Soldiers Live

5

An Abode of Ravens: Headquarters

Outpost was a quiet city of broad lanes and white walls. We had adopted the native custom of whitewashing everything but the thatch and decorative vegetation.

On holidays some locals even painted each other white. White had been a great symbol of resistance to the Shadowmasters in times gone by.

Our city was artificial and military, all straight lines, cleanliness and quiet. Except at night, if Tobo's friends got to brawling amongst themselves. By day, noise was confined to the training fields where the latest bunch of native would-be adventurers were learning the Black Company way of doing business. I was remote from all that except for patching up training mishaps. No one from my era was involved anymore. Like One-Eye I am a relic of a distant age, a living icon of the history that makes up so much of the unique social adhesive we used to hold the Company together. They rolled me out on special occasions and had me give sermons that began, "In those days the Company was in service to... "

It was a spooky night, the two moons illuminating everything while casting conflicting shadows. And Tobo's pets were increasingly disturbed about something. I began to catch straightforward glimpses of some when they became too distracted to work at staying out of sight. In most cases I was sorry.

The uproar up toward the shadowgate rose and fell. There were lights up there now, too. A couple of fireballs flew just before I reached my destination. I began to feel uneasy myself.

Headquarters was a two-story sprawl at the center of town. Sleepy had filled it with assistants and associates and functionaries who kept track of every horseshoe nail and every grain of rice. She had turned command into a bureaucratic exercise. And I did not like it. Of course. Because I was a cranky old man who remembered how things used to be in the good old days when we did things the right way. My way.

I do not think I have lost my sense of humor, though. I see the irony in having turned into my own grandfather.

I have stepped aside. I have passed the torch to someone younger, more energetic and tactically brighter than I ever was. But I have not abandoned my right to be involved, to contribute, to criticize and, particularly, to complain. It is a job somebody has to do. So I exasperate the younger people sometimes. Which is good for them. It builds character.

I strode through the ground-floor busywork Sleepy uses to shield herself from the world. Day or night there was a crew on duty, counting those arrowheads and grains of rice. I should remind her to get out into the world once in a while. Putting up barriers will not protect her from her demons because they are all inside her already.

I was almost old enough to get away with talk like that.

Irritation crossed her dry, dusky, almost sexless face when I walked in. She was at her prayers. I do not understand that. Despite everything she has been through, much of which puts the lie to Vehdna doctrine, she persists in her faith.

"I'll wait till you're done."

The fact that I had caught her was what irritated her. The fact that she needed to believe even in the face of the evidence was what embarrassed her.

She rose, folded her prayer rug. "How bad is he this time?"

"Rumor got it wrong. It wasn't One-Eye. It was Gota. And she's gone. But One-Eye is in a pickle about something else he thinks is going to happen. About which he was less than vague. Tobo's friends are being more than normally weird so it's entirely possible it isn't One-Eye's imagination."

"I'd better send someone after Sahra."

"Tobo is taking care of it."

Sleepy considered me steadily. She may be short but she has presence and self-confidence. "What's on your mind?"

"I'm feeling some of what One-Eye is. Or maybe I just naturally can't stand a prolonged peace."

"Lady nagging you about going home again?"

"No. Murgen's last communion with Shivetya has her worried." To say the least. Modern history had turned cruel back in our home world. The Deceiver cult has rebounded in our absence, making converts by the hundred. At the same time Soulcatcher tormented the Taglian Territories in a mad and mainly fruitless effort to root out her enemies, most of whom were imaginary until she and Mogaba created them through their zeal. "She hasn't said so but I'm pretty sure she's afraid Booboo is manipulating Soulcatcher somehow."

Sleepy could not stifle a smile. "Booboo?"

"Your fault. I picked it up from something you wrote."

"She's your daughter."

"We have to call her something."

"I can't believe you two never picked a name."

"She was born before... " I like "Ghana." It was good enough for my grandmother. Lady would have demurred. It sounded too much like Kina.

And although Booboo might be a nightmare stalking, Booboo was Lady's daughter and in the land where she had grown up mothers always named the daughters. Always. When the time was right.

This time will never be right. This child denies us both. She stipulates that our flesh quickened her flesh but she is animated by an absolute conviction that she is the spiritual daughter of the Goddess Kina. She is the Daughter of Night. Her sole purpose for existing is to precipitate the Year of the Skulls, that great human disaster that will free her slumbering soulmother so she can resume working her wickedness upon the world. Or upon the worlds, actually, as we had discovered once my quest for the Company's ancient origins had led us to the time-wracked fortress on the plain of glittering stone lying between our world and the Land of Unknown Shadows.

Silence stretched between us. Sleepy had been Annalist a long time. She had come to the Company young. Its traditions meant a great deal to her. Consequently she remained unfailingly courteous to her predecessors. But internally, I am sure, she was impatient with us old farts. Particularly with me. She never knew me well. And I was always taking up time wanting to know what was going on. I have begun putting too much emphasis on detail now that I do not have much to do but write.

I told her, "I don't offer advice unless you ask."

That startled her.

"Trick I learned from Soulcatcher. Makes people think you're reading their minds. She's much better at it."

"I'm sure she is. She's had all that time to practice." She puffed air out of expanded cheeks. "It's been a week since we've talked. Let's see. Nothing to report from Shivetya. Murgen's been at Khang Phi with Sahra so he hasn't been in touch with the golem. Reports from the men working on the plain say they're suffering from recurring premonitions of disaster."

"Really? They said it that way?" She had her pontifical moments.

"Roughly."

"What's the traffic situation?"

"There is none." She looked puzzled. The plain had seen no one cross for generations before the Company managed the passage. The last, before us, had been the Shadowmasters who had fled the Land of Unknown Shadows for our world back before I was born.

"Wrong question. I guess. How're you coming with preparations for our return?"

"That a personal or professional question?" Everything was business with Sleepy. I do not recall ever having seen her relax. Sometimes that worried me. Something in her past, hinted at in her own Annals, had left her convinced that that was the only way she could be safe.

"Both." I wished I could tell Lady that we would be going home soon. She had no love for the Land of Unknown Shadows.

I am sure she will not enjoy the future wherever we go. It is an absolute certainty that the times to come will not be good. I do not believe she understands that yet. Not in her heart.

Even she can be naive about some things.

"The short answer is that we can probably put a reinforced company across as early as next month. If we can acquire the shadowgate knowledge."

Crossing the plain is a major undertaking because you have to carry with you everything you will need for a week. Up there there is nothing to eat but glittering stone. Stone remembers but stone has little nutritional value.

"Are you going too?"

"I'm going to send scouts and spies, no matter what. We can use the home shadowgate as long as we only put through a few men at a time."

"You won't take Shivetya's word?"

"The demon has his own agenda."

She would know. She had been in direct communion with that Steadfast Guardian.

What I knew of the golem's designs made me concerned for Lady. Shivetya, that ancient entity, created to manage and watch over the plain—which was an artifact itself—wanted to die. He could not do so while Kina survived. One of his tasks was to ensure that the sleeping Goddess did not awaken and escape her imprisonment.

When Kina ceased to exist, my wife's tenuous grasp on those magical powers critical to her sense of self-worth and identity would perish with her. What powers Lady boasted, she possessed only because she had found a way to steal from the Goddess. She was a complete parasite.

I said, "And you, believing the Company dictum that we have no friends outside, don't value his friendship."

"Oh, he's perfectly marvelous, Croaker. He saved my life. But he didn't do it because I'm cute and I jiggle in the right places when I run."

She was not cute. I could not imagine her jiggling, either. This was a woman who had gotten away with pretending to be a boy for years. There was nothing feminine about her. Nor anything masculine, either. She was not a sexual being at all, though for a while there had been rumors that she and Swan had become a midnight item.

It turned out purely platonic.

"I'll reserve comment. You've surprised me before."

"Captain!"

Took her a while, sometimes, to understand when someone was joking. Or even being sarcastic, though she had a tongue like a razor herself.

She realized I was ribbing her. "I see. Then let me surprise you one more time by asking your advice."

"Oh-oh. You'll have them sharpening their skates in hell."

"Howler and Longshadow. I've got to make decisions."

"File of Nine nagging you again?" The File of Nine—"File" from military usage—was a council of warlords, their identities kept secret, who formed the nearest thing to a real ruling body in Hsien. The monarchy and aristocracy of record were little more than decorative and, in the main, too intimate with poverty to accomplish much if the inclination existed.

The File of Nine had only limited power. Their existence barely assured that near-anarchy did not devolve into complete chaos. The Nine would have been more effective had they not prized their anonymity more than their implied power.

"Them and the Court of All Seasons. The Noble Judges really want Longshadow." The imperial court of Hsien—consisting of aristocrats with less real world power than the File of Nine but enjoying more a demonstrative moral authority—were obsessively interested in gaining possession of Longshadow. Being an old cynic I tended to suspect them of less than moral ambitions. But we had few dealings with them. Their seat, Quang Ninh City, was much too far away.

The one thing the peoples of Hsien held in common, every noble and every peasant, every priest and every warlord, was an implacable and ugly thirst for revenge upon the Shadowmaster invaders of yesteryear. Longshadow, still trapped in stasis underneath the glittering plain, represented the last possible opportunity to extract that cathartic vengeance. Longshadow's value in our dealings with the Children of the Dead was phenomenally disproportionate.

Hatreds seldom are constrained to rational scales.

Sleepy continued, "And hardly a day goes by that I don't hear from some lesser warlord begging me to bring Longshadow in. The way they all volunteer to take charge of him leaves me nurturing the sneaking suspicion that most of them aren't quite as idealistically motivated as the File of Nine and the Court of All Seasons."

"No doubt. He'd be a handy tool for anybody who wanted to adjust the power balance. If anyone was fool enough to believe he could manage a puppet Shadowmaster." No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don't believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness. I married one of those. I am not sure she has learned her lesson yet. "Has anyone offered to fix our shadowgate?"

"The Court is actually willing to give us someone. The trouble with that is that they don't actually have anyone equipped with the skills to make the needed fixes. Chances are, no one has those skills. But the knowledge exists in records stored at Khang Phi."

"So why don't we?... "

"We're working on it. Meantime, the Court do seem to believe in us. And they absolutely do want some kind of revenge before all of Longshadow's surviving victims have been claimed by age."

"And what about the Howler?"

"Tobo wants him. Says he can handle him now."

"Does anybody else think so?" I meant Lady. "Or is he overconfident?"

Sleepy shrugged. "There's nobody telling me they've got anything more they can teach him." She meant Lady, too, and did not mean that Tobo suffered from a teen attitude. Tobo had no trouble taking advice or instruction when either of those did not originate with his mother.

I asked anyway. "Not even Lady?"

"She, I think, might be holding out on him."

"You can bet on it." I married the woman but I don't have many illusions about her. She would be thrilled to go back to her old wicked ways. Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance. Though we get along well enough. "She can't be any other way. Get her to tell you about her first husband. You'll marvel that she came out as sane as she did." I marveled every day. Right before I gave in to my astonishment that the woman really had given up everything to ride off with me. Well, something. She had not had much at the time and her prospects had been grim. "What the hell is that?"

"Alarm horns." Sleepy bolted out of her seat. She was spry for a woman treading hard on the heels of middle age. On the other hand, of course, she was so short she did not have a lot of real getting up to do. "I didn't order any drills."

She had an ugly habit of doing that. Only the traitor Mogaba, when he had been with us, had had as determined an attitude about preparedness.

Sleepy was too serious about everything.

Tobo's unknown shadows began raising their biggest uproar yet.

"Come on!" Sleepy snapped. "Why aren't you armed?" She was. She always was, although I never have seen her use a weapon more substantial than guile.

"I'm retired. I'm a paper pusher these days."

"I don't see you wearing a tombstone for a hat."

"I had an attitude problem once upon a time, myself, but... "

"Speaking of which. I want a reading in the officers' mess before lights out. Something that tells us all about the wages of indolence and the neglect of readiness. Or about the fate of ordinary mercenaries." She was in brisk motion, headed for the main exit, overtaking staffers who were not dawdling themselves. "Make a hole, people. Make a hole. Coming through."

Outside, people were pointing and babbling. The moonlight and a lot of fire betrayed a pillar of black, oily smoke boiling up from just below the gate to the glittering plain. I stated the obvious. "Something's happened." Clever me.

"Suvrin's up there. He has a level head."

Suvrin was a solid young officer with maybe just a tad of worship for his captain. You could be confident that neither accidents nor stupid mistakes would happen on Suvrin's watch.

Runners gathered, ready to carry Sleepy's instructions. She gave the only order she could till we knew more. Be alert. Even though to a man we believed that there was no way major trouble could come at us from off the plain.

The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.