Soldiers Live

143

Fortress with No Name: Sleeping with the Demon

Soulcatcher kept reminding me that she was in touch with the demon. That, in fact, as long as she remained attached to the white crow she would be little more than Shivetya's tool. This information did not seem newsworthy or particularly important until I suffered the visit from the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.

I had not been especially sensitive to them in the past. I knew them better from description than encounter. This time around made clear why that was.

Their ugliness invaded my dreams but only as a sense of presence little more concrete than that of the Unknown Shadows. Golden glimmers of hideous beast-mask faces in the corner of dream's eye, and scattered single syllable fragments of attempted communication, were all that I recalled after I awakened, sweating and shaking and filled with undirected terror.

Shivetya's gaze, directed my way, seemed more amused than ever.

I soon learned that his amusement had limits.

I had made him a promise. He could look inside me and see that I intended to keep it. But he could also see that I meant to stall for as long as it took me to arrange my own life to my satisfaction.

He had been patient for ten thousand years. Now, suddenly, his patience began to wilt.

I became aware of it first while I was sleeping. On a night when the Nef were almost getting through, my dreams filled unexpectedly with a presence that pushed in like a whale driving through a pod of dolphins. A big, unseen thing that approached like the darkness itself but without containing a thread of evil. Just a vast, slow thing that was.

I knew what it was and understood that it was trying to make a mind-to-mind contact the way it had with others before me. But my mind had a hard shell around it. It was difficult for ideas to get through.

Good thing Goblin and One-Eye were no longer around. They could have gotten hours of joy out of a straight line like that.

A couple sleeps more, though, and my mind had become a sieve. Me and Shivetya were yukking it up like a couple of old tonk buddies. The white crow was put out because she did not have a job translating anymore. I guess the demon had the sheer mental brute force to make contact with anyone.

I learned from the golem in the way that Baladitya had learned before me. I learned by being taken inside the demon's living dream, where past was almost indistinguishable from present. Where the wondrous pageant of the plain's history, and the history of the worlds it connected, were all remembered, in as much detail as Shivetya had cared to witness at the time. There was a great deal about the Black Company. He had chosen the Company as the instrument of his escape a very long time ago, long before Kina chose Lady to become her instrument inside the enemy force and the vessel that would birth the Daughter of Night, who was the intended instrument of her own liberation. Long before any of us were the least aware of all the pitfalls we were going to encounter on our road to Khatovar. But Shivetya chose better than did Kina. The Goddess failed to look closely enough at Lady's character. Lady was too damned stubborn and selfish to be anyone's tool for long.

There were just seven of us when some inexplicable urge made me decide to retrace the Company's olden journeys. And of those seven, now there is just me.

Soldiers live.

The Black Company is in Suvrin's hands now. Such as it is. It is headed south now, according to Shivetya's dreams, satisfactorily avenged, planning to cross the glittering plain back to the Land of Unknown Shadows. There are only a handful of Taglians and Dejagorans and Sangelis left to miss our world. The Company will become a new thing in a new world. And pudgy little Suvrin will be its creator.

Never before had there been anyone of the Black Company who had survived so long that he could see how vast are the changes time will sculpt even upon a band determined to stay one with its past.

When my thoughts ranged those bleak marches Shivetya always filled my head with ripples of amusement. Because those were almost invisible changes when compared with those that he had witnessed in his time. He had seen empires, civilizations, entire races, come and go. He remembered the gods themselves, the ugly builders of the plain, and all the powers that had come into and changed his estate and then had faded away again. He even recalled a time when he was not alone in the fortress with no name, a time when his devotion to duty caused his mates to nail him to his throne so they could desert without him interfering.

At long last I began to understand what had happened to Murgen in those long ago days when he had had so much trouble clinging to his place in time. Murgen was crazy, some, and Soulcatcher was involved, some—those were the days when Soulcatcher had found her way onto the plain—and Murgen never had a clue himself what was happening but behind everything else was Shivetya, carefully setting up his path into retirement. And, of course, Shivetya does not see time like the rest of us. Unless we demand his attention right here at the vanguard he floats everywhere, everywhen, reexperiencing rather than remembering.

Gods, how I envied him! The entire histories of sixteen worlds were his to know. Not just to study and interpret but pretty much to live whenever the mood took him.

I did have a question. The question of supreme importance if I was going to set the demon free. He had to answer it to my satisfaction if he wanted me to fulfill our agreement.

What would happen to the glittering plain if he was no longer here to manage it?