Soldiers Live

130

Taglios: Khadidas

Tobo was there to help when I wakened my old friend Goblin, who had become the unwilling vessel of the Khadidas.

It was not that difficult once Tobo's controlling spells had been cancelled. Tobo shook Goblin while I stood by. And once the little shit began to stir Tobo stood by while I nagged.

The little man's eyelids snapped open. The eyes behind them were not the eyes of the hedge wizard Goblin. I was looking straight into large chips of the darkness. Those eyes seemed to want to suck me in.

The mouth of the Khadidas opened, preparing to vent some infamy or blasphemy. I interposed One-Eye's ragged old hat between Kina's slave and myself. The effect was electric. The Goblin body convulsed as though I had whacked it with a hot poker. I slapped the hat down on its head.

"Lift," I told Tobo, who had placed himself at the head of Goblin's cot, out of the Khadidas's field of vision. I held the hat in place while Tobo raised Goblin into a sitting position. "It works. Better than I hoped."

"Better than I thought it would, for sure."

"One-Eye always did underplay it when he did something right." The wicked light had left Goblin's eyes. Now he just looked empty. Not even a thousand-yard stare, there. More like nobody at home at all.

"Do the spear."

I did the spear. But, man, was I reluctant to trust the wisdom of a dead man when it came to putting that potent a tool into the hands of a devil.

I stood it up in front of Goblin, its butt between his heels. I wrapped his hands around the black shaft. Then I shoved One-Eye's filthy felt relic down onto his head even more solidly. Then I gripped his hands hard, squeezing them onto the silver-and-black wood.

Life began to enter his eyes.

I told Tobo, "Not as dramatic as watching a baby being born but dramatic enough." Even a dummy like me did not need a map to see that we were conjuring up the real Goblin.

A Goblin in pain so deep I was aware immediately that only Lady could begin to understand.

I settled myself on a stool. Tobo eased Goblin onto a chair with an upright back, then planted himself on the edge of the cot. Goblin kept turning from one of us to the other, tears streaming but unable to speak, however hard he tried. He reached out to Tobo in a silent plea for contact.

"Careful of that hat," I said. "I'm already thinking about nailing it to his head." And thinking about how wonderful a friend One-Eye had been, too. Because he had foreseen some possibility like this and had invested his final years in making a rescue feasible.

I choked up for a moment, thinking I never had a friend who would go that far for me. Then I recalled that Sleepy had spent fifteen years working to exhume the Captured. And now, barely five years later, all those people but Lady and I were gone. Belly up. Up in smoke. Finished.

Soldiers live.

Not once had Sleepy ever behaved like she believed that she had wasted her life. But I am sure she had thought it sometimes. Regarding some individuals.

I said, "You ought to keep at least one hand on the spear, Goblin." We had done nothing to rid him of the Khadidas. The monster had been pushed back into the pit where it had lain till it had sprung forward to seize control, but now behind feeble barriers. The monster was much stronger than Goblin. We would have to work hard to keep it suppressed.

"What're we going to do with you?" I asked. And felt a twinge of guilt. Because I had plans for him already. Plans that might change the world.

"What do you think, Goblin? You going to help us help you hang on?"

Goblin was getting some muscle control back. He managed a weak, "Yeah," as he nodded his head, too.

"I'm going to leave everything in the hands of you two gentlemen," Suvrin said. He nodded politely to Goblin. "I scarcely knew this man. And then mainly from the perspective of being the butt of practical jokes he and One-Eye played. Meaning I might not be disinterested even if I tried. What is that stuff around the bottom of that thing on his head?"

"Glue. That thing is a hat. You must've seen One-Eye wearing it. The old fart rigged it up with some spells, planning for something like what did happen."

"You told me."

"All right. The glue is because we don't want the hat to come off. Ever. If we could come up with a way that would leave him free to feed himself and scratch his butt we'd glue his hands to One-Eye's spear, too."

There is something about becoming Captain that takes the humor out of a man. It had gotten to Suvrin already. He never cracked a smile. He asked, "You gotten any useful information out of him? Not yet? When?"

"I don't know. He's coming around. Really. Remember, in practical terms he's been dead for six years. He's having trouble figuring out how to use his body again. Especially his tongue. Meanwhile, the Khadidas is still inside of him trying to take over again."

"And Lady?"

I was more concerned about my wife than I was about Goblin. She was acting strange. It did not seem like I knew her anymore. I had resurrected all my earlier worries about her connection with Kina. Kina was the master manipulator and planner. Kina schemed schemes ages long and many layers deep.

But Kina was slow. Very slow. Which was why she favored plots that required years to ripen. She could not handle swiftly changing fortunes.

"Lady is a puzzle right now," I confessed. "But a benign one."

Goblin made a gurgling sound. The Khadidas was working hard to keep him from talking.

Suvrin asked, "Do you know anything about the leading men of Taglios?"

"Not the current crop. Except for types. My advice would just be, don't ever turn your back on any of them. You could talk to Runmust Singh. If he survived the latest fighting." I had a feeling he might have been with Sleepy in that ambush. "Or you could just ask Aridatha to loan you a couple of advisors."

Suvrin seemed unusually amenable to consulting for a Captain of the Company.

He told me, "We need to resume our lessons. So I can study the Annals."

I responded, "We need some peace for that. Maybe a few years. We could build a new Company while we're at it."

Goblin gurgled again and nodded.

The little creature was like a puppy in some ways.

I told Suvrin, "I need to talk to Goblin a while." Once our hesitant new commander stepped out, I said, "We need to work out ways around the Khadidas's interference."

Nod.

"And that's how we'll do it, I guess. Unless it can control more than your speech." I peered at the little man. He did not respond. I realized that I had not posed a yes or no question. "Can it do that?"

No.

"All right, then. The most critical question of all. Is the Khadidas in direct contact with Kina?"

No. And yes. And a shrug. So we proceeded to play a game of a thousand questions during which I seemed to go the wrong direction, no matter where I went, making him gurgle in frustration. His best efforts to speak seldom produced more than one recognizable syllable.

Eventually, despite my density, I got it. The Khadidas could communicate with the Goddess only when it was in control of the Goblin flesh. It could not do so when it was not in control.

That made sense. Some. Though I had been cautioned to remember that the Goblin I was interviewing was actually a ghost that had not been able to leave when its body died and had been reanimated by the breath of the Goddess.

"That is exciting news, Goblin. Look, I have a plan." Difficult as it was, I dredged a form of it up from its hidden place deep down inside me, hoping the Goddess had no way of listening in. My plan depended entirely on my understanding of the Goblin I had known for so long, hoping he had not altered drastically during the past two decades. A man might change a lot in that much time—if he had to spend part of it dead and enslaved by the Mother of Deceivers.

On the surface Goblin seemed to like my plan, as I presented it. Seemed willing to participate. Even seemed enthusiastic about plunging One-Eye's spear into the blackest of hearts.

I told him, "I don't want to waste one minute I don't have to. You understand?"

Nod. Even a gurgled, "Yes!" With enthusiasm. With outright eagerness.

"I'll be back soon." I felt almost bad, not telling a dead man all of the truth.