"Why not?"
"I don't have any here. I've explained before. The Unknown Shadows hate the plain. It's very difficult to get them to come up here. Most of those who do come refuse to have anything to do with people. I don't want them to have anything to do with people. It puts them in a bad temper every time. You have a whole regiment cluttering up the place. There must be a man somewhere who doesn't have something else to do."
Sarcastic infidel. There were twelve hundred men cooling their heels around the fortress, waiting to lead the treasure train, doing nothing useful in the interim. "I was looking for something a little faster." Once the Company was on the barren plain, even with Shivetya working wonders, there was little time to waste.
There had been no good news from Suvrin, either. Tobo should have gone with him. Or Doj or Lady, at the very least. Someone better equipped to deal with the Unknown Shadows. But at the very least there should have been word that a bridgehead had been established.
Baladitya said, "Then you'd better go down there yourself. Because he isn't going to respond to any lesser authority."
"What? Why?"
"Because he hears voices calling him. He's trying to figure out what to answer them."
"Darn!" Sleepy broke out in what, for her, was a blistering blue streak. "That wrangle-franging mudsucker! I'm going to... "
Tobo and Baladitya grinned. Sleepy shut up. She remembered times when her Company brothers would get her going to see just how creative she would be in avoiding use of common profanity. She muttered, "I should've written you people the way you really are. Not you, Baladitya. You're actually a human being." She glared at Tobo. "You I'm beginning to wonder about."
"For a nonbeliever," Baladitya said, of himself.
"Yes. Well. There're more of you lost souls than there are those of us who know the Truth. I must be God's Beacon in the Land of Our Sorrows."
Baladitya frowned, then caught on. Sleepy was actually poking fun at her religion's attitude toward those outside it, all the unbelievers who made up the population of the Land of Our Sorrows. Which, in an earlier age, when the Vehdna were more numerous and more enthusiastic about rescuing the infidel from damnation, had been called the Realm of War.
Only Believers lived inside the Realm of Peace.
Sleepy snapped, "Tobo, stop trying to sneak away. You're going down there with me. Just in case he really is hearing voices."
"That sounds to me like a real good reason for everybody else to stay away."
"Tobo."
"Right behind you, Captain. Ain't nobody gonna sneak up on your back."
Sleepy growled. She never got used to the informality and irreverence, though it had been a firm fixture of Company culture since long before her advent.
The soldiers mocked everything and bitched about the rest. Yet the work got done.
Sleepy conscripted a half dozen more companions while hurrying to the stairway down. All from Hsien. She marveled at the results of her relentless training regimen. Many who had joined the Company had been the dregs of the Land of Unknown Shadows, criminals and fugitives, bandits and deserters from the forces of the warlords, and fools who thought a turn with the Soldiers of Darkness would be a great adventure. Sleek, strong and confident, they put on a show now, after months of intense preparation. The clash of steel, probably closer than they anticipated, would be their final tempering.
Sleepy's descent led her past dozens of men still carrying treasure toward the surface. From behind her Tobo asked, "You sure you aren't overdoing the tomb robbing? We've already got enough to make the whole mob rich." A fact not lost on some recruits of less than unstained provenance. But temptation was easy to resist when you knew only your Captain could get you off the plain alive and that the Unknown Shadows would hound you pitilessly if you tried anything after you were off.
"We can't beat the Protector with eight thousand men, Tobo. We need secret weapons and force multipliers. Gold fills both roles."
Sometimes Tobo was troubled by his Captain. At some point, during her copious free time, she had gotten too close to a library centered around military theory. At times she tended to regurgitate notions like "strategic center of gravity" and "force multipliers" just when that would leave her listeners uncomfortable and concerned.
Tobo was also concerned because the old folks, the veterans, Croaker and Lady and the others, approved. That meant that he was not getting it.
"We'll take time out here," Sleepy said when they reached the level of the ice caverns where the Captured had been held. "You men," she said to those she had had follow, "I want four of you to take a couple of sleepers up top. Longshadow and the Howler. Howler is going to travel with us. With Tobo. A work party will take Longshadow to Hsien for trial. You two. Stay with us."
The ice caverns seemed timeless, changeless. Frost soon obscured the smaller signs of any traffic. The dead could not be told from the enchanted except on close examination by someone who was knowledgeable.
Sleepy continued, "You men don't go in there until we call you. You even breathe on those things sometimes, somebody dies." Which, upon close examination, could be seen to have happened before. The corpses included several of the Captured as well as a handful of the mystery ancients whose presence Shivetya had yet to explain.
There was a great deal the demon would not share.
Sleepy told Tobo, "We want these two to go upstairs without them waking up."
"I have to break stasis. Otherwise they'll die as soon as we touch them."
"I understand that. But I want them kept in a condition where they can't cause trouble. There won't be anybody there to control Longshadow if he wakes up all the way."
"Let me do my job."
Touchy. Sleepy posted herself between the boy wizard and the cavern entrance in case curiosity overcame the good sense of the soldiers. She marveled at how quickly the ice reasserted itself, at how delicately cobweblike were some of the structures around the sleeping old men. Beyond Howler, now, there was little evidence of the trampling the place had taken when the Captured were released. The cavern floor tilted upward back there, turned, and the cave itself got tight enough to force an explorer to crawl. If you went back far enough you reached a place where the most holy relics of the Deceiver cult had been hidden during an ancient persecution. The Company had destroyed them, giving particular attention to the powerful Books of the Dead.
Sleepy was quiet for a long time after she sent the two sleeping sorcerers to the surface. She and Tobo and two young Bone Warriors resumed their descent into the earth. Sleepy had two things on her mind: The first was the identity of the source of the pale blue light leaking through the ice of the cavern of the old men, to illuminate the human hoard, and second, "What is the center of gravity of the Taglian empire?" She was more interested in the latter. The former was just a curiosity. It did not matter. Probably just the light of another world.
"Soulcatcher," Tobo replied. "You don't have to think about that. If you kill the Protector you're left facing a big snake with no head. The Radisha and the Prahbrindrah Drah step up and announce themselves and the whole thing is over with." He made it sound simple.
"Except for hunting down the Great General."
"And Narayan Singh. And the Daughter of Night. But the Protector is the only part we can't manage using the Black Hounds."
Sleepy did not miss the way his voice went hollow when he mentioned the Daughter of Night. He had met the witch when she was the Company's prisoner, before the flight to the Land of Unknown Shadows. Sleepy had not failed to notice the impact the girl had had then.
The Captain missed very little. And forgot nothing. And seldom made an error.
But setting up the old folks to put themselves out of the way, so they would not be peering over her shoulder, proved to be an error of the first order.