47

The biggest problem I expected with the evacuation was one that came up every time the Company picked up and moved out after having been settled in one place for a long time. Roots had to be torn up. Ties had to be severed. Men had to abandon the lives they had created for themselves.

Some just would not go.

Some who did go would tell someone where they were headed.

The nominal strength of the Company was somewhat over two hundred people, a third of whom did not live in Taglios at all but maintained identities at scattered locations where they could aid brothers who were traveling. Overall, it was very much like what the Deceivers used to do. Partly that was intentional, because those people had spent centuries finding the safest ways.

Early on, couriers went out carrying code words to all our distant brothers to warn them that a time of trouble was coming. Nobody would be told what was happening, only warned that something was and that it was going to be big. Once that code word arrived, it would already be too late to drop out of anything.

Behind the couriers, eventually, would come the majority of the men, in driblets small enough not to attract attention, disguised a dozen ways, departing Taglios in what I considered their order of plausible risk. The last to leave town would be those with the heaviest entanglements. All the men would pass through a series of checkpoints and assembly points, each time being informed only of an immediate destination. The key hope, though, was that Soulcatcher would not begin to catch on until those who were going to go were well away.

Those who refused to go would be excused—if they remained loyal to the Company interests in the city. It would be useful to have a few agents on hand after the Company appeared to have gone.

That, too, was something the Deceivers had done for generations.

There would be flashy smoke shows. The demon Niassi would be much more prevalent, putting a damper on Grey efficiency. The men who stayed—I would not know who they were because I would be among the first to leave—would be expected to undertake what was supposed to look like a series of random assaults, break-ins and acts of vandalism that later would begin to appear to be part of a terror campaign meant to peak during the Druga Pavi. If Soulcatcher took the bait, she would spend her time preparing to ambush us there.

If not, every hour bought was an hour farther down the road my brothers would be before the Protector realized that we had done the unexpected again. And even then, I expected her to look in the wrong places for a long time.

48

My party was the first to leave Taglios. We went the morning Banh Do Trang died. With me went Narayan Singh, Willow Swan, the Radisha Drah, Mother Gota and Uncle Doj, Riverwalker, Iqbal Singh with his wife Suruvhija and two children and baby, and his brother Runmust. In addition, we had several goats with small packs and chickens tied to their backs, two donkeys, one or the other of which Gota rode much of the time, and an ox cart drawn by a beast we strove hard to keep looking sadder and scruffier than it really was. Most everyone adopted some form of disguise. The Shadar trimmed their hair and beards and the whole family adopted Vehdna dress. I stayed Vehdna but became a woman. The Radisha became a man. Uncle Doj and Willow Swan shaved their heads and became Bhodi disciples. Swan darkened himself with stain but there was no way to change his blue eyes. Gota had to do without Nyueng Bao fashions.

Narayan Singh remained exactly the same, virtually indistinguishable from thousands of others just like him.

We looked bizarre, but even stranger bands collected to share the rigors of the road. And we would collect together only when we camped. On the road we stretched out over half a mile, one Singh brother out front, the other in back, while River stayed fairly close to me. The brothers carried a pair of devices given them by Goblin and One-Eye. If Narayan, the Radisha or Swan strayed far from a line running between them, choke spells would begin constricting around their throats.

None of the three had been informed of that. We were all supposed to be friends and allies now. But I believe in trusting some of my friends more than others.

On the Rock Road that the Captain had had built between Taglios and Jaicur, we did not catch the eye at all. But a crowd like that, with a baby and an ox cart and regular Vehdna prayers and whatnot, is not swift. Nor did the season help. I became thoroughly sick of the rain.

The last time I traveled down the Rock Road I rode a giant black stallion that covered the distance between Taglios and Ghoja on the River Main in a day and a night without hurrying.

Four days after leaving the city we were still at least that long from the bridge at Ghoja, which would be our first dangerous bottleneck. In the afternoon Uncle Doj chose to announce that we had come as close as the road would carry us to the place where he had hidden the copy of the Book of the Dead.

“Aw, darn,” I said. “I was hoping it would be way farther down the road. How are we going to explain having a book if we get stopped?”

Doj showed me his palms and a big smile. “I’m a priest. A missionary. Blame it on me.” Despite the hardships, he was happy. “Come help me dig it up.”

“What is this place?” I asked two hours later. We had come into something that might have come from one of Murgen’s old nightmares about Kina. Twenty yards of woods formed a palisade all around it.

“It’s a graveyard. During the chaos of the first Shadowlander invasion, before the Black Company came, possibly even before you were born, one of the Shadowlander armies used this as a camp, then as a burial ground. They planted the trees to conceal the tombs and monuments from enemy eyes.” Noting my appalled expression, he added, “Down there they have different customs for dealing with the dead.”

I knew that. I had been there. I had seen it. But never had I seen it so concentrated, nor exuding such an air of depression. “This is grim.”

“A spell makes it seem that way. They thought they would come back and turn the place into a memorial after they won the war. They wanted to keep people away.”

“I’m willing to go along with their wishes. This is too creepy for me.”

“It’s not that bad. Come on. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

It did, but not a lot longer. It was a matter of pulling the door away from one of the fancier tombs and digging out a bundle wrapped in several layers of oilskins.

“This is a place worth remembering,” Doj said as we went away. “People around here won’t come near it. People from farther away don’t know about it. It’s a good hideout.”

“I can’t wait.”

“You’ll love the Grove of Doom, too.”

“I’ve been there. I didn’t like it, either, but at the time I was too worried about Stranglers to be scared of ghosts or ancient goddesses.”

“It’s another good place to hide.”

I am not suspicious by nature the way Soulcatcher is but I am suspicious occasionally. I am particularly suspicious of reticent old Nyueng Bao who suddenly turn chatty and helpful. “The Captain hid out there once,” I said. “He didn’t find the place congenial, either. What’re you up to?”

“Up to? I don’t understand.”

“You understand perfectly, old man. Yesterday I was just another jengali, albeit one you had to tolerate. Today, suddenly, I’m getting unsolicited advice. I’m being offered the benefit of your accumulated wisdom, like I’m some kind of apprentice. You want me to take a turn carrying that?” He was, after all, an old man.

“As the pace and pressures have increased and events have taken unexpected—but usually favorable—twists, I’ve begun reflecting more intently on the wisdom of Hong Tray, on the foresight she showed, even upon her devilish sense of humor, and I believe I’m finally beginning to grasp the full significance of her prophecies.”

“Or of mass quantities of bullfeathers. Tell it to Sahra and Murgen next time you see them. And put a little honest sentiment into your apologies.”

My attempt to be unpleasant did not subdue him. That took the arrival of the afternoon rains, a little early, a lot heavy, supported by a truly ferocious fall of hail. Along the road, dashing out from under the trees where we had left our own party, a score of travelers tried to collect the ice before it melted. Taglians never see snow, and rainy-season storms provide the only time they ever see ice—unless they travel far down into what used to be the Shadowlands, to the higher elevations of the Dandha Presh.

Scavenging hailstones was a young people’s game. The old folks pushed under the trees as far as they could get, wearing their rain gear. The baby would not stop crying. She did not like the thunder. Runmust and Iqbal tried to keep an eye on the children as well as to watch unknown travelers closely. They were convinced that anyone met on the road might be an enemy spy. Which seemed a perfectly sensible attitude to me.

Riverwalker prowled, cursing the rain. That also seemed a perfectly sensible attitude.

Uncle Doj did a fine job of not drawing attention to his burden. He settled beside Gota. She began to gripe but without her usual enthusiasm.

I sat down near the Radisha. We were calling her Tadjik these days. I said, “Have you begun to understand why your brother found life on the road so appealing?”

“I trust you’re being sarcastic?”

“Not entirely. What was the worst crisis you faced today? Your feet get wet?”

She grunted. She got the point.

“I believe it was the politics he resented. The fact that no matter what he considered doing, there were always a hundred selfish men who wanted to subvert his vision for their own profit.”

“You knew him?” the Radisha asked.

“Not well. Not to philosophize with. But he wasn’t a man who kept his views secret.”

“My brother? Being away must’ve changed him a lot more than I thought it could, then. He never revealed his inner self while he lived in the Palace. That would have been too risky.”

“His power was more secure out there. He didn’t have to please anyone but the Liberator. His men came to love him. They would’ve followed him anywhere. Which got most of them killed when you turned on the Company.”

“He’s really alive? You aren’t just manipulating me for your own ends?”

“Of course I am. Manipulating you, that is. But it is true that he’s alive. All the Captured are. That’s why we left Taglios even though we had your side on the run. We want our brothers out before we do anything more.”

I heard a whisper. “Sister. Sister.”

“What?”

The Radisha had not spoken. She eyed me inquisitively. “I didn’t say it.”

I glanced around apprehensively, saw nothing. “Must just be the rain in the leaves.”

“Uhm.” The Radisha was not convinced, either.

Hard to believe. I really missed Goblin and One-Eye.

I found Uncle Doj again. “Lady insisted that you’re a minor wizard. If you have any talent at all, please use it to see if we’re being watched or followed.” Once Soulcatcher started looking for us outside Taglios, it should not take long for her crows and shadows to find us.

Uncle Doj grunted noncommittally.

49

Real fear found us the morning after next, just when it seemed we had every reason to be positive. We had made good time the day before, there were no crows around yet, and it looked like we would reach the Grove of Doom before the afternoon rains, which meant we could complete our business there and get clear before night fell. I was happy.

A band of horsemen appeared on the road south of us, headed our way. As they drew nearer, it became evident that they were uniformly clad. “What should we do?” River asked.

“Just hope they aren’t looking for us. Keep moving.” They showed no interest in travelers ahead of us, though they forced everyone off the road. They were not galloping but were not dawdling, either.

Uncle Doj drifted nearer the donkey not carrying Gota. Ash Wand lay hidden amidst the clutter of tent and tent poles that formed that animal’s burden. Several precious fireball projectors were among the bamboo tent poles, too.

We had very few of those left now. We would have no more until we fetched Lady out of the ground. Goblin and One-Eye could not create them themselves—though Goblin admitted privately that the opposite would have been the case even just ten years ago.

They were too old for almost anything that required flexible thought and, especially, physical dexterity. The mist projector was, in all probability, the last great contribution they would make. And most of the nonmagical construction on that had been accomplished using Tobo’s young hands.

I caught a glint of polished steel from the horsemen. “Left side of the road,” I told River. “I want everybody over there when we have to get out of their way.”

But I spoke too late. Point-man Iqbal had already jumped off to the right. “I hope he has sense enough to get back across after they pass by.”

“He isn’t stupid, Sleepy.”

“He’s out here with us, isn’t he?”

“That’s a fact.”

The band of horsemen turned out to be what I expected: the forerunners of a much larger troop which, in turn, proved to be the vanguard of the Third Territorial Division of the Taglian Army.

The Third Territorial Division was the Great General’s personal formation. Which meant that God had chosen to bring us face-to-face with Mogaba.

I tried not to worry about what sort of practical joke God was contemplating. Only He knows His own heart. I just made sure my whole crowd was on the left side of the road. I got us loosened up even more. Then I worried about which of us might be recognizable by Mogaba or any veterans who had been around long enough to recall the Kiaulune and Shadowmaster wars.

None of us were memorable. Few of us went back far enough to have crossed paths with the Great General. That is, except Uncle Doj, Mother Gota, Willow Swan . . . right! And Narayan Singh! Narayan had been a close ally of the Great General in the days before the last Shadowmaster war. Those two had had their wicked heads together innumerable times.

“I will need to alter my appearance.”

“What?” The skinny little Deceiver had materialized beside me, startling me. If he could sneak up like that . . . 

“This will be the Great General, Mogaba. Not so? And he might recognize me even though it has been years since last we stood face-to-face.”

“You astonish me,” I admitted.

“I do what the goddess desires.”

“Of course.” There is no God but God. Yet every day I had to deal with a goddess whose impact on my life was more tangible. There were times when I had to struggle hard not to think. In Forgiveness He is Like the Earth. “Suppose you just borrow some clothing and get rid of your turban?” Though doing nothing struck me as the perfect solution with him. As noted before, Narayan Singh resembled the majority of the poor male Gunni population. I thought Mogaba would have trouble recognizing him even if they had been lovers. Unless Narayan gave himself away. And how could he do that? He was the Master Deceiver, the living saint of the cult.

“That might work.”

Singh drifted away. I watched him, suddenly suspicious. He could not be unaware of his own natural anonymity. Therefore he must be trying to create a predisposed pattern of thought inside my mind.

I wished I could just cut his throat. I did not like what he did to my thinking. I could easily become obsessed with concerns about what he was really doing. But we needed him. We could not collect the Key without him. Even Uncle Doj did not know exactly what we were seeking. He had never actually seen, or even known about, the Key before it was stolen. I hoped he would recognize it if he saw it.

I might spend a little time thinking how we could get around my having given him such solid guarantees that he was willing to travel with us and trust us not to murder the Daughter of Night while they were separated.

The cavalry finished clattering past. They had paid us no heed, since we had not insisted on getting in their way. Behind them a few hundred yards came the first battalion of infantry, as neat, clean and impressive as Mogaba could keep them while on the march. I received several offers of temporary marriage but otherwise the soldiers were indifferent to our presence. The Third Territorial was a well-disciplined, professional division, an extension of Mogaba’s will and character, nothing like the gangs of ragged outcasts that constituted the Company.

We were a military nil anyway. We could not get together and fight our weight in lepers today, let alone deal with formations like the Third Territorial. Croaker’s heart would be broken when we dragged him out of the ground.

My optimism began to fade. With the soldiers hogging the road, we traveled much slower. The landmarks showing the way to the Grove of Doom were in sight but still hours away. The cart and the animals could not be pushed on muddy ground.

I began to watch for a place to sit out the rain, though I did not recall any good site from previous visits to the area. Uncle Doj was no help when I asked. He told me, “There is no significant cover closer than the grove.”

“Someone should go scout that.”

“You have reason for concern?”

“We’re dealing with Deceivers.” I did not mention that Slink and the band from Semchi were supposed to meet us there. Doj did not need to know. And Slink might have gotten slowed down if he had to duck around Mogaba’s army and patrols.

“I’ll go. When I can leave without arousing curiosity.”

“Take Swan. He’s the most likely to give us away.” The Radisha was a risk, too, though thus far she had shown no inclination to yell for help. But Riverwalker was close enough to grab her by the throat if she even took a deep breath.

She was not stupid. If she intended to betray us, she meant to wait till she could manage it with some chance of surviving the attempt.

Uncle Doj and Willow Swan managed to drift away without attracting attention, though Uncle had to go without Ash Wand. I joined River and the Radisha. I noted, “This country is a lot more developed than it used to be.” When I was young, most of the land between Taglios and Ghoja was deserted. Villages were small and poor and supported themselves on minimal tracts of land. There were no independent farms in those days. Now the latter seemed to be everywhere, founded by confident and independence-minded veterans or by refugees from the tortured lands that once lay prostrate under the heels of the Shadowmasters. Many of the new farms crowded right up to the road right-of-way. They made getting off the road difficult at times.

The force moving north numbered about ten thousand, men enough to occupy miles and miles of roadway even without the train and camp followers coming on behind. Soon it was obvious we would not reach the Grove of Doom before the rains came and might not get there before nightfall.

Given any choice at all, I did not want to be anywhere near the place after dark. I had gone in there by night once before, ages ago, as part of a Company raid meant to capture Narayan and the Daughter of Night. We murdered a lot of their friends but those two had gotten away. I remembered only the fear and the cold and the way the grove seemed to have a soul of its own that was more alien than the soul of a spider. Murgen once said that being in that place at night was as bad as walking through one of Kina’s dreams. Though of this world, it had a powerful otherworldly taint.

I tried to ask Narayan about it. Why had his predecessors chosen that particular grove as their most holy place? How had it been different from other groves of those times, when humanity’s impact on the face of the earth had been so much less?

“Why do you wish to know, Annalist?” Singh was suspicious of my interest.

“Because I’m naturally curious. Aren’t you ever curious about how things came to be and why people do the things they do?”

“I serve the goddess.”

I waited. Evidently he deemed that an adequate explanation. Being somewhat religious myself, I could encompass it even though I did not find it satisfying.

I offered a snort of disgust. Narayan responded with a smirk. “She is real,” he said.

“She is the darkness.”

“You see her handiwork around you every day.”

Not true. “Untrue, little man. But if she ever gets loose, I think we will.” This discussion had become terribly uncomfortable suddenly. It put me in the position of admitting the existence of a god other than my god, which my religion insisted was impossible. “There is no God but God.”

Narayan smirked.

Mogaba did the one good thing he had ever done for me. By turning up in person he saved me the rigorous and embarrassing mental gymnastics necessary to reconfigure Kina as a fallen angel thrown down into the pit. I knew it could be done. Elements of Kina myth could be hammered into conformity with the tenets of the only true religion, given a quick coat of blackwash, and I would have completed a course of religious acrobatics elegant enough to spark the pride of my childhood teachers.

Mogaba and his staff traveled three quarters of the way toward the rear of the column. The Great General was mounted, which was a surprise. He was never a rider before. The greater surprise, though, was the nature of his steed.

It was one of the sorcerously bred black stallions the Company had brought down from the north. I had thought they were all dead. I had not seen one since the Kiaulune wars. This one not only was not dead, it was in outstanding health. Despite its age. It also appeared bored by the business of travel.

“Don’t gape,” Riverwalker told me. “People get curious about why other people are curious.”

“I think we can afford to stare some. Mogaba will feel like he deserves it.” Mogaba looked every bit the Great General and mighty warrior. He was tall and perfectly proportioned, well-muscled, well-clad, well-groomed. But for the dust of silver in his hair, he looked little older than he had been when first I saw him, right after the Company captured Jaicur from Stormshadow. He had had no hair then, having preferred to shave his head. He seemed in a good humor, not a condition I had associated with him in the past, when all his schemes had come to frustration as the Captain just seemed to bumble around and do the one thing that would undo all his efforts.

As the Great General came abreast, his mount suddenly snorted and tossed its head, then shied slightly, as though it had stirred up a snake. Mogaba cursed, although he was never in any danger of losing his seat.

Laughter dropped out of the sky. And a white crow fell right behind it, alighting precariously atop the pole carried by the Great General’s personal standardbearer.

Cursing still, Mogaba failed to note that his steed turned its head to watch me as I passed.

The darned thing winked.

I had been recognized. The beast must be the very one I had ridden so long ago, for so many hundreds of miles.

I began to get nervous.

Someone amongst Mogaba’s personal guard launched an arrow at the crow. It missed. It fell not far from Runmust, who shouted angrily before he thought. Now the Great General vented his spleen upon the archer.

The horse continued to watch me. I fought an urge to run. Maybe I could get through this yet . . . 

The white crow squawked something that might have been words but were just racket to me. Mogaba’s mount jumped enough to freshen the well of vituperation. It faced forward and began to trot. The ultimate effect was to divert attention from us southbound scrubs.

Everybody but Iqbal’s Suruvhija stared at the ground and walked a little faster. Soon we were past the worst danger. I drifted over beside Swan, who was still so nervous he stuttered when he tried to crack a joke about pigeons coming to roost on the Great General while he was still alive.

Laughter passed overhead. The crow, up high, was almost indistinguishable against the gathering clouds. I wished I had someone along who could advise me about that thing.

For a generation, crows have not been good omens for the Company. But this one seemed to have done us a favor.

Could it be Murgen from another time?

Murgen would be watching, I was sure, but that crow had no way to communicate. So maybe so . . . 

If so, this encounter would have been an adventure for him, too, what with him knowing that if we got caught, his chances for resurrection plummeted to zero.

50

The passages of the Great General held us up long enough that we could not leave the road unremarked until after the rains began falling hard enough to conceal our movements from everyone except someone extremely close by. We left the road unnoticed then. Our travel formation collapsed into a miserable pack. Only Narayan Singh showed real eagerness to get to the grove. And he did not hurry. Not often long on empathy, I found myself pitying Iqbal’s children.

Swan pointed out, “It’d be to Singh’s advantage to get us there just after night falls.”

“Darkness always comes.”

“Uhn?”

“A Deceiver aphorism. Darkness is their time. And darkness always comes.”

“You don’t seem particularly bothered.” He was hard to hear. The rainfall was that heavy.

“I’m bothered, buddy. I’ve been here before. It isn’t what you’d call a good place.” I could not state that fact with sufficient emphasis. The Grove of Doom was the heart of darkness, a spawning ground for all hopelessness and despair. It gnawed at your soul. Unless you were a believer, apparently. It never seemed to trouble those for whom it was a holy place.

“Places are natural, Sleepy. People are good and evil.”

“You’ll change your mind after you get there.”

“I got a sneaking suspicion I’m gonna drown first. Do we got to be out in this?”

“You find a roof, I’ll be glad to get under it.” Big thunder had begun fencing with swords of lightning. There would be hail before long. I wished I had a better hat. Maybe one of those huge woven-bamboo things Nyueng Bao farmers wear in the rice paddies.

I could just make out Riverwalker and the Radisha. I followed them hoping they were following someone they could see. I hoped we did not have anyone get disoriented and lost. Not tonight. I hoped the guys from Semchi were where they were supposed to be.

Iqbal appeared in the gloom as the hail began to fall. He bent over to try to ease the sting of the missiles. I did the same. It did not help much.

Iqbal shouted, “Left, down the hill. There’s a stand of little evergreens. Better than nothing at all.”

Swan and I dashed that way. The hailstones kept getting bigger and more numerous as the thunder got louder and the lightning closer. But the air was cooling down.

There is a bright side to everything.

I slipped, fell, rolled, found the trees the hard way, by sliding in amongst them. Uncle Doj and Gota, River and the Radisha were in there already. Iqbal was an optimist. I would not have called those darned things trees. They were bushes suffering from overweening ambition. Not a one was ten feet tall and you had to get down on your belly in the damp and needles to enjoy their shelter. But their branches did break the fall of the hailstones, which rattled and roared through the foliage. I started to ask about the animals but then heard the goats bleating.

I felt a little guilty. I do not like animals much. I had been shirking my share of their caretaking.

Hailstones dribbled down through the branches and rolled in from outside. Swan picked up a huge example, brushed it off, showed it to me, grinned and popped it into his mouth.

“This is the life,” I said. “When you’re with the Black Company, every day is a paradise on earth.”

Swan said, “This would be a superb recruiting tool.”

As those things always do, the storm went away. We crawled out and counted heads and discovered that not even Narayan Singh had gone missing. The living saint of the Stranglers did not want to leave us behind. That book really was important to him.

The rain dwindled to a drizzle. We clambered out of the muck, many communing bluntly with their preferred gods while we formed up. We did not spread out much now, except for Uncle Doj, who managed to disappear into a landscape with almost no cover.

Over the next hour we ran into several landmarks I recognized from Croaker’s and Murgen’s Annals. I kept an eye out for Slink and his companions. I did not see them. I hoped that was a good omen rather than a bad.

The later it got, the more peachy it seemed to Narayan Singh. I was afraid he would curse us all by betraying a genuine smile. I considered mentioning his children’s names just to let him know he was weighing on my mind.

My divination skills were flawless. It was dusk when we reached the grove. We were all miserable. The baby would not stop crying. I was developing a blister from walking in wet boots. With the possible exception of Narayan, not a soul amongst us remained mission-oriented. Everybody just wanted to drop somewhere while somebody else got a fire going so we could dry out and get something to eat.

Narayan insisted that we press on to the Deceiver temple in the heart of the grove. “It’ll be dry there,” he promised.

His proposal aroused no enthusiasm. Though we were barely inside its boundary, the smell of the Grove surrounded us. It was not a pleasant odor. I wondered how much worse it was back in the heyday of the Deceivers, when they murdered people there often and in some numbers.

The place possessed strong psychic character, an eerieness, a creepiness. Gunni would blame that on Kina because this was one of the places where a fragment of her dismembered body had fallen, or something such. Despite the fact that Kina was also supposed to be bound in enchanted sleep somewhere on or under or beyond the plain of glittering stone. Gunni do not have ghosts. We Vehdna do. Nyueng Bao do. For me, the grove was haunted by the souls of all the victims who died there for Kina’s pleasure or glory or whatever reason Stranglers kill.

Had I mentioned it, Narayan or one of the more devout Gunni would have brought up the matter of rakshasas, those malignant demons, those evil night-rangers jealous of men and gods alike. Rakshasas might pretend to be the spirit of someone who had passed on, merely as a tool for tormenting the living.

Uncle Doj said, “Like it or not, Narayan is right. We should move into the best shelter available. We would be no less safe there than here. And we would be free of this pestilential drizzle.” The rain just would not go away.

I considered him. He was old and worn out and had less reason to want to move on than any of us younger folks. He must have a reason to want to go on. He must know something.

Doj always did. Getting him to share it was the big trick.

I was in charge. Time for an unpopular decision. “We’ll go ahead.”

Grumble grumble grumble.

The temple projected a presence more powerful than that of the Grove. I had no trouble locating it without being able to see it. Walking close behind, Swan asked me, “How come you never tore this place down when you were on top?”

I did not understand his question. Narayan, just ahead of me, overheard it and did understand. “They tried. More than once. We rebuilt it when no one was watching.” He launched a rambling rant about how his goddess had watched over the builders. It sounded like a recruiting speech. He kept it up until Runmust swatted him with a bamboo pole.

It was one of those poles, too, though Narayan did not know. The grove was a very dark place, perfect for an ambush by shadows. Runmust was not going to go quietly.

I could not help wondering what evils Soulcatcher was up to now that she had complete freedom to work her will upon Taglios.

I hoped the people who stayed behind completed their missions, particularly those tasked to penetrate the Palace again. Jaul Barundandi had to be recruited and brought in too deep to run before his rage subsided sufficiently for reason to reassert itself.

51

The baby continued to cry, burrowing into her mother’s breast without looking for nourishment. The noise worried everyone. Anyone who wished to visit misfortune upon us would have no trouble tracking us. We would be unlikely to hear them sneaking up, because of the crying and the sound of drizzle falling from branch to branch in the waterlogged trees. River and the Company Singhs kept their hands on their weapons. Uncle Doj had recovered Ash Wand and was keeping it handy despite the risk of rust.

The animals were as thrilled as the infant was. The goats bleated and dragged their feet. The donkeys kept getting stubborn, but Mother Gota knew a trick or three for getting balky beasts of burden moving. A considerable ration of pain was involved.

The rain never ended.

Narayan Singh took the lead. He knew the way. He was home.

I felt the dread temple loom before us although I could not see it. Narayan’s sandals whispered as they scattered soggy leaves. I listened intently but heard nothing new until Willow Swan started muttering, nagging himself for having followed up on the one original idea he had ever had. If he had ignored it, he could be rocking beside a fireplace in his own home, listening to his own grandkids cry, instead of tramping through the blue miseries on yet one more mystery quest where the best he could look forward to was to stay alive longer than the people dragging him around. Then he asked me, “Sleepy, you ever consider throwing in with that little turd?”

Somewhere, an owl screamed.

“Which one? And why?”

“Narayan. Bring on the Year of the Skulls. Then we could all finally sit back and relax and not have to slog around in the rain and shit anymore.”

“No. I haven’t.”

The owl screamed again. It sounded frustrated.

What sounded like crow laughter answered it, taunting.

“But that’s what the Company set out to do in the first place, isn’t it? To bring on the end of the world?”

“A handful of the senior people did, apparently. But not the guys who actually had to do the work. There’s a chance they didn’t have any idea what it was all about. That they marched because staying home might be a less pleasant option.”

“Some things never change. I know that story by heart. Careful. These steps are slicker than greased owl shit.”

He had heard the birds conversing, too. That was a northern saying that lost something in translation.

Rain or no, the goats and donkeys flat refused to move any nearer the Deceiver shrine, at least until a light took life inside the temple doorway. That came from a single feeble oil lamp, but in the darkness it seemed almost bright.

Swan observed, “Narayan knows right where to look, don’t he?”

“I’m watching him. Every minute.” For what good keeping a close eye on a Deceiver would do.

To tell the truth, I was counting on Uncle Doj. Doj would be much harder to trick. He was an old trickster himself. As a trickmaster, I needed to stick to what I knew, which was designing wicked plots and writing about them after they ran their course.

Something flapped overhead as I entered the temple. Owl or crow, I did not turn quickly enough to discover the truth. I did tell Runmust and Iqbal, “Keep a close watch while I check this out. Doj. Swan. Come with me. You know more about this place than anyone else.”

Below, River and Gota swore vilely as they strove to keep the goats under control. Iqbal’s sons had fallen asleep where they stood, indifferent to the ongoing rain.

Narayan blocked my advance just steps inside the temple. “Not until I complete the rituals of sanctification. Otherwise you’ll defile the holy place.”

It was not my holy place. I did not care if I defiled it. In fact, that sounded like an amusement to be indulged—just before I had the place torn down yet again and this time plowed under. But I did have to get along. For the moment. “Doj. Keep an eye on him. Runmust. You, too.” He could pick the living saint off with his bamboo if the Deceiver tried to be clever.

“We have an understanding,” Narayan reminded me. He seemed troubled. And not by me. He kept poking around like he was looking for something that was supposed to be there but just was not.

“You make sure you hold up your end, little man.” I stepped back outside, into a drizzle that had become more of a heavy, falling mist.

“Sleepy,” Iqbal whispered from the base of the steps. “Check what I found.”

I barely heard him. The baby continued to crank. Long-suffering Suruvhija rocked her and hummed a lullaby. She was not much more than a girl herself and, I suspected, not very bright. I could not imagine any woman being happy with her life, but Suruvhija seemed content to go where Iqbal led. A breeze stirred the branches of the grove. “What?” Of course I could not see. I descended the temple steps into the damp, chilly darkness.

“Here.” He shoved something into my hands.

Pieces of cloth. Fine cloth, like silk, six or seven pieces, each with a weight in one corner.

I smiled into the face of the night. I snickered. My faith in God was restored. The demon had betrayed her children again. Slink had gotten to the grove in time. Slink had been sneakier than any Deceiver. Slink had done his job. He was out there somewhere right now, covering us, ready to offer Narayan another horrible surprise. I felt much more confident when I went back inside and yelled at Narayan, “Get your skinny ass moving, Singh. We’ve got women and children freezing out here.”

Narayan was not a happy living saint. Whatever he was looking for, under cover of fortifying the temple against the defiling presence of unbelievers, just was not there to be found.

I was tempted to toss him the captured rumels. I forbore. That would only make him angry and tempt him to go back on his agreement. I did tell him, “You’ve had time enough to sanctify the whole darned woods against the presence of nonbelievers, don’t you think? You forget how miserable it is out here?”

“You should cultivate patience, Annalist. It’s an extremely useful trait in both our chosen careers.” I forbore mentioning that we had been patient enough to get him tucked into our trick bag. Then his exasperation surfaced for a moment. He hurled something to the floor. He was not out of control by much but it was the first time I ever saw him less than perfectly composed when he was supposed to be the master of the situation. He whispered something as he beckoned me. I do believe he took his goddess’s name in vain.

This new version of the temple was scarcely a shadow of what Croaker and Lady had survived. The present idol was wooden, not more than five feet tall and unfinished. The offerings before it were all old and feeble. The temple as a whole did not possess the sinister, grim air of a place where many lives had been sacrificed. These were lean times for Deceivers.

Narayan persisted in his search. I could not bring myself to break his heart by telling him the friends he expected to meet must have fallen foul of the friends I’d hoped to meet. You need to keep a certain amount of mystery in any relationship.

I said, “Tell me where it’s all right to spread out and where you’d rather we didn’t and I’ll see that we do our best to honor your wishes.”

Narayan looked at me like I’d just sprouted an extra head. I told him, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. We’re probably going to be working together for a while. It’d make things easier for everybody if we all made the effort to respect one another’s customs and philosophies.”

Narayan scooted off. He began the process of laying a fire and of telling people where they could homestead. The temple was not that big inside. There would not be much room to spread out there.

Singh would not turn his back on me.

“You spooked him good,” Riverwalker told me. “He’ll spend the whole night with his back to the wall, trying to stay awake.”

“I hope my snoring helps. Iqbal, don’t do that.” The fool had actually started helping Mother Gota set up to do some cooking. That old woman was a menace around a cook fire. She was already under a ban throughout the Company. She could boil water and give it a taste to gag you.

Iqbal grinned a grin that told the world he needed to consult One-Eye about his teeth. “We’re setting this up for me.”

“All right.” Much better. Much much better.

After she finished helping Iqbal, the old woman helped milk the goats. Now I understood how Narayan felt. Maybe I should keep my back to a wall and watch my dozing, too.

Gota was not even complaining.

And Uncle Doj had stayed outside, presumably to enjoy the refreshing weather and cheerful woods.

52

It was dry in that wicked temple but it never got warm. I do not believe a brushfire could have routed the chill that inhabited that place, that gnawed into your bones and soul like an ancient and ugly spiritual rheumatism. Even Narayan Singh felt it. He hunched over the fire, twitching, as though he expected a blow from behind at any minute. He muttered something about his faith having been tested enough.

I do not belong to an empathetic and compassionate brotherhood. Those who offend us must look forward to moments of extreme discomfort, should God in His magnanimity see fit to present us with the opportunity to provide it. And our antipathy toward Narayan Singh was so old it had become ritual. So it was not with any commiseration that I told him, “We’re prepared to make the exchange. Our First Book of the Dead for your Key.”

His head came up. He stared at me directly, the true Narayan behind the masked Narayan considering me coldly. Wariness took life in the corners of his eyes. “How could—”

“Never mind. We have it. A swap was the deal. And we’re ready to swap now.”

Calculation began to replace caution. I would have bet a handsome sum he was assessing his chances of murdering us in our sleep so he would not have to keep his side of the bargain.

“It would be, perhaps, a less elegant solution than mass murder, Narayan, but why not just do the deal the way we agreed?” I shivered. The temple seemed to be getting colder, if that was possible. “In fact, I’ll give you a bonus. Once you hand over the Key, you can go. Away. Free. As long as you vow not to screw with the Black Company anymore.” A vow he would make in an instant, I was sure, such vows being worth the bark they are written on when they spring from the mouths of Deceivers. Kina would not expect him to keep faith with an unbeliever.

“A truly generous, offer, Annalist,” Singh replied. Suspiciously. “Let me sleep on it.”

“By all means.” I snapped my fingers. Iqbal and Runmust broke out the shackles. “Put the goatbells on him tonight, too.” We had several of those, to go with several goats. Once attached to Narayan’s shackles, they made a racket whenever he moved. He was a stealthmaster, but not master enough to keep the bells from betraying him. “But don’t be surprised if I don’t feel as generous when light and warmth return to the world. Darkness always comes, but the sun also rises.”

I had my blanket around me already. I pulled it tighter and lay down, squirmed a little in a vain attempt to get comfortable, then fell into the sort of evil-haunted dreams apparently experienced by anyone who passes the night in the Grove of Doom.

I was aware that I was dreaming. And I was familiar with the dreamscapes, though I had never visited them myself. Both Lady and Murgen had written about them. The visual elements did not trouble me terribly. But nothing had prepared me for the stench, which was the stink of thousand-week-old battlefields, worse than any stench I remembered from the siege of Jaicur. Countless crows had come to banquet there.

After a while I began to feel another presence, far off but approaching, and I was afraid, not wanting to come face-to-face with Narayan’s dreadful goddess. I wanted to run but did not know how. Murgen had drawn upon years of experience when he eluded Kina.

Then I realized I was not being stalked. This presence was not inimical. In fact, it was more aware of me than I of it. It was amused by my discomfort.

Murgen?

’Tis I, my apprentice. I thought you ’d dream here tonight. I was right. I like being right. It’s one of the joys of bachelorhood I had forgotten until I became a haunt.

I don’t think Sahra would appreciate—

Of course not. Forget that. I don’t have time. There’re things you should know and I won’t be able to reach you again directly until you enter the dark roads on the glittering plain. Listen.

I “listened.”

Life in Taglios was proceeding normally. The scandal at the royal library and disappearance of the chief librarian had been played into a major distraction by the Protector. Soulcatcher was more interested in consolidating her position than in rooting out remnants of the Black Company. After all these years she still did not take us as seriously as we wanted. Or she was completely confident that she could root us out and exterminate us any time she felt like bothering.

That being a possibility, Murgen’s advice was sound. We should keep moving fast while that option was available.

The best news was that Jaul Barundandi had shown an eager willingness to attach himself to the cause in hopes of avenging his wife. His initial assignment, to be carried out only if he was confident he could manage without getting caught or leaving evidence, was to penetrate the Protector’s quarters and steal, destroy, or somehow incapacitate the magical carpets she had stolen from the Howler. If those could be denied her, our position would improve dramatically. He was also to recruit allies—without telling them that he was helping the Black Company. The ancient hysterical prejudice remained potent.

It sounded wonderful but I counted on nothing. Men driven solely by a need for revenge are flawed tools at best. If he let the obsession consume him, he would be lost to us before he could do any of the quiet, long-term things that make an inside man such a treasure.

The bad news was bad indeed.

The main party, traveling by water, had passed through the delta and was now ascending the Naghir River, meaning it was way ahead of us in terms of time still needed to reach the Shadowgate.

One-Eye had suffered a stroke two nights earlier, during a drunken knock-down-drag-out with his best friend Goblin.

Death did not claim him. Goblin’s swift intercession had prevented that. But now he suffered from a mild paralysis and the sort of perplexing speech problems that sometimes come after a stroke. The latter made it difficult for One-Eye to communicate to Goblin what Goblin needed to know to cope with the problem. The words One-Eye wanted to say or write were not the words that came out.

A problem that is maddening enough for the ordinary Annalist, coping only with time constraints and native stupidity.

You cannot prepare yourself enough. The inevitable is always a shock when it lowers its evil wing.

As if responding to a great joke, the circling crows rattled with dark, mocking laughter. The skulls in the bonefield grinned, enjoying the grand joke, too.

There were more minor bits of news. Once Murgen exhausted his store, I asked, Can you reach Slink if he’s here? Can you put a thought into his empty head?

Possibly.

Try. With this.

My idea amused Murgen. He hurried off to haunt Slink’s certain-to-be-strange dreams. The crows scattered, as though there was nothing interesting keeping them around anymore.

I continued to people the place of nightmare, hoping I would not become a regular, as had befallen Lady and Murgen. I wondered if Lady still went there, making her interment that much more a session in hell.

A crow landed high up in a barren tree, against the face of what passed for a sun in that place. I could not distinguish it but it seemed different from the other crows.

Sister, sister. I am with you always.

Terror reached down inside me and squeezed my heart with a fist of iron. I shot bolt upright. Panic and confusion swamped me as I grabbed for my weapons.

Doj stared at me from beyond the fire. “Nightmares?”

I shivered in the cold. “Yes.”

“They’re the bad side of staying here. But you can learn to shut them out.”

“I know what to do about them. Get away from this godforsaken place as soon as I can. Tomorrow. Early. Right after the Deceiver turns over the Key and you authenticate it.”

I thought I heard faint crow laughter in the night outside.

53

I took my turn on watch. I discovered that I was not the only one with problem dreams. Everyone slept poorly, including Narayan. Iqbal’s baby never stopped whimpering. The goats and donkeys, though not allowed inside, also bleated and snorted and whimpered all night long.

The Grove of Doom is just plain a Bad Place. No way around that. Some things are black and white.

Morning was not much more pleasant than night had been. And even before breakfast, Narayan tried to sneak away. Riverwalker showed remarkable restraint in bringing him back still able to walk.

“You were going to run out on me now?” I demanded. I had a good idea what he really had in mind but did not want him to suspect I knew what had become of the friends he had expected to rescue him. “I thought you wanted that book back.”

He shrugged.

“I had a dream last night. And it wasn’t a good dream. It took me places I didn’t want to go, with beings I didn’t want to see. But it was a true dream. I came away with the certainty that neither of us has any chance of getting what we want if we don’t fulfill our ends of our bargain. So I’m here to tell you I’m playing it straight up, the Book of the Dead for the Key.”

Narayan betrayed a flicker of annoyance at my mention of a dream. No doubt he had hoped for divine guidance and had failed to receive it last night. “I just wanted to look for something I left here last time I visited.”

“The Key?”

“No. A personal trinket.” He squatted beside the cook fire, where Mother Gota and Suruvhija were preparing rice. The Radisha, to the amazement of all, was trying to help. Or, better put, was trying to learn what was being done so she could help at another time. Neither woman offered the Princess’s status any special respect. Gota snarled and complained at the Radisha exactly as she would have done with the rest of us.

I watched Narayan eat. He used chopsticks. I had not noticed that before. Paranoid me, I searched my memory, trying to remember if Singh had used the customary wooden spoon in the past. Uncle Doj, like all Nyueng Bao, used chopsticks. And he claimed they constituted some of his deadliest weapons.

I was going to go crazy if I did not get Narayan out of my life for a while.

He smiled as though he was reading my mind. I think maybe he put too much faith in my word on behalf of the Company. “Show me the book, Annalist.”

I looked around. “Doj?”

The man appeared in the temple doorway. What was he up to in there? “Yes?”

“The Master Deceiver wishes to see the Book of the Dead.”

“As you wish.” He descended the leaf-strewn outer steps, rummaged through one of the donkey packs, came up with the oilskin package we had retrieved from the Shadowlander tomb. He presented it to the Deceiver with a bow and a flourish, stepped back and crossed his arms. I noted that in some mystic manner, Ash Wand had found its way onto his back. I recalled that Doj’s adopted family bore Narayan Singh and the Strangler cult an abiding grudge. Deceivers had murdered To Tan, the son of Sahra’s brother Thai Dei. Thai Dei lay buried beneath glittering stone with the Captured.

Uncle Doj had offered no promises to Narayan Singh.

I wondered if Singh knew all that. Most of it, probably, though the subject never arose in his presence.

I noted, also, that without plan or signal, my other companions had placed themselves so that we were surrounded by armed men. Only Swan seemed unsure of his role. “Settle and have some rice,” I told him.

“I hate rice, Sleepy.”

“We’re going places where there’ll be a little more variety. I hope. I’ve eaten rice till it’s coming out my ears, too.”

Narayan opened the oilskins reverently, set them aside one by one, ready to be reused. The book he revealed was big and ugly but not much distinguished it from volumes I saw every day when I was Dorabee Dey Banerjae. Nothing branded it the most holy, most sacred text of the darkest cult in the world.

Narayan opened it. The writing inside was completely inelegant, erratic, disorganized and sloppy. The Daughter of Night had begun inscribing it when she was four. As Narayan turned the pages I saw that the girl was a fast learner. Her hand improved rapidly. I saw, too, that she had written in the same script used to record the first volume of the Annals. Were both in the same language?

Where was Master Santaraksita when I needed him?

Out on the Naghir with Sahra and One-Eye. No doubt complaining about the accommodations and the lack of fine dining. Too bad, old man. I have the same problems here.

“Satisfied that it’s genuine?” I asked.

Narayan could not deny it.

“So I’ve lived up to my half of the bargain. I have, in fact, made every effort to facilitate it. The game is back to you now.”

“You have nothing to lose, Annalist. I still wonder how I would get away from here alive.”

“I won’t do anything to keep you from leaving. If revenge is absolutely necessary, it’ll be that much sweeter down the road.” Narayan tried to read my true intentions. He was incapable of accepting anything at face value. “On the other hand, there’s no way you’ll go anywhere if you don’t produce the Key. And we’ll know if you try to pass off a substitute.” I looked at Doj.

Narayan did the same. Then he settled into an attitude of prayer and sealed his eyes.

Kina may have responded. The grove did turn icy cold. A sudden breeze brought a ghost of the odor from the place of the bones.

Singh shuddered, opened his eyes. “I have to go into the temple. Alone.”

“Wouldn’t be a back way out of there, would there?”

Singh smiled softly. “Would it do me any good if there were?”

“Not this time. Your only way out of here is not to be a Deceiver.”

“So be it. There’ll be no Year of the Skulls if I don’t take a chance.”

“Let him go,” I told Doj, who stood between Narayan and the temple. River and Runmust, I noted, now had bamboo in hand, in case the little man made a break.

“He’s been in there a long time,” River complained.

“But he’s still there,” Doj assured us. “The Key must be well hidden.”

Or not there anymore, I did not say. “What’re we looking at here?” I asked Doj. “I’m not clear on what this Key is. Is it another lance head?” The Lance of Passion had opened the plain to Croaker, then had ushered the Captured to their doom.

“I’ve only heard it described. It’s a strangely shaped hammer. He’s about to come out.”

Narayan appeared. He seemed changed, invigorated, frightened. Riverwalker gestured with his bamboo. Runmust raised his slowly. Singh knew what those poles could do. He had no chance if he tried to run now.

He carried what looked like a cast-iron war hammer, old, rusty, and ugly, with the head all chipped and cracked. Narayan made it seem heavier than it looked.

“Doj?” I asked. “What do you think?”

“Fits the description, Annalist. Except for the head being all cracked.”

Singh said, “I dropped it. It cracked when it hit the temple floor.”

“Feel it, Doj. If there’s any power there, you ought to be able to tell.”

Doj did as I said once Singh surrendered the hammer. The Nyueng Bao seemed startled by its weight. “This must be it, Annalist.”

“Take your book and start running, Deceiver. Before temptation makes me forget my promises.”

Narayan clutched the book but did not move. He stared at Suruvhija and the baby.

Suruvhija was using a red silk scarf to dab spit-up off the infant’s chin.

Fools! Idiots!

54

While we were getting ready to travel, one of Iqbal’s kids—the older boy—noticed a particularly deep flaw in the head of the hammer. The rest of us had been too busy congratulating ourselves and deciding what the Company would do once we brought the Captured forth from the plain. The boy got his father’s attention. Iqbal summoned Runmust and me.

Being old folks, it took us a while to see what the boy meant. Us having bad eyes and all.

“Looks like gold in there.”

“That would explain the weight. Doj. Come here. You ever hear anything about this hammer being gold inside?”

Iqbal began prying with a knife. A fragment of iron fell away.

“No,” Doj said. “Don’t damage it any more.”

“Everybody calm down. It’s still the Key. Doj, study it. Carefully. I don’t want all the years and all the crap we went through to go to waste now. What?” Weapons had begun to appear.

“Look who’s here,” Swan said. “Where did those guys come from?”

Slink and his band had arrived. I exchanged looks with Slink. He shrugged. “Gave us the slip.”

“I’m not surprised. We screwed up here. He knew somebody was out there.” Suruvhija still had the red scarf draped over her shoulder. “Folks, we need to get traveling. We want to get across the bridge at Ghoja before the Protector starts looking for us.” From the beginning I had pretended that getting across that bridge would give us a running chance.

I told Slink, “You guys did a great job at Semchi.”

“Could’ve been better. If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve waited till they damaged the Bhodi Tree. Then we’d have been heroes instead of just bandits.”

I shrugged. “Next time. Swan, tell that goat we’re going to eat it if it don’t start cooperating.”

“You promise?”

“I promise we’ll get some real food when we get to Jaicur.”

55

Our crossing at Ghoja was another grand anticlimax.

We all worked ourselves into a state of nerves before we reached the bottleneck. I sent Slink forward to scout and did not believe a word, emotionally, when he reported the only attention being paid anyone went to those few travelers who argued about paying a two-copper pais toll for use of the bridge. These tightwads were commended to the old ford downstream from the bridge. A ford that was impassable because this was the rainy season. Traffic was heavy. The soldiers assigned to watch the bridge were too busy loafing and playing cards to harass wayfarers.

Some part of me was determined to expect the worst.

Ghoja had grown into a small town serving those who traveled the Rock Road, which was one of the Black Company’s lasting legacies. The Captain had had the highway paved from Taglios to Jaicur during his preparations for invading the Shadowlands. Prisoners of war had provided the labor. More recently, Mogaba had used convicts to extend the road southwestward, adding tributaries, to connect the cities and territories newly taken under Taglian protection.

Once we were safely over the Main, I began to ponder our next steps. I gathered everyone. “Is there any way we could forge a rescript ordering the garrison here to arrest Narayan if he crosses the bridge?”

Doj told me, “You’re too optimistic. If he’s going south, he’s already ahead of us.”

Swan added, “Not to mention that if he fell into the Protector’s hands, she’d find out everything he knows about you.”

“The voice of an expert heard.”

“I didn’t take the job voluntarily.”

“All right. She could, yes. He knows where we’re headed. And why. And that we have the Key. But what does he know about the other bunch? If he doesn’t get caught, won’t he try to intercept them so he can do something about getting the Daughter of Night away from them?”

No one found any cause to disagree.

“I suggest we remind one another of that occasionally, so it gets said sometime when Murgen is around to hear it.” Sahra never promised to spare Narayan’s ragged old hide. Maybe she could ambush him and take back that unfinished first Book of the Dead.

Swan pointed out, “That crow is still following us.”

A small but lofty fortification overlooked the bridge and ford from the south bank. The bird was up top watching us. It had not moved since our crossing. Maybe it wanted to rest its bones, too.

River whispered, “We still have one bamboo pole with crow-killing balls in it.”

“Leave it alone. It doesn’t seem to mean any harm. For now, anyway.” I was sure it had tried to communicate several times. “We can take it out if anything changes.”

At Ghoja we heard nothing but the traditional grumbling about those in charge. Rumors concerning events in Taglios seemed so exaggerated that no one believed a tenth of anything they heard. Later, after we reached Jaicur and were taking it easy for a while, the temper of rumor began to change. It now carried a subtle vibration suggesting the great spider at the heart of the web had begun to stir. It would be a long time before any concrete news caught up but the general consensus was that we should get going right now and not dawdle along the way.

Runmust discovered that a man answering Narayan’s description had been seen lurking in the vicinity of the shop operated by his now-pseudonymous offspring, Sugriva. “The man does have a weakness. Should we kill Sugriva while we’re here?”

“He’s never done anything to us.”

“His father did. It would be a reminder to him.”

“He doesn’t need reminding. If Narayan is so dim that he thinks we’re done with him now, let him. Just let me be there to see the look on his face when we catch him again.”

Narayan had stood out in Jaicur because the city was still very nearly a military encampment. People would remember us as well, if asked during the next few weeks.

I roamed around looking for my childhood a few times but nothing that I remembered, people or places, good or evil, remained. That past survived nowhere but within my mind. Which was the one place I wished that it could die.

56

The practical rules of Company field operations resemble those obeyed by stage magicians. We would prefer our audience saw nothing at all but we do realize that invisibility is impractical. So we try to show the watcher something other than what he is looking for. Thus the goats and donkeys. And, south of Jaicur, all new looks and identities for everybody, with the enlarged party breaking up into two independently traveling “families,” plus a group of failed southern fortune-hunters dragging home in despair and defeat after having had their spirits crushed by the Taglian experience. There were quite a few men of the latter sort around. They had to be watched. Many were not above taking advantage of weaker parties if they thought they could manage it. The roads were not patrolled anymore. The Protector did not care if they were safe.

Doj and Swan, Gota and I formed the advance party. We looked weak but that old man was worth four or five ordinary mortals. We had only one scrape. It was over in seconds. Several blood trails led off into the brush. Doj had chosen to leave no one dead.

The land became less hospitable and rose steadily. In clear air it was possible to look ahead and catch the faintest glimpse of the peaks of the Dandha Presh, still many days’ journey south of us. The paved road ended alongside an abandoned work camp. “They must’ve run out of prisoners,” Swan observed. The camp had been stripped of everything portable.

“What they ran out of is enemies Soulcatcher thought were worth an investment in a road. She could always find people she doesn’t like and use them up in an engineering project.” And she had done so on the western route, which was being followed by the rest of the Company. They would have paved footing all the way to Charandaprash. Their road, and the waterways serving it, had remained under construction until just a few years ago, when the Protector evidently decided the Kiaulune wars really were over, that it was not necessary to make life easy for the Great General and his men, and bullied the Radisha into no longer spending the money.

I wondered what the Radisha’s perspective would be. I suspected she had believed she was in charge right up to the moment we disappeared her. Then she had begun getting an education, here amongst her faithful subjects.

We reached Lake Tanji, which I love. The lake is a vast sprawl of icy indigo beauty. When I was a lot younger, we fought our deadliest encounter with the things that had given the Shadowmasters their names there. More than a decade later you could still see places where rock had melted. If you went exploring some of the narrow gulches scarring the hillsides, you could find clutches of human bones that had come back to the surface with time.

“This is a place of dark memory,” Doj remarked. He had been here for that battle, too. And so had Gota, who had stopped complaining long enough to deal with her memories also.

She really did have a lot of pain these days.

The white crow streaked overhead. It dropped down the slope ahead, vanished into the ragged foliage of a tall mountain pine. We saw that bird almost every day now. There was no doubt it was following us. Swan swore that it had tried to strike up a conversation with him once when he was out in the brush relieving himself.

When I asked what it wanted, he said, “Hey, I got the hell out of there, Sleepy. I’ve got problems enough. I don’t need to get known as a guy who gossips with birds, too.”

“It might’ve had something interesting to say.”

“Without a doubt. And if it really wants to tell somebody something badly enough, it’ll come talk to you.”

Right now Swan looked down the slope and said, “It’s hiding from something.”

“But not from us.” I looked back up the slope. The ground appeared untouched up there. There was no sign of other travelers. Below me, downhill, the meandering track appeared occasionally upon the slope and along the shore, both of which were deserted. This was no longer a popular route. “I could retire beside that lake,” I told Swan.

“Must not be the best place or somebody would’ve beaten you to it.”

He had a point. This country was far emptier now than it had been twenty years ago. Then there had been villages around the lake.

“There you go,” Swan said, looking back.

“What?” I looked. It took a moment. “Oh. The bird?”

“Not just a bird. A crow. The regular kind of crow.”

“Your eyes are better than mine. Ignore it. If we don’t pay it any special attention, it shouldn’t have any reason to concentrate on us.” My heartbeat was rising, though.

Maybe it was just a feral crow and had nothing to do with Soulcatcher. Crows are not fastidious about their dining.

Or maybe the Protector had, at last, begun looking for us outside of Taglios.

White crow in hiding, black crow in the air, searching. What did it mean?

Not much we could do about it, whatever. Though Uncle Doj had a calculating eye whenever he looked up at the black crow.

It lost interest after a while. It went away. I told the others, “That shouldn’t be a problem. Crows are smart, for birds, but one by itself can’t remember a lot of instructions or carry much information back. If it is one of hers.” We had to assume that it was. Crows were much less common than they used to be. Those remaining always seemed to be under Soulcatcher’s control. Her control was probably why they were dying out.

If this one was a scout for the Protector, it would be days yet before it could report.

Doj observed, “If it was suspicious, we can expect to have shadows around in a few days.”

That would be Soulcatcher’s best means of scouting us. Shadows traveled faster than crows, could be given much more complex instructions and could bring back far more information. But could Soulcatcher control them so far away? The original Shadowmasters had had major difficulties managing their pets over long distances.

We passed along the shores of Lake Tanji. Each of us seized an opportunity to bathe in the icy water. The old road then led us on to the Plain of Charandaprash, where the Black Company had won one of its greatest triumphs and the Great General had suffered his most humiliating defeat—through no fault of his own. Though a capricious history would not recall the blame due his cowardly master, Longshadow. Wreckage from that battle still lay scattered across the slopes. A small garrison watched over the approaches to the pass through the Dandha Presh. It showed no interest in clearing any mess or, even, in monitoring traffic. Nobody looked my group over. Nobody asked questions. We were assessed an unofficial toll and warned that the donkey might find the footing treacherous in the high pass because there was still ice on the rocks up there. We did learn that there had been heavier traffic than usual lately. That told me that Sahra’s group had encountered no insuperable difficulties and was ahead of us, as it should be, even with all the old men and reluctant companions.

The mountains were far colder and more barren than the highlands we had crossed. I wondered how the Radisha was handling it, about her thoughts concerning the empire she had acquired, mostly thanks to the Company. Doubtless her eyes had been opened some.

They needed a lot of opening. She had spent most of her life cooped up inside the Palace.

The white crow turned up every few days but its darker kinfolk did not. Maybe the Protector was preoccupied elsewhere.

I wished I had Murgen’s talent for leaving his body. I had not had so much as a good dream since leaving the Grove of Doom. I knew exactly as little as everyone else. And that was extremely frustrating after having had easy access to secrets from afar for so long.

Nights in the mountains get really cold. I told Swan I was tempted to take up his suggestion that we go off somewhere and set up housekeeping in our own tavern and brewery. When it got really cold, a few lesser sins did not seem to matter.

57

The timing of events in Taglios is uncertain because the principal reporter, Murgen, had maintained such a casual relationship with the concept for the last decade and a half. But his sketchy descriptions of events in the city following our departure are of more than passing interest.

At first the Protector suspected nothing. The stay-behinds planted smoke buttons and started rumors but with a declining enthusiasm the Taglian peoples began to sense. At the same time, though, the populace developed an abiding suspicion that the Protector had done away with the reigning Princess. The people became less tractable by the hour.

The arrival of the Great General and his forces guaranteed the peace. Moreover, it freed the Protector to go hunting enemies instead of spending her time making sure her friends remained intimidated enough to continue supporting her. In just days she found the Nyueng Bao warehouse on the waterfront, empty now except for a few cages occupied by missing members of the Privy Council, none of whom were in shape to resume their duties. An armamentarium of booby traps came with the prodigal ministers, of course, but none of those were clever enough to inconvenience Soulcatcher herself. Quite a few Greys were not so fortunate. The Protector took rather a heartless view of those who did fall victim to the Company legacy. “Better to get the dimwits winnowed out now, when the broader risk is minimal,” she told Mogaba. The Great General’s attitude complemented hers precisely.

Questions asked in the neighborhood produced no information of substance, however vigorously they were put. The Nyueng Bao merchants had been careful to maintain a veil around themselves and their businesses. They had even employed the magical in their quest for greater anonymity. Wisps of confusion spells persisted yet.

“I smell those two wizards,” Soulcatcher muttered. “But you promised me that they were dead, didn’t you, Great General?”

“I saw them die myself.”

“You’d better hope you don’t irritate me so much you don’t survive to see them die again, for real.” Her voice was that of a spoiled child.

The Great General did not respond. If Soulcatcher frightened him, he showed no sign. Neither did he betray any anger. He waited, reasonably confident that he was too valuable to become the victim of an evil caprice. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he thought the Protector was not equally valuable.

“There’s no trace of them,” Soulcatcher mumbled later, in a voice academically cool. “They’re gone. Yet the impression of their presence persists, as bold as a bucket of blood thrown against a wall.”

“Illusion,” Mogaba said. “I’m sure you’d find a hundred instances in the Black Company Annals of where they drew an enemy’s eye in one direction while they moved in another. Or made someone believe their numbers were far greater than they actually were.”

“You’d find as many instances in my diaries. If I bothered to keep any. I don’t, because books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.” The voice she used now was the antithesis of academic. It was that of a man who knew, from painful experience, that education just taught people sneakier ways to rob you. “They aren’t here anymore but they may have left spies.”

“Of course they did. It’s doctrine. But you’ll have a hell of a time finding them. They won’t be people anyone else would suspect.”

Jaul Barundandi and two of his assistants laid out a dinner while the Protector and her champion talked. Their presence attracted no notice. Paranoid though she was, Soulcatcher paid little heed to the furniture. Every staffer had been interrogated in the hours following the Radisha’s disappearance and no inside accomplices had been found.

The Protector was not unaware that she was not as beloved of the staff as the Radisha had been. But she was not troubled. No mundane attacker had any genuine hope of penetrating her personal defenses. And these days she had no peer in this world. Sheer perversity and protracted elusiveness had put her in a position to elect herself queen of the world. If she wanted to bother.

Someday, when she got her head organized, she was going to have to think about that.

Halfway through a rare meal Soulcatcher paused in mid-chew. She told Mogaba, “Find me a Nyueng Bao. Any Nyueng Bao. Right now. Right away.”

The lean black man showed no emotion as he rose. “May I ask why?”

“Their headquarters was inside a Nyueng Bao warehouse. Nyueng Bao have been associated with the Company since the fighting at Dejagore. The last Annalist married one of them. He had a child by her. The association may be more than historical happenstance.” She knew a great deal more about Nyueng Bao than she was willing to share, of course.

Mogaba inclined his upper body in a ghost of a bow. Mostly he was comfortable working with Soulcatcher. Mostly he approved of her thinking. He went in search of someone who could catch him a couple of swamp monkeys.

The servants hovered around the Protector, perfectly attentive. Idly, she noted that these three were among the same half dozen who struggled to make her life easier wherever she happened to be in the Palace. In fact, one or more always followed her on her exploratory safaris into the maze of abandoned corridors that made up the majority of the Palace, just in case she needed something. Lately they had brought life into her personal quarters, which for so long had been as chill and barren and dusty as the empty sectors.

It was their nature. It was bred into them. They must serve. Without the Radisha to fulfill their need for a master, they had had to turn to her.

Mogaba was away hours longer than she liked. When the man did deign to return, her voice of choice was spoiled-brat querulous. “Where have you been? What took you so long?”

“I’ve been demonstrating how hard it is to catch the wind. There are no Nyueng Bao anywhere in the city. The last time anyone can remember seeing any of them was the day before yesterday, in the morning. They were going aboard a barge that later headed downriver, toward the swamps. Evidently the swamp people have been leaving Taglios since before the Radisha disappeared and you hurt your heel.”

Soulcatcher growled. She did not want to be reminded that she had been tricked. The heel itself was reminder enough.

“The Nyueng Bao are a stubborn people.”

“Famous for it,” Mogaba agreed.

“I’ve visited them twice before. Each time they failed to appreciate my full message. I suppose I’ll have to go preach to them again. And round up any fugitives they’ve taken in.” It was an obvious conclusion, that the Company survivors had retreated into the swamps. The Nyueng Bao had taken in fugitives before. And supportive evidence was available if the Protector cared to dig. The barges carrying the majority of the Company had gone downriver. You had to go down into the delta to get to the Naghir River, which was the principal navigable waterway leading into the south.

Soulcatcher popped up. She rushed out with the bounce and enthusiasm of a teenager. Mogaba settled down to contemplate the remains of his meal, which had not yet been cleared away. One of the servants murmured, “We thought you might wish to continue, sir. Should you prefer otherwise, we will clear away instantly.”

Mogaba looked up into a bland face that projected eagerness to serve. Nevertheless, he had a momentary impression that the man was measuring his back for a dagger.

“Take it away. I’m not hungry.”

“As you wish, sir. Girish, take the leftovers to the charity postern. Make certain the beggars there know that the Protector is thinking of them.”

Mogaba watched the servants depart. He wondered what had given him the impression that that man was insincere. The truth supposedly lay in a man’s deeds, and that one never behaved as anything less than a totally devoted servant.

Soulcatcher stamped into her personal suite. The more she thought about the Nyueng Bao, the more enraged she became. What would it take to teach those people? That seemed like something they could work out between them before the sun came up. A night of shadow-terror ought, at the very least, to put them into a mood to pay attention.

Soulcatcher understood herself better than outsiders believed she did. She wondered why she was in so foul a temper, which seemed to go beyond her usual caprice and irritability. She belched, hammered her chest with a fist to loosen another burp. Maybe it was the spicy food. She sensed bad heartburn coming. She felt a little light-headed, too.

She climbed to the parapet where she kept the only two flying carpets left in the world. That could be reached only by the route she followed. She would go down there and make those swamp monkeys pay for the heartburn, too. Dinner had been a Nyueng Bao ethnic specialty consisting of big, ugly mushrooms, uglier eels, and unidentifiable vegetables in a blisteringly spicy sauce, served upon a bed of rice. It had been a favorite of the Radisha’s, served often. The kitchens had not changed their routines, because the Protector did not care about the menu.

The Protector belched again. The growing heartburn seared her insides.

She jumped on the larger carpet. It creaked under her weight. She ordered it to head downriver. Fast.

A few miles out, four hundred feet above the rooftops, streaking faster than a racing pigeon, sabotaged frame members under the carpet began to snap. Once the first went, the stress became too much for the others. The carpet disintegrated in seconds.

A burst of light flared, bright enough to be seen by half the city. The last thing Soulcatcher saw, as she arced toward the surface of the river, was a huge circle of characters declaring “Water Sleeps.”

Just before the flash leaped through his window, a bemused Mogaba discovered a folded, sealed letter on his spartan cot. Belching, glad he had eaten no more of that spicy food, he broke the wax and read “My brother unforgiven.” Then the unexpected lightning grabbed his attention. He read the slogan in the sky, too. All the labor he had invested in learning to read over the past few years was to be rewarded thus?

What now? If the Protector was gone? Pretend she was in hiding, too, and make the deceit a double veil?

He belched again, settled down on his cot. He did not feel well at all. That was a baffling new feeling for him. He never got sick.

58

A chatty youngster of native stock and a more than customarily ambitious disposition interviewed us at the military control point we encountered at the southern end of the pass. He was not yet old enough to be pompously officious but he would get there. Personally, he seemed more interested in foreign news than in contraband or wanted men. “What’s going on up north?” he wanted to know. “We’ve seen a lot of refugees lately.” He examined our meager possessions without ever looking inside anything.

Gota and Doj rattled at one another in Nyueng Bao and pretended not to understand the young man’s accented Taglian. I shrugged and responded in Jaicuri at first, which is close enough to Taglian for the two peoples to understand one another most of the time, but here it only frustrated the young official. I had no desire to stand around gossiping with a functionary. “I do not know about others. We have had nothing but decades of misfortune and suffering. We heard there were opportunities down here so we abandoned the Land of Our Sorrows and came.”

The official assumed I meant a particular country, as I had hoped, rather than recognizing that the Land of Our Sorrows was the Vehdna way of describing where a convert lived before he became acquainted with God.

“You say there are many others doing the same as us?” I tried to sound troubled.

“Recently, yes. Which is why I feared something might be afoot.”

He feared for the stability of the empire to which he had attached himself. I could not resist a prank. “There were rumors that the Black Company had surfaced in Taglios and was warring with the Protector. But there are always crazy stories about the Black Company. They never mean anything. And they had nothing to do with our decision.”

The young man became more unhappy. He passed us through without further interest. I did not bother commending him but he was the only official we had encountered since leaving Taglios who was making a serious effort to perform his duties. And he was doing it only in hopes of getting ahead.

I never had to bring out the richly complex legend I have invented for our foursome, in which Swan was my second husband, Gota the mother of my deceased first spouse and Doj her cousin, all of us survivors of the wars. The story would have played in any region where there had been any extended fighting. Splatchcobbled family survival teams were not at all uncommon.

I complained, “I worked on weaving us a history all the way down here and I never got to use it. Not once. Nobody’s doing their job.”

Doj smiled and winked and vanished into the broken ground beside the road, off to reclaim the weapons we had hidden before approaching the checkpoint.

“Somebody should do something about that,” Swan declared. “Next vice-regal subofficer I see, I’ll march right up and give him a piece of my mind. We all pay taxes. We have a right to expect more effort from our officials.”

Gota woke up long enough to call Swan an idiot in Taglian and Nyueng Bao. She told him he ought to shut up before even the God of Fools renounced him. Then she closed her eyes and resumed snoring. Gota had begun to concern me. She had shown less life every day for the past few months. Doj seemed to think she believed she no longer had anything to live for.

Maybe Sahra could get her going again. We should be joining up with the others before long. Maybe Sahra could get her excited about rescuing Thai Dei and the Captured.

I was troubled about consequences. All these years I had striven toward the undertaking we would launch before long, and now, for the first time, I had begun to wonder what success might really mean. Those people buried out there never were paragons of sanity and righteousness. They had had almost two decades to ferment in their own juices. They were unlikely to entertain much brotherly love toward the rest of the world.

And then there was the guardian demon Shivetya and, somewhere, the enchanted and enchained thing worshipped by Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night. Not to mention the mysteries and dangers of the plain itself. And all the perils we did not yet know.

Only Swan had any experience of that. He had nothing positive to report. Nor had Murgen at any time over the years, though his experiences had been dramatically different from Swan’s. Murgen had experienced the glittering plain in two worlds at once. Swan seemed to have experienced the version in our world in sharper focus. Even after so many years he could describe particular landmarks in exquisite detail.

“How come you never talked about this before?”

“I never hid it, Sleepy. But there just don’t seem to be much percentage in volunteering anything in this world. If I admit anything I know about that place, next thing I’ll know is, good old Willow Swan is elected to go back up there as the guide for a gang of invaders guaranteed to irritate the shit out of whatever spirits haunt the place. Am I right? Or am I right?”

“You aren’t as stupid as you let on. I thought you didn’t see any spirits.”

“Not the way Murgen claimed he saw them but that don’t mean I didn’t feel them creeping around. You’ll find out. You try to sleep at night when you feel hungry shadows calling you from a few feet away. It’s like being inside a zoo with all the predators in the world slavering just the other side of the bars. Bars that you can’t see and can’t even feel and so have no way of knowing if they’re trustworthy. And all this jabber ain’t doing my nerves any good at all, neither, Sleepy.”

“We may never have to go up there, Swan—if the Key we’ve got is a fake or isn’t any good anymore. Then there won’t be anything we can do but maybe set up your brewery and pretend we never heard of the Protector or the Radisha or the Black Company.”

“Be still, my heart. You know goddamn well that thing’s going to be the true Key. Your god, my gods, somebody’s gods have got a boner for Willow Swan and they’re gonna keep making sure that whatever happens, it’s gonna be the worst possible thing and it’s gonna happen to me. I oughta run out on you now. I oughta turn you in to the nearest royal official. Only that would let Soulcatcher know that I’m still alive. Then she’d get real nasty, asking me why I didn’t turn you in three, four months ago.”

“Not to mention you’d probably get yourself dead long before you could unearth an official who cared enough to listen to you.”

“There’s that, too.”

Doj came back with the weapons. We passed them around, resumed traveling. Swan continued eloquently describing himself as the firstborn son of Misfortune.

He went through these spells of high drama.

A half mile down the road we encountered a small peasants’ market. A few old folks and youngsters who could not contribute much on the farm waited to take advantage of travelers still shaking from the miseries of the mountains. Fresh foods in season were their hot sellers but they retailed gossip at no charge as long as you contributed a few snippets of your own. They found doings beyond the Dandha Presh particularly intriguing.

I asked a young girl, who looked like she could be the little sister of the customs official back up the road, “Do you remember many of the people who came through here? My father was supposed to have come down ahead of us, to find us a place to settle.” I proceeded to describe Narayan Singh in detail.

The child was a lighthearted thing, without a care or concern. Chances were she did not recall what she had eaten for breakfast. She did not remember Narayan but went off to find someone who might.

“Where was she when I was young enough to get married?” Swan grumbled. “She’ll be pretty when she’s older and she doesn’t have a brain in her head to complicate things.”

“Buy her. Bring her along. Raise her up right.”

“I’m not as pretty as I used to be.”

I tried to think of someone who was. Not even Sahra qualified.

I waited. Swan muttered. Doj and Gota wandered around, Uncle swapping tales and Mother examining the wares for sale. Except for the produce, those were feeble. She did acquire a scrawny chicken. The one positive of our travel team was that there were no Gunni or Shadar to complicate mealtime. Only Gota, who kept trying to do the cooking. Maybe I could murder the chicken in her sleep and get it roasted before she woke up.

The girl brought a very old man. He was no help, either. He seemed interested only in telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. But it did seem possible that Narayan had come through the pass some time before we had.

I hoped Murgen was on the job and had alerted the others to the possibilities.

Doj and Gota headed on down the road before I finished with the locals, surprised that my command of the language was adequate to the task. Evidently Gota was tired of riding. The donkey certainly could use the break.

“Is that a pet?” the small girl asked.

“It’s a donkey,” I said, really astonished that I had been having so little trouble communicating. They had donkeys down here, did they not?

“I know that. I meant the bird.”

“Huh! Well.” The white crow was perched on the donkey’s pack. It winked. It laughed. It said, “Sister, sister,” and flapped into the air, then glided on down the mountain.

Swan said, “I was just thinking I found an up side to this trip. It’s not raining down here.”

“Maybe I’ll see if they’ll let me have the child. In exchange for your strong back.”

“We’re getting a little too domestic here, Goodwife . . . Sleepy? Didn’t you ever have a real name?”

“Anyanyadir, the Lost Princess of Jaicur. But even now my wicked stepmother has discovered that I still live and has summoned the princes of the rakshasas to bargain with them for my murder. Hey! I’m kidding. I’m Sleepy. And you’ve known me practically since I started being Sleepy, off and on. So just let it be.”

59

Once we cleared the mountains, it was no long journey to the site of Kiaulune. Incredible destruction had been wrought there during the Shadowmaster wars, then during the Kiaulune wars between the Radisha and those who chose to keep faith with the Black Company. A pity most of the wreckage had been cleared away even before Soulcatcher decided she could declare victory and go north to claim her new place as Protector of All the Taglias. The Radisha should have seen it at its worst, to understand what she had wrought by betraying her contract with the Company. But the worst now existed only in the memories of survivors. The once-clamorous valley now boasted a sizable town and a checkerboard of new farms peopled by a mixture of natives, former prisoners of war and deserters from every conceivable faction. Peace had broken out and was being enthusiastically exploited on the presumption that it could not possibly last.

The transition from the old Kiaulune, once called Shadowcatch, and the new, simply called the New Town, saw one thing remain unchanged. Over there on the far slope of the valley, miles and miles away, beyond the crumbled, brush-strewn ruins of once-mighty Overlook, where the land quickly changed from rich green to almost barren brown, was the dreaded thing called the Shadowgate. It did not stand out but I felt its call. I told my companions, “We have to be careful not to get in a hurry now. Haste could be deadly.”

The Shadowgate was not just the only way we could get up onto the plain to go free the Captured, it was also the only portal through which the shadows imprisoned up there could escape and begin treating the whole world the way their cousins had the destitute of Taglios. And that gate was in tender shape. The Shadowmasters had injured and weakened it badly when gaining access to the shadows they enslaved.

“We’re in complete agreement on that,” Uncle Doj replied. “All the lore emphasizes the need for caution.”

There had been some disagreement between us lately. He had resumed his romance with the idea of the Company Annalist becoming his understudy in the peculiar role he played among the Nyueng Bao. The Company Annalist who had no great interest in the job but Doj was one of those people who just have grave difficulties getting their minds around the concept “No!”

“That’s new,” I said, indicating a small structure a quarter mile below the Shadowgate, beside the road. “And I don’t like its looks.” It was hard to tell from so far but the structure looked like a small fortification built of stone salvaged from the rubble of Overlook.

Doj grunted. “A potential complication.”

Swan observed, “We keep standing around looking like spies, somebody’s going to get unpleasant with us.”

A point not without substance, although those in charge seemed awfully lax. It was obvious that trouble had not visited in a while. Quite probably not since the Black Company left. “Somebody—probably named me, because I’m the only one here who looks like what she says she is—will have to go scout around.” The original plan had been for everybody to camp in the barrens not far downhill from where that new structure now stood.

I was troubled. Someone should have been watching for us to come out of the mountains. I hoped that was just Sahra’s oversight. She had been married to the Company for an age but never did learn to think like a soldier. If nobody offered good advice, or she chose to ignore the advice she was given because, like many civilians, she could not grasp why all the little horsepuckey things have to be done, she might not have thought it important to watch for us.

I prayed it was as simple as that.

Nobody demanded that I give them the role of scout. Poor me. More sore feet while the rest of them loafed around in the shade of young pines.

The white crow materialized minutes after I turned the knee of a hill and the others were out of sight. It swooped at me and squawked. It swooped at me again. I tried to swat it like it was some huge, really annoying bug. It laughed and came back, now squawking what sounded like words.

I got it. Finally. The bird wanted me to follow it. “Lead on, fell harbinger, never forgetting that I’m not Gunni and therefore hobbled by no holy ban against eating meat.” I had enjoyed, if that is the proper word, crow stew several times during the lowest lows of my military career.

The crow had only my interests at heart. It led me straight to a large tent village on a hillside overlooking the near outskirts of the New Town. Our people had to be only some of the refugees housed there but Sahra’s hand was obvious everywhere. The layout was neat and orderly and clean. Exactly as the Captain’s rules insisted, though those are honored mainly in the breech when he is not around.

I suffered an immediate conflict. Charge ahead to see everyone I had missed for months? Or run back and collect my traveling companions? Once I started gabbing, it might be hours before—

My choice got made for me. Tobo spotted me.

My first warning was a shout. “Sleepy!” A mass of churning arms and legs charged in from the left and collected me in a totally unexpected hug.

I wriggled loose. “You’ve grown.” A lot. He was taller than me now. And his voice had deepened. “You won’t be able to be Shiki anymore. The great men of Taglios will be brokenhearted.”

“Goblin says it’s time I start breaking the girls’ hearts, anyway.” There was not much doubt that he would have the power to do that. He was going to be a handsome man who had no lack of confidence.

Uncharacteristically, I slipped an arm around his waist and walked down toward where other familiar faces had begun to appear. “How was your journey?”

“Mostly kind of fun, except when they made me study, which was about all the time. Sri Surendranath is worse than Goblin but he says I could be a scholar. So Mother always backs them up whenever anybody wants to make me study. But we got to see a lot of neat things. There was this temple in Praiphurbed that was completely covered with carvings of people doing it all different ways—oh, I’m sorry.” He reddened.

Tobo had a mental image of me as a sort of chaste nun. And most of my adult life would not contradict that view. But I am not against interpersonal adventures, I am just not interested myself. Probably because, Swan insists, I have not yet run into the man whose animal presence completely overwhelms my intellectual reluctance. Swan being a leading authority in his own mind.

He keeps volunteering. Who knows? Maybe someday I will become curious enough to experiment, just to find out if I can be touched without running away to my place to hide.

Now the others were wishing me welcome with a sincerity that set another place inside me, a small, warm place, all aglow. My comrades. My brothers. All kinds of rattle and chatter inundated me. Now we were going to do something. Now we were going to get somewhere. Now we were going to kick some ass if we had to. Sleepy was here to figure it all out and tell everybody where and when to stick the knife.

“God knows all the secrets and all the jokes,” I said, “and I wish He’d share the secret of the joke that explains why He created such a scruffy bunch of hired killers.” I used a little finger to get rid of a tear before anybody realized that it was not raining. “You guys look pretty fat for having been on the road so long.”

Somebody said, “Shit, we been here waiting for you for a whole fuckin’ month. Some of us. The slowest ones got here last week.”

“How’s One-Eye doing?” I asked as Sahra wriggled through the throng.

“He’s fucked up,” a voice volunteered. “How’d you know . . . ?”

I exchanged hugs with Sahra. She said, “We were starting to worry.” A question clung to the edge of her statement.

“Tobo. Your grandmother and Uncle Doj are waiting in the woods back up the road. Run up and tell them to come on down.”

“Where’re the rest?” somebody demanded.

“Swan is with them. The rest are behind us somewhere. We broke up into three groups after we reached the highlands. There were crows around. We didn’t want to give them anything obvious to watch.”

“We did the same thing after we left the barges,” Sahra told me. “Did you see many crows? We saw only a few. They might not have been the Protector’s.”

“The white one keeps turning up.”

“We saw it, too. Are you hungry?”

“You kidding? I’ve been eating your mother’s cooking since we left Jaicur.” I looked around. People were watching who were not Black Company. They might only be refugees, too, but the enthusiasm of my reception was sure to cause talk.

Sahra laughed. It sounded more like the laughter of relief than that of good humor. “How is Mother?”

“I think there’s something wrong, Sahra. She’s stopped being nasty, bitter old Ky Gota. Most of the time she’s lost inside herself. And those times when she is completely aware, she almost has manners.”

“In here.” Sahra lifted a tent flap. It was the largest tent in the encampment. “And Uncle Doj?”

“A step slower but still Uncle Doj. He wants me to turn Nyueng Bao and be his apprentice. Like I have a lot of free time being Murgen’s apprentice. He says it’s just because he doesn’t have anybody else to pass his responsibilities on to. Whatever they are. He seems to think I should sign on before he tells me what for.”

“Did you get the Key?”

“We did. Uncle Doj has it in his pack. But Singh got away. Not unexpectedly. Did he turn up here? We picked up rumors along the way that gave me the idea that he was ahead of us and gaining ground. You do still have the girl?”

Sahra nodded. “But she’s a handful. I think bringing her south again put her in closer touch with Kina. Common sense tells me we should break our promise and kill her.” She settled on a cushion. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m completely worn out. Keeping these people under control when there’s so little for them to do . . . it’s a miracle that we haven’t had any major incidents . . . I bought a farm.”

“You what?”

“I bought a farm. Not far from the Shadowgate. They tell me the soil is lousy, but it’s a place where most of the men can stay out of sight and keep out of trouble and even stay busy building housing or working the ground so we’ll eventually be self-supporting. Half the gang is over there now. Most of these guys here would be, too, except that Murgen said you were going to arrive today. You made good time. We didn’t expect you for several more hours.”

“Does that mean you’re all caught up on what’s going on in the world outside?”

“I have a particularly talented husband who doesn’t always share everything with me. And I don’t always share him with the others. And we both probably shouldn’t be that way. There’re a thousand things we need to talk about, Sleepy. I don’t know where to start. So why not just with, how are you?”

60

The brotherhood had to begin moving.

Goblin burst into the tent uninvited and gasped out the news that Murgen said my feted arrival had caught the eyes of official informants and had aroused the suspicions of the local authorities. Those folks had been disinclined to investigate the refugee camp before only due to a complete lack of ambition. I sent Kendo and a dozen men to secure the southern end of the pass through the Dandha Presh, both to guarantee a favorable welcome for those coming down behind me and to help keep anyone from strolling off northward with news about where we were. I sent several small teams off to capture senior officers and officials before they could become organized. There was no real, fixed, solid governmental structure here because the Protector favored the rule of limited anarchy.

It was obvious that these former Shadowlands, despite their proximity to the glittering plain, were no more than an afterthought to the powers in Taglios. The troubles in the region had been settled with a vengeance. The Great General had won the reputation he had desired. There were few troops and no officials of any renown here now. It looked like a safe, remote province suitable for rusticating human embarrassments deemed not worth exterminating.

Even so, region wide, there were many more of them than there were of us and we were out of battle practice ourselves. Brains, speed and ferocity would have to sustain us till we gathered the whole clan and completed preparations to follow the road up the south side of the valley.

“So, now you’ve had your power fix and you’ve got time to talk, how the hell are you, Sleepy?” Goblin asked. He looked exhausted.

“Worn to the bone from traveling but still full of vinegar. It’s nice to talk to somebody where I don’t have to lean over backwards to look them in the eye.”

“Walk in the goddamn door talking that shit. I knew there was a reason I didn’t miss you.”

“You say the sweetest things. How’s One-Eye?”

“Getting better. Having Gota here will hurry it up. But he’s never going to be completely right. He’s going to be slow and shaky and have spells where he’ll have trouble remembering what he’s doing. And he’ll always have trouble communicating, especially when he’s excited.”

I nodded, took a deep breath, said, “And it’s going to happen again, isn’t it?”

“It could. It often does. It doesn’t have to, though.” He rubbed his forehead. “Headache. I need some sleep. You can drive yourself crazy trying to deal with something like this.”

“If you need sleep, you’d better get it now. Things are starting to happen. We’ll need you fresh when it gets exciting.”

“I knew there was another reason I didn’t miss you. You haven’t been here long enough to blow your nose and already people and things are flying all over, getting ready to beat each other in the head.”

“It’s my perky personality. Think I should visit One-Eye?”

“Up to you. But he’ll be heartbroken if you don’t. He’s probably already all bent out of shape because you came and saw me first.”

I asked how to find One-Eye and left Goblin. I noted that refugees not associated with the Company were sneaking out of the camp. There were signs of excitement over in the New Town, too.

Gota, Doj and Swan were nearing the camp from the uphill side. Tobo larked around them like an excited pup. I wondered where Swan would stand once the real excitement started. He would stay neutral as long as he could, probably.

“You look better than I expected,” I told One-Eye, who was actually doing something when I ducked into his tent. “That spear? I thought you lost it ages ago.” The weapon in question was an elaborately carved and decorated artifact of extreme magical potency that he had begun crafting back during the siege of Jaicur. Its designated target then had been the Shadowmaster Shadowspinner. Later, he had continued improving it so he could use it against Longshadow. That spear was so darkly beautiful that it seemed a sin to use it just to kill someone.

One-Eye took his time collecting himself. He looked up at me. There was less of him than there was when last I had seen him, and even then he had been just a shell of the One-Eye I remembered from when I was young.

“No.”

Just that one word. None of the usual creative invective or accusations and insults. He did not want to embarrass himself. The results of the stroke were more crippling emotionally than physically. He had been master of his surroundings for two hundred years, far beyond the dreams of men, but now he could not count on being able to speak a complete, coherent sentence.

“I’m here. I’ve got the Key. And things have begun to happen already.”

One-Eye nodded slowly. I hope he understood. There had been a woman in Jaicur, she was a hundred nineteen when she died, they said. In all my years I never saw her do anything but sit in a chair and drool. She understood nothing anyone said to her. She had to be changed like a baby. She had to be fed like a baby. I did not want that to happen to One-Eye. He was old and cantankerous and a major pain more often than not, but he was a fixture of my universe. He was my brother.

“That other woman. That married one. She does not have the fire.” His words were a ghost of speech. When he talked, his hands shook too badly to hold his tools.

“She’s afraid to succeed.”

“And afraid not to. You are busy, Little Girl.” He beamed because he had gotten that out without much trouble. “You do what you must. But I have to talk to you again. Soon. Before this happens to me again.” He spoke slowly and with great care. “You are the one.” He was tiring, so great was his mental effort. He beckoned me closer, murmured, “Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Someone threw the tent flap back. Brilliant light burst inside. I knew it was Gota without being able to see. Her odor preceded her. “Try not to make him talk too much. He’s worn out.”

“I have seen this problem before.” Cold, yet civil. More animated than she had been for some time but still not the caustic, frequently irrational Gota of last year. “I will be of more value here.” Her accent was much less heavy than usual. “Go kill someone, Stone Soldier.”

“Been a while since anybody called me that.”

Gota bowed mockingly as she waddled past. “Bone Warrior. Soldier of Darkness, go forth and conjure the Children of the Dead from the Land of Unknown Shadows. All Evil Dies There an Endless Death.”

I stepped outside, baffled. What was that all about?

Behind me, “Calling the Heaven and the Earth and the Day and the Night.”

I thought I had heard that formula before but could not recall the place or the context. Surely it was sometime when a person of the Nyueng Bao conviction was being particularly cryptic.

The excitement had increased. Someone had stolen some horses already . . . had acquired them. Let us not leap too far with our conclusions. Several riders were charging around, unguided by any rational plan. Something should have been in place for a situation like this. I grumbled, “This’s what happens when nobody wants to take charge. You three men! Get over here! What in the name of God are you doing?”

After listening to their hemming and hawing, I gave some orders. They galloped off with messages. I murmured, “There is no God but God. God is the Almighty, Boundless in Mercy. Show Mercy unto me, O Lord of the Seasons. Let mine enemies be even more confused than my friends.” I felt like I was inside the eye of a storm of screwups.

My fault? All I did was show up. If I was likely to have that effect, someone should have met me away from witnesses and led me to Sahra’s farm. That might have given us time to get into shape, with nobody the wiser.

We really had very little formal organization, no declared chain of command, and no established table of responsibility. We had no real policies other than fixed enmities and an emotional commitment to release the Captured. We had deteriorated into little more than a glorified bandit gang and I was embarrassed. It was partly my fault.

I rubbed my behind. I had a distinct feeling the Captain was going to catch up on years’ worth of chew-outs. I could make all the excuses I wanted about only being a stand-in for Murgen while he was buried, but I had been chosen as his understudy. And the Annalist is often the Standardbearer, too, and the Standardbearer is generally designated because those in command think he is capable of becoming Lieutenant and possibly, eventually, Captain. Which meant that Murgen had seen something in me a long time ago and the Old Man had not found cause to disagree with him. And I had done nothing with that but have a good time designing torments for our enemies while a woman who was not a pledged member of the Company assumed most of its leadership by default. Sahra’s courage and intelligence and determination were beyond reproach but her skills as a soldier and commander were less so. She meant well but she did not understand strategies not designed around her own needs and desires. She wanted to resurrect the Captured, of course, but not for the benefit of the Black Company. She wanted her husband back. To Sahra, the Company was just a means of achieving her ends.

We were about to pay the price of my reluctance to step forward and serve the interests of the Company.

We were hardly more than the gang of thugs the Protector claimed us to be. I was willing to bet that any determined resistance we encountered hereabouts was likely to shatter what little family spirit the Company had left. We would have to pay for forgetting who and what we were. And my anger, mainly at myself, made me seem twice life-size. I stomped around screaming and foaming at the mouth and before long had bullied everyone into doing something useful.

And then a sorry bunch of ragamuffins trudged out of the New Town and headed for the refugee camp like a reluctant flock of geese, honking and straggling all over. They numbered about fifty and carried weapons. The steel was more impressive than the soldiers carrying it. The local armorer did his job well. Whoever trained recruits did not. They were more pathetic than my gang. And my guys had the advantage of having knocked people over the head before and so had little reluctance to hurt someone again. Particularly if that someone threatened them.

“Tobo. Go get Goblin.”

The boy eyed the approaching disorder. “I can handle that clusterfuck, Sleepy. One-Eye and Goblin have been teaching me their tricks.”

Scary idea, a frenetic teenager with their skills and their lunatic lack of responsibility. “That might well be. You might be a god. But I didn’t tell you to handle it. I told you to go get Goblin. So move it.”

Red anger flooded his face but he went. If I had been his mother, he would have argued until the wave of southerners rolled over us.

I walked toward the soldiers, painfully conscious that I still wore the rags I had had on since the day we sneaked out of Taglios. Nor was I equipped with anything remarkable in the way of weapons. I carried a stubby little sword that never had been much use for anything but chopping wood. I was always at my best as the kind of soldier who stands off at a distance and plinks the enemy when he is not looking.

I found a suitable spot and waited, arms crossed.