Lately there seemed to be less shadow activity than in the past. Possibly Shivetya had found a way to control them. Maybe even to destroy them. They were a later accretion. He had no use for them. He would love to be rid of them.
Which would be as wonderful for those sad but deadly monsters as it would be for us. They would achieve the release of death at least. A release Shivetya understood. It was a release he yearned for himself.
I started barking at people. "Let's get that equipment out and moving! Where are those mules? I thought I sent them up here last week." When a lot of people agree with you, you can move a lot of material without drawing much attention. I started work on this as soon as I was sure Sleepy did not intend to pursue it herself.
"Calm down," Tobo told me. And I did. Stunned. Because a kid was saying it to a veteran. And was right. "Come here. Lady, you too." He stepped away from the road, to a rudely made wooden box balanced precariously atop a jagged boulder.
"This same rock is over on the home side," I said. "Your father had a bunker right over there where that bush is. What have you got?"
The box contained what looked like four black glass cylinders a foot long, two inches in diameter, equipped with a metal handle on one end.
"These are keys. Like the Lance of Passion was. The kind you need to get on and off the plain. I made new ones. It's not hard if you have the specifications. Blade has one key. Suvrin has two. One is in place in this gate here. We'll take it away when we leave. Two more are with a couple of the battalion commanders who went up already. You're going to take two with you. Just in case."
He handed me one cylinder and gave the other to Lady. Mine seemed heavier than an object its size ought to be. The handle was silver. I asked, "You just drop it into the hole in the plain, right?"
"Exactly. Remember your repair lessons?" He faced Lady when he asked that. I did sit in on the classes but my wife had gotten a lot better understanding of the process. It would have to be a major emergency before we counted on me doing anything even vaguely related to sorcery.
A stream of mules and men passed through the shadowgate. Each got checked by a sergeant who must have spent his formative years at Sleepy's headquarters. He wanted to make note of every man, every animal, every fireball thrower and other major item of equipment or weaponry. The Nyueng Bao, not really belonging to the Company, were rude to him. I went over and was rude myself. "You're gumming up the works, Sergeant. Go away. Or I'll ask Tobo to sic one of the Black Hounds on you."
The pack was not far off. Nobody could see them, of course, but they made plenty of racket when they quarreled among themselves. And that never stopped.
My threat had the desired effect. The keeper of inventories departed so fast there was almost a whoosh. He would file an official complaint. But that would end up far down the list of my delinquencies.
Tobo overtook me. Most of my gang were through now. The kid bowed to his father, formally polite. He and Murgen had a mutual problem. Neither knew quite how to bridge the gap left by Murgen having been buried during most of the years Tobo was growing up.
The boy told me, in a voice his father was intended to hear, "You'd better push it now. Mom just got word of what you're doing. She'll keep her mouth shut for Gota's sake. For now. But when she hears that Dad is in on it she's going to boil over and head straight for the Captain."
I gave Murgen an ugly look. Didn't tell the old lady you were going out with the guys, eh? How did Tobo know what his mother had just found out? The kid snapped his fingers, made a series of hand gestures, said something obscure, apparently to empty air.
A pair of shadows raced across the slope, slanting down from the southwest. They headed straight toward us. I saw nothing to cast them. Then, suddenly, I had a face full of flapping wings, weights on my shoulders and what felt like dragon's talons trying to rip the meat off my collarbones. Ravens.
"They only look like crows," Tobo said. "Don't ever forget that they're not." I shuddered. I have lived with this stuff all around me, decade after decade, but being exposed to it has not made it any less creepy.
Tobo told me. "At my request they've agreed to assume this shape. They'll be your eyes and ears wherever you have to operate without me. They won't have the strategic range you were used to with Dad but they can cover a few hundred miles, fast, and they'll give you a strong tactical advantage. Besides scouting they can carry messages. Be sure to frame those carefully, clearly, without ambiguity, and try to keep them short. Give them an absolutely crystal clear address. Name names and make sure they know who the names belong to."
I turned my head right and left, caught glimpses from the sides of my eyes. It was disconcerting, having those cruel beaks so close. The eyes are the first things the Choosers of the Slain go for on the battlefield.
One bird was black, the other white. They were bigger than the local breed of raven. And the white one had not gotten the shape quite right. It looked like one of its parents had been a startled pigeon instead of a crow.
"If it turns out that I can't catch up and you need to get in touch, they can find me easily."
I am sure I looked grim.
Grinning, Tobo told me, "And I thought they'd go great with your costume. Mom told me you always had ravens on your shoulders when you did Widowmaker, years ago."
I sighed. "Those were real crows. And they belonged to Soulcatcher. The two of us had a sort of understanding in those days. Enemy of my enemy kind of thing."
"You did bring the Widowmaker armor with you, didn't you? And One-Eye's spear? You know you won't be able to come back for anything you leave behind."
"Yes, yes. I have it." This Widowmaker costume armor was not the same outfit that I had worn decades ago. That had gotten lost during Sleepy and Sahra's Kiaulune wars. Soulcatcher probably had it in her trophy chamber. This armor, though mainly for show, came from Hsien's finest armories and had a distinct native flavor. Its black, chitinous lacquer surface boasted inlays of gold and silver symbols that Hsien associated with sorcery and evil and darkness. Some reproduced arcane characters of power once associated with the Shadowmasters. Others went back to an age when Hsien's now-extinct Kina cult was sending out Deceiver companies on crusade. All those symbols were scary, at least in the world where first they had been imagined.
Lady's reconstituted Lifetaker armor was uglier than mine. The stuff on its exterior was less clearly defined and much more creepy because she had insisted on being involved in its design and creation. The inside of her head is filled with spiders.
She did not get any pretend-to-be Choosers of the Slain. She got several ornate little teak boxes and a thin stack of sheets of the strange rice paper preferred by the monks of Khang Phi.
"You have to go. I'll see that they don't send a messenger to order you back."
I grunted. Except for Uncle Doj, who paused to murmur with Tobo, I was the last of my gang through the Hsien shadowgate. Lady squeezed my hand when I joined her on the risky side. She said, "We're off, darling. Again." She seemed excited.
"Again." I could not recall ever being excited by moving out.
Murgen asked, "You want to show the standard now?"
"Not until we're on the plain itself. We're renegades here. Let's don't make Sleepy look small." I had an idea, then. If I could come up with some material... we could run up the old Company standard. From before we adopted Soulcatcher's firebreathing skull.