The rescue was running smoothly, like a well-greased siege engine missing only a few minor parts. Goblin had Murgen and Croaker headed toward the surface aboard makeshift litters.
Croaker had not said a word, nor had he made any effort to do so, even though he had been awake and aware. He stared at me for a long time. I had no idea what was going on inside his head. I just hoped he was sane.
Before he departed, Murgen did give my hand a small squeeze. I hoped that was an expression of gratitude or encouragement.
I was not at all happy about his being unable to provide information or advice. I had not thought much about what role I would play after the Captured were wakened. I had operated on the unspoken assumption, more or less, that I would retire to my Annals—or even farther, to the Standardbearer job, if Murgen wanted to be Annalist again.
More and more people kept coming downstairs even though I had tried to send word up to warn everyone that they faced a horrible climb going in the other direction.
The white crow continued to curse and jabber semicoherently until it lost its voice. I was concerned about Lady. She had managed that feathery spy quite well for a long time, never giving herself away even when she did try to clue me in, but now she seemed to be losing control. Of herself. I assured her repeatedly that she would go upstairs as soon as I had bearers capable of getting her there. Doj, Sahra and Gota had Thai Dei ready to travel. I gave them the go-ahead. One-Eye would follow him, then Lady would go. The Prahbrindrah Drah would be the last, this time.
Tobo seemed fascinated by his father, apparently because he could not quite believe that the man was real in a fleshy sense. Circumstances had kept his parents separate almost since his conception.
The boy started to tag along after the rest of the family. I called out, “Tobo, stay down here. You have a job to do. See about your dad after we get Lady and the Prince moved out. Hello, Suvrin. Why’re you down here?”
“Curiosity. Sri Santaraksita’s curiosity. He insisted that he had to see the caverns. He drove me crazy reminding me how storied they are in religious legend. He couldn’t be this close to something like that and not explore it personally.”
“I see.” I noticed the old librarian now. He was working his way up the line of old men, examining each and murmuring to himself. Occasionally he would bounce up and down in excitement. Swan had gone back to make him keep his hands to himself. He wanted to finger and sniff every bit of ancient metal and cloth. He seemed to have trouble understanding that those old men were still alive but very vulnerable.
“Swan. Bring him up here.” I did want the benefit of his expertise just a while ago. In a softer voice, I told Suvrin, “You’re the one who’s going to carry him back upstairs if he can’t make it on his own. And I’ll be right behind you, giving encouragement by poking you with a spear.”
Suvrin seemed to have thought about the climb already. He was not looking forward to it, either. “The man has no concept—”
I interrupted. “What about Shivetya?”
“He’s back right side up and safely away from the pit. I can’t say he seemed particularly grateful, though.”
“He say or do something?”
“No. It was his expression. And that was probably because we dropped him on his nose once. In think I’d have trouble being grateful for a pop in the snoot myself.”
Santaraksita was puffing when he joined us. He, was excited. “We’re walking the actual roads of myth, Dorabee! I have begun begging the Lords of Light to let me live long enough to report my adventures to the bhadrhalok!”
“Who will call you a liar over and over again. Sri, you know the Right People don’t become involved in actual adventures. All of you, follow me now. We’re going to have another actual adventure traveling into mythology.” I headed on up the steepening slope.
I soon discovered that someone had gone this way before me. At first I suspected Tobo had gotten farther than I had thought. Then I decided that the disturbances in the frost were too old for that, so concluded that Soulcatcher must have gone back this way, just to see what she could see.
Back there, small side caves entered the main cavern, few of them large enough to permit passage of an adult body. The main cave dwindled in diameter. We had to hunch down, then we had to crawl. Whoever had gone before us had done the same.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Swan asked. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Of course I do.” Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out.
I had been through here in my dreams. But only sort of, evidently, because every few feet I ran into some detail I did not recall from those nightmares. And then we stumbled onto something that was far more than a mere detail.
The sole of a boot nearly smacked me in the face because I was concentrating on trying to decipher the story encrypted in the frost on the cave floor. That was the story of someone who had been moving wildly, maybe in a panic. Not only had the frost been rubbed away, in places the stone itself was bruised or chipped.
“I think I’ve found Mather, Willow.” It was one of those odd moments when you discover the trivial. I noticed that Cordy Mather really needed to have his boots resoled. I did not immediately wonder how a man’s leg could stick out like that, with the toe pointing halfway upward above horizontal while the man himself was lying on his stomach. “We’d better stop right here and take a good look. I don’t see the man doing this to himself.”
Swan said, “I’ll get Goblin. Don’t do anything till he gets here.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m fond of my hide. If I lose it, I’ll miss out on our honeymoon.” I drew my sword, for what good that might do, then raised up slowly till the top of my head bumped the cavern roof.
Cordy Mather had crawled over a hump in the floor. And something fatal had happened to him before he could get all of himself onto the downward side.
Suvrin eased up beside me. Inexplicably, I found myself painfully aware of him as a masculine presence. Luckily, he was even less interpersonally adept than I was. He failed to notice my flustered and uncomfortable reaction.
Odd. The urge was not something I would pursue, certainly. I just wondered why I sometimes suffered these sudden, random impulses, some of which were extremely difficult to resist. Ninety-nine percent of the time I did not so much as think about the possibility of combining myself, a man and a bed in a search for adventure.
Maybe I should not have been teasing Swan.
Suvrin said, “That sure doesn’t look very appetizing. What do you think happened?”
“I’m not even going to guess. I’m just going to sit here and wait for the expert to show up.”
“May I look?” Santaraksita asked.
Suvrin scooted back. He discovered that the older man was too broad to pass by him there. So we all had to retreat twenty yards so Santaraksita could get past us in turn. I admonished him repeatedly not to go farther forward than I had. “I definitely don’t want to have to drag you out of here.” Though I will grant that the man was a great deal leaner now than when I had worked for him. “And because you want to get home to tell the bhadrhalok all about this.”
“You were right about them, Dorabee. They won’t believe a word I say. And not only because they’re the Right People but because Surendranath Santaraksita never had an adventure in his life. He never had the urge until this adventure had him.”
“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”
“You persist in amazing me, Dorabee. Who are you quoting?”
“V.T.C. Ghosh. He was an acolyte of B.B. Mukerjee, one of the six Bhomparan disciples of Sondhel Ghose the Janaka.”
Santaraksita’s face lit right up. “Dorabee! You are a marvel indeed. A wonder of wonders. The pupil begins to exceed the master. What was your source? I don’t recall ever having read of a Ghosh or a Mukerjee featured in the Janaka school.”
I snickered like a prankster kid. “That’s because I was pulling your leg. I made it up, Sri.” And that seemed to leave him even more amazed.
Goblin broke it up. “Swan says you found a dead man.”
“Yes. It looks like Cordy Mather from this end. I didn’t see his face, though. I wasn’t going to move anything anywhere until we had a good idea what happened to him. I’d rather it didn’t happen to me.”
Goblin grunted. “Pudgeman, you want to back down here so I can get past you? This tunnel gets pretty tight, don’t it? Watch out you don’t let your chubby butt plug it up. For how come do you want to go slithering around back here, anyway, Sleepy?”
“Because if I keep going this way far enough I’ll get to the place where the Deceivers concealed the original Books of the Dead.”
Goblin gave me a funny look but took my word for it. I talked to ghosts in mist machines. Birds talked to me. A talking bird was following me right now, at a distance. At the moment it did not have much to say because its throat was sore but it did manage to rip out a curse or two whenever it had to dodge somebody’s flailing feet. “That’s interesting.”
“I thought so.”
“Ah. Yeah. It’s not sorcery, though. It’s your basic mechanical booby trap. Spring-loaded. Stabs you with a poisoned pin. There’re probably twenty more between here and where you want to go. What do you think Mather was trying to do?”
“If he woke up and found himself down here and didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, he might have panicked and taken off and just went in the wrong direction. I bet it’s his fault all those guys back there are dead. He probably tried to wake them up.”
Goblin grunted again. “There. That’s disarmed. I’d better go ahead and see what else is waiting. But first we need to get Mather pulled back so you all can get past him.”
“If you can weasel past him so can I.”
“Yeah, you can. But what about your boyfriend and your sugar daddy? They’ve got a little more pork on them.” He grunted and cursed softly as he fought Mather’s remains back over the hump in the floor. I noticed, for the first time, that the echoes were different in this more confined space, jammed with bodies. They were almost nonexistent.
I do not believe it was miles to where the Deceivers of antiquity concealed their treasures and relics but my body believed that before we got there. Goblin disarmed another dozen traps and found several more that had fallen victim to time. The underground wind whimpered and whined as it rushed past us in the tight places. It sucked the warmth right out of me. But it did not dissuade me. I went where I wanted to go. And was hungry enough to eat a camel when I got there.
It had been a long, long time since breakfast. I had a dread feeling it could be longer still before supper.
“It feels like a temple, doesn’t it?” Suvrin asked. He was less troubled than the rest of us. Though raised nearer this place than anyone else, he was less intimate with the legends of the Dark Mother. He stopped staring at the three lecterns and the huge books they bore long enough to turn to me and whisper, “Here.” He offered me a bit of crumbling flax cake from the pouch he wore at the small of his back.
“You must have read my mind.”
“You talk to yourself a lot. I don’t think you realize you’re doing it.” I did not. It was a bad habit that needed breaking right now. “I heard you when we were crawling through the tunnel.”
That had been a private discourse with my God. An internal dialog, I had thought. The subject of food had come up. And here was food. So maybe the All-Merciful was on the job after all.
“Thanks. Goblin. You feel any tricks or traps in here?” There were echoes again, though with a different timbre. We were inside a large chamber. The floor and walls were all ice that had been cut and polished by the flow of frigid water. I presumed the invisible ceiling was the same. The place did have a feel of the holy to it—even though that was the holiness of darkness.
“No traps that I can sense. I’d think they’d leave that sort of stuff outside, don’t you?” He sounded like he wanted to convince himself.
“You’re asking me to define the psychology of those who worship devils and rakshasas? Vehdna priests would guarantee you that there’s nothing so foul or evil as to be beyond the capacity of those most accursed of unbelievers.” I thought they would guarantee it. If they had heard of the Stranglers. I had not heard of them before I became attached to the Company.
Suvrin said, “Sri, I don’t think you should—”
Master Santaraksita had recognized the ancient books as something remarkable and just could not resist going up for an up-close look. I agreed with Suvrin. “Master! Don’t go charging—”
The noise sounded something like someone ripping tent canvas for half a second, then popped like the crack of a whip. Master Santaraksita left the floor of the unholy chapel, folded around his middle, and flew at the rest of us in an arc that admitted only slight acquaintance with gravity. Suvrin tried to catch him. Goblin tried to duck. Santaraksita bounced Suvrin sideways and ricocheted into me. The lot of us ended up in a breathless tangle of arms and legs.
The white crow had something uncomplimentary to say about that.
“You and me and a stew pot, critter,” I gasped when I got my breath back. I snagged Goblin’s leg. “No more traps, eh? They’d leave that sort of thing out in the caverns, eh? What the devil was that, then?”
“That was a magical booby trap, woman. And a damned fine example of its kind, too. It remained undetectable until Santaraksita tripped it.”
“Sri? Are you injured?” I asked.
“Only my pride, Dorabee,” he puffed. “Only my pride. It’ll take me a week to get my wind back, though.” He rolled off Suvrin, got onto his hands and knees. He had a definite green look to him.
“You’ve enjoyed a cheap lesson, then,” I told him. “Don’t rush into something when you don’t know what you’re rushing into.”
“You’d think I’d know that after this last year, wouldn’t you?”
“You might think, yes.”
“Don’t anybody ask how Junior is doing,” Suvrin grumbled. “He couldn’t possibly get hurt.”
“We knew you’d be fine,” Goblin told him. “As long as he landed on your head.” The little wizard limped forward. As he neared the point where Santaraksita had gone airborne, he became very cautious. He extended a single finger forward one slow inch at a time.
A smaller piece of cloth ripped. Goblin spun around, his arm flung backward. He staggered a couple of steps before he fell to his knees not far from me.
“After all this time he finally recognizes the natural order of things.”
Goblin shook his hand the way you do when you burn your fingers. “Damn, that smarts. That’s a good spell. It’s got real pop. Don’t do that!”
Suvrin had decided to throw a chunk of ice.
On its way back, the missile parted Suvrin’s hair. It then hit the cavern wall and showered the white crow with fragments of ice. The bird had a word to say about that. It followed up with a few more. I began to wonder if Lady had lost track of the fact that she was not, herself, the white crow, and in fact, was just a passenger making use of the albino’s eyes.
Goblin stuck his injured finger in his mouth, squatted down and considered the chamber for a while. I squatted, too, after taking time out to keep Suvrin and Master Santaraksita from making even greater nuisances of themselves.
Swan slithered into the chamber, disturbing the crow. The bird said nothing, though. It just sidled away and looked put out about all existence. Swan settled beside me. “Wow. Kind of impressive even though it’s simple.”
“Those are the original Books of the Dead. Supposedly almost as old as Kina herself.”
“So why is everybody just sitting here?”
“Goblin’s trying to figure how to get to them.” I told him what had happened.
“Damn. I always miss the best stuff. Hey, Junior! Run up there and show us your flying trick again.”
“Master Santaraksita did the flying, Mr. Swan.” Suvrin needed to work on his sense of humor. He did not own a proper Black Company attitude.
I asked, “Why not try it yourself, Willow? Take a run at the books.”
“You promise to let me land on you?”
“No. But I’ll blow you a kiss as you fly by.”
“It’d probably help if you people would shut up,” Goblin said. He rose. “But by being blindingly, blisteringly brilliant I’ve worked it out anyway, already, in spite of you all. We get to the lecterns by using the golden pickax as a passkey. That was why Narayan Singh was so upset when he saw what we had.”
“Tobo still has the pick,” I said. A minute later I said, “Don’t everybody stumble all over each other offering to go get him.”
“Let’s just go together and all be equally miserable,” Goblin suggested. “That’s what the Black Company is all about. Sharing the good times along with the bad.”
“You trying to con me into thinking that this is one of the good times?” I asked, crawling into the cave right behind him.
“Nobody wants to kill us today. Nobody’s trying. That sounds like a good time to me.”
He had a point. A definite point.
Maybe my Company attitude needed attention, too.
Behind me, Suvrin grumbled about starting to feel like a gopher. I glanced back. Swan had had an attack of good sense and decided to bring up the rear, thereby making sure that Master Santaraksita did not stay behind and tinker with things that might cause a change in Goblin’s opinion about this being one of the good times.
“Where did he go?” I mused aloud. People were still working in the cave of the ancients, getting Lady and the Prahbrindrah Drah ready to go upstairs. But Tobo was not among them. “He wouldn’t just run upstairs, would he?” He had the energy of youth but nobody was so energetic they would just charge into that climb on impulse.
While I tromped around muttering and looking for the kid, Goblin did the obvious and questioned witnesses. He got an answer before I finished building up a good mad. “Sleepy. He left.”
“Surprise, surprise . . . what?” That was not all of it. The little wizard was upset.
“He turned right when he left, Sleepy.”
“He . . . oh.” Now I did have a good mad worked up. A booming, head-throbbing, want-to-make-somebody-pay, real bad mad. “That idiot! That moron! That darned fool! I’ll cut his legs off! Let’s see if we can catch him.”
Right was downward. Right was deeper into the earth and time, deeper into despair and darkness. Right could only be the road to the resting place of the Mother of Night.
As I started out, with intent to turn right, I collected the standard. The white crow shrieked approval. Goblin sneered, “You’re going to be sorry before you go down a hundred steps, Sleepy.”
I was tempted to abandon the darned thing before we had gone that far. It was too long to be dragging around in a stairwell.
This stair has no bottom,” I told Goblin. We were puffing badly despite the direction we were headed. We had passed openings into other caves the stairwell had pierced. Each appeared to have been visited by human beings sometime in the past. We discovered both treasures and bone-yards. I suspected Sri Santaraksita, Baladitya and I could not live long enough just to catalog all the mysteries buried beneath the plain. And every darned unknown ancient thing I glimpsed in passing called to me like the sirens of legend.
But Tobo was still ahead of us and seemed deaf to our calling. Perhaps just as we did not waste time and breath responding to Suvrin and Santaraksita, who kept calling down to us from ever farther behind. It was my devout hope they would be smitten by good sense and abandon the pursuit.
Goblin did not respond to my remarks. He had no breath left over.
I asked, “Can’t you use some kind of spell to slow him down or knock him out? I’m worried. He really can’t be so far ahead that he can’t hear us. Darn!” I had gotten tangled with the standard. Again.
Goblin just shook his head and kept moving. “He can’t hear.” Puff-puff. “But he don’t know that he can’t hear.”
Enough said. There was a bottom to the stair. And the Queen of Deceit was napping down there, with just a whisper of awareness left for manipulating a cocky, know-it-all boy who had a touch of talent and had taken possession of an instrument that could become a nasty weapon in the hands of those who would disarm her and have her slumber continue neverending.
After a while we had to slow down. The unnatural light faded until it became too weak to provide a reliable forecast of our footing. The occasional breezes rising past us were no longer cold. And they had begun to bear traces of a familiar, repugnant odor.
When Goblin caught that smell he slowed way down, worked hard on regaining his breath before he had to suck that stench down in its full potency. “Been a while since I’ve come face-to-face with a god,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to wrangle one anymore.”
“And what would that be? I never realized that I was in the company of an experienced god-wrangler.”
“It takes youth. It takes confidence. It takes brashness. Most of all, it takes a huge ration of stupidity and a lot of luck.”
“Then why don’t we just sit down here and let those sterling qualities carry Tobo through? Though I confess I’m a little nervous about his supply of luck.”
“I’m tempted, Sleepy. Sorely and sincerely. He needs the lesson.” Troubled, perhaps even a little frightened, he continued, “But he’s got the pickax and the Company needs him. He’s the future. Me and One-Eye are today and yesterday.” He started picking up the pace again, which meant a rapid heightening of the intensity of my skirmish with the standard.
“What do you mean, he’s the future?”
“Nobody lives forever, Sleepy.”
The burst of speed did not last. We encountered a mist that complicated the hazards of darkness. The visibility turned nil and the footing became particularly treacherous for a short person trying to drag a long pole down a tight and unpredictable stairway. The moist air was heavier than anything I had experienced since the fogs above the corpse-choked flood that had surrounded Jaicur during the siege.
A chilling shriek came from far back up the stair. My mind flooded with images of horrors pouncing gleefully upon Suvrin and Master Santaraksita.
The shriek continued, approaching faster than any human being could possibly descend that stairway. “What the hell is that?” Goblin snapped.
“I don’t—” The shrieking stopped. At the same time, I stepped down and there was no more down to step. I staggered, betrayed by the darkness. The Lance banged into overhead and wall. We had reached another landing, I assumed, until I felt around with my toes and the standard and could find no more edge. “What do you have over there?” I asked.
“Steps behind me. A wall to the right that goes forward about six feet, then ends. All level floor.”
“I’ve got a wall on the left that just keeps going on and a level floor. Gah!” Something slammed into my back. I had only an instant of warning, the sound of wings violently flapping as a large bird tried to stop before it hit.
The white crow cursed as it landed on the floor. It flopped around for a moment, then started climbing me. That would have been a sight, I am sure, had there been any light to reveal it.
I fought down an impulse to bat the creature into the darkness. I hoped it was here to help. “Tobo!”
My voice rolled away into the distance, then came back in a series of echoes. The heavy air seemed to load those up with despair.
The boy did not answer but he did move. Or something moved. I heard a rustle from less than twenty feet away.
“Goblin. Talk to me about this.”
“We’ve been blinded. By sorcery. There’s light out there. I’m working on getting our sight back. Give me your hand. Let’s stick together.”
The crow murmured, “Sister, sister. Walk straight ahead. Look bold. You will pass through the darkness.” Its diction had improved dramatically over the past year. Maybe that was because we were so much closer to the force manipulating the bird.
I felt around for Goblin, grabbed hold, pulled, dropped the standard, picked it up and pulled again. “All right. I’m ready.”
That crow knew what it was talking about. After a half dozen steps we transited into a lighted ice cavern. Make that comparatively lighted. Dim, grey-blue light leaked in through translucent walls as though it was high noon just on the other side of a few feet of ice. Much more light radiated from the vicinity of the woman asleep on a bier at the center of the vast chamber, some seventy feet away. Tobo stood halfway between us and it, looking backward, completely surprised to see us there and equally baffled as to where there might be.
“Don’t you move, boy,” Goblin snapped. “Don’t you even take a deep breath until I tell you it’s safe to do so.”
The form on the bier was a little fuzzy, as though surrounded by heat shimmer. And in spite of that, I knew the woman lying there was the most beautiful creature in the world. I knew that I loved her more than life itself, that I wanted to rush over there and drink deeply of those perfect lips.
The white crow sneezed in my ear.
That certainly took the edge off the mood.
“Where have we seen all this before?” Goblin asked, voice dripping sarcasm. “She must be awfully weak or she’d pluck something better from our minds than a replay of an old Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. There isn’t a castle built like this anywhere south of the Sea of Torments.”
“A castle? What? What castle?” The word for castle did not exist in Taglian or Jaicuri. I knew it meant a kind of fortress only because I had spent so much time exploring the Annals.
“We seem to be inside the keep of an abandoned castle. There’re dormant rose creepers all over the place. There’re tons of cobwebs. In the middle of everything is a beautiful blonde woman lying in an open casket. She just begs to be kissed and brought back to life. The part that always gets ignored, and that our ungracious hostess has overlooked here, is that the bitch in the story almost certainly was a vampire.”
“That isn’t what I see.” Carefully, detail by detail, I described the ice cave and the absolutely not blonde woman I saw lying upon a bier at its center. While I spoke. Goblin finally worked some subtle spell on Tobo that kept him too confused to move.
Goblin asked, “Do you remember your mother, Sleepy?”
“I vaguely recall a woman who might have been. She died when I was little. Nobody talked about her.” We did not need to go into this. We had work to do right here, right now. I hoped he got that message from my tone and expression.
“What do you want to bet that what you’re seeing is an idealized vision of your mother charged up with a whole lot of sexual come-hither.”
I did not argue. That might be. He knew the artifices of darkness. I did keep moving forward slowly, closing in on Tobo.
“Which would mean that up close and quickly, she doesn’t have a real good connection with what’s outside her.” Two decades ago it had become clear that Kina did not think or work well in real time, that she did best when she applied her influence over years rather than minutes. “I’m too old to be snared by temptations of the flesh and you’re too unsexed and undefined.” He grinned weakly. “The kid, on the other hand, is at that age. I’d give a toe or two to see what he sees. Ruff!” He gestured. Tobo collapsed like a wet sock. “Grab the hammer. Hang onto it hard. Don’t get any closer to her than you absolutely have to. Drag Tobo back to the doorway.” He sounded old and hollow and possessed by a despair that he did not want to share.
“What’s going on, Goblin? Talk to me.” This was a situation where we ought not to keep dangers to ourselves.
“We’re face-to-face with the great manipulator who’s been disfiguring our lives for twenty-five years. She’s very slow but she’s far more dangerous than anything we’ve faced before.”
“I know that.” But my reaction was elation. My spirits soared. All my hidden doubts, kept so carefully submerged for so long, now seemed trivial, even silly. This lovely creature was no god. Not like my God is God. Forgive me my weakness and my doubts, O Lord of Hosts. The Darkness is everywhere, and dwells within us all. Forgive me now, when the hour of my death stares me in the face.
In Forgiveness He is Like the Earth.
I grabbed hold of Tobo’s arm and yanked him upright. I clutched him as tightly as I gripped the standard. He would not break away easily. Disoriented, he did not struggle when I pulled him back from the sleeping form.
I averted my eyes. She was beauty incarnate. To gaze upon her was to love her. To love her was to dedicate oneself to her will, to lose oneself within her. O Lord of the Hours, watch over and guard me in the presence of the spawn of al-Shiel.
“I need the pickax, Tobo.” I tried not to think about why I wanted that unholy tool. At this distance Kina might be able to pluck that right out of my mind.
Moving slowly, Tobo removed the pick from under his shirt and handed it over. “Got it!” I told Goblin.
“Then get going!”
As I started to do that, Suvrin and Santaraksita, gasping violently, stumbled into the light. Both froze, staring at Kina. In soft awe, Suvrin declared, “Holy shit! She’s gorgeous!”
Master Santaraksita seemed to be experiencing some confusion as he stared.
Suvrin started forward, drooling. I popped him in the funny bone with the dull end of the pick head. That not only got his attention, it relaxed his overwhelming interest in Kina. “Mother of Deceivers,” I told him. “Mistress of Illusion. Turn around. Get the boy out of here. Take him back to his mother. Sri, don’t make me hurt you, too.”
Something like a bit of mist rose from and hovered over the sleeping woman’s mouth. For an instant it seemed vaguely man-shaped, which reminded me of afrits, the unhappy ghosts of murdered men. Millions of such devils could be at Kina’s beck.
“Run, goddamnit!” Goblin said.
“Run,” the crow told me.
I did not run. I got hold of Santaraksita and started pulling.
Goblin was talking to himself, something about wishing he had had the good sense to steal One-Eye’s spear if he was going to get himself into something like this.
“Goblin!” I heaved the standard. It was not my intent that it do so, but it stood straight up and bounced a couple of times on its butt before it tipped forward and fell into the little wizard’s eager hands. He turned with it as the illusions surrounding Kina evaporated.
If Kina was ever human, if any of the countless forms of myth regarding her creation indeed resembled fact, a lot of work had gone into making her big and ugly.
She is the Mother of Deceivers, Sleepy. The Mother of Deceivers. That great hideous form covered with pustules from which infant skulls suppurated could no more be the true aspect of Kina than the sleeping beauties had been.
The stench of old death became powerful.
I stared at the body, now lying upon the icy floor. It was the dark purple-black of the death-dancer of my dreams but it dwarfed Shivetya. It was naked. Its perfect female proportions distracted from the ten thousand scars that marred its skin. It did not move, not even to breathe.
Another feather of vapor rose from one huge nostril.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Goblin shrieked. He jerked to the right suddenly, the Lance of Passion darting toward some target I could not see. The Lance’s head burned like it was covered by flickering alcohol flames.
A huge, unheard scream tore at my mind. Suvrin and Master Santaraksita moaned. Tobo squealed. The white crow unleashed a random stream of obscenities. I am sure I contributed to the chorus. As I kicked and punched the others to get them going, I realized that my throat was raw.
Goblin whirled back to his left, thrusting at the wisp of mist that had left Kina’s nostril a moment before.
Once again pale blue fire surrounded the head of the Lance. This time it ran a foot up the shaft before it faded. This time the Lance’s head betrayed penstrokes of dark ruby glow along its edges.
Another wisp of the essence of Kina rose from her nose.
There was no darkness or mist hiding the entrance now. Kina’s focus was elsewhere. Suvrin and Santaraksita were on the stair already, wasting breath babbling about what they had seen. I slugged Tobo up side the head with all the force I could muster. “Get out of here!”
When he opened his mouth to argue, I popped him again. I did not want to hear it. I did not want to hear anything. Not even a divine revelation. It could wait. “Goblin! Get your sorry butt in motion. We’re out of the way.”
The third wisp impaled itself upon the Lance’s head. This time the fire crept two yards up the shaft, though it did not seem to affect the wood directly. However, this time the Lance’s head became so hot that shaft wood in contact with it began to smolder.
Goblin started to back down but another wisp rose and drifted faster than he moved, getting between him and the stair. He thrust at it a few times but each time he did, it drifted out of reach. It continued to control his path of retreat.
I am no sorceress. Despite a life spent in the proximity of wizards and witch women and whatnot, I have no idea how their minds work when they are involved with their craft. So I will never be clear on what thought process led Goblin to make his decision. But from having known the man most of my life, I have to conclude that he did what he did because he believed it was the most effective thing that he could do.
Having failed to skewer the wisp, having noted that a second had appeared and had begun to circle him from the opposite direction, the frog-faced little man just whirled, lowered the head of the Lance and charged Kina. He let out a great mad bellow and drove the weapon through the flesh of an arm and into her ribs below her right breast. And just before the weapon struck home, one wisp flung itself in front, trying to block the thrust. The Lance’s head was ablaze when it pierced demonic flesh.
The second wisp set Goblin aflame.
Even screaming, telling me to get out, Goblin continued to heave against the Lance, driving it deeper into Kina, possibly in some mad, wild hope of penetrating her black heart.
The blue flame feasted on Goblin’s flesh. He let go of the Lance, threw himself to the icy floor, rolled around violently, slapping at himself. Nothing helped. He began to melt like an overheated candle.
He screamed and screamed.
On that psychic level where I had sensed her moments earlier, Kina also screamed and screamed and screamed. Suvrin and Santaraksita screamed. Tobo screamed. I screamed and staggered into the stairwell, retreating despite the urging of that mad part of me that wanted to go back and help Goblin. And there could have been no greater madness than that. The Destroyer ruled the cavern of her imprisonment.
Goblin had struck a fierce blow but in truth, its impact was no greater than the nip of a wolf cub at the ear of a dozing tiger. I knew that. And I knew that the cub, caught, was trying to buy time for the rest of its pack.
I gasped, “Tobo, go ahead as fast as you can. Tell the others.” He was younger, he was faster, he could get there long before I could.
He was the future.
I would try to keep anything from coming up the stair behind him.
The screaming continued down below, from both sources. Goblin was being more stubborn than ever he had been with One-Eye.
We climbed as fast as Master Santaraksita could manage. I stayed behind the other two, already ready to turn and put the unholy pickax between us and any pursuit. I was convinced that the power of that talisman would shield us.
Darkness no longer inhabited the stair. Visibility was much better than it had been when we came down. So good, in fact, that had there been no landings to break up the line of sight, we would have been able to look up the stairs for a mile.
I was gasping for breath and fighting leg cramps before the screaming stopped. Suvrin had collapsed once already, losing what little his stomach contained. Master Santaraksita seemed the hardiest of us now, without a complaint to his name, though he was so pale I feared his heart would betray him before long.
As we fought for breath I stared downward, listening to the ominous silence. “God is Great.” Gasp. “There is no God but God.” Gasp. “In Mercy He is Like the Earth.” Gasp. “He Walks with Us in All Our Hours.” Gasp. “O Lord of Creation, I Acknowledge that I am Your Child.”
Master Santaraksita had enough spare breath to chide, “He’s going to get bored and find something else to do if you don’t get to the point, Dorabee.”
“How’s this?” Gasp. “Help!”
“Better. Much better. Suvrin! Get up.”
The white crow arrowed up the stairwell, nearly bowled me over landing on my shoulder. I did make the process more difficult by trying to duck the arriving bird. It lashed my face with flapping wings. “Climb,” it said. “Slowly, without panic. Steadily. I will watch behind you.”
We climbed for five or ten days. Hunger nagged me. Terror and lack of sleep made me see things that were not there. I did not look back for fear of seeing something terrible closing in. We moved slower and slower as the effort devoured our energies and will, and our capacity for recovery. It became a major trek and an act of ultimate will to climb from one landing to the next. Then we began resting between landings, though neither Suvrin nor Santaraksita ever suggested it.
The crow told me, “Stop and sleep.”
No one argued. There are limits to how far and hard terror can drive anyone. We found ours. I collapsed so fast I later claimed I heard my first snore before I hit the stone of the landing. I was only vaguely aware of the crow launching itself into the darkness, headed downward again.
Sleepy?”
My soul wanted to leap up and flail around in terror. My flesh was incapable and quite possibly indifferent. I was so stiff and I hurt so much that I just could not move.
My mind still worked fine. It ran as sparkling swift as a mountain stream. “Huh?” I continued trying to get the muscles unlocked.
“Easy. It’s Willow. Just open your eyes. You’re safe.”
“What’re you doing way down here?”
“Way down where?”
“Uh—”
“You’re one landing downstairs from the cave of the ancients.”
I kept trying to get up. Muscle by muscle my body gradually yielded to my will. I looked around, vision foggy. Suvrin and Master Santaraksita were still asleep.
Swan said, “They were tired, guaranteed. I heard you snoring all the way up in the cave.”
Twinge of fear. “Where’s Tobo?”
“He went on up top. Everyone went. I made them go. I stayed in case . . . The crow told me not to come down. But what’s one landing? You think you can get moving again? I can’t carry anybody. I can barely keep going myself.”
“I can manage one flight. Up to the cave. That’s far enough for now.”
“The cave?”
“I still have something to do there.”
“Are you sure you want to go out of your way?”
“I’m sure, Willow.” I could tell him it was a matter of life or death. For a whole world. Or maybe for multiple worlds. But why be melodramatic? “Can you get these two moving again? And headed toward the top?” I did not think Master Santaraksita could bear seeing what I intended to do next.
“I’ll get them moving. But I’m sticking with you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes, it will. You can hardly stand up.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“You go right ahead and talk. It’ll get the kinks out of your jaw. But I’m staying.”
I stared at him hard for some time. He did not back down. Neither did he betray any motive but concern for a brother he suspected of failing to be in her right mind. I closed my eyes for half a minute, then opened them to peer down the stairs. “God was listening.”
Swan was working on Suvrin. The Shadowlander officer had his eyes open but seemed unable to move. He murmured, “I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much.” Panic flooded his eyes. “Did we get away?”
I said, “We’re getting away. We’ve still got a long way to climb.”
“Goblin’s dead,” Swan said. “The crow told me when it came up to get something to eat.”
“Where is that thing?”
“Down there. Watching.”
I felt a chill. Paranoia touched me. There had been a connection between Lady and Kina ever since Narayan Singh and Kina had used Lady as a vessel to produce the Daughter of Night. That had created a connection, a connection Lady had hammered into place cleverly, unbreakably, so that she could steal power from the goddess indefinitely. “Forgive me, O Lord. Drive these infidel thoughts from my heart.”
Swan said, “Huh?”
“Nothing, part of the ongoing dialog between me and my God. Suvrin! Sweety. You ready to do some jumping jacks?”
Suvrin offered me an old-fashioned, storm-cloud glower. “Smack her, Swan. At a time like this, cheerful ought to be against the laws of heaven and earth.”
“You’ll be cheerful in a minute, too. As soon as you figure out that you’re still alive.”
“Humph!” He began to help Swan waken Master Santaraksita.
Upright now, I did a few small exercises to loosen up even more.
“Ah, Dorabee,” Santaraksita said softly. “I have survived another adventure with you.”
“I’ve got God on my side.”
“Excellent. Do keep him there. I don’t think I can survive another of your adventures without divine assistance.”
“You’ll outlive me, Sri.”
“Perhaps. Probably, if I do get out of this and I don’t tempt fate ever again. You, you’ll probably graduate to snake-dancing with cobras.”
“Sri?”
“I’ve decided. I don’t want to be an adventurer anymore, Dorabee. I’m too old for it. It’s time to wrap myself up in a cozy library again. This just hurts too much. Ow! Young man . . . ”
Swan grinned. He was not that much younger than the librarian. “Let’s get going, old-timer. You keep lying around here and whatever adventure you found down there is going to catch up and have you all over again.”
A possibility that posed a fine motivation for us all.
When we finally got moving again, I brought up the rear. Swan wrangled my companions. I gripped the golden pickax so tightly my knuckles ached.
Goblin was dead.
That did not seem possible.
Goblin was a fixture. A permanent fixture. A cornerstone. Without its Goblin, there could be no Black Company . . . You are mad, Sleepy. The family will not cease to exist simply because one member, unexpectedly, has been plucked out by evil fortune. Life would not end because of Goblin’s absence. It would just get a lot harder. I seemed to hear Goblin whisper, “He is the future.”
“Sleepy. Snap out of it.”
“Huh?”
Swan said, “We’re at the cave. You two. Keep climbing. We’ll catch up with you.”
Suvrin started to ask. I shook my head, pointed upward. “Go. Now. And don’t look back.” I waited until I saw Suvrin actually guide Master Santaraksita over the tumbled stones and onto the stairs. “We’ll catch up.”
“What’s that?” Swan asked. He cupped an ear.
“I don’t hear anything.”
He shrugged. “It’s gone now. Something from upstairs.”
We entered the cavern of the ancients. The wonder had been polished off it by the trampling about of a horde of Company people. I was amazed that they had managed without damaging any more of the sleepers. As it was, almost all the wondrous ice webbing and cocooning had broken up and collapsed. A few stalactites had fallen from the ceiling. “How did that happen?”
Swan frowned. “During the earthquake.”
“Earthquake? What earthquake?”
“You didn’t . . . there was one hell of a shake. I can’t say exactly how long ago. Probably when you were all the way down. It’s hard to tell time in here.”
“No lie. Oh, yuck.” I had discovered why the white crow had all that energy. It had been dining on one of my dead brothers.
Some evil part of me tossed up the thought that I could follow the bird’s example. Another part wondered what would happen if Croaker found out. That man was obsessed with the holy state of Company brotherhood.
“You never know what you’ll do until you’re in the ring with the bull, do you?”
“What?”’
“A proverb from back home. Means that actually facing the reality is never quite like preparing to face the reality. You never really know what you’ll do until you get there.”
I passed the rest of the Captured, not meeting any open eyes. I wondered if they could hear. I offered up some reassurances that sounded feeble even to me. The cavern shrank. When it came time to get down and crawl, I crawled. I told Swan, “Maybe it’s good, you being here after all. I’m starting to have little dizzy spells.”
“You hear anything?”
I listened. This time I did hear something. “Sounds like somebody singing. A marching song? Something full of ‘yo-ho-ho’s.’ ” What the devil?
“Down here? We have dwarfs, too?”
“Dwarfs?”
“Mythical creatures. Like short people with big beards and permanent bad tempers. They lived underground, like nagas, only supposedly big on mining and metalworking. If they ever did exist, they died out a long time ago.”
The singing was getting louder. “Let’s get this handled before somebody interrupts.”
The pessimist in me was sure I would not be able to pull it off. If nothing else, the earthquake Swan mentioned would in some way have sealed the chamber of unholy books off from the rest of the world. If the chamber was not sealed off, then I would trip the only booby trap that Goblin had overlooked. If Goblin had not overlooked any booby traps, then the pickax would not be a protective key, it would be a trigger igniting the thousand secret sorceries protecting the books.
“Sleepy, do you know you talk to yourself when you’re worried about stuff?”
“What?”
“You’re crawling along there muttering about all the bad things that’re going to happen. You keep on and you’re going to convince me.”
That was twice. I had to get that under control. I did not use to do that.
The place where the Books of the Dead were hidden had not changed visibly. The pessimist in me worked hard to find a dangerous difference, though.
Swan finally asked, “Are you going to study on it till we pass out from hunger? Or are you going to go ahead and do something?”
“I always was a better planner than a doer, Willow.” I sucked in a peck of frigid air, took the pickax out of my waistband, intoned, “O Lord of Heaven and Earth, let there be no password that has to go with this.”
“Right behind you, boss,” Swan said, making a joke as he nudged me forward. “Don’t be shy now.”
Of course not. That would belittle Goblin’s sacrifice and memory.
I realized that my breathing had turned to rapid, shallow panting as I reached the point where Master Santaraksita had achieved flight. I held the pick in front of me with both hands, muscles protesting its weight, squeezing it so tight I feared I would leave my fingerprints etched upon it permanently.
A tingling began in my hands. It crept up my arms as I eased forward. My skin crawled and I developed severe goose bumps. I said, “You’d better hold onto me, Willow.” In case I needed yanking back. “In case you need the connection to the pick.” The shield was not rejecting me. Not yet.
Swan rested his hands on my shoulders an instant before the tingling reached my body. I began to shiver. Suddenly I had the chills and shakes of an autumn sickness.
“Woo!” Swan said. “This feels weird.”
“It gets weirder,” I promised. “I’ve got one of those agues where the chill goes all the way to the marrow.”
“Uh . . . yeah. I’m getting there, too. Toss in some joint aches, too. Come on. Let’s get that fire started and warm ourselves.”
Would fire be enough?
Once we moved forward another ten feet, the miseries stopped getting worse. The tingling on the outside faded. I told Swan, “I think it’s safe to let go now.”
“You should have seen your hair. It started dancing around when we were halfway through. It lasted only a couple of steps but it was a sight.”
“I’ll bet.” My hair was a sight anyway, usually. I did not offer it nearly enough attention and I had not had it trimmed in months. “Got anything to start a fire with?”
“You don’t? You didn’t prepare for this? You knew it had to be done and you didn’t bring—”
“All right, we’ll use mine. I just don’t have much tinder left. Didn’t want to use mine up when I could use yours.”
“Thanks a lot. You’re getting as bad as those two nasty old men.” Chagrined, he recalled that one of the nasty old men he meant had just completed his tenure with the Company.
“I learned from the best. Listen. I’ve been thinking about this. Even if we are past all the traps, the books themselves might be dangerous. Considering the way the brains of wizards work, it’s probably not a smart thing to peek inside at the pages. One look at the writings and you’re likely to spend the rest of your life standing there reading—even if you don’t recognize a word—out loud. I recall reading about a spell that worked that way, once.”
“So what do we do?”
“You notice that all three books are open? We’ll have to come at them from underneath and tip the covers shut. So that they end up face-down. Even then we might want to handle them with our eyes shut when we go burn them. I’ve read about grimoires that had rakshasas bound into their covers.” Although nothing as exciting as that ever turned up in the library where I had worked.
“A talking book that can read itself to me. That’s what I need.”
“I thought Soulcatcher made you learn how to read when you were the king of the Greys.”
“She did. That don’t mean I want to read. Reading is bloody hard work.”
“I thought managing a brewery was hard work. You never shied away from that.” Being shorter, I took the job of sneaking up on the three lecterns. I used extreme caution. They might have been great actors but I was soon convinced that they could not see me coming.
“I like making beer. I don’t like reading.”
He should have been the one getting ready to burn books, then. I was suffering a crisis of conscience as troublesome as any of my crises of faith. I loved books. I believed in books. As a rule I did not believe in destroying books because their contents were disagreeable. But these books contained the dark, secret patterns for bringing on the end of the world. The end of many worlds, actually, for if the Year of the Skulls successfully sacrificed my world, others connected to the glittering plain must follow.
This was not a crisis that needed immediate resolution. I had my answers worked out already, which was why I was on hands and knees under the lecterns while suffering verbal abuse from an infidel who had no use for my god or for the Deceivers’ merciless Destroyer. I tipped the covers of the books shut while wondering if there was still some way the Children of Night could get to me.
“The covers appear to be blank,” Swan said.
“You’re looking at the backs of the books. I’m closing them so they’re face-down. Remember?”
“Hold it.” He held up a finger, cocked an ear.
“Echoes.”
“Uhm. Somebody’s out there.”
I listened harder. “Singing again. I wish they wouldn’t sing. Nobody in the band but Sahra can carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it. You can come on up here now. I think it’s safe.”
“You think?”
“I’m still alive.”
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily a recommendation. You’re too sour and bitter for the monsters to eat. I, on the other hand—”
“You, on the other hand, are plain lucky that my god forbids me to reveal that the only thing interested in eating you would be the kind of beetle that flourishes on a diet of livestock by-product. Right there looks like a good place to start a fire.”
Swan was up beside me now. “There” was some kind of large brazier-looking thing that still had a few charcoal remnants in it. It was made of hammered brass in a style common to most of the cultures of this end of the world.
“You want me to tear a few pages out for tinder?”
“No, I don’t want you to tear pages out. Weren’t you listening when I told you the books might make you want to read them?”
“I was listening. Sometimes I don’t hear very well, though.”
“Like most of the human race.” I was prepared. In minutes I had a small fire burning. I lifted one of the books carefully, making sure it faced away from Swan and me. I fanned its pages out slightly and set it down in the flames, spine upward. I burned the last volume first. Just in case.
Something might interfere. I wanted the first volume destroyed to be one the Daughter of Night had not yet seen. The first book, which she had copied parts of several times and might have partially memorized, I would burn last.
The book caught fire eventually but did not burn well. It produced a nasty-smelling dark smoke that filled the cavern and forced Swan and me to get down on our stomachs on the icy floor.
The underground wind did carry some of the smoke away. The rest was no longer overwhelming when I consigned the second book to the flames.
While waiting to add the final book to the fire, I brooded about why Kina was doing nothing to resist this blow to her hopes for resurrection. I could only pray that Goblin’s sacrifice had hurt her so badly she could not look outside herself yet. I could only pray that I was not a victim of some grand deceit. Maybe these books were decoys. Maybe I was doing exactly what Kina had planned for me to do.
There were doubts. Always.
“You’re muttering to yourself again.”
“Uhn.” I possessed not so much as the faintest hope that Goblin’s death had put Kina out of the misery of the world permanently.
“This feels so nice,” I said. “I could go to sleep right here.” And I did so, promptly.
Good old Willow’s sense of duty, or self-preservation, or something, kept him going. He got the last Book of the Dead into the fire for me before he, too, settled down for a nap.
The singing soldiers proved to be Runmust, Iqbal and Riverwalker. They had come to rescue the rest of us when Tobo reached them with news of the disaster that had befallen us down below. They had found us by following the smoke. “At the risk of finding myself goaded into employing unseemly language, how is it that I find anyone singing? How is it that you haven’t taken the road to The Land of the Unknown Shadows? I believe I was pretty insistent on the necessity for that.”
Runmust and Iqbal giggled like they were younger than Tobo and knew a dirty joke. Riverwalker managed to maintain a more sober demeanor. Barely. “You’re tired and hungry, so we don’t blame you for being cranky, Sleepy. Let’s do something about that. Settle down and have a snack.” He could not restrain a big, goofy grin as he rummaged in his pack.
I exchanged glances with Swan. I asked, “You have any clue what’s going on here?”
“Maybe there’s a stage of starvation where you get lightheaded and silly.”
“I suppose Jaicur could have been an exception.”
Riverwalker produced something the shape and color of a puffball mushroom but a good eight inches in diameter. It looked heavier than a mushroom that size ought to be.
“What the hell is that?” Swan asked. River had several more in his pack. And his henchmen had brought packs, too.
Riverwalker produced a knife and began slicing. “A gift from our demon friend, Shivetya. Evidently after a day of reflection he decided we deserved a payoff for saving his big ugly ass. Eat.” He offered me an end slice an inch thick. “You’ll like it.”
Swan started eating before I did. I had an ounce of paranoia left. He leaned my way. “Tastes like pork. Heh-heh-heh.” Then he had no time for joking. He began wolfing the material, which looked exactly the same all the way through.
It had a heavy, almost cheesy texture. When I surrendered to the inevitable and bit into it, my salivary system responded with a flood. The experience of taste was so sharp it was almost painful. There was nothing comparable in my memory. A touch of ginger, a touch of cinnamon, lemons, sweetness, the scent of candied violets . . . After the first shock a sense of well-being gradually spread outward from my mouth, and again from my stomach soon after the first mouthfuls hit bottom.
“More,” Swan said.
Riverwalker surrendered another slice.
“More,” I agreed, and bit into another slice myself. It might be poison but if it was, it was the sweetest poison God ever permitted. “Shivetya really gave you this?”
“About a ton. Almost literally. Fit for man and beast. Even the baby likes it.”
Iqbal and Runmust found that news hilarious. Swan snickered, too, though he could not possibly have any idea what the joke might be. In fact, I found that assertion rather amusing myself. Heck, everything was amusing. I had begun to feel relaxed and confident. My aches and pains no longer formed the center of my consciousness. They had become mere annoyances way out on the edge of awareness.
“Continue.”
Iqbal squealed, “He grew them. These nasty lumps developed all over him, like bigass boils, only when they popped, out came these things.”
Under more normal circumstances that idea and the images it engendered would have seemed repulsive. I grunted, took another wonderful mouthful, pictured the creation process, caught myself in the midst of a fit of giggles. I regained control, though that took an effort. “So it finally decided to communicate?”
“Sort of. When we left, it was trying to manage some kind of dialog with Doj. It didn’t seem to be working all that well, though.”
Swan sighed. “I haven’t felt this relaxed and positive since Cordy and I used to go fishing when we were kids. This’s the way we felt lying beside the creek in the shade, never really caring if we got a bite while we shared our daydreams or just watched clouds scoot overhead.”
Even the recollection of his friend’s fate did not break his mood entirely.
I understood what he was trying to communicate even though I had had no special friend with whom to share the rare, golden moments of childhood. I had had no childhood. I felt really good myself. I said, “This whatever-it-is is great stuff. River. You seen any side effects yet?”
“It’s damned near impossible to stop yourself if you get the giggles.”
“I’ll try not to get started. Wow! I feel like I could whip twice my weight in wolves right now. Why don’t we get going?”
Nobody took the opportunity to mention that me whipping twice my weight in wolves might entail me fighting only the back half of one of the monsters. Iqbal and Runmust continued to giggle over some shared joke of long ago.
“Boys,” I said, pointing. “That way. Don’t touch anything. Keep going. We’re going to go back upstairs.”
Dang me, I kept getting silly ideas. And every one of them made me want to start laughing. Riverwalker told me, “We found out that if we sing it helps us keep our minds on business.” A big grin spread across his face. He began humming one of the filthier marching songs. It concerned the business that seems to be on the minds of most men most of the time.
I hummed along and got everybody started moving.
Foul-smelling smoke from roasted books filled the cavern. It seemed even stronger in the stairwell. Some of it drifted downward.
Kina was not yet aware, I was sure. She would have done something if she had known. But she would not remain ignorant forever.
I hoped we could get ourselves well on the road before she recovered enough to assimulate the truth. Her dreams were deadly enough.
I settled my behind onto the rise in the floor near the entrance to the stairwell. I sat there dully wondering why the excavation had been started way out here on the periphery. I did not concern myself about it much, though. I ate again. “This stuff could get addictive.” And not because it made me feel happy and silly but because it took away aches and pains and every inclination to sleep. I could sit there knowing my body was at its physical limits without having to endure all the suffering associated with that state. And my mind remained particularly alert and useful because I was not preoccupied with the miseries plaguing my flesh.
Swan grunted his agreement. He did not seem to have been rendered as cheerful as the rest of us. Although, come to think of it, I was not doing much whistling or singing myself.
My mood improved after I had eaten again, though.
In one of his more lucid moments Riverwalker suggested, “We shouldn’t waste any more time than we have to, Sleepy. The rest should all be gone by now but they went away hoping that you and the standard would catch up.”
“If Tobo hasn’t already told them, I’ve got some bad news about that.”
“The boy said nothing about the standard. He may not have had a chance. Everybody was so shocked about Goblin and so worried about how to keep One-Eye from finding out . . . ”
“Goblin drove the Lance into Kina’s body. It’s still there. You know me. I’m completely hooked by the Company mystique. I believe that besides the Annals, the standard is the most important symbol we have. It goes all the way back to Khatovar. It ties the generations together. I’d understand if somebody wanted to go back after it. But that somebody isn’t going to be me. Not in this decade.”
That good feeling was moving through me again. I rose. Swan helped me step up to the higher floor level. “Hello!”
Riverwalker chuckled. “I wondered how long it would take you to notice.”
The crack in the floor was almost gone.
I went and looked. It seemed to be as deep as ever but now was nowhere more than a foot wide. “How did it heal so fast?” I assumed our presence had been a catalyst. Glancing around the crack toward the demon’s throne, I noticed Doj and Tobo hurrying our way. Shivetya’s eyes were open. He was watching. “I thought you said everybody had left.”
“The earthquake did it.” River ignored the presence of Doj and Tobo.
Swan said, “It’s the latest thing in home repairs. Go down there and stab that thing again, maybe the plain will heal up completely.”
“Might get the clockwork running again,” Doj said, having overheard our conversation as he arrived.
“Clockwork?”
Doj did a little hop. “This floor is a huge circle. It’s a one-eightieth-scale representation of the plain as a whole, with a complete travel chart inlaid. It rides on stone rollers and was capable of turning before the Thousand Voices got curious and broke it.”
“Interesting. I take it your chat with the demon proceeded informatively.”
Doj grunted assent. “But slowly. That was the big problem. Just figuring out that communication has to be managed very slowly. I think that would carry over physically, too. That if he decided to stand up—if he could—it might take hours. But as the Steadfast Guardian, he never had to move fast. He controlled the whole plain from here, using the charts in the floors and the clockwork mechanisms.”
Never had I seen Doj so straightforward and animated. The knowledge bug must have bitten him, along with its kissing cousin that makes the newly illuminated want to share with everyone. And that was not like Doj at all. Nor like any other Nyueng Bao of my experience. Only Mother Gota and Tobo ever chattered—and between them they revealed less than Uncle Doj on a particularly reticent day.
Doj continued, “He says his original reason for being created was to manage the machinery that saw that travelers got where they wanted to go. Over time there were battles upon the plain, wars between the worlds, this fortress was built around him, and at every stage he was saddled with additional duties. Sleepy, the creature is half as old as time itself. He actually witnessed the battle between Kina and the demons when the Lords of Light fought the Lords of Darkness. It was the first great war between the worlds, it did take place here on the plain, and none of the myths have got it close to right.”
That was interesting and I said so. But I refused to allow the past’s allure to seduce me right now.
“I must confess a grand temptation to create a permanent camp here,” Doj enthused. “It will take lifetimes to recover and record everything. He’s seen so much! He remembers the Children of the Dead, Sleepy. To him the passing of the Nyueng Bao De Duang happened just yesterday. We need only to keep him convinced that we should have his help.”
I looked questions at each of my companions. Riverwalker finally volunteered, “He’s got to have been stuffing himself with the demon food.” Meaning he thought Doj was out of character a few leagues, too. “Several others also went through big changes when they overindulged.”
“That much I understood already. Tobo. Have you undergone a complete character shift, too?” He had not said a word. That was remarkable. He had an opinion about everything.
“He scared the crap out of me, Sleepy.”
“He? Who?”
“The demon. The monster. Shivetya. He looked inside my head. He talked to me there. I think he did it to my father, too. For years and years, maybe. In the Annals? When Dad thought Kina or the Protector were manipulating him? I’m betting that lots of times it was really Shivetya.”
“That could be. That really could be.”
The world is infested with superhuman things that toy with the destinies of individuals and nations. Gunni priests have been claiming that for a hundred generations. The gods were banging elbows with each other, stirring the cauldron. But none of those gods were my God, the True God, the Almighty, Who seemed to have elected to elevate Himself above the fray.
I needed the solace of my kind of priest. And there were none nearer than five hundred miles.
“How many stories are there about this place?” I asked Doj. “And how many of them are true?”
“I suspect we haven’t yet heard one out of ten,” the old swordmaster replied. He grinned. He was enjoying himself. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them are true. Can you sense it? This fortress, this plain, they’re many things at the same time. Until recently I believed it had to be the Land of Unknown Shadows. As your Captain believed that it had to be Khatovar. But it’s only a pathway to other places. And Shivetya, the Steadfast Guardian, is many things, too. Including, I think, infinitely weary of being everything that he’s had to be.”
Tobo was so anxious to interject his own thoughts that he danced around like a little boy with a desperate need to pee. He announced, “Shivetya wants to die, Sleepy. But he can’t. Not as long as Kina is still alive. And she’s immortal.”
“He’s got a problem then, doesn’t he?”
Swan had an idea. “He could divide up that life span and offer it to us. I’d take him up on it. I could use another couple thousand years. After I get away from this kind of life.”
I moved us closer to the demon as we talked. My natural pessimism and sourness evidently reasserted itself, though I never stopped feeling younger and happier and more energetic than I had for ages. I just stopped giggling with the rest of them. I asked, “Where’s your mother, Tobo?”
His good humor waned momentarily. “She went with Granny Gota.”
A glance at Doj made me suspect that there had been a sharp encounter between Sahra the mother and men willing to accept her son as one of them. This was Nyueng Bao stubbornness again, from two directions. On this one the Troll must have sided with her grandson and Doj.
I changed the subject. “All right. You two claim you’ve been in Shivetya’s mind. Or maybe he’s been in yours. Whichever, tell me what he wants.” I did not believe the demon was being helpful out of the goodness of his ancient heart. He could not be. He was a demon, accursed of God whether he was a creature of light or of shadow. To a demon we adventurers had to be as brief and transient as individual honeybees would be to us—though, like the bees, we might be able to make ourselves obnoxious for a short while.
Doj said, “He wants what anyone in his position would want. That seems obvious.”
Tobo interjected, “He also wants loose, Sleepy. He’s been pinned that way for a long time. The plain keeps changing because he can’t get out to stop anybody.”
“What’s he going to do if we pluck the daggers out of his limbs? Will he go on being our pal? Or will he start busting heads?”
Doj and Tobo exchanged uncertain glances. So. They had not spent much time worrying about that.
I said, “I see. Well, he may be the sweetest guy on God’s green earth but he stays right where he is for now. A few weeks or months more shouldn’t make much difference to him. How the heck did he manage to get himself nailed to his chair?”
“Somebody tricked him,” Tobo said.
Surprise, surprise. “You think so?”
It seemed there was a lot more light now than there had been when I was headed in the other direction with Swan. Or maybe my eyes had adapted to the interior of the fortress. I could make out the designs in the floor clearly. All the features of the plain could be found there except for the standing stones with their glittering gold characters. And those might have been represented by certain shadowy discolorations I was unable to examine more closely. There were even tiny points that seemed to be moving, which almost certainly meant something if one knew how to read them.
Shivetya’s throne rested atop a circular elevation positioned at the heart of an intermediate raised circle just over twenty yards across. Doj assured me that that was roughly one-eightieth the diameter of the biggest circle and that that was an eightieth of the diameter of the entire plain. The smaller circle, I noted, also boasted its representation of the plain—in much less obvious detail. Presumably, Shivetya could sit his throne and, turning, could see the whole of his kingdom. If he needed more information, he could step down to the next level, where everything was portrayed in a scale eighty times finer.
The implications of the quality of the magical engineering involved in creating all this began to seep through. I was intimidated thoroughly. The builders must have been of godlike power. They had to have been as far beyond the greatest wizards known to me as those were beyond no-talents like me. I was sure that Lady and Longshadow, Soulcatcher and Howler, would have little more grasp of the forces and principles involved than I did.
I stepped in front of Shivetya. The demon’s eyes remained open. I felt him touch me lightly, inside. For some reason my thoughts turned to mountainous highlands and places where the snow never melted. To old things, slow things. To silence and stone. My brain had no better way of interpreting the actuality of what Shivetya was.
I kept reminding myself that the demon antedated the oldest history of my world. And I sensed what Tobo had mentioned, Shivetya’s quiet, calm desire not to grow any older. He had a very Gunni sort of desire to find his way into a nirvana as an antidote to the infinite tedium and pain of being.
I tried talking to the demon. I tried exchanging thoughts. That was a frightening experience even though I was filled with the confidence and good feeling that came from the gift food Shivetya had provided. I did not want to share my mind even with an immortal golem who could not possibly have any genuine comprehension of the things it contained or of why those troubled me so.
“Sleepy?”
“Huh?” I jumped up. I felt good enough to do that. I felt as good as I should have back in my teens, had I never had a need to feel sorry for myself. The healing properties of the demon’s gift continued to work their magic.
Swan said, “We all fell asleep. I don’t know for how long. I don’t even know how.”
I looked at the demon. It had not moved. No surprise there. But the white crow was perched on its shoulder. As soon as it recognized that I was alert, it launched itself toward me. I threw up an arm. The bird settled on my wrist as though I were a falconer. In a voice almost too slow to follow, it said, “This will be my voice. It is trained and its mind is not cluttered with thoughts and beliefs that will get in the way.”
Marvelous. I wondered what Lady would think. If Shivetya took over, she would be deaf and blind until we brought her back from her enchanted sleep.
“This will be my voice now.”
I understood the repetition to be a response to my flutter of unspoken curiosity.
“I understand.”
“I will aid you in your quest. In return, you will destroy the Drin, Kina. Then you will release me.”
I understood that he meant for me to release him from life and obligation, not just from that throne.
“I would if I had the power.”
“You have the power. You have always had the power.”
“What does that mean?” I recognized a cryptic, sorcerer-type pronouncement when I heard one.
“You will understand when it is time to understand. Now it is time for you to depart, Stone Soldier. Go. Become Deathwalker.”
“What the devil does that mean?” I squeaked. So did several of my companions, all of whom were awake now and most of whom were gobbling demon food while eavesdropping.
The floor started moving, at first almost imperceptibly. Quickly I noted that only the part immediately around the throne, that had healed itself completely, was involved. I now knew that all the damage, including the earthquake so violent it had been felt as far away as Taglios, had been initiated entirely by Soulcatcher during an ill-conceived experiment. She had discovered the “machinery” and in her willful, damn-the-consequences way, had begun tinkering just to see what would happen. I knew that as fully as if I had been there as an eyewitness, because an actual eyewitness had given me his memories.
I knew everything Soulcatcher had done during her several visits to the fortress, in a time when Longshadow believed he was the total master of the Shadowgate and did not believe that others would dare approach it even if they did possess a workable key.
I now knew many things as if I had lived them. Some were things I was not eager to know. A few concerned questions I had had for years, offering answers that I could share with Master Santaraksita. But mostly it was just stuff I was likely to find useful if I was going to become what Shivetya hoped I would.
A startled bluebottle of speculation buzzed through my mind. I checked to see if I had an answer. But I had no memories of what might have become of the Key that would have been necessary if, indeed, Longshadow, as Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, with his student Ashutosh Yaksha, had come to our world from the Land of Unknown Shadows.
And for sure, I did not get any relief from my fear of heights.
An instant after the floor stopped turning, the white crow launched itself upward. And darned if I did not launch myself right after it—though not through any wish of my own.
My companions rose behind me. In their surprise and fright several dropped weapons and possessions and, probably, body contents. Only Tobo seemed to find unanticipated flight to be a positive experience.
Runmust and Iqbal sealed their eyes and belched rapid prayers to their false vision of God. I spoke my mind to the God Who Is God, reminding Him to be merciful. Riverwalker addressed impassioned appeals to his heathen deities. Doj and Swan said nothing at all, Swan because he had fainted.
Tobo babbled in delight, informing everyone how wonderful the experience was, look here, look there, the vast expanse of the chamber stretches out below us like the plain itself . . .
We passed through a hole in the ceiling and into the colder air of the real plain. It was dusk out there, the sky still crimson over the western horizon but already deep indigo directly ahead. The stars of the Noose shone palely in front of us. As we descended toward the surface, I found nerve enough to glance back. The fortress stood silhouetted against the northern sky, on its outside in worse shape now than when we had arrived. All our clutter, everything dropped during our ascension or that we had had no time to grab, now flew along right behind us.
For a while I watched eagerly for the standard to join the flock. My hopes were disappointed. It did not appear.
In retrospect I cannot see why I should have hoped otherwise.
Now Tobo pretended he was a bird. By experimenting he discovered that he could use his arms to direct his flight, to rise and fall somewhat, to speed up and slow down slightly. He never shut up for a instant, loving every moment, continuously admonishing the rest of us to enjoy the adventure, because none of us would ever have the chance to experience anything like this again.
“Wisdom from the mouths of infants,” Doj announced. Then he threw up.
They were both right.
Our flight ended where the rest of the band was camped at the last circle before the southwest road reached our destination shadowgate. Flying definitely offered the advantage of speed. We outflew the white crow, arriving less than two hours after our toes departed solid stone. That Shivetya fellow was a handy friend to have.
I tried to see what lay beyond the edge of the plain but it was just too dark. There might have been one or two small points of light out there. It was hard to tell.
We descended feetfirst, evidently immune to shadows. I had sensed several of those pacing us but they had shown no inclination to get too close. Which left me admiring Shivetya’s power even more, for those things were little more than bundles of hatred and hunger to kill.
We passed through the top of the shielding protecting our brethren without compromising it. The whole band watched our arrival in disbelief. Tobo managed to direct himself toward his mother and accomplished a somersault before he touched down. I did not exactly get down and hug the stone surface but I was glad the ordeal was over. The Singh brothers rushed around looking for family. So did Doj, who ignored Sahra and went directly to Gota. Gota was not in good spirits and possibly was in ill health. I could not tell much more about anyone in the feeble light available from a changeable moon. Gota did not offer any complaint or criticism. Swan stuck with me.
As soon as he convinced himself that it was safe to open his eyes, Riverwalker began bustling around being a busybody, devoutly determined to make sure everyone and everything conformed to whatever rules he happened to recall at the moment. I frowned, shook my head, but did not interfere. We all need our rituals to help us get by.
“Sahra,” I asked, “how are they?” I meant those we had brought out of the caverns, because I had a suspicion that Gota’s state meant nothing good and I did not want to hear what I feared it did mean.
Sahra could not feel friendly. She blamed me because she had discovered her baby strolling through the sky. Never mind that he had come down safely and could not stop raving about the experience.
What a fall from a great height might do to a body never occurred to him. But it certainly did to Sahra.
“No change in the Captured. One-Eye went into a funk when he heard about Goblin and hasn’t spoken since. Mother isn’t sure if it’s emotional withdrawal or he had another stroke. What worries her is the possibility that he doesn’t want to live anymore.”
“Who would he fight with?” I did not mean to belittle, though it came out sounding that way.
Sahra showed me an instant of pique but did not reveal her thoughts. “Mother can be a handful.”
“Probably what got them together in the first place.” I made no mention of the fact that I feared Gota would not be with us much longer. The Troll had to be around eighty. “I’ll go talk to him.”
“He’s asleep. It can wait.”
“In the morning, then. Are we still in touch with Murgen?”
The light was good enough to reveal Sahra’s anger. Perhaps she was right. I had not had my feet on the ground two minutes and already I wanted to use her husband. But she managed the emotion. We had worked together for a long time now, early on with her usually being the stronger one, only occasionally with me taking the lead role. We always managed without sharp words. We always managed because we knew we had somewhere to go and we had to collaborate to get there. These days I took charge most of the time but she could do so when it was appropriate.
Only she was just about where she wanted to get to now, was she not? She had Murgen out of the ground. She would not need to go on with her role once he was up and around. Unless he was not the man she wanted him to be. In which case she would have to contrive a new Sahra all over again.
I am sure that had her on edge more than ever. Neither she nor Murgen were the people they had been. None of us were. There were going to be some difficulties adjusting, possibly some major difficulties.
I anticipated big problems with Lady and the Captain.
Sahra said, “I’ve done my best to keep the mist projector working but I haven’t been able to make contact since we left that fortress. He doesn’t seem to be willing to leave his body anymore. And I can’t get that to wake up more than it already is.” So she was also afraid that the rescue might have been a mistake, that we might have hurt Murgen instead of saving him. Upbeat, hopefully, she said, “Maybe Tobo can help.”
I wondered what had become of the tough, focused, dedicated Sahra who had been Minh Subredil. I tried to reassure this Sahra. “Murgen will be fine.” Shivetya had given me the knowledge we needed to reanimate the Captured. “But we have to get him off the plain before we can wake him all the way up. Same for the others.”
Riverwalker returned from his tour. “The demon food is going fast here, Sleepy. There’s enough to get us off the plain and have a couple meals more but then we’re on our own. We either eat the dog and the horses or we scrounge up something locally fast.”
“Ah, well. We knew that going in. We’re better off than we expected to be. Did anybody think to steal anything valuable while we were there?”
That comment got me blank looks. Then I realized that it was possible no one else had noticed the treasures I had discovered while chasing Tobo into the deeps of the earth. The boy would have said something if he had seen anything. He could not shut up.
Swan told me, “It’ll be harvest time when we get there.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “I just know.”
So he might. “Everybody listen up. Get all the rest you can tonight. I want to get up and move out early tomorrow. And nobody knows what we’ll run into at the end of the road.”
Somebody grumbled something about if I wanted him to sleep, why did I not shut up and let him get to work?
I could not keep my eyes open myself, although it had not been that long since I had wakened by Shivetya’s throne. In fact, my mind seemed to be shutting down. I said, “Forget everything else. I’m going to take my own advice. Where’s a place I can wrap my blanket around me and lie down before I collapse?”
The only open space was back at the tail end of the Company. All my flying companions except Tobo had to migrate back there. I had planned to eat before I slept but exhaustion overwhelmed me before I swallowed my third bite of demon’s food. My final reflection concerned whether God could overlook one of the Faithful accepting a gift from one of the Damned.
An interesting exercise. God knows all. Therefore, God knew what Shivetya was doing and allowed him to do it. Therefore, it must be God’s will that we benefit from the demon’s generosity. It would be a sin to defy God’s will.
I dreamed strange dreams.
Of course I did. Was not Shivetya in my mind? Was I not in the haunted place of glittering stone?
Stone remembered. And stone wanted me to know.
I was in another place, then, in a time not my own. I was Shivetya as the demon experienced the world, everywhere at once, a pale imitation of God. I could be everywhere at once because by staring at the floor surrounding my throne, I connected with my realm as a whole. We became one knowledge, the singer and the song.
Men were moving across my face, a large band. I knew time differently from mortals but I understood that it had been ages since this had happened last. Mortals did not cross me anymore. Not often. Never in numbers like this.
There was enough Sleepy there for me to recognize Shivetya’s memory of the coming of the Captured, before they stumbled into Soulcatcher’s trap. Why would the demon want me to see this? I knew this story. Murgen had shared it with me several times, to make sure it got recorded in the Annals just the way he wanted.
There was no solid feeling of a personality surrounding me, yet I felt a mild pressure to abandon curiosity, to turn outward from questions, to cease being a viewpoint, to let the flower unfold. I should have paid more attention to Uncle Doj. The ability to abandon the self would have been a useful talent at a time like this.
Time was different for the demon, definitely. But he tried to accommodate the ephemeral mortal, to get to the point, to provide the information he thought I would find useful.
I watched the whole adventure, including the great and desperate escape that had devoured Bucket and had allowed Willow the chance to remain in the story as a pawn of wickedness. And I did not understand immediately because at first I observed only the finer details of a story already known in outline.
I was not completely stupid. I caught on. The question had occurred to me before but had not been critical. Now I just needed to reclaim enough self to recall that I had asked it.
The question was, what had become of the one member of that expedition for whom there was still no account? The incredibly dangerous apprentice shapeshifter Lisa Deale Bowalk, trapped in the form of a black leopard, had been carried onto the plain in a cage, as had the prisoners Longshadow and Howler. She had vanished during the excitement. Murgen never discovered what had become of her. That he mentioned.
I learned the truth. According to Shivetya.
Not every trivial detail became entirely clear. Shivetya had trouble focusing that tightly in time. But it seemed that Bowalk’s cage had gotten damaged in the panicky rush to escape by brothers of the Company unfortunate enough not to be included amongst the Captured.
Panic mothers panic. The great, wicked cat caught the fever. Her violence was sufficient to complete the demolition of her cage. She ripped her way out, injuring herself in the process. She fled on three legs, carrying her left front paw elevated, allowing it to touch stone only when absolutely necessary. She whined horribly when she did. Nevertheless, she covered ground fast. She traveled nearly thirty miles before nightfall—but had chosen a direction at random and apparently did not recognize that she was not headed toward home until it was too late to change her mind.
She chose a road and ran. And in the night one small, clever shadow caught up, just short of the end of that road. It did what untamed shadows always do. It attacked. I found the result difficult to believe. The shadow hurt the panther but did not kill her. She fought it and won. And stumbled onward. And before a more powerful shadow could overtake and finish her, she staggered through a derelict shadowgate and became invisible to Shivetya. Which meant that she was last seen alive entering a world neither our own nor the Land of Unknown Shadows. I hoped that that crippled gate had finished her, or that it had injured her beyond recovery, because she was possessed of a hatred as dark as that which impelled the shadows, but hers was a hatred much more narrowly directed. And the Company was its object.
The fragment of Sleepy-self never entirely subsumed into the Shivetya overview wondered what the Captain would think when he learned that Bowalk had reached Khatovar by accident when it was supposed to be impossible for the Company to get there by intent.
The Sleepy-self did not see why this news was important enough for Shivetya to have hijacked my dreams, but significant it must be.
Significant, too, must be the Nef, the dreamwalkers, that Murgen had named the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.
I became more Shivetya, pulling away from the point experience of tracking the shapechanger. I became more one with the demon while the demon became more one with the plain, more purely a manifestation of the will of the great engine. I enjoyed flickers of memories of golden ages of peace, prosperity and enlightenment that had reached across silent stone to many worlds. I witnessed the passage of a hundred conquerers. I saw portions of the most ancient wars now recalled in the Gunni and Deceiver religions, and even in my own, for being Shivetya and embracing all times at the same time, I could not help but see that the war in Heaven, which was supposed to have occurred soon after God created the earth and the sky, and which ended with the Adversary being cast down into a pit, could be an echo of the same divine struggle other religions remembered according to their own predilections.
Before the war of the gods, there was the plain. And before the plain, there was the Nef. The plain, the great machine, eventually imagined Shivetya as its Steadfast Guardian and servant. In turn, the demon imagined the Washene, the Washane and the Washone in the likeness of the Nef. These dreamwalking ghosts of the builders were Shivetya’s gods. They existed independently of his mind but not of his existence. They would perish if he perished. And they had had no desire to be called into being in the first instance.
Bizarre. I was caught amongst the personifications of aspects of religion in which I could not believe. Here were facts my faith forbid me to accept. Acceptance would damn me forever.
Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable.
But perhaps that was not necessary. Truth and reality seemed to be protean on the plain. There were too many different stories about Kina, Shivetya, and the fortress in the middle. Maybe every story was true at least part of the time.
There was an intellectual exercise of a sacerdotal magnitude. What if my beliefs were completely valid but only part of the time and only where I was located myself? What then? How could that be? What could that mean?
It meant unpleasant times in the afterlife if I persisted in relaxing my vigilance against heresies. It might be difficult for a woman to achieve Paradise but it would be no trouble at all for her to win a place in al-Shiel.
That must have been one kick-ass nightmare,” Willow Swan told me, kneeling beside me, having just shaken my shoulder to waken me. “Not only were you snoring, you were grunting and squeaking and carrying on a conversation with yourself in three different languages.”
“I’m a woman of many talents. Everybody says so.” I shook my head groggily. “What time is it? It’s still dark.”
“Another talent emerges. I can’t get anything past the old girl.”
I grumbled, “The priests and the holy books tell us that God created man in His own image but I’ve read a lot of holy books—including those of the idolaters—and not once have I found any other evidence that He had a sense of humor, let alone is the kind of person who would try to make jokes before the sun even came up. You’re a sick man, Willow Swan. What’s going on?”
“Last night you said we’d have to start early. So Sahra thought you meant we should be ready to go as soon as there’s light enough to see. So we can get off the plain with plenty of daylight to spare.”
“Sahra is a wise woman. Wake me up when she’s ready to go.”
“I think right now would be a good time to get up, then.”
I raised my hands. It was just light enough to see them. “Gather ’round, people.” Once a reasonable crowd had done so I explained that each of us who had stayed behind in the fortress had been given knowledge that would help us in times to come. “Shivetya seems very interested in our success. He tried to give us what he believed would be useful tools. But he’s very slow and has his own demonic perspectives and doesn’t know how to explain anything clearly. So it’s extremely likely that there is a lot we know that we won’t know we know until something makes us think of it. Be patient with us. We’ll probably be a little strange for a while. I’m having trouble getting used to the reeducated me and I live here. New knowledge pops up every time I turn around. Right now, though, I just want to get off this plain. Our resources are still limited. We have to establish ourselves as fast as we can.”
Those faces I could discern revealed fear of the future. Somewhere the dog whined. Iqbal’s baby whimpered momentarily as Suruvhija shifted her from one nipple to the other. In my consideration, that child ought to have been weaned by now but I knew I had no justification for my opinion. None of my babies have been born yet. And it is getting a little late to bring them in.
People waited for me to tell them something informative. The more thoughtful now wondered what new troubles awaited us since we had actually made it this far. Swan could be right. It could be harvest season in the Land of Unknown Shadows. And it could also be the season for scalping foreigners.
I was troubled myself but had been faced with the unknown so often that I had calluses on that breed of fear. I knew perfectly well it would do me no good to fuss and worry when I had no idea what lay ahead. But worry I would, anyway. Even when knowledge contracted while I slept assured me that we would not encounter disasters once we shifted off the plain.
I had planned to offer a rousing speech but quickly discarded that notion. No one was interested. Not even me. “Is everybody ready? Then let’s go.”
Getting started took less time than I expected. Most of my brothers had not stopped to hear me say what they anticipated would be the same old same old. They had gone on getting ready to roll. I told Swan, “I guess ‘In those days the Company . . . ’ works a lot better after supper and a hard day’s work.”
“Does for me. Works even better when I’ve had something to drink. And it’s a kick-ass wowser after I’ve gone to bed.”
I walked with Sahra for a while, renewing our acquaintance, easing the strain between us. She remained tense, though. It would not be that long before she had to deal with her husband in the flesh for the first time in a decade and a half. I did not know how to make that easier for her.
Then I walked with the Radisha for an hour. She, too, was in an unsettled mood. It had been even longer since she had had to deal with her brother in all but the most remote capacities. She was a realist, however. “There’s nothing I can lose to him, is there? I’ve lost it all already. First to the Protector, through my own blindness. Then you stole me away from Taglios and robbed me of even the hope of reclaiming my place.”
“Bet you something, Princess. Bet you that you’re already being remembered as the mother of a golden age.” That actually seemed a reasonable prediction. The past always seems better when the present consists of clabbered misery. “Even without the Protector back in the capital yet. Once we’re established, the first mission I mean to launch will be to get word back to Taglios that you and your brother are both alive, you’re really angry, and you’re going to come back.”
“We all must dream,” the woman told me.
“You don’t want to go back?”
“Do you recall the taunt you laid before me every day? Rajadharma?”
“Sure.”
“What I may want is of no importance. What my brother might want does not signify, either. He’s had his adventures. Now I’ve had mine. Rajadharma constrains us more surely than could the stoutest chain. Rajadharma will call us back across the uncounted leagues as long as we continue to breathe, through the impossible places, past all the deadly perils and improbable beings. You reminded me again and again of my obligation. Perhaps by doing so, you created a monster fit to battle the beast who displaced me. Rajadharma has become my vice, Sleepy. It has become my irrational compulsion. I continue to follow you only because reason insists that even though this path leads me farther from Taglios today, it is the shortest road to my destiny.”
“I’ll help where I can.” I did not commit the Company, though. I still had the Captain and Lieutenant to waken and deal with. I started to move on. I wanted to visit with Master Santaraksita for a while and lose myself, perhaps, in an interplay of intellectual speculation. The librarian’s horizons were much broader these days.
“Sleepy.”
“Radisha?”
“Has the Black Company extracted sufficient revenge?”
We had taken away everything but the love of her people. And she was not a bad woman. “In my eyes you’re just one small gesture short of redemption. I want you to apologize to the Captain once he recovers enough to understand what’s happening.”
Her lips tightened. She and her brother did not let themselves be slaves to considerations of station or caste, but still, apology to a foreign mercenary? “If I must, I must. My options are limited.”
“Water sleeps, Radisha.” I joined Suvrin and Master Santaraksita, taking a few minutes to visit with the black stallion on the way there. It carried One-Eye, who was breathing but otherwise did not look much better than a corpse. I hoped he was just sleeping an old man’s sleep. The horse seemed bored. I suppose it was tired of adventures.
“Master. Suvrin. By some chance do you two suffer any memories you didn’t have before we came to the plain?”
They did indeed, Santaraksita more so than Suvrin. Shivetya’s gifts seemed shaped for each individual. Master Santaraksita proceeded to relate yet another version of the Kina myth and of Shivetya’s relationship to the Queen of Death and Terror. This one assumed the point of view of the demon. It did not say much that was new, just shifted the relative importance of various characters and, laterally, blamed Kina for the passing of the last few builders.
Kina remained a black-hearted villain in this version, while Shivetya became one of the great unsung heroes, deserving of a much higher standing in myth. Which could be true. He had no standing at all. Nobody outside the plain had ever heard of him. I suggested, “When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.”
Santaraksita smiled sourly. “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.”
He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
And that is a truth upon which you can rely.
I raised my head carefully to peer over the edge of the plain at the Land of Unknown Shadows. Willow Swan snaked up on my right. He did the same. Riverwalker copied him on my left. River said, “I’ll be damned.”
I agreed. “No doubt about it. Doj. Gota. Come and look. Will somebody bring One-Eye up?” The little man had started talking about an hour ago. He did appear to be in touch with the real world at least part of the time.
I beckoned the white crow. That darned thing was going to give us away if it kept circling.
“To who?” Swan asked. “I don’t see anybody.” Obviously, I was thinking out loud again. Swan weaseled sideways so Doj could crawl up beside me.
Doj rose up. He froze. After fifteen seconds he harrumphed.
Gota said it. “Is the same place we left. You got us turned around, you fool Stone Soldier.”
At first glimpse it was identical. Only, “Look to the right. There isn’t any Overlook. And never was. And Kiaulune isn’t the New City.” I never saw Kiaulune before it became Shadowcatch but doubted these ruins resembled that old city much, either. “Get Suvrin. He might know.”
I continued to stare. The more I did so, the more differences stood out. Doj said it. “The hand of mankind rested more lightly here. And men went away a long time ago.” It was only the shape of the land that was identical.
“Back about the time of the earthquakes, you suppose?” What would have been hardscrabble farmland in my world here looked like better soil that had been abandoned for twenty years. It was overgrown by brush and brambles and cedars but no truly sizable trees were yet evident except those that grew in orderly rows and those so distant they painted the foothills of the Dandha Presh a deep green that was almost black.
Suvrin arrived. I offered a few questions. He told me, “It does look like they say Kiaulune did before the Shadowmasters came. When my grandparents were children. The city didn’t start growing until Longshadow decided to build Overlook. Only, I don’t see anything down there now but ruins.”
“Look at the shadowgate. It’s in better shape than our own.” But not in good repair by any standard. The quakes had taken their bites. “You can tell where it is.” That was a weight off my shoulders. I had anticipated fighting starvation while we fussed with strings and colored powders in an effort to survey the only safe pathway through.
Several men carried One-Eye up and set him down amongst us. They silhouetted themselves above the skyline doing so. My grumbling did no good. On the other hand, no bloodthirsty hordes materialized below the shadowgate, so it was possible that we were not yet betrayed. “One-Eye. Do you sense anything down there?”
I did not know if he would respond. He seemed to be asleep again. His chin rested on his chest. People gave him room because it was in these moments he began to ply his cane. After a few seconds, though, he lifted his chin, opened his eyes, murmured, “A place where I can rest.” The wind that was always with us on the plain almost stole his words away. “A place where all evil dies an endless death. No wickedness stirs down there, Little Girl.”
One-Eye’s remarks excited everyone who had witnessed his most recent episode. Half a dozen more men exposed their silhouettes to anyone watching from below. Still others seemed to think we ought to trudge right on down there in a big, disorderly mob, right now.
“Kendo!” I called. “Slink! I want you each to take six men out through the gate. Fully armed, including bamboo. Slink, take the right side of the road. You take the left, Kendo. You’ll be covering the rest of us as we come out. River, you’re the reserve. Take ten men and wait just inside the shadowgate. You’ll stay there and become the rear guard if nothing bothers them.”
Training and discipline took over. A superior standard of both are among the Company’s most potent tools. Properly employed, they become our deadliest tools. We try to inculcate discipline from a recruit’s first day, right alongside a healthy distrust of everyone on the outside. We try to pound into his very bones what he needs to do in every situation.
The slope from the edge of the plain to the shadowgate seemed to stretch for miles. I felt bone-naked descending it without the standard. Tobo, carrying the golden pickax, had to take my place. I told him, “Don’t get too fond of the job, kid. It may be all I have if we get the Captain and the Lieutenant back. And I won’t even have that if your dad wants all of his old jobs back.”
Experiment quickly proved no key but the pick was needed to leave the plain. The shadowgate did tickle and tingle, though.
The first thing I noticed outside was a powerful mixture of sagey and piney smells. There had been few odors on the plain. Then I noticed the incredible warmth. This world was much warmer than the plain was. It was early autumn here . . . as promised, Willow. As promised.
Kendo and Slink kept their squads moving, screening our advance. More and more people passed through the gate. I got myself hoisted onto the black stallion so I could see better. Which meant that somebody had to carry One-Eye. I told Sahra, “Let’s head for those ruins.” I was about to add something about shelter being easier to find there when Kendo Cutter shouted.
I looked where he pointed. It took a sharp eye to see them. The old men coming uphill slowly wore robes almost exactly the same color as the road and the earth behind them. There were five of them. They were bent and moved slowly.
“We did give ourselves away up there. And somebody was watching. Doj!”
Waste of breath. The Swordmaster was headed downhill already. Tobo and Gota were right behind him, which did nothing for Sahra’s nerves. I rushed forward, caught the boy. “You stay back.”
“But, Sleepy!”
“You want to debate it with Runmust and Iqbal?” He did not want to argue with the large Shadar gentlemen. I did not want to argue with the Troll. I let her go. She might be more intimidating than Doj, anyway. He was just one old man with a sword. She was a vicious old woman with a virulent tongue.
I checked my battered old shortsword. That was going to perform wonders if they climbed over Uncle Doj. Then I headed downhill myself. Sahra accompanied me.
The old men in brown looked at Doj and Gota. Doj and Gota looked at them. Those five men looked like they had been cast in the same mold, being nearly as wide as they were tall and very long in the tooth.
One of the natives said something rapid in a liquid tongue. The cadence was unusual but the words sounded vaguely familiar. I did catch the phrase “Children of the Dead.” Doj replied at length in Nyueng Bao, which included the formulas “The Land of Unknown Shadows” and “All Evil Dies There an Endless Death.” The old men seemed hugely puzzled by Doj’s accent but recognized those phrases well enough to become visibly agitated. I could not tell if that was a positive sign or not.
Mother Gota began muttering the incantation that included “Calling the Heaven and the Earth and the Day and the Night,” and that excited the old men even more.
Sahra told me, “Evidently the language has changed a great deal since the Children of the Dead ran away.”
It took me a moment to understand that she was translating what Doj had said in an aside to Gota.
There was a stream of chatter from the old men, all apparently in the form of pointed questions that Doj could not answer.
Sahra said, “They seem to be extremely worried about someone they keep calling ‘that devil-dog Merika Montera.’ Also about a pupil of this monster, a supposed future Grandmaster. Apparently the two were driven into exile together.”
“Merika Montera would be Longshadow. We know there was a time when he used the name Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha. He sent an agent named Ashutosh Yaksha to live among the Nyueng Bao in an effort to find and steal the Key that we’ve brought with us. The golden pickax.”
Uncle Doj chided, “Sleepy, these old men don’t speak Taglian or Dejagoran, but there’s still a chance that they might recognize our version of names they fear and hate just a whole hell of a lot. Right now they’re clamoring for answers about one Achoes Tosiak-shah. It sounds like Longshadow and Shadowspinner, before they were exiled, were the last of a race of outsider sorcerers who enslaved these people’s forefathers—through their ability to manipulate killer shadows they summoned from the plain.”
“Wouldn’t you know? They brought their business with them. Tell these guys whatever they need to know. Tell them the truth. Tell them who we are and what we intend to do. And what we’ve already done to their buddies Longshadow and Shadowspinner.”
“We might be wise to find out a little more about them before we become completely candid.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to break any lifetime habits.”
Doj nodded slightly, betraying the slightest smile. He faced the old men and began talking. I found that my Nyueng Bao was improving. I had no trouble isolating “Stone Soldiers” and “Soldiers of Darkness” in his monologue. Native faces kept turning my way, always more surprised.
Sahra told me, “They’re monks of some sort. They’ve been watching for a long time. Watching is what their order does. In case the Shadowmasters try to return. They did not expect anyone to come for real.”
“They especially didn’t expect women, eh?”
“That amazes them. And Swan worries them. Their ancestors’ experiences with white devils were not positive.” Then, of course, the white crow swooped and landed on my shoulder. And the great black stallion, with its prune of a rider, came down to stick its nose in. And as the chatter picked up, still well-seasoned with “Stone Soldier” and “Soldier of Darkness” and “Steadfast Guardian,” the rest of the band drifted forward, impelled by curiosity. First thing I knew, Tobo was right there beside me, along with Runmust, Iqbal and Suruvhija and all their offspring, the dog, and ever-increasing jabber about what should we do with the Captured, where were we going to set up camp . . .
“You hearing these questions?” I asked Doj.
“I hear them. I think we’re going to be granted this whole valley. For the time being. While they send messages to the Court of All Seasons and the File of Nine. We’ll have more important visitors eventually. Until then—as I understand them—we can set down anywhere we want. The dialect is a little tricky, though, so be careful.”
Dozens of veteran eyes scanned the valley for defensible positions. It took no effort to identify them. They were the same as those we recalled from the Kiaulune wars.
I wondered if all the connected worlds would be equally familiar physically.
I indicated my choice. No one demurred. Runmust and the Singhs hurried off to survey the site, accompanied by a dozen men armed for anything. The five old monks did not protest. Mostly they seemed bemused and amazed.
So it was that the Black Company reached the Land of Unknown Shadows instead of fabled Khatovar. There it was that the Company settled and rested and recovered. There it was that I filled book after book with words when I was not planning or leading expeditions to rescue the rest of my captured brothers, and even that devil-dog Merika Montera so he would be available for another, rather less pleasant encounter with justice than the one that had driven him into exile. The grandchildren of his former slaves feared him not at all.
I won him a stay, at Lady’s request, so he could help with Tobo’s schooling. The stay was good for as long as he did that job satisfactorily and not for a moment more. The old monks, as tight of lip as their cousin Doj, agreed that Tobo had to be trained but would not reveal their reasoning even to me.
At one time the Land of the Unknown Shadows had suffered many lean, pale bonesacks just like Longshadow. They were invaders from another world. They had brought no wives with them. Time did not love them.
And thus it was. And thus it was.
Soldiers live. And wonder why.
One-Eye survived another four years, suffering strokes, yet recovering slowly every time. Seldom did he leave the house we built for him and Gota. Mostly he tinkered with his black spear while Gota hovered around and fussed. He fussed right back and never stopped worrying about Tobo’s education.
Once again Tobo was smothered in parents both real and surrogate.
He studied with One-Eye, he studied with Lady, he studied with Longshadow and Master Santaraksita, with the Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah, and with the masters of our adoptive world. He studied hard and well and much, much more than he wanted. He was very talented. He was what his great-grandmother Hong Tray had foreseen.
The Captured all returned to us, except for those who died beneath the plain, but even the best of them—Murgen, Lady, the Captain—were strange and deeply changed. Fey. But we were changed as well, by life, so that those of us they remembered at all were almost alien to them.
A new order came into being.
It had to be.
Someday we will cross the plain again.
Water sleeps.
For now, I just rest. And indulge myself in writing, in remembering the fallen, in considering the strange twists life takes, in considering what plan God must have if the good are condemned to die young while the wicked prosper, if righteous men can commit deep evil while bad men demonstrate unexpected streaks of humanity.
Soldiers live. And wonder why.
The Great General started south through the Dandha Presh moments after the Protector abandoned him so she could make more speed. Consequently he met Soulcatcher on the southern side of the summit just a week later. She talked to herself continuously in a committee of voices while she was awake and gibbered in tongues during her brief bouts of sleep. Mogaba thought the Daughter of Night seemed smugly pleased in the moment before she collapsed from exhaustion.
“Kill them,” Mogaba urged the moment he had Soulcatcher’s ear and a bit of privacy. “Those two can be nothing but trouble and there’s no way you can profit from keeping them around.”
“Possibly true.” The Protector’s voice was a sly one. “But if I’m clever enough I can use the girl to tap into Kina’s power the way my sister did.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a life noteworthy for its regiments of disappointments, it’s that you can’t rely on cleverness. You’re a powerful woman now. Kill them while you can. Kill them before they find a way to turn the tables. You don’t need to become any stronger. There’s no one in this world capable of challenging you.”
“There’s always someone, Mogaba.”
“Kill them. They sure won’t waste a second on you.”
Soulcatcher approached the Daughter of Night, who had not moved since her collapse. “My dear sweet niece wouldn’t harm me.” The voice she chose could have been that of a naive fourteen-year-old responding to the charge that her twenty-five-year-old lover was interested in only one thing. Then she laughed cruelly, kicked the Daughter of Night viciously. “You even think about it, bitch, and I’ll roast and eat you one limb at a time. And still make sure you live long enough to see your mother die first.”
The Great General neither moved nor made any remark. His face betrayed nothing, not even to Soulcatcher’s acute eye. But in his sinking heart he understood that yet again he had allied himself with complete and unpredictable insanity. And yet again he had no option but to ride the tiger. He observed, “Perhaps we should give thought to how to guard our minds against intrusion by the Queen of Terror and Darkness.”
“I’m ahead of you, General. I’m the professional.” This voice was that of a self-important little mouse of a functionary. It became that of a self-confident woman being conversational, the voice Mogaba suspected was Soulcatcher’s own. It resembled closely the voice of her sister, Lady. “For the last week I’ve had nothing to do but nurture the blisters on my feet and think. I conceived marvelous new torments to practice upon the Black Company—too late to enjoy them. Isn’t that the way it always goes? You always think of the perfect comeback about an hour too late for it to do any good? I suppose I’ll find other enemies and my innovation won’t be wasted. Most of the time, though, I considered how best to circumvent Kina’s power.” She did not fear naming the goddess directly. “We can do it.”
The Daughter of Night stirred slightly. Her shoulders tightened. She glanced up for an instant. She looked a little uncertain, a little troubled.
For the first time since her birth she was completely out of touch with her soul-mother. She had been out of touch for several days. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
Soulcatcher eyed Narayan Singh. That old man was not much use anymore. She could test her new torments on him once she had him back in Taglios, before a suitable audience.
“General, if I get caught up in one of those byways that distract me so often, I want you to nudge me back to the business at hand. Which will be empire building. And, in my spare time, the creation of a new flying carpet. I think I know enough of the Howler’s secrets to manage. This past week has forced me to admit to myself that I have no innate fondness for exercise.”
Soulcatcher prodded the Daughter of Night again, then settled on a rotten log and removed her boots. “Mogaba, don’t ever tell anyone that you’ve seen the world’s greatest sorceress stumped for a way to handle something as trivial as blisters.”
Narayan Singh, who had been snoring fitfully, suddenly rose up and gripped the bars of his cage, his face contorted in terror, its butternut color all but gone. “Water sleeps!” he screamed. “Thi Kim! Thi Kim is coming!” Then he collapsed, unconscious again, though his body continued to spasm.
Soulcatcher growled softly. “Water sleeps? We’ll see what the dead can do.” They were all gone this time. It was her world now. “What else did he say?”
“Something that sounded like a Nyueng Bao name.”
“Uhm. Yes. But not a name. Something about death. Or a murder. Thi Kim. Coming. Hmm. Maybe a nickname? Murder walker? I should learn the language better.”
The Daughter of Night, she noted, was shaking more than Singh.
The wind whines and howls through fangs of ice. It races furiously around the nameless fortress but tonight neither the lightning nor the storm has any power to disturb. The creature on the wooden throne is relaxed. He will rest comfortably through a night of years for the first time in a long millennium. The silver daggers are no inconvenience at all.
Shivetya sleeps and dreams dreams of immortality’s end.
Fury crackles between the standing stones. Shadows flee. Shadows hide. Shadows huddle in terror.
Immortality is threatened.