Soldiers Live, Page 2

Tobo reappeared. He looked ghastly. “Captain... Croaker. Sir. I misunderstood what he tried to tell me.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t him. It was Nana Gota.”

  3

  An Abode of Ravens:

  A Labor of Love

  Tobo’s grandmother, Ky Gota, had died happy. As happy as the Troll could die, which was drunker than three owls drowned in a wine cask. She had enjoyed a vast quantity of extremely high-potency product before she went. I told the boy, “If it’s any consolation she probably didn’t know a thing.” Although the evidence suggested she knew exactly what was happening.

  I did not fool him. “She knew it was coming. The Greylings were here.” Something behind the still chittered softly in reponse to the sound of his voice. Like the baobhas, the greylings are a harbinger of death. One of a great many in Hsien. Some of the things that had been howling in the wilderness earlier would have been, too.

  I said the things you say to the young. “It was probably a blessing. She was in constant pain and there was nothing I could do for her anymore.” The old woman’s body had been a torment to her for as long as I had known her. Her last few years had been hell.

  For a moment Tobo looked like a sad little boy who wanted to bury his face in his mother’s skirt and shed some tears. Then he was a young man whose control was complete again. “She did live a long life and a fulfilled one, no matter how much she complained. The family owes One-Eye for that.”

  Complain she had, often and loudly, to everyone about everything and everyone else. I had been fortunate enough to miss much of the Gota era by having gotten myself buried alive for a decade and a half. Such a clever man am I. “Speaking of family, you’ll have to find Doj. And you’d better send word to your mother. And as soon as you can you’ll need to let us know about funeral arrangements.” Nyueng Bao funerary customs seem almost whimsical. Sometimes they bury their dead, sometimes they burn them, sometimes they wrap them and hang them in trees. The rules are unclear.

  “Doj will make the arrangements. I’m sure the Community will demand something traditional. In which case my place is somewhere out of the way.”

  The Community consists of those Nyueng Bao associated with the Black Company who have not enlisted formally and who have not yet disappeared into the mysterious reaches of the Land of Unknown Shadows.

  “No doubt.” The Community are proud of Tobo but custom demands that they look down on him for his mixed blood and lack of respect for tradition. “Others will need to know, too. This’ll be a time of great ceremony. Your grandmother is the first female from our world to pass away over here. Unless you count the white crow.” Old Gota seemed much less formidable in death.

  Tobo’s thoughts were moving obliquely to mine. “There’ll be another crow, Captain. There’ll always be another crow. They feel at home around the Black Company.” Which is why the Children of the Dead call our town the Abode of Ravens. There are always crows, real or unknown.

  “They used to stay fat.”

  The unknown shadows were all around us now. I could see them easily myself, though seldom clearly and seldom for more than an instant. Moments of intense emotion draw them out of the shells where Tobo taught them to hide.

  A renewed racket arose outside. The little darknesses stirred excitedly, then scattered, somehow disappearing without ever revealing what they were. Tobo said, “The dreamwalkers must be hanging around on the other side of the shadowgate again.”

  I did not think so. This evening’s racket was different.

  An articulate cry came from the room where we had left One-Eye. So the old man had been faking his snooze after all. “I’d better see what he wants. You get Doj.”

  “You don’t believe it.” The old man was agitated now. He was angry enough to speak clearly, without much huffing and puffing. He threw up a hand. One wrinkled, twisted ebony digit pointed at something only he could see. “The doom is coming, Croaker. Soon. Maybe even tonight.” Something outside howled as if to strengthen his argument but he did not hear it.

  The hand fell. It rested for several seconds. Then it rose again, one digit indicating an ornate black spear resting on pegs above the doorway. “It’s done.” He had been crafting that death tool for a generation. Its magical power was strong enough for me to sense whenever I considered it directly. Normally I am deaf, dumb and blind in that area. I married my own personal consultant. “You run into. Goblin. Give him. The spear.”

  “I should just hand it over?”

  “My hat, too.” One-Eye showed me a toothless grin. For the entirety of my time with the Company he had worn the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest, most disreputable black felt hat imaginable. “But you got. To do it. Right.” So. He still had one practical joke to pull even though it would be on a dead man and he would be dead himself long before it could happen.

  There was a scratch at the door. Someone entered without awaiting invitation. I looked up. Doj, the old swordmaster and priest of the Nyueng Bao Community. Associated with the Company but not of it for twenty-five years now. I do not entirely trust him even after so long. I seem to be the only doubter left, though.

  Doj said, “The boy said Gota...”

  I gestured. “Back there.”

  He nodded understanding. I would focus on One-Eye because I could do nothing for the dead. Nor all that much for One-Eye, I feared. Doj asked, “Where is Thai Dei?”

  “At Khang Phi, I assume. With Murgen and Sahra.”

  He grunted. “I’ll send someone.”

  “Let Tobo send some of his pets.” That would get some of them out from under foot — and have the additional consequence of reminding the File of Nine, the master council of warlords, that the Stone Soldiers enjoy unusual resources. If they could detect those entities at all.

  Doj paused at the doorway to the back. “There’s something wrong with those things tonight. They’re like monkeys when there’s a leopard on the prowl.”

  Monkeys we know well. The rock apes haunting the ruins lying where Kiaulune stands in our own world are as pesky and numerous as a plague of locusts. They are smart enough and deft enough to get into anything not locked up magically. And they are fearless. And Tobo is too soft of heart to employ his supernatural friends in a swift educational strike.

  Doj vanished through the doorway. He remained spry although he was older than Gota. He still ran through his fencing rituals every morning. I knew by direct observation that he could defeat all but a handful of his disciples using practice swords. I suspect the handful would be surprised unpleasantly if the duel ever involved real steel.

  Tobo is the only one as talented as Doj. But Tobo can do anything, always with grace and usually with ridiculous ease. Tobo is the child we all think we deserve.

  I chuckled.

  One-Eye murmured, “What?”

  “Just thinking how my baby grew up.”

  “That’s funny?”

  “Like a broken broom handle pounded up the shit chute.”

  “You should. Learn to appreciate. Cosmic. Practical jokes.”

  “I...”

  The cosmos was spared my rancor. The street door opened to someone even less formal than Uncle Doj. Willow Swan invited himself inside. “Shut it quick!” I snapped. “That moonlight shining off the top of your head is blinding me.” I could not resist. I recalled him when he was a young man with beautiful long blond hair, a pretty face and a poorly disguised lust for my woman.

  Swan said, “Sleepy sent me. There’re rumors.”

  “Stay with One-Eye. I’ll deliver the news myself.”

  Swan bent forward. “He breathing?”

  With his eye shut One-Eye looked dead. Which meant he was laying back in the weeds hoping to get somebody with his cane. He would remain a vicious little shit till the moment he did stop breathing.

  “He’s fine. For now. Just stay with him. And holler if anything changes.” I put my things back in my bag. My knees creaked as I rose. I could not manage that without putting some
of my weight on One-Eye’s chair. The gods are cruel. They should let the flesh age at the rate the spirit does. Sure, some people would die of old age in a week. But the keepers would hang around forever. And I would not have all these aches and pains. Either way.

  I limped as I left One-Eye’s house. My feet hurt.

  Things scurried everywhere but where I was looking. Moonlight did not help a bit.

  4

  The Grove of Doom:

  Night Songs

  The drums had begun at sunset, softly, a dark whispering promise of a shadow of all night falling. Now they roared boldly. True night had come. There was not even a sliver of moon. The flickering light of a hundred fires set shadows dancing. It appeared that the trees had pulled up their roots to participate. A hundred frenzied disciples of the Mother of Night capered with them, their passion building.

  A hundred bound prisoners shivered and wept and fouled themselves, fear unmanning some who had believed themselves heroic. Their pleas fell upon unhearing ears.

  A looming darkness emerged from the night, dragged by prisoners straining at cables in the hopeless hope that by pleasing their captors they might yet survive. Twenty feet tall, the shape proved to be a statue of a woman as black and glistening as polished ebony. It had four arms. It had rubies for eyes and crystal fangs for teeth. It wore a necklace of skulls. It wore another necklace of severed penises. Each taloned hand clutched a symbol of her power over humanity. The prisoners saw only the noose.

  The beat of the drums grew more swift. Their volume rose. The Children of Kina began to sing a dark hymn. Those prisoners who were devout began to pray to their own favored gods.

  A skinny old man watched from the steps of the temple at the heart of the Grove of Doom. He was seated. He no longer stood unless he had to. His right leg had been broken and the bone improperly set. Walking was difficult and painful. Even standing was a chore.

  A tangle of scaffolding rose behind him. The temple was undergoing restoration. Again.

  Standing over him, unable to remain still, was a beautiful young woman. The old man feared her excitement was sensual, almost sexual. That should not be. She was the Daughter of Night. She did not exist to serve her own senses.

  “I feel it, Narayan!” she enthused. “The imminence is there. This is going to reconnect me with my mother.”

  “Perhaps.” The old man was not convinced. There had been no connection with the Goddess for four years. He was troubled. His faith was being tested. Again. And this child had grown up far too headstrong and independent. “Or it may just bring the wrath of the Protector down on our heads.” He went no farther. The argument had been running from the moment that she had used some of her raw, completely untrained magical talent to blind their keepers for the moments they had needed to escape the Protector’s custody three years ago.

  The girl’s face hardened. For a moment it took on the dread implacability apparent on the face of the idol. As she always did when the matter of the Protector came up, she said, “She’ll regret mistreating us, Narayan. Her punishment won’t be forgotten for a thousand years.”

  Narayan had grown old being persecuted. It was the natural order of his existence. He sought always to make sure that his cult survived the wrath of its enemies. The Daughter of Night was young and powerful and possessed all of youth’s impetuosity and disbelief in its own mortality. She was the child of a Goddess! That Goddess’s ruling age was about to break upon the world, changing everything. In the new order the Daughter of Night would herself become a Goddess. What reason had she to fear? That madwoman in Taglios was nothing!

  Invincibility and caution, they were forever at loggerheads, yet were forever inseparable.

  The Daughter of Night did believe with all her heart and soul that she was the spiritual child of a Goddess. She had to. But she had been born of man and woman. A flake of humanity remained as a stain upon her heart. She had to have somebody.

  Her movements became more pronounced and more sensual, less controlled. Narayan grimaced. She must not forge an interior connection between pleasure and death. The Goddess was a destroyer in one avatar but lives taken in her name were not taken for reasons so slight. Kina would not countenance her Daughter yielding to hedonism. If she did there would be punishments, no doubt falling heaviest upon Narayan Singh.

  The priests were ready. They dragged weeping prisoners forward to fulfill the crowning purpose of their lives, their parts in the rites that would reconsecrate Kina’s temple. The second rite would strive to contact the Goddess, who lay bound in enchanted sleep, so that once again the Daughter of Night would be blessed with the Dark Mother’s wisdom and far-seeing vision.

  All things that needed doing. But Narayan Singh, the living saint of the Deceivers, the great hero of the Strangler cult, was not a happy man. Control had drifted too far away. The girl had begun altering the cult to reflect her own inner landscape. He feared the chance that one of their arguments would not heal afterward. That had happened with his real children. He had sworn an oath to Kina that he would bring the girl up right, that they both would see her bring on the Year of the Skulls. But if she continued growing ever more headstrong and self-serving...

  She could restrain herself no longer. She hurried down the steps. She plucked a strangling scarf from the hands of one of the priests.

  What Narayan saw in the girl’s face then he had seen only one place before, in his wife’s face, in her passion, so long ago that it seemed to have happened during an earlier turn around the Wheel of Life.

  Saddened, he realized that when the next rite started she would throw herself into the torture of the victims. In her state she might become too involved and spill their blood, which would be an offense the Goddess would never excuse.

  He was becoming extremely troubled, was Narayan Singh.

  And then he became more troubled still as his wandering eye caught sight of a crow in the crotch of a tree almost directly behind the deadly rite. Worse, that crow noticed him noticing it. It flung itself into the air with a mocking cry. A hundred crow voices immediately answered from all over the grove.

  The Protector knew!

  Narayan yelled at the girl. Attention much too focused, she did not hear him.

  Agony ripped through his leg as he climbed to his feet. How soon would the soldiers arrive? How would he ever run again? How would he keep the Goddess’s hope alive when his flesh had grown so frail and his faith had worn so threadbare?

  5

  An Abode of Ravens:

  Headquarters

  Outpost was a quiet city of broad lanes and white walls. We had adopted the native custom of whitewashing everything but the thatch and decorative vegetation.

  On holidays some locals even painted each other white. White had been a great symbol of resistance to the Shadowmasters in times gone by.

  Our city was artificial and military, all straight lines, cleanliness and quiet. Except at night, if Tobo’s friends got to brawling amongst themselves. By day, noise was confined to the training fields where the latest bunch of native would-be adventurers were learning the Black Company way of doing business. I was remote from all that except for patching up training mishaps. No one from my era was involved anymore. Like One-Eye I am a relic of a distant age, a living icon of the history that makes up so much of the unique social adhesive we used to hold the Company together. They rolled me out on special occasions and had me give sermons that began, “In those days the Company was in service to...”

  It was a spooky night, the two moons illuminating everything while casting conflicting shadows. And Tobo’s pets were increasingly disturbed about something. I began to catch straightforward glimpses of some when they became too distracted to work at staying out of sight. In most cases I was sorry.

  The uproar up toward the shadowgate rose and fell. There were lights up there now, too. A couple of fireballs flew just before I reached my destination. I began to feel uneasy myself.

  Headquarters was a two-story sp
rawl at the center of town. Sleepy had filled it with assistants and associates and functionaries who kept track of every horseshoe nail and every grain of rice. She had turned command into a bureaucratic exercise. And I did not like it. Of course. Because I was a cranky old man who remembered how things used to be in the good old days when we did things the right way. My way.

  I do not think I have lost my sense of humor, though. I see the irony in having turned into my own grandfather.

  I have stepped aside. I have passed the torch to someone younger, more energetic and tactically brighter than I ever was. But I have not abandoned my right to be involved, to contribute, to criticize and, particularly, to complain. It is a job somebody has to do. So I exasperate the younger people sometimes. Which is good for them. It builds character.

  I strode through the ground-floor busywork Sleepy uses to shield herself from the world. Day or night there was a crew on duty, counting those arrowheads and grains of rice. I should remind her to get out into the world once in a while. Putting up barriers will not protect her from her demons because they are all inside her already.

  I was almost old enough to get away with talk like that.

  Irritation crossed her dry, dusky, almost sexless face when I walked in. She was at her prayers. I do not understand that. Despite everything she has been through, much of which puts the lie to Vehdna doctrine, she persists in her faith.

  “I’ll wait till you’re done.”

  The fact that I had caught her was what irritated her. The fact that she needed to believe even in the face of the evidence was what embarrassed her.

  She rose, folded her prayer rug. “How bad is he this time?”

  “Rumor got it wrong. It wasn’t One-Eye. It was Gota. And she’s gone. But One-Eye is in a pickle about something else he thinks is going to happen. About which he was less than vague. Tobo’s friends are being more than normally weird so it’s entirely possible it isn’t One-Eye’s imagination.”