Soldiers Live tbc-10

by Glen Charles Cook

  That was the course I preferred. I figured that once we installed Soulcatcher in the cave of the ancients Lady would lose interest eventually. The effect on the world at large would be the same as if we had killed her right away while Lady could sustain her tether to her roots via the pretense that she would jump in and resurrect her sister one day soon.

  Lady said, “I like that idea. I’ll see how soon Howler can get a carpet put together.”

  “All right.” I peeled back one of Soulcatcher’s eyelids. I saw nothing promising. I got the feeling that her essence might be absent, out wandering, lost. Paybacks, Murgen might say, if that was true.

  As soon as she left, Tobo said, “You’re up to something besides what you told her, aren’t you?”

  “Me?” I shrugged. “I have some ideas. Some of them I might have to clear with the Captain.”

  Shukrat then said something that rained her dumb blonde image for me. “You know the reason that Soulcatcher followed you all down here from the north is the same reason that Lady wants to save her now? I’ll bet that if she really wanted to badly enough she could’ve killed you all just about any time she wanted.”

  I stared. I looked at Tobo. I stared some more.

  Shukrat reddened. She murmured, “Neither one of them ever learned how to say, ‘I love you.’”

  I understood. It was the same thing Goblin and One-Eye had had going for all those years, at a somewhat less lethal level. When they were sober. It was the sort of thing I see all the time amongst my brethren, who cannot, or believe that they dare not, express their real feelings. I added, “Only those two don’t even know they need to say it.”

  81

  The Shadowlander Military Cemetery:

  Laying To Rest

  Willow Swan stuck his head into the tent. “Croaker. Murgen. Anybody who’s interested. Sahra’s ready to do her thing with Thai Dei and Uncle Doj.”

  About damned time, I thought but did not say. There were moments, lately, when I wanted to have the whole damned Nyueng Bao Community lined up and spanked. They had dragged the two corpses a hundred fifty miles while they argued bitterly about what to do with them. I did manage to keep my mouth shut but kept wanting to scream, “They don’t care anymore! Do something! They smell. Bad!” Not the sort of thing you do with grieving relatives, of course. Not unless you feel like you have developed a shortage of enemies.

  The Nyueng Bao had prepared a pair of ghats in a prominent place near the center of the Shadowlander military cemetery. Though only a few swamp folk remained with us those survivors were gathered in cliques, according to the funeral option they believed best honored the dead.

  Who would believe a funeral could become savagely political? But people can find reasons to squabble about almost anything.

  Thai Dei’s send-off was less controversial, of course. He had not believed in much of anything but his own honor, himself. A ritualistic passage through the purifying flame for a warrior who would not bend, troubled only a couple of conservative old-timers who thought the ceremonies too foreign. Uncle Doj was the great bone of contention.

  With Doj the burning group were in dispute with the exposure group, who wanted to lay the corpse out on a high platform and leave it till its bones were clean.

  This was supposed to be the proper send-off for a high priest of the Path of the Sword—though no one could say how, why or when that idea had arisen. None of the men from Hsien, some of whom had grown up in Hsien’s martial arts monasteries, had heard of any such practice there. The people of Hsien buried their dead. Doj’s cronies insisted that his predecessors had been exposed exactly the way they wanted to do him now.

  As we filed past the ghats, each tossing on an herb packet and a folded piece of paper carrying a prayer the fire would send along with the dead, Suvrin suggested, “They might have acquired the custom when they first passed through my country. Some of the peoples back home, back then, did expose corpses that they were especially afraid would be seized by skinwalkers.”

  Skinwalkers again. One of those monsters no one has ever seen, like vampires and werewolves. With all the real monsters loose in the world, seen and suffered often enough, why did so many people trouble themselves about things no reliable witness ever saw? “Wouldn’t fire work just as well?”

  “Burning wasn’t acceptable. It isn’t even in modern times, even though so many northerners have come across the Dandha Presh.”

  I grunted. It must have to do with religion and religion seldom makes sense to me.

  “The common people, the poor, anyone that wouldn’t attract a skinwalker, gets a normal burial. Just like here.” He indicated the graves around us. “People who might attract a skinwalker will be exposed. So there won’t be a good suit of skin to steal.” He gestured. “The above-ground tombs. They must contain priests and captains who were being stored temporarily, until they could be properly exposed. Their army must have been hard-pressed. They never got back to deal with it.”

  Actually, I could see several fallen collections of poles with bits of rag and bone beneath that might have been exposure platforms a long time ago. “Looks like your skinwalkers never got here to take advantage, either.”

  That earned me a scowl.

  I was not quite sure why Suvrin was Sleepy’s favorite and probable designated successor. But I never understood why Murgen picked Sleepy, either. Yet he had chosen well. She had brought the Company through the Kiaulune wars and the era of the Captivity. And there had been a lot of raised eyebrows when I had chosen Murgen to become Annalist. And Murgen had managed despite never having been quite certain of his sanity.

  Sleepy saw something.

  Suvrin did not agree. Suvrin insisted that he was going to leave us. But I noted that he had passed up several wonderful opportunities to do so already.

  As was her right, being Thai Dei’s closest surviving relative, Sahra asked Murgen to join her and Tobo in placing the torches into Thai Dei’s pyre. Fitting, I thought, although the old men grumbled. Murgen and Thai Dei had been as close as brothers for a long, long time.

  Sahra asked no one but Tobo to help bring the fire to Doj.

  Even I saluted the dead swordmaster, though in life I never trusted him.

  Lady leaned against me from my left. “I suppose you’ll have to admit that he was trustworthy now.” Mind reading.

  “I don’t have to admit any such thing. He just kicked off before he could screw us over.”

  “No fool like an old fool.”

  I stopped arguing. She would win every debate by dint of outliving me. I changed the subject. “You still feel like you’re getting stronger?” For an age now she had been able to steal almost no supernatural power from Kina. But long ago she had been able to parasitize enough to come close to being Soulcatcher’s equal. She believed Goblin’s attack on the Goddess was why there was so little power left to steal.

  It seemed reasonable to me that Goblin returning as Kina’s tool would mean fresh power available but it had not worked that way. Not until Goblin and the girl had entered the Grove of Doom.

  “It’s coming. Little by little.” She sounded like she did not want to wait. “I can do a few parlor tricks now.” The way she thought, that might mean she was limited to destroying small villages with a single wink. “I need to get closer to see what helps.”

  I did not follow up. I could feel her excitement. She hid it well but if I got her going she would drive me nuts talking about stuff that was entirely beyond me.

  I could do that, too, either going on with my theories about diseases or about the Company’s history.

  Definitely a match made in heaven.

  I told her, “Soon as we’re done paying our respects, how about you see Howler? Find out if my idea gets him moving on the carpets any faster.”

  “If you give him what he wants now he won’t have any incentive to stay with us.”

  “Where’s he gonna run to?”

  “He’ll find somewhere. He always has.”
r />   And, somehow, that always ended up in our way. “Then I expect we’ll push him hard to get us a couple, three carpets. And you can hang around playing apprentice while he does, sister Shukrat.”

  “Yech! No way! He’s creepy. He stinks. And he has more hands than some of those four-armed Gunni gods.”

  “He’s little,” Tobo called from the chair we had brought along so he could rest between ceremonial stints. “Spank him.”

  “That’s probably what he wants.”

  “Get somebody to carry me around and I’ll go with you,” Tobo told Shukrat. “I make the Howler nervous. Croaker. What’ll we call him if Shivetya cures his screaming?”

  “Stinky might work. Or the Stinker for formal.”

  The flames of the funeral pyres leapt higher. Tobo ignored me now. I let it drop, too. Time to say goodbye, old man. They never took the oath but Thai Dei and Doj were brothers in their hearts. They stories were warp and woof of the Company tapestry.

  82

  With the Company:

  Going South

  Sleepy always saw idleness as a vacuum in need of filling. No way was she going to put up with ten thousand men sitting around, maybe spending an hour or two each day training. When they were feeling particularly ambitious.

  Just miles away stood a perfectly ugly wood desperately in need of clear-cutting.

  You put a whole lot of people to work on a place like that, starting from the outside and working inward, making sure you get even the tiniest twigs and shoots, you can get some great bonfires burning. The evening of the second day the soldiers had one entire horizon hidden behind ramparts of smoke.

  Sleepy was daring Goblin and the girl to come show us what they had.

  I had doubts about the wisdom of that. Sleepy was not impressed enough with the fact that Goblin had a slice of Kina stuffed inside him. And Kina’s bad-ass reputation was well-deserved.

  But I was not the boss. I could advise but I could not make anyone listen. My worries just earned me one of Sleepy’s enigmatic smiles.

  “You ready to go for a fly?” Lady asked. “Howler’s got a carpet ready.”

  “You in a hurry?”

  “You told me Sileth’s only got a week. That was three days ago.”

  “I did, didn’t I? How big is that carpet?”

  “Big enough.”

  “I mean it, hon. It’s got to have room for six people.”

  She stared. After several seconds she said, “I don’t think I’m even going to ask. Except maybe who.”

  “You and Soulcatcher. Howler. Gromovol. Arkana if she wants to go.”

  “Still playing games, Love?”

  “No game. Progress. We lost the most promising one of those kids when Magadan got killed. That was a bad career move on his part. Gromovol is as useless as teats on a bull. I’d just as soon kill him. But if we give him back to those two old Voroshk demons Shivetya’s got tied up down there we might score a point or two.”

  She frowned.

  “Thought you were the master manipulator of the greatest empire...” She pointed a finger. An invisible darning needle began to sew my lips together. She was getting the power back. “I’ll just explain then, shall I?”

  “There’s the man I married.”

  Bullshit. But I was not going to argue. “We got the top two Voroshk locked up out there on the plain. They’ve got no home anymore, far as we know. As far as Shivetya is letting anybody know. They have no future, nowhere to go. An apparent act of kindness might add a couple of heavyweights to our ranks just when it would be handy to have them.”

  “You’re evil.”

  “I try. Let me go blow in Arkana’s ear.”

  “You do and you’ll wake up in the morning wondering how long before you get your first hot flash.”

  Well, well. Maybe that explained some recent crankiness. Hers. Mine was caused by the iron-strapped, rock-headed obtuseness of the people who insisted on tangling my feet. That was a whole different hunk of monkey meat.

  I went to blow in Arkana’s ear. Verbally.

  “I’m not going to give Gromovol a choice,” I told Arkana. “This is a chance for me to maybe make peace with his old man. Which is the only good that can ever come of the idiot. If I keep him here he’ll eventually do something stupider than anything he’s done already. I’ve told you before, I’ve been in this racket a long time. When you come up with a liability as big as Gromovol you look for a way to use him. Or you kill him. I’ve been getting soft in my twilight years.”

  Her skeptical expression told me how well I had sold that fairy tale.

  “You, you’re special. You get choices. You can go back if you want. You can tag along for the visit and stay with us when we’re done. Or you can hang around here and not go at all.”

  “Oh, I’ll go. I can’t not. I’ll decide what else I need to do after we get there.”

  We went aloft by night, under the light of a full moon, with Lady, Soulcatcher, Gromovol and Arkana aboard Howler’s new carpet. Tobo, Shukrat, Murgen and I witched along on flying posts. Despite Sleepy’s objections, and Tobo’s aches and pains, Tobo insisted on coming along because Shukrat was coming. So Murgen rode with me because Sahra refused to fly. The youngsters larked about us fearlessly, engaged in some dragonfly mating ritual.

  Murgen and I dropped out briefly at Dejagore. Sleepy insisted we check up on Blade and his occupation force.

  Drifting down toward Dejagore’s citadel, I asked, “You think Sahra’s been having visions or something?”

  “Huh?” Murgen’s thoughts had been wandering.

  “This frantic mother stuff. I swear she keeps getting worse. I thought you might have noticed her having psychic seizures. Or something.”

  “She don’t talk about it. If she does.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that if she hasn’t she’s definitely afraid that she might start.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When we were young she worried about turning into her mother.”

  “Sometimes she’s damned crabby.”

  “She’s no Gota the Troll, though. Her body doesn’t hurt her enough. So now she’s terrified she’s going to turn into Hong Tray. Her grandmother.”

  “And?”

  “And maybe she will. She’s started to look like the old woman did. Whenever she starts cranking about it I remind her how calm and accepting Hong Tray always was. Like a solid rock in a wild river.”

  “Doesn’t work, does it?”

  “Not for a second. Well. Somebody must’ve smelled us coming.”

  We had not yet settled to the top of the citadel tower, but Blade and his chief lieutenants were there to meet us. Blade called up, “We were expecting Tobo, the way the shadows were all spooked up.”

  “You got lucky. The kid’s hurt so you get the old farts instead. Captain wants us to check up on you. So you give us a couple of good drinks, we’ll tell her you’re doing a kickass job, no need to even think about you guys.”

  “I think we can handle that.”

  83

  Taglios:

  Decision

  The sharpest-eyed spy can be misdirected or deluded if you know he is watching. Having been of the Company once and having been victimized by the Company more than once, the Great General understood its policy of deception. His understanding had served him well during the Kiaulune wars, where the trickery had gotten the best of him rarely. He and Aridatha Singh were observing large-scale close order drills from the wall of a fortress that bestrode a hill just south of Taglios. The soldiers had begun to show some interest in improving their skills lately. The approach of a powerful enemy was a mighty motivator.

  The Great General asked, “They all went?”

  “I’ve had the report from two independent sources within the last hour. They went out right after moonrise. A flying carpet and three flying poles. They headed south. They passed close enough to Haband’s tree for him to identify the Howler, Lady, Croaker, Murgen, the boy wi
zard and three of those white wizard children I saw when I visited. They aren’t worried about us.”

  “There’d be more of those.”

  “I’m sure the rumor is true. I’ve had it confirmed too many times. They’re dead.”

  The Great General refused to take anything at face value where those people were concerned. “Where would they go?”

  “Maybe something’s happened at Dejagore. Or farther south.”

  Farther south would have to be beyond the Dandha Presh. Support for the Protector had evaporated outside those territories still directly under the Great General’s control, near as his agents could determine, though there had been no outbreaks of enthusiasm for the return of the royals. The mood of the empire was indifferent, excepting amongst those who could profit, one way or another.

  Same as it always was, Mogaba reflected.

  Mogaba played with a snail shell as he talked. Doing so seemed almost a tick anymore. But he startled Aridatha by popping his arm back suddenly, snapping the shell out as hard as he could throw. “Time for a full-scale field exercise. Let’s find out how good their intelligence is with wonder boy away.”

  Aridatha asked a few brisk questions. These days he commanded the division that would form the left wing of Mogaba’s army. It was backboned by his own City Battalions.

  The Great General said, “Make all your preparations exactly as you would if we were going down there to fight. Issue appropriate rations. But prepare in a relaxed manner. We just want to see how ready we are. So we know where we need to do more work. Don’t encourage questions. And from now on I want to see our spies personally when they bring in news.”

  Aridatha went away wondering what Mogaba really had in mind.

  The Great General sent for the rest of his staff and commanders. He spent a particularly long time, in bright midday sun, conferring with his cavalry captains.