What got me nervous in the first place was the way the imprisoned Soulcatcher’s gaze seemed to follow me everywhere as we brought the girl in and settled her, while Arkana set the stasis spells on her—as relayed to her by the white crow.
Paranoia struck deep.
Soulcatcher had control of the bird. And she knew all the ins and outs of the sorcery necessary to lock someone into the ice caverns—or to release a prisoner. She could let herself go.
The bird was not right there when that thought hit me. Else she would have known that I had realized the possibility. I covered up before it noticed.
I stood in the weak, sourceless, pale cold light and stared for a long time, without really seeing. My baby. Hard to believe.
“I never knew you, darling.” A tear rolled down. I thought of all the cold, hard men I had known and wondered what they would think if they could see me now, having turned into a maudlin old man.
They might be envious of the fact that I had hung around long enough to become an old man.
The white crow came flapping in from wherever it had been, landed on my right shoulder. Wings slapped my face, stinging. “Goddamnit!” It had not taken the liberty before.
I do not know how long I wallowed in self-pity before the bird stirred me. Far longer than I realized at the time. The crow brought me back to this world of real trials and deep pain. “Arkana. We’d better head back now.” My separation from Lady would be more than a week long before we reached Taglios.
It was going to be longer than that.
Arkana did not respond.
“Arkana?”
Arkana was not there.
The flying posts were not there.
Emotion is the mind killer.
In my worry about my women I had forgotten that my adopted daughter was the one Voroshk with a brain. The one who had said she was going to bide her time and pick her moment.
That moment had come and gone, it seemed. There was nobody down in that cavern but me and the scruffy white bird.
She had not been completely cruel. She took the key to the Shadowgates so the gimp old man had no way to get away but she did not make him climb all the way up out of that hole. Only part of the way. She left my flying post just far enough up to give herself a few hours’ head start. Just long enough that I had no chance to catch her.
* * *
Shivetya manna makes a tiresome diet, however good you feel for the first few hours after you eat. Self-pity and self-accusation make bitter desserts. And a crow haunted by your oldest and dearest enemy makes for a somewhat less than ideal partner in exile.
After the anger faded and the despair subsided I helped myself to Baladitya’s writing materials and went to work on bringing the Annals up to date.
There was no time in that place so I do not know how long that took. It seemed longer than it probably was. I began to worry because nobody came to see why we had failed to return. I feared that meant there was no one who could come. The most likely someones who might not be able to come being Tobo or Lady.
But Shukrat was healthy. How come she did not show up?
With no one else there I found myself talking to the crow more and more. And more as time went by, in an effort to defeat the gathering despair.
Shivetya watched from his huge wooden throne, evidently amused by my predicament. While I was amused by Soulcatcher’s.
She did have the knowledge to get herself out of the ice cavern. She just did not have the hands. And I thought that was delicious.
I was five or six sleeps into my exile when the Nef returned, first appearing inside my dreams.
143
Fortress with No Name: Sleeping with the Demon
Soulcatcher kept reminding me that she was in touch with the demon. That, in fact, as long as she remained attached to the white crow she would be little more than Shivetya’s tool. This information did not seem newsworthy or particularly important until I suffered the visit from the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.
I had not been especially sensitive to them in the past. I knew them better from description than encounter. This time around made clear why that was.
Their ugliness invaded my dreams but only as a sense of presence little more concrete than that of the Unknown Shadows. Golden glimmers of hideous beast-mask faces in the corner of dream’s eye, and scattered single syllable fragments of attempted communication, were all that I recalled after I awakened, sweating and shaking and filled with undirected terror.
Shivetya’s gaze, directed my way, seemed more amused than ever.
I soon learned that his amusement had limits.
I had made him a promise. He could look inside me and see that I intended to keep it. But he could also see that I meant to stall for as long as it took me to arrange my own life to my satisfaction.
He had been patient for ten thousand years. Now, suddenly, his patience began to wilt.
I became aware of it first while I was sleeping. On a night when the Nef were almost getting through, my dreams filled unexpectedly with a presence that pushed in like a whale driving through a pod of dolphins. A big, unseen thing that approached like the darkness itself but without containing a thread of evil. Just a vast, slow thing that was.
I knew what it was and understood that it was trying to make a mind-to-mind contact the way it had with others before me. But my mind had a hard shell around it. It was difficult for ideas to get through.
Good thing Goblin and One-Eye were no longer around. They could have gotten hours of joy out of a straight line like that.
* * *
A couple sleeps more, though, and my mind had become a sieve. Me and Shivetya were yukking it up like a couple of old tonk buddies. The white crow was put out because she did not have a job translating anymore. I guess the demon had the sheer mental brute force to make contact with anyone.
I learned from the golem in the way that Baladitya had learned before me. I learned by being taken inside the demon’s living dream, where past was almost indistinguishable from present. Where the wondrous pageant of the plain’s history, and the history of the worlds it connected, were all remembered, in as much detail as Shivetya had cared to witness at the time. There was a great deal about the Black Company. He had chosen the Company as the instrument of his escape a very long time ago, long before Kina chose Lady to become her instrument inside the enemy force and the vessel that would birth the Daughter of Night, who was the intended instrument of her own liberation. Long before any of us were the least aware of all the pitfalls we were going to encounter on our road to Khatovar. But Shivetya chose better than did Kina. The Goddess failed to look closely enough at Lady’s character. Lady was too damned stubborn and selfish to be anyone’s tool for long.
There were just seven of us when some inexplicable urge made me decide to retrace the Company’s olden journeys. And of those seven, now there is just me.
Soldiers live.
The Black Company is in Suvrin’s hands now. Such as it is. It is headed south now, according to Shivetya’s dreams, satisfactorily avenged, planning to cross the glittering plain back to the Land of Unknown Shadows. There are only a handful of Taglians and Dejagorans and Sangelis left to miss our world. The Company will become a new thing in a new world. And pudgy little Suvrin will be its creator.
Never before had there been anyone of the Black Company who had survived so long that he could see how vast are the changes time will sculpt even upon a band determined to stay one with its past.
When my thoughts ranged those bleak marches Shivetya always filled my head with ripples of amusement. Because those were almost invisible changes when compared with those that he had witnessed in his time. He had seen empires, civilizations, entire races, come and go. He remembered the gods themselves, the ugly builders of the plain, and all the powers that had come into and changed his estate and then had faded away again. He even recalled a time when he was not alone in the fortress with no name, a time when his devotion to duty c
aused his mates to nail him to his throne so they could desert without him interfering.
At long last I began to understand what had happened to Murgen in those long ago days when he had had so much trouble clinging to his place in time. Murgen was crazy, some, and Soulcatcher was involved, some—those were the days when Soulcatcher had found her way onto the plain—and Murgen never had a clue himself what was happening but behind everything else was Shivetya, carefully setting up his path into retirement. And, of course, Shivetya does not see time like the rest of us. Unless we demand his attention right here at the vanguard he floats everywhere, everywhen, reexperiencing rather than remembering.
Gods, how I envied him! The entire histories of sixteen worlds were his to know. Not just to study and interpret but pretty much to live whenever the mood took him.
I did have a question. The question of supreme importance if I was going to set the demon free. He had to answer it to my satisfaction if he wanted me to fulfill our agreement.
What would happen to the glittering plain if he was no longer here to manage it?
144
Fortress with No Name: Arkana’s Tale
Shivetya was never as powerful as Kina but he was a whole hell of a lot faster on his mental feet. It had taken the sleeping Goddess years to impact the world outside and create a vast paranoia concerning the Black Company. Shivetya it took just weeks. It would not have taken that long had he not reached out for a specific someone with a mind shell thicker than mine: Shukrat.
The demon was disinclined to connect with Tobo. Tobo had been his good buddy before but Tobo’s behavior recently hinted at potentially troublesome character flaws.
Shukrat finally began to get the idea that there might be a problem causing the prolonged absence of Arkana and her beloved adopted daddy. Even when she did start to worry, though, she did not want to leave Tobo. Tobo was less popular with the Children of the Dead than he was with the Unknown Shadows. The men from Hsien might not give their utmost to pull him through.
The boy’s health kept suffering one setback after another complication. The fact that the army was moving would not help his recovery.
Shivetya could show me the Company’s southward progress. And did regularly. But I would not look in on Lady. My wife’s condition was more grim than Tobo’s. There was nothing I could do about it but it upset me so I just did not go where the pain was going to get me. Sometimes the blind eye is the least terrible way of suffering what we cannot make right.
Then there was Arkana.
The little blonde had run off in accordance with her own stated doctrine. Home to the world of the Voroshk. She used the key we had brought to enter the plain to make her exit. Because Shivetya was interested the once shattered Voroshk Shadowgate was almost completely whole again.
In Arkana’s homeworld the war with the shadows continued, but sporadically. The shadows had been reduced to a tenth of their original number. The Voroshk had suffered as badly. Their world had been all but destroyed. Not one in a hundred peasants had survived an invasion so enthusiastic it is almost impossible to find a shadow on the plain these days.
Shadows kill. They prefer people but will prey on anything they run into. Even things you find under rocks. People are smart enough to figure out ways to get through the night. Not much else can.
The few survivors in the Voroshk world were starving. They had lost so many draft animals they could not plant. Their livestock had all been taken, if not by the shadows then by the Voroshk themselves. The Voroshk had no intention of sharing the common suffering.
Arkana had gone, had seen, had changed her uncertain mind. This was not what she wanted. But she had waited too long to turn back.
She was seen. Family closed in fast. And deprived her of her post and clothing. She became a prisoner of her relatives, who began formulating big breeding plans immediately.
The Shadowgate disaster had left the Voroshk with few women of childbearing age.
Arkana got elected to become queen ant for a whole new mob.
She would do what she had to do to survive. She would bide her time once again. Her uncles had confiscated her key to the Shadowgates but were unaware what it was. And she was not talking. They were the sort of men who would abandon the disaster they had created and go coursing off in search of new worlds to conquer. So much easier than rebuilding.
It was a good thing Shivetya had power enough to will the shattered gate to heal itself, though that might imply that the nonfunctional gates had failed because of benign neglect. In fact, recalling what Tobo and Suvrin had reported concerning their explorations, all the Shadowgates were crippled somehow.
Shivetya did not like anyone very much these days.
I let him know, “I have a couple of things left to do.” Since my mind was no longer a mystery, he knew what already. And he did have a little patience left.
A pretty indulgent partner in crime, that old devil.
145
Glittering Stone: Then Shukrat Came
Shukrat arrived while I was sleeping, dropping in through the hole in the roof. So entangled with Shivetya was I now that I knew she was there without noticing or paying much mind. My friend the white crow came and did the wake-up dirty deed. I sat up, rewarding the bird with some rude remark or other.
“Just trying to be helpful. You aren’t leaving me much to do these days.”
“Funny how being a prisoner reduces your options, isn’t it? What goes around comes around and all that? But we can still be friends, can’t we? Hi, cuter daughter. You finally got here.”
Shukrat was exhausted but game. “So what’s going on, Pop? Where’s Arkana?”
“Well. Arkana got a wild hair, ran off home and now is knee-deep in shit.” I explained.
Shukrat’s reaction was, “Yuch!”
“Hey, you could be the most popular girl in town yourself if you give them the chance.”
“They might try. They’ll be sorry if they do. I didn’t waste all my time with Tobo playing games. How come you know all that if she took your key and you can’t go out poking around?”
“Shivetya and I have been getting to know one another. There isn’t much else to do around here when you’re waiting for your slower child to start wondering if you haven’t maybe gotten yourself into some trouble.”
“I see you did some writing, too.”
“I’m running short on time, daughter,” I said, revealing a secret never even shared with my wife. “I’ve had so much luck, for so long, that the law of averages is overdue to catch up. Any day. There’s only one risk left that I’m willing to take. So I want to have all my shit in order before something happens. I want to check out knowing I did everything the Company could ask, and then some.” My expectation that I do not have much time left has become an ever more powerful influence on my thinking since our return from the Land of Unknown Shadows. It has approached the level of obsession since I have been back here in the fortress with no name.
Shukrat proceeded with normal, journey-ending business while we talked, unloading her flying post. She swung down a large hemp sack that rattled as she said, “Let me get some rest, first, then we’ll go rescue Scruffy Butt. Not because I give a damn what they do to her, you understand. Just as a favor to my Pop.”
“I understand. I appreciate it. Maybe she can do the same for you, someday.”
“Oh, yeah, that would be good.”
“What’s in the sack?”
She thought about being evasive, realized that there was no point. “Snail shells. Tobo didn’t want me to travel unprotected. He worries about me.”
“How is he?”
“He has good days and he has bad days. More bad than good. In his health and in his mind. It scares me. Nobody can tell me if he’s going to make it. Or if he’ll be sane if he does. I’m afraid it might all depend on his mother.”
“What? Sahra turned up?”
“No. She’s definitely dead. I think. But her ghost, and her mother’s ghos
t and her grandmother’s ghost, keep following him wherever he goes. Whenever his fever gets to him he sees them. And they talk to him. They nag him, he says. He doesn’t like it. But my opinion is, he damned well ought to start listening to them. Because he gets these brain fevers every time he starts to do something that his mother wouldn’t have liked while she was alive. Even if it’s only something like forgetting to clean his teeth.”
“You really believe he’s being haunted by his female ancestors?”
“Doesn’t matter if I do, Pop. He believes it. Even when he’s fever-free and completely sane he’ll say his mother intends to stay around until he no longer needs her guidance. Then she’ll be free to join Murgen. Tobo really resents the implication that he isn’t mature and his behavior is keeping her from her rest. And Sahra, apparently, is just as resentful of his immaturity, because she’d rather be somewhere besides here baby-sitting a grown man.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s something more?”
“Because you’re right. There is more. He thinks those women might run out of patience. He’s afraid they’ll just drag him along with them.”
“You mean kill him?”
“No! His mother, Pop. Not kill him. Take him along. Out of his body. The way they say his father used to do. Only they wouldn’t let him come back. If that happened his body would die eventually. And before you tell me Sahra wouldn’t let her baby die, you need to remember this ghost isn’t the Sahra you knew. This Sahra has been on the other side for a while, running with ghosts who have been there a lot longer than she has. And at least one of those was able to see Tobo’s various potential futures way back before Murgen and Sahra ever got together.”
Sounded to me like Shukrat was just as much a believer as Tobo was.
“All right. Rest, little girl. I’ll come up with a plan while you do.”
Look at me. Manly man. Older than dirt, limping, one bad eye, short one hand, reads and writes, but a manly man for all that.