Soulcatcher’s survival instincts had been
honed to a razor’s edge by centuries of adventures among
peoples who considered her continued good health a liability. She
sensed a change in the world long before she had any idea what that
change might be, good or ill or indifferent, and ages before she
dared hazard a guess as to its cause.
At first it was just that sense. Then, gradually, it became the
pressure of a thousand eyes. But she could discover nothing. Her
crows could find nothing either, other than the occasional,
unpredictable, flickering glimpse of their quarry, the two
Deceivers. That was ancient news.
Soulcatcher abandoned the hunt immediately. It would not be
difficult to get close to the Deceivers again.
She learned nothing more before nightfall—except that her crows
were extremely unsettled, getting more and more nervous, less and
less tractable and increasingly inclined to jump at shadows. They
could not make clear the nature of their malaise because they did
not understand it themselves.
That began to grow clearer as the twilight gathered. Messengers
interrupted Soulcatcher’s meditations to inform her that
several of the murder had fallen prey to a sudden illness.
“Show me.”
She made no effort to disguise herself as she followed her birds
to the nearest feathered corpse. She picked it up, rolled it
carefully in her gloved hands.
It was obvious what had killed the crow. Not illness but a
killer shadow. No cadaver looked like one did after a shadow
finished with it. But that could not be. It was still light out.
Her tame shadows were all in hiding and there were no rogue shadows
around anymore. Nor would wild shadows have wasted themselves on a
crow when there was human game in the vicinity. She should have
heard Narayan Singh and that wretched niece of hers screaming long
before any crow . . . There had been no sound
from the bird whatsoever. Nor had there been from any of a half
dozen others the murder knew to be gone. The survivors had plenty
to say. Including stating plainly that they were not about to stray
away from her protection.
“How can I fight this if I don’t know what it is? If
you won’t find out for me?”
The crows would not be bullied or cajoled. They were geniuses
for birds. Which meant they were just bright enough to have noticed
that every one of the dead had been completely alone when evil had
befallen them.
Soulcatcher cursed them, then calmed herself and convinced the
most valiant birds that they had to, therefore, do their scouting
in threes and fours until darkness closed in completely. At that
point she would have bats and owls and her own shadows available to
take over.
Darkness came. As the Deceivers correctly observe, the darkness
always comes.
With nightfall came a silent but horribly vicious warfare with
Soulcatcher poised at the eye of the storm.
Initially she had to hold on desperately against unknown
assailants until her own shadows could bring in enough swift
reinforcements. Then, spending shadows profligately, she took the
offensive. And when dawn came, and she was almost without
supernatural allies because of the cost of the struggle, she gave
way to exhaustion, having gained a knowledge of a portion of the
truth.
They were back. The Black Company were, with new formations, new
allies, new sorceries, and still without a dram of mercy in their
hearts. These were not the Company she had known in younger years
but they were the spiritual children of the cold killers of the
olden days. No matter what you tried, it seemed, you could kill
only men. The ideal lived on.
Ha! An end to the boredom of empire stood at hand.
Bravado and pretense did not lessen the inexplicable fear. They
had fled onto the plain. And now they were back. That had to mean
much more. She needed to interrogate shadows who had existed on the
glittering stone during those silent years. When there was time.
Before she did anything else she had to do what she always did so
well: survive.
She was out here hundreds of miles from any support. She was
besieged by things that would not yield to her will or sorcery and
which she could detect, it seemed, only through her own shadows or
when one of them attacked her directly. They were as fierce as
shadows but strange. They were more otherworldly than her spirit
slaves and seemed possessed of a higher order of intelligence.
Each one she extinguished personally infected her with both a
vast sorrow and with the certainty that she was battling only the
most feeble of their kind. Always there was a powerful presentiment
of demons or demigods to come.
What she could not comprehend was why all this frightened her
so. There was nothing here more deadly or threatening or bizarre
than a thousand perils she had faced before. Nothing here matched
the sheer dark menace of the Dominator in his time.
There were infrequent moments when she still longed for those
dark and ancient times. The Dominator had taken her and all her
sisters, had made one of them his wife and another his
lover . . .
He had been a strong, hard, cruel man, the Dominator. His empire
had been one of cruelty and steel. And Soulcatcher had revelled in
its pomp and dark glory. And would never forgive her rival, her
last surviving sister, for having brought all that to an end. Blame
the death of the Dominator on the White Rose if you wanted.
Soulcatcher knew the truth. The Dominator never would have gone
down if his whining virgin of a wife had not helped his destruction
along.
And who had fought and conspired so hard after their
resurrection to keep the Dominator in the ground? His loving wife,
that was who!
She would be back. She would be out there somewhere, wherever
the Black Company had been hiding. She was not here yet but she
would be soon. Having been buried alive again would be no
impediment to the inevitable, that grim moment when they would
settle their differences face-to-face.
Soulcatcher could will herself blind in some quarters, despite
centuries of cynical experience. She would not see that fortune
could be just as erratic and insane as she was.
Soulcatcher’s powers of recuperation were tremendous.
After a few hours of rest she rose and started walking northward,
her stride long and confident. Tonight she would gather an army of
her own shadows around her. Never again would she be as threatened
as she had been the night before.
So she told herself.
By late afternoon her confidence was as high as ever it had been
and fragments of her mind were already peeping past today’s
crisis to scout out what might be done to sculpt the future.
Soulcatcher had long been intimate with the knowledge that
horrible things could and did happen to her but always she had
enjoyed the certainty that she would come through everything
alive.
Soulcatcher’s survival instincts had been
honed to a razor’s edge by centuries of adventures among
peoples who considered her continued good health a liability. She
sensed a change in the world long before she had any idea what that
change might be, good or ill or indifferent, and ages before she
dared hazard a guess as to its cause.
At first it was just that sense. Then, gradually, it became the
pressure of a thousand eyes. But she could discover nothing. Her
crows could find nothing either, other than the occasional,
unpredictable, flickering glimpse of their quarry, the two
Deceivers. That was ancient news.
Soulcatcher abandoned the hunt immediately. It would not be
difficult to get close to the Deceivers again.
She learned nothing more before nightfall—except that her crows
were extremely unsettled, getting more and more nervous, less and
less tractable and increasingly inclined to jump at shadows. They
could not make clear the nature of their malaise because they did
not understand it themselves.
That began to grow clearer as the twilight gathered. Messengers
interrupted Soulcatcher’s meditations to inform her that
several of the murder had fallen prey to a sudden illness.
“Show me.”
She made no effort to disguise herself as she followed her birds
to the nearest feathered corpse. She picked it up, rolled it
carefully in her gloved hands.
It was obvious what had killed the crow. Not illness but a
killer shadow. No cadaver looked like one did after a shadow
finished with it. But that could not be. It was still light out.
Her tame shadows were all in hiding and there were no rogue shadows
around anymore. Nor would wild shadows have wasted themselves on a
crow when there was human game in the vicinity. She should have
heard Narayan Singh and that wretched niece of hers screaming long
before any crow . . . There had been no sound
from the bird whatsoever. Nor had there been from any of a half
dozen others the murder knew to be gone. The survivors had plenty
to say. Including stating plainly that they were not about to stray
away from her protection.
“How can I fight this if I don’t know what it is? If
you won’t find out for me?”
The crows would not be bullied or cajoled. They were geniuses
for birds. Which meant they were just bright enough to have noticed
that every one of the dead had been completely alone when evil had
befallen them.
Soulcatcher cursed them, then calmed herself and convinced the
most valiant birds that they had to, therefore, do their scouting
in threes and fours until darkness closed in completely. At that
point she would have bats and owls and her own shadows available to
take over.
Darkness came. As the Deceivers correctly observe, the darkness
always comes.
With nightfall came a silent but horribly vicious warfare with
Soulcatcher poised at the eye of the storm.
Initially she had to hold on desperately against unknown
assailants until her own shadows could bring in enough swift
reinforcements. Then, spending shadows profligately, she took the
offensive. And when dawn came, and she was almost without
supernatural allies because of the cost of the struggle, she gave
way to exhaustion, having gained a knowledge of a portion of the
truth.
They were back. The Black Company were, with new formations, new
allies, new sorceries, and still without a dram of mercy in their
hearts. These were not the Company she had known in younger years
but they were the spiritual children of the cold killers of the
olden days. No matter what you tried, it seemed, you could kill
only men. The ideal lived on.
Ha! An end to the boredom of empire stood at hand.
Bravado and pretense did not lessen the inexplicable fear. They
had fled onto the plain. And now they were back. That had to mean
much more. She needed to interrogate shadows who had existed on the
glittering stone during those silent years. When there was time.
Before she did anything else she had to do what she always did so
well: survive.
She was out here hundreds of miles from any support. She was
besieged by things that would not yield to her will or sorcery and
which she could detect, it seemed, only through her own shadows or
when one of them attacked her directly. They were as fierce as
shadows but strange. They were more otherworldly than her spirit
slaves and seemed possessed of a higher order of intelligence.
Each one she extinguished personally infected her with both a
vast sorrow and with the certainty that she was battling only the
most feeble of their kind. Always there was a powerful presentiment
of demons or demigods to come.
What she could not comprehend was why all this frightened her
so. There was nothing here more deadly or threatening or bizarre
than a thousand perils she had faced before. Nothing here matched
the sheer dark menace of the Dominator in his time.
There were infrequent moments when she still longed for those
dark and ancient times. The Dominator had taken her and all her
sisters, had made one of them his wife and another his
lover . . .
He had been a strong, hard, cruel man, the Dominator. His empire
had been one of cruelty and steel. And Soulcatcher had revelled in
its pomp and dark glory. And would never forgive her rival, her
last surviving sister, for having brought all that to an end. Blame
the death of the Dominator on the White Rose if you wanted.
Soulcatcher knew the truth. The Dominator never would have gone
down if his whining virgin of a wife had not helped his destruction
along.
And who had fought and conspired so hard after their
resurrection to keep the Dominator in the ground? His loving wife,
that was who!
She would be back. She would be out there somewhere, wherever
the Black Company had been hiding. She was not here yet but she
would be soon. Having been buried alive again would be no
impediment to the inevitable, that grim moment when they would
settle their differences face-to-face.
Soulcatcher could will herself blind in some quarters, despite
centuries of cynical experience. She would not see that fortune
could be just as erratic and insane as she was.
Soulcatcher’s powers of recuperation were tremendous.
After a few hours of rest she rose and started walking northward,
her stride long and confident. Tonight she would gather an army of
her own shadows around her. Never again would she be as threatened
as she had been the night before.
So she told herself.
By late afternoon her confidence was as high as ever it had been
and fragments of her mind were already peeping past today’s
crisis to scout out what might be done to sculpt the future.
Soulcatcher had long been intimate with the knowledge that
horrible things could and did happen to her but always she had
enjoyed the certainty that she would come through everything
alive.