Bleak Seasons

99

I popped out of contact with Smoke. “It’s time, One-Eye. She’s gone.”

The little wizard tossed a friendly miniature owl into the darkened hallway. Untouched by confusion spells it headed for that part of town where it imagined it nested. It did not look for any particular human. That was not its mission. But plenty of humans looked for it. When it fluttered past them two dozen Black Company veterans and their Nyueng Bao bodyguards rushed a building that had deserved razing a generation before the Shadowmasters entered this quarter of the world.

I had tracked Soulcatcher back to that building from her raid on Smoke’s library. She felt so safe there she was almost contemptuous of security precautions. She had managed to get by undisturbed there for years.

She was going to be one unhappy player when she discovered that she was less in control than she imagined.

I watched, pleased, while Black Company soldiers took the building by the numbers and in a manner so professional that not one Captain ever would have found cause for complaint.

The men now even had the knack of getting their jobs done without stumbling over the Nyueng Bao, who were worse than a herd of cats when it came to getting underfoot. You just had to use them like they were your shadows.

Hardly anyone not directly involved noticed my guys. They got inside, spread out, dug deep, found what I wanted, gathered it up and got back out long before Soulcatcher discovered that she had been outmaneuvered.

Otto and Hagop directed the raid. Putting them in charge was my way of bringing them back into the family. Good soldiers they, they carried out my suggestions, not just cleaning out Soulcatcher’s hideout but grabbing her favorite white crow. They plucked a couple of his feathers and left them in place of the books, tied together with a strand of hair taken from the head of a much younger Soulcatcher, a long time back, and come south with the plunder brought by Otto and Hagop.

That ought to rattle her.

Maybe I should have let Croaker and Lady in on my scheme. In a way, I was making a statement in their names. But this had become personal. I had a statement to make for Murgen. And there was no time for consultations and conferences.

Smoke and I swooped over the guys as they lugged their plunder toward the Palace. I meant to give the books to Croaker as soon as they arrived. He could do whatever he wanted with them. Which probably meant that they would bounce once and land back in my lap, to be disappeared from the ken of all villains and villainesses probably no better than I had hidden the Widowmaker armor.

I wondered if I was going to get too intimate with the meaning of hubris. Soulcatcher would know who done her wrong. She was maybe only a year younger than Lady, which left her an ageless amount trickier and nastier than me.

But what did I have to lose? The only thing I ever loved was gone. I could dance with disaster and grin to the end. Soulcatcher could not do anything that would hurt more than losing Sahra had.

Really?

Sometimes you bullshit yourself.