She Is The Darkness

34

I could hear One-Eye cursing fate in general and several Vehdna Taglians in particular. One wheel of the wagon had become pinched between boulders and the soldiers were not getting it pried out fast enough to suit the little wizard. He had been in a foul temper all morning. I do believe he thought we would not continue on south after we won at Charandaprash. I do believe he thought the Old Man would be content to occupy the pass, then withdraw to warmer climes and wait for summer.

Where was Longshadow going to go? Home. And because of the earthquake home was a house that would not be completed any time soon. So where was the big hurry? What kind of tunnel-vision fanatic did not even take time out for one good drunk after winning a battle so huge and obviously unwinnable going in?

One-Eye had been saying all this and a lot more from the minute Croaker had told him to move out. One-Eye was not a happy trooper.

He was even more unhappy because I got to ride. My fever and chills thing kept coming and going. The Captain saw that as a good excuse to keep me near Smoke against whom he continued to caution me regularly. I did not tell him that walking with the ghost was becoming as unattractive as attractive, that it was getting scary out there. I had not talked it over with One-Eye yet, either. I knew I should. I would not like myself much anymore if something happened because I failed to warn them.

But I did not want to cry wolf, either. One-Eye had not mentioned running into anything unusual during his occasional trips out. Maybe I was letting my imagination get the best of me.

I was in pretty good shape for the moment. A little shaken by the ride but neither feverish nor fighting a chill. Might be an opportune time to take a look around.

Outside, One-Eye snarled something at Thai Dei. “Not a good idea, One-Eye,” I snapped in Jewel Cities dialect. “He’d as soon kick your ass as look at you.”

“Ha! That ought to be interesting. See what JoJo does. Might even wake him up.”

Like most Company members One-Eye had a Nyueng Bao bodyguard. His was Cho Dai Cho, as unobtrusive and unambitious a bodyguard as ever lived. He was around only because the tribal elders had decreed it. He did not seem to have much interest in saving One-Eye from himself or anyone else. I had not seen Cho four times in the last month.

I could not find Soulcatcher. I knew she was there and Smoke was not fighting me but the woman was operating under a spell that hid her from even this sort of seeing. I could guess where she was roughly, though, because of the comings and goings of crows in the mountains west of us.

I looked around for One-Eye’s shapeshifter friend Lisa Bowalk but there was no trace of her, either. Nor could I pinpoint Mogaba and the couple of Nar who had chosen to stand by him when he deserted the Company for service to the Shadowmaster.

This was something to think about. If people had begun to suspect we were watching... But there was Longshadow in his crystal dome atop Overlook’s tallest tower, seated at a stone desk, calmly giving orders to messengers, arranging for the defense of his dwindling empire rationally and with vigor and making no effort to hide himself from me.

And down below, in a private apartment, here was an uncomfortable and weakened Narayan Singh cringing in a corner while the Daughter of Night, like a dwarf rather than a child, apparently carried on half of a conversation with her spiritual mother. There was a smell of Kina in the room but not that terrifying sense of presence I had encountered before.

I observed for a while. I ran back the hours. There was no doubt. Narayan Singh was not running anything anymore. He was an adjunct to the Daughter of Night, useful principally as a voice through which she could communicate with the Shadowmaster and the Deceivers. But Singh was beginning to suspect that his usefulness was running its course, that it would not be very much longer at all before the child would be ready to dispose of him.

When the time came she would do it with no more thought or emotion than she would discarding a well-gnawed pork rib.

Her communions with her divine parent were reshaping her fast.

Kina seemed to be in a hurry, perhaps pressed for time, so that she did not have time to wait for the child to mature into her role.

I was very uncomfortable around the kid even though she was a hundred miles away. I got out of there.

I tried tracking Howler down but caught only glimpses as he buzzed here and there on his raggedy-ass, oft-patched smaller carpet. He seemed to have upped his level of precaution dramatically, too. I could spot him only when he was in a really big hurry and, apparently, outrunning his invisibility shield.

Who would he be hiding from? If he did not know about me?

There was still the Radisha, whom I had not spied on for way too long.

In present time she was in the midst of a large audition with the chief priests of the major temples of the city. The subject was, not surprisingly, the war. In particular, the sacrilegious, atheistic, anticlerical stance of the men directing the Taglian effort. The new generation of priests were much less contentious amongst sects than had been their predecessors, who had paid for their stubbornly parochial attitudes with their lives.

“There’s no doubt,” the Radisha admitted to a priest of Rhavi-Lemna, a goddess of brotherly love, “that the Liberator has been sending troops raised among the devout to pursue his feud with Blade.” News from the war zone was still far away. “He’s blatant about it, it’s true, but you people keep going along with it.”

A priest in vermilion grumbled, “Because Blade has been promised the protectorship here when the Shadowmaster triumphs. He’ll exterminate us all. If he’s still alive.”

“Which brings us to the crux again, doesn’t it? Even though my brother has become a competent commander and a corps of experienced officers has developed, neither the soldiers themselves nor the people believe we can defeat the Shadowmaster without the guidance of the Black Company. We’re still in a position where we’re compelled to let darkness wrestle darkness, hoping our kind of darkness triumphs and we can control it after it does so.”

Rhavi-Lemna was a reasonable goddess. It would not be natural for her priests to be firebrands. But the Gunni have a hundred gods and goddesses, great and small, and some of them are a lot less tolerant. Someone shouted, “We should kill them now! They’re a greater danger to our way of life than any masked sorcerer eight hundred miles away.”

There were still many Taglians who had not served in the armies nor traveled south to see what legacy the Shadowmasters had left in the lands retaken from their rule. Men who did not believe simply because they preferred something else to be true.

This was an unending squabble that might not be settled in my lifetime. There was a war on and as long as we did not yet have it won the “Kill them now!” school of thinking would remain a distinct minority. But the “Kill them later!” school had plenty of members.

“There aren’t more than fifty or sixty of them,” the Radisha countered. “How hard can it be to dispose of them once they’ve outlived their usefulness?”

“Pretty damned hard, I imagine. The Shadowmasters haven’t managed. Neither have the Deceivers.”

“Steps are being taken.”

Interesting. I had not seen any sign of that.

Time to cruise days gone by, then.

Away I went. Skipping like a seven-year-old girl, toes coming down every hour or so as I headed toward the last time I checked on the Woman. There was not much there. A lot of the same stuff. One idea after another bounced off Cordy Mather in the deeps of night, every one rejected by Mather, and the more vigorously so the better the Woman seemed to like them.

Of more interest was the fact that she had started looking for Smoke. In fact, she was getting suspicious, though not yet in any major way. Mather kept telling her we were all right and must have made some arrangement to look out for Smoke. We would not just let the old boy starve.

“They hate him, dear. He did everything he could to undercut the Black Company.”

“They would find a crueler way to get even. After they woke him up. So he could appreciate the pain.”

Cordy echoed my thoughts perfectly. Starvation would do fine but I wanted him conscious while he went.

Waking up to find himself in our hands might just be enough. He would have a shit hemorrhage.

All the way back to my last visit I found nothing particularly exciting. The Woman never said anything interesting except when she was finished using Mather and then she said nothing original. Yet I could not help thinking that something was going on.

She was the Radisha Drah. Her whole life had been spent aware that everything she said or did might be observed by someone who did not wish her well.

I skipped back to today but did not find anything to hurry back to the Old Man.

There would be some excitement when the news from Charandaprash arrived. People would stop thinking as clearly and carefully. I would be back.

I took a dive into Smoke’s old hiding place before I left. The old Annals were right where I had hidden them.

Interesting to note, though, as I departed, that there were crows all over the Palace district.

One-Eye was still cursing when I came out. Cursing again, I learned, as I let myself down from the rear of the wagon. A different wheel was stuck. We had moved several miles. I was bone dry. I lifted the lid on One-Eye’s waterbarrel. There was not much there. The little that remained was pretty nasty. I drank it anyway.

I walked around to where One-Eye was abusing a fresh crew of victims. “You little shit. Quit barking at the help. They’ll stuff that damned hat down your throat and I’ll end up having to walk. Where’s the Old Man?”