The Many Deaths of the Black Company

  “Come on, woman! We’ve got work to do. You’ve had enough sleep for ten people.”

  “She’s sure been getting my share.”

  Lady cracked an eyelid. At the same time she muttered something incoherent that sounded suspiciously like one of her traditional early morning threats.

  I said, “All that rest hasn’t improved her disposition any. I’ll remember this next time she claims lack of sleep is why she’s cranky.”

  “You want me to dump a bucket of cold water on her?” Arkana asked. She could be a presumptuous little witch.

  “She does need a bath.”

  Lady growled again, but this time in a lame attempt to be cheerful.

  I told her, “Don’t even try to be nice.” The way the human body works, returning from a coma in a good humor is flat impossible.

  Her throat was dry and tight. After we dealt with that, she asked, “Where are we? How long was I down this time?”

  I had lost track.

  “Fifteen days? At least. Probably more,” Shukrat said. “You were sleeping for all of us. We were all too busy.”

  Lady examined her surroundings. She knew she had not been here before. She could not see Booboo from where she sat.

  I told her, “The war is over. We won. Sort of. Aridatha Singh surrendered. We offered them good terms.”

  Lady grunted, mind not working swiftly. “Mogaba let him do that?”

  “The Great General isn’t with us anymore.”

  “I need to talk to you about that, Pop,” Shukrat said. “I went out to that sandbar.”

  I signed her to silence. Something from the hidden realm would be around somewhere. I continued talking to Lady. “A lot of people aren’t with us anymore. Including almost everybody who went to town with us the night you got hit. Sleepy, too, later on. In an ambush. Suvrin took over. He’ll be all right. He’ll grow into it. As long as we help him.”

  Arkana added, “Don’t forget the Prince and General Chu. And Mihlos. I miss him.”

  “Because he panted around behind you like a horny hound dog,” Shukrat sneered. “And you just led him on.”

  “And who went out of her way to make sure she wiggled and jiggled whenever he was around?”

  “Girls?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just jealous. Where were you when I was Mihlos’s age?”

  Lady interrupted. “What else do I need to know?”

  “The Palace fell down. We’ve occupied the city. Aridatha Singh is in charge now and gets Arkana wiggling and jiggling whenever he comes around. We don’t know how the succession will work out. We captured Booboo and the Khadidas. We destroyed the Books of the Dead. Again. Booboo is right over there. If you want to see her.” I extended a hand to help her rise. If she wanted. “She’s pretty.”

  “I want. But I won’t be able to stand up by myself. I don’t think I’ll even be able to sit up for long without help.”

  The crow snickered.

  Lady gave the bird a long, hard look. Then she offered me its twin.

  I asked, “How’s your connection with Kina?”

  “What do you mean, how is my connection?”

  “Did I stutter? Is it still there? Is it stronger? Is it weaker?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know. Why not answer me?”

  The girls were startled. They looked like they wished they were anywhere else. But they spread out.

  “She didn’t take me over while I was sleeping, if that’s what you’re after. I did have some awful nightmares, though. It was like I was trapped inside her imagination for an age. But she ignored me. She had something on her mind.” She came close to grinding her teeth with each word. She did not want to open up. “The nightmare went away a while ago.”

  I could understand. The only place I want to reveal myself, even a little, is here, where hardly anyone will ever notice.

  “Did you have any sense of time? I’m thinking maybe something happening here changed what you were going through there.”

  “Sense of time? It was forever. And no time at all. Kina doesn’t experience time the way we do. I don’t think. She sure doesn’t let it oppress her. Come on. Show me my baby. Before I collapse.” She strained to get up.

  Shukrat and Arkana got hold of her arms and helped her up. Arkana asked, “She always this cranky when she wakes up, Pop?”

  “You’re going to become part of the family, get used to it. You will if you don’t take it personal.” I chuckled when Lady asked me how I would like it if she stopped getting personal. “She’s not bad today.”

  The crow hissed. Clearly, it did not care if Lady figured it out. In fact, what it said sounded like, “Sister, sister.” Which was the taunt Lady had employed a few years ago, when she was looking out from behind the eyes of another crow.

  Curious, the white crows. There has been one around, off and on, since the siege of Dejagore. Back then Murgen had been the mind behind the bird’s eyes. Most of the time. Apparently. But was Shivetya the mind behind the crow-riding minds? Could he have had that much power to affect events outside the glittering plain?

  That would explain a good deal. Maybe even Murgen’s former difficulties with his place in time. But that would mean that Soulcatcher was not responsible for much of what we believed were her crimes. I was not sure I wanted it to be that way.

  The bird snickered. Like it could read my mind.

  Soulcatcher always had had a knack for reading me.

  “We lost Murgen, too,” I said as we moved into position facing one another over the unconscious girl.

  “I understood that. From your having told me how many we lost. That would be everyone not wearing Voroshk clothing. Correct?”

  “Except for one damned lucky soldier from Hsien who managed to be behind the right person at the right time. Lucky is now Tam Do’s official nickname.”

  “Must be in the blood,” Lady muttered, forcing herself to look at the girl. “The women of my blood are fated to spend most of their existence trapped and asleep.” She rested her weight more fully on the girls, extended a hand to touch Booboo’s cheek. She lapsed into the language of the Jewel Cities. “Asleep like this was the only way I ever saw my mother. She was the one they told the first Sleeping Beauty stories about. Her Prince Charming never came. My father did. And he was content with her the way she was.”

  Now there was a slice of horror to lug around in the back of your brain: knowing that your mother was not even aware that you had been born.

  And we like to whine about how cruel the world is today.

  They were giants in the olden days.

  We will be giants ourselves five hundred years from now.

  “So this is our baby.” She stared. “Conceived on a battlefield.” Her emotions were plain upon her face. Never had I seen her looking more vulnerable.

  “This is our baby.”

  “Shall we wake her up?”

  “I don’t think so. Not now, anyway. Life is insane enough right now without asking for more trouble.”

  That did not set well. Not at all. Lady wanted to establish some kind of emotional dialog with this flesh of her flesh. For my part, I found that now I had been exposed directly, the emotional distress was fading away. I do not believe my thoughts were skewed by might-have-beens and wish-that-weres.

  Lady did concede that it might not be a good plan to waken Booboo without Tobo there for backup.

  She did not do anything untoward but she did have the girls breathing nervously for a while.

  130

  Taglios: Khadidas

  Tobo was there to help when I wakened my old friend Goblin, who had become the unwilling vessel of the Khadidas.

  It was not that difficult once Tobo’s controlling spells had been cancelled. Tobo shook Goblin while I stood by. And once the little shit began to stir Tobo stood by while I nagged.

  The little man’s eyelids snapped open. The eyes behind them were not the eyes of the hedge wizard Goblin. I
was looking straight into large chips of the darkness. Those eyes seemed to want to suck me in.

  The mouth of the Khadidas opened, preparing to vent some infamy or blasphemy. I interposed One-Eye’s ragged old hat between Kina’s slave and myself. The effect was electric. The Goblin body convulsed as though I had whacked it with a hot poker. I slapped the hat down on its head.

  “Lift,” I told Tobo, who had placed himself at the head of Goblin’s cot, out of the Khadidas’s field of vision. I held the hat in place while Tobo raised Goblin into a sitting position. “It works. Better than I hoped.”

  “Better than I thought it would, for sure.”

  “One-Eye always did underplay it when he did something right.” The wicked light had left Goblin’s eyes. Now he just looked empty. Not even a thousand-yard stare, there. More like nobody at home at all.

  “Do the spear.”

  I did the spear. But, man, was I reluctant to trust the wisdom of a dead man when it came to putting that potent a tool into the hands of a devil.

  I stood it up in front of Goblin, its butt between his heels. I wrapped his hands around the black shaft. Then I shoved One-Eye’s filthy felt relic down onto his head even more solidly. Then I gripped his hands hard, squeezing them onto the silver-and-black wood.

  Life began to enter his eyes.

  I told Tobo, “Not as dramatic as watching a baby being born but dramatic enough.” Even a dummy like me did not need a map to see that we were conjuring up the real Goblin.

  A Goblin in pain so deep I was aware immediately that only Lady could begin to understand.

  I settled myself on a stool. Tobo eased Goblin onto a chair with an upright back, then planted himself on the edge of the cot. Goblin kept turning from one of us to the other, tears streaming but unable to speak, however hard he tried. He reached out to Tobo in a silent plea for contact.

  “Careful of that hat,” I said. “I’m already thinking about nailing it to his head.” And thinking about how wonderful a friend One-Eye had been, too. Because he had foreseen some possibility like this and had invested his final years in making a rescue feasible.

  I choked up for a moment, thinking I never had a friend who would go that far for me. Then I recalled that Sleepy had spent fifteen years working to exhume the Captured. And now, barely five years later, all those people but Lady and I were gone. Belly up. Up in smoke. Finished.

  Soldiers live.

  Not once had Sleepy ever behaved like she believed that she had wasted her life. But I am sure she had thought it sometimes. Regarding some individuals.

  I said, “You ought to keep at least one hand on the spear, Goblin.” We had done nothing to rid him of the Khadidas. The monster had been pushed back into the pit where it had lain till it had sprung forward to seize control, but now behind feeble barriers. The monster was much stronger than Goblin. We would have to work hard to keep it suppressed.

  “What’re we going to do with you?” I asked. And felt a twinge of guilt. Because I had plans for him already. Plans that might change the world.

  “What do you think, Goblin? You going to help us help you hang on?”

  Goblin was getting some muscle control back. He managed a weak, “Yeah,” as he nodded his head, too.

  * * *

  “I’m going to leave everything in the hands of you two gentlemen,” Suvrin said. He nodded politely to Goblin. “I scarcely knew this man. And then mainly from the perspective of being the butt of practical jokes he and One-Eye played. Meaning I might not be disinterested even if I tried. What is that stuff around the bottom of that thing on his head?”

  “Glue. That thing is a hat. You must’ve seen One-Eye wearing it. The old fart rigged it up with some spells, planning for something like what did happen.”

  “You told me.”

  “All right. The glue is because we don’t want the hat to come off. Ever. If we could come up with a way that would leave him free to feed himself and scratch his butt we’d glue his hands to One-Eye’s spear, too.”

  There is something about becoming Captain that takes the humor out of a man. It had gotten to Suvrin already. He never cracked a smile. He asked, “You gotten any useful information out of him? Not yet? When?”

  “I don’t know. He’s coming around. Really. Remember, in practical terms he’s been dead for six years. He’s having trouble figuring out how to use his body again. Especially his tongue. Meanwhile, the Khadidas is still inside of him trying to take over again.”

  “And Lady?”

  I was more concerned about my wife than I was about Goblin. She was acting strange. It did not seem like I knew her anymore. I had resurrected all my earlier worries about her connection with Kina. Kina was the master manipulator and planner. Kina schemed schemes ages long and many layers deep.

  But Kina was slow. Very slow. Which was why she favored plots that required years to ripen. She could not handle swiftly changing fortunes.

  “Lady is a puzzle right now,” I confessed. “But a benign one.”

  Goblin made a gurgling sound. The Khadidas was working hard to keep him from talking.

  Suvrin asked, “Do you know anything about the leading men of Taglios?”

  “Not the current crop. Except for types. My advice would just be, don’t ever turn your back on any of them. You could talk to Runmust Singh. If he survived the latest fighting.” I had a feeling he might have been with Sleepy in that ambush. “Or you could just ask Aridatha to loan you a couple of advisors.”

  Suvrin seemed unusually amenable to consulting for a Captain of the Company.

  He told me, “We need to resume our lessons. So I can study the Annals.”

  I responded, “We need some peace for that. Maybe a few years. We could build a new Company while we’re at it.”

  Goblin gurgled again and nodded.

  The little creature was like a puppy in some ways.

  I told Suvrin, “I need to talk to Goblin a while.” Once our hesitant new commander stepped out, I said, “We need to work out ways around the Khadidas’s interference.”

  Nod.

  “And that’s how we’ll do it, I guess. Unless it can control more than your speech.” I peered at the little man. He did not respond. I realized that I had not posed a yes or no question. “Can it do that?”

  No.

  “All right, then. The most critical question of all. Is the Khadidas in direct contact with Kina?”

  No. And yes. And a shrug. So we proceeded to play a game of a thousand questions during which I seemed to go the wrong direction, no matter where I went, making him gurgle in frustration. His best efforts to speak seldom produced more than one recognizable syllable.

  Eventually, despite my density, I got it. The Khadidas could communicate with the Goddess only when it was in control of the Goblin flesh. It could not do so when it was not in control.

  That made sense. Some. Though I had been cautioned to remember that the Goblin I was interviewing was actually a ghost that had not been able to leave when its body died and had been reanimated by the breath of the Goddess.

  “That is exciting news, Goblin. Look, I have a plan.” Difficult as it was, I dredged a form of it up from its hidden place deep down inside me, hoping the Goddess had no way of listening in. My plan depended entirely on my understanding of the Goblin I had known for so long, hoping he had not altered drastically during the past two decades. A man might change a lot in that much time—if he had to spend part of it dead and enslaved by the Mother of Deceivers.

  On the surface Goblin seemed to like my plan, as I presented it. Seemed willing to participate. Even seemed enthusiastic about plunging One-Eye’s spear into the blackest of hearts.

  I told him, “I don’t want to waste one minute I don’t have to. You understand?”

  Nod. Even a gurgled, “Yes!” With enthusiasm. With outright eagerness.

  “I’ll be back soon.” I felt almost bad, not telling a dead man all of the truth.

  131

  Around
Taglios: Aerial Recon

  I found Arkana and asked if she wanted to go flying, nodding to indicate that she really did want to make a tour of the upper air. For the benefit of the curious I mentioned wanting to check rumors that troops loyal to the Protectorate were headed toward the city. One force had crossed the Main at Vehdna-Bota. Another was gathering out east, near Mukhra in Ajitsthan, where Mogaba had enjoyed considerable popularity among the tribes. Since those rumors were beginning to make a lot of people nervous nobody would be surprised that I would want to take a look.

  And that is what we did while we were aloft, because it was work that had to be done. Doing the work, though, gave me time to talk to Arkana.

  She replied, “I can see one big problem with your plan. Maybe. What happens to the plain and the Shadowgates? You asked me if I wanted to go home. The answer is yes. I don’t think to stay, though. Just to see what happened there. To bury my dead, I guess you could say. But I don’t see how that could keep from complicating everything else if I had to do it first because there wouldn’t be any way later.”

  “You’re right. And I need to do what I’ve got to do as soon as I can. Before Kina catches on.” If she had not foreseen the possibilities already. Or learned of them from Goblin. Or Shivetya. Or from Lady, who was smart enough to guess what I was thinking. Sometimes. “Particularly before my wife catches on. Or starts thinking I’m chasing around.”

  We were approaching the River Main, heading for Vehdna-Bota. There were pillars of smoke north of the ford, away from the small settlement. But not many.

  Arkana told me, “That’s not much of an army.”

  “Not in any hurry to get into harm’s way, either, looks like. There’s plenty of daylight left they could use for traveling.”

  Not in any hurry. When we went down for a closer look we found men scattering like startled roaches.

  “Somebody covering his ass,” I said. “Making a show of honoring his obligations. That bunch will never actually get to Taglios.”

  We went back up. We talked, not just about what had to be accomplished. Arkana seemed able to relax, now. Seemed to have made peace with the bad times. Some manage that with comparative ease. Others remain crippled for life. Those are not the sort who remain soldiers. They become ex-soldiers and get intimate with wine or poppies.