She Is The Darkness

106

Kina was looking for me. Or for something. Whatever direction I went I sensed her before long, though she never closed in. But if I was not her object, what was?

I fought off the urge to run to Sarie, telling myself to wait the demon out. But the logical side of my mind, logically, told me that Kina had been waiting for ages. She would not get impatient in one night.

But why would she want to find me?

I needed to get back to my flesh. The goddess was less a terror when I was not amongst the ghosts.

I wished Thai Dei would waken me. When somebody did that it seemed my spirit did not have to traverse the distance between.

I sneaked around to the camp in front of the Shadowgate. Gods, what squalor! Successful conquerers ought to live better.

One-Eye was stirring. So was Gota. Another terrible breakfast was about to be committed.

It was light out. I was still ghostwalking. I had not done so during daylight since we lost Smoke. I had begun to think that I could not do it during the day.

Got to get back up there, I thought. They need to know. They would not wait around for me. They would not carry me anywhere, either. I was no prisoner.

One-Eye seemed to sense something. He became nervous, snippy. Which was not much of a change, really. Then Goblin sat up and threatened to turn One-Eye into a lizard if he did not quit his bitching. Goblin had not aged well during the campaign and One-Eye did not fail to mention that fact, probably for the thousandth time. The bickering started. Mother Gota was not shy about offering an occasional opinion of her own. One-Eye found time amidst his endless verbal feud to cuss the rest of us for not having hung around till he turned up again before we went up the mountain. "They had to know I'd be back. They know I couldn't stay away. They went just to spite me. It's that fucking woman. Or the kid. They think they're punishing me. They got another think coming. I'm tempted just to walk out on them. That'd show them. They'd miss me if I was gone."

That was One-Eye all wrapped up in one quintessential wad of contradictory nonsense.

His heart would have been broken had he known just how little he had been missed by most of us. Of course, we had not run into many situations where having him around might have been useful. One-Eye and his pal Goblin was not much use during peacetime.

Suddenly, I realized we were surrounded by the stench of Kina. It had grown so slowly it had not intruded on my awareness. I squirted through the Shadowgate moaning because I might have missed learning something interesting. When One-Eye got to running his mouth he seldom shut up till he emptied his entire head.

I streaked down the southward road as fast as I could. Which did not seem very swift by daylight. Maybe I was slower with the sun shining. In fact, as the sun rose higher I grew more sluggish. And more easily distracted.

I noticed that every circle showed hints of gates for east and west roads. I became entangled in the puzzle of why they should exist, of what sort of tangle that would make of the face of the plain. If there was only one gate from outside and only one destination to be sought... The stones? The pillars. Of course.

The side roads could be used to reach individual stones. Though why anyone would want to do so remained a mystery.

It struck me, suddenly, that I had been in the same place a long time, wandering through the wilderness of my own thoughts.

I sat up. I looked around wildly. "Where is Narayan Singh?" I demanded. I was alone except for Thai Dei. There was no evidence the circle had been visited by anyone else. Where was all the trash?

"You woke up," Thai Dei said. People really sound stupid when they are caught off guard and state the obvious.

"Where is everybody?"

"You would not wake up. They left without you." Which meant without him. "The Liberator said he would collect you on the way back. He seemed troubled."

"I don't blame him. I'm troubled. Help me up here."

My knees were wobbly. That did not last, though.

"Food?" I croaked. Walking the ghostworld alone was less demanding than doing it with Smoke but still it drained me.

"They took everything. Almost. I was able to steal a small amount."

His small amount was actually a fair amount by Nyueng Bao standards. Those people thrived on two grains of rice and a rotten fishhead a day. He said, "They were generous with water." He held up two canteens, explained, "It rained while you were sleeping."

"What?" I muttered around a mouthful. "When?" I had not been conscious of the weather where I was.

"It rained. The water seemed to run into the circle and pool here. Without harming the protective barriers. Will we wait here?" He sounded hopeful.

"No. I need to see the Captain right away."

Thai Dei grunted one of his expressive grunts. He found me lacking in wisdom.

We two could cover ground faster than the gang up ahead. After a couple hours we could make out a small group in the distance. I asked, "What the hell are they doing?" Thai Dei's eyes were better than mine.

"They appear to be handing things from man to man."

They were, indeed. We saw that when we got closer. One man stood astride something. He accepted an unhappy goat from a man nearer us on the road and passed it to a man beyond him. That goat appeared to be the last thing needing to be passed over. The man on our side hopped across while the fellow on the far side helped the man standing astraddle.

I hollered and waved. Somebody hollered and waved back but nobody waited up.

"Fucker is big," I said, meaning the fortress. Now we were close it seemed to swell with every step. It was built of a blackish basaltic stone darker than the surrounding plain. It was in a bad state of repair. "It wasn't immune to the earthquakes."

Thai Dei grunted. He was nervous again.

"There's what they were crossing." It was a crack in the plain. It extended both directions as far as I could see. Nowhere did it appear to be very wide though it was narrowest where our guys had crossed. It was about three feet wide there. They had even taken the carts and wagons over.

Farther away part of the fortress wall had collapsed and poured into the gap. The stone looked freshly fallen so I presumed this was the collapse we had witnessed. There were a couple of older falls evident, too. At a guess I would say the oldest occurred the day we felt the quake all the way off in Taglios.

Thai Dei and I were too old to run except when we had to. But we wasted no time. We hopped the crack before the goat guys moved out of sight around the curve of the wall. One was Sparkle, another Wheezer. Wheezer would be getting a lot of shit details for a while.

I huffed and puffed and hurried on. My pack seemed to be putting on weight. I panted, "It feel like we've gained some altitude since we've been up here?"

Thai Dei offered an affirmative grunt. He said nothing else. He was puffing himself.

I looked back. It did seem I could see more plain from here than I had seen from back up the road.

Thai Dei wondered, "Have the earthquakes broken the road's protection?" He must have been worrying for a while.

I thought as we walked. "Couldn't have. The shadows would have gotten us." There was still road surface underfoot but it was not as clear here. I wondered if the entire fortress was encased in protection and, if so, how elastic that could be. I was still alive but it seemed unlikely the fortress could fall down again and again without overstressing the barrier somewhere.

Once across the crack we were soon under the wall's loom. I ran my fingers over the dark stone. "Huh?" It was crumbly. "That look like sandstone to you?"

Thai Dei grunted negatively, followed that with an interrogative noise. "Seems like a lot of little tiny crystals. Like salt. But it is not sandstone."

Something had been done to it. Something not natural. That kind of stone stood up to everything forever—like the rest of the stone on the plain.

Thai Dei muttered, "I smell sorcery."

"You have a fine nose, my brother."

The guys we were following were in a hurry themselves, also following the curve of the wall and whoever was ahead of them. They refused to wait but we continued to gain ground.

We rounded a knee of wall and found many of the animals and much of the equipment crowded into a shady patch in front of what once must have been the main gate. I glanced upward. The clever builders ran the only protected approach where it could be bombarded at will for a great distance. I wondered if I went up there with a big enough rock could I squash the forvalaka. The black leopard was in a foul mood. She roared and snarled and chewed at the bars of her cage. She was being ignored because of her bad attitude.

I wondered if we ought not just leave her behind when we turned back. The shadows would find a way.

The other animals had been left to supervise themselves, too.

Sparkle and Wheezer, only twenty yards ahead now, were squeezing through the gateway. The gate itself was broken and twisted and hung on a single huge lower hinge. A big crack in the masonry indicated that this damage had been caused by earthquakes, too.

There was a large open space immediately behind the gate. Most fortifications have them. They are where you put the people the place was built to protect. A lot of the guys were there. A debate was running about whether or not the broken gate should be busted down so the animals and wagons could be brought inside. Concurrently, an argument raged amongst the Nyueng Bao about whether or not they were obligated to follow the Company deeper into the fortress.

"Shit. I thought you died," Willow Swan said when he saw me. "Thought we were gonna pick up the stiff on the way back. If you didn't start smelling too bad."

"Thoughtful of you. Where's the Old Man?" Mather and Blade, I noted, were not among those in the courtyard. I peered around.

Every vertical surface consisted of the same decomposed basalt. The inner fortress was so huge its magnitude would have stricken me numb had I not experienced Overlook and the Palace in Taglios. Though still standing, it had been cracked a hundred ways. Thousands of chunks great and small had fallen from its face and lay in heaps at the base of the wall.

"They went inside. Ten minutes ago, maybe. Shouldn't take long to catch up." Swan winced as he started toward the steps rising to the skinny door of the inner fortress. I suspected that, as he had a habit of doing, he had begged off earlier and had changed his mind since.

Thai Dei clumped after me, every slamming step an indictment. Because he joined me several other Nyueng Bao peeled off the debating party and followed.

The doorway seemed like a veil of darkness. It felt like a veil of darkness when I stepped through it. Like what I thought a veil of darkness ought to feel like, anyway.

There was little light inside. That little seemed to seep through unseen cracks above and ahead and got all the life sucked out before it reached me. "Quit shoving back there!" I snapped. Thai Dei's cousins were pushing me forward as they came through the doorway. "And be quiet. I'm trying to listen." Sounds were coming from somewhere. They were ricocheting around inside a vast empty space, though, which made it impossible to guess where they originated.

Willow Swan muttered, "I was right the first time. I got no business being in here." And he was right, for sure, as I would learn before much time passed.

"Quiet." In a moment I set off in the apparent direction of the voices.