Soldiers Live (31 page)

Midway Between:

The Capture
The cage was inside a halfway collapsed tent. Several fireballs had ripped
through the fabric but had failed to set it afire. I told everyone, “Be
extremely careful here. If there was ever a time when Soulcatcher would try to
spring something on us this would be it.”

Sleepy had her henchmen push curious soldiers back. We were already closer to
the tent than Lady liked—though that had as much to do with who we expected to
meet here as it had to do with concern about sorcerous deadfalls.

Nobody had yet been able to sense anything active in that line.

Lady told Tobo, “Go over everything three more times. Then check it again.

Howler, you go over it, too.” Of no one in particular she asked, “Where’s
Goblin?” When she got no answer she turned on the men who had found the tent,

all of whom were in perfect health despite having taken time to scrounge
souvenirs before they reported their find. “Where’s the little man? The one who
got away at Nijha.”

Shrugs. They might not know what she was talking about. But one brave soul did
say, “There’s another cage under there. It’s tipped over and broken. Maybe he
got away.”

Lady and I exchanged glances. Why would Goblin leave without the girl?

He would not.

Tobo called out, “There’s no danger here.”

Howler tried to concur but his voice gurgled off into a scream.

I said, “Something definitely ain’t right. Tobo, send your unseen pals out to
scout around. We especially need to know where Goblin and Soulcatcher are. As
soon as we can. We have to keep after them.”

Sleepy nodded irritated agreement.

Lady and I approached the tent warily.

Booby traps come in many forms.

As we had been warned, one broken cage was empty. The other lay on its side,

door downward. One fine-looking woman lay sort of splattered all over inside,

wearing not a stitch.

Lady stunned me by starting to rush forward saying something about her poor
baby. I caught her arm. “Easy.” The body looked, to me, like it had been posed.

It would excite Soulcatcher’s sense of humor for decades if she could get us to
jump to our deaths over a child who had no more feeling for us than she did for
the horses, cattle, and whatnot that passed through her life.

Lady paused but would not remain patient long. “What?”

“That isn’t Booboo. I don’t think.” But that naked flesh could not be an
illusion, could it? Goblin used to do that sort of thing . . . But Tobo said
nothing magical was going on.

I squatted, groaning as my knees creaked, reached through the bars and pulled
dark hair away from the woman’s neck, which it had concealed.

I pulled Lady down beside me. Her knees popped as badly as mine had. “Look
there. I do pretty good work, don’t I? You can hardly see the scars.” I
exaggerated. The scarring was ugly. But not all that ugly for somebody who had
had her head sewn back on.

“Check the foot. Which foot got hurt? The right one, wasn’t it?”

I uncovered the woman’s right foot. The injury done by Goblin’s booby trap, and
Soulcatcher’s own crude self-repairs, were immediately obvious.

“I hate her even more than I used to,” Lady said. “Except for that heel and her
scars she’s still looking just as sleek as she did on her nineteenth birthday.

What’s wrong with her?”

I said, “I can’t tell from here. But I’m not getting any closer till I know it’s
safe. Where’d Tobo and Howler go? Get them back here.” This remained a
potentially explosive situation, even if no sorcery was active. Soulcatcher
would be in a foul temper when she regained consciousness.

Lady mused, “The child must have a low opinion of our intelligence if she
thought this would fool us.”

I wondered. Maybe we just showed up before the trap could be fully prepared.

When Tobo returned he told us, “Cat Sith just spotted Soulcatcher at the north
edge of the woods. She has Goblin on a leash. She’s rallied some soldiers and
has them building earthworks.” He became increasingly distracted as he stared at
my sister-in-law.

Now was that not an interesting set of developments?

Sleepy blurted, “The Daughter of Night is pretending that she’s the Protector?”

Tobo almost reeled back when he realized that he was lusting after a woman five
hundred years his senior.

Lady, always an advocate for swift and decisive action when she had been in
command, insisted, “We need to press her. Whoever’s in charge. Every second she
gets to pull things together will mean more casualties and difficulties for us
later.”

Sleepy did not disagree. It was hard to argue with the truth. She went off to
restore order and resume the advance. It was weird that the Taglians, already
broken twice and neither well-trained nor motivated, would be rallying. But Tobo
insisted that they were doing so and he was not subject to fantasies. Of that
sort.

It seemed unlikely that the Taglians would be well-armed. Most of the Taglian
soldiers had thrown down their weapons the first time they fled.

Lady gripped my hand for a moment. “Think we’ll ever really get to see her?”

“You begin to wonder if she’s any closer, or any more real, than Khatovar, don’t
you?”

Willow Swan came bounding up. “Is it true? Have we caught Soulcatcher again?”

“News spreads fast,” I said. “Yes. That’s her. I’m pretty sure. You’re welcome
to join me while I examine her. To make sure.” He had gotten closer to her than
I ever had as her one-time physician and surgeon. He would have a better chance
of spotting physical evidence that this was one of Soulcatcher’s elaborate
tricks. If he remembered anything at all after five years away.

I did not believe this was a trick. There was something badly wrong with my
honey’s little sister. I felt that before I got my close-up look.

Swan examined and grumbled. He had no happy recollections of the way Soulcatcher
had used him way back when.

But he was not driven by any particular hatred of her, either. Sleepy said, “You
keep what this woman did to you firmly in mind, Willow Swan. I don’t want to see
it happen again. And if I do get a whiff, you can count on getting kneecapped
before you score.”

Swan wanted to rage and protest that there was no damned way that witch was
going to get inside his head again. But he did not. He was only flesh and he
recognized that that flesh was incapable of rational thought around any female
who shared Soulcatcher’s family blood.

His record spoke for itself.

“Then why don’t we just kill her?” he asked. Wounded pride burned through his
cool. “Right here. Right now. While we’ve got the best chance we’ll ever get.

End it all forever.”

“We won’t because we don’t know what Goblin and Booboo did to her,” I snapped
when Lady seemed strangely reluctant to disappoint a fellow whose passion had
fixed upon her originally. She would not be developing a sense of compassion at
this late date, would she? Or of family? She and her sister were one another’s
oldest surviving enemies. “Soulcatcher won’t help us more than she absolutely
has to but she will help. For a while.”

Lady nodded. Her sister was insane but her insanity was pragmatic.

Sister Soulcatcher showed no signs of recovering.

I did not say so but my outburst was part whistling past the graveyard. I was
increasingly certain that there was something gravely wrong with Soulcatcher. I
feared she might be dying. This was the thing that had claimed Sedvod. And
nobody else saw it.

The others were all too excited by the prospect of having her at our mercy.

Midway Between:

Unpleasant Truth
Getting Soulcatcher awake and aware enough to understand and begin suffering
because of her circumstances preoccupied Lady and Swan for some time. Murgen and
Thai Dei, Sahra and Uncle Doj joined them. In time they meant to strong-arm
Soulcatcher into assisting us but first they wanted to fatten up on a feast of
gloating.

Soulcatcher did not cooperate. She remained steadfastly unaware, exactly the way
Sedvod had done.

The racket of skirmishing rose and fell in the distance, never becoming intense.

Our guys did not sound much more ambitious than were our enemies. I did not
blame them for a disinclination to get killed when the battle’s outcome had been
determined already.

Riverwalker jogged into sight. “The Captain’s compliments and could you all come
up and help her? She has a situation. She’d like some advice.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything.”

“What kind of situation?” Murgen asked. He was not distracted by Soulcatcher. He
understood that when the word “situation” was used this way it meant that his
son was about to be asked to jump into something particularly hot.

“We’re having trouble coming to grips with what’s left of the enemy.”

I suggested, “Why not just leave them the hell alone now? They’re on the run.”

Riverwalker ignored me.

“At about a hundred yards the soldiers start losing interest. The few who do
manage to go on and get within fifty yards say they find themselves thinking how
awful they are for interfering with Her and that they really ought to be helping
Her fulfill Her holy destiny. ‘Her’ not being defined but they assume they’re
thinking about the Protector because the Protector is the devil they know and
the devil they thought they were supposed to be chasing.”

Lady waved me closer. She murmured, “I’ll handle this end. Take the carpet and
posts up and bombard the Taglian command from outside spell range.”

“We’re almost out of fireballs again.”

“So drop rocks. Or burning brush. Or anything else that will make her
concentrate on staying out of the way. Every time she moves a few more of her
troops will drift outside the spell. Whereupon they’ll suddenly get smart and
run away.”

Her confident prescription suggested that this was an effect she knew of old.

I told everyone, “First thing we do is load up on arrows. We’ll just drop them
from higher than she can reach. From five hundred feet up they ought to be good
and deadly.” My gut knotted. I was talking about bombarding my own flesh and
blood.

But part of me was certain that the girl would avoid personal damage. And part
believed that a confrontation had been inherent in the situation from the moment
Narayan Singh had snatched our baby from Lady’s arms.

It did work. The girl, wearing her aunt’s costume, darted around, followed by
Goblin. The last few fireballs and firebombs got spent. Their infallible lack of
accuracy refreshed my cynical view of our chances of catching a break.

The pair tried to fight back. Whenever a flier descended below a certain level a
string of urine-colored lights flung upward. But I kept them too busy skipping
out of harm’s way to concentrate on their marksmanship. I could not tell which
was the source of the deadly light.

I noted that the girl seemed unaware that the guy overhead in the ugly suit was
her doting papa.

Our soldiers grasped the situation quickly and seized those opportunities
offered by the shifting perimeter around the Taglian forces.

The Daughter of Night was no soldier but she was quick and decisive and did have
a source of advice in a man who had spent more than a century soldiering.

Goblin told her to attack, to get what use she could out of the troops she held
in thrall. She did attack. Straight toward Sleepy, ignoring the missiles falling
around her. Our people had no choice but to run from her while trying to weaken
her from extreme rage. Anybody who got too close underwent a sudden change of
heart and took up arms on behalf of the Deceiver messiah, without understanding
what was happening.

Because she was indifferent to how many of her helpers perished, Booboo was able
to chase around everywhere, breaking up everything before it got organized,

gaining a recruit for each two or three men she lost, making it emotionally ever
more difficult for our archers to hurl missiles at soldiers who had been
comrades not that long before. The girl even came near recapturing Soulcatcher.

Then Tobo screwed up.

He assumed that his strength, combined with that of the Howler, would be enough
to overpower an untrained girl if they came at her suddenly, from an unexpected
direction. And maybe he was right. But he forget that her companion was not the
Goblin he had grown up around. This Goblin was infected with wicked godhood.

That urine-colored light caught the flying carpet a glancing blow just before
the Howler and Tobo cut loose with the best they had. A chunk of carpet turned
into fluttering black scraps. Howler and Tobo and the rest of the carpet hurtled
ahead, safe from spells but not from a brutal beating by the branches of the
trees into which they plunged. The Howler got off a couple of heartfelt shrieks.

The urine-colored bar of light did the magical equivalent of jostling the
mystical elbows of the young sorcerer and the ancient one alike. Their spells
did a lot of damage to Booboo’s defenders. They even managed to stun their
intended targets. But because the spellcasters were bouncing around in the
branches in the woods, instead of reporting in, the rest of us never got a
chance to take advantage.

Midway Between:

The Rescuers
We had a standoff of sorts. We could not get at Goblin and the Daughter of Night
when they were most vulnerable. Their thugs did not know that we had lost our
most potent weapons, at least for a time. My ravens, who had returned
conveniently only when it was time for them to become Tobo’s mouthpieces,

informed me that Howler and Tobo had survived but were hurt. They were hidden in
the woods a few dozen yards from where the Daughter of Night and Goblin, barely
recovered enough to keep breathing, were hunkered down.

I tried to let Sleepy know quietly but Sahra was too alert. In moments she
worked herself into a state that even Murgen could not soften. “You’ve got to do
something!” she shrieked.

“The Daughter of Night will hear you,” Murgen growled.

“You’ve got to get him out of there!”

“Be quiet!”

I agreed. Somebody had to do something. That somebody might be me. But the only
useful help I had was my two raven assistants. They alternately reported Tobo
unconscious or quietly delirious. They could not get reliable orders from him.

They refused to let me use them to transmit orders to the other Unknown Shadows.

Those were gathering in numbers such that it was impossible not to catch
glimpses of them when you turned or moved suddenly.

“We can’t get close to him,” Murgen told Sahra. He shook her. She was not
listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths.

Shukrat stepped forward. She told us, “I can bring him out.”

Sahra shut up. Even Sleepy stopped pulling the remains of our army back together
and offered her attention for a moment.

“I’ll need my own clothing back,” Shukrat told us. Her accent was slight. “The
enchantment won’t touch me if I’m protected by my own clothing.” Her use of
Taglian had become conversational.

Sahra’s hysteria faded immediately. I will never understand that woman. I would
have bet on it getting worse.

The rest of us exchanged glances. We could not survive without Tobo. Not in this
world. Not with our enemies. We had to get him out of there before the Daughter
of Night discovered the opportunity that fortune had thrown down at her feet.

Shukrat said, “You’ve got to trust me sometime. This might be a good time to
take a chance.”

Maybe she was not as dumb as she put on.

Tobo trusted her.

I looked over her head to where Sleepy had resumed expostulating angrily with
Iqbal Singh and an officer in badly dented Hsien style armor. She had heard. She
waved a hand and nodded to indicate that the decision was up to me. I knew the
Voroshk kids better than she did.

“All right,” I told Shukrat. “But I go with you.”

“How?”

“I’ll put on Gromovol’s . . . ”

She was more amused than alarmed, though she was troubled. She was very worried
about Tobo.

Because I have this obsessional thing about loyalties and brotherhood and
keeping faith with the past I sometimes have trouble believing that other people
respond as flexibly to their situation as they do. I could not have made my
peace with such a dramatic shift in circumstances as easily as Shukrat had.

I said, “That won’t work, eh?”

“No. The clothing is created specially for each of us. Individually.” She had
only that slight accent, no greater than my own, but she did not yet possess a
large vocabulary. Her speech was simpler than it might have been. “Though it can
be adjusted by a tailor of sufficient skill. The skill takes twenty years to
learn, though.”

“All right. Where’s that stuff stashed? In Tobo’s wagon?” The kid had so much
junk he needed his own wagon and teamsters to haul it around. The wagon
contained things as diverse as marbles and miracles. He had been indulged all
his life and would not leave anything behind. “Let’s go.”

I hoped he had not left any protective spells where they would keep us from
getting at the tools we needed to save his scruffy young butt.