Firefly stuck like my shadow. She said, “Those that choose the fire just want it all to end. Mostly.”
Did she sound a bit yearning herself?
“No,” she told me, divining my thoughts with a glance. “I have stuff to look forward to.” A flash of devilish smile. “You want to play with your grandchildren, don’t you?”
My answering smile was forced. That might be nice but she had promised me already that I would not remember her a year from now.
Accident-prone members of the Eastern Army had weeded themselves out long ago. There was not much work for the medical staff. Near as I could tell, we had it much easier than the other thousands, who put in sixteen-hour days between working construction and doing watch duty.
* * *
The biggest reason that I had nothing to do was that the troops were meeting no normal resistance. The Taken and their associates had scoured the forest of human foes. The Taken had no trouble discerning revenants on the move, either. They tracked those from above until overwhelming magical force could be collected to eliminate them.
Mischievous Rain’s strategy was straightforward industrial. She was totally thorough, by the numbers, a step at a time. She would not hurry. She exterminated the lesser monsters before she focused on the big ones, the groggy ancients that were still not yet fully wakened.
Her approach to those, who in their prime might have been stronger than the Dominator, was industrial, too. Detect something. Identify it. Isolate it. Hit it with all the power of every adept available. Rest, then repeat with the next one.
I have heard that the light of those burns was visible two hundred miles away and the thunder could be heard for a hundred.
The Ghost Country became pimpled by upwells of molten earth once again. Nobody called down a star but probably only because nobody had any idea how.
Molten earth proved sufficient unto every modern challenge.
* * *
Suppertime. The whole family was there, including Ankou, Kuroneko, and Shironeko. Everyone was bushed but me and Firefly. My wife said, “I am wiped. And we’re doing eight more of them tomorrow.”
“I wish I could contribute something.”
“You do what’s needed just by being here when I get home from work.”
Firefly snickered. “Great riff, Mom.”
“Maybe. But I mean it.”
I said, “I was thinking, maybe the Lady could use the same tactics to fix it so we don’t ever have to worry about a Port of Shadows.”
The Taken, my wife, looked thoughtful. “I see problems that we don’t face out here.”
“Like what?”
“Like He hasn’t been in the ground long enough. He’s still awake. He’s still scheming. An attack like what we’re using here would break His bonds seconds before it could get to Him. We would set His tail feathers on fire but He would get away.” She chewed a few mouthfuls before adding, “But it’s worth consideration. There might be an angle. Good thinking, love.”
“I don’t have much to do but think. You don’t let me ride along.”
“No. I don’t. And that isn’t going to change.”
Firefly said, “Hahh! You’re too precious to lose, Dad.”
The Taken said, “Blessed Baku! You are an imp.”
“I can’t help it, can I? Look who my mom and pop were.”
Really? What was happening? This was the kind of silly shit that went on inside real families, or so I was inclined to imagine. It had gone on inside mine when I was Firefly’s age, before the shit commenced its pitiless rain. There were few good days, then, however determined we were.
Mischievous Rain asked, “You just remembered something sad?”
“I did. From when I was little.” I was uncomfortable. All those eyes looking at me. “You share a knack with our mistress’s sister, Soulcatcher. She always made me feel like she was reading my mind, too.”
“I’m sorry, dear. That’s never been my intention. And I really don’t know what you’re thinking. Which is probably for the best.”
Firefly giggled. “Here’s an idea, Dad. Don’t think thoughts that will get you in trouble.”
“Baku, you’re not funny,” Mischievous Rain said. “You would be in deep trouble if I really could read minds, wouldn’t you?”
“So it’s not funny when Firefly says it but it is when you do?”
“Exactly. I’m a special case, dear.”
Shin scowled. Firefly cackled and muttered something about perverted thoughts. I kept my big mouth shut.
Whatever verbal reassurance she offered, Mischievous Rain’s smirk made me think that she knew exactly what horndoggery had been going on inside my noodle lately. But she was young. Maybe she was still too innocent to smell that out.
“In your dreams, Dad,” Firefly said, meaning I know not what.
I never thought that she could read my mind.
Shironeko told me, “You’re getting all creepy again.” And she was six years younger than my wife. Then she said, “Shin, hand me another lamb kabob.”
It was good to be tight with the top Taken. Carpets not out hunting or on air-support duty stayed busy moving supplies, of which there were always never enough—although there were always enough for some.
I was lucky in another way, too. Other than the wizards, who stayed too damned busy to spy on me, there were no Black Company witnesses to my brief season of favor.
Still, the riding would get seriously annoying someday—if I was not lucky enough to get killed.
Might as well savor the moment. Life is too profoundly harsh not to snag any treat or happy chance, however brief or small.
One thing I have learned for sure about life is, there will be changes for the badder. No matter how fair or foul the present, it can turn uglier in a blink.
* * *
We received doses of deep ugly the following week, starting when the troops awakened something millennially horrible. Something Dominator-scale horrible, or worse. Had every swinging dick not been anticipating something of the sort, had not every sorcerer not instantly run toward the fire, the more mundane thousands of the Eastern Army would have been well and truly butchered.
Even so, Croaker finally had him some real work. Too much work.
The forest bearding the Ghost Country suffered more than did Whisper’s army. Vast tracts got smashed. Pines, firs, and spruces centuries old got shattered into kindling, then burned. Our sorcerers had no time to fight those fires because they had to focus on killing monsters so that they could stay alive. For a while it looked like we might have to run for it just to escape the fires.
A naughty weather god thought it would be fun to intervene.
It rained.
It rained every bit as savagely as it had that time when the summer storm came down on Aloe from the north. It pounded away for three days. The Taken and sorcerers stayed in the fight while the rest of us cowered inside leaking log houses, trying without much luck to stay warm and dry while water levels inside the camp rose because Whisper’s engineers had not foreseen any need for catastrophic-monsoon-scale drainage.
The creek rose and rose. It swept the bridge away, and that a stoutly built bridge. Floodwater gnawed at the turf wall on the creek side of camp.
The good news was that the forest fires died.
The further good news was that the thing responsible for the fires disliked the rain more than the fires themselves did. If that makes sense to anyone who was not there.
There was a stunning magazine of lightning in that storm, and several vicious cyclones. One of the new Taken had claimed the departed Stormbringer’s knack for managing violent weather, at least insofar as being able to direct the lightning.
That mostly smashed down on the revenant, down and through. Soon the lesser sorcerers were able to get in close and hack off chunks.
Pieces of the last and greatest monster went into sealed boxes. Once the world dried out and bonfires again became practical those boxes would get toast
ed, roasted, and charred into ash that could be scattered on the wind or the racing creek.
The lightning tried to make sweet love to the granite castle.
Every bolt was a hammer blow that powdered an infinitesimal fraction off its protection. The strikes never stopped. Once the storm moved along they continued using directed sorcery. Mischievous Rain was smug about her industrial strategy. The spell nets abraded steadily, slowly, like an edifice of salt assailed by a relentless rain.
After the storm we survivors suffered a wealth of sunshine and humidity and, uncharacteristic for the Ghost Country, mosquitoes. But old campaigner Limper turned out to own a spell for noxious bugs and he was willing to share.
Even the worst among us occasionally does something good.
My dearly beloved never lost her concentration. Once the rain stopped it took her just hours to determine that no further revenant threat would emerge. There was no reason for anyone, from herself to the youngest and lowliest apprentice farrier, to worry about anything but getting on after our main objective.
Damn, was it ever obvious why the woman in the Tower was invested in my special girl.
Mischievous Rain might be an incarnate animation of the Lady’s will.
“You can come along this time,” she told me. We had just finished breakfast. The family had collected around her flying carpet. It was an incredible autumn morning. Mischievous Rain squeezed my right hand. Firefly was on my left, clinging, maybe scared. Her mother, on the other hand, was relaxed and confident. “This will begin the wrap-up. I want you to be there.”
Really? That did not start the happy sparks flying. It felt like she had a secret need for her deeds to be remembered, which left me thinking that she might be as unoptimistic about the long term as our daughter was.
I assumed my usual position on the carpet, full cloaked in abiding, nonspecific sorrow. Firefly stayed clingy. Shin was more sullenly silent than ever. Mischievous Rain mumbled constantly. I caught only disjointed snatches of something gloomy, utterly sad mutters.
But sadly sounds and moody bleaks soon abandoned us. The day would not sustain them.
It was an amazing morning, perfection, halfway between sunrise and noon. Nothing threatening lurked anywhere nearby. Much of the Ghost Country no longer existed. Vast tracts had been burnt barren. We had attained total success against the olden moldies and their modern allies. Only the granite castle now defied the Lady we loved.
Mischievous Rain took us to where she and I and the girls had studied the fortress before. She hovered where Ankou had left us, and where Kuroneko and Shironeko had demonstrated their aptitude for remaining unseen while they planted shadow pots.
The rustic charm was gone. Except for charred stumps and trunks the land had gone nude right up to the razor-slash line marking the boundary of the castle’s protection.
The ground was black and turned to glass in spots. There should have been drifts of ash but that had washed away in the storm.
We had not improved the beauty of the province.
Mischievous Rain paraphrased an old saying: “We make a desert and call it victory.”
Mischievous Rain then said, “Amazing, isn’t it?” Not being specific about what she meant.
To me the amazing had to do with her approach to taming the Ghost Country. Her side, our side, had suffered inconsequently compared to our opposition. She had achieved absolute dominion over the second-most-problematic prefecture of the modern world. I did not doubt that she could crack the granite castle. I could see her taming the Plain of Fear using the same strategy, if she so chose. If our mistress at Charm so chose, although I could not imagine any reason for her to make that choice.
To be truthful, I had no idea what this ferocious campaign was all about. Well, yes, there were Rebels and Resurrectionists in need of butchering out here. Hints from the wife and kids suggested a possible connection to the Port of Shadows business, but … I could not help suspecting that something more was afoot.
* * *
We floated fifteen feet off the ground. The other Taken joined us. Not much got said. We stared across partially harvested fields. The rain had not fallen heavily there. The protective spells were even proof against the fury of nature. Damn!
There had been people in those fields last time. There was no sign of human life today. No animals were visible, either. I had seen sheep, cattle, goats, and swine before. “They’ve totally hunkered down.”
Mischievous Rain said, “Yes. I had hoped that they would talk.”
Firefly blurted, “After what you did to the rest of the Ghost Country?”
“Perhaps you’re right.” She said something in the language of the Domination. Flying carpets scattered, the Taken going off to check the shielding spells for vulnerabilities.
The protection should have suffered a serious weakening. Gone were the shimmers, the hazes, and the fogs that sometimes formed little patches at the boundary.
Mischievous Rain took us so close that the spells made my teeth ache. We traced the boundary upward.
Taken rejoined us, delivering reports in the old language.
Firefly hugged me harder and closer.
Ankou jumped overboard, undismayed by our altitude. He slid down the face of the invisible dome, growing as he went. He hit the ground still long and lean and black but now twice the size of the biggest, fiercest tiger that ever lived.
So. That explained why Whisper’s caged monsters had been afraid of a little three-eyed kitty.
Ankou was one brutally terrifying apparition in this form.
I hoped my kids would not pull a similar stunt. I did not need to add them to my nightmares.
Mischievous Rain said something loudly but calmly, in TelleKurre. Clever Croaker recognized a few nouns, which let him know what language was being spoken but not much else. He had no idea what was actually said.
Swirling insanity followed. Carpets scattered again, after dropping off all not-Taken passengers, which included me, my kids, their hunter-girl aunties, and every associate sorcerer ever conscripted for the Ghost Country campaign.
Those guys had them a mission, though. Apparently.
Mushroom man Croaker had no clue before he saw the direct action. And what he saw then had little to do with what actually was going on.
He saw only what Mischievous Rain wanted the denizens of the granite castle to see. But those people did not care what she showed them.
The Taken found no weak points. They did determine that the barrier was more robust than Mischievous Rain had imagined.
From the mouth of a babe, Shironeko fetchingly wondered, “How come those people aren’t making any effort to reinforce their protection?”
Firefly whispered, “Dad, stop with the creepy face.”
Mischievous Rain said, “That’s an interesting question, Shiroko. You would expect them to try to replace what we’ve ground away, wouldn’t you?”
“Are they that confident in what they have in place already?”
Kuroneko chimed in, “They want you to do what you’re doing.”
The Black Company Annalist achieved a slow epiphany. “It’s about exhaustion.”
Our sorcerers had been dragging since the storm. They worked longer hours than did the soldiers with their axes and shovels. And sorcery drained not just the body but the soul. Even the Taken had been unmerciful with themselves during the life-or-death struggle with those absurdly powerful ancient monsters and revenants.
The barrier looked like just a little more furious effort would destroy it, yet the Taken declared it deceptively solid.
I said, “Darling, you are doing what they want, which is to wear yourself out. What if there’s another barrier behind this one and it’s just as strong?” I went on, “Those people are Resurrectionists or Rebels, right?”
“Resurrectionists. So we hear from prisoners.”
Some of those had bought their lives and now made their livings doing scutwork around our camp.
“Di
d any of them know how they made such a wild and weird and marvelously invulnerable…”
“No!” Snapped with startling ferocity, so angrily that I did not need Firefly’s warning nudge to put any further questions on hold.
Damn! What?
Minutes later, having calmed herself, my wife announced a suspension of offensive operations. She would not continue to do anything that our enemies might want her to do.
“We have time,” she said. “I will not rush in and commit an error in haste.”
It occurred to me that having the Lady’s champions and sorcerers concentrated here already offered the rest of the world a serious temptation to indulge in bad behavior. I said nothing. Life went smoother when I kept my mouth shut.
Mischievous Rain left two Taken to orbit the castle slowly, low enough not to stand out against the sky.
Ankou stayed, too.
Everyone else got the rest of the day off.
Mischievous Rain declared herself a period of solitude. No one was allowed to interrupt her brooding.
* * *
I have reached a time of life where I need to make water during the night. Firefly sometimes snuggled in with me, when she chose not to go roaming with her brother, evidently feeling safer when she was there with me. I thought she was getting a little old for it but no one else seemed bothered. Normally I was careful not to disturb her when I got up.… She was there this time but she was not the only one. My wife was with us, too, making half a Croaker fantasy come true.
I dealt with my business, came back to see that I had not been dreaming, settled in, whispered, “Are you awake? And if you are, how come you’re here with us?”
“Relax. Hold us. We need that. And go back to sleep.”
I wrote it down next morning as soon as I could get to pen and ink. When I finished I was no longer sure that all that actually happened. It might have been wishful thinking.
Anyway, nothing more serious than spooning happened, in the real world or in that of the dream.
* * *
“Are there any ghost or revenant survivors?” Mischievous Rain pointed at me. “I know your mantra. But I’m asking about things that were dead already, now.”
It did seem probable that plenty of spooks still haunted the Ghost Country. We had not been making war on them. But did they matter anymore?