Soldiers Live

135

Taglios: The Mad Season

Lady dealt with the temptation easily for several days after Croaker departed. She kept reminding herself that all she had to do was hang on till he got back. By then the Daughter of Night would not be the Deceiver messiah anymore. She would be just plain Booboo.

Sense told Lady to be patient. But emotion knew no patience. And emotion threatened to devour her. Despite her long history, emotion had stolen control.

She broke after only four days.

Lady took a quick look into the hallway to make certain no one was likely to intervene, then settled on a stool beside her daughter's bed. She plucked the ends of strands of spells keeping the girl asleep and constrained. She worked quickly and deftly. She had been studying Booboo's bonds all those four days.

Those spells unravelled almost as if they had a will of their own.

Lady proceeded with an uncharacteristically naive haste. That part of her that had grown hard and bitter in the real world mocked her for her childishness. This was the world. Her world. The real world. There was no reason to expect any good to come her way.

Booboo's eyes snapped open with mechanical suddenness. The color was right but still they were not the family eyes. Nor were they Croaker's eyes. They were eyes colder than Lady's own in her crudest hour. They were the eyes of a serpent, a naga, or a deity. For an instant Lady froze like a mouse caught in a snake's stare. Then she said, "I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different." She tried to assert control while the girl was physically too weak to act.

The girl's "love me" aura had touched Lady already, so subtly that she remained unaware of it until it was too late.

Lady had not worn her Voroshk costume. There was no shelter from the storm.

A vibration developed down deep inside her, at glacial speeds. As it built she watched the power of the Goddess slowly fill the Daughter of Night. The buzz within Lady included a trace of mirth. She understood that her unpracticed maternal emotions had been discovered and manipulated, ever so subtly, for a very long time. So subtly that she had not suspected. Worse, so subtly that she was not adequately prepared to respond to any disaster.

Nevertheless, she was a woman of incredible will, having had ages to practice employing it.

There was a countermove left.

In an instant Lady made the cruelest decision of her life. She would regret it forever but knew the choice she made would leave her with the least painful long-term wounds.

The Lady of Charm had centuries of practice making terrible decisions quickly, and just as many years of practice living with the consequences.

From her belt Lady drew a memento of her brief passage as Captain of the Black Company. The dagger's pommel was a silver skull with one ruby eye. The ruby always seemed to be alive. Lady lifted the blade slowly, her gaze locked with that of the Daughter of Night. The sense of the presence of Kina grew ever stronger between them.

"I love you," Lady said, responding to a question never asked, existing only within the girl's heart. "I will love you forever. I will always love you. But I won't let you do this thing to my world."

Lady could do it, in spite of all. She had slain as dear before, when she was not yet as old as the child lying beneath her knife. And for less reason.

She felt a madness creep through her. She tried to concentrate.

She could kill because she was filled with a conviction that there was no better thing she could do.

Kina and the Daughter of Night both strove to crack Lady's terrible will. But the dagger descended toward the girl's breast, its progress inexorable. The Daughter of Night quickly became the hypnotized prey, unable to believe that Lady's blade kept falling.

The tip of the knife touched cloth. It passed through, found flesh, then a rib. Lady shifted her weight so she could drive the blade between bones.

She never sensed it coming. The blow, seemingly struck to the right side of her head, was powerful enough to hurl her sideways a half dozen feet, into a wall. Darkness closed in. For an instant there was a living dream in which she saw herself trying to strangle her child instead of stabbing her.

The Daughter of Night felt fire rip across her chest as her would-be killer flung toward the wall. She screamed. But the agony that moved her was not that of her wound. It was a black explosion inside her mind, a sudden tidal wave of knifelike shards of a thousand dark dreams, of a scream harsher than ten thousand whetstones sharpening swords, of a rage so vast and red it could be called the Eater of Worlds.

That blow was violent enough to fling her upward and to one side. She came down sprawled across the still form of her birth mother. But she did not know. She was unconscious long before gravity placed and posed her.

A whiff of old death, of graveyard mold, hung in the air of the room.