A messenger huffed and puffed into the presence. The search had stumbled onto some corpses. From long ago. Three men wearing nothing but loincloths. They appeared to have gotten lost in the maze of the Palace, but had perished of wounds suffered earlier. The searchers were troubled because the corpses had not suffered much from vermin or normal putrefaction.
“Don’t do anything with them,” Mogaba said. “Don’t even touch them. Just seal them up where they are.” He told Ghopal, “Those would be some of the Deceivers who tried to assassinate the Liberator and the Radisha when you were still wearing diapers.” He sighed. “No matter what we do to hurry this it’s going to take an age.”
“They do have to eat.”
“Eventually, yes. We’ll guard the kitchens at all times.” And, he said aloud to no one, because these days it was more secure to communicate by passing notes, any food easily reached during quiet hours would be poisoned.
“Keep at it here, Ghopal. Day and night. Use as many people as we can spare.” The Great General expected his enemies to come for him and he was making preparations to welcome them.
Mogaba withdrew to his own quarters. There he invested an hour in one of his hobbies before he moved on to the Protector’s quarters to nap. He used her apartment now because no one ever went there. No one but the Great General dared. No one but the Great General could pass through the warding spells the Protector had left in place.
It had become his sanctuary.
Mogaba’s scouts and spies had reported that Croaker and all his mob had rejoined the Company, back from wherever they had gone, with even more tools of deviltry.
The crisis could come any time now.
103
Beside the Cemetery:
Search for a Lost Soul
I had been in the neighborhood of necromantic activities before, and other high-order divining, but never any closer than I got that night. I do not plan to get that close again. If my honey wants somebody handy to save her sweet butt when she gets in trouble, I will tie a long rope to her ankle and attach the other end to a horse. If something goes sour I will swat the horse’s butt.
This séance did not go well. And before it was over I got a much uglier vision of that place of bones that had claimed so many of the dreams of Murgen and my beloved.
The smell was bad but the cold was worse. I have never felt such cold. I roasted myself beside a bonfire for hours after the summoning was over but mortal flames did little to defeat that bitter chill. It was so bad we did not undertake the Captain’s raid that night or even the next and when we did we went only because Her Highness began wondering publicly if us slackers were waiting for summer weather.
Murgen, Sleepy and I were present at the summoning. No one else was invited, not even Shukrat or Suvrin or any of Sahra’s friends. And it started going bad right away. Right after starting Lady raised a hand to massage her right temple. Soon afterward I began to catch fleeting, random impressions of things that were not there. The cold came first, then the smell. Before I saw anything there were several moments when my balance became very iffy.
Lady grew more and more excited as things continued to refuse to go the way she wanted. She started over twice. And when she finally did storm ahead she did not get where she wanted to go. Eventually she gave up. But not before the rest of us had gotten a good strong whiff of Kina’s charnel dreams.
“I’m sorry,” Lady told Tobo. “Kina keeps trying to get at me through our connection. The more power I siphon from her the more easily she can touch me.”
Not good. We could have Lady turn kickass powerful — and be in thrall to the Goddess when she did.
She seemed to read my mind. She gave me a dirty look. “The bitch isn’t going to get a hold on me.”
I considered reminding her of whom we were speaking. The Mother of Deceit. Kina did not need control where she could manipulate. And she could manipulate whole populations. In her sleep. Instead, I asked, “Did we find out anything about Sahra?”
Lady’s temper was not improving. “Certainly not what we would’ve if that old devil-sow hadn’t decided to wreck our game.” Her mind had been affected somehow. She seemed almost drunk. “We couldn’t raise Sahra. Couldn’t even touch her. Which leaves the matter’s resolution ambiguous.” Her speech continued slurred, she was aware of it, yet she persisted in trying to use difficult words. “I think she’s dead. If she was alive Tobo and the hidden folk would’ve found her. Nothing hides from the Black Hounds for long.”
“Soldiers live,” I whispered. “It ain’t right, something like that happening.” But Fortune does not care. Unless Fortune gets a laugh out of human pain. “There has to be more meaning...”
“You going mystical on us at this late date, Croaker?” Sleepy snapped. “You’re the one who always says nothing has any meaning we don’t put into it ourselves.”
“Sure as shit sounds like me, don’t it? Let’s go work out our frustrations by kicking Mogaba’s antique ass.”
Sleepy gave us the once-over, unwilling to send us out while we were in so bleak a mood. We might be dangerous to ourselves.
She was no happier with us later. We did not improve, any of us. Finally, she swallowed her reservations and told us to go.
Howler had completed a large carpet capable of moving twenty passengers. Tonight it carried sixteen of those, plus freight. Amongst the sixteen were both elder Voroshk, a number of commando-trained soldiers from Hsien and Murgen. Murgen had been zombielike since Lady’s failed ritual. He had overheard her saying she thought Sahra was dead.
I had urged him to stay behind but he insisted on joining us.
I should have stood fast. He could not help but be a liability.
Tobo was less distracted. He was too involved with Shukrat to be obsessed about his mother being missing. Still, he would bear watching.
Lady and I dressed up in full costume, with Voroshk apparel over the black Widowmaker and Lifetaker armor. My two ravens tagged along. Arkana flew with us, being tested. Which she understood fully.
Down below, dark things were on the move. They had been since nightfall.
Taglios never sleeps. Tonight those with reasons to be out after dark would have cause to worry about what might be lurking in the shadows. Hey, Mogaba. Look out. Darkness always comes.
We were still climbing away from camp when I eased over next to Lady. We flew knee to knee, our Voroshk apparel whipping in the breeze for twenty yards behind us. First we discussed which of our companions needed watching the closest, then we revisited the failed attempt to contact Sahra’s spirit. For the twentieth time. Lady insisted, “I do believe she’s out there, just as desperate to make contact with us as we were to make contact with her. But the ugly Goddess wants to keep us apart.”
“Is Kina awake?”
“More than she has been for a long, long time. At least since Goblin went down there. Maybe since the days when she sensed her doom afoot and commenced her war on us ere ever we entered this country.”
Ere ever? Wow. “I have a question on another subject. It’s been bothering me for a long time but I’ve never quite been able to put the words together right.”
“Artist.”
“Power junkie.”
“What’s your question, Old Style?”
“What happened to Soulcatcher’s shadows?”
Lady looked at me blankly.
“Come on. The old brain can’t have slowed down that much. She was an accomplished shadowmaster. She didn’t have a lot of shadows left because Tobo’s pets kept picking them off. She stopped trying to use them against us. But she still had some hidden away somewhere. Saved for a rainy day.”
Lady growled, “It couldn’t have gotten any stormier than it did.” But she was not arguing. She had her mind wrapped around the question. “My bet is that the Unknown Shadows finished them all off. There aren’t any killer shadows left. If there were we’d still be hearing reports of unexplained deaths.”
“Maybe.” Probabl
y. If they were out there anywhere the excitement the shadows would cause would be much greater than the numbers justified. The peoples of the Taglian territories had a long history of suffering from killer shadows.
Even so, I moved up until I was flying hip to hip with Tobo, an eventuality Shukrat found distasteful. She drifted away. Rather haughtily adolescent, I thought.
“I don’t plan to take over your life.” I told the boy about my concerns.
He seemed to agree that they were valid. “I’ll find out if there’s any reason to worry.”
I fell back until I rejoined Lady.
She asked, “What did he say?”
“He’ll check it out.”
“You don’t sound real happy about that.”
“He said it the way you do when you agree with somebody just so you don’t have to spend time with them fussing over something that doesn’t bother you.”
104
Taglios:
View from the Protector’s Window
Mogaba’s eyelids kept getting heavier. Twice he drifted off completely, to start awake violently, disturbed once by some clamor in the city, once by shouting down below that suggested the guards might have glimpsed the Khadidas. It was the wee hours of the morning, when even the heartbeat of the world had trouble thumping on.
They were not going to come tonight. They had not come last night, nor the night before. Maybe they were waiting for a larger moon.
Something dark blurred the glass in the window whence the Great General watched his own quarters and the best part of the Palace’s northern face. Including all the significant entrances. He did not even breathe.
The Unknown Shadows could not find a way past the glass and the Protector’s permanent wards. Mogaba resumed breathing. Slowly, invisible in the deep darkness of the room, he rose and glided nearer the glass, so that he would have a broader view.
They had come. Not when he had expected but exactly where. The same place their messengers had come every time. That same turret top.
He felt no particular elation. What he felt, in fact, was sorrow. All their lives, his and theirs, had come to no more than this. For a moment there was even the temptation to shout a warning. To cry out that that prideful fool who had made such a stupid choice in Dejagore so long ago had not meant any of them to come to this. But, no. It was too late. Fortune’s die was cast. The cruel game had to be played to its end, no matter what anyone wanted.
105
The Palace:
The Great General’s Place
Lady led the way, grim as ever when she donned the Lifetaker persona. I was not pleased. Someone with more power ought to have been first down the stair. But Tobo was sure he needed to go last. Otherwise the Howler and the Voroshk might not feel motivated enough to participate. And Howler would not go first because he had to manage his carpet until everybody was off.
The stair was crowded. No one wanted to be there in that darkness, though only Lady, Murgen and I were old enough to remember when darkness was our determined foe. I tried to stay close to Lady, my foolish mind somehow afflicted with the notion that I had to protect her.
There went a joke of cosmic proportion.
We made it down the stairwell without mishap. And, despite a horrendous racket, without causing any alarm. Lady murmured, “Mogaba must be sleeping the sleep of the innocent. All that noise should’ve raised the dead.”
“Uhn?”
“His quarters are straight ahead.”
I knew that. We had rehearsed this raid before we left. In a half-ass sort of way. Which means not thoroughly enough to satisfy me.
“He’s a heavy sleeper,” I said. That was one of the few knocks against him before his defection. That and an intensity even his brother Nar had found oppressive. But I was speaking to the night. She was pulling ahead.
Someone generated a light, a feeble glowball that drifted above our heads. It had an alien feel so I assume one of the Voroshk was responsible. As the light grew so did a sense of relaxation, of confidence.
Maybe one of those cranky old men was not as dim as he let on.
“The light is my familiar,” someone murmured in one of the dialects of Hsien. The phrase possessed the rhythm of ritual. Later I would learn that it was part of an incantation meant to repel the Unknown Shadows, those being disliked by everyone but Tobo.
The hidden realm was there, too, all around us. And so troubled that even I could feel it.
Tobo whispered, “There’s something strange here. I had hundreds of the hidden folk put into the Palace. But none of them are reporting. As far as I can tell they aren’t here anymore.” He whispered to the creepy darkness. Things unseen moved around us, jostling us from directions we were not looking. Some of the stress oppressing me went away.
Lady beckoned soldiers forward. It was time to break into Mogaba’s quarters. Though that implies more force than was needed. His door was not locked. Nor had it ever been before, according to Lady.
She and Shukrat took point. They knew their ways around. Unless clever Mogaba had rearranged his furniture.
Soldiers followed. The Voroshk and Howler crept inside. Murgen followed them. Lady and Shukrat began to argue sharply, in whispers, about who should find a lamp. Somebody stumbled into somebody else. Somebody fell down. Another somebody crashed into something. Then somebody else stated categorically, “Oh, shit!”
Arkana was just sliding into the room, a step ahead of me, when Tobo echoed those sentiments from behind me. He started to push. “Out of the way, damnit!”
A huge crash of breaking pottery. I had not known that Mogaba was a collector, though there were some marvellous craftsmen in this part of the world...
A man screamed.
Before his lungs were empty other screams joined his. And fireballs leapt from small projectors. And I knew why so many men were screaming and why they were so panicky they were blowing holes through one another.
Shadows.
The old evil. Killer shadows.
Deadly shadows off the glittering plain. Shadows, the exploitation of which had given the Shadowmasters their name. Shadows of the sort Soulcatcher had used to prop up her Protectorate until the coming of Tobo’s allies from the Land of Unknown Shadows.
I had the answer to the question I had addressed to Lady and Tobo.
People panicked completely. Fireballs flew everywhere, caused far more carnage than mere starving mad shadows. One of those ripped through my Voroshk cloak. The cloak seemed to whine but pulled itself together around me. A shadow hit me. My apparel repelled it, a fact I did not fail to note despite the rising chaos. It also shed the next fireball that found me.
I saw Lady hit several times, rapidly. I saw one of the Voroshk succumb to shadows.
I tried to bellow into the madness, to calm them down, but the panic had them all. Even Howler and Lady caught it.
But Shukrat did keep her wits about her. She crouched in a corner and let her cloak form a barrier impervious to fireballs and shadows alike.
Men fought to get out the door. Howler loosed a spell that flashed so brightly it blinded everyone not in Voroshk protective clothing, including the little sorcerer himself. His effort did not avail. A moment later he screamed with more enthusiasm than ever he had before his cure.
“Get out of my way!” Tobo bellowed. He hurled me aside. His father was inside that room.
Before I regained my feet the tower was creaking under the psychic mass of Tobo’s unseen friends. Their battle with the invisible killers was brief but belated. And, probably, needless, because the fireballs ate shadows alive. Unknown Shadows as well as the traditional lurkers in darkness.
I did not know if I wanted to get off the floor. It was very still in that other room now, except for Arkana crying. But I had to get up. We had to get moving. The rest of the palace was not silent anymore. An alarm had been sounded. People with sharp instruments would be coming to get us.
It was impossible to tell who was dead, who was dying, a
nd who was only mildly injured. For a while it was too dark.
I got Tobo to provide another light. Then I started getting the fallen moved back to the tower top. Arkana and Shukrat and Tobo’s hidden allies kept the Palace Guard at bay. I kept my emotions turned off while I lugged bodies. At the moment I could not afford to indulge.
“How are we going to get these posts and the carpet out of here?” I demanded. Lady, both of the elder Voroshk, Howler, Murgen were all out of action. So were most of the commandos.
“Shukrat and I can handle the carpet. You and Arkana will have to tow the posts.”
“You hear that, new daughter?” Minutes earlier I had been about to slap the girl around to crack her shock. But she had solid stuff inside her. She was dragging the dead and injured now, calmer than most of the others.
“I know. I’ll need something to use for tethers.”
“Find it fast. I’ll lug bodies.”
A crossbow bolt buzzed past without doing any harm. An instant later the section of wall whence it had come was shattered rock and boiling flame.
Tobo was not in a kindly mood.
I told Arkana, “You get those posts out of here right now. All but mine.” She had gotten some rope from aboard the carpet.
Good girl, Arkana. She got busy. Like Shukrat, she focused on the task at hand.
Funny, I thought, how the Company seemed to attract good women.
The Palace Guards and a surprising number of Greys responded to the alarm. And they refused to be intimidated by Tobo’s violence and by Tobo’s half-seen friends. Brave men, they. There are always brave and honorable men amongst one’s enemies. Missiles filled the air. A few found targets.
I began to wonder if this would not be a good time to reconsider my lifelong determination never to leave Company people behind.