Doj nodded
slightly as Lady and I rode past his place. When I glanced back a
minute later he was in the street with several Nyueng Bao henchmen.
He was wearing his sword, Ash Wand. Up ahead, Thai Dei,
Murgen’s brother-in-law and bodyguard, strolled along the
street. He was armed, too. If he was moving, Murgen would be,
too.
I kept a wary watch behind. This had to be done before Sleepy
caught on. Before she could issue orders forbidding it. I would not
defy direct orders.
She and Sahra were down in the valley. Tran Huu Nhang had come
out under a flag of truce. I had a feeling he would announce that
the File of Nine had decided to accept reality. They would never
admit it but their army had been defeated without stepping onto the
field of battle. It was evaporating. The private soldiers were
unwilling to endure the persistent attentions of the Unknown
Shadows.
It was all pretty amusing—unless you were one of the Nine
determined to make a reputation for the File, or you were a crow
with hopes of getting fat. Amusing but handy. I was tired of
waiting for a chance to slip away. My need to settle with the
Bowalk monster had grown pretty powerful, though I hid it well. I
have a number of obsessions that I do not let show.
Officially, the Eleventh Battalion was rotating up to guard the
shadowgate. In reality, the Eleventh would be started through to
the fortress at the heart of the plain, after nightfall. My gang
would be up there much earlier, swiftly moving beyond any hope of
Sleepy turning us around. Tobo would cover our backtrail.
I made a sign I hoped would be seen and passed along. We needed
to move faster. Sleepy is a resourceful little witch. If there was
any way to beat me out of this she might have it figured out
already.
It did seem like she was out there by herself on the Bowalk
question. One-Eye had a lot more friends dead than he had had while
he was alive.
Tobo was at the shadowgate. But he was supposed to be keeping an
eye on his mother and the Captain. Before I could say anything,
though, he told me, “They’re safe. The meet is a
face-saving scheme by the Nine. They’ve realized what they
did was stupid. There’ll be a lot of ceremony but no
admission of anything, like even that they’ve got an army
over there that wanted to do us evil, and before they’re done
they’ll give Mom a bull that grants the Company permission to
find and use the shadowgate secrets.” He grinned, a kid
excited. “I don’t think they’ve been getting
enough sleep.”
“And why are you here?”
“I have family going through. Don’t I?”
Of course he did. I was on edge. “Let’s keep moving,
people.” With Nyueng Bao, old Company hands, my wife and
whatnot, I would have just over forty people joining my hunt. For a
while. If it dragged on I might not be able to hold them
together.
Tobo told me, “Make camp at the first circle. Even if it
seems like you can cover a lot more ground before it gets
dark.” He told Lady, “It’s important. Keep him in
check. The first circle. So I can catch up when I get
away.”
Willow Swan called, “Hey, Croaker. If you stand right here
and look just right out of the side of your eye, you can see the
Nef. In broad daylight.”
Swan was on the other side of the Hsien shadowgate. His voice
had a dampened, distant quality.
I gave him my best scowl. “Don’t forget plain
discipline.” Shivetya might be our ally and the soul of the
plain but there were perils up there even he could not master. The
Unforgiven Dead were as hungry for life as ever. Only the roads
and circles were safe. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid
piercing the protective boundaries. Their master spells would
repair them if you did. But you would not be alive to enjoy the
result. All that would be left of you was a desiccated husk that
had taken a while dying, screaming all the way.
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.
“Good,” Doj told me, stepping through the gate.
“A bit of wisdom. That’s really good.”
I began the climb to the plain somewhat numbed by the
realization that I was the only living member of the company who
recalled our original banner. It had been no more cheerful than
today’s was but it had been a lot busier. A field of scarlet
with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper
left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right
quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a
bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an
eagle.
There was nothing in the Annals to suggest when or why that
banner had been adopted.
Doj nodded
slightly as Lady and I rode past his place. When I glanced back a
minute later he was in the street with several Nyueng Bao henchmen.
He was wearing his sword, Ash Wand. Up ahead, Thai Dei,
Murgen’s brother-in-law and bodyguard, strolled along the
street. He was armed, too. If he was moving, Murgen would be,
too.
I kept a wary watch behind. This had to be done before Sleepy
caught on. Before she could issue orders forbidding it. I would not
defy direct orders.
She and Sahra were down in the valley. Tran Huu Nhang had come
out under a flag of truce. I had a feeling he would announce that
the File of Nine had decided to accept reality. They would never
admit it but their army had been defeated without stepping onto the
field of battle. It was evaporating. The private soldiers were
unwilling to endure the persistent attentions of the Unknown
Shadows.
It was all pretty amusing—unless you were one of the Nine
determined to make a reputation for the File, or you were a crow
with hopes of getting fat. Amusing but handy. I was tired of
waiting for a chance to slip away. My need to settle with the
Bowalk monster had grown pretty powerful, though I hid it well. I
have a number of obsessions that I do not let show.
Officially, the Eleventh Battalion was rotating up to guard the
shadowgate. In reality, the Eleventh would be started through to
the fortress at the heart of the plain, after nightfall. My gang
would be up there much earlier, swiftly moving beyond any hope of
Sleepy turning us around. Tobo would cover our backtrail.
I made a sign I hoped would be seen and passed along. We needed
to move faster. Sleepy is a resourceful little witch. If there was
any way to beat me out of this she might have it figured out
already.
It did seem like she was out there by herself on the Bowalk
question. One-Eye had a lot more friends dead than he had had while
he was alive.
Tobo was at the shadowgate. But he was supposed to be keeping an
eye on his mother and the Captain. Before I could say anything,
though, he told me, “They’re safe. The meet is a
face-saving scheme by the Nine. They’ve realized what they
did was stupid. There’ll be a lot of ceremony but no
admission of anything, like even that they’ve got an army
over there that wanted to do us evil, and before they’re done
they’ll give Mom a bull that grants the Company permission to
find and use the shadowgate secrets.” He grinned, a kid
excited. “I don’t think they’ve been getting
enough sleep.”
“And why are you here?”
“I have family going through. Don’t I?”
Of course he did. I was on edge. “Let’s keep moving,
people.” With Nyueng Bao, old Company hands, my wife and
whatnot, I would have just over forty people joining my hunt. For a
while. If it dragged on I might not be able to hold them
together.
Tobo told me, “Make camp at the first circle. Even if it
seems like you can cover a lot more ground before it gets
dark.” He told Lady, “It’s important. Keep him in
check. The first circle. So I can catch up when I get
away.”
Willow Swan called, “Hey, Croaker. If you stand right here
and look just right out of the side of your eye, you can see the
Nef. In broad daylight.”
Swan was on the other side of the Hsien shadowgate. His voice
had a dampened, distant quality.
I gave him my best scowl. “Don’t forget plain
discipline.” Shivetya might be our ally and the soul of the
plain but there were perils up there even he could not master. The
Unforgiven Dead were as hungry for life as ever. Only the roads
and circles were safe. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid
piercing the protective boundaries. Their master spells would
repair them if you did. But you would not be alive to enjoy the
result. All that would be left of you was a desiccated husk that
had taken a while dying, screaming all the way.
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.
“Good,” Doj told me, stepping through the gate.
“A bit of wisdom. That’s really good.”
I began the climb to the plain somewhat numbed by the
realization that I was the only living member of the company who
recalled our original banner. It had been no more cheerful than
today’s was but it had been a lot busier. A field of scarlet
with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper
left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right
quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a
bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an
eagle.
There was nothing in the Annals to suggest when or why that
banner had been adopted.