I sighed, dropped my stuff. I shrugged. "After breakfast, then."
"Let them go through," Lady said.
"The Nef? You kidding?"
"Doj and I can handle them."
Interesting, her confidence. But it was misplaced. She knew nothing about the Nef. Unless she had met them in her dreams.
I moved people away from potential trouble, creating a clear path. "Everyone ready? Pull the key, then, Murgen." It would be intriguing to see if the plain would let him.
Doj swung Ash Wand around in front of him, exposed eight inches of blade.
The key came out of its seat. Murgen jumped back. The Nef leapt into the circle. And streaked straight across, to the side road. They hit it and never looked back.
"That's definitely weird," Willow Swan said. The dream-walkers were in a hurry but nobody dwindles that fast. Nor, normally, do they grow transparent as they go. "Slid right back into dreamland."
I wondered, "You suppose I would've slid into dreamland if I'd tried that road?" The road itself began to fade.
Nobody disagreed. Doj mused, "Tobo did say to stay put."
Middle of the night. Something wakened me. Felt like a tiny earthquake. The stars above were dancing. After another jiggle they settled down. And were no longer the stars that had been up there when I laid down. This was a different sky altogether.
"That way!" Doj insisted. It was morning, we were up and Doj insisted on heading back the way we had come.
"The fortress is that way."
"We don't want to go to the fortress," Lady reminded me. "We want to go to Khatovar."
"Which isn't back that way... is it?" Tobo had not caught up. I was not thrilled about that.
Willow Swan suggested, "You can go look, Croaker. It wouldn't take that long."
I was tired of arguing, particularly in front of a crowd. I did not want my right to lead to become more questionable than it was already. We all possessed guilty hearts. Me more than any because I bought the Company mystique more than any. "I'll take Swan's advice." I pointed here, there, choosing companions. "You guys get to go with me. Mount up. Let's go."
So we were off to the mule races.
"I don't believe it." I did not. Could not. My eyes had to be liars.
Lying at the rim of the glittering plain I stared down at another landscape with topography resembling that at Kiaulune and at the Abode of Ravens. But here there was no bustling, recovering Kiaulune. There was no fallen castle Overlook, formerly equipped with towers from which Longshadow could look down onto the glittering plain and see what was coming to get him. Nor was there a whitewashed army town with neat ranks of fields on the slopes below it. This country was feral. This country was much more damp than the other two. Wild brush and scraggly trees advanced to within yards of the crippled shadowgate. The works around that were the only recognizable human handiwork visible, and they were in ruins.
"Stay low," Doj advised when I started to rise, which would silhouette me above the skyline. I knew better than that. People who do know better generally get skragged that one time they forget or let something slide. Which is why we pound it in and pound it in and pound it in. "That jungle doesn't mean that there aren't eyes watching."
"You're right. I almost did a stupid. Anybody want to guess how old that scrub down there is? I'd say between fifteen and twenty with a bet that it's a lot closer to twenty."
Murgen wondered, "What difference does it make?"
"The forvalaka broke through this shadowgate about nineteen years ago. She got away. Soulcatcher was too busy burying our asses to chase her, shadows did get after her... "
"Oh. Yeah. She didn't go out alone when she went."
"That's my guess. Shadows got out behind her and wiped out everything we can see from here."
Murgen grunted. Lady nodded, as did Doj. They saw it the same.
Khatovar. My destination for an age. My obsession. Destroyed because we had not had the good sense to cut a young woman's throat in a place now long ago and far away.
The quality of mercy has left me a great, sour role in the theater of my own despair.
Though it is true that it had not seemed important at the time, and we were real busy trying to get out of there with our asses still attached.
21
Taglios: The Great General
Mogaba leaned back, smiling. "I can't help wishing Narayan Singh continued luck." Relaxed, content, for the first time in years, he found life good. The Protector was in the provinces indulging her passion for religious persecution. Therefore, she was not around the Palace making life miserable for those who actually hauled on the reins, riding the tiger whilst trying to keep the mundane work of government simmering.
His mention of the living saint made Aridatha Singh flinch. It was subtle but the reaction was there. And it was unique. Other Singhs did not react to the name, other than with an obligatory curse, perhaps. This demanded further examination.
Mogaba asked, "Any trouble out there?"
Aridatha said, "It's quiet. You have the Protector out of town, making no ridiculous demands, things settle down. People get too busy making a living to act up."
Ghopal was less upbeat. The Greys were out in the streets and alleys every day. "Graffiti keeps turning up more and more. ‘Water Sleeps' most often."
"And?" Murgen asked. His voice was soft but intense, his eyes narrow.
"The other traditional taunts are all there. ‘All Their Days Are Numbered.' ‘Rajadharma.' "
"And?" Mogaba seemed to have shifted characters the way Soulcatcher did. Perhaps he was aping her style.
"That one, too. ‘My Brother Unforgiven.' "
That harsh indictment again. That accusation which always disturbed the incomplete slumber of the part of him guilty about betraying the Black Company to advance his own ambitions. No good had come of it. His life had become enslaved by it. His punishment was to move from one villain to another, always serving wickedness, like a loose woman passing from man to man down a long decline.
Aridatha Singh, eager to move away from talk about Narayan Singh and the Deceivers, interjected, "One of my officers reported a new one yesterday. ‘Thi Kim is coming.' "
"Thi Kim? What is that? Or who?"
Ghopal observed, "It sounds Nyueng Bao."
"We don't see much of those people these days."
"Since somebody snatched the Radisha right out of the Palace... " Ghopal stopped. Mogaba had begun to darken again, though that failure belonged to the Greys, not to the army. He had been in the territories at the time.
"So. All the old slogans. But the Company all fled through the shadowgate. And perished on the other side because they never came back."
Ghopal knew little about the world outside his own narrow, filthy streets. "Maybe some of them did survive and we just don't know about it."
"No. They didn't. We would've heard. The Protector's had people down there harvesting shadows since they left." People who had been lured into her service by cruelly false promises to teach them her ways and make them captains in her great, unrevealed enterprise.
None of those collaborators survived long. Shadows were clever and persistent. Quite a few found ways to escape from novices long enough to destroy their tormenters and be destroyed themselves.
Soulcatcher made sure conditions for disaster remained ripe.
Mogaba closed his eyes, leaned back again, steepled his dark fingers. "I've enjoyed not having the Protector around." Getting those words out casually was difficult. His throat was tight. His chest felt like a huge weight was pressing in on it. He was afraid. Soulcatcher terrified him. And for that he hated her. And for that he loathed himself. He was Mogaba, the Great General, the purest, smartest, strongest of the Nar warriors produced by Gea-Xle. For him fear was supposed to be a tool by which he managed the weak. He was not supposed to know it personally.