I found Murgen
waiting when I got home to dreamland.
“You seem surprised. I
told you I’d see you on the plain.”
“You did. But I don’t need it to be right now. Right
now I need to sleep.”
“You are. You’ll wake up as refreshed as if you
hadn’t dreamed at all.”
“I don’t want to be drifting around loose from my
body, either.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can control it?”
“You can. Just decide not to do it. It’s pretty
basic. Most people manage it instinctively. Ask around tomorrow.
See how many of these people even recall being loose from their
flesh.”
“It’s something everybody does?”
“Up here. It’s something everybody can do. If they
want. Most don’t want it so emphatically that they
don’t even recognize that the opportunity is there. Which
doesn’t matter. It’s not why I’m here.”
“It matters a bunch to me. That stuff is scary. I’m
just a simple low-class city brat—”
“Cancel the old whine-and-toe shuffle, Sleepy.
You’re wasting time. I probably know as much about you as you
know about yourself. There’re things you need to
know.”
“I’m listening.”
“Till now you’ve dealt with the plain well enough by
letting the Annals guide you. Stick with the rules you’ve
already made and you won’t have any trouble. Don’t
dawdle. You didn’t bring enough water—even if you slaughter
your animals as you go, the way you planned. There’s ice here
that you can melt but if you waste time getting here, you’ll
end up having to kill more animals than you want. And take good
care of them while they’re still alive. Don’t let them
get so thirsty they start charging around looking for water and go
busting through your protection. That’ll heal itself but it
does take time. The shadows won’t give you time.”
“Then we’re safe from the break that killed Sindawe
and some of the others?”
“Yes. You’ll find Bucket tomorrow. I warn you now so
you’ll have time to prepare yourself.”
I was prepared already. I had been prepared for a long time.
Actually seeing Bucket dead would be difficult but I would get past
it. “Tell me what I should do now that I’m
here.”
“You’re doing it. Just don’t do it
slowly.”
“Should I split the group? Send a strike force
forward?”
“That wouldn’t be wise. You wouldn’t be able
to manage whichever group you weren’t with. And that’ll
be the one where somebody screws up and gets us all
killed.”
“You, too?”
“There’s nobody else who can get me out if you fail.
There isn’t even anyone else out there who knows that
we’re alive.”
“The Daughter of Night and Narayan Singh know.
Probably.” They had overheard enough to figure it out,
certainly.
“Which means Soulcatcher does too, now. But you know, I
don’t really see those people developing an interest in
raising the dead. Not to mention that now the Shadowgate can only
be opened from this side. This is the last cast of the dice,
Sleepy. And it’s for everything.”
I did not remind Murgen that Narayan Singh and his ward had a
very strong interest in resurrecting someone who was practically
his grave-mate. He was right about the Shadowgate, assuming there
were no more Keys outside. “How did I know you were going to
say something like that?”
He gave me the smile that probably won Sahra’s heart.
I told him, “You should go see Sahra.”
“I already have. That’s why I was so late getting
around to you.”
“What can I say? Oh. I saw those
creatures . . . the . . . ”
I did not know what they were called, so I tried to describe
them.
“The Washane, the Washene and the Washone, collectively
referred to as the Nef. They’re dreamwalkers, too.”
“Too?”
“I’m a dreamwalker. You can see me but only with
your mind’s eye. In some way that you remember me. The Nef
are out here all the time. They may be trapped, or they may no
longer have bodies to go back to. I’ve never been able to
tell. They want to communicate so badly because they want something
badly but don’t seem capable of learning how. They’re
from one of the other worlds. If they no longer have bodies they
may even be skinwalkers, so be very careful around them.”
“The . . . duh . . . what are you
blathering about?”
“Oh. We haven’t talked about any of that yet, have
we?”
“Any of what?”
“I really thought you’d figure most of it out by
reading between the lines. The Companies had to come from somewhere
and it would be hard to scratch out a living on a tabletop of bare
stone. So they must have come from somewhere else. Somewhere very
else, since the plain isn’t so big you can’t walk
around it and discover that there’s nowhere for armies to
come from. The land just gets colder and more
inhospitable.”
“I’m real thick, boss. You should’ve drawn me
some pictures.”
“I wasn’t keen on having anyone outside know. I
didn’t want anybody getting scared to come get me.”
“You’re my brother.”
He ignored me. “I haven’t slept here, so I have a
lot of time on my hands. I’ve used some of it exploring.
There are sixteen Shadowgates, Sleepy. And fifteen of them open
onto places that aren’t our world. Or did at one time. Most
of them are dead now and in my state, I can’t see what used
to be on the other side without actually going out there. And
I don’t have the eggs to do that, because I like my own
world just fine and I don’t want to take a chance of getting
trapped any farther away from it than I already am.
“Only four of the gates are still alive. And the one to
our world is so badly hurt that it probably won’t last many
generations more.”
I was lost. Completely. I was prepared for none of this. And yet
he was right when he hinted that there were bells I should have
heard ringing. “What does all that have to do with Kina? It
isn’t in her legend anywhere. In fact, what does it even have
to do with us? It’s not in our legend anywhere.”
“Yes it is, Sleepy. The truth is just so old that time has
totally distorted it. Examine Gunni mythology. There’s a lot
there about other planes, other realms of reality, different
heavens and whatnot. Those stories go way back before the coming of
the Free Companies, a thousand years or more. Near as I’ve
been able to find out, when the first Free Company came off the
plain, almost six hundred years ago, that event marked the first
time our Shadowgate had been used in at least eight centuries.
That’s a lot of time for truth to mutate.”
“Whoa. Whoa. You’re starting to imply things I
can’t quite get my mind around.”
“You’d better open it up and spread it out wide,
Sleepy, because there’s a whole lot more. And I doubt
I’ve discovered even a tenth of it.”
I have a dark, cynical, untrusting side that at times even
doubts the motives of my closest friends. “Why is it that
none of this ever got mentioned until now? This isn’t fresh
news to you, is it?”
“No. It isn’t. But I told you, I want out of here.
Badly. I chose not to pass on any information that might handicap
you.”
“Handicap me? What the heck are you talking
about?”
“Kina and the Captured aren’t the only things
sleeping up here. There’re also a lot of truths that would
shake the foundations of our world. Truths I have no trouble
imagining wholesale slaughters and holy wars arising to suppress.
Truths I have no trouble seeing getting my family and the Company
obliterated, they’re so threatening.”
“I’m trying to open my mind but I’m having
trouble. I feel like I’m about to plunge into an
abyss.”
“Just hang on. I’ve been out here forever and I
still have trouble with it. I think the way to start is, I should
outline the history of the plain.”
“Yes. Why don’t you do that? That might be
interesting.”
“You still have that edge on your tongue, don’t you?
Maybe Swan is right and what you really need is a
good . . . all right. All right. Listen
closely. The plain was created so far back in antiquity that nobody
on any of the worlds has any idea who built it, how, or why, though
you have to believe that it was meant to be a pathway between the
worlds.”
“Why the shadows and standing stones and—”
“I can’t tell you anything if I’m not the one
doing the talking.”
“Sorry.”
“In the beginning there was the plain. Just the plain,
with its network of roads that have to be walked a certain way to
get to other worlds. For example, every traveler has to enter the
great circle at the center of the plain before he can leave the
plain again. Back then there were no shadows, no Shadowgates, no
standing stones, no great fortress inside the great circle, no
caverns beneath the stone, no sleeping gods, no Captured, no Books
of the Dead. There was nothing but the plain. The crossroads of
worlds. Or possibly of time. One rogue school of thought insists
the gates all open into the same world but at times which are
separated by tens of thousands of years.
“At some time still in unimaginable antiquity, human
nature asserted itself and would-be conquerers began to charge back
and forth across the plain. During a period of exhaustion the wise
men of a dozen worlds combined to make the first modifications to
the plain. They built a fortress in the great circle and garrisoned
it with a race of created immortal guardians whose task it would be
to prevent armies from passing from world to world.
“Then we pass to the edge of proto-history, the age now
recalled poorly as it is distorted in Gunni myth.
“Those driven to conquer will try to do so, whatever the
obstacles. Kina apparently started out as your run-of-the-mill,
dark-lord type that arises every few centuries, as Lady’s
first husband was, only she was another in a line and association
of many such, some of whom are now recalled as gods because of the
impact they had on their times. The whole cabal decided to beef
Kina up until she could overcome the ‘demons’ on the
plain. In the process she did become what, for want of a better
descriptive, we would have to call a god. And she behaved every bit
as badly as her associates should have expected, with results more
or less like those recalled in the mythology. Once Kina was asleep,
her associates opened the maze of caverns under the plain and
buried her way down deep somewhere. Then they created Shivetya, the
Steadfast Guardian, to keep watch. Or they conscripted a surviving
demon of the same name and strengthened him and bound him to do the
job, if you prefer a less common version of the story. Then,
apparently too exhausted to recover their greatness, they faded
away. So Kina came out on top even if she ended up
imprisoned.”
“Why didn’t they just kill her? That’s
something I’ve never understood about these squabbles amongst
the gods. There’s only one version of the Kina myth where her
enemies do anything but just tuck her in. And in that one, even
after she’s all chopped up and scattered around, they leave
the pieces alive and trying to get back together.”
“My guess would be she had some kind of deadman spell that
entwined the fates of the other gods with her own. Those people
wouldn’t have trusted one another for a second. All of them
would have had some protective mechanism like Longshadow used when
he tied his fate into the well-being of the Shadowgate.”
“But the Shadowgate doesn’t depend on his health
anymore. Not as long as he stays inside.”
“I was just posing an example, Sleepy. Let’s stick
to the history of the plain. What followed Kina’s downfall
isn’t documented at all, but more conquerers came and went
and further efforts were made to dissuade them while keeping the
plain open for commerce. The gates and Keys were created. One world
gathered its sorcerers and had them steal the souls of millions of
prisoners of war, creating the shadows and endowing them with a
bitter hatred of everything living. They meant to close down the
plain entirely. Which naturally led some other race to create the
shields that protect the circles and roads. Nobody knows for sure
how or when the standing stones began to appear but they’re
the most recent addition to the plain, probably put out by the
precursors of the multiple-worlds’ religious movement that
produced the Free Companies. I understand that the stones
aren’t quarried, they’re created things. They’re
immune to the shadows and indifferent to the protective shields but
they’re attuned to the various Keys carried away during the
Free Companies’ age.”
“It’s too much to grasp. It’ll take a long
time to digest. Kina is real, though?”
“Absolutely. Buried right down here under me somewhere.
I’ve never been tempted to go look for her. I wouldn’t
want to accidentally cut her loose. I don’t know how I could
manage that but I definitely don’t want to find out the hard
way.”
“What about Rhaydreynak and the Books of the Dead? Where
do they fit?” Rhaydreynak’s war on the cult of Kina
antedated the appearance of the Free Companies by several centuries
supposedly, yet there were scary similarities suggesting shared
origins.
“The rise of the Free Companies is actually one of the
least well known despite its being closest in time. There were many
Companies over several hundred years. They came from several
different worlds and went off into several more, representing
almost as many different sects of Kina worshippers. Most seem to
have been sent out to explore, not conquer or to serve as
mercenaries or even to bring on the Year of the Skulls. What their
true mission seems to have been was to determine which world should
be awarded the honor of being sacrificed in order to bring on the
Year of the Skulls.”
“Then a bunch of worlds decided to gang up on
ours?”
“Kina spanned many worlds. Her deviltry was almost
universal, apparently.”
“And we lost the toss and got to bury her in
ours?”
“You’re not in our world anymore, Sleepy.
This’s the in-between. Where you are depends on what gate you
walk out. And these days you have only one choice. Its Shadowgate
lies straight ahead, on the far side of the plain. It’s as if
the plain itself is closing down the alternate ways.”
“I don’t get it. Why would it do that? And
how?”
“Sometimes its seems like the plain itself is alive,
Sleepy. Or at least that it can think.”
“Is it where we came from? Is it where the Captain spent
most of his life trying to go?”
“No. The Company can’t go back to Khatovar. Croaker
will never reach the promised land. That Shadowgate is dead. The
world where you’re headed is very much like our own. To other
worlds it’s known by a name that translates into Taglian
somewhat vaguely as The Land of Unknown Shadows.”
Without thinking I responded, “All Evil Dies There an
Endless Death.”
“What?” Startled. “Yes. How did you know? They
were the people who committed the murders that produced the
shadows.”
“I heard it somewhere. From a Nyueng Bao.”
“Yes. Nyueng Bao De Duang. In current Nyueng Bao usage
that means something like ‘The Chosen Children’
colloquially and nothing whatsoever that’s sensible
literally. In the days when their forebears were sent out from The
Land of Unknown Shadows it meant, roughly, ‘the Children of
the Dead.’“
“You’ve been busy,” I observed.
“Hardly, considering how long I’ve been trapped
here.
Try it for a decade, Sleepy. You won’t have to put up with
any of the distractions you complain about when you aren’t
getting everything you want to do done.”
“No kidding? Seems to me I’m all of a sudden having
to work even while I’m sleeping.”
“Not for long. Whoever has control of that mist-making
thing is trying to get me to answer him. Why don’t you sneak
around there and smash that sucker so I don’t have to get
dragged into it every time somebody wants my view on how to crack a
walnut or whatever else the crisis of the moment happens to
be.”
“Not hardly, former boss. I’m carrying a whole bag
of nuts myself.”
“You would—” Murgen departed as though yanked
away.
I could have sworn I heard the laughter of an eavesdropping
white crow.
I found Murgen
waiting when I got home to dreamland.
“You seem surprised. I
told you I’d see you on the plain.”
“You did. But I don’t need it to be right now. Right
now I need to sleep.”
“You are. You’ll wake up as refreshed as if you
hadn’t dreamed at all.”
“I don’t want to be drifting around loose from my
body, either.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can control it?”
“You can. Just decide not to do it. It’s pretty
basic. Most people manage it instinctively. Ask around tomorrow.
See how many of these people even recall being loose from their
flesh.”
“It’s something everybody does?”
“Up here. It’s something everybody can do. If they
want. Most don’t want it so emphatically that they
don’t even recognize that the opportunity is there. Which
doesn’t matter. It’s not why I’m here.”
“It matters a bunch to me. That stuff is scary. I’m
just a simple low-class city brat—”
“Cancel the old whine-and-toe shuffle, Sleepy.
You’re wasting time. I probably know as much about you as you
know about yourself. There’re things you need to
know.”
“I’m listening.”
“Till now you’ve dealt with the plain well enough by
letting the Annals guide you. Stick with the rules you’ve
already made and you won’t have any trouble. Don’t
dawdle. You didn’t bring enough water—even if you slaughter
your animals as you go, the way you planned. There’s ice here
that you can melt but if you waste time getting here, you’ll
end up having to kill more animals than you want. And take good
care of them while they’re still alive. Don’t let them
get so thirsty they start charging around looking for water and go
busting through your protection. That’ll heal itself but it
does take time. The shadows won’t give you time.”
“Then we’re safe from the break that killed Sindawe
and some of the others?”
“Yes. You’ll find Bucket tomorrow. I warn you now so
you’ll have time to prepare yourself.”
I was prepared already. I had been prepared for a long time.
Actually seeing Bucket dead would be difficult but I would get past
it. “Tell me what I should do now that I’m
here.”
“You’re doing it. Just don’t do it
slowly.”
“Should I split the group? Send a strike force
forward?”
“That wouldn’t be wise. You wouldn’t be able
to manage whichever group you weren’t with. And that’ll
be the one where somebody screws up and gets us all
killed.”
“You, too?”
“There’s nobody else who can get me out if you fail.
There isn’t even anyone else out there who knows that
we’re alive.”
“The Daughter of Night and Narayan Singh know.
Probably.” They had overheard enough to figure it out,
certainly.
“Which means Soulcatcher does too, now. But you know, I
don’t really see those people developing an interest in
raising the dead. Not to mention that now the Shadowgate can only
be opened from this side. This is the last cast of the dice,
Sleepy. And it’s for everything.”
I did not remind Murgen that Narayan Singh and his ward had a
very strong interest in resurrecting someone who was practically
his grave-mate. He was right about the Shadowgate, assuming there
were no more Keys outside. “How did I know you were going to
say something like that?”
He gave me the smile that probably won Sahra’s heart.
I told him, “You should go see Sahra.”
“I already have. That’s why I was so late getting
around to you.”
“What can I say? Oh. I saw those
creatures . . . the . . . ”
I did not know what they were called, so I tried to describe
them.
“The Washane, the Washene and the Washone, collectively
referred to as the Nef. They’re dreamwalkers, too.”
“Too?”
“I’m a dreamwalker. You can see me but only with
your mind’s eye. In some way that you remember me. The Nef
are out here all the time. They may be trapped, or they may no
longer have bodies to go back to. I’ve never been able to
tell. They want to communicate so badly because they want something
badly but don’t seem capable of learning how. They’re
from one of the other worlds. If they no longer have bodies they
may even be skinwalkers, so be very careful around them.”
“The . . . duh . . . what are you
blathering about?”
“Oh. We haven’t talked about any of that yet, have
we?”
“Any of what?”
“I really thought you’d figure most of it out by
reading between the lines. The Companies had to come from somewhere
and it would be hard to scratch out a living on a tabletop of bare
stone. So they must have come from somewhere else. Somewhere very
else, since the plain isn’t so big you can’t walk
around it and discover that there’s nowhere for armies to
come from. The land just gets colder and more
inhospitable.”
“I’m real thick, boss. You should’ve drawn me
some pictures.”
“I wasn’t keen on having anyone outside know. I
didn’t want anybody getting scared to come get me.”
“You’re my brother.”
He ignored me. “I haven’t slept here, so I have a
lot of time on my hands. I’ve used some of it exploring.
There are sixteen Shadowgates, Sleepy. And fifteen of them open
onto places that aren’t our world. Or did at one time. Most
of them are dead now and in my state, I can’t see what used
to be on the other side without actually going out there. And
I don’t have the eggs to do that, because I like my own
world just fine and I don’t want to take a chance of getting
trapped any farther away from it than I already am.
“Only four of the gates are still alive. And the one to
our world is so badly hurt that it probably won’t last many
generations more.”
I was lost. Completely. I was prepared for none of this. And yet
he was right when he hinted that there were bells I should have
heard ringing. “What does all that have to do with Kina? It
isn’t in her legend anywhere. In fact, what does it even have
to do with us? It’s not in our legend anywhere.”
“Yes it is, Sleepy. The truth is just so old that time has
totally distorted it. Examine Gunni mythology. There’s a lot
there about other planes, other realms of reality, different
heavens and whatnot. Those stories go way back before the coming of
the Free Companies, a thousand years or more. Near as I’ve
been able to find out, when the first Free Company came off the
plain, almost six hundred years ago, that event marked the first
time our Shadowgate had been used in at least eight centuries.
That’s a lot of time for truth to mutate.”
“Whoa. Whoa. You’re starting to imply things I
can’t quite get my mind around.”
“You’d better open it up and spread it out wide,
Sleepy, because there’s a whole lot more. And I doubt
I’ve discovered even a tenth of it.”
I have a dark, cynical, untrusting side that at times even
doubts the motives of my closest friends. “Why is it that
none of this ever got mentioned until now? This isn’t fresh
news to you, is it?”
“No. It isn’t. But I told you, I want out of here.
Badly. I chose not to pass on any information that might handicap
you.”
“Handicap me? What the heck are you talking
about?”
“Kina and the Captured aren’t the only things
sleeping up here. There’re also a lot of truths that would
shake the foundations of our world. Truths I have no trouble
imagining wholesale slaughters and holy wars arising to suppress.
Truths I have no trouble seeing getting my family and the Company
obliterated, they’re so threatening.”
“I’m trying to open my mind but I’m having
trouble. I feel like I’m about to plunge into an
abyss.”
“Just hang on. I’ve been out here forever and I
still have trouble with it. I think the way to start is, I should
outline the history of the plain.”
“Yes. Why don’t you do that? That might be
interesting.”
“You still have that edge on your tongue, don’t you?
Maybe Swan is right and what you really need is a
good . . . all right. All right. Listen
closely. The plain was created so far back in antiquity that nobody
on any of the worlds has any idea who built it, how, or why, though
you have to believe that it was meant to be a pathway between the
worlds.”
“Why the shadows and standing stones and—”
“I can’t tell you anything if I’m not the one
doing the talking.”
“Sorry.”
“In the beginning there was the plain. Just the plain,
with its network of roads that have to be walked a certain way to
get to other worlds. For example, every traveler has to enter the
great circle at the center of the plain before he can leave the
plain again. Back then there were no shadows, no Shadowgates, no
standing stones, no great fortress inside the great circle, no
caverns beneath the stone, no sleeping gods, no Captured, no Books
of the Dead. There was nothing but the plain. The crossroads of
worlds. Or possibly of time. One rogue school of thought insists
the gates all open into the same world but at times which are
separated by tens of thousands of years.
“At some time still in unimaginable antiquity, human
nature asserted itself and would-be conquerers began to charge back
and forth across the plain. During a period of exhaustion the wise
men of a dozen worlds combined to make the first modifications to
the plain. They built a fortress in the great circle and garrisoned
it with a race of created immortal guardians whose task it would be
to prevent armies from passing from world to world.
“Then we pass to the edge of proto-history, the age now
recalled poorly as it is distorted in Gunni myth.
“Those driven to conquer will try to do so, whatever the
obstacles. Kina apparently started out as your run-of-the-mill,
dark-lord type that arises every few centuries, as Lady’s
first husband was, only she was another in a line and association
of many such, some of whom are now recalled as gods because of the
impact they had on their times. The whole cabal decided to beef
Kina up until she could overcome the ‘demons’ on the
plain. In the process she did become what, for want of a better
descriptive, we would have to call a god. And she behaved every bit
as badly as her associates should have expected, with results more
or less like those recalled in the mythology. Once Kina was asleep,
her associates opened the maze of caverns under the plain and
buried her way down deep somewhere. Then they created Shivetya, the
Steadfast Guardian, to keep watch. Or they conscripted a surviving
demon of the same name and strengthened him and bound him to do the
job, if you prefer a less common version of the story. Then,
apparently too exhausted to recover their greatness, they faded
away. So Kina came out on top even if she ended up
imprisoned.”
“Why didn’t they just kill her? That’s
something I’ve never understood about these squabbles amongst
the gods. There’s only one version of the Kina myth where her
enemies do anything but just tuck her in. And in that one, even
after she’s all chopped up and scattered around, they leave
the pieces alive and trying to get back together.”
“My guess would be she had some kind of deadman spell that
entwined the fates of the other gods with her own. Those people
wouldn’t have trusted one another for a second. All of them
would have had some protective mechanism like Longshadow used when
he tied his fate into the well-being of the Shadowgate.”
“But the Shadowgate doesn’t depend on his health
anymore. Not as long as he stays inside.”
“I was just posing an example, Sleepy. Let’s stick
to the history of the plain. What followed Kina’s downfall
isn’t documented at all, but more conquerers came and went
and further efforts were made to dissuade them while keeping the
plain open for commerce. The gates and Keys were created. One world
gathered its sorcerers and had them steal the souls of millions of
prisoners of war, creating the shadows and endowing them with a
bitter hatred of everything living. They meant to close down the
plain entirely. Which naturally led some other race to create the
shields that protect the circles and roads. Nobody knows for sure
how or when the standing stones began to appear but they’re
the most recent addition to the plain, probably put out by the
precursors of the multiple-worlds’ religious movement that
produced the Free Companies. I understand that the stones
aren’t quarried, they’re created things. They’re
immune to the shadows and indifferent to the protective shields but
they’re attuned to the various Keys carried away during the
Free Companies’ age.”
“It’s too much to grasp. It’ll take a long
time to digest. Kina is real, though?”
“Absolutely. Buried right down here under me somewhere.
I’ve never been tempted to go look for her. I wouldn’t
want to accidentally cut her loose. I don’t know how I could
manage that but I definitely don’t want to find out the hard
way.”
“What about Rhaydreynak and the Books of the Dead? Where
do they fit?” Rhaydreynak’s war on the cult of Kina
antedated the appearance of the Free Companies by several centuries
supposedly, yet there were scary similarities suggesting shared
origins.
“The rise of the Free Companies is actually one of the
least well known despite its being closest in time. There were many
Companies over several hundred years. They came from several
different worlds and went off into several more, representing
almost as many different sects of Kina worshippers. Most seem to
have been sent out to explore, not conquer or to serve as
mercenaries or even to bring on the Year of the Skulls. What their
true mission seems to have been was to determine which world should
be awarded the honor of being sacrificed in order to bring on the
Year of the Skulls.”
“Then a bunch of worlds decided to gang up on
ours?”
“Kina spanned many worlds. Her deviltry was almost
universal, apparently.”
“And we lost the toss and got to bury her in
ours?”
“You’re not in our world anymore, Sleepy.
This’s the in-between. Where you are depends on what gate you
walk out. And these days you have only one choice. Its Shadowgate
lies straight ahead, on the far side of the plain. It’s as if
the plain itself is closing down the alternate ways.”
“I don’t get it. Why would it do that? And
how?”
“Sometimes its seems like the plain itself is alive,
Sleepy. Or at least that it can think.”
“Is it where we came from? Is it where the Captain spent
most of his life trying to go?”
“No. The Company can’t go back to Khatovar. Croaker
will never reach the promised land. That Shadowgate is dead. The
world where you’re headed is very much like our own. To other
worlds it’s known by a name that translates into Taglian
somewhat vaguely as The Land of Unknown Shadows.”
Without thinking I responded, “All Evil Dies There an
Endless Death.”
“What?” Startled. “Yes. How did you know? They
were the people who committed the murders that produced the
shadows.”
“I heard it somewhere. From a Nyueng Bao.”
“Yes. Nyueng Bao De Duang. In current Nyueng Bao usage
that means something like ‘The Chosen Children’
colloquially and nothing whatsoever that’s sensible
literally. In the days when their forebears were sent out from The
Land of Unknown Shadows it meant, roughly, ‘the Children of
the Dead.’“
“You’ve been busy,” I observed.
“Hardly, considering how long I’ve been trapped
here.
Try it for a decade, Sleepy. You won’t have to put up with
any of the distractions you complain about when you aren’t
getting everything you want to do done.”
“No kidding? Seems to me I’m all of a sudden having
to work even while I’m sleeping.”
“Not for long. Whoever has control of that mist-making
thing is trying to get me to answer him. Why don’t you sneak
around there and smash that sucker so I don’t have to get
dragged into it every time somebody wants my view on how to crack a
walnut or whatever else the crisis of the moment happens to
be.”
“Not hardly, former boss. I’m carrying a whole bag
of nuts myself.”
“You would—” Murgen departed as though yanked
away.
I could have sworn I heard the laughter of an eavesdropping
white crow.