Soldiers Live (2 page)

I rose and retreated, not turning my back. One-Eye’s lone remaining
pleasure—other than staying drunk—was tripping the unwary with his cane.

Tobo reappeared. He looked ghastly. “Captain . . . Croaker. Sir. I misunderstood
what he tried to tell me.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t him. It was Nana Gota.”

An Abode of Ravens:

A Labor of Love
Tobo’s grandmother, Ky Gota, had died happy. As happy as the Troll could die,

which was drunker than three owls drowned in a wine cask. She had enjoyed a vast
quantity of extremely high-potency product before she went. I told the boy, “If
it’s any consolation she probably didn’t know a thing.” Although the evidence
suggested she knew exactly what was happening.

I did not fool him. “She knew it was coming. The Greylings were here.” Something
behind the still chittered softly in reponse to the sound of his voice. Like the
baobhas, the greylings are a harbinger of death. One of a great many in Hsien.

Some of the things that had been howling in the wilderness earlier would have
been, too.

I said the things you say to the young. “It was probably a blessing. She was in
constant pain and there was nothing I could do for her anymore.” The old woman’s
body had been a torment to her for as long as I had known her. Her last few
years had been hell.

For a moment Tobo looked like a sad little boy who wanted to bury his face in
his mother’s skirt and shed some tears. Then he was a young man whose control
was complete again. “She did live a long life and a fulfilled one, no matter how
much she complained. The family owes One-Eye for that.”

Complain she had, often and loudly, to everyone about everything and everyone
else. I had been fortunate enough to miss much of the Gota era by having gotten
myself buried alive for a decade and a half. Such a clever man am I. “Speaking
of family, you’ll have to find Doj. And you’d better send word to your mother.

And as soon as you can you’ll need to let us know about funeral arrangements.”

Nyueng Bao funerary customs seem almost whimsical. Sometimes they bury their
dead, sometimes they burn them, sometimes they wrap them and hang them in trees.

The rules are unclear.

“Doj will make the arrangements. I’m sure the Community will demand something
traditional. In which case my place is somewhere out of the way.”

The Community consists of those Nyueng Bao associated with the Black Company who
have not enlisted formally and who have not yet disappeared into the mysterious
reaches of the Land of Unknown Shadows.

“No doubt.” The Community are proud of Tobo but custom demands that they look
down on him for his mixed blood and lack of respect for tradition. “Others will
need to know, too. This’ll be a time of great ceremony. Your grandmother is the
first female from our world to pass away over here. Unless you count the white
crow.” Old Gota seemed much less formidable in death.

Tobo’s thoughts were moving obliquely to mine. “There’ll be another crow,

Captain. There’ll always be another crow. They feel at home around the Black
Company.” Which is why the Children of the Dead call our town the Abode of
Ravens. There are always crows, real or unknown.

“They used to stay fat.”

The unknown shadows were all around us now. I could see them easily myself,

though seldom clearly and seldom for more than an instant. Moments of intense
emotion draw them out of the shells where Tobo taught them to hide.

A renewed racket arose outside. The little darknesses stirred excitedly, then
scattered, somehow disappearing without ever revealing what they were. Tobo
said, “The dreamwalkers must be hanging around on the other side of the
shadowgate again.”

I did not think so. This evening’s racket was different.

An articulate cry came from the room where we had left One-Eye. So the old man
had been faking his snooze after all. “I’d better see what he wants. You get
Doj.”

“You don’t believe it.” The old man was agitated now. He was angry enough to
speak clearly, without much huffing and puffing. He threw up a hand. One
wrinkled, twisted ebony digit pointed at something only he could see. “The doom
is coming, Croaker. Soon. Maybe even tonight.” Something outside howled as if to
strengthen his argument but he did not hear it.

The hand fell. It rested for several seconds. Then it rose again, one digit
indicating an ornate black spear resting on pegs above the doorway. “It’s done.”

He had been crafting that death tool for a generation. Its magical power was
strong enough for me to sense whenever I considered it directly. Normally I am
deaf, dumb and blind in that area. I married my own personal consultant. “You
run into. Goblin. Give him. The spear.”

“I should just hand it over?”

“My hat, too.” One-Eye showed me a toothless grin. For the entirety of my time
with the Company he had worn the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest, most disreputable
black felt hat imaginable. “But you got. To do it. Right.” So. He still had one
practical joke to pull even though it would be on a dead man and he would be
dead himself long before it could happen.

There was a scratch at the door. Someone entered without awaiting invitation. I
looked up. Doj, the old swordmaster and priest of the Nyueng Bao Community.

Associated with the Company but not of it for twenty-five years now. I do not
entirely trust him even after so long. I seem to be the only doubter left,

though.

Doj said, “The boy said Gota . . . ”

I gestured. “Back there.”

He nodded understanding. I would focus on One-Eye because I could do nothing for
the dead. Nor all that much for One-Eye, I feared. Doj asked, “Where is Thai
Dei?”

“At Khang Phi, I assume. With Murgen and Sahra.”

He grunted. “I’ll send someone.”

“Let Tobo send some of his pets.” That would get some of them out from under
foot—and have the additional consequence of reminding the File of Nine, the
master council of warlords, that the Stone Soldiers enjoy unusual resources. If
they could detect those entities at all.

Doj paused at the doorway to the back. “There’s something wrong with those
things tonight. They’re like monkeys when there’s a leopard on the prowl.”

Monkeys we know well. The rock apes haunting the ruins lying where Kiaulune
stands in our own world are as pesky and numerous as a plague of locusts. They
are smart enough and deft enough to get into anything not locked up magically.

And they are fearless. And Tobo is too soft of heart to employ his supernatural
friends in a swift educational strike.

Doj vanished through the doorway. He remained spry although he was older than
Gota. He still ran through his fencing rituals every morning. I knew by direct
observation that he could defeat all but a handful of his disciples using
practice swords. I suspect the handful would be surprised unpleasantly if the
duel ever involved real steel.

Tobo is the only one as talented as Doj. But Tobo can do anything, always with
grace and usually with ridiculous ease. Tobo is the child we all think we
deserve.

I chuckled.

One-Eye murmured, “What?”

“Just thinking how my baby grew up.”

“That’s funny?”

“Like a broken broom handle pounded up the shit chute.”

“You should. Learn to appreciate. Cosmic. Practical jokes.”

“I . . . ”

The cosmos was spared my rancor. The street door opened to someone even less
formal than Uncle Doj. Willow Swan invited himself inside. “Shut it quick!” I
snapped. “That moonlight shining off the top of your head is blinding me.” I
could not resist. I recalled him when he was a young man with beautiful long
blond hair, a pretty face and a poorly disguised lust for my woman.

Swan said, “Sleepy sent me. There’re rumors.”

“Stay with One-Eye. I’ll deliver the news myself.”

Swan bent forward. “He breathing?”

With his eye shut One-Eye looked dead. Which meant he was laying back in the
weeds hoping to get somebody with his cane. He would remain a vicious little
shit till the moment he did stop breathing.

“He’s fine. For now. Just stay with him. And holler if anything changes.” I put
my things back in my bag. My knees creaked as I rose. I could not manage that
without putting some of my weight on One-Eye’s chair. The gods are cruel. They
should let the flesh age at the rate the spirit does. Sure, some people would
die of old age in a week. But the keepers would hang around forever. And I would
not have all these aches and pains. Either way.

I limped as I left One-Eye’s house. My feet hurt.

Things scurried everywhere but where I was looking. Moonlight did not help a
bit.

The Grove of Doom:

Night Songs
The drums had begun at sunset, softly, a dark whispering promise of a shadow of
all night falling. Now they roared boldly. True night had come. There was not
even a sliver of moon. The flickering light of a hundred fires set shadows
dancing. It appeared that the trees had pulled up their roots to participate. A
hundred frenzied disciples of the Mother of Night capered with them, their
passion building.

A hundred bound prisoners shivered and wept and fouled themselves, fear
unmanning some who had believed themselves heroic. Their pleas fell upon
unhearing ears.

A looming darkness emerged from the night, dragged by prisoners straining at
cables in the hopeless hope that by pleasing their captors they might yet
survive. Twenty feet tall, the shape proved to be a statue of a woman as black
and glistening as polished ebony. It had four arms. It had rubies for eyes and
crystal fangs for teeth. It wore a necklace of skulls. It wore another necklace
of severed penises. Each taloned hand clutched a symbol of her power over
humanity. The prisoners saw only the noose.

The beat of the drums grew more swift. Their volume rose. The Children of Kina
began to sing a dark hymn. Those prisoners who were devout began to pray to
their own favored gods.

A skinny old man watched from the steps of the temple at the heart of the Grove
of Doom. He was seated. He no longer stood unless he had to. His right leg had
been broken and the bone improperly set. Walking was difficult and painful. Even
standing was a chore.

A tangle of scaffolding rose behind him. The temple was undergoing restoration.

Again.

Standing over him, unable to remain still, was a beautiful young woman. The old
man feared her excitement was sensual, almost sexual. That should not be. She
was the Daughter of Night. She did not exist to serve her own senses.

“I feel it, Narayan!” she enthused. “The imminence is there. This is going to
reconnect me with my mother.”

“Perhaps.” The old man was not convinced. There had been no connection with the
Goddess for four years. He was troubled. His faith was being tested. Again. And
this child had grown up far too headstrong and independent. “Or it may just
bring the wrath of the Protector down on our heads.” He went no farther. The
argument had been running from the moment that she had used some of her raw,

completely untrained magical talent to blind their keepers for the moments they
had needed to escape the Protector’s custody three years ago.

The girl’s face hardened. For a moment it took on the dread implacability
apparent on the face of the idol. As she always did when the matter of the
Protector came up, she said, “She’ll regret mistreating us, Narayan. Her
punishment won’t be forgotten for a thousand years.”

Narayan had grown old being persecuted. It was the natural order of his
existence. He sought always to make sure that his cult survived the wrath of its
enemies. The Daughter of Night was young and powerful and possessed all of
youth’s impetuosity and disbelief in its own mortality. She was the child of a
Goddess! That Goddess’s ruling age was about to break upon the world, changing
everything. In the new order the Daughter of Night would herself become a
Goddess. What reason had she to fear? That madwoman in Taglios was nothing!

Invincibility and caution, they were forever at loggerheads, yet were forever
inseparable.

The Daughter of Night did believe with all her heart and soul that she was the
spiritual child of a Goddess. She had to. But she had been born of man and
woman. A flake of humanity remained as a stain upon her heart. She had to have
somebody.

Her movements became more pronounced and more sensual, less controlled. Narayan
grimaced. She must not forge an interior connection between pleasure and death.

The Goddess was a destroyer in one avatar but lives taken in her name were not
taken for reasons so slight. Kina would not countenance her Daughter yielding to
hedonism. If she did there would be punishments, no doubt falling heaviest upon
Narayan Singh.

The priests were ready. They dragged weeping prisoners forward to fulfill the
crowning purpose of their lives, their parts in the rites that would
reconsecrate Kina’s temple. The second rite would strive to contact the Goddess,

who lay bound in enchanted sleep, so that once again the Daughter of Night would
be blessed with the Dark Mother’s wisdom and far-seeing vision.

All things that needed doing. But Narayan Singh, the living saint of the
Deceivers, the great hero of the Strangler cult, was not a happy man. Control
had drifted too far away. The girl had begun altering the cult to reflect her
own inner landscape. He feared the chance that one of their arguments would not
heal afterward. That had happened with his real children. He had sworn an oath
to Kina that he would bring the girl up right, that they both would see her
bring on the Year of the Skulls. But if she continued growing ever more
headstrong and self-serving . . .

She could restrain herself no longer. She hurried down the steps. She plucked a
strangling scarf from the hands of one of the priests.

What Narayan saw in the girl’s face then he had seen only one place before, in
his wife’s face, in her passion, so long ago that it seemed to have happened
during an earlier turn around the Wheel of Life.

Saddened, he realized that when the next rite started she would throw herself
into the torture of the victims. In her state she might become too involved and
spill their blood, which would be an offense the Goddess would never excuse.

He was becoming extremely troubled, was Narayan Singh.

And then he became more troubled still as his wandering eye caught sight of a
crow in the crotch of a tree almost directly behind the deadly rite. Worse, that
crow noticed him noticing it. It flung itself into the air with a mocking cry. A
hundred crow voices immediately answered from all over the grove.

The Protector knew!

Narayan yelled at the girl. Attention much too focused, she did not hear him.

Agony ripped through his leg as he climbed to his feet. How soon would the
soldiers arrive? How would he ever run again? How would he keep the Goddess’s
hope alive when his flesh had grown so frail and his faith had worn so
threadbare?