Soldiers Live (52 page)

Taglios:

Best Served Cold
The only check on Tobo was Lady, who could not maintain her level of interest.

The only check on Lady was the wonder boy. And he had other things on his mind.

And altogether too much of that touched by the darkness.

No Shukrat, no Croaker, no Lady paying attention. Nights in the city lost their
traditional noisome urban charm. Some people began to compare the new age to a
time when the Protector had loosed her murderous shadows upon the city, for no
more obvious reason than existed behind the unleashing of the horrors out there
now.

The fact that there were few actual deaths went unremarked.

The Unknown Shadows enjoyed themselves greatly, tormenting the living. As did
Tobo, who found himself free to do anything he wanted.

Except in his dreams.

A woman had begun to haunt those. A beautiful Nyueng Bao woman who seemed to be
the embodiment of sorrow. He understood in his heart that this was his mother as
she had appeared when she was young, before she had met his father. Usually she
was not alone. Sometimes she was accompanied by a young, unbent Nana Gota. And
sometimes by another woman, always gentle, always with a smile, forged of steel
tougher than that of Uncle Doj’s sword Ash Wand. This woman, who had to be his
great grandmother, Hong Tray, never spoke. She communicated more with a
disapproving eye than Sahra could say in a hundred words.

His vengeances were unacceptable to all these women who had created and formed
him.

Tobo could not determine if he was being touched by the ghosts of his
ancestors—a possibility entirely in keeping with Nyueng Bao beliefs—or if the
women were the product of some conscience-stricken cellar of his mind. The
darkness within him was strong enough to make him want to defy them.

None of them wanted to be avenged.

Sahra’s ghost warned, “You won’t just hurt yourself, darling. If you go on
you’ll be running into a trap. Put aside your pain. Embrace your true destiny
and let it lift you up.”

Hong Tray studied him with eyes like cold steel marbles, agreeing that he had
come to a crossroads. That he was about to make a choice that would shape the
rest of his life.

He knew, of course, that the words the ghost women spoke, and the ghosts
themselves, had to be metaphors.

He had no trouble with his conscience when he was awake. So he tried to avoid
sleep.

Sleep deprivation clouded his judgment even further.

The hidden folk always reported the same thing: Aridatha Singh would not leave
his offices. He worked day and night, seldom doing more than catnap, as he tried
to hold the Taglian world together by the weight of his own will. The struggle
to maintain control ought to have beaten him down and have shredded his spirit
in days. Most men would have started cutting throats to more swiftly facilitate
reconstruction and assuage frustration. Aridatha just beat people down with
reason and public opinion. He treated with no one in secret. He made sure the
world knew when someone refused to handle the city’s business publicly.

Obstructionists were becoming known. The mood of people displaced by strife and
fire was not forgiving of traditional factionalism.

The unthinkable happened. Several men of high caste were beaten savagely. Shadar
were seen in the crowds, encouraging the violence. No one wondered, though, and
Aridatha Singh did not appear to be aware of that personally.

It was deep night but a light traffic continued to and from the City Battalions
barracks containing Aridatha Singh’s headquarters. A dark fog slowly gathered
around the place. People grew sleepy. Shadows scampered among the shadows. For
an instant, here and there, little people or little animals were visible
briefly—had anyone been awake to see them.

Tobo came walking through it all, so tired his eyes were crossing, so sure of
himself that he had not brought his flying post nor had he armored himself in
Voroshk black. So sure of himself that he did not double-check reports from his
Unknown Shadows.

He expected to walk in, complete his revenge, and be gone with no one the wiser.

Aridatha Singh’s fate would become a great and terrible mystery.

The hidden folk could tell him nothing about Singh’s office. They could not get
inside it. It was kept sealed airtight. But the sentries outside were snoring.

Tobo shoved the door. It gave way only grudgingly, swinging inward. He stepped
inside, panting. Across the room three men had fallen forward onto a worktable
or lay sprawled in their chairs. “Not good,” Tobo muttered, unexcited by the
presence of the potential witnesses.

“Not good at all,” Aridatha said, lifting his face off the desktop.

Tobo just had time to catch the swish of air behind him before something hit the
back of his head with force enough to crack bone. He went down into the darkness
knowing he had been betrayed, that he had walked into a trap. The Unknown
Shadows scattered in every direction, going mad, making Taglios a city of
nightmares.

Sahra, Gota and Hong Tray all awaited Tobo on the other shore of consciousness.

All three told him that this was a disaster entirely of his own devising. He
could have avoided it simply by doing the right thing.

He had been warned beforehand. He had not listened.

Sahra’s sorrow was deeper than ever Tobo had known it before.

Taglios:

The Mad Season
Lady dealt with the temptation easily for several days after Croaker departed.

She kept reminding herself that all she had to do was hang on till he got back.

By then the Daughter of Night would not be the Deceiver messiah anymore. She
would be just plain Booboo.

Sense told Lady to be patient. But emotion knew no patience. And emotion
threatened to devour her. Despite her long history, emotion had stolen control.

She broke after only four days.

Lady took a quick look into the hallway to make certain no one was likely to
intervene, then settled on a stool beside her daughter’s bed. She plucked the
ends of strands of spells keeping the girl asleep and constrained. She worked
quickly and deftly. She had been studying Booboo’s bonds all those four days.

Those spells unravelled almost as if they had a will of their own.

Lady proceeded with an uncharacteristically naive haste. That part of her that
had grown hard and bitter in the real world mocked her for her childishness.

This was the world. Her world. The real world. There was no reason to expect any
good to come her way.

Booboo’s eyes snapped open with mechanical suddenness. The color was right but
still they were not the family eyes. Nor were they Croaker’s eyes. They were
eyes colder than Lady’s own in her crudest hour. They were the eyes of a
serpent, a naga, or a deity. For an instant Lady froze like a mouse caught in a
snake’s stare. Then she said, “I’m an incurable romantic. The essence of romance
is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.” She tried to
assert control while the girl was physically too weak to act.

The girl’s “love me” aura had touched Lady already, so subtly that she remained
unaware of it until it was too late.

Lady had not worn her Voroshk costume. There was no shelter from the storm.

A vibration developed down deep inside her, at glacial speeds. As it built she
watched the power of the Goddess slowly fill the Daughter of Night. The buzz
within Lady included a trace of mirth. She understood that her unpracticed
maternal emotions had been discovered and manipulated, ever so subtly, for a
very long time. So subtly that she had not suspected. Worse, so subtly that she
was not adequately prepared to respond to any disaster.

Nevertheless, she was a woman of incredible will, having had ages to practice
employing it.

There was a countermove left.

In an instant Lady made the cruelest decision of her life. She would regret it
forever but knew the choice she made would leave her with the least painful
long-term wounds.

The Lady of Charm had centuries of practice making terrible decisions quickly,

and just as many years of practice living with the consequences.

From her belt Lady drew a memento of her brief passage as Captain of the Black
Company. The dagger’s pommel was a silver skull with one ruby eye. The ruby
always seemed to be alive. Lady lifted the blade slowly, her gaze locked with
that of the Daughter of Night. The sense of the presence of Kina grew ever
stronger between them.

“I love you,” Lady said, responding to a question never asked, existing only
within the girl’s heart. “I will love you forever. I will always love you. But I
won’t let you do this thing to my world.”

Lady could do it, in spite of all. She had slain as dear before, when she was
not yet as old as the child lying beneath her knife. And for less reason.

She felt a madness creep through her. She tried to concentrate.

She could kill because she was filled with a conviction that there was no better
thing she could do.

Kina and the Daughter of Night both strove to crack Lady’s terrible will. But
the dagger descended toward the girl’s breast, its progress inexorable. The
Daughter of Night quickly became the hypnotized prey, unable to believe that
Lady’s blade kept falling.

The tip of the knife touched cloth. It passed through, found flesh, then a rib.

Lady shifted her weight so she could drive the blade between bones.

She never sensed it coming. The blow, seemingly struck to the right side of her
head, was powerful enough to hurl her sideways a half dozen feet, into a wall.

Darkness closed in. For an instant there was a living dream in which she saw
herself trying to strangle her child instead of stabbing her.

The Daughter of Night felt fire rip across her chest as her would-be killer
flung toward the wall. She screamed. But the agony that moved her was not that
of her wound. It was a black explosion inside her mind, a sudden tidal wave of
knifelike shards of a thousand dark dreams, of a scream harsher than ten
thousand whetstones sharpening swords, of a rage so vast and red it could be
called the Eater of Worlds.

That blow was violent enough to fling her upward and to one side. She came down
sprawled across the still form of her birth mother. But she did not know. She
was unconscious long before gravity placed and posed her.

A whiff of old death, of graveyard mold, hung in the air of the room.

Fortress with No Name:

Godstalking
Goblin was too eager. Twice I felt compelled to yell at him to slow down. He
plunged down the dark stairwell at a pace I could not match. Even wearing the
Voroshk apparel the bruising impacts with the walls became too much for my
nerve.

We had not yet gone as deep as the ice cavern where Soulcatcher lay when I
bellowed an order to stop. Wonder of wonders, this time Goblin heard me. And
listened. And responded when I told him we had to go back up.

“What?” He turned the word into a two syllable whisper from an old tomb.

“We can’t do this in the dark. We’ll beat ourselves unconscious before we get
down there. Or at least get there too beaten up to think.”

He made a sound that signified reluctant agreement. He had had a few unpleasant
collisions of his own.

“We have to go get lights.” Why had I overlooked something so obvious? Because I
was too damned busy looking for the subtle and the sneaky, I suppose.

The stairwell was much too tight to turn the flying posts. We had to back them
up. That was a slow, humbling, sometimes painful task. And things did not get
much less humiliating when we did reach the top.

The girls and the white crow awaited us. In attitudes so smug they could be read
even though the ladies were clad for action. Arkana swung a lantern back and
forth.

For an instant I suffered an entirely irrelevant worry because I had not brought
my Widowmaker costume. It seemed appropriate to the situation. But definitely
not necessary.

All that armor ever was was a costume.

Now Shukrat waved a lantern back and forth. And laughed.

“Not a word,” I grumped.

“Did I say anything?”

“You’re thinking it, darling daughter.”

She raised her lantern higher, the better to see what I was wearing. My apparel
was in slow, creeping motion all around me, repairing extensive damage. “Not a
word from me, old-timer. You know your Shukrat. Honors her elders to a fault.

But I’m going to laugh, now. Please don’t jump to conclusions and think that
it’s at you.”

Arkana laughed harder.

Goblin made a series of noises, depleting his vocabulary fast.

“He’s right. Give us those lanterns. We need to get this done.” I hoped my
dimwit failure to consider the need for light would not be the one little thing
that got us destroyed. And that that was the last little thing I had been dumb
enough to forget.

Goblin took the lantern from Shukrat. He headed down into the earth again. He
was not nearly so hurried this time. Possibly his lust for revenge had begun to
cool.

I took Arkana’s lantern. The white crow flapped over to the tip of my post.

Before I finished telling it that traveling with me might not be a good idea.

Shukrat had another lantern going and was helping Arkana get herself another
lit.

The girls had been ready for us.

I bickered with them all the way down to the ice cavern. They had fun with me
all the way. They refused to listen to my warnings.

The white crow decided the cave of the ancients would be a fine place to detour.

I bellowed, “Don’t touch anything in there! Especially don’t touch yourself.” I
continued, mumbling, “When will I learn to keep my big damned mouth shut?” It
would be a great and wonderful irony if the bird’s touch was Soulcatcher’s
undoing, after all her lucky years.

Goblin got the hurries again. When I tried to slow him down he told me, “There’s
something going on with Kina! She’s starting to stir.”

“Shit!”

Keeping up was impossible, until we reached the black barrier. There Goblin’s
nerve failed him. There he froze, recalling the horror of the years he had spent
on the other side.

“Goblin. We’re almost there. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to do it now.” Numb
as I was to things supernatural even I could sense Kina’s proximity and her
heightened awareness. Which must not be our fault. Her attention was focused
elsewhere. “Now!” I said with more force.

Behind us the girls had begun whispering, troubled. They sensed much more than I
ever could.

I told them, “You two go back upstairs now. I guarantee you that you’ll be glad
you did. Especially if things don’t work out for us. Goblin.”

He reclaimed his courage. Or maybe just found his hatred again. His face
hardened. He started forward.

“Don’t rush,” I stage-whispered as he passed through the black barrier. “Girls,

I mean it. Start running now. There have to be some survivors.” I pushed through
the terrible barrier behind Goblin, nearly messing myself with the fear. Despite
what I had told the little man this was no time to be slow or tentative. Once we
breached the barrier Kina knew that we had come. Her slowness would be our only
ally.

Once I breached that barrier I flung myself into the anteroom area outside the
entrance to Kina’s prison. Goblin lined himself up to charge. I had to do
several things at once: encourage him, prepare myself to weather what was about
to happen and do my thankless bit to make this deicide work.

Got to keep the whole picture in mind. Got to do each thing on time, in the
right order, just the way you worked it out over the last few months.

As Goblin surged forward I placed my flying post into the angle where the floor
met the left-hand wall, then plastered myself against the wall above it and
willed my Voroshk clothing to form a protective scab over it and me. Then, in
light almost too dim for use, I found the right page in the First Father’s
notebook. I kept my protection open just enough to let me watch Goblin hurtle
straight at Kina and, to my surprise, drive One-Eye’s spear into her temple. I
had expected him to go for the heart.

I completed the cantrip that would destroy Goblin’s post, finished shutting me
and my post in. Then I allowed myself to feel lower than snake shit because of
what I was doing.

I had been hard at work justifying myself to myself for months. And had carried
on. But now it was happening. And when it was over I would have to live with my
deceits forever.

The entire universe shook. The cavern where Kina lay was big but it was
confined. The stairwell was the only escape the products of that violence could
find. The energy wave pounded at my protection.

I clung to the stone wall, beneath layers and layers of Voroshk material, while
the universe howled and shuddered. I swore that if Kina was powerful enough to
get through this I would enlist in her service myself because the only thing
tougher than her would be the guys who tied her up. And they had not been seen
for several millenia.

The noise began to fade. But I had trouble hearing it go. The roar had deafened
me temporarily.

I hoped the girls did head back up the way I told them.

I hoped the violence did no damage elsewhere. I doubted that it would. A major
earthquake had split the plain open without destroying the ice caves or doing
any harm down here.

I willed the Voroshk clothing to open a crack through which I could see. If need
be, if Kina had survived but was injured, I would push my post in there and blow
it, too. And if I survived a second blast I would start hoping that I did not
suffer a heart attack or starve to death while trying to climb those miles of
steps.

The material protecting me had been so traumatized that it took ten minutes to
respond. It twitched and shivered and crawled, moving in small surges, as it
tried to heal itself.

Once I had an eyehole I discovered that there was nothing to see. Intense bright
light still burned inside Kina’s cell. It might have been fading but it was
going slowly if it was.

It was half an hour before I could look for details without having my eyeballs
hurt. Just as well. It took that long for my protective outfit to heal and relax
sufficiently to allow me off the wall.

Those outfits are made smart. They take just long enough recovering to keep you
from doing something stupid.

I mounted my post and moved forward, knowing, as I went, that my protection
would not survive another blast soon.

At first I could find nothing. Later, after the light faded some more, I began
to discover bits of what might once have been tooth or bone embedded in various
surfaces. Of flesh, be it Goblin’s or the Goddess’s, there was no sign.

In fact, I doubted that any of the tooth and bone fragments could have belonged
to any mere mortal. The explosion had been that violent. More violent, even,

than those that had destroyed the Voroshk shadowgate, that had initiated the
collapse of the Palace.

Kina’s destruction had somehow added vast energy to the explosion.

My post was not behaving quite right. It stuttered and was slow to respond. It
must have gotten rattled around some even though I had done my best to protect
it.

Once the light faded round where the Goddess had lain I saw what looked like a
long black snake lying in the rubble of Kina’s rock bed. It was the only
nonwhite thing in the place, other than me.

I approached carefully. For all I knew that was the bone of darkness that had
snuggled next to Kina’s heart. And I was prepared to believe that anything I saw
or experienced in this place would be illusion.

Kina was the Mother of Deceit.

One of the great powers of the Deceivers was their ability to leave you doubting
everything and trusting no one.

The black thing was no snake. It was the deformed remains of One-Eye’s spear. It
had come through the violence with surprisingly little damage. It was just
twisted and bent a little, and lightly charred on its surface. The metal inlays
had been only slightly distorted by intense heat.

Man, he must have put some artful protective spells onto that thing.

I gathered the spear, went and made sure that I was securely attached to my
post, then gave it the command to take me back to base point.