by Glen Cook
Well. So Catcher knew what she was doing when she played Sleepy as a slim girl pretending to be a guy. Interesting. Sleepy did a great job fooling everybody.
I needed to have a talk with Bucket. He had to know something, somehow.
I caught a whiff of Kina. She was close and getting closer.
Sleepy jumped up, yanked up her pants, looked around wildly. She sensed the goddess, too. She concentrated visibly, turned slowly, tried to identify the bearing of the source of her discomfort. But the presence faded fast. Kina had no more interest here.
Sleepy stopped turning when she faced me. She jumped. Her chin thrust forward slightly the way people do sometimes when they see something unexpected. She squinted. “Murgen? Are you a ghost or something? Are you dead?”
I tried saying no, but she could not hear me so I shook my head.
“So the rumors were true. You really can leave your body.”
I nodded, too amazed to wonder how the kid could take it so calmly. One thing people can always do is surprise you.
If Sleepy could see me that meant I could communicate over a distance. Even if he could not hear me. As long as he remembered the deaf and dumb sign he was supposed to have learned. But, as I recalled, he had had trouble catching on... She, Murgen. She.
I had not gotten used to the idea the first time it came around.
I started using finger speech without the slightest idea of what Sleepy could follow. I might be just some shimmering blob of ectoplasm that smelled like Murgen.
No point. As I started Uncle Doj arrived, drawn by Sleepy’s voice. His movements were a painful shuffle. “Be calm, young one,” he said. “You remember me. I am of the Standardbearer’s family. I have been looking for you.” Doj was about as alert as any human being could be. He should have been able to hear me breathing. “You called out to the Standardbearer. Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I’m trapped. A man came. He took the child who was here with me. I was afraid. The Standardbearer is my friend and mentor.”
Glib, that kid. And thoroughly loaded up with a healthy dose of Company suspicion.
And I was thoroughly loaded up with a healthy burden of news they needed out on the plain. I had to go. Sleepy would be all right with Doj. I made the sign for horse. After three tries Sleepy nodded. I hoped that was a response.
Doj asked, “You were a captive of she who flies the crows?” He said that last part in Nyueng Bao, as though it was a name like the Thousand Voices, but Sleepy understood anyway. Sharp kid. Must have picked it up following me around.
“Yes.”
“Did she leave anything behind? Where did she hide when she was here?” Doj cut Sleepy loose but it was obvious Sleepy’s liberty was not his real concern. His behavior confirmed my notion that there had been a clash between Catcher and the Nyueng Bao.
I began to drift away. Sleepy said, “There’s a cave. Over there. But we weren’t here very long.” She whistled a peculiar four note melody. My horse snorted in reply. He could not come, of course, because he was a captive himself.
I headed for the plain.
106
Kina was looking for me. Or for something. Whatever direction I went I sensed her before long, though she never closed in. But if I was not her object, what was?
I fought off the urge to run to Sarie, telling myself to wait the demon out. But the logical side of my mind, logically, told me that Kina had been waiting for ages. She would not get impatient in one night.
But why would she want to find me?
I needed to get back to my flesh. The goddess was less a terror when I was not amongst the ghosts.
I wished Thai Dei would waken me. When somebody did that it seemed my spirit did not have to traverse the distance between.
I sneaked around to the camp in front of the Shadowgate. Gods, what squalor! Successful conquerers ought to live better.
One-Eye was stirring. So was Gota. Another terrible breakfast was about to be committed.
It was light out. I was still ghostwalking. I had not done so during daylight since we lost Smoke. I had begun to think that I could not do it during the day.
Got to get back up there, I thought. They need to know. They would not wait around for me. They would not carry me anywhere, either. I was no prisoner.
One-Eye seemed to sense something. He became nervous, snippy. Which was not much of a change, really. Then Goblin sat up and threatened to turn One-Eye into a lizard if he did not quit his bitching. Goblin had not aged well during the campaign and One-Eye did not fail to mention that fact, probably for the thousandth time. The bickering started. Mother Gota was not shy about offering an occasional opinion of her own. One-Eye found time amidst his endless verbal feud to cuss the rest of us for not having hung around till he turned up again before we went up the mountain. “They had to know I’d be back. They know I couldn’t stay away. They went just to spite me. It’s that fucking woman. Or the kid. They think they’re punishing me. They got another think coming. I’m tempted just to walk out on them. That’d show them. They’d miss me if I was gone.”
That was One-Eye all wrapped up in one quintessential wad of contradictory nonsense.
His heart would have been broken had he known just how little he had been missed by most of us. Of course, we had not run into many situations where having him around might have been useful. One-Eye and his pal Goblin was not much use during peacetime.
Suddenly, I realized we were surrounded by the stench of Kina. It had grown so slowly it had not intruded on my awareness. I squirted through the Shadowgate moaning because I might have missed learning something interesting. When One-Eye got to running his mouth he seldom shut up till he emptied his entire head.
I streaked down the southward road as fast as I could. Which did not seem very swift by daylight. Maybe I was slower with the sun shining. In fact, as the sun rose higher I grew more sluggish. And more easily distracted.
I noticed that every circle showed hints of gates for east and west roads. I became entangled in the puzzle of why they should exist, of what sort of tangle that would make of the face of the plain. If there was only one gate from outside and only one destination to be sought... The stones? The pillars. Of course.
The side roads could be used to reach individual stones. Though why anyone would want to do so remained a mystery.
It struck me, suddenly, that I had been in the same place a long time, wandering through the wilderness of my own thoughts.
I sat up. I looked around wildly. “Where is Narayan Singh?” I demanded. I was alone except for Thai Dei. There was no evidence the circle had been visited by anyone else. Where was all the trash?
“You woke up,” Thai Dei said. People really sound stupid when they are caught off guard and state the obvious.
“Where is everybody?”
“You would not wake up. They left without you.” Which meant without him. “The Liberator said he would collect you on the way back. He seemed troubled.”
“I don’t blame him. I’m troubled. Help me up here.”
My knees were wobbly. That did not last, though.
“Food?” I croaked. Walking the ghostworld alone was less demanding than doing it with Smoke but still it drained me.
“They took everything. Almost. I was able to steal a small amount.”
His small amount was actually a fair amount by Nyueng Bao standards. Those people thrived on two grains of rice and a rotten fishhead a day. He said, “They were generous with water.” He held up two canteens, explained, “It rained while you were sleeping.”
“What?” I muttered around a mouthful. “When?” I had not been conscious of the weather where I was.
“It rained. The water seemed to run into the circle and pool here. Without harming the protective barriers. Will we wait here?” He sounded hopeful.
“No. I need to see the Captain right away.”
Thai Dei grunted one of his expressive grunts. He found me lacking in wisdom.
“They appear to be handing things from man to man.”
They were, indeed. We saw that when we got closer. One man stood astride something. He accepted an unhappy goat from a man nearer us on the road and passed it to a man beyond him. That goat appeared to be the last thing needing to be passed over. The man on our side hopped across while the fellow on the far side helped the man standing astraddle.
I hollered and waved. Somebody hollered and waved back but nobody waited up.
“Fucker is big,” I said, meaning the fortress. Now we were close it seemed to swell with every step. It was built of a blackish basaltic stone darker than the surrounding plain. It was in a bad state of repair. “It wasn’t immune to the earthquakes.”
Thai Dei grunted. He was nervous again.
“There’s what they were crossing.” It was a crack in the plain. It extended both directions as far as I could see. Nowhere did it appear to be very wide though it was narrowest where our guys had crossed. It was about three feet wide there. They had even taken the carts and wagons over.
Farther away part of the fortress wall had collapsed and poured into the gap. The stone looked freshly fallen so I presumed this was the collapse we had witnessed. There were a couple of older falls evident, too. At a guess I would say the oldest occurred the day we felt the quake all the way off in Taglios.
Thai Dei and I were too old to run except when we had to. But we wasted no time. We hopped the crack before the goat guys moved out of sight around the curve of the wall. One was Sparkle, another Wheezer. Wheezer would be getting a lot of shit details for a while.
I huffed and puffed and hurried on. My pack seemed to be putting on weight. I panted, “It feel like we’ve gained some altitude since we’ve been up here?”
Thai Dei offered an affirmative grunt. He said nothing else. He was puffing himself.
I looked back. It did seem I could see more plain from here than I had seen from back up the road.
Thai Dei wondered, “Have the earthquakes broken the road’s protection?” He must have been worrying for a while.
I thought as we walked. “Couldn’t have. The shadows would have gotten us.” There was still road surface underfoot but it was not as clear here. I wondered if the entire fortress was encased in protection and, if so, how elastic that could be. I was still alive but it seemed unlikely the fortress could fall down again and again without overstressing the barrier somewhere.
Once across the crack we were soon under the wall’s loom. I ran my fingers over the dark stone. “Huh?” It was crumbly. “That look like sandstone to you?”
Thai Dei grunted negatively, followed that with an interrogative noise. “Seems like a lot of little tiny crystals. Like salt. But it is not sandstone.”
Something had been done to it. Something not natural. That kind of stone stood up to everything forever — like the rest of the stone on the plain.
Thai Dei muttered, “I smell sorcery.”
“You have a fine nose, my brother.”
The guys we were following were in a hurry themselves, also following the curve of the wall and whoever was ahead of them. They refused to wait but we continued to gain ground.
We rounded a knee of wall and found many of the animals and much of the equipment crowded into a shady patch in front of what once must have been the main gate. I glanced upward. The clever builders ran the only protected approach where it could be bombarded at will for a great distance. I wondered if I went up there with a big enough rock could I squash the forvalaka. The black leopard was in a foul mood. She roared and snarled and chewed at the bars of her cage. She was being ignored because of her bad attitude.
I wondered if we ought not just leave her behind when we turned back. The shadows would find a way.
The other animals had been left to supervise themselves, too.
Sparkle and Wheezer, only twenty yards ahead now, were squeezing through the gateway. The gate itself was broken and twisted and hung on a single huge lower hinge. A big crack in the masonry indicated that this damage had been caused by earthquakes, too.
There was a large open space immediately behind the gate. Most fortifications have them. They are where you put the people the place was built to protect. A lot of the guys were there. A debate was running about whether or not the broken gate should be busted down so the animals and wagons could be brought inside. Concurrently, an argument raged amongst the Nyueng Bao about whether or not they were obligated to follow the Company deeper into the fortress.
“Shit. I thought you died,” Willow Swan said when he saw me. “Thought we were gonna pick up the stiff on the way back. If you didn’t start smelling too bad.”
“Thoughtful of you. Where’s the Old Man?” Mather and Blade, I noted, were not among those in the courtyard. I peered around.
Every vertical surface consisted of the same decomposed basalt. The inner fortress was so huge its magnitude would have stricken me numb had I not experienced Overlook and the Palace in Taglios. Though still standing, it had been cracked a hundred ways. Thousands of chunks great and small had fallen from its face and lay in heaps at the base of the wall.
“They went inside. Ten minutes ago, maybe. Shouldn’t take long to catch up.” Swan winced as he started toward the steps rising to the skinny door of the inner fortress. I suspected that, as he had a habit of doing, he had begged off earlier and had changed his mind since.
Thai Dei clumped after me, every slamming step an indictment. Because he joined me several other Nyueng Bao peeled off the debating party and followed.
The doorway seemed like a veil of darkness. It felt like a veil of darkness when I stepped through it. Like what I thought a veil of darkness ought to feel like, anyway.
There was little light inside. That little seemed to seep through unseen cracks above and ahead and got all the life sucked out before it reached me. “Quit shoving back there!” I snapped. Thai Dei’s cousins were pushing me forward as they came through the doorway. “And be quiet. I’m trying to listen.” Sounds were coming from somewhere. They were ricocheting around inside a vast empty space, though, which made it impossible to guess where they originated.
Willow Swan muttered, “I was right the first time. I got no business being in here.” And he was right, for sure, as I would learn before much time passed.
“Quiet.” In a moment I set off in the apparent direction of the voices.
107
I heard Lady and Croaker, Bucket, Hagop, Otto, Loftus, Longo and Clete all cheerfully engaged in a vulgar debate. There was not one highbrow among them. When I caught up I found the whole Old Crew in one ugly clump. They had even brought Howler, Longshadow and Catcher along. Howler and Longshadow were out of their cages. Longshadow was presided over by Blade and Cordy Mather. Howler was alert but Longshadow was little more than a drooling cabbage. The Prahbrindrah Drah had gotten stuck with watching and helping Howler.
No matter. I approached the Old Man where he and Lady were crouched, peering through a break in a wall at something that was, I guessed, never meant to be seen. Croaker looked back to see who was crowding him. I demanded, “Where’s Narayan Singh?”
“He’s...” A bewildered, blank look captured his face. It was hard to make out, though. His whole crowd had only one torch burning for light. Longinus held that and he was about twenty feet away. Still, I could see Croaker well enough to see that, suddenly, he looked like he had been hit over the head with an axe handle.
I turned to Lady. “You tell me. Where’s Narayan Singh? Wasn’t he one of your favorite prisoners?” Was he not somebody who would have been killed a long time ago if a fool name of Murgen was in charge?
Lady just stared at me. I got the feeling she wanted to put her Lifetaker helmet back on and kick me in the head. But she remained s
trong. She continued to avoid old habits.
Croaker said, “I forgot he even existed. How could that happen?”
Lady went on from there. “What happened? What did Singh do?”
I ticked fingers. “He escaped. He attacked Uncle Doj. Using a black rumel. He found Catcher’s hideout and freed the Daughter of Night. They’re on the run, probably already plotting how to get back in business.”
Lady’s fingers probed her waistline, then felt for a left sleeve that did not exist. She had no place to hide a strangling cloth while wearing armor. Her expression of surprise left her looking totally goofy. This sort of thing did not happen to her!
Soulcatcher, although farther away than Longo and his torch, heard me just fine. She made an inarticulate sound that had to be rage, began to flop on her litter. She seemed to be in awfully good shape for somebody who had been tied and gagged for three days.
I said, “I think the Mother of Deceivers pulled a fast one.” I thought I would shut my mouth for a while. Croaker was so angry he was shaking.
Lady handled it better. After a long, exasperated sigh directed at no one in particular she crouched and peered through the crack again. I bent over. There was a hint of reddish light beyond her. She said, “He’s marked now. He can be found. I’ll handle that when we get back to camp. This time I’ll take your advice.” She shook her head suddenly, violently, as though trying to clear it. “She is insidious. I didn’t think she could do that to me. Come on.” She ducked through the gap in the wall.
“Here. Take this.” Bucket shoved the standard into my hands. I had sort of pretended not to notice him carrying it. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
“I overslept.”
Croaker went through behind Lady. A couple other guys were thinking about going. Nobody was in a hurry, though, so I shoved the head of the standard into the hole and started after it.
Croaker had a little trouble. He was a big man. I had more trouble than he did because I went into the crack with a long pole.
Thai Dei grabbed the standard from behind about the same time Croaker got ahold of the other end. One pulled one way and the other pushed the other and I got squished in the middle. After I yelled some and dragged my ass on through and got the damned standard back under control I took the opportunity to look around.
