The Taken promised, “This will become tolerable once the next group goes west. The ones that are still here won’t be able to sustain the field.”
Most of those would be prepubescent.
We did still have that mob of twelve out there in the woods. And now that we had the returned girls to hunt them down, it would not be long before we harvested a whole new crop.
Once the second shipment headed west the Honnoh girls began pinpointing sisters not yet collected. Which turned out to be somewhat less amazing than we had anticipated. Our huntresses had to be within five miles of a free-range Tides Elba before they could tell that she was around. Neither girl liked riding but riding was, for the moment, the only way to move them hither and yon.
The Taken had not brought much out but the girls and a quarter ton of clerical plunder that went straight into Admin’s clutches. There were no messages for me nor any for the children. Whatever else they might be, Baku and Shin were kids enough to be disappointed.
I was disappointed, too. Mischievous Rain was an orphan herself. She ought to understand what it was like to feel abandoned.
Weird. My head. The course of my thoughts. I was no longer the Croaker so favored at the Taken’s initial appearance, so long ago. I had to concentrate ferociously to remember Mischievous Rain despite my yearning for her return. Was her hair black, then? And something about tattoos …
I was not sure about anything. But I wanted to see the real her again.
Despite the workload brought on by having to examine potential recruits—thirty-four since the Honnoh success—I found time to get back into the Annals, the books so hated because they remembered so resolutely. What I had written down was impossible to unremember. My latest scribbling was more detailed than what I used to do, probably because I had extra time available, being in garrison. I found nothing remarkable but I was amazed at how thoroughly I had forgotten so much.
What that meant I could not guess but I did find it irksome. I was not yet old enough to be forgetting details of my own history.
Still, it seemed we were all getting senile where this one story was concerned. I asked around. Only Sana remembered as much as I did. Her recollections were perfect. She did not understand why nobody else remembered everything. Everybody else had been there, too.
“Does it matter that Sana remembers stuff that none of the other town girls do?” the Old Man asked. For him hardly anything mattered unless it related to the Company’s welfare, prosperity, or safety.
“I don’t know, do I? We might be losing information that could be invaluable down the road.”
The Captain, Candy, and the Lieutenant all gave me the fisheye. They thought I was stretching things so I could get some help feeding a case of the curiosities. They could be a little bit right, but …
I was more right, I was sure. My premonitions of that sort usually turn out to have some reliable intuition behind them.
So I got the benefit of the doubt despite a general air of skepticism.
I said, “I don’t know why it’s important but the effect is real. The Tower wants us to forget the first Mischievous Rain, even to the point of piling heartaches onto the twins.”
From the corner of my eye I caught a flicker of cat’s tail protruding from a shadow for an instant. Deliberate or accidental, it did offer a valuable reminder.
It told me to get as much written down and hidden as I could because ink and paper never forget.
* * *
The Honnoh girls did not contribute a great deal at first. Riding with the regular patrols took a lot of time for not much in the way of returns. Once the flying carpet was back and available their mission should take off.
What information the girls did discover often made no sense. They operated entirely on emotion and empathy.
Tides Elba did not come back after delivering her second squad of sisters to the Tower.
The Old Man grumbled, “Here we go with the gamesmanship again.” He decided to send out lots of smaller patrols, some with a sorcerer and all with shadow pots through which the twins could duck back and forth, providing swift, sophisticated communications as well as close terror support.
The man never seemed like he was paying attention but he figured stuff like that out, then insisted that my kids earn their keep.
Everyone got used to the system fast. It became part of regular operations. Fast long-distance communication and quick insertion of reactive horror gave us a huge edge over what was left of a decimated and demoralized enemy.
Meantime, Buzz and Elmo dismantled the Resurrectionist site stick by stick and brick by brick.
And the lucky boys did find real treasures, including something more valuable than the Tides Elba girls that I had been convinced were what the fighting was all about.
Two Dead once did say that the Resurrectionists had elevated magical camouflage to an art form. Buzzard Neck Tesch, in a foul humor because he had to protect a delectable collection of split-tail not only from his troopers but from himself, proved Two Dead’s assertion when he vented his frustration by way of a huge indulgence in magical vandalism. So there he was, muttering and flinging minor destructive spells left and right, making a racket, further irritating all those men he was keeping away from the poontang, when some random spell triggered a chain of secondary magical reactions.
Elmo would later declare, “And then something magical happened!” whenever he told the story.
A host of camouflage spells collapsed. Elmo discovered that wrecking the meeting hall had been a waste of time. The precious things that the Resurrectionists had wanted to hide were scattered around the woods, mostly under illusory brush. Our guys came within inches of some back when they were burying the enemy dead.
Gold revealed itself in small quantities, in fractional coinage.
Silver revealed itself in only slightly larger quantities.
Copper was there but it was less big a deal than was the iron and steel in a weapons cache vast enough to arm thousands.
Most intriguing, though, from the perspective of somebody who was me, were two Domination-era teakwood caskets, suitably grotesque and showing no decay, that turned up. Each contained documents in the local language, as it had been written and spoken one or two centuries ago. I could sound out the text and understand some of the words, but making sense of it all was very slow going.
I sat at the dinner table, eating with one hand. Sana and El came and went and peeked over my shoulders, to no avail. My other hand stayed busy shuffling papers.
The evening’s main course was something rich and beefy and if I had had a hand to spare I could have rubbed a tummy beginning to show proof that Sana really was a tremendous cook.
Those documents were seriously important. They had something to do with the creation of the Tides Elba girls. I got most of the nouns. There is a saying amongst those who decipher ancient documents: The worms ate the verbs. Here the verbs had survived but they had been imaginatively conjugated while the nouns had been imaginatively spelled. You could find the same word in two or three different spellings in the same paragraph—where there were recognizable paragraph breaks. Even the concept of sentences must have been sketchy, back then.
There were fewer agreed-on rules in the old days. Or this particular writer had had no respect for the rules that did exist. And his or her penmanship fell far short of qualifying as calligraphy, as well.
The documents were mostly in one hand but had marginal notes in another ink and hand.
I found something older in the bottom of the second casket. That was in TelleKurre, in a hand that was calligrapher fine. But I could not figure out what the sheets said. I could only sound out the alien words.
Firefly asked, “What’s your problem, Dad? You look like you swallowed a bug.”
“These papers are more important than the ones we sent to the Tower before. They all have something to do with the girls that look like your mother.”
“Dad, I love you, but you’re hop
eless. I’m not sure what Mom ever saw in you. Go in the bedroom and read the stuff out loud. How hard is that?”
“Pretty hard if you don’t know what you’re trying to read. Do you read Levanev from a hundred years ago? Or TelleKurre?”
“I’m a little kid. I can’t read yet.”
An outright lie, though she did lack adult proficiency.
She said, “Shin, do something with this idiot.”
Then Sana distracted us all with delectable desserts.
Shin shuffled his cards. “There isn’t anything here for that. Oh. This might help, looked at from the corner of his eye, held bottom up. Seems like a waste, though. Be like killing a tick with a sledgehammer.”
Six years old? Or a ten-thousand-year terror?
Maybe. One or the other. Or both.
Firefly asked, “You can read them, can’t you? Even if you don’t know what the words mean? Those look like modern letters.”
“Yeah. That’s true. I could.”
“So go in the bedroom and read them out loud. Somebody at Charm will know what the words mean.”
The kid made me feel like a drooling retard. How come I never thought of that? It should have been bone obvious. Assuming anyone at the Tower end bothered to listen.
Firefly said, “You’re worried about what’s in those papers, let’s find out if you need to be.”
I sighed. Children were beginning to consume my life. Especially this child. “All right.” I swept the documents into a pile. “El, please light the lamps in the mistress’s bedroom.”
* * *
Except for the occasional remote chirrup of wind chimes I had little sense of anyone listening to my reading—except for Firefly, who kept popping in to correct my pronunciation. I asked her, “Why don’t we save time by having you read this stuff?”
Again she fibbed. “’Cause I’m a little kid and I can’t read.”
I did not buy that, though it might only be a half fib. I read for another hour. Kindly Sana brought tea laced with lemon juice and honey but even so my throat began to protest. The pile of documents was not dwindling as fast as I would like.
Despite no blatant reaction from the Tower I had a sense that excitement had begun to build out west. Something that I had read had proven interesting.
There was an explosion of wind chimes.
A smoldering circle formed in the air. Either the Lady or my Mischievous Rain looked out of it. I figured Mischievous Rain because of the streaks in her hair. And because Firefly asked, “Mom, when are you coming home?”
Mom replied in a language that Dad did not understand. Baku said something petulant. Her mother responded with a prolonged speech. I did not have to speak the language to understand that Firefly was getting a list of instructions.
Baku’s attitude did not improve. When her mother finished Firefly responded with a speech of her own. It sounded fierce. And it did have impact. Her mother looked a little embarrassed, a little defensive, maybe even a little shamed.
The Taken responded. Firefly seemed placated, sort of, but not a whole lot.
The Taken caught my eye, winked, pursed her lips, then followed on with a kiss blown my way. Then she snapped at Blessed Baku and went away. The circle of fire shrank to a spark in a second.
Although distracted I wondered, “Why didn’t she wait to hear it all?”
“Maybe she’d heard enough?”
Yeah. That made sense. But she had not told me what to do about anything, either.
Sometimes Croaker has a hard time remembering his place on the mushroom farm.
25
Once Upon a Time: Baby Time
Laissa got spooky as her time approached. She no longer slept. She was aggressive with Papa, and shameless. Kitten seldom had a chance for a private word.
Papa gave up on privacy entirely. “Kitten, it’s going to be two more weeks.” In theory Laissa was at term now. From the little Kitten knew about this stuff she thought that was unusual in a first pregnancy.
“Two more? Isn’t that…? Is it dangerous?”
“She’ll be fine. It doesn’t look like she’ll have much trouble.”
Papa was leading up to something. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve never delivered a human baby. Animals, yes.” Kitten had assisted with a few animal birthings. “It shouldn’t be much different. But I’d feel more comfortable if we had a midwife to help.”
Kitten stifled a flash of irrational irritation because it was always all about Laissa. “Are you considering rounding one up?”
“I am.”
“Leaving me to handle everything if the baby comes early.”
“The divinations are clear. The timing is exact. The baby will arrive during the afternoon thirteen days from now. It will be male.” He hesitated, then. “But it gets cloudy after that. There could be something special about the infant.” Something might be not right with a baby whose mother was a dead girl? Imagine that.
Divinations were often inaccurate, especially if you had enemies who knew you were trying to spy on the future. They could slip a finger in and make the future tell you lies.
That did not seem likely out here.
“If you’re absolutely sure.”
“Nothing in all creation is one hundred percent sure, Kitten. Not even death itself anymore. But I am close to sure on this.”
“Well, then, go. Do it. Don’t waste time. And be careful. Don’t get noticed. Because this midwife is going to be missed.”
Had he thought about what they would do with a midwife once they had their use of her? Not likely. That was not his way. But they could not have someone running around raving about flying carpets and stone-cold dead girls having babies inside impossible castles in the Ghost Country.
Laissa tried to drape herself on Papa. She ended up hanging on sideways because her belly got in the way. Kitten was amused. Laissa whined, “Papa, I’m really, really cold.”
The baby took a lot of warmth from its mother.
Kitten had needed several months to realize that when Laissa talked about Papa making her warm she was actually talking about warmth. Life-energy warmth, not animal pleasure, though Laissa had confided that sometimes when Papa made her really warm she felt really, really good inside, too.
Kitten’s envious, petty side made her want to tell Papa to bring in three or four strapping farm boys to keep his precious Laissa near live-girl temperature.
As Credence Senjak, who insisted on being called Bathdek, Kitten had been the pivot of her own young universe. She had been as selfish as she could be in her circumstances. That girl would have had no trouble stating the facts then, however much Papa and Laissa might have been stung. Now, though, she could not be that small. Some insidious influence had seduced her into taking an empathetic outlook.
Her Senjak side was appalled.
* * *
Papa’s girls watched his carpet race out of sight. Laissa said, “You should go now. I know you’re ready.”
“Are you crazy? I’m not going anywhere.”
“This could be the last chance you’ll ever get.”
“No. It won’t be. And I won’t leave you here with nobody to look out for you when you’re ready to pop.”
Laissa sighed. “You’re a good sister, Kitten. I love you for that. But if you don’t go now you really might never get another chance.”
“If that’s how it goes then that’s how it goes. I’ll live with it. You’re my sister … I was never a good sister before … I found you. Before I found my way…” It was hard to express what she felt. “Just understand that I’m not going anywhere until we get through this and I know that you’re going to be all right. And now I need you to sit down and put your feet up while I go feed the animals.”
She could use that time to reflect. Because Laissa might be right about there not being many more chances. They were almost entirely self-sufficient now.
Feeding the animals included work that could be critical to her escape if
she really had to leave without Laissa.
Damn that girl. She refused to even think about leaving Papa. So. Kitten finally worked out what Laissa and Papa had not yet. Their physical intimacy gave Laissa the energy she needed to go on mimicking a living human being.
* * *
The woman Papa brought in was about thirty, short, wide, brown, and really unhappy about her new circumstances. Kitten thought she was young for a midwife but she had a big reputation where Papa found her. Papa promised her that she would be taken back home with a huge reward once Laissa’s baby had been delivered. She did not believe him, though Papa probably meant it. How could she know exactly where she had been? Kitten and Laissa tried to reassure her, too. She refused to be reassured.
She did do as she was told. She might not believe that she had any hope but she refused to do anything that would call down the darkness upon herself. She said almost nothing at all, ever.
Within hours of her arrival she worked out who the girls in this wild place were. Papa still had not done that. But Papa did not care.
Bathdek whispered, “I promise, I’ll get you out of here if the birthing goes well.” She placed a long-odds bet. “I have been making preparations to go for years. I’ve only stayed to help my sister.”
The midwife grasped that straw and held it to her heart.
* * *
Bathdek could not believe that the thing her sister birthed could so thoroughly mimick a human being. Well, a human infant, as she imagined they probably looked.
The midwife did not act like the little beast was a monster.
Laissa produced no breast milk. Of course.
How could it be otherwise? Bathdek and the midwife prepared goats’ and sheep’s milk. The midwife demonstrated how best to get that into the infant. She told Papa, “This is only a stopgap, sir. Your son won’t prosper without mother’s milk.”