Personally uninclined toward mortal self-sacrifice, I had trouble overriding my cynical nature—particularly as regarded someone as self-indulgent as Goblin had been for so long.
Goblin brandished One-Eye’s spear and told me what I had already told him but had not done. “Time to go downstairs, Croaker.” He got it all out in a single, bell-tone clear sentence.
I patted myself down. Final check. Still not sure I was ready for this.
134
Taglios: Best Served Cold
The only check on Tobo was Lady, who could not maintain her level of interest. The only check on Lady was the wonder boy. And he had other things on his mind. And altogether too much of that touched by the darkness.
No Shukrat, no Croaker, no Lady paying attention. Nights in the city lost their traditional noisome urban charm. Some people began to compare the new age to a time when the Protector had loosed her murderous shadows upon the city, for no more obvious reason than existed behind the unleashing of the horrors out there now.
The fact that there were few actual deaths went unremarked.
The Unknown Shadows enjoyed themselves greatly, tormenting the living. As did Tobo, who found himself free to do anything he wanted.
Except in his dreams.
A woman had begun to haunt those. A beautiful Nyueng Bao woman who seemed to be the embodiment of sorrow. He understood in his heart that this was his mother as she had appeared when she was young, before she had met his father. Usually she was not alone. Sometimes she was accompanied by a young, unbent Nana Gota. And sometimes by another woman, always gentle, always with a smile, forged of steel tougher than that of Uncle Doj’s sword Ash Wand. This woman, who had to be his great grandmother, Hong Tray, never spoke. She communicated more with a disapproving eye than Sahra could say in a hundred words.
His vengeances were unacceptable to all these women who had created and formed him.
Tobo could not determine if he was being touched by the ghosts of his ancestors—a possibility entirely in keeping with Nyueng Bao beliefs—or if the women were the product of some conscience-stricken cellar of his mind. The darkness within him was strong enough to make him want to defy them.
None of them wanted to be avenged.
Sahra’s ghost warned, “You won’t just hurt yourself, darling. If you go on you’ll be running into a trap. Put aside your pain. Embrace your true destiny and let it lift you up.”
Hong Tray studied him with eyes like cold steel marbles, agreeing that he had come to a crossroads. That he was about to make a choice that would shape the rest of his life.
He knew, of course, that the words the ghost women spoke, and the ghosts themselves, had to be metaphors.
He had no trouble with his conscience when he was awake. So he tried to avoid sleep.
Sleep deprivation clouded his judgment even further.
* * *
The hidden folk always reported the same thing: Aridatha Singh would not leave his offices. He worked day and night, seldom doing more than catnap, as he tried to hold the Taglian world together by the weight of his own will. The struggle to maintain control ought to have beaten him down and have shredded his spirit in days. Most men would have started cutting throats to more swiftly facilitate reconstruction and assuage frustration. Aridatha just beat people down with reason and public opinion. He treated with no one in secret. He made sure the world knew when someone refused to handle the city’s business publicly.
Obstructionists were becoming known. The mood of people displaced by strife and fire was not forgiving of traditional factionalism.
The unthinkable happened. Several men of high caste were beaten savagely. Shadar were seen in the crowds, encouraging the violence. No one wondered, though, and Aridatha Singh did not appear to be aware of that personally.
* * *
It was deep night but a light traffic continued to and from the City Battalions barracks containing Aridatha Singh’s headquarters. A dark fog slowly gathered around the place. People grew sleepy. Shadows scampered among the shadows. For an instant, here and there, little people or little animals were visible briefly—had anyone been awake to see them.
Tobo came walking through it all, so tired his eyes were crossing, so sure of himself that he had not brought his flying post nor had he armored himself in Voroshk black. So sure of himself that he did not double-check reports from his Unknown Shadows.
He expected to walk in, complete his revenge, and be gone with no one the wiser. Aridatha Singh’s fate would become a great and terrible mystery.
The hidden folk could tell him nothing about Singh’s office. They could not get inside it. It was kept sealed airtight. But the sentries outside were snoring.
Tobo shoved the door. It gave way only grudgingly, swinging inward. He stepped inside, panting. Across the room three men had fallen forward onto a worktable or lay sprawled in their chairs. “Not good,” Tobo muttered, unexcited by the presence of the potential witnesses.
“Not good at all,” Aridatha said, lifting his face off the desktop.
Tobo just had time to catch the swish of air behind him before something hit the back of his head with force enough to crack bone. He went down into the darkness knowing he had been betrayed, that he had walked into a trap. The Unknown Shadows scattered in every direction, going mad, making Taglios a city of nightmares.
Sahra, Gota and Hong Tray all awaited Tobo on the other shore of consciousness. All three told him that this was a disaster entirely of his own devising. He could have avoided it simply by doing the right thing.
He had been warned beforehand. He had not listened.
Sahra’s sorrow was deeper than ever Tobo had known it before.
135
Taglios: The Mad Season
Lady dealt with the temptation easily for several days after Croaker departed. She kept reminding herself that all she had to do was hang on till he got back. By then the Daughter of Night would not be the Deceiver messiah anymore. She would be just plain Booboo.
Sense told Lady to be patient. But emotion knew no patience. And emotion threatened to devour her. Despite her long history, emotion had stolen control.
She broke after only four days.
* * *
Lady took a quick look into the hallway to make certain no one was likely to intervene, then settled on a stool beside her daughter’s bed. She plucked the ends of strands of spells keeping the girl asleep and constrained. She worked quickly and deftly. She had been studying Booboo’s bonds all those four days.
Those spells unravelled almost as if they had a will of their own.
Lady proceeded with an uncharacteristically naive haste. That part of her that had grown hard and bitter in the real world mocked her for her childishness. This was the world. Her world. The real world. There was no reason to expect any good to come her way.
Booboo’s eyes snapped open with mechanical suddenness. The color was right but still they were not the family eyes. Nor were they Croaker’s eyes. They were eyes colder than Lady’s own in her cruelest hour. They were the eyes of a serpent, a naga, or a deity. For an instant Lady froze like a mouse caught in a snake’s stare. Then she said, “I’m an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.” She tried to assert control while the girl was physically too weak to act.
The girl’s “love me” aura had touched Lady already, so subtly that she remained unaware of it until it was too late.
Lady had not worn her Voroshk costume. There was no shelter from the storm.
A vibration developed down deep inside her, at glacial speeds. As it built she watched the power of the Goddess slowly fill the Daughter of Night. The buzz within Lady included a trace of mirth. She understood that her unpracticed maternal emotions had been discovered and manipulated, ever so subtly, for a very long time. So subtly that she had not suspected. Worse, so subtly that she was not adequately prepared to respond to any disaster.
Neverthele
ss, she was a woman of incredible will, having had ages to practice employing it.
There was a countermove left.
In an instant Lady made the cruelest decision of her life. She would regret it forever but knew the choice she made would leave her with the least painful long-term wounds.
The Lady of Charm had centuries of practice making terrible decisions quickly, and just as many years of practice living with the consequences.
From her belt Lady drew a memento of her brief passage as Captain of the Black Company. The dagger’s pommel was a silver skull with one ruby eye. The ruby always seemed to be alive. Lady lifted the blade slowly, her gaze locked with that of the Daughter of Night. The sense of the presence of Kina grew ever stronger between them.
“I love you,” Lady said, responding to a question never asked, existing only within the girl’s heart. “I will love you forever. I will always love you. But I won’t let you do this thing to my world.”
Lady could do it, in spite of all. She had slain as dear before, when she was not yet as old as the child lying beneath her knife. And for less reason.
She felt a madness creep through her. She tried to concentrate.
She could kill because she was filled with a conviction that there was no better thing she could do.
Kina and the Daughter of Night both strove to crack Lady’s terrible will. But the dagger descended toward the girl’s breast, its progress inexorable. The Daughter of Night quickly became the hypnotized prey, unable to believe that Lady’s blade kept falling.
The tip of the knife touched cloth. It passed through, found flesh, then a rib. Lady shifted her weight so she could drive the blade between bones.
She never sensed it coming. The blow, seemingly struck to the right side of her head, was powerful enough to hurl her sideways a half dozen feet, into a wall. Darkness closed in. For an instant there was a living dream in which she saw herself trying to strangle her child instead of stabbing her.
* * *
The Daughter of Night felt fire rip across her chest as her would-be killer flung toward the wall. She screamed. But the agony that moved her was not that of her wound. It was a black explosion inside her mind, a sudden tidal wave of knifelike shards of a thousand dark dreams, of a scream harsher than ten thousand whetstones sharpening swords, of a rage so vast and red it could be called the Eater of Worlds.
That blow was violent enough to fling her upward and to one side. She came down sprawled across the still form of her birth mother. But she did not know. She was unconscious long before gravity placed and posed her.
A whiff of old death, of graveyard mold, hung in the air of the room.
136
Fortress with No Name: Godstalking
Goblin was too eager. Twice I felt compelled to yell at him to slow down. He plunged down the dark stairwell at a pace I could not match. Even wearing the Voroshk apparel the bruising impacts with the walls became too much for my nerve.
We had not yet gone as deep as the ice cavern where Soulcatcher lay when I bellowed an order to stop. Wonder of wonders, this time Goblin heard me. And listened. And responded when I told him we had to go back up.
“What?” He turned the word into a two syllable whisper from an old tomb.
“We can’t do this in the dark. We’ll beat ourselves unconscious before we get down there. Or at least get there too beaten up to think.”
He made a sound that signified reluctant agreement. He had had a few unpleasant collisions of his own.
“We have to go get lights.” Why had I overlooked something so obvious? Because I was too damned busy looking for the subtle and the sneaky, I suppose.
The stairwell was much too tight to turn the flying posts. We had to back them up. That was a slow, humbling, sometimes painful task. And things did not get much less humiliating when we did reach the top.
The girls and the white crow awaited us. In attitudes so smug they could be read even though the ladies were clad for action. Arkana swung a lantern back and forth.
For an instant I suffered an entirely irrelevant worry because I had not brought my Widowmaker costume. It seemed appropriate to the situation. But definitely not necessary.
All that armor ever was was a costume.
Now Shukrat waved a lantern back and forth. And laughed.
“Not a word,” I grumped.
“Did I say anything?”
“You’re thinking it, darling daughter.”
She raised her lantern higher, the better to see what I was wearing. My apparel was in slow, creeping motion all around me, repairing extensive damage. “Not a word from me, old-timer. You know your Shukrat. Honors her elders to a fault. But I’m going to laugh, now. Please don’t jump to conclusions and think that it’s at you.”
Arkana laughed harder.
Goblin made a series of noises, depleting his vocabulary fast.
“He’s right. Give us those lanterns. We need to get this done.” I hoped my dimwit failure to consider the need for light would not be the one little thing that got us destroyed. And that that was the last little thing I had been dumb enough to forget.
Goblin took the lantern from Shukrat. He headed down into the earth again. He was not nearly so hurried this time. Possibly his lust for revenge had begun to cool.
I took Arkana’s lantern. The white crow flapped over to the tip of my post. Before I finished telling it that traveling with me might not be a good idea Shukrat had another lantern going and was helping Arkana get herself another lit.
The girls had been ready for us.
I bickered with them all the way down to the ice cavern. They had fun with me all the way. They refused to listen to my warnings.
The white crow decided the cave of the ancients would be a fine place to detour. I bellowed, “Don’t touch anything in there! Especially don’t touch yourself.” I continued, mumbling, “When will I learn to keep my big damned mouth shut?” It would be a great and wonderful irony if the bird’s touch was Soulcatcher’s undoing, after all her lucky years.
Goblin got the hurries again. When I tried to slow him down he told me, “There’s something going on with Kina! She’s starting to stir.”
“Shit!”
Keeping up was impossible, until we reached the black barrier. There Goblin’s nerve failed him. There he froze, recalling the horror of the years he had spent on the other side.
“Goblin. We’re almost there. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to do it now.” Numb as I was to things supernatural even I could sense Kina’s proximity and her heightened awareness. Which must not be our fault. Her attention was focused elsewhere. “Now!” I said with more force.
Behind us the girls had begun whispering, troubled. They sensed much more than I ever could.
I told them, “You two go back upstairs now. I guarantee you that you’ll be glad you did. Especially if things don’t work out for us. Goblin.”
He reclaimed his courage. Or maybe just found his hatred again. His face hardened. He started forward.
“Don’t rush,” I stage-whispered as he passed through the black barrier. “Girls, I mean it. Start running now. There have to be some survivors.” I pushed through the terrible barrier behind Goblin, nearly messing myself with the fear. Despite what I had told the little man this was no time to be slow or tentative. Once we breached the barrier Kina knew that we had come. Her slowness would be our only ally.
Once I breached that barrier I flung myself into the anteroom area outside the entrance to Kina’s prison. Goblin lined himself up to charge. I had to do several things at once: encourage him, prepare myself to weather what was about to happen and do my thankless bit to make this deicide work.
Got to keep the whole picture in mind. Got to do each thing on time, in the right order, just the way you worked it out over the last few months.
As Goblin surged forward I placed my flying post into the angle where the floor met the left-hand wall, then plastered myself against the wall above it and willed my V
oroshk clothing to form a protective scab over it and me. Then, in light almost too dim for use, I found the right page in the First Father’s notebook. I kept my protection open just enough to let me watch Goblin hurtle straight at Kina and, to my surprise, drive One-Eye’s spear into her temple. I had expected him to go for the heart.
I completed the cantrip that would destroy Goblin’s post, finished shutting me and my post in. Then I allowed myself to feel lower than snake shit because of what I was doing.
I had been hard at work justifying myself to myself for months. And had carried on. But now it was happening. And when it was over I would have to live with my deceits forever.
The entire universe shook. The cavern where Kina lay was big but it was confined. The stairwell was the only escape the products of that violence could find. The energy wave pounded at my protection.
I clung to the stone wall, beneath layers and layers of Voroshk material, while the universe howled and shuddered. I swore that if Kina was powerful enough to get through this I would enlist in her service myself because the only thing tougher than her would be the guys who tied her up. And they had not been seen for several millenia.
The noise began to fade. But I had trouble hearing it go. The roar had deafened me temporarily.
I hoped the girls did head back up the way I told them.
I hoped the violence did no damage elsewhere. I doubted that it would. A major earthquake had split the plain open without destroying the ice caves or doing any harm down here.
* * *
I willed the Voroshk clothing to open a crack through which I could see. If need be, if Kina had survived but was injured, I would push my post in there and blow it, too. And if I survived a second blast I would start hoping that I did not suffer a heart attack or starve to death while trying to climb those miles of steps.
The material protecting me had been so traumatized that it took ten minutes to respond. It twitched and shivered and crawled, moving in small surges, as it tried to heal itself.
Once I had an eyehole I discovered that there was nothing to see. Intense bright light still burned inside Kina’s cell. It might have been fading but it was going slowly if it was.