She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company (48 page)

Kina was looking for me. Or for something. Whatever direction I went I sensed
her before long, though she never closed in. But if I was not her object, what
was?

I fought off the urge to run to Sarie, telling myself to wait the demon out. But
the logical side of my mind, logically, told me that Kina had been waiting for
ages. She would not get impatient in one night.

But why would she want to find me?

I needed to get back to my flesh. The goddess was less a terror when I was not
amongst the ghosts.

I wished Thai Dei would waken me. When somebody did that it seemed my spirit did
not have to traverse the distance between.

I sneaked around to the camp in front of the Shadowgate. Gods, what squalor!

Successful conquerers ought to live better.

One-Eye was stirring. So was Gota. Another terrible breakfast was about to be
committed.

It was light out. I was still ghostwalking. I had not done so during daylight
since we lost Smoke. I had begun to think that I could not do it during the day.

Got to get back up there, I thought. They need to know. They would not wait
around for me. They would not carry me anywhere, either. I was no prisoner.

One-Eye seemed to sense something. He became nervous, snippy. Which was not much
of a change, really. Then Goblin sat up and threatened to turn One-Eye into a
lizard if he did not quit his bitching. Goblin had not aged well during the
campaign and One-Eye did not fail to mention that fact, probably for the
thousandth time. The bickering started. Mother Gota was not shy about offering
an occasional opinion of her own. One-Eye found time amidst his endless verbal
feud to cuss the rest of us for not having hung around till he turned up again
before we went up the mountain. “They had to know I’d be back. They know I
couldn’t stay away. They went just to spite me. It’s that fucking woman. Or the
kid. They think they’re punishing me. They got another think coming. I’m tempted
just to walk out on them. That’d show them. They’d miss me if I was gone.”

That was One-Eye all wrapped up in one quintessential wad of contradictory
nonsense.

His heart would have been broken had he known just how little he had been missed
by most of us. Of course, we had not run into many situations where having him
around might have been useful. One-Eye and his pal Goblin was not much use
during peacetime.

Suddenly, I realized we were surrounded by the stench of Kina. It had grown so
slowly it had not intruded on my awareness. I squirted through the Shadowgate
moaning because I might have missed learning something interesting. When One-Eye
got to running his mouth he seldom shut up till he emptied his entire head.

I streaked down the southward road as fast as I could. Which did not seem very
swift by daylight. Maybe I was slower with the sun shining. In fact, as the sun
rose higher I grew more sluggish. And more easily distracted.

I noticed that every circle showed hints of gates for east and west roads. I
became entangled in the puzzle of why they should exist, of what sort of tangle
that would make of the face of the plain. If there was only one gate from
outside and only one destination to be sought . . . The stones? The pillars. Of
course.

The side roads could be used to reach individual stones. Though why anyone would
want to do so remained a mystery.

It struck me, suddenly, that I had been in the same place a long time, wandering
through the wilderness of my own thoughts.

I sat up. I looked around wildly. “Where is Narayan Singh?” I demanded. I was
alone except for Thai Dei. There was no evidence the circle had been visited by
anyone else. Where was all the trash?

“You woke up,” Thai Dei said. People really sound stupid when they are caught
off guard and state the obvious.

“Where is everybody?”

“You would not wake up. They left without you.” Which meant without him. “The
Liberator said he would collect you on the way back. He seemed troubled.”

“I don’t blame him. I’m troubled. Help me up here.”

My knees were wobbly. That did not last, though.

“Food?” I croaked. Walking the ghostworld alone was less demanding than doing it
with Smoke but still it drained me.

“They took everything. Almost. I was able to steal a small amount.”

His small amount was actually a fair amount by Nyueng Bao standards. Those
people thrived on two grains of rice and a rotten fishhead a day. He said, “They
were generous with water.” He held up two canteens, explained, “It rained while
you were sleeping.”

“What?” I muttered around a mouthful. “When?” I had not been conscious of the
weather where I was.

“It rained. The water seemed to run into the circle and pool here. Without
harming the protective barriers. Will we wait here?” He sounded hopeful.

“No. I need to see the Captain right away.”

Thai Dei grunted one of his expressive grunts. He found me lacking in wisdom.

We two could cover ground faster than the gang up ahead. After a couple hours we
could make out a small group in the distance. I asked, “What the hell are they
doing?” Thai Dei’s eyes were better than mine.

“They appear to be handing things from man to man.”

They were, indeed. We saw that when we got closer. One man stood astride
something. He accepted an unhappy goat from a man nearer us on the road and
passed it to a man beyond him. That goat appeared to be the last thing needing
to be passed over. The man on our side hopped across while the fellow on the far
side helped the man standing astraddle.

I hollered and waved. Somebody hollered and waved back but nobody waited up.

“Fucker is big,” I said, meaning the fortress. Now we were close it seemed to
swell with every step. It was built of a blackish basaltic stone darker than the
surrounding plain. It was in a bad state of repair. “It wasn’t immune to the
earthquakes.”

Thai Dei grunted. He was nervous again.

“There’s what they were crossing.” It was a crack in the plain. It extended both
directions as far as I could see. Nowhere did it appear to be very wide though
it was narrowest where our guys had crossed. It was about three feet wide there.

They had even taken the carts and wagons over.

Farther away part of the fortress wall had collapsed and poured into the gap.

The stone looked freshly fallen so I presumed this was the collapse we had
witnessed. There were a couple of older falls evident, too. At a guess I would
say the oldest occurred the day we felt the quake all the way off in Taglios.

Thai Dei and I were too old to run except when we had to. But we wasted no time.

We hopped the crack before the goat guys moved out of sight around the curve of
the wall. One was Sparkle, another Wheezer. Wheezer would be getting a lot of
shit details for a while.

I huffed and puffed and hurried on. My pack seemed to be putting on weight. I
panted, “It feel like we’ve gained some altitude since we’ve been up here?”

Thai Dei offered an affirmative grunt. He said nothing else. He was puffing
himself.

I looked back. It did seem I could see more plain from here than I had seen from
back up the road.

Thai Dei wondered, “Have the earthquakes broken the road’s protection?” He must
have been worrying for a while.

I thought as we walked. “Couldn’t have. The shadows would have gotten us.” There
was still road surface underfoot but it was not as clear here. I wondered if the
entire fortress was encased in protection and, if so, how elastic that could be.

I was still alive but it seemed unlikely the fortress could fall down again and
again without overstressing the barrier somewhere.

Once across the crack we were soon under the wall’s loom. I ran my fingers over
the dark stone. “Huh?” It was crumbly. “That look like sandstone to you?”

Thai Dei grunted negatively, followed that with an interrogative noise. “Seems
like a lot of little tiny crystals. Like salt. But it is not sandstone.”

Something had been done to it. Something not natural. That kind of stone stood
up to everything forever—like the rest of the stone on the plain.

Thai Dei muttered, “I smell sorcery.”

“You have a fine nose, my brother.”

The guys we were following were in a hurry themselves, also following the curve
of the wall and whoever was ahead of them. They refused to wait but we continued
to gain ground.

We rounded a knee of wall and found many of the animals and much of the
equipment crowded into a shady patch in front of what once must have been the
main gate. I glanced upward. The clever builders ran the only protected approach
where it could be bombarded at will for a great distance. I wondered if I went
up there with a big enough rock could I squash the forvalaka. The black leopard
was in a foul mood. She roared and snarled and chewed at the bars of her cage.

She was being ignored because of her bad attitude.

I wondered if we ought not just leave her behind when we turned back. The
shadows would find a way.

The other animals had been left to supervise themselves, too.

Sparkle and Wheezer, only twenty yards ahead now, were squeezing through the
gateway. The gate itself was broken and twisted and hung on a single huge lower
hinge. A big crack in the masonry indicated that this damage had been caused by
earthquakes, too.

There was a large open space immediately behind the gate. Most fortifications
have them. They are where you put the people the place was built to protect. A
lot of the guys were there. A debate was running about whether or not the broken
gate should be busted down so the animals and wagons could be brought inside.

Concurrently, an argument raged amongst the Nyueng Bao about whether or not they
were obligated to follow the Company deeper into the fortress.

“Shit. I thought you died,” Willow Swan said when he saw me. “Thought we were
gonna pick up the stiff on the way back. If you didn’t start smelling too bad.”

“Thoughtful of you. Where’s the Old Man?” Mather and Blade, I noted, were not
among those in the courtyard. I peered around.

Every vertical surface consisted of the same decomposed basalt. The inner
fortress was so huge its magnitude would have stricken me numb had I not
experienced Overlook and the Palace in Taglios. Though still standing, it had
been cracked a hundred ways. Thousands of chunks great and small had fallen from
its face and lay in heaps at the base of the wall.

“They went inside. Ten minutes ago, maybe. Shouldn’t take long to catch up.”

Swan winced as he started toward the steps rising to the skinny door of the
inner fortress. I suspected that, as he had a habit of doing, he had begged off
earlier and had changed his mind since.

Thai Dei clumped after me, every slamming step an indictment. Because he joined
me several other Nyueng Bao peeled off the debating party and followed.

The doorway seemed like a veil of darkness. It felt like a veil of darkness when
I stepped through it. Like what I thought a veil of darkness ought to feel like,

anyway.

There was little light inside. That little seemed to seep through unseen cracks
above and ahead and got all the life sucked out before it reached me. “Quit
shoving back there!” I snapped. Thai Dei’s cousins were pushing me forward as
they came through the doorway. “And be quiet. I’m trying to listen.” Sounds were
coming from somewhere. They were ricocheting around inside a vast empty space,

though, which made it impossible to guess where they originated.

Willow Swan muttered, “I was right the first time. I got no business being in
here.” And he was right, for sure, as I would learn before much time passed.

“Quiet.” In a moment I set off in the apparent direction of the voices.

I heard Lady and Croaker, Bucket, Hagop, Otto, Loftus, Longo and Clete all
cheerfully engaged in a vulgar debate. There was not one highbrow among them.

When I caught up I found the whole Old Crew in one ugly clump. They had even
brought Howler, Longshadow and Catcher along. Howler and Longshadow were out of
their cages. Longshadow was presided over by Blade and Cordy Mather. Howler was
alert but Longshadow was little more than a drooling cabbage. The Prahbrindrah
Drah had gotten stuck with watching and helping Howler.

No matter. I approached the Old Man where he and Lady were crouched, peering
through a break in a wall at something that was, I guessed, never meant to be
seen. Croaker looked back to see who was crowding him. I demanded, “Where’s
Narayan Singh?”

“He’s . . . ” A bewildered, blank look captured his face. It was hard to make
out, though. His whole crowd had only one torch burning for light. Longinus held
that and he was about twenty feet away. Still, I could see Croaker well enough
to see that, suddenly, he looked like he had been hit over the head with an axe
handle.

I turned to Lady. “You tell me. Where’s Narayan Singh? Wasn’t he one of your
favorite prisoners?” Was he not somebody who would have been killed a long time
ago if a fool name of Murgen was in charge?

Lady just stared at me. I got the feeling she wanted to put her Lifetaker helmet
back on and kick me in the head. But she remained strong. She continued to avoid
old habits.

Croaker said, “I forgot he even existed. How could that happen?”

Lady went on from there. “What happened? What did Singh do?”

I ticked fingers. “He escaped. He attacked Uncle Doj. Using a black rumel. He
found Catcher’s hideout and freed the Daughter of Night. They’re on the run,

probably already plotting how to get back in business.”

Lady’s fingers probed her waistline, then felt for a left sleeve that did not
exist. She had no place to hide a strangling cloth while wearing armor. Her
expression of surprise left her looking totally goofy. This sort of thing did
not happen to her!

Soulcatcher, although farther away than Longo and his torch, heard me just fine.

She made an inarticulate sound that had to be rage, began to flop on her litter.

She seemed to be in awfully good shape for somebody who had been tied and gagged
for three days.

I said, “I think the Mother of Deceivers pulled a fast one.” I thought I would
shut my mouth for a while. Croaker was so angry he was shaking.

Lady handled it better. After a long, exasperated sigh directed at no one in
particular she crouched and peered through the crack again. I bent over. There
was a hint of reddish light beyond her. She said, “He’s marked now. He can be
found. I’ll handle that when we get back to camp. This time I’ll take your
advice.” She shook her head suddenly, violently, as though trying to clear it.

“She is insidious. I didn’t think she could do that to me. Come on.” She ducked
through the gap in the wall.

“Here. Take this.” Bucket shoved the standard into my hands. I had sort of
pretended not to notice him carrying it. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”

“I overslept.”

Croaker went through behind Lady. A couple other guys were thinking about going.

Nobody was in a hurry, though, so I shoved the head of the standard into the
hole and started after it.

Croaker had a little trouble. He was a big man. I had more trouble than he did
because I went into the crack with a long pole.

Thai Dei grabbed the standard from behind about the same time Croaker got ahold
of the other end. One pulled one way and the other pushed the other and I got
squished in the middle. After I yelled some and dragged my ass on through and
got the damned standard back under control I took the opportunity to look
around.

It was very dark in there. Except for the glow from a crack in the floor about a
half mile away . . .

Death is eternity. Eternity is stone.

“Stone is silent,” Lady said.

It is immortality of a sort.

The earth twitched. From up ahead came the scream of stone moving on stone. A
hulking darkness above the reddish lightleak heaved.

Men coming through the crack behind us forced us first three forward. Longo
finally arrived with the torch. It did not do much to relieve the darkness but
did show us where we were putting our feet. “One-Eye says we’re walking into a
trap, boss.” I began telling him and Lady about my latest night of ghostwalking.

“Whose trap is it?” Croaker demanded after a while. “That might be critical.”

I said, “I didn’t have a chance to talk it over with the little shit.”

Lady said, “It’s my sister’s trap. Have the men drag her in here. I’ll stop
listening to me and start taking your advice. She can stay right here when we go
back.”

I nodded as though that plan excited me. Far be it from me to remind her that
she had killed Soulcatcher before.

Croaker raised an eyebrow in my direction but said nothing otherwise. He had a
peace to maintain.

“Get them all in here,” Lady ordered. There were times when she was something
more than the Lieutenant.

They banged Catcher around good dragging her through the crack. But the bitch
kept right on smiling behind her gag. That was unnerving. Which is why she did
it, I guess. Logically, she ought to be starved, thirsty, littersore and very
depressed. Few of the men were gutsy enough to stand guard over her while she
was allowed to eat or relieve herself. Usually the job went to Swan or Mather or
the Prince if anybody bothered to remember her at all. Blade, though, would have
nothing to do with Catcher. I think he hated her because Lady did and his regard
for Lady was well inside the realm of obsession.

Catcher had a really dark and promising look for good old Murgen, happy or not
otherwise.

“Start exploring,” Lady snapped. She knelt over Catcher but looked up at
Croaker. “You’re here. What are you going to do about it?” It was obvious that
she was suffering one of her mood swings.

I knew Croaker wanted to tell her that this was not Khatovar, to insist that we
had not traveled halfway across the earth and had not hacked our ways through
hell only for the sake of finding an abandoned rockpile already fallen into
ruin. But he could not claim that because he did not know the truth.

He said nothing.

Croaker was becoming more taciturn all the time.

Lady muttered under her breath, grabbed Soulcatcher’s chin and forced her sister
to look her in the eye. “You have anything you want to share with us, dear? Is
there any little secret about this place that you’d trade for not getting left
behind when we leave?”

Catcher winked at me. Lady did not have a hope.

I got the impression that she was willing to haul out of there right now and to
hell with puttering around the rockpile trying to get the angle on everybody
else.

Catcher really was in a bad mood. And Lady, too. Lucky for Kina she was divine.

Catcher smiled and smiled but never volunteered anything. She would not, not to
save her own ass. Which was what I expected. All the Ten Who Were Taken were
vulnerable only through their obsessions.

“Sheeit!” echoed through the darkness. “What the fuck was that? Captain! Murgen.

You got to see this.”

Croaker shrugged and nodded. It did not matter what it was. It was an excuse to
get away from the old lady for a minute.

I shuffled out onto a floor I could sense only by feeling it under my feet.

Croaker shuffled behind me. He was muttering like an old madman, shaking his
head, wanting to know what the hell he was doing here. This was not the place he
had been going for the last thirty years. This was somebody’s cruel joke. This
was somebody’s nightmare. This could not be the birthplace of the Free Companies
of Khatovar. There was nothing here.

I felt his despair grow. And knew it would swell till it became deep and black.

And then, in all likelihood, it would take a sideways turn when he convinced
himself that it had all come to this because he had let himself get distracted.

I had no trouble seeing the future, no sheep’s guts needed. Sometime not long
after we returned to Kiaulune he would decide we went wrong because we moved
before we studied those early Annals. He would decide we had to go get them. And
doing that just might generate the bloodshed needed to give Kina her Year of the
Skulls.

She is the darkness, all right.

I was surrounded by females, human, divine and demigod, every one of whom could
drape herself in that cloak. But right now lumbering, dull old Kina seemed to
have all her many sets of claws firmly locked on the title.

“Yah!” The Old Man grabbed my shoulder, stopped me just a few steps short of
daydreaming my way into an unscheduled dive into an abyss with no bottom. The
weak scarlet light came up from that. So did a trailer of mist. But that gap got
only a glance before our attention became fixed on the cause of the recent
outburst.

Now I could get a fair look at what had heaved following that last little tickle
of an earth tremor. “Torches!” I bellowed. “Get some light over here. Get some
more torches lit.” They did have plenty more, the brothers, but they were being
frugal. “It’s a big-ass old wooden throne.” What I could not bring myself to add
was that that big-ass old wooden throne had a big-ass old humanoid body nailed
to it with silver knives. Throne and body were poised above the abyss, painted
cruelly by the red light. I wanted torches so I could see the body better. I
thought its eyes were open and I did not want that to be true.

“What the fuck is it?” somebody asked. “A giant?”

Thai Dei, lurking in my shadow as always, offered one quick phrase in Nyueng
Bao. I did not understand anything but the accusation “Bone Warrior.”

“What was that?”

“It might be the golem Shivetya, Stone Soldier.” Why was he dragging that old
stuff out now?

“Shivetya?” I knew what a golem was. An artificial man, commonly created from
clay. In some mythologies all of us descend from such divine knickknacks.

“It is Gunni myth, Soldier of Darkness. Khadi, or Kina, when she was young,

warred with everyone. She so weakened the Lords of Light that the Lords of
Darkness thought to see a chance to conquer them and sent an army of demons to
attack them. The fighting went so poorly for the Lords of Light that the god
Fretinyahl, who is sometimes said to be Kina’s father, begged Kina for help. She
agreed, but for reasons of her own. In the final battle on the stone plain Khadi
grew bigger and stronger every time she devoured one of the demons.”

This much of the mythology I knew. Among other versions. Some witnesses claimed
Kina was created specially for the last great battle with the demon host sent up
by the Lords of Darkness. According to others she was sired by the devil
Ranashya who disguised himself in the aspect of Fretinyahl and had his way with
Mata, one of the forms the mother goddess takes in Gunni myth. Still others
insist Kina is not native to Gunni myth at all but is a powerful outside
intruder whose presence was so wicked it had to be accepted even while mostly
ignored.

The key story was pretty basic. Desperate gods chose to battle evil with evil
and ended up having their weapon turn and chomp on their fingers. Kina’s
creator, or father, eventually tricked her into falling asleep, after which she
was imprisoned until her worshippers could spring her with the Year of the
Skulls. The Year of the Skulls was something that was going to come. There was
no preventing it. Even though Kina was asleep and imprisoned a tiny wisp of her
essence had escaped and remained in the world guiding those who would bring on
the end of the age. But it could be thwarted indefinitely by the efforts of good
and righteous men.

“Once they understood how they had damned themselves the other Lords of Light
directed Fretinyahl to make a demon out of clay and animate it with a shard of
his own soul so he would never lose control. This golem was given the name
Shivetya, which means Deathless. Shivetya is supposed to guard the gateway to
Khadi’s resting place forever. I never heard anything about Shivetya being
nailed into place but even the gods are cruel and unforgiving, Bone Warrior.”

“No shit. And can that crap. I didn’t like it from Gota and Doj and I sure don’t
like it from you.” I looked at Croaker. “You follow that? You ever heard any of
that before?”

“Some. A friendly old scholar in Taglios did tell me that while the exact
meaning of Khatovar has been lost, similarities with modern dialect suggested
something like ‘Place from which Khadi went forth,’ or simply ‘Khadi’s gate.’ ”

“And you wanted to go there anyway?” Were we walking into the realities behind
the dark heart of southern myth? I did not want that. I wanted to be on my way
to paradise. We were supposed to be on the road to paradise.

Croaker did not answer me.

“Tell me more,” I said to the air. A bunch of torches were burning now. Most of
the gang were ranged behind me and the Old Man. More light did not stop me
having to see what I did not want to see. The thing pinned to the throne had
open eyes.

It did not move, though. “Shit,” Longinus said. “It’s just some kind of goddamn
idol. Don’t let’s get all spooked out.”

I began to inch forward, lowering the standard so I could use it like a pike. I
have no clue why I thought that might do me some good against some divine
toss-off.

Croaker came with me.

We halved the distance to the throne. The engineer brothers stuck close with
torches. Everybody else seemed less inclined to look at anything up close. I saw
no evidence that the thing on the throne was anything but a carving. At closer
view it did begin to look a little crudely made.

We halved the distance again. I could now inhale the thin vapors from the crack
in the floor. They were very cold and smelled faintly of old death.