The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (62 page)

Dozens of veteran eyes scanned the valley for defensible positions. It took no effort to identify them. They were the same as those we recalled from the Kiaulune wars.

I wondered if all the connected worlds would be equally familiar physically.

I indicated my choice. No one demurred. Runmust and the Singhs hurried off to survey the site, accompanied by a dozen men armed for anything. The five old monks did not protest. Mostly they seemed bemused and amazed.

*   *   *

So it was that the Black Company reached the Land of Unknown Shadows instead of fabled Khatovar. There it was that the Company settled and rested and recovered. There it was that I filled book after book with words when I was not planning or leading expeditions to rescue the rest of my captured brothers, and even that devil-dog Merika Montera so he would be available for another, rather less pleasant encounter with justice than the one that had driven him into exile. The grandchildren of his former slaves feared him not at all.

I won him a stay, at Lady’s request, so he could help with Tobo’s schooling. The stay was good for as long as he did that job satisfactorily and not for a moment more. The old monks, as tight of lip as their cousin Doj, agreed that Tobo had to be trained but would not reveal their reasoning even to me.

At one time the Land of the Unknown Shadows had suffered many lean, pale bonesacks just like Longshadow. They were invaders from another world. They had brought no wives with them. Time did not love them.

And thus it was. And thus it was.

Soldiers live. And wonder why.

One-Eye survived another four years, suffering strokes, yet recovering slowly every time. Seldom did he leave the house we built for him and Gota. Mostly he tinkered with his black spear while Gota hovered around and fussed. He fussed right back and never stopped worrying about Tobo’s education.

Once again Tobo was smothered in parents both real and surrogate.

He studied with One-Eye, he studied with Lady, he studied with Longshadow and Master Santaraksita, with the Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah, and with the masters of our adoptive world. He studied hard and well and much, much more than he wanted. He was very talented. He was what his great-grandmother Hong Tray had foreseen.

The Captured all returned to us, except for those who died beneath the plain, but even the best of them—Murgen, Lady, the Captain—were strange and deeply changed. Fey. But we were changed as well, by life, so that those of us they remembered at all were almost alien to them.

A new order came into being.

It had to be.

Someday we will cross the plain again.

Water sleeps.

*   *   *

For now, I just rest. And indulge myself in writing, in remembering the fallen, in considering the strange twists life takes, in considering what plan God must have if the good are condemned to die young while the wicked prosper, if righteous men can commit deep evil while bad men demonstrate unexpected streaks of humanity.

Soldiers live. And wonder why.

99

The Great General started south through the Dandha Presh moments after the Protector abandoned him so she could make more speed. Consequently he met Soulcatcher on the southern side of the summit just a week later. She talked to herself continuously in a committee of voices while she was awake and gibbered in tongues during her brief bouts of sleep. Mogaba thought the Daughter of Night seemed smugly pleased in the moment before she collapsed from exhaustion.

“Kill them,” Mogaba urged the moment he had Soulcatcher’s ear and a bit of privacy. “Those two can be nothing but trouble and there’s no way you can profit from keeping them around.”

“Possibly true.” The Protector’s voice was a sly one. “But if I’m clever enough I can use the girl to tap into Kina’s power the way my sister did.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a life noteworthy for its regiments of disappointments, it’s that you can’t rely on cleverness. You’re a powerful woman now. Kill them while you can. Kill them before they find a way to turn the tables. You don’t need to become any stronger. There’s no one in this world capable of challenging you.”

“There’s always someone, Mogaba.”

“Kill them. They sure won’t waste a second on you.”

Soulcatcher approached the Daughter of Night, who had not moved since her collapse. “My dear sweet niece wouldn’t harm me.” The voice she chose could have been that of a naive fourteen-year-old responding to the charge that her twenty-five-year-old lover was interested in only one thing. Then she laughed cruelly, kicked the Daughter of Night viciously. “You even think about it, bitch, and I’ll roast and eat you one limb at a time. And still make sure you live long enough to see your mother die first.”

The Great General neither moved nor made any remark. His face betrayed nothing, not even to Soulcatcher’s acute eye. But in his sinking heart he understood that yet again he had allied himself with complete and unpredictable insanity. And yet again he had no option but to ride the tiger. He observed, “Perhaps we should give thought to how to guard our minds against intrusion by the Queen of Terror and Darkness.”

“I’m ahead of you, General. I’m the professional.” This voice was that of a self-important little mouse of a functionary. It became that of a self-confident woman being conversational, the voice Mogaba suspected was Soulcatcher’s own. It resembled closely the voice of her sister, Lady. “For the last week I’ve had nothing to do but nurture the blisters on my feet and think. I conceived marvelous new torments to practice upon the Black Company—too late to enjoy them. Isn’t that the way it always goes? You always think of the perfect comeback about an hour too late for it to do any good? I suppose I’ll find other enemies and my innovation won’t be wasted. Most of the time, though, I considered how best to circumvent Kina’s power.” She did not fear naming the goddess directly. “We can do it.”

The Daughter of Night stirred slightly. Her shoulders tightened. She glanced up for an instant. She looked a little uncertain, a little troubled.

For the first time since her birth she was completely out of touch with her soul-mother. She had been out of touch for several days. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

Soulcatcher eyed Narayan Singh. That old man was not much use anymore. She could test her new torments on him once she had him back in Taglios, before a suitable audience.

“General, if I get caught up in one of those byways that distract me so often, I want you to nudge me back to the business at hand. Which will be empire building. And, in my spare time, the creation of a new flying carpet. I think I know enough of the Howler’s secrets to manage. This past week has forced me to admit to myself that I have no innate fondness for exercise.”

Soulcatcher prodded the Daughter of Night again, then settled on a rotten log and removed her boots. “Mogaba, don’t ever tell anyone that you’ve seen the world’s greatest sorceress stumped for a way to handle something as trivial as blisters.”

Narayan Singh, who had been snoring fitfully, suddenly rose up and gripped the bars of his cage, his face contorted in terror, its butternut color all but gone. “Water sleeps!” he screamed. “Thi Kim! Thi Kim is coming!” Then he collapsed, unconscious again, though his body continued to spasm.

Soulcatcher growled softly. “Water sleeps? We’ll see what the dead can do.” They were all gone this time. It was her world now. “What else did he say?”

“Something that sounded like a Nyueng Bao name.”

“Uhm. Yes. But not a name. Something about death. Or a murder. Thi Kim. Coming. Hmm. Maybe a nickname? Murder walker? I should learn the language better.”

The Daughter of Night, she noted, was shaking more than Singh.

*   *   *

The wind whines and howls through fangs of ice. It races furiously around the nameless fortress but tonight neither the lightning nor the storm has any power to disturb. The creature on the wooden throne is relaxed. He will rest comfortably through a night of years for the first time in a long millennium. The silver daggers are no inconvenience at all.

Shivetya sleeps and dreams dreams of immortality’s end.

Fury crackles between the standing stones. Shadows flee. Shadows hide. Shadows huddle in terror.

Immortality is threatened.

Soldiers Live

Book Four of Glittering Stone

For Russell Galen, #40, at a quarter century.

It hasn’t been a perfect marriage, but close enough

to keep me smiling. Let’s see if we can’t make it to silver.

(Diamond? Whatever a 50th anniversary is.)

1

An Abode of Ravens: When No Men Died

Four years passed and no one died.

Not of violence or hazard of the calling, anyway. Otto and Hagop did pass on within days of each other, of natural causes associated with aging, last year. A few weeks ago one Tam Duc, recruit in training, perished of the overconfident exuberance of youth. He fell into a crevasse while he and his lance brothers were riding their blankets down the long slick slope of the Tien Myuen glacier. There were a few others. But not a one by an unfriendly hand.

Four years has to be a record, though not the sort often recalled in these Annals.

That much peace is impossible to believe.

Peace that prolonged becomes increasingly seductive.

Many of us are old and tired and retain no youthful fire in the belly. But us old farts are not in charge anymore. And though we were prepared to forget horror, horror was not as accomodating toward us.

*   *   *

In those days the Company was in service to its own name. We recognized no master. We counted the warlords of Hsien as our allies. They feared us. We were supernatural, many recalled from the dead, the ultimate Stone Soldiers. They dreaded the chance that we might take sides in their squabbles over the bones of Hsien, that once-mighty empire the Nyueng Bao recall as the Land of Unknown Shadows.

The more idealistic warlords have hopes of us. The mysterious File of Nine provide arms and money and let us recruit because they hope we can be manipulated into helping them restore the golden age that existed before the Shadowmasters enslaved their world so cruelly that its people still call themselves the Children of the Dead.

There is no chance we will participate. But we permit them the hope, the illusion. We have to get strong. We have a mission of our own.

By standing still we have caused the blossoming of a city. A once-chaotic encampment has become ordered and has acquired names, Outpost or the Bridgehead among those who came from beyond the plain and what translates as Abode of Ravens amongst the Children of the Dead. The place keeps growing. It has generated scores of permanent structures. It is in the processing of acquiring a wall. The main street is being paved with cobblestones.

Sleepy likes to keep everyone busy. She cannot stand a loafer. The Children of the Dead will inherit a treasure when we finally go away.

2

An Abode of Ravens: When the Baobhas Sang

Boom! Boom!
Somebody hammered on my door. I glanced at Lady. She had stayed up late last night and so had fallen asleep while studying this evening. She was determined to discover all the secrets of Hsien magic and to help Tobo harness the startlingly plentiful supernatural manifestations of this world. Not that Tobo needed much help anymore.

This world has more real phantoms and marvellous beings hiding in the bushes and behind the rocks and trees and on the edge of night than any twenty generations of our own frightened peasants could imagine. They gravitate toward Tobo as though he is some sort of nightside messiah. Or amusing pet, maybe.

Boom! Boom!
I would have to get off my butt myself. That looked like a long, hard trek over there.

Boom! Boom!
“Come on, Croaker! Wake up!” The door swung inward as my visitor invited himself inside. The very devil of my thoughts.

“Tobo…”

“Didn’t you hear the baobhas singing?”

“I heard a racket. Your friends are always kicking up a fuss about something. I don’t pay any attention anymore.”

“When the baobhas sing it means somebody is going to die. And there’s been a cold wind off the plain all day and Big Ears and Golden-Eye have been extremely nervous and … it’s One-Eye, sir. I just went over to talk to him. He looks like he’d had another stroke.”

“Shit. Let me get my bag.” No surprise, One-Eye suffering a stroke. That old fart has been trying to sneak out on us for years. Most of the vinegar went out of him back when we lost Goblin.

“Hurry!”

The kid loved that old shit-disturber. Sometimes it seemed like One-Eye was what he wanted to be when he grew up. In fact, it seemed Tobo venerated everybody but his own mother, though the friction between them diminished as he aged. He had matured considerably since my latest resurrection.

“I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Your Grace. This old body doesn’t have the spring it did in the olden days.”

“Physician, heal thyself.”

“Believe me, kid, I would if I could. If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years.”

“That wind off the plain. It has Uncle worried, too.”

“Doj is always worried about something. What does your father say?”

“He and Mom are still at Khang Phi visiting Master Santaraksita.”

At a tender twenty Tobo is already the most powerful sorcerer in all this world. Lady says he might possibly become a match for her in her prime. Scary. But he has parents he calls Mom and Dad still. He has friends he treats like people, not objects. He accords his teachers respect and honor instead of devouring them just to prove that he is stronger. His mother raised him well, despite having done so in the environment of the Black Company. And despite his innate rebellious streak. I hope he will remain a decent human being once he comes into his full powers.