The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (60 page)

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.

96

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.

97

“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 idolators—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.”