She Is The Darkness

56

"I figured you'd crawl out of the woodwork pretty soon," Willow Swan grumbled when I joined the crowd around Lady. Her staff were munching rolls one-handed while she told them what she wanted done so she could catch Narayan. "You turn up every time things get nasty."

Blade showed me a smile. "The man needs a girlfriend."

"Thought he had one, only she already has a boyfriend."

"That's where she was last night, eh?"

"Maybe." It might explain why Croaker was so damned groggy this morning.

That man just had one adventure after another.

Lady was saying, "There were shadows in there before but Jarwaral says they haven't been a problem lately. These charts supposedly show us where we can find the shadowweavers if we want. I want. We'll take them out before we go after the Deceiver. Ah! Murgen."

"She had to spot me," I muttered to Blade. I looked for the inevitable crows. They were notable for their scarcity. The couple I did see acted like they were blind drunk.

Lady had employed some spell to diminish the flow of information to her sister.

"You stand out in a crowd," Swan told me. "The women always notice you."

Lady continued, "Come here. The Captain sent these charts. What do you know about them?"

"They're supposed to be reliable." A hundred percent unless there had been some heavy renovations in the last few hours.

"They aren't very extensive."

Bitch and gripe, bitch and gripe. Nobody is ever satisfied. "Want I should go dig the guy up and let you do some kind of necromantic thing on him?"

She gave me such an ugly look that for a moment I was afraid she would call my bluff. But she did not doubt me, she just was not getting the kind of fear and respect she expected. She relaxed, told me, "Except for the locations of the shadowweaver hideouts and where Singh is holing up there isn't much here we didn't know already."

Which stuff was what the exercise was all about, woman. "There's a little more. Longshadow is almost always locked up in this tower here, doing whatever he does instead of giving us grief. Howler has an apartment somewhere around here. He keeps two carpets on a flat place over here and a little bitty, brand-new one rolled up right beside his bed."

Lady gave me a piercing look. How could I know that?

I told her, "The day he got here Howler started covering his ass in case his partner turned on him someday."

"Uhm?" she grunted. "Howler would. Particularly in view of what Longshadow tried to do to his previous associates." She turned her attention to the charts. But I knew she was not satisfied. She could not be satisfied when somebody else knew anything that she did not.

She beckoned Isi, Ochiba and Sindawe closer. The Nar generals worked well with her. They did not do so with the Old Man. Croaker could not trust them even though they stuck with the Company against Mogaba. "Should we do this in the daytime or at night?"

Ochiba, a man I had heard speak maybe five times in that many years, said, "It won't matter in there."

"True. But I prefer by daylight. For the impact on morale."

"It's daytime now," Swan observed.

I told Blade, "You can't get anything past this guy."

Lady glanced at Willow. "You want to see how well your Guards can perform in there?"

"I'd love to. But that isn't their job."

Their job was to look out for the Prince and Princess, neither of whom he or they had been near in recent times.

Everybody there had that thought at the same time I did. Everybody gave Swan a long look. He reddened.

"Sindawe, you're my second choice." Lady stepped aside so the tall Nar could move closer to the charts. I had kept wriggling forward. Now I could see that there was more than one set. Only one was the one I had prepared. The other, structured differently, may have been put together by Lady's people based on what her soldiers had found inside Overlook.

The Nar officer stared for a while. "We ought to rotate fresh troops in before we do anything else."

Isi agreed. "The men inside have been there a long time, under a lot of pressure."

Lady said, "I'll approve that."

Sindawe said, "We should add numbers for this. Once we start moving there won't be any point to pretense. Will there?"

"Probably not. Succeed or fail, going ahead will attract some close scrutiny. And the Captain hasn't given us the option of not going ahead. Has he, Murgen?"

I shrugged. "He'll always defer to the commander on the scene. You know that. As long as you can make a good argument."

"We don't have an option, then. We've been stalling in hopes somebody else would come up with a workable solution to the Longshadow dilemma."

"What's that?" I asked.

"The fact that we can't kill him. You know that, don't you?"

I knew that. What I did not know was how they planned to send fresh troops into Overlook.

Sindawe said, "We ought to pursue every phase of the effort at once. Here, here, toward these shadow weaver hideouts. Here, toward the Deceiver's holeup. And a general raid against the garrison and servant population, too. So they don't interfere in our other efforts."

"Go for Longshadow, too," Lady suggested. "You might get lucky."

I was missing something. There was a hundred-foot wall over there, not nearly as shiny as it used to be, and absent some of its pretty towers, but not one foot shorter than it ever was. Why were these people not impressed? "You all walk through walls or something?"

"If that's convenient," Lady replied.

"We'll crawl," Sindawe told me.

Soon enough I discovered something else that I had missed while doing my all-seeing thing in the ghostworld because I had not been looking.