* * *
Mogaba sat in his quarters staring out at a full moon. He wondered if it had been too easy. Were the Singhs genuinely interested in ridding Taglios of the Protector? Or had they just played along, sensing that he was the more deadly threat at the moment?
If they were not committed he would learn the truth only when Soulcatcher sank her teeth into his throat.
He was going to be an intimate acquaintance of fear for a long time to come.
22
Khatovar: Invasion
Swan volunteered to slither down to the Shadowgate with me. I demurred. “I think I’ll take my sweetheart. We don’t get many chances to get away together.” And she would have a steadier hand than I would when it came to working on the Shadowgate. Which, even from the head of the slope, could be seen to need restoration.
After examining the Shadowgate from a closer vantage, I told my beloved, “Bowalk really tore it up getting through.”
“She had shadows gnawing on her. According to what Sleepy says Shivetya showed her. Tell me you’d be gentle and not slam the door if you had those things after you.”
“I don’t even want to think about it. Are we safe? Is anything out there watching?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I have a little power here on the plain. A dim one-hundredth of what used to be. But outside the Shadowgates I might as well be deaf, dumb and blind. All I can do is pretend.”
“So Kina is alive, then?”
“Possibly. If I’m not just tapping Shivetya or some residual, ambient power. The plain is a place of many strange energies. They leak in from the different worlds.”
“But you believe you’re bleeding Kina again. Don’t you?”
“If I am, she’s not just sleeping, she’s in a coma.”
“There!”
“There what?”
“I thought I saw something move.”
“That was just the breeze stirring the branches.”
“You think so? I’m not inclined to take chances.”
The sarky witch said, “You stand guard. I’ll work on the gate.”
If she did I could not tell. She was less active than I would have been.
* * *
We were through. Into Khatovar. I did not feel like I had found my way into paradise. I did not feel like I had come home. I felt the letdown I had expected almost from the moment I had become aware that my lust to find Khatovar had been imposed upon me from without. Khadi’s Gate was a wasteland.
Clete and Loftus started laying out a camp close enough to the gate that we could make a quick getaway if that became necessary. I was still at the gate itself, surveying this world where the Black Company had been born.
Definitely the disappointment I had anticipated. Maybe even worse.
Something stirred the hair on the back of my neck. I turned. I saw nothing but had a distinct feeling that something had just come through the Shadowgate.
I caught movement in the edge of my vision. Something dark. A shape both large and ugly.
One of the Black Hounds.
The back of my neck went cool again. Then again.
Maybe Tobo was coming after all.
The darker of my two ravens settled onto a nearby boulder. After a shower of hisses directed nowhere in particular, it cocked a big yellow eye my way and said, “There are no occupied human dwellings within fifty miles. The ruins of a city lie under the trees below the rocky prominence to the northeast. There are signs that humans visit it occasionally.”
I gaped. That damned bird was better-spoken than most of my companions. But before I could strike up a conversation, it took to the air again.
So there were people in this world. But the closest were at least three days away.
The promontory the bird mentioned was the place where the fortress Overlook had stood in our own world. The ruins likely occupied the same site as Kiaulune.
Another chill on the neck. The Unknown Shadows continued to come through.
I went down to camp. The engineer brothers were old but efficient. It was livable right now—as long as we got no rain.
The rain would be along before long. It was clear it rained often here.
Fires were burning. Somebody had killed a wild pig. It smelled heavenly, roasting. Shelters were going up. Sentries were out. Uncle Doj had appointed himself sergeant of the guard and was making a circuit of the four guardposts.
I waited till Murgen found something to occupy him, beckoned Swan and Lady. “Let’s think about what we do now.” I looked my wife in the eye. She understood what I wanted to know. She shook her head.
There was no Khatovaran source of magical power she could parasitize.
I grumped, “I didn’t expect towers of pearl and ruby beside streets of gold, but this is ridiculous.” I checked Doj and Murgen. They showed no interest in us yet.
“Sour grapes.” Swan sneered, heading straight for the critical point. “That’s a whole world out there. Damned near empty, it looks like. How do you expect to find one insane killer monster?”
“I got to thinking about that while I was standing up there looking at all this. Amongst other things. And I think I’ve had an evil epiphany.”
Lady contributed to the Annals and tried to keep up with her successors. She shook her head, said, “There isn’t much in what she wrote.”
Swan glanced around. Nobody was close. In a soft voice he said, “She hasn’t been writing the histories since you came back, has she?”
I asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Over the years Tobo and Suvrin and some of their cronies have visited most of the Shadowgates. They visited the Khatovar gate several times.”
“How do you know?”
“I sneak around. I listen when I’m not supposed to hear. I know Suvrin and Tobo came out here while you were wounded. Just the two of them. And later, while we were in Khang Phi, Suvrin went out again. Alone.”
“Then I’m right. We’ve been jobbed. How come you didn’t mention this before?”
“It had to do with Khatovar. I figured you were behind whatever was going on.”
Lady made a growling, chuckling sound that told me she had a handle on the truth. “That devious little witch. You really think so?”
Swan asked, “What am I missing?”
I told him, “I think we’re out here raiding Khatovar not because I’m so damned clever but because Sleepy wants us old farts out from under foot when she breaks out into the homeworld. I’ll bet the whole damned force is moving right now. And Sleepy won’t have a single one of us asking questions or giving advice or trying to do things our own way.”
Swan took a while to think about it. Then he took a while to look around at the gang who had elected to defy the command authority to pursue revenge on One-Eye’s killer. He said, “Either she is really an astute little bitch or we’ve been around so many sneaky people so long that we see machinations everywhere we look.”
“Tobo knew,” I said. Tobo had to be part of it. He let his father and Uncle Doj come out here.… “You know, I’m so paranoid I’m going to put a guard on the gate from the other side. And I’ll fill them up with lies about how a demon in the guise of one of our people might try to sabotage the gate so we can’t get back out of Khatovar.”
Neither Lady nor Swan argued. Swan did remark. “You are paranoid. You think Sahra would let Sleepy get away with leaving Thai Dei, Murgen and Doj trapped out here?”
“I think it’s a mad universe. I think almost anything somebody can imagine happening can happen. Even the cruelest, blackest sin.”
Lady asked, “And what do you intend to do about it?”
“I’m going to kill the forvalaka.”
Swan said, “Murgen’s noticed that something’s going on. He’s headed this way.”
“I’m going to play the game. Tobo sent a bunch of his pets through after us. Let’s make sure they can’t get back out unless we let them go. We’ll use
them to find Bowalk. Then we’ll kill her.”
23
Glittering Stone: Fortress with No Name
Sleepy reached the fortress at the heart of the plain by the expedient of refusing to be steered elsewhere. Shivetya’s helpful shortcuts were not going to divert her from examining the root of her scheme for conquest.
There was one temporal power greater than the greatest sorcery. Greed. And she owned the wellspring of a flood of what the greedy held most dear: gold. Not to mention silver and gems and pearls.
For thousands of years fugitives from many worlds had hidden their treasures in the caverns beneath Shivetya’s throne. Who knew why? Possibly Shivetya. But Shivetya would not tell tales—unless they advanced his cause. Shivetya had the mind and soul of an immortal spider. Shivetya had no remorse, no compassion, knew only his task and his will to end it. He was the Company’s ally but he was not the Company’s friend. He would destroy the Company instantly if that suited an altered purpose and he was in a position to do so.
Sleepy meant to cover her back.
She approached Baladitya. “Where’s Blade?”
Baladitya had begun gushing discoveries he had made since being handed his mission. Sleepy felt a twinge of guilt. She remembered Baladitya’s kind of excitement, long ago and far away. But being responsible for thousands of people, pursuing a timetable with very little slippage built in, left no opportunity for simple pleasures. That made her cranky and curt, sometimes.
“He’s down below. He doesn’t come up much anymore.”
Irked, Sleepy looked around for someone young enough to gallop a mile down into the earth. She spied Tobo and Sahra arguing. Not exactly unusual. But not so frequently lately. They had been butting heads since Tobo entered puberty.
One of Tobo’s djinn could get down there faster than the youngest pair of legs. “Tobo!” Sleepy beckoned.
Exasperation flashed across the boy’s face. Everyone wanted something from him.
He did respond. He showed no defiance. He never did. His calm half-caste face settled into perfect nonexpression. Nor did his stance in any way betray what he might be thinking. Sleepy seldom saw anyone so inscrutable. And yet he was so young.
He just stood waiting for her to tell him what she wanted.
“Blade is down below somewhere. Send one of your messengers to tell him I want him up here.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have any here. I’ve explained before. The Unknown Shadows hate the plain. It’s very difficult to get them to come up here. Most of those who do come refuse to have anything to do with people. I don’t want them to have anything to do with people. It puts them in a bad temper every time. You have a whole regiment cluttering up the place. There must be a man somewhere who doesn’t have something else to do.”
Sarcastic infidel. There were twelve hundred men cooling their heels around the fortress, waiting to lead the treasure train, doing nothing useful in the interim. “I was looking for something a little faster.” Once the Company was on the barren plain, even with Shivetya working wonders, there was little time to waste.
There had been no good news from Suvrin, either. Tobo should have gone with him. Or Doj or Lady, at the very least. Someone better equipped to deal with the Unknown Shadows. But at the very least there should have been word that a bridgehead had been established.
Baladitya said, “Then you’d better go down there yourself. Because he isn’t going to respond to any lesser authority.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he hears voices calling him. He’s trying to figure out what to answer them.”
“Darn!” Sleepy broke out in what, for her, was a blistering blue streak. “That wrangle-franging mudsucker! I’m going to…”
Tobo and Baladitya grinned. Sleepy shut up. She remembered times when her Company brothers would get her going to see just how creative she would be in avoiding use of common profanity. She muttered, “I should’ve written you people the way you really are. Not you, Baladitya. You’re actually a human being.” She glared at Tobo. “You I’m beginning to wonder about.”
“For a nonbeliever,” Baladitya said, of himself.
“Yes. Well. There’re more of you lost souls than there are those of us who know the Truth. I must be God’s Beacon in the Land of Our Sorrows.”
Baladitya frowned, then caught on. Sleepy was actually poking fun at her religion’s attitude toward those outside it, all the unbelievers who made up the population of the Land of Our Sorrows. Which, in an earlier age, when the Vehdna were more numerous and more enthusiastic about rescuing the infidel from damnation, had been called the Realm of War.
Only Believers lived inside the Realm of Peace.
Sleepy snapped, “Tobo, stop trying to sneak away. You’re going down there with me. Just in case he really is hearing voices.”
“That sounds to me like a real good reason for everybody else to stay away.”
“Tobo.”
“Right behind you, Captain. Ain’t nobody gonna sneak up on your back.”
Sleepy growled. She never got used to the informality and irreverence, though it had been a firm fixture of Company culture since long before her advent.
The soldiers mocked everything and bitched about the rest. Yet the work got done.
Sleepy conscripted a half dozen more companions while hurrying to the stairway down. All from Hsien. She marveled at the results of her relentless training regimen. Many who had joined the Company had been the dregs of the Land of Unknown Shadows, criminals and fugitives, bandits and deserters from the forces of the warlords, and fools who thought a turn with the Soldiers of Darkness would be a great adventure. Sleek, strong and confident, they put on a show now, after months of intense preparation. The clash of steel, probably closer than they anticipated, would be their final tempering.
Sleepy’s descent led her past dozens of men still carrying treasure toward the surface. From behind her Tobo asked, “You sure you aren’t overdoing the tomb robbing? We’ve already got enough to make the whole mob rich.” A fact not lost on some recruits of less than unstained provenance. But temptation was easy to resist when you knew only your Captain could get you off the plain alive and that the Unknown Shadows would hound you pitilessly if you tried anything after you were off.
“We can’t beat the Protector with eight thousand men, Tobo. We need secret weapons and force multipliers. Gold fills both roles.”
Sometimes Tobo was troubled by his Captain. At some point, during her copious free time, she had gotten too close to a library centered around military theory. At times she tended to regurgitate notions like “strategic center of gravity” and “force multipliers” just when that would leave her listeners uncomfortable and concerned.
Tobo was also concerned because the old folks, the veterans, Croaker and Lady and the others, approved. That meant that he was not getting it.
“We’ll take time out here,” Sleepy said when they reached the level of the ice caverns where the Captured had been held. “You men,” she said to those she had had follow, “I want four of you to take a couple of sleepers up top. Longshadow and the Howler. Howler is going to travel with us. With Tobo. A work party will take Longshadow to Hsien for trial. You two. Stay with us.”
The ice caverns seemed timeless, changeless. Frost soon obscured the smaller signs of any traffic. The dead could not be told from the enchanted except on close examination by someone who was knowledgeable.
Sleepy continued, “You men don’t go in there until we call you. You even breathe on those things sometimes, somebody dies.” Which, upon close examination, could be seen to have happened before. The corpses included several of the Captured as well as a handful of the mystery ancients whose presence Shivetya had yet to explain.
There was a great deal the demon would not share.
Sleepy told Tobo, “We want these two to go upstairs without them waking up.”
“I have to break stas
is. Otherwise they’ll die as soon as we touch them.”
“I understand that. But I want them kept in a condition where they can’t cause trouble. There won’t be anybody there to control Longshadow if he wakes up all the way.”
“Let me do my job.”
Touchy. Sleepy posted herself between the boy wizard and the cavern entrance in case curiosity overcame the good sense of the soldiers. She marveled at how quickly the ice reasserted itself, at how delicately cobweblike some of the structures around the sleeping old men were. Beyond Howler, now, there was little evidence of the trampling the place had taken when the Captured were released. The cavern floor tilted upward back there, turned, and the cave itself got tight enough to force an explorer to crawl. If you went back far enough you reached a place where the most holy relics of the Deceiver cult had been hidden during an ancient persecution. The Company had destroyed them, giving particular attention to the powerful Books of the Dead.
* * *
Sleepy was quiet for a long time after she sent the two sleeping sorcerers to the surface. She and Tobo and two young Bone Warriors resumed their descent into the earth. Sleepy had two things on her mind: The first was the identity of the source of the pale blue light leaking through the ice of the cavern of the old men, to illuminate the human hoard, and second, “What is the center of gravity of the Taglian empire?” She was more interested in the latter. The former was just a curiosity. It did not matter. Probably just the light of another world.
“Soulcatcher,” Tobo replied. “You don’t have to think about that. If you kill the Protector you’re left facing a big snake with no head. The Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah step up and announce themselves and the whole thing is over with.” He made it sound simple.
“Except for hunting down the Great General.”
“And Narayan Singh. And the Daughter of Night. But the Protector is the only part we can’t manage using the Black Hounds.”
Sleepy did not miss the way his voice went hollow when he mentioned the Daughter of Night. He had met the witch when she was the Company’s prisoner, before the flight to the Land of Unknown Shadows. Sleepy had not failed to notice the impact the girl had had then.