Soldiers Live

  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 Tarn 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.”

&n
bsp; “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.

  I asked about her leg.

  She laughed. “I can be one of the old folks now. I can use it to predict the weather.”

  “It’s all right otherwise?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do good work.”

  “Lots of practice.”

  “You get that in this racket.”

  We flew back toward Taglios, chatting in a relaxed way, me thinking that this was what it would have been like had Booboo grown up with her parents. Me fooling myself. Lying to myself. No child would grow up even as normal as Arkana if they had Lady for a mother and me for a father.

  Maybe I had found the way. Adopt them after they have gotten through their formative years.

  We were passing south of Taglios, going to scout the forces gathering in Ajitsthan, when Arkana spotted a billowing figure climbing toward us. “That’s Shukrat.”

  “Have you two made peace? Real peace?”

  “Sort of. Mainly because we’ve only got each other. From back home. If it wasn’t for that we wouldn’t even be talking. Partly it’s because of family stuff. Things our parents did to each other. And partly it’s us. She’s too cute and too sweet and dumb as a bucket of rocks. But all she’s ever had to do is make big eyes or bounce a little and look helpless.”

  “And you were the smart one. Always expected to figure it out for yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re growing up to be the prett
ier one, too. Shukrat’s going to be all freckles and frump before long.”

  We slowed so Shukrat could catch up. She came up on my other side. I asked, “What’s up, other daughter?”

  “Croaker, I wanted to talk about what happened to those men on that island. That scares me. Really bad. I really like Tobo. A lot.” I was sure she was bright red behind her facial wraps. She did blush easily. “But I don’t think I want to be involved with anyone capable of doing that.”

  “We’re all capable of that, Shukrat. Put in the right place at the right time and given a motive. It’s the people around us that keep us from doing it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Tobo cares about you. Probably a lot more than he’s willing to admit. He’s a passionate kid.

  “Because he’s what he is he’s always had the capacity for huge evil, Shukrat. You know, nobody starts out to be a villain. Not the Shadowmasters. Not my wife or her sister. Not even the Voroshk. But being powerful can turn you villainous. Because there’s nothing to stop you from doing whatever you want to do. Except for something inside you. For Tobo, for a long time, that something was his love and respect for his parents. He fought with Sahra every day but there was no way he was ever going to do something that would disappoint her. While she was alive. After she disappeared the brake on his dark side became his father. But now Murgen is gone, too. So there’s only one more person whose good opinion is important enough to him to keep him from letting himself go.”

  Shukrat had to think about that for a while. She was nowhere as dim as Arkana claimed but there were times when it took her a while to get her mind wrapped all the way around complex issues.

  “You’re saying me caring about him is what will keep him from doing that stuff again?”

  “Yes. I think that. But I also think you have to confront him with your knowledge and make him understand that you won’t accept any excuses for behavior like that. Don’t nag. Don’t carp. State your case firmly and clearly, then shut up. Don’t negotiate. You have to mark out an absolute limit he’ll always know is there. And stick with it. You always have to know it’s there, too.”