Soldiers Live

104

Taglios: View from the Protector's Window

Mogaba's eyelids kept getting heavier. Twice he drifted off completely, to start awake violently, disturbed once by some clamor in the city, once by shouting down below that suggested the guards might have glimpsed the Khadidas. It was the wee hours of the morning, when even the heartbeat of the world had trouble thumping on.

They were not going to come tonight. They had not come last night, nor the night before. Maybe they were waiting for a larger moon.

Something dark blurred the glass in the window whence the Great General watched his own quarters and the best part of the Palace's northern face. Including all the significant entrances. He did not even breathe.

The Unknown Shadows could not find a way past the glass and the Protector's permanent wards. Mogaba resumed breathing. Slowly, invisible in the deep darkness of the room, he rose and glided nearer the glass, so that he would have a broader view.

They had come. Not when he had expected but exactly where. The same place their messengers had come every time. That same turret top.

He felt no particular elation. What he felt, in fact, was sorrow. All their lives, his and theirs, had come to no more than this. For a moment there was even the temptation to shout a warning. To cry out that that prideful fool who had made such a stupid choice in Dejagore so long ago had not meant any of them to come to this. But, no. It was too late. Fortune's die was cast. The cruel game had to be played to its end, no matter what anyone wanted.