As I asked, Arkana swooped down, black cloth popping and crackling in the wind. She carried One-Eye’s spear and his ugly old hat. The hat still smelled of the ugly old man who had worn it.
“Right there where the red flag is.”
Poles with colored streamers indicated points where the Unknown Shadows had detected something human under the rubble. There were just two red ribbons. The rest were black. There would be no rush to dig there. The red streamer not indicated by Tobo was the focus of frenzied activity.
I asked, “What’s over there?”
“Ten to twelve people trapped in one of the treasury strong rooms. We’re sending water and soup down through bamboo pipes. They’ll be all right.”
“Uhm.” I could imagine the nightmares they would suffer for the rest of their lives. “Just hang onto that stuff,” I told Arkana. I studied the stone around the base of the red-streamer pole. “Tobo, are they conscious down there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’d hate to think they’re just waiting to do something obnoxious when we dig them out.”
He said, “We can just leave them there. Without water they’ll die.”
“It’s a solution.” But not one that interested me. Only Booboo would really suffer. “Suvrin, may I?” When he nodded I beckoned some men who were standing around awaiting instructions. If the girl was aware I was sure we would get a dose of “love me” real quick. Which meant only people in Voroshk clothing should do the final digging.
* * *
The Khadidas and Daughter of Night had crawled into a corner of their hiding place when the collapse came. The walls had held up just enough. But they had not had time to collect food and water.
Sadly, my baby did have a lamp and supplies and did make a valiant attempt to keep right on enscribing the Books of the Dead, perhaps in hope of lending Kina enough strength to save her. She could not have had much hope otherwise.
I thought a lot about what Booboo had been through in her near quarter century. About what had been done to her and what she believed she was. The loving part of me thought it might be a priceless mercy if she was saved the cruelty of reawakening.
It never got beyond being a notion. No argument I could present would ever convince Lady that that was appropriate. She wanted a little Lady so badly.
I discovered the Radisha beside me. It was amazing how much she had aged. She even carried a cane. “It’s true, you know,” she said in a weary voice.
“What’s that?” Though I knew what she was going to say.
“The coming of the Black Company did mean the end of Taglios. Just not the way we imagined.”
“All we ever wanted was to pass on through.”
She nodded, keeping her bitterness contained.
“You think we were hard on Taglios? Consider how happy the Shadowmasters must be.”
“But you haven’t finished with Taglios,” the Prahbrindrah Drah observed, joining us. “I’ve just heard what happened to Lady. How is she?”
“Stable.” He was another of those men who had been infatuated with my wife at one time. “And you’re right. In a way. As long as people try to push us around people get hurt. But that shouldn’t last much longer. We’re close to where we have to go.” I stepped forward, spoke to the men digging, first in the language of the Children of the Dead, then in Taglian. “We’re getting close. Hold up till those of us who are protected can help. Tobo! Girls. They’re almost through over here.”
Not far off more interior brickwork surrendered to the seduction of gravity.
127
Taglios: And My Baby
The soldiers created a precarious opening through which someone might wriggle. I asked for a lantern, meaning to be first inside, but Tobo seized it when it arrived. I did not argue. He was better equipped than I.
Seconds after the boy began to duckwalk a blast of urine-colored light ripped through the opening. It glanced off Tobo, hit a block of stone, scattered. It was a potent blast. Stone melted. And one stray ricochet found the Prahbrindrah Drah.
The results were ugly. And instantly fatal.
“That was it,” Tobo called back, unaware of the disaster. “That’s all he had. He’s out of it now. Croaker, help me drag them out.”
The Radisha began to wail.
The boy recognized the scope of the disaster immediately. The Taglian empire was, as of this moment, without an acceptable helmsman. Was without legitimate direction. “It’ll have to wait a minute,” I said. “The Prince is hurt. I want to get him to medical care right now.” Maybe, just one more time, we could pretend the supreme authority was fine but staying out of sight. Soulcatcher got away with it. The Great General got away with it. Why not my own band of opportunists?
I feared there had been too many witnesses, though Suvrin and Aridatha took up the pretense immediately and the Radisha herself joined me after only a few heartbeats. She put on a creditable show of threatening me with serious unpleasantness if her brother happened to die.
Now aware that political disaster threatened, Tobo launched some glitzy distraction. To which I paid little attention because I was desperate to get the Prince out of the public eye. There was a lot of flash behind me, and changing colors playing through the ruins. A big bunch of masonry went down. And Shukrat began helping Tobo pull the Khadidas out of the ground.
Aridatha’s men hauled the Prince’s litter away.
The Prince seen to, Arkana and I began to ease through the rubble toward the hole. I beckoned more stretcher-bearers. The thing being dragged into the light did not look dangerous. It looked like an old, worn-out version of a Goblin who was already dead.
“You want these now?” Arkana asked.
“Hang on just another minute. Get him over here, guys. On the stretcher. Easy. Easy! Tobo. Can you wake him up? Just for a second? Long enough for him to recognize me and what I’m doing?”
“Probably. If you want to risk it.” There was a choke in the boy’s voice. He looked at the spear and the ugly hat and wanted to believe that I had a way to reach the Goblin trapped inside the Khadidas. The Goblin who was always like an uncle to him.
“Oh, shit!” I said. “Wait! Wait!”
“What?”
“I just had an ugly thought. About how Kina might react through Lady if we drive the devil out of Goblin.”
Tobo sucked in a bucket of air, released it. “I don’t see how she could work that. But why take a chance? She is the Mother of Deception. Shuke, honey, do me a favor. Get the small carpet from my room. Just fold it up and bring it back. We’ll use that to haul them away.”
Shukrat jumped onto her post and zipped away. While he waited Tobo had an awning erected to keep potential rain off Goblin, then snaked back into the hole. He did not ask for help so I stood back with Aridatha and Arkana, insides turning over, awaiting my first glimpse of Booboo.
I asked Singh, “The fires under the rubble never go out. What the hell keeps burning?”
“Five hundred years worth of archives. Everything that belonged to the Inspector General of the Records. It’ll make for interesting times when we try to put things back together.”
Shukrat, the little darling, obviously knew her way around Tobo’s quarters. She was back with a small, folded flying carpet before the kid himself poked his head back out of the hole. With Arkana’s help she snapped the frame into position, stretched the fabric taut.
Arkana finally found nerve enough to speak to Aridatha directly, in a nonbusiness capacity. “You think it’s going to rain?”
You could see she wanted to melt like a slug freshly sprinkled with salt. All that work to find the nerve to speak and something that feeble was all she could get out. When fat raindrops had begun plunking down at random intervals nearly a minute before.
She was just a kid.
They had the Khadidas on the flying carpet now. And a couple of soldiers, one Taglian and one from Hsien, had hold of a pair of ankles.
“You all right, Po
p?” Arkana asked, holding onto my left arm.
“She looks just like Lady did the first time we met.” In a time of terror. There was terror here, now, but of an entirely different sort.
“Then your wife must have had some filthy hygiene habits in her younger days.”
“Ah, but she was eager to learn. Tobo, can you make sure Booboo doesn’t wake up until I want her to?” I did not want to have to cope with her witchery. “And let’s keep these two away from each other from now on. We don’t need them getting their heads together.”
“We don’t need them, period,” someone muttered. Shukrat, I realized. Shukrat did not like the way Tobo kept eyeballing the Daughter of Night.
Nor did my other adopted offspring particularly approve of the contemplative stares of Aridatha Singh.
Tobo called, “Croaker, you want to wake up yourself? Just for a minute? So you can take a look at her? See if anything’s missing or broken?”
One of the city soldiers told another that everything looked just fine to him. A little soap and some clean clothes …
I never thought I would be a father and have to pretend not to hear such remarks.
The man was right. She was a beautiful child. Exactly like her mother. And like Lady’s, most of her beauty lay right on the surface. I had to remind myself not to be taken in by what I saw or by what I wanted to feel. My emotions would not be trustworthy. They might not be my own. The Mother of Deceit had not left the game.
I knelt beside my daughter. My emotions were engaged indeed. I felt a thousand years old and utterly powerless. It took a major application of will to touch her.
Her skin felt cold.
In moments I reported, “She’s got lots of bruises and scrapes but there isn’t any serious damage. Nothing permanent. She is dehydrated.” She shook each time I touched her, as though I was massaging her with pieces of ice. “She’ll recover, if we take care of her. Put her in with Lady.”
Tobo said, “You’ll need somebody to stay with her. Somebody who can control her.”
“I will.”
“I will.”
Shukrat and Arkana both volunteered.
Well. Were they that concerned about competition from a beat-up, unconscious woman who knew absolutely nothing about men?
I would bet Tobo was grinning when he said, “All right, ladies. Work yourselves out a schedule. Croaker, what do you plan to do about Goblin?”
Suvrin seemed a little irked. Events were going forward without consulting the new Captain of the Black Company. But in matters concerning Booboo and the Khadidas he was no expert.
“Stash him. I’ll wait till I’m well-rested to deal with him. Meantime, we need somebody to crawl into that hole and collect up all of Booboo’s scribblings. Somebody from Hsien, preferably. Somebody illiterate. We’ll take no chance anybody will read that stuff. I’ll take care of it. But right now I’m going to go take a nap. I’m totally exhausted.”
128
Taglios: Another Great General
I was worried. I pranced from foot to foot like a little boy at a wedding who really needed to pee. It was another day and I still had not gotten started with Booboo and the Khadidas. Giving them and their Goddess any time at all was bound to lead to mischief.
But I had more immediate responsibilities. The fighting was over. Our obligation to the dead had to be handled now. And a huge city, with many dead of its own, had to be kept on a tight rein. Recent disasters would encourage plotters and conspirators.
The Children of the Dead knew how to put on a memorial for fallen comrades. Deep-voiced drums muttered and grumbled. Horns conjured forth the mood and gloom of a chilly, rainy morning despite a bright, cloudless winter sky. The soldiers paraded in all their brilliant colors, with all their thousands of banners. The locals were suitably impressed. We sent Sleepy off in more style than she could have hoped for while she lived. We said our good-byes to a great many people.
Then we stood back and rendered appropriate honors as Aridatha Singh directed equally large, if not nearly so dramatic, ceremonies honoring those who had fallen on behalf of the Protectorate. And when that was done we joined the local soldiers and the most important men of the city in honoring the Prahbrindrah Drah.
His funeral was the grandest I ever attended. I developed the distinct impression that all those leading men had gathered, however, to eyeball one another suspiciously rather than to mourn the passing of a ruler none had seen since they were young.
Aridatha Singh was popular with these men. Because Aridatha Singh had gathered to himself the loyalties of the survivors of the Second Territorial Division, the Greys, and the commanders of the rural garrisons nearest the city. Aridatha Singh had become the most powerful man in the Taglian Territories, despite having done little to acquire that power—except to be competent and a nice guy.
They say that when the hour comes, so will the man. Sometimes fate will even conspire to put a competent, honest man in the right place at the right time. Almost overnight the graffiti began giving Aridatha Mogaba’s old title, Great General.
Now, if he could just manage to get by without antagonizing the occupiers.
I tried to keep an eye on Tobo but that was difficult with a kid so talented.
129
Taglios: Open Tomb, Open Eyes
The hours of ceremony ground me down. I wanted to put myself away for another long nap. But I refused to give the Queen of Darkness any further respite.
“These are them,” Arkana told me in perfectly colloquial bad Taglian, indicating eight bitty wooden kegs. “Eight different men took turns crawling in there and stuffing papers—and everything else they could find—into a keg. Which I had sealed up as soon as the man came out. By an illiterate cooper.”
“You are a treasure indeed, daughter dear. Gentlemen, let’s build us a bonfire.” I had brought a couple of carts loaded with wood purchased from a wood seller whose usual customers were people who needed firewood for funeral ghats. I had been surprised to find he had any stock left, considering recent events.
The gentlemen I spoke to all hailed from Hsien. They knew only that the eight kegs contained the hopes of life of a monster more blackhearted than the legendary Shadowmasters who had tortured the Land of Unknown Shadows. And that was all they needed to know.
The pyre went up quickly, the kegs scattered throughout it. A fraction of me bemoaned the fate of the latest incarnation of the Books of the Dead. I hate seeing any book destroyed. But I did not interfere when the oil splashed and the fireballs zipped in.
My reluctance might be Kina trying to manipulate me.
I stayed there until I was confident that my natural daughter’s life’s work had been consumed completely by the flames.
In some myths Hagna, god of fire, is Kina’s mortal enemy. In others, when she is in her Destroyer avatar, he is her ally.
The more I am exposed to the Gunni pantheon the more confused I become.
“What task now?” I wondered aloud.
Everyone but Arkana and a few curious street kids, the near-feral ones called jengali, had moved along. A ragged, bemused white crow had been hanging around, too, but it had nothing to say. It had been doing a lot of sticking close and keeping its beak shut lately.
“Time to wake somebody up, Pop. Your wife, your daughter or the Khadidas.”
I surveyed the workmen clearing rubble. Most were civilians now, supervised by soldiers there just to keep them from stealing any treasures they unearthed.
The masonry had stopped collapsing. The fires had burned out. The popular consensus was that an all-new palace should be erected, once the old structures had been cleared away.
I could not imagine what treasures and surprises might surface if they did demolish and remove the whole rambling monster. No one ever knew the palace in its entirety. No one but a long-dead wizard named Smoke.
The death pyre of the Books of the Dead attracted more jengali, who wanted to take advantage of the warmth.
*
* *
Shukrat glowered at Arkana. Seemed Arkana was not doing her share of Booboo watching. And Arkana did not care if Shukrat was pissed off.
I noticed a change in Lady. She did not seem to be in a sort of coma anymore. She seemed to be in a normal but deep sleep. I threw open a window. I am a firm believer in the health benefits of fresh air. The scruffy white crow appeared almost immediately. I asked, “How long has this been going on?” I had my back to Booboo. Cleaned and groomed and dressed in decent clothing she was quite the sleeping beauty. I tried not to look at her long. Seeing her still ripped at my heart.
“What?” Shukrat asked. She stuck her tongue out at Arkana.
“The snoring. Lady didn’t snore before.” I meant since she had fallen under the spell. Before, she had snored for as long as I had been sleeping with her. Though she refused to believe it.
Shukrat said, “She started right after we brought the Daughter of Night in. I didn’t think anything about it.”
“No reason you should.”
Arkana nodded. “I never noticed her not snoring.”
The white crow chuckled from the window sill. I asked, “Did she snore when she was a kid?”
The crow made a noise. The girls looked at me, then at the bird. No dummies, they realized right away that it was not just an albino with bad personal habits. Being sorceresses they soon understood that it was a genuine crow, too, rather than some creature whose usual form was no form, and out of sight.
“Assuming she is sleeping, she’s been there a long time. You’d think she would’ve wakened on her own.” I touched my wife gently. She did not respond. I shook her, much less tenderly. She groaned, muttered, rolled onto her side, pulled her knees up. I said, “Don’t give me that stuff. It’s time to get up.”
The girls smiled. They felt my relief.
She was just sleeping now, even if that had been going on for a long time and might go on for a while more.