of his limbs.
And he did want to hurt Kina. That was never in doubt.
A long, difficult discussion ended up with me chagrined a bit as I finally got the message that Goblin was not deeply interested in backup that would pull him out if things went sour. He wanted backup that would make sure the job got done even if he failed.
I do not know why I had so much trouble recognizing and understanding Goblin’s program. Possibly because I was concentrating on getting things to go forward exactly the way I wanted. Goblin had told me almost everything before, one time or another, when I had been focused enough to ask.
Personally uninclined toward mortal self-sacrifice, I had trouble overriding my cynical nature—particularly as regarded someone as self-indulgent as Goblin had been for so long.
Goblin brandished One-Eye’s spear and told me what I had already told him but had not done. “Time to go downstairs, Croaker.” He got it all out in a single, bell-tone clear sentence.
I patted myself down. Final check. Still not sure I was ready for this.
The only check on Tobo was Lady, who could not maintain her level of interest. The only check on Lady was the wonder boy. And he had other things on his mind. And altogether too much of that touched by the darkness.
No Shukrat, no Croaker, no Lady paying attention. Nights in the city lost their traditional noisome urban charm. Some people began to compare the new age to a time when the Protector had loosed her murderous shadows upon the city, for no more obvious reason than existed behind the unleashing of the horrors out there now.
The fact that there were few actual deaths went unremarked.
The Unknown Shadows enjoyed themselves greatly, tormenting the living. As did Tobo, who found himself free to do anything he wanted.
Except in his dreams.
A woman had begun to haunt those. A beautiful Nyueng Bao woman who seemed to be the embodiment of sorrow. He understood in his heart that this was his mother as she had appeared when she was young, before she had met his father. Usually she was not alone. Sometimes she was accompanied by a young, unbent Nana Gota. And sometimes by another woman, always gentle, always with a smile, forged of steel tougher than that of Uncle Doj’s sword Ash Wand. This woman, who had to be his great grandmother, Hong Tray, never spoke. She communicated more with a disapproving eye than Sahra could say in a hundred words.
His vengeances were unacceptable to all these women who had created and formed him.
Tobo could not determine if he was being touched by the ghosts of his ancestors—a possibility entirely in keeping with Nyueng Bao beliefs—or if the women were the product of some conscience-stricken cellar of his mind. The darkness within him was strong enough to make him want to defy them.
None of them wanted to be avenged.
Sahra’s ghost warned, “You won’t just hurt yourself, darling. If you go on you’ll be running into a trap. Put aside your pain. Embrace your true destiny and let it lift you up.”
Hong Tray studied him with eyes like cold steel marbles, agreeing that he had come to a crossroads. That he was about to make a choice that would shape the rest of his life.
He knew, of course, that the words the ghost women spoke, and the ghosts themselves, had to be metaphors.
He had no trouble with his conscience when he was awake. So he tried to avoid sleep.
Sleep deprivation clouded his judgment even further.
The hidden folk always reported the same thing: Aridatha Singh would not leave his offices. He worked day and night, seldom doing more than catnap, as he tried to hold the Taglian world together by the weight of his own will. The struggle to maintain control ought to have beaten him down and have shredded his spirit in days. Most men would have started cutting throats to more swiftly facilitate reconstruction and assuage frustration. Aridatha just beat people down with reason and public opinion. He treated with no one in secret. He made sure the world knew when someone refused to handle the city’s business publicly.
Obstructionists were becoming known. The mood of people displaced by strife and fire was not forgiving of traditional factionalism.
The unthinkable happened. Several men of high caste were beaten savagely. Shadar were seen in the crowds, encouraging the violence. No one wondered, though, and Aridatha Singh did not appear to be aware of that personally.
It was deep night but a light traffic continued to and from the City Battalions barracks containing Aridatha Singh’s headquarters. A dark fog slowly gathered around the place. People grew sleepy. Shadows scampered among the shadows. For an instant, here and there, little people or little animals were visible briefly—had anyone been awake to see them.
Tobo came walking through it all, so tired his eyes were crossing, so sure of himself that he had not brought his flying post nor had he armored himself in Voroshk black. So sure of himself that he did not double-check reports from his Unknown Shadows.
He expected to walk in, complete his revenge, and be gone with no one the wiser. Aridatha Singh’s fate would become a great and terrible mystery.
The hidden folk could tell him nothing about Singh’s office. They could not get inside it. It was kept sealed airtight. But the sentries outside were snoring.
Tobo shoved the door. It gave way only grudgingly, swinging inward. He stepped inside, panting. Across the room three men had fallen forward onto a worktable or lay sprawled in their chairs. “Not good,” Tobo muttered, unexcited by the presence of the potential witnesses.
“Not good at all,” Aridatha said, lifting his face off the desktop.
Tobo just had time to catch the swish of air behind him before something hit the back of his head with force enough to crack bone. He went down into the darkness knowing he had been betrayed, that he had walked into a trap. The Unknown Shadows scattered in every direction, going mad, making Taglios a city of nightmares.
Sahra, Gota and Hong Tray all awaited Tobo on the other shore of consciousness. All three told him that this was a disaster entirely of his own devising. He could have avoided it simply by doing the right thing.
He had been warned beforehand. He had not listened.
Sahra’s sorrow was deeper than ever Tobo had known it before.
Lady dealt with the temptation easily for several days after Croaker departed. She kept reminding herself that all she had to do was hang on till he got back. By then the Daughter of Night would not be the Deceiver messiah anymore. She would be just plain Booboo.
Sense told Lady to be patient. But emotion knew no patience. And emotion threatened to devour her. Despite her long history, emotion had stolen control.
She broke after only four days.
Lady took a quick look into the hallway to make certain no one was likely to intervene, then settled on a stool beside her daughter’s bed. She plucked the ends of strands of spells keeping the girl asleep and constrained. She worked quickly and deftly. She had been studying Booboo’s bonds all those four days.
Those spells unravelled almost as if they had a will of their own.
Lady proceeded with an uncharacteristically naive haste. That part of her that had grown hard and bitter in the real world mocked her for her childishness. This was the world. Her world. The real world. There was no reason to expect any good to come her way.
Booboo’s eyes snapped open with mechanical suddenness. The color was right but still they were not the family eyes. Nor were they Croaker’s eyes. They were eyes colder than Lady’s own in her crudest hour. They were the eyes of a serpent, a naga, or a deity. For an instant Lady froze like a mouse caught in a snake’s stare. Then she said, “I’m an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.” She tried to assert control while the girl was physically too weak to act.
The girl’s “love me” aura had touched Lady already, so subtly that she remained unaware of it until it was too late.
Lady had not worn her Voroshk costume. There was no shelter from the storm.
A vibration developed down deep inside her, at glacial speeds. As it built she watched the power of the Goddess slowly fill the Daughter of Night. The buzz within Lady included a trace of mirth. She understood that her unpracticed maternal emotions had been discovered and manipulated, ever so subtly, for a very long time. So subtly that she had not suspected. Worse, so subtly that she was not adequately prepared to respond to any disaster.
Nevertheless, she was a woman of incredible will, having had ages to practice employing it.
There was a countermove left.
In an instant Lady made the cruelest decision of her life. She would regret it forever but knew the choice she made would leave her with the least painful long-term wounds.
The Lady of Charm had centuries of practice making terrible decisions quickly, and just as many years of practice living with the consequences.
From her belt Lady drew a memento of her brief passage as Captain of the Black Company. The dagger’s pommel was a silver skull with one ruby eye. The ruby always seemed to be alive. Lady lifted the blade slowly, her gaze locked with that of the Daughter of Night. The sense of the presence of Kina grew ever stronger between them.
“I love you,” Lady said, responding to a question never asked, existing only within the girl’s heart. “I will love you forever. I will always love you. But I won’t let you do this thing to my world.”
Lady could do it, in spite of all. She had slain as dear before, when she was not yet as old as the child lying beneath her knife. And for less reason.
She felt a madness creep through her. She tried to concentrate.
She could kill because she was filled with a conviction that there was no better thing she could do.
Kina and the Daughter of Night both strove to crack Lady’s terrible will. But the dagger descended toward the girl’s breast, its progress inexorable. The Daughter of Night quickly became the hypnotized prey, unable to believe that Lady’s blade kept falling.
The tip of the knife touched cloth. It passed through, found flesh, then a rib. Lady shifted her weight so she could drive the blade between bones.
She never sensed it coming. The blow, seemingly struck to the right side of her head, was powerful enough to hurl her sideways a half dozen feet, into a wall. Darkness closed in. For an instant there was a living dream in which she saw herself trying to strangle her child instead of stabbing her.
The Daughter of Night felt fire rip across her chest as her would-be killer flung toward the wall. She screamed. But the agony that moved her was not that of her wound. It was a black explosion inside her mind, a sudden tidal wave of knifelike shards of a thousand dark dreams, of a scream harsher than ten thousand whetstones sharpening swords, of a rage so vast and red it could be called the Eater of Worlds.
That blow was violent enough to fling her upward and to one side. She came down sprawled across the still form of her birth mother. But she did not know. She was unconscious long before gravity placed and posed her.
A whiff of old death, of graveyard mold, hung in the air of the room.
Goblin was too eager. Twice I felt compelled to yell at him to slow down. He plunged down the dark stairwell at a pace I could not match. Even wearing the Voroshk apparel the bruising impacts with the walls became too much for my nerve.
We had not yet gone as deep as the ice cavern where Soulcatcher lay when I bellowed an order to stop. Wonder of wonders, this time Goblin heard me. And listened. And responded when I told him we had to go back up.
“What?” He turned the word into a two syllable whisper from an old tomb.
“We can’t do this in the dark. We’ll beat ourselves unconscious before we get down there. Or at least get there too beaten up to think.”
He made a sound that signified reluctant agreement. He had had a few unpleasant collisions of his own.
“We have to go get lights.” Why had I overlooked something so obvious? Because I was too damned busy looking for the subtle and the sneaky, I suppose.
The stairwell was much too tight to turn the flying posts. We had to back them up. That was a slow, humbling, sometimes painful task. And things did not get much less humiliating when we did reach the top.
The girls and the white crow awaited us. In attitudes so smug they could be read even though the ladies were clad for action. Arkana swung a lantern back and forth.
For an instant I suffered an entirely irrelevant worry because I had not brought my Widowmaker costume. It seemed appropriate to the situation. But definitely not necessary.
All that armor ever was was a costume.
Now Shukrat waved a lantern back and forth. And laughed.
“Not a word,” I grumped.
“Did I say anything?”
“You’re thinking it, darling daughter.”
She raised her lantern higher, the better to see what I was wearing. My apparel was in slow, creeping motion all around me, repairing extensive damage. “Not a word from me, old-timer. You know your Shukrat. Honors her elders to a fault. But I’m going to laugh, now. Please don’t jump to conclusions and think that it’s at you.”
Arkana laughed harder.
Goblin made a series of noises, depleting his vocabulary fast.
“He’s right. Give us those lanterns. We need to get this done.” I hoped my dimwit failure to consider the need for light would not be the one little thing that got us destroyed. And that that was the last little thing I had been dumb enough to forget.
Goblin took the lantern from Shukrat. He headed down into the earth again. He was not nearly so hurried this time. Possibly his lust for revenge had begun to cool.
I took Arkana’s lantern. The white crow flapped over to the tip of my post. Before I finished telling it that traveling with me might not be a good idea. Shukrat had another lantern going and was helping Arkana get herself another lit.
The girls had been ready for us.
I bickered with them all the way down to the ice cavern. They had fun with me all the way. They refused to listen to my warnings.
The white crow decided the cave of the ancients would be a fine place to detour. I bellowed, “Don’t touch anything in there! Especially don’t touch yourself.” I continued, mumbling, “When will I learn to keep my big damned mouth shut?” It would be a great and wonderful irony if the bird’s touch was Soulcatcher’s undoing, after all her lucky years.
Goblin got the hurries again. When I tried to slow him down he told me, “There’s something going on with Kina! She’s starting to stir.”
“Shit!”
Keeping up was impossible, until we reached the black barrier. There Goblin’s nerve failed him. There he froze, recalling the horror of the years he had spent on the other side.
“Goblin. We’re almost there. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to do it now.” Numb as I was to things supernatural even I could sense Kina’s proximity and her heightened awareness. Which must not be our fault. Her attention was focused elsewhere. “Now!” I said with more force.
Behind us the girls had begun whispering, troubled. They sensed much more than I ever could.
I told them, “You two go back upstairs now. I guarantee you that you’ll be glad you did. Especially if things don’t work out for us. Goblin.”
He reclaimed his courage. Or maybe just found his hatred again. His face hardened. He started forward.
“Don’t rush,” I stage-whispered as he passed through the black barrier. “Girls, I mean it. Start running now. There have to be some survivors.” I pushed through the terrible barrier behind Goblin, nearly messing myself with the fear. Despite what I had told the little man this was no time to be slow or tentative. Once we breached the barrier Kina knew that we had come. Her slowness would be our only ally.
Once I breached that barrier I flung myself into the anteroom area outside the entrance to Kina’s prison. Goblin lined himself up to charge. I had to do several things at once: encourage him, prepare myself to weather what was about to happen and do my thankless bit to make this deicide work.
Got to keep the whole picture in mind. Got to do each thing on time, in the right order, just the way you worked it out over the last few months.
As Goblin surged forward I placed my flying post into the angle where the floor met the left-hand wall, then plastered myself against the wall above it and willed my Voroshk clothing to form a protective scab over it and me. Then, in light almost too dim for use, I found the right page in the First Father’s notebook. I kept my protection open just enough to let me watch Goblin hurtle straight at Kina and, to my surprise, drive One-Eye’s spear into her temple. I had expected him to go for the heart.
I completed the cantrip that would destroy Goblin’s post, finished shutting me and my post in. Then I allowed myself to feel lower than snake shit because of what I was doing.
I had been hard at work justifying myself to myself for months. And had carried on. But now it was happening. And when it was over I would have to live with my deceits forever.
The entire universe shook. The cavern where Kina lay was big but it was confined. The stairwell was the only escape the products of that violence could find. The energy wave pounded at my protection.
I clung to the stone wall, beneath layers and layers of Voroshk material, while the universe howled and shuddered. I swore that if Kina was powerful enough to get through this I would enlist in her service myself because the only thing tougher than her would be the guys who tied her up. And they had not been seen for several millenia.
The noise began to fade. But I had trouble hearing it go. The roar had deafened me temporarily.
I hoped the girls did head back up the way I told them.
I hoped the violence did no damage elsewhere. I doubted that it would. A major earthquake had split the plain open without destroying the ice caves or doing any harm down here.
I willed the Voroshk clothing to open a crack through which I could see. If need be, if Kina had survived but was injured, I would push my post in there and blow it, too. And if I survived a second blast I would start hoping that I did not suffer a heart attack or starve to death while trying to climb those miles of steps.
The material protecting me had been so traumatized that it took ten minutes to respond. It twitched and shivered and crawled, moving in small surges, as it tried to heal itself.
Once I had an eyehole I discovered that there was nothing to see. Intense bright light still burned inside Kina’s cell. It might have been fading but it was going slowly if it was.
It was half an hour before I could look for details without having my eyeballs hurt. Just as well. It took that long for my protective outfit to heal and relax sufficiently to allow me off the wall.
Those outfits are made smart. They take just long enough recovering to keep you from doing something stupid.
I mounted my post and moved forward, knowing, as I went, that my protection would not survive another blast soon.
At first I could find nothing. Later, after the light faded some more, I began to discover bits of what might once have been tooth or bone embedded in various surfaces. Of flesh, be it Goblin’s or the Goddess’s, there was no sign.
In fact, I doubted that any of the tooth and bone fragments could have belonged to any mere mortal. The explosion had been that violent. More violent, even, than those that had destroyed the Voroshk shadowgate, that had initiated the collapse of the Palace.
Kina’s destruction had somehow added vast energy to the explosion.
My post was not behaving quite right. It stuttered and was slow to respond. It must have gotten rattled around some even though I had done my best to protect it.
Once the light faded round where the Goddess had lain I saw what looked like a long black snake lying in the rubble of Kina’s rock bed. It was the only nonwhite thing in the place, other than me.
I approached carefully. For all I knew that was the bone of darkness that had snuggled next to Kina’s heart. And I was prepared to believe that anything I saw or experienced in this place would be illusion.
Kina was the Mother of Deceit.
One of the great powers of the Deceivers was their ability to leave you doubting everything and trusting no one.
The black thing was no snake. It was the deformed remains of One-Eye’s spear. It had come through the violence with surprisingly little damage. It was just twisted and bent a little, and lightly charred on its surface. The metal inlays had been only slightly distorted by intense heat.
Man, he must have put some artful protective spells onto that thing.
I gathered the spear, went and made sure that I was securely attached to my post, then gave it the command to take me back to base point.
We wobbled down out of the sky like a family of mangy buzzards. My Voroshk clothing still had not healed completely. The girls were more tattered than I. The blast had caught them climbing the stairwell. They had bruises over most of their bodies.
The real miracle was how well all the posts had come through, though none remained unscathed.
The Grove of Doom rose to meet us, welcoming us like a mother greeting lost children.
Bizarre thoughts and images kept worming into my mind now. They worried me. They made me doubt that Kina was actually gone, not just in hiding.
Jokingly, Shukrat told me what I ought to be worried about was Kina’s father and husband wanting to get even. I did not laugh. To me it seemed like a worthy concern.
The Grove of Doom was empty. Of humanity. But some birds had moved in already and there were a few small animals in the underbrush now.
There was no sense of grim foreboding about the place anymore.
“We did it,” I sighed. “Finally. For real. No more Kina to torment the worlds.”
Not having spent their lives under the threat of the Year of the Skulls, the girls were less excited.
The white crow settled on a nearby branch, divested itself of a dirty feather. “Are you sure?” The beast was having lots of fun tickling my fears. She and I seemed to be headed for a long and unpleasant relationship—unless I kept my promise to Shivetya.
I said, “If there was any place in this world where Kina’s survival would manifest itself, that would be here. This place has been almost a part of her since her cult began. And that might have been here. I don’t think she could disengage herself from the Grove even if she wanted to.”
“Then let’s get going,” Shukrat said.
Arkana sneered, “She can’t wait to get her hands on Tobo again.” She was not being mean-spirited. And Shukrat’s counterfire included a mention of Aridatha Singh and Arkana’s terminal timidity. Which did turn Arkana serious.
“Hey, Pop. What do you think Kina being gone will mean to the Daughter of Night?” Walking on eggshells. But worried by the glances she had seen Singh lay upon the girl, not entirely believing that every man reacted like that. “Is she going to turn normal?”
Shukrat showed a sudden interest, too.
“I don’t know, baby doll. I worry, though. She’s been connected to Kina from the second she was conceived. Seems like to her it would be about like you or me having our liver ripped out.”
I was more worried about my wife. Her losing her connection to Kina would devastate her. Everything she was, in her own heart, was tied up in her being the terrible sorceress. Without Kina to leech from she would be just another middle-aged woman gone dumpy and grey.
The weather had been problematic all the way up from the shadowgate. We had had to skirt rain storms and thunder-heads again and again. That had cost us more than a day.
Now, only twenty miles out, there was no evading the weather. Except by going up way high, where it was icy cold and almost impossible to breathe, then zigging back and forth between seething mountains of cloud while being tossed and taunted by turbulence. Shukrat and Arkana were dead set against getting caught aloft in a thunderstorm. Arkana told me, “Think what might happen if you got hit by lightning.”
I did not think long. There was no one I wanted to see badly enough to have my post blow up between my legs. I headed for the ground. We holed up in a Gunni farming village where the locals treated us with the same cautious respect they would have shown a trio of nagas, the evil serpent people Gunni myth has living deep underground but surfacing to plague humanity on numerous occasions, always a couple, three villages away.
We did not steal any of their babies or maidens, nor their sacred cattle, nor even their sheep. I found it interesting that they were sufficiently flexible religiously to raise sheep for sale to folks like the Vehdna, who were going to gobble them right down.
The lightning quit stomping around soon after midnight. We left our hosts with coin enough to have them blessing our names. Which we never mentioned.
There was no lightning now but there was a steady, light rain. The Voroshk apparel helped, but only some. I was cold and miserable and my pet crow, now riding right in front of me in order to get under a fold of my cloak, was so far gone in the miseries that it no longer bothered to complain.
The Company barracks seemed both unnaturally quiet and abnormally alert. Armed sentries appeared everywhere. “Looks like Suvrin’s worried about an attack.”
“Something must have happened.”
I hovered. “You girls sense anything?”
“Something definitely isn’t right,” Arkana said. “I don’t know what.”
“We’d better find out.” Gone less than two weeks and everything had gone to hell?
Survin explained. I controlled myself and did not run off to see Lady before I got the whole story. Suvrin told me, “General Singh has Tobo in a cell that’s isolated so the Unknown Shadows can’t reach him for instructions. Singh won’t let anyone visit Tobo. We do know the kid is hurt, though.”
“Obviously. Or he wouldn’t put up with this. He tried something stupid?”
“Oh, yes. And I don’t have the horses to get him out of it.”
“Now you do. If you want to bother. What about Lady?”
“We don’t know what happened. Nobody was there. And I’ve had no reports recently. Last I heard, she was conscious but sullen and unresponsive. And the girl is worse. Your effort was successful?”
“Pretty much. Which probably explains Lady and Booboo.” I did not expand. “It feels creepy around here.”
“Gets more that way every night. Tobo’s friends aren’t happy. And they get unhappier by the hour. But Aridatha isn’t intimidated.”
“We’ll see if we can’t change that. After I see my wife.” Or the person who used to be my wife.
I took Arkana with me. Just in case. “Don’t say anything. Just stay in the background and cover me,” I told her.
There was a guard outside my quarters but he was not there to keep anyone in. Probably not to keep anyone out, either. He was an early-warning marker for Suvrin. He and I exchanged nods. He broke Arkana’s heart by failing to notice that she was an attractive young woman. I guess that was supposed to be obvious despite the Voroshk outfit.
Lady sat at a small table. She stared into nothingness. At some time she had been playing a solitaire-type card game but had lost interest long ago. The lamp beside her was almost drained of oil. Black smoke boiled off it because its wick needed trimming.
Wherever she was looking, it was plain she saw nothing but despair.
She had lost all interest in maintaining her appearance.
I laid my good hand on her right shoulder. “Darling. I’m back.”
She did not respond right away. Once she did recognize my voice she pulled away. “You did it,” she said, more thinking out loud than actually speaking to me. “You did something to Kina.” Only in the “you” was there any human emotion.
I glanced back at Arkana, to see if she was paying attention. This would be a critical moment. “I killed her. Just the way we contracted to do.” If there was any fragment of the Goddess in her now, that ought to provoke a reaction.
It did but not the physical attempt at revenge I would have preferred. Almost.
She just started crying.
I did not remind her that she had known this day was coming. Instead, I asked, “How is Booboo? How is she taking it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”
“What? Before I left we couldn’t get you away from her long enough to eat.”
The dam broke. The tears started. She became a woman I had not seen before, busted open like an overly ripe fruit. “I tried to kill her.”
“What?” She had spoken very softly.
“I tried to kill her, Croaker! I tried to murder my own daughter! I tried, with all my will and strength, to put a dagger in her heart! And I would’ve done it if something hadn’t knocked me out.”
“I know you. So I know there was a reason other than you just thought it might be fun. What was it?”
She babbled. Years of holding everything together gave way. The floods swept all before them.
The timing matched my assault on Kina. Lady’s violent reaction to Booboo could have been caused by fear leaking through from the Goddess. Booboo’s own behavior would have been shaped the same way.
Lady sobbed for a long time. I held her. I feared for her. She had fallen so far. And I had been ballast almost every foot of the way down.
All my fault? Or just the spark and romance of youth’s summer turning to the bleak seasons of despair of old age?
Arkana was a good daughter. She stood by patiently throughout the emotional storm. She remained there for me without intruding on my wife’s black hours. After we left I thanked her profoundly.
“You think she’ll be able to pull herself back together?” Arkana asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to make her want to. If she did, I wouldn’t have any worries. She’s got an iron will when she wants to direct it. Right now I’m just going to try to keep on loving her and hoping something happens to sting her with a spark of hope.”
“I don’t know if I could stand being completely powerless, either. I might kill myself.”
“Nine hundred ninety-nine people out of a thousand live their whole lives without having a millionth of your power. And they get by.”
“Only because they’re completely ignorant of what they’re missing. Nobody mourns losing what they never had in the first place.”
She had me there.
The full meaning of Lady’s melancholy would be denied me forever because I was never able to experience life as she had at the opposite extreme. Whereas she knew my way of life very well indeed.
And that might be contributing to her despair as well.
Booboo was worse than Lady. She was lost inside herself. She had real guards watching her. They told me she had not done anything but stare into infinity since she recovered consciousness. Not once had they felt any urge to serve her or ravish her.
One guard was a Shadar who had followed Sleepy since the Kiaulune wars. He told me, “Suruvhija Singh and her children are taking care of her.”
I felt a slight twinge. Iqbal Singh’s widow. Favored by Sleepy. But I had been unaware that the family had survived the fighting south of Taglios. I had been too centered on my own preoccupations to look after the welfare of Company dependents.
The Daughter of Night was clean and well-groomed and had been dressed carefully. She sat in a rocking chair, which was an unusual piece of furniture in these parts. She was aware of nothing outside the boundaries of her mind. She drooled on her pretty white sari, which was only a shade paler than her near-albino skin. Someone had placed a rag where it would catch the drool.
Speaking of albinos. The white crow had managed to arrive before me. But it was being very careful not to piss me off these days.
It had overheard enough, here and there, to suspect that I might have a great deal of influence on its future.
Shivetya had given us an unbelievable amount of help in return for our promise to end his stewardship of the glittering plain. I meant to keep that promise. I try to keep all of the Company’s promises. Keeping our promises is what separates us from people like the Radisha, who try to screw us rather than keep their word when that seems inconvenient.
I circled Booboo twice. She gave no sign she was aware of me. I knelt in front of her. Her eyes were open. Her pupils were tiny. Her eyes did not track when I moved a finger back and forth in front of them.
I backed off and considered options. Finally, I led Arkana into the hallway, told her what I wanted to try and how she could help.
We rejoined Booboo and the bird. Neither appeared to have moved a muscle.
Arkana and I separated, each moving slowly, as though hoping to drift around behind Booboo without being noticed. Once there we just waited. And waited.
It is hard to be patient when you are Arkana’s age. Eventually she began to fidget. Which caused the occasional faint whisper of motion, after which she would even stop breathing for a while.
After a time so long even I began to get restless I signalled Arkana forward. Doing her absolute best to remain totally silent she dropped to her knees beside Booboo’s right rocker, out of sight behind the girl’s right ear but with her face so close Booboo might be able to feel the warmth of her presence. I did the same on the left. Neither of us moved till my knees were about to kill me. We tried to avoid breathing on the girl.
I nodded.
Arkana whispered, “Sosa, sosa,” so softly that I could not hear her. So softly that even someone who did hear the words whispered directly into her ear would not be able to make them out.
I have no idea why she chose to say that. I leaned closer so the warmth of my presence would be a hint more obvious. I nodded.
“Sosa, sosa.” No louder than before.
The skin on Booboo’s neck twitched.
I smiled at Arkana, winked.
Treachery will out.
“Sosa, sosa.”
Slowly, the girl began to turn her head toward Arkana, the child within unable to restrain her curiosity.
It was not that she had been faking. Just that nothing obvious was going to sneak past her palisade of despair.
I got up and drifted so she would not discover me without making a special effort.
Arkana gave me a look which asked how I had known that Booboo could be reached. I shrugged. Just intuition, I guessed. A conviction that her curiosity could be wakened if it was teased with sufficient subtlety.
But what now? How to hold her attention forcefully enough to keep her from running away again?
Soon the girl was seeing and hearing us perfectly well. But still she did not respond. Still she would not answer questions.
She had no will to live. And I could see why. At no time had there ever been anything in her life but Kina and the struggle to release the Goddess. Never had there been anything but the quest to bring on the Year of the Skulls.
Suruvhija appeared. I had not known her in the days when she and her husband joined the Company. She might have been a beauty, then, but I doubted it. She was not now. And none of her children made you want to jump in and hug them. But they were good people, if sad.
“You got her to wake up!” Suruvhija said. “That’s great.”
“Now we need to keep her that way. Any ideas?”
“Why?”
We all turned to the girl.
I asked, “What?”
“Why do you trouble me? Release me. I have no reason to live. There is no future. There will be no salvation and no resurrection now. There will be no age of wondrous rebirth.”
She was wide awake now, but bleak, depressed. I dropped to my knees in front of her, took her hands in an effort to keep her engaged with the world outside her head.
“What does that mean? What you just said.”
She seemed puzzled by the question. I spent a few minutes demonstrating my ignorance of her faith. I hoped a chance to explain might animate her.
I have not yet encountered a true believer who could resist an opportunity to expostulate upon his particular truth. Booboo was no exception, though she was a slow starter.
I did not interrupt until near the end. Until that point she did not mention anything I had not heard before, somewhere, in some version. “Excuse me,” I said. “I think I missed something. The Year of the Skulls isn’t the end of the world?”
Suruvhija’s oldest boy, Bhijar, arrived with food and drink. I made sure Booboo got served first. She sucked down a pint of water before telling me, “Yes, it is the end of the world. Of this world, the way it is now. It’s a cleansing. A time when all evil and corruption get swept away and only those souls with a genuine chance of redemption get left on the Wheel of Life.”
I felt confused. I felt lost. I did not understand. I knew the Deceivers wanted to hasten the coming of the Year of the Skulls. That was pretty much what their cult was all about. I knew most Gunni wanted the opposite, but believed that the coming of the Year of the Skulls was inevitable. Someday. It was one of the Ages of Creation, the Fourth Age, ordained at the dawn of time. But this was the first I ever heard that there was supposed to be something on the other side. Particularly something apparently positive.
I murmured to myself, “All evil dies there an endless death.” Then I asked, “You’re telling me Kina’s ultimate task was to clear away all the human dross so that good and righteous men can pass on to paradise?”
Exasperated by my density, she shook her head violently, then went to work trying to explain.
I whispered to Arkana, “Have them bring my wife.”
I am not as dim as I pretended with my daughter that evening but I admit I never did get what she was trying to explain. However, I did realize that she truly believed that by destroying Kina I had deprived the world of any opportunity to get past its current age of sin and corruption into an age of enlightenment.
I guess Kina had been meant to devour all the demons again, only this time those would have been the devils of human kind who make life and history over into torture chambers.
The Lords of Light were going to have to take it from the top, hatching themselves a whole new scheme for worldly redemption. Assuming they were still around somewhere themselves.
Lady arrived, accompanied by Bhijar. She melted the moment she saw that Booboo was awake.
I watched, numb, as she took my place on her knees in front of the Daughter of Night. This was my wife? This clump of raw sentimentality was the woman who used to be the Lady, once able to inspire an entire empire with the terror of her name?
I did not listen. I have to admit that I was embarrassed by her behavior. Because I had not realized that there was so much sloppy emotion bottled up inside her. Around me Lady always clung to shreds of her old image . . . whenever she was not lost in her own realm of self-pity.
The whole scene seemed to amaze the Daughter of Night. She did not know what to make of it.
Suruvhija became embarrassed, too. She hustled her brood out of the room. The boys went quickly, unable to stand so much sentiment. Suruvhija herself offered me a look of commiseration before she shut the door.
I tried to tell Suruvhija I was thirsty. My throat was too dry. I went after her. I stumbled as I crossed the room. Not that that made any difference. Mental clumsiness was my real downfall.
I stepped into the corridor and called after Suruvhija, “Please bring some more drinking water. We’re all still dry.”
She nodded her understanding. She was embarrassed again, this time because she was alone with a man who was not her husband. I was about to say something to spare her when Arkana yelled at me.
It took me a moment to get back through the doorway.
Booboo had a rumel, a Deceiver strangling scarf, wrapped around her mother’s throat. Her eyes were dark with the last ghost of Kina. Her strength was, obviously, supernatural. Arkana was having no luck breaking her hold. And that little blonde was no weakling.
I needed not die to get sent to hell. I had an instant to pick which torture I wanted to suffer for the rest of my existence.
I slapped Booboo with my bad hand. She did not let up. I punched her. She rocked. Blood gushed from her nose. She did not ease up on the yellow silk cloth. I drew the dagger that is with me all the time, that normally gets used only when I am eating. I reached out and pricked the skin right under her left eye.
And still she did not stop.
The white crow said, “This is Kina’s revenge, Croaker.”
Which hell?
Lady was almost gone.
I stabbed the girl in the arm.
She hardly even bled.
I stabbed again, trying for the elbow joint.
No good.
I tried to cut the tendons in her wrists.
All the while Arkana was still trying to pull her off from behind or to break her grip on the silk cloth or to cut that cloth.
I launched as violent a blow as I could manage. When that did nothing but rock the girl’s head back again I lost control. As the saying goes, I saw red.
When Arkana finally stopped me I had stabbed my own daughter more than twenty times. I had not killed her, though. Yet. But she had given up her hold on the strangling cloth.
Possibly too late. Lady was hacking and gasping, still choking. I got down and started trying to clear her windpipe. There seemed to be some damage to her larynx.
Arkana remained calm. She summoned help.
“Where did Booboo get the strangling scarf?” I asked. “She didn’t have it before we went south.” She had been stripped naked, scrubbed down, and dressed in new clothing. Then she had been placed in this room. So someone had brought her the rumel. A secret Deceiver. “We need to find out exactly who visited her.” I did not want it to be Suruvhija, though she was instantly the logical suspect. Except for the fact that she was a woman. Hitherto, my wife and daughter had been the only women we knew to have been admitted to the secret brotherhood.
Still, this was a time of great changes. Suruvhija’s sorrow and slowness of wit could be an act.
They do not call them Deceivers for nothing.
The villain was not a Deceiver after all. He did not understand what a Deceiver was. He being Suruvhija’s son Bhijar, whom Booboo had pulled in with her “love me” effect, working him only when no one else was around. She had sent him to a secret member of the Strangler brotherhood. He had gotten the killing scarf there. That had happened while we were in the air, coming home from the glittering plain.
The boy received only what punishment his mother thought was appropriate. The Deceiver who supplied the rumel, though, soon went the way of his Goddess. Along with a number of friends. There would be no mercy for Stranglers until the last was dead.
While others rooted out the truth I stayed busy with Lady and Booboo. I soon realized that I did not have the skills to save either. I summoned the best physicans from the Land of Unknown Shadows. To a man they told me what I did not want to hear.
Sorcery was the only hope for either woman. And Tobo was the only one with a command of the appropriate sorcery. Arkana and Shukrat could not help much. They knew little about the healing arts.
I told Suvrin, “Regardless of my personal motives, the boy is one of us. We can’t leave him in a Taglian cell.”
Suvrin had a little too much of the politician in him. Too much of the kind of mind willing to let an individual go so the rest will not be inconvenienced. He wanted to avoid a confrontation with Aridatha Singh.
I continued, “You do need to get into the Annals, Captain. You need to understand completely what it means to be a brother of the Black Company.”
“Maybe I do. Until I do I’ll run things the way I am now.”
I did not argue. I had not expected any other answer. I met Shukrat outside, shook my head. She tested her sleep spell on the men Suvrin sent after me to make sure I behaved. That spell worked perfectly.
Shukrat and I went looking for the Great General.
Arkana kindly flew high cover.
We were going to bust Tobo out.
The flaw in that plan was, we did not know where Tobo was being held.
So we had to go ask Aridatha. Being more careful than Tobo had been when it came to invading the Great General’s quarters. Shukrat prepared the way with her sleep spell. It all started out so well I was hard pressed not to look on the dark side and expect a trap.
Singh was not easy to handle unconscious. At least not easy for a gimp old man and a mite of a teenage girl. Nevertheless, we got him aboard my post before he was missed, then took him way up high into the clouds, and through, into the moonlight.
I had Shukrat wake him up.
“We need to talk, Aridatha. And you need to stay calm while we do. Because it’s almost a mile down to the ground.”
Singh was a cool one. He collected himself. “What do you want?”
“Tobo. Where is he? I’m asking, counting on you to continue being concerned about Taglios. About what new fighting would do to the city.”
Singh did not say anything.
I told him, “You’re doing a good job of riding the tiger. But that tiger is going to get a chance to run wild if I end up having to drop your ass from a mile up in the sky.”
He considered that, suspecting that I might not be bluffing. “You could start a new war.”
“You could.”
“The man tried to assassinate me.”
“He won’t do that again,” Shukrat told him. “We’re going to have a talk, Tobo and me. When we’re done he’ll stop doing stupid things forever.” She did not sound like she had any doubts. She did make it sound like Tobo had a surprise coming.
I said, “To lay your mind at rest, it won’t trouble me a bit if we get into a new fight with you people. I don’t have much left to live for. I can burn Taglios to the ground without compunction. Unlike some, I don’t love the place. It’s done nothing to win my heart.”
Arkana said, “If he kills you there won’t be anyone to look out for the Radisha.” The Radisha had become regent despite tradition because Aridatha Singh insisted. Strongly. And nobody wanted to argue with the Great General. Even out in the provinces resistance to the new order seemed to be weakening, almost as if it was just too much trouble to fight over all of this when things were going so well otherwise.
Arkana did not give a rat’s ass about the Radisha’s welfare. She just wanted Aridatha to survive this incident.
“Just tell us where Tobo is,” I said. “Shukrat and I will bring him out.” Slowly, slowly, I tilted my post forward. Timing its arrival well, a gap in the clouds appeared below, allowing the moonlight to get through and reflect off the surface of the river. We discovered that, when he could actually see how high he was, Aridatha Singh had a fear of heights. It proved to be one of those fears which evades reason’s control.
We set him down on the north bank of the river. Arkana stayed with him. I wondered if she would find the nerve to betray her interest.
Before Tobo could help me with my women, I, with the help of the best physicians and surgeons among the Children of the Dead, had to bring him back from his head wound. His Taglian captors had done nothing for him. He was two-thirds of the way down the path to a lonely grave.
There were no other Nyueng Bao with the Company anymore. The handful who had reached Taglios with us had stolen away to their native swamps soon afterward.
Tobo required delicate surgery to clear a dozen dangerous bone chips off the surface of his brain. I did most of the work myself, using my fellow surgeons as my other hand. The job took twelve hours. Shukrat was there every second. Sometimes I thought the ghost of the boy’s mother was looking over my shoulder.
I collapsed moments after we finished, my physical and emotional reserves utterly spent. Some kind souls saw to it that I got into a bed.
It had to be afternoon. Storm season thunder rocked the old Greys barracks. The roaring hiss of the deluge ate up almost all other sound. The air was cool to the point of feeling nippy. I told myself to enjoy the cool while I could. Once the rain stopped the heat would return. And the air would be damp enough to steam vegetables.
A whole different, pounding roar developed as wild winds began to slam and kick the barracks. Hail had begun to fall. Heavily. The streets would be filling with Taglian children determined to harvest the ice. Some surely would be injured by large hailstones. It happened frequently.
Shukrat came in. She did not look cheerful. Suruvhija followed her, bringing food and drink.
I asked, “How bad is it? Is it infection?”
Shukrat was puzzled for a moment. “Oh. No. Tobo is all right. He was even awake for a minute a little while ago.”
So. The way she did not go on told me where the real problem lay.
When I jumped up, nearly injuring myself in my haste, she barked, “Take it easy! Getting in a dangerous hurry won’t help.” And, when I failed to calm myself enough to suit her, “You won’t be fit to help anybody if you show up emotionally too ragged to cope.”
She was right. An old man like me, in my professions, got plenty of exposure to that truth. Not only fear, but most emotion, is the mind killer. We do stupid things when we let emotion take over. Then we are forced to endure the consequences for the rest of our days.
I took deep breaths and drank cold water. I told myself I could handle even the worst news because I have been dealing with bad news all my life. “Lead on,” I told Shukrat.
Soldiers live. Bad news is part of the life.
Arkana and the white crow were with Lady and Booboo when I arrived. Suruvhija had gotten there ahead of me. She slipped out right away, with a murmur of gratitude for excusing her son from the worst consequences of his actions.
It was not a good day for me physically either. I was having to use my cane.
Both of my women were lying on their backs, making no noise. I saw no immediate cue as to what the crisis might be. The crow paced back and forth on a shelf above Lady’s cot. Arkana perched on a chair beside my daughter.
I went to my wife first.
Lady was breathing. Barely. And having to work extremely hard at it, gasping and fighting for every breath. I groaned. “I may have to cut her throat open below the obstruction.” The operation might save her life but her vanity would be sorely tested. The results are never pretty.
I felt relieved as I turned to the girl. And guilty, because I felt so much relief.
Soldiers live.
Booboo was gone. But it had only just happened.
That ripped my guts out.
Arkana told me, “There was someone with her every minute, Pop. It was like she just didn’t want to make it.” She made me take the chair.
“Oh, I understand that part. She didn’t have any reason to go on. We took everything that meant anything away from her. But knowing she wanted out, in here,” and I tapped my temple, “doesn’t do anything to stop the bleeding in here,” tapping my chest. I drew a deep breath, let it go in a long sigh. “Tell Suruvhija to come back in.”
Once the little Shadar woman returned, I told her, “Buy as much ice as you can get. I want to pack my daughter in ice.” I touched Booboo. She was still warmer than the surrounding air.
Shukrat asked, “What’s up? What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to take her down to the ice cave.” We had to go back to get the Children of the Dead back across the plain and to keep our word to Shivetya. Maybe sooner was better than later.
The white crow made a little sound, simply a device for getting my attention.
I said, “She’s first in my heart. If that’s what it takes to save her, then I’ll put her down there with you, too.”
Suruvhija was gone. I hoped she got no grief trying to buy ice. If anyone tried to keep her from getting the money I would be tempted to break some bones.
I did not reflect on what my response, as Captain, would have been toward an underling with my present attitude. The Words Immortal are: That Was Different.
The first ice arrived not much later. Booboo had chosen the perfect time and season to die. We bundled her in a quarter ton of hailstones, inside heavy blankets, which we sewed shut. Lady’s flying post, slaved to Arkana’s, was just able to hoist the weight.
The fly of indecision bit me. I wanted to get the girl into the safety of the cavern before nature had its way. But I did not want to be away from Tobo and my wife and run the risk of disaster here.
Shukrat assured me, “I’ll damned well make sure Tobo is all right. And as soon as he’s able I’ll have him help Lady. If you’re not back. Now go. Do what you have to do.”
“Come on, Pop,” Arkana told me. “Once we put on some altitude that ice isn’t going to melt nearly so fast.”
“Yeah. Shukrat. If anything happens . . . get more ice. Come on down. Maybe Shivetya can help.”
Before we left I did have to visit Suvrin, to let him know what was going on and arrange it so he would know what to do if the fates ordained that this was the time when Croaker would not be coming back.
Even when you fly with the wind it takes a long time to get from Taglios to the fortress with no name. It seems to take forever when worry is your most intimate traveling companion. The white crow was not good for much of anything but an emergency source of provender. Arkana was a dutiful daughter, more helpful than she needed to be, but she was just too young. Most of her earnest conversation seemed so naive, or even foolish, that it became hard to recall a time when I was that age, still idealistic and hurling myself at life headlong, believing that truth and right must inevitably triumph.
I kept my opinions to myself. After everything she had suffered already Arkana did not deserve to have her surviving optimism skewered by my bitter cynicisms.
Perhaps her youthful shallowness was useful as a shield. It might help her shake off those early traumas. I have known people like that, who live only in the present moment.
Soon after we placed Booboo in the cave of the ancients, a scant few yards from her aunt, I was stricken by a series of horrible thoughts.
What got me nervous in the first place was the way the imprisoned Soulcatcher’s gaze seemed to follow me everywhere as we brought the girl in and settled her, while Arkana set the stasis spells on her—as relayed to her by the white crow.
Paranoia struck deep.
Soulcatcher had control of the bird. And she knew all the ins and outs of the sorcery necessary to lock someone into the ice caverns—or to release a prisoner. She could let herself go.
The bird was not right there when that thought hit me. Else she would have known that I had realized the possibility. I covered up before it noticed.
I stood in the weak, sourceless, pale cold light and stared for a long time, without really seeing. My baby. Hard to believe.
“I never knew you, darling.” A tear rolled down. I thought of all the cold, hard men I had known and wondered what they would think if they could see me now, having turned into a maudlin old man.
They might be envious of the fact that I had hung around long enough to become an old man.
The white crow came flapping in from wherever it had been, landed on my right shoulder. Wings slapped my face, stinging. “Goddamnit!” It had not taken the liberty before.
I do not know how long I wallowed in self-pity before the bird stirred me. Far longer than I realized at the time. The crow brought me back to this world of real trials and deep pain. “Arkana. We’d better head back now.” My separation from Lady would be more than a week long before we reached Taglios.
It was going to be longer than that.
Arkana did not respond.
“Arkana?”
Arkana was not there.
The flying posts were not there.
Emotion is the mind killer.
In my worry about my women I had forgotten that my adopted daughter was the one Voroshk with a brain. The one who had said she was going to bide her time and pick her moment.
That moment had come and gone, it seemed. There was nobody down in that cavern but me and the scruffy white bird.
She had not been completely cruel. She took the key to the shadowgates so the gimp old man had no way to get away but she did not make him climb all the way up out of that hole. Only part of the way. She left my flying post just far enough up to give herself a few hours’ head start. Just long enough that I had no chance to catch her.
Shivetya manna makes a tiresome diet, however good you feel for the first few hours after you eat. Self-pity and self-accusation make bitter desserts. And a crow haunted by your oldest and dearest enemy makes for a somewhat less than ideal partner in exile.
After the anger faded and the despair subsided I helped myself to Baladitya’s writing materials and went to work on bringing the Annals up to date.
There was no time in that place so I do not know how long that took. It seemed longer than it probably was. I began to worry because nobody came to see why we had failed to return. I feared that meant there was no one who could come. The most likely someones who might not be able to come being Tobo or Lady.
But Shukrat was healthy. How come she did not show up?
With no one else there I found myself talking to the crow more and more. And more as time went by, in an effort to defeat the gathering despair.
Shivetya watched from his huge wooden throne, evidently amused by my predicament. While I was amused by Soulcatcher’s.
She did have the knowledge to get herself out of the ice cavern. She just did not have the hands. And I thought that was delicious.
I was five or six sleeps into my exile when the Nef returned, first appearing inside my dreams.
Soulcatcher kept reminding me that she was in touch with the demon. That, in fact, as long as she remained attached to the white crow she would be little more than Shivetya’s tool. This information did not seem newsworthy or particularly important until I suffered the visit from the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.
I had not been especially sensitive to them in the past. I knew them better from description than encounter. This time around made clear why that was.
Their ugliness invaded my dreams but only as a sense of presence little more concrete than that of the Unknown Shadows. Golden glimmers of hideous beast-mask faces in the corner of dream’s eye, and scattered single syllable fragments of attempted communication, were all that I recalled after I awakened, sweating and shaking and filled with undirected terror.
Shivetya’s gaze, directed my way, seemed more amused than ever.
I soon learned that his amusement had limits.
I had made him a promise. He could look inside me and see that I intended to keep it. But he could also see that I meant to stall for as long as it took me to arrange my own life to my satisfaction.
He had been patient for ten thousand years. Now, suddenly, his patience began to wilt.
I became aware of it first while I was sleeping. On a night when the Nef were almost getting through, my dreams filled unexpectedly with a presence that pushed in like a whale driving through a pod of dolphins. A big, unseen thing that approached like the darkness itself but without containing a thread of evil. Just a vast, slow thing that was.
I knew what it was and understood that it was trying to make a mind-to-mind contact the way it had with others before me. But my mind had a hard shell around it. It was difficult for ideas to get through.
Good thing Goblin and One-Eye were no longer around. They could have gotten hours of joy out of a straight line like that.
A couple sleeps more, though, and my mind had become a sieve. Me and Shivetya were yukking it up like a couple of old tonk buddies. The white crow was put out because she did not have a job translating anymore. I guess the demon had the sheer mental brute force to make contact with anyone.
I learned from the golem in the way that Baladitya had learned before me. I learned by being taken inside the demon’s living dream, where past was almost indistinguishable from present. Where the wondrous pageant of the plain’s history, and the history of the worlds it connected, were all remembered, in as much detail as Shivetya had cared to witness at the time. There was a great deal about the Black Company. He had chosen the Company as the instrument of his escape a very long time ago, long before Kina chose Lady to become her instrument inside the enemy force and the vessel that would birth the Daughter of Night, who was the intended instrument of her own liberation. Long before any of us were the least aware of all the pitfalls we were going to encounter on our road to Khatovar. But Shivetya chose better than did Kina. The Goddess failed to look closely enough at Lady’s character. Lady was too damned stubborn and selfish to be anyone’s tool for long.
There were just seven of us when some inexplicable urge made me decide to retrace the Company’s olden journeys. And of those seven, now there is just me.
Soldiers live.
The Black Company is in Suvrin’s hands now. Such as it is. It is headed south now, according to Shivetya’s dreams, satisfactorily avenged, planning to cross the glittering plain back to the Land of Unknown Shadows. There are only a handful of Taglians and Dejagorans and Sangelis left to miss our world. The Company will become a new thing in a new world. And pudgy little Suvrin will be its creator.
Never before had there been anyone of the Black Company who had survived so long that he could see how vast are the changes time will sculpt even upon a band determined to stay one with its past.
When my thoughts ranged those bleak marches Shivetya always filled my head with ripples of amusement. Because those were almost invisible changes when compared with those that he had witnessed in his time. He had seen empires, civilizations, entire races, come and go. He remembered the gods themselves, the ugly builders of the plain, and all the powers that had come into and changed his estate and then had faded away again. He even recalled a time when he was not alone in the fortress with no name, a time when his devotion to duty caused his mates to nail him to his throne so they could desert without him interfering.
At long last I began to understand what had happened to Murgen in those long ago days when he had had so much trouble clinging to his place in time. Murgen was crazy, some, and Soulcatcher was involved, some—those were the days when Soulcatcher had found her way onto the plain—and Murgen never had a clue himself what was happening but behind everything else was Shivetya, carefully setting up his path into retirement. And, of course, Shivetya does not see time like the rest of us. Unless we demand his attention right here at the vanguard he floats everywhere, everywhen, reexperiencing rather than remembering.
Gods, how I envied him! The entire histories of sixteen worlds were his to know. Not just to study and interpret but pretty much to live whenever the mood took him.
I did have a question. The question of supreme importance if I was going to set the demon free. He had to answer it to my satisfaction if he wanted me to fulfill our agreement.
What would happen to the glittering plain if he was no longer here to manage it?
Shivetya was never as powerful as Kina but he was a whole hell of a lot faster on his mental feet. It had taken the sleeping Goddess years to impact the world outside and create a vast paranoia concerning the Black Company. Shivetya it took just weeks. It would not have taken that long had he not reached out for a specific someone with a mind shell thicker than mine: Shukrat.
The demon was disinclined to connect with Tobo. Tobo had been his good buddy before but Tobo’s behavior recently hinted at potentially troublesome character flaws.
Shukrat finally began to get the idea that there might be a problem causing the prolonged absence of Arkana and her beloved adopted daddy. Even when she did start to worry, though, she did not want to leave Tobo. Tobo was less popular with the Children of the Dead than he was with the Unknown Shadows. The men from Hsien might not give their utmost to pull him through.
The boy’s health kept suffering one setback after another complication. The fact that the army was moving would not help his recovery.
Shivetya could show me the Company’s southward progress. And did regularly. But I would not look in on Lady. My wife’s condition was more grim than Tobo’s. There was nothing I could do about it but it upset me so I just did not go where the pain was going to get me. Sometimes the blind eye is the least terrible way of suffering what we cannot make right.
Then there was Arkana.
The little blonde had run off in accordance with her own stated doctrine. Home to the world of the Voroshk. She used the key we had brought to enter the plain to make her exit. Because Shivetya was interested the once shattered Voroshk shadowgate was almost completely whole again.
In Arkana’s homeworld the war with the shadows continued, but sporadically. The shadows had been reduced to a tenth of their original number. The Voroshk had suffered as badly. Their world had been all but destroyed. Not one in a hundred peasants had survived an invasion so enthusiastic it is almost impossible to find a shadow on the plain these days.
Shadows kill. They prefer people but will prey on anything they run into. Even things you find under rocks. People are smart enough to figure out ways to get through the night. Not much else can.
The few survivors in the Voroshk world were starving. They had lost so many draft animals they could not plant. Their livestock had all been taken, if not by the shadows then by the Voroshk themselves. The Voroshk had no intention of sharing the common suffering.
Arkana had gone, had seen, had changed her uncertain mind. This was not what she wanted. But she had waited too long to turn back.
She was seen. Family closed in fast. And deprived her of her post and clothing. She became a prisoner of her relatives, who began formulating big breeding plans immediately.
The shadowgate disaster had left the Voroshk with few women of childbearing age.
Arkana got elected to become queen ant for a whole new mob.
She would do what she had to do to survive. She would bide her time once again. Her uncles had confiscated her key to the shadowgates but were unaware what it was. And she was not talking. They were the sort of men who would abandon the disaster they had created and go coursing off in search of new worlds to conquer. So much easier than rebuilding.
It was a good thing Shivetya had power enough to will the shattered gate to heal itself, though that might imply that the nonfunctional gates had failed because of benign neglect. In fact, recalling what Tobo and Suvrin had reported concerning their explorations, all the shadowgates were crippled somehow.
Shivetya did not like anyone very much these days.
I let him know, “I have a couple of things left to do.” Since my mind was no longer a mystery, he knew what already. And he did have a little patience left.
A pretty indulgent partner in crime, that old devil.
Shukrat arrived while I was sleeping, dropping in through the hole in the roof. So entangled with Shivetya was I now that I knew she was there without noticing or paying much mind. My friend the white crow came and did the wake-up dirty deed. I sat up, rewarding the bird with some rude remark or other.
“Just trying to be helpful. You aren’t leaving me much to do these days.”
“Funny how being a prisoner reduces your options, isn’t it? What goes around comes around and all that? But we can still be friends, can’t we? Hi, cuter daughter. You finally got here.”
Shukrat was exhausted but game. “So what’s going on, Pop? Where’s Arkana?”
“Well. Arkana got a wild hair, ran off home and now is knee-deep in shit.” I explained.
Shukrat’s reaction was, “Yuch!”
“Hey, you could be the most popular girl in town yourself if you give them the chance.”
“They might try. They’ll be sorry if they do. I didn’t waste all my time with Tobo playing games. How come you know all that if she took your key and you can’t go out poking around?”
“Shivetya and I have been getting to know one another. There isn’t much else to do around here when you’re waiting for your slower child to start wondering if you haven’t maybe gotten yourself into some trouble.”
“I see you did some writing, too.”
“I’m running short on time, daughter,” I said, revealing a secret never even shared with my wife. “I’ve had so much luck, for so long, that the law of averages is overdue to catch up. Any day. There’s only one risk left that I’m willing to take. So I want to have all my shit in order before something happens. I want to check out knowing I did everything the Company could ask, and then some.” My expectation that I do not have much time left has become an ever more powerful influence on my thinking since our return from the Land of Unknown Shadows. It has approached the level of obsession since I have been back here in the fortress with no name.
Shukrat proceeded with normal, journey-ending business while we talked, unloading her flying post. She swung down a large hemp sack that rattled as she said, “Let me get some rest, first, then we’ll go rescue Scruffy Butt. Not because I give a damn what they do to her, you understand. Just as a favor to my Pop.”
“I understand. I appreciate it. Maybe she can do the same for you, someday.”
“Oh, yeah, that would be good.”
“What’s in the sack?”
She thought about being evasive, realized that there was no point. “Snail shells. Tobo didn’t want me to travel unprotected. He worries about me.”
“How is he?”
“He has good days and he has bad days. More bad than good. In his health and in his mind. It scares me. Nobody can tell me if he’s going to make it. Or if he’ll be sane if he does. I’m afraid it might all depend on his mother.”
“What? Sahra turned up?”
“No. She’s definitely dead. I think. But her ghost, and her mother’s ghost and her grandmother’s ghost, keep following him wherever he goes. Whenever his fever gets to him he sees them. And they talk to him. They nag him, he says. He doesn’t like it. But my opinion is, he damned well ought to start listening to them. Because he gets these brain fevers every time he starts to do something that his mother wouldn’t have liked while she was alive. Even if it’s only something like forgetting to clean his teeth.”
“You really believe he’s being haunted by his female ancestors?”
“Doesn’t matter if I do, Pop. He believes it. Even when he’s fever-free and completely sane he’ll say his mother intends to stay around until he no longer needs her guidance. Then she’ll be free to join Murgen. Tobo really resents the implication that he isn’t mature and his behavior is keeping her from her rest. And Sahra, apparently, is just as resentful of his immaturity, because she’d rather be somewhere besides here baby-sitting a grown man.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s something more?”
“Because you’re right. There is more. He thinks those women might run out of patience. He’s afraid they’ll just drag him along with them.”
“You mean kill him?”
“No! His mother, Pop. Not kill him. Take him along. Out of his body. The way they say his father used to do. Only they wouldn’t let him come back. If that happened his body would die eventually. And before you tell me Sahra wouldn’t let her baby die, you need to remember this ghost isn’t the Sahra you knew. This Sahra has been on the other side for a while, running with ghosts who have been there a lot longer than she has. And at least one of those was able to see Tobo’s various potential futures way back before Murgen and Sahra ever got together.”
Sounded to me like Shukrat was just as much a believer as Tobo was.
“All right. Rest, little girl. I’ll come up with a plan while you do.”
Look at me. Manly man. Older than dirt, limping, one bad eye, short one hand, reads and writes, but a manly man for all that.
The Voroshk shadowgate was being watched from the other side. Shukrat’s uncles hoped she would find her way home, too, and they were eager to obtain another breeder.
We did not work hard to avoid being discovered by the watchers. But we did come by night and Shukrat did leak some of her most unusual companions through to distract the sentries.
Tobo did not stint when he gave her Unknown Shadows to help her out in her adventures down this way. Unlike when he gave me those two wanna-be ravens that were never around and had not been seen now in months. He assigned her some of the biggest, the darkest, the smartest, that would stand by her and do what she said.
The Black Hounds darted around and over the two watchers, keeping them from flying just long enough for us to get through the shadowgate and add ourselves to the equation. Shukrat was able to put them both to sleep despite the state of high excitement the Unknown Shadows had aroused.
In moments we understood why.
“They’re just kids!” I said, while undressing one. “This one can’t be more than eleven or twelve.”
The one Shukrat stripped was even younger. “These two are the youngest Tologev brothers. Somebody really is desperate if he’s sending kids this young out alone when there’re still shadows roaming around.”
I thought that was just fine. The thinner the Voroshk were spread, the better.
The two boys we left behind, up in trees for their own safety. We confiscated their posts and clothing.
It was a long flight. We did not show ourselves during the day. Along the way Shukrat showed me the ruins of Khatovar. I did not feel inclined to explore. I did not have time. There were changes going on inside me. I had to hold them off until I got Arkana free.
The white crow mocked me and accused me of cheating on Lady. She refused to believe I was not. I no longer argued. She was still bitter because she had not been able to take me away from her sister.
Arkana was being held in a minor Voroshk fortress called Rhuknavr. We flew in low, to within a mile, then awaited midnight while floating high up in the tops of trees that were old when Khatovar fell. We put out a dozen shadowtraps Shukrat had crafted according to Shivetya’s instructions. Once she released the Unknown Shadows, though, the traps were not necessary.
At my insistence Shukrat made doubly sure that the Unknown Shadows clearly understood we were about to butt heads with people who had considerable experience dealing with creatures of darkness. Their advantage over the killer shadows was that they were not just driven clumps of hunger and hatred. They were cunning and wicked and able to reason, although unfortunately weak on the concept of cooperation.
I asked Shukrat, “You think we might have better luck in the daytime, after everybody inside there relaxes?”
“They’re not that alert. They haven’t had an incident here for a long time.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. Now that I’m close enough to feel them.” Meaning, probably, that she was hiding the whispers of the Unknown Shadows already.
“Uhm? Are you close enough for them to feel you?”
“No. Because I’m alone. And because I’m dressed. And because they aren’t trying to feel for me.”
“I see.” If it was not our unseen associates it must be something like the way I had begun to sense Shivetya. “Bird. Pay attention.” It was not my intent to waste any resource. The white crow was a valuable resource. “So where is my other baby, Shukrat? Be as exact as you can because my feathered friend needs to know how to get there to tell her that we’re coming and she should be ready to go.”
The crow squawked like it had just found a snake raiding its nest. It protested so vigorously that the surrounding night fell into an uneasy silence.
“Good for you nobody in these parts would recognize Taglian. What’s the big squawk? You infiltrated how many places at other times?”
The crow continued to mutter something to the effect of, that was different. The difference mainly being whose idea the infiltration was. She understood that I was getting real thick with Shivetya, though, and the golem might have a great deal to say about whether or not she ever got out of the cave of the ancients. Once she got the frustration worked out she was ready to go.
I had Shukrat describe the interior of Rhuknavr the best she could. Which was not that well. She had not been there in ten years. The crow would have to locate Arkana on her own. Shukrat could not pin her down.
I said, “You just tell her we’re coming and she should be ready. And, if she can manage it, she might put a sleep spell on anybody near enough to touch.”
The crow left. We waited. I stared at the sky. I found this one far stranger than that of the Land of Unknown Shadows. There was no large moon here, apparently. At least none tonight nor during the nights I spent here before. But there were scores of little ones, the biggest maybe a fifth the size of my own. All the moons seemed terribly busy, scampering hither and yon. When I mentioned them to Shukrat she began telling me about her world’s unique breed of astrology, which relied upon the motions of all those moons. Even after ages of study those moons still presented the occasional surprise.
“Once, when I was little, two of them banged off of each other. None of the others have moved quite the same way since. And it rained down pieces for years. Only about a hundred miles from here there’s a place where a really big piece hit. I was at Junkledesag, which is over that way another eighty miles, and it was still awful. There were earthquakes and noise like the end of the world. There was a fire in the sky that took all night to fade away. It was like when one of the rheitgeistiden explodes, only a million times worse. It knocked a huge hole in the ground. Now the hole is kind of a lake.”
The white crow dropped out of the night. “Ready.”
“Easier than you expected, eh?”
The bird grunted sullenly.
“Show us the way, Fearless Feathered Explorer.”
The next stage was anticlimactic. Only three or four actual Voroshk occupied Rhuknavr. In behavior so human I do not know why I did not foresee it, a small faction of survivors were concealing Arkana’s return from the rest. For what little advantage controlling a viable breeder gave.
We left our posts nuzzling the fortress beside an unglazed hall-end window. The interior was too tight for flight. The crow showed the way to Arkana’s chamber. There were no bars anywhere but there was a sleeping, non-Voroshk sentry slumped on a stool in the hallway. There had been a pretense that Arkana was a guest.
The girl jumped on me the moment we entered. “I knew you’d come.”
“Did you?”
“I hoped you would. All right? I’m sorry. I was stupid. I just wanted . . . I had to . . . Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Why not save your talking until we’re out of here? The point of sending the bird ahead was so you’d be ready.” The critter named flapped out the room’s one small window.
She grabbed odds and ends. Not much. “I don’t know where my rheitgeistide and shefsepoke are.”
“We brought something for you. Let’s go.”
All went well until we were sliding out the window. Then a child, rubbing sleep from her eyes, wandered into the hallway, presumably disturbed by some sound. She stared for a moment, then folded, touched by a sleep spell from one of the girls.
Nothing happened immediately. But in time the child would tell somebody. Unless she had a habit of sleepwalking.
Comfortably aloft and heading south, I asked Arkana, “Are you pregnant?”
She took no offense. “No. They hadn’t worked out who got to be first. Though every time I turned around somebody was trying to sneak in. Like they thought I couldn’t possibly resist them. I passed out enough bruises that even Gromovol would’ve figured out that that kind of shit could get somebody hurt—but these guys were real optimists.”
She had been hanging out with the right people to learn how to sucker a guy who thought girls ought to be easy prey. I said, “I guess we can thank some god for that small favor.”
“You can thank Arkana for not putting up with their shit.”
“That’s my delicate flower.”
Soon after sunrise Shukrat spotted seven or eight protean black dots bobbing in the air far behind us. “They’re chasing us, Pop.”
I checked. “We climb up a little higher, we’ll be able to stay far enough ahead.”
The girls agreed. But Arkana added, “There weren’t that many of the Family at Rhuknavr. They must’ve sent for help from Junkledesag or Drasivrad. There aren’t but fifteen or sixteen of the Family left alive.”
I said, “Just in case they do start pressing us, do either of you have an objection to more of them getting hurt?”
Arkana gave me an unhappy look. Despite our hours aloft she was not yet fully clad in apparel taken from one of the boy sentries at the gate. Getting dressed is hard to do when you are riding one of those posts and staying out of sight by skimming the treetops. Not to mention that before she started changing she had to convince the clothing that it now belonged to her, not the boy from the shadowgate. “How do you expect to manage that, Pop?” She sounded suspicious. And rightly so.
“Same way I got Kina. But you’ll have to name me names.” I had the First Father’s book with me. I had taught myself enough of the Voroshk language to use the codes to blow those guys out of the sky. If I knew who I was turning into a cloud of dust.
“Don’t do that. Not if you don’t have to.”
I gave it a moment. Then, “If you can forgive them, then I can.”
“They never really did anything to me.”
They would have but I did not belabor the point. Both of these kids were too forgiving and too understanding for their own good. Those guys back there would have done a whole lot of ugly to both of them, given the chance. I know those kind of guys. I have been those kind of guys.
Just for my own pleasure, privately, when the girls were not paying attention, I tripped the codes that would kill Arkana’s post. We were too far from Rhuknavr for me to tell if it worked. I hoped not, now. Because after I did it I remembered the sleepy little girl in the hallway.
She would haunt me for a while.
It was closer than it really needed to be, us getting through the shadowgate ahead of trouble. The key gave me some grief, probably because I was in too much of a hurry.
“Now what?” Shukrat asked once we were safe from the men and naked boys cursing us from the other side of the barrier.
I said, “I guess you two can go back to the army. I’m going to stay here. On the plain. With Shivetya. There’s a job I’ve got to do. A promise I have to keep.”
Nobody spoke again until we were close to the fortress with no name. Then Shukrat asked, “What about Lady?”
“If she’s in good enough health you can bring her down here to me and I’ll do what I can to help her. If she’s not, leave her the fuck alone. Her main problem is she’s got to heal herself.”
Both girls looked at me like I was some really stinky monster that had just popped up in the middle of a bunny farm ripping the fur out of cute and tender throats.
“Look, I love my wife just one whole hell of a lot. There isn’t any way I can explain it to you. But the fact is, love her is about all I can do. She’s insane. By any standard but her own. And there’s nothing I can do to change that. If you were familiar with the Annals you would know that.”
Arkana sneered. “You don’t ever give up, do you?”
She caught me off balance that time. “Actually, no. I wasn’t thinking about finding somebody to keep the Annals. I was trying to clarify my relationship with my wife.”
But did I know what that was myself? Even after all these years? Possibly more important, did she have any idea?
All that seemed to matter less and less as we drew closer to the fortress with no name.
I stood before the golem Shivetya, basking in his mild impatience. I was impatient myself. But the distractions of the world still had their hold on me.
That part of Gunni philosophy is solidly founded. Before you can achieve more than the lowest possible order of spiritual focus you have to learn to put all worldly distractions aside. All of them. Right now. Never mind what. Otherwise there will always be that one more critical thing that just absolutely has to be handled before you can move forward.
My one more thing was Lady. My wife. Who continued to wobble on the brink of the abyss without ever quite slipping over. To me it was evident that the missing medicine now was any will to battle on. And the white crow agreed with me.
“Let me work on her,” the bird told me. “Ten minutes and I’ll have her so pissed off she’ll melt mountains trying to get close enough to spank me.”
“No doubt. But I like things the way they are. Except for how long it’s taking.”
Suvrin seemed to be taking forever making any headway coming south. Though he was covering ground much faster than we had headed north. Nobody was trying to slow him down.
I whiled my time exploring the expansive wonders of Shivetya’s memories—but avoiding those including Khatovar. Khatovar was a dessert I meant to save until there were no distractions at all. Khatovar was a special treat for a time when every flavor could be savored.
Eventually, I yielded to the inevitable and sent the girls to bring Lady to me. Maybe my big pal on the wooden throne could give me a hint or two how to goose her into getting going again.
The Nef appeared almost as soon as the girls popped out of the hole in the roof. They were in a black humor, eager for a fight, and because I could not communicate with them my mood soon turned just as dark. I hunted up One-Eye’s spear. If it could handle a Goddess it ought to be able to polish off three obnoxious, nagging spooks.
Shivetya stopped me. He could communicate with the Nef. He indicated that he would calm them down with an explanation of what we were doing here. His liberation would not sentence them to extinction. In fact, they were about to enter a new phase of existence. They were going to get work maintaining the glittering plain. There were scores of odd jobs and cleanups that needed special attention.
Shivetya and I were now so connected I could see the plain in my mind almost at will and the rest of the world, through his eyes, with only a little more effort. For a while I watched the girls race northward, each occasionally finding a moment to have fun flying.
I slept for a few hours. Or a week. When I awakened I picked up a lamp and walked over to the throne. I carried One-Eye’s spear under my other arm, on the bad hand side. Shivetya and I stared at each other for a while.
“Is it time?” I asked. And, “You think we’re ready to manage without the daggers, now? Yeah? Just one more little thing, then. I need to leave a note for my girls.” That turned into a letter. Trust the Annalist to go on and on.
A very clear thought. Have you finished now? Are you certain you are done?
“It’s time.”
My bridesmaids, the Nef, drifted in out of the darkness. They seemed more substantial than ever before. They like me just fine, now.
I am putting the pen down.
We saw lights from way out. What was that? There are no lights on the glittering plain. We climbed a thousand feet. By then the lights were gone except for what came out of the hole in the dome over the top of the demon’s throne room. Before we got there that went away, too.
Then we were too busy getting Lady and Tobo through the hole to worry about anything else. Rheitgeistiden are trouble when their riders are not helping.
When we got to the floor we found only one oil lamp burning on that old man’s—that scholar from Taglios’s—worktable. Croaker left a note. And, that clever old fart, he wrote it in our language. Not very good, but good enough to understand.
I guess he did have the gift for tongues like he always said.
Arkana took the lamp and used it to fire up a couple of lanterns. We went off to look for Croaker. She said, “You know, he was always teasing us but after a while I did start feeling almost like he was my dad.” We never ever talk about our real fathers. We would never get along.
“Yeah. He looked out for you. Maybe more than you know.”
“You, too.”
We found Croaker sitting beside the wooden throne. “Hey. He’s still breathing.”
“I don’t think . . . Shit. Look. Those knives are all gone from the demon.” Actually, they were laying all over the floor.
So just then the demon’s eyes open and so do Croaker’s and both of them look pretty confused and it is only then that I really understand what Croaker was trying to tell us in his letter. It was not some confused religious good-bye, he just did not have enough of the right words to tell us that he and the demon had it worked out to trade places. So Shivetya got to become a mortal for as long as Croaker’s body would last and Croaker got to be a big, old, wise sea dragon swimming all around in the ocean of history. So both of them got to go to heaven. And the Nef were happy. And the plain went on. And the white crow kept bitching, riding around on the Croaker body’s shoulder. And Arkana and I got in a running fight about who was going to go on keeping the Annals, because both of us hate to write.
So we take turns. When the little tramp will get away from Tobo long enough to pick up a pen and do her part.
A point she missed, probably because she is too dim to notice, is that Lady is recovering. A while ago I saw her spinning tiny fireballs. I think if there was some way she could make love to that big monster over there she would do it three times a day. Because it is from him that the power flows. It is, probably, the best and most meaningful gift he has ever given her and with it she can become anything she wants to be. Maybe even the young and beautiful and romantically sorrowful and remote Lady of Charm again.
But then he would have to turn Soulcatcher loose just to give balance to the world.
I wonder if he was right when he said a thousand years from now we might be the gods everyone remembers.
And I wonder what he might do about his daughter. His flesh daughter. I think there is no hope for her because she has no hope of her own, but I also think that if there is a hope, Pop will find it.
Suvrin is looking impatient. He wants to hitch a ride down to the Hsien shadowgate. He is not Aridatha Singh but he may have to do.
I guess it is time to go see our new world. The Abode of Ravens. The Land of Unknown Shadows. Shukrat says the names have a ring. That it sounds like home to her.
I think home is what I carry around inside me. I am a snail with the meat on the outside.
And it is Shukrat’s damned turn to write. The sneaking, slacking little bimbo.
Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It murmurs on across grey stone, carrying dust from far climes to nibble eternally at the memorial pillars. There are a few shadows out there still but they are the weak and the timid and the hopelessly lost.
It is immortality of a sort.
Memory is immortality of a sort.
In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.
Soldiers live. And wonder why.