Water Sleeps (46 page)

I knew everything Soulcatcher had done during her several visits to the
fortress, in a time when Longshadow believed he was the total master of the
Shadowgate and did not believe that others would dare approach it even if they
did possess a workable key.

I now knew many things as if I had lived them. Some were things I was not eager
to know. A few concerned questions I had had for years, offering answers that I
could share with Master Santaraksita. But mostly it was just stuff I was likely
to find useful if I was going to become what Shivetya hoped I would.

A startled bluebottle of speculation buzzed through my mind. I checked to see if
I had an answer. But I had no memories of what might have become of the Key that
would have been necessary if, indeed, Longshadow, as Maricha Manthara
Dhumraksha, with his student Ashutosh Yaksha, had come to our world from the
Land of Unknown Shadows.

And for sure, I did not get any relief from my fear of heights.

An instant after the floor stopped turning, the white crow launched itself
upward. And darned if I did not launch myself right after it—though not through
any wish of my own.

My companions rose behind me. In their surprise and fright several dropped
weapons and possessions and, probably, body contents. Only Tobo seemed to find
unanticipated flight to be a positive experience.

Runmust and Iqbal sealed their eyes and belched rapid prayers to their false
vision of God. I spoke my mind to the God Who Is God, reminding Him to be
merciful. Riverwalker addressed impassioned appeals to his heathen deities. Doj
and Swan said nothing at all, Swan because he had fainted.

Tobo babbled in delight, informing everyone how wonderful the experience was,

look here, look there, the vast expanse of the chamber stretches out below us
like the plain itself . . .

We passed through a hole in the ceiling and into the colder air of the real
plain. It was dusk out there, the sky still crimson over the western horizon but
already deep indigo directly ahead. The stars of the Noose shone palely in front
of us. As we descended toward the surface, I found nerve enough to glance back.

The fortress stood silhouetted against the northern sky, on its outside in worse
shape now than when we had arrived. All our clutter, everything dropped during
our ascension or that we had had no time to grab, now flew along right behind
us.

For a while I watched eagerly for the standard to join the flock. My hopes were
disappointed. It did not appear.

In retrospect I cannot see why I should have hoped otherwise.

Now Tobo pretended he was a bird. By experimenting he discovered that he could
use his arms to direct his flight, to rise and fall somewhat, to speed up and
slow down slightly. He never shut up for a instant, loving every moment,

continuously admonishing the rest of us to enjoy the adventure, because none of
us would ever have the chance to experience anything like this again.

“Wisdom from the mouths of infants,” Doj announced. Then he threw up.

They were both right.

O ur flight ended where the rest of the band was camped at the last circle
before the southwest road reached our destination shadowgate. Flying definitely
offered the advantage of speed. We outflew the white crow, arriving less than
two hours after our toes departed solid stone. That Shivetya fellow was a handy
friend to have.

I tried to see what lay beyond the edge of the plain but it was just too dark.

There might have been one or two small points of light out there. It was hard to
tell.

We descended feetfirst, evidently immune to shadows. I had sensed several of
those pacing us but they had shown no inclination to get too close. Which left
me admiring Shivetya’s power even more, for those things were little more than
bundles of hatred and hunger to kill.

We passed through the top of the shielding protecting our brethren without
compromising it. The whole band watched our arrival in disbelief. Tobo managed
to direct himself toward his mother and accomplished a somersault before he
touched down. I did not exactly get down and hug the stone surface but I was
glad the ordeal was over. The Singh brothers rushed around looking for family.

So did Doj, who ignored Sahra and went directly to Gota. Gota was not in good
spirits and possibly was in ill health. I could not tell much more about anyone
in the feeble light available from a changeable moon. Gota did not offer any
complaint or criticism. Swan stuck with me.

As soon as he convinced himself that it was safe to open his eyes, Riverwalker
began bustling around being a busybody, devoutly determined to make sure
everyone and everything conformed to whatever rules he happened to recall at the
moment. I frowned, shook my head, but did not interfere. We all need our rituals
to help us get by.

“Sahra,” I asked, “how are they?” I meant those we had brought out of the
caverns, because I had a suspicion that Gota’s state meant nothing good and I
did not want to hear what I feared it did mean.

Sahra could not feel friendly. She blamed me because she had discovered her baby
strolling through the sky. Never mind that he had come down safely and could not
stop raving about the experience.

What a fall from a great height might do to a body never occurred to him. But it
certainly did to Sahra.

“No change in the Captured. One-Eye went into a funk when he heard about Goblin
and hasn’t spoken since. Mother isn’t sure if it’s emotional withdrawal or he
had another stroke. What worries her is the possibility that he doesn’t want to
live anymore.”

“Who would he fight with?” I did not mean to belittle, though it came out
sounding that way.

Sahra showed me an instant of pique but did not reveal her thoughts. “Mother can
be a handful.”

“Probably what got them together in the first place.” I made no mention of the
fact that I feared Gota would not be with us much longer. The Troll had to be
around eighty. “I’ll go talk to him.”

“He’s asleep. It can wait.”

“In the morning, then. Are we still in touch with Murgen?”

The light was good enough to reveal Sahra’s anger. Perhaps she was right. I had
not had my feet on the ground two minutes and already I wanted to use her
husband. But she managed the emotion. We had worked together for a long time
now, early on with her usually being the stronger one, only occasionally with me
taking the lead role. We always managed without sharp words. We always managed
because we knew we had somewhere to go and we had to collaborate to get there.

These days I took charge most of the time but she could do so when it was
appropriate.

Only she was just about where she wanted to get to now, was she not? She had
Murgen out of the ground. She would not need to go on with her role once he was
up and around. Unless he was not the man she wanted him to be. In which case she
would have to contrive a new Sahra all over again.

I am sure that had her on edge more than ever. Neither she nor Murgen were the
people they had been. None of us were. There were going to be some difficulties
adjusting, possibly some major difficulties.

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.

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.