She Is The Darkness

84

Mother Gota would not talk to Uncle Doj. Mother Gota would not talk to her darling baby boy. But Mother Gota and silence had been strangers for decades. So Mother Gota talked to me.

She was not happy about the way her life was going, though she refused to get specific in front of a Soldier of Darkness, family or not.

I was in a karma-building cycle, apparently. I endured her crabbing, nodding and grunting in the right places while I made notes concerning recent events. I said, "You could always go home. Just pack up and go back to the swamp. Let Uncle boil his own bitterroot." The root was a recent discovery. Shadowlander fugitives had been caught eating it. It was a common weed that was not completely inedible if you boiled its roots for six or eight hours before you ground them into meal that tasted like soggy white oak sawdust. A lot was getting eaten because there was little else to be found close by. Croaker still had not authorized anyone to begin exploiting Overlook.

Uncle Doj had discovered bitterroot long ago. He had not eaten much else since Charandaprash. How had he found that much time to spend sitting in one place? Maybe he cured twenty pounds of root at a time.

"You, Bone Warrior, you would have me abandon my duty?"

Hell, yes. Anything to get you out of my hair. But I did not say that aloud. I just asked, "What duty is that?"

She opened her mouth to tell me but Nyueng Bao caution took over. She gulped like a fish out of water, then, as always when pressed, told me, "I go get some wood." That in Taglian instead of Nyueng Bao, which was good enough for me as long as I asked no questions.

"Good idea."

Thai Dei came to stand by me as I watched her go. I said, "Soon the Company will return to the road to Khatovar. Your people need to decide what to do when that happens." I reached for a rock.

I thought I made no giveaway motion but the crow was ready. It just hopped over the whistling stone and offered me one mocking caw for my trouble. The black birds remained scarce but there was always one near me and a dozen around Croaker's headquarters. Catcher was lying low but she had not stopped watching.

A nearby Taglian, maybe thinking he could curry favor, aimed a bamboo pole at the crow. "Save that for a shadow!" I snapped. "We're not out of this yet." Interesting. The would-be sniper wore a ragged, crudely drawn Company badge. I saw no one armed with bamboo who did not sport some version of our badge. The management had stopped pretending to be fair.

Red Rudy wandered over, stood leaning on a spear. He stared northward, silently watching something. Nobody else said anything, either. I took advantage of the silence to scribble a few more notes. Finally, Rudy mused, "Ever notice how, when the light is right, you can see where everybody's going over there?"

"No." I looked up.

He was right. Just now the light had every piece of metal beyond Overlook reflecting right at us. And a whole lot of metal was headed up the road I had walked with that useless One-Eye... "Oh, no. Whose bright idea was this?"

Somebody wanted to call on Soulcatcher.

"Thought you'd be interested." Rudy collected his spear and strolled off. Probably to find a deep hole to pull in after him.

"What is happening?" Thai Dei asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe just the end of the world."

Or maybe not. Maybe somebody in the headquarters bunker was playing mind games with her sister.

The sun moved on. Light no longer glimmered off the moving force. Nobody but Rudy seemed to understand what was happening but everybody sensed that something was. It became very quiet on my far hillside.

Nothing happened for a while. I made notes. I watched Mother Gota dwindle into the distance. Looked like she planned to do her wood gleaning farther afield.

Afternoon shadows crept across the far foothills. "That's dark," I said. Especially near where Soulcatcher was last seen. That darkness was swelling...

I gaped. That was no shadow. That was a cloud of darkness. It boiled out of the canyons and forests and masked the foothills...

Crows.

All the crows we had not seen for the past several days!

The darkness rose like a blast from a volcano. It began to spread.

"That's got to be every crow in the world," I breathed. The cloud just kept growing. Part seemed headed my way.

Suddenly, lightning sliced inside it. The wind began to blow. I began to lose track of where and when I was and what I was doing. Somebody asked, "What's happening?"

A second voice asked, "What's that smell?"

Kina. But I could not explain.

More lightnings ripped through the thunderhead of crows. Most of that darkness rushed my way. The stench of Kina became overpowering. There were sounds around me, heard as though from a great distance. They did not include the panic that seemed appropriate.

The darkness bent over and grabbed me, took me up like a mother lifts a frightened infant. The face of Kina was in the darkness but it was not Kina who possessed me. She was angry. Again. She was disoriented.

She was not alone.

Lady was there, maybe riding Smoke, maybe in some other fashion. The lightning was her doing, evidently. She had Kina in one sorcerous hand while trying to spank her sister with the other.

Catcher was there, too. And she seemed amused, not troubled, although she was caught between a devil goddess and a sister who would roast her happily. Soulcatcher would go to the burning stake chuckling at the fire. The woman was completely mad.

The darkness wrapped me up. It devoured me. It tried to chew me up but found me unpalatable. It spit me out.

I staggered like a drunk. A voice in my head said, There you are, darling. I missed you. You have been away too long. Moonlight glinted off the corpse-strewn black water lapping at Dejagore's wall. I imagined something stirring in those waters, something that wanted to grab me and pull me deep into the inky darkness, down amongst the naked bones. I looked to my left and there stood the long-dead Speaker of the Nyueng Bao, Ky Dam. His wife Hong Tray was with him. They smiled. The old woman made a finger sign I knew to be a blessing.

Darkness swallowed me.

Darkness had no stomach for me. It puked me up.

I was in a tree. My eyes saw strangely. I had to turn my head this way and that to see out of one or the other. Men of half a dozen races were slaughtering men of several others below me. The trees were repelled. They loved death but hated the shedding of blood.

I was in the Grove of Doom. In a tree?

I raised a hand to feel my eyes. White feathers blocked my vision.

I lost consciousness.

I went a hundred places. A hundred places came to me. I seemed to visit all times and all places of the past several years.

I was on the plain of bones. Darkness had come. A black wind blew the bones about. I tumbled like a leaf. Crows mocked me from the naked trees. I rolled over into a deeper night and in an instant was strolling up the sloped floor of the tunnel where the old men rested in their cocoons of spun ice.

A great deep booming thundered in my head. It was pain incarnate, yet seemed to carry a message. I tried to listen.

Time expanded to encompass the throbbing within me, which became a slow, deep voice that speeded up until it turned into Thai Dei nagging worriedly in Nyueng Bao. "Standardbearer! Speak to me."

I tried but my jaws would not work. I could do nothing but make inarticulate noises.

"He's all right." That was Uncle Doj. I opened my eyes. Doj knelt beside me, fingers against the side of my neck. "What happened, Bone Warrior?"

I sat up. My muscles were watery. I was drained. But it seemed no time had passed. I volleyed the question back. "What happened over there?" Crows still swarmed in the distance, though not in clouds like I had seen.

"Where?" Thai Dei asked.

"There. Where the birds are."

Thai Dei said. "I do not know. I saw nothing unusual."

"No cloud of darkness? No lightning?"

After a pause, "None that I saw."

Uncle Doj considered the distance thoughtfully.

"I need something to eat." Though I had not been ghost-walking, I was that weak.

The event was troubling.