“Yeah. Let’s hope,” Swan said. “We need to get down out of these rocks.” He was not talking to me, really. “I hate mountains.”
“I’m not too fond of cold and snow, either,” I said. Of Lady I asked, “You really need to keep avoiding me?”
“What do you want to know?”
“How can you be getting your powers back? I thought that business in the Barrowland stripped you forever.”
“I’m a thief. Otherwise, none of your business.”
Her entourage sneered at me, mostly because they thought that would make points with her.
“Have you been dreaming again?”
She thought about that one before admitting, “Yes.”
“I thought so. You’ve been looking a little ragged.”
“You want to play you have to pay the price. What about you, Annalist?”
I found I was reluctant to reveal anything. Especially in front of those guys. I forced myself. “Yeah. Something that might have been Kina turned up in my dreams a couple times. Almost like an intrusion from outside. I wondered if that might have been the same time she was bothering you.”
That interested her. You could see the thoughts begin moving behind her eyes, the consideration, the calculation. She told me, “If it happens again, note the time. If you can.”
“I’ll try. How did you manage to go head-to-head with Kina the other night and come out in one piece?”
Without missing a beat Lady shifted to Groghor, a language on its last death rattle. “That was not Kina.” I learned it from my grandmother, whose people had all been wiped out in the consolidation wars that had built the Lady’s empire. Granny was dead and so was my mother and I had not used the tongue except to cuss people out since I signed on with the Company.
“How do you... ?” I sputtered. “How could you know that I... ?”
“The Captain has been kind enough to have your work copied and forwarded to me. You mentioned Groghor somewhere. I am a little rusty. I have not spoken this language in more than a century. Pardon my lapses.”
“You’re doing fine. But why bother?”
“My sister never learned the language. Nor did this bunch, half of whom are probably spies for someone.”
“What’s the deal? You said that wasn’t Kina. Sure fooled me if it wasn’t. Sure fit the description.”
“That was my beloved sister. Pretending to be Kina. I expect she surprised Kina’s worshippers as much as she surprised the rest of us.”
“But...” The Daughter of Night had seemed happy enough.
“I can touch the real Kina, Murgen. Believe me. It’s why I don’t sleep well. The real Kina is still in her trance. She can only touch the world in dreams. And I have to stay a part of those dreams.”
“So Kina is definitely real, then?”
“There is something that fits the bill of particulars, Murgen. I’m not sure that when it’s awake it thinks of itself as Kina or as a goddess. It does want to bring on the Year of the Skulls. It does want to get free of its chains. But these are just emotions I have gained from it over the years. It is far too alien for me to know it well.”
“Like Old Father Tree?”
She had to think to remember the tree-god thing that had ruled the Plain of Fear and defied her when she was still the Lady.
“I never touched that mind.”
“Why would your sister pretend to be Kina?”
“I have never known why my sister does any of the things she does. She has never been rational. Two does not follow One in her scheme, nor does Three come before Four. She is capable of spending incredible energies and vast fortunes on the execution of a prank. She is capable of destroying cities without ever being able to explain why. You can know what she is doing but not why or you can know why she is doing something but not what. She was that way when she was three years old, before anyone knew she was cursed with the power, too.”
“You believe you’re cursed?”
She actually smiled. When she did her beauty shone through. “By an insane sister, for sure. I wish I had even the foggiest notion why she’s just out there, doing nothing but watching and constantly reminding us that she’s there.”
“Reminding us?”
“Don’t you get a little tired of those damned crows?”
“Yes, I do. I thought revenge was her thing.”
“If that was all she wanted she would have squashed me a long time ago.”
There was a stir behind me. Scores of eyes were staring at us as everyone in earshot tried to figure out what was going on. It had to be some secret if we were going to talk it over in a language nobody knew.
Willow Swan looked like his feelings were hurt.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a voice from behind me. “The Liberator’s compliments and would you be so good as to get your ass on about the job he gave you? He said to suggest that he wants the answer before sundown.”
That was not in a language no one else understood. It cheered Swan right up. Even Lady chuckled.
I do believe I blushed. “I’ll want to pursue this further,” I told Lady, who did not seem thrilled by the prospect. To the messenger, who happened to be the nephew of a prominent Taglian general, I said, “Just for that I think I’ll go do what the Old Man wants.”
37
It took me a long time to find Goblin but there was no hurry. The Shadowlanders up the pass were being particularly stubborn. Big Bucket was having to use a lot of firebombs to root them out.
I found it hard to believe. Goblin was on the other side of the Dandha Presh. His Shaded Road was an expedition that had pushed a commando force across the Shindai Kus. Croaker had talked about the possibility once, ages ago, before we ever even went after Dejagore, but I always thought it was completely impractical. So much so that the possibility had not occurred to me even when I had found Goblin on the shore of the Shindai Kus.
Goblin was still Goblin. The desert only baked it in. “I’m one step and ten seconds short of exhaustion,” he complained to the man nearest him, a Company brother named Bubba-do who was not too bright and who, I noted, kept Goblin on his left side, which was where he had the bad ear. “But I’m here. I’m in place. I’m on time. And nobody knows we’re here.”
Lights flared in the mountains above. Tiny balls of fire rose over the high Dandha Presh. Bubba-do said, “Looks like da Captain won his bet.”
“I’m worried. This damned thing’s been going too good. I’ve been fighting these people for years. I know how they think. I know Mogaba.” So did Bubba-do but that did not matter in Goblin’s view. “He ain’t going to let himself get whipped by Croaker. Whole point of him going over to the Shadowmaster was he wanted to prove he was a better soldier and general.”
Goblin went on and on. His men ignored him most of the time. After he had heard scouting reports about the surrounding terrain he allowed his men to build several small, carefully hidden fires. That side of the Dandha Presh was colder than the northern slope. It was impossible to manage without heat if you were not moving.
“I should’ve found a farm. Maybe a small town. Someplace where we could get inside.”
“That would mean killing a bunch of people so they couldn’t rat on us and that probably wouldn’t do any good anyway because somebody probably would’ve got away.”
It was almost dark. The excitement in the mountains was getting colorful. I began to wonder if Mogaba himself was not up there directing the resistance.
“You got company,” somebody said. Instantly everybody at Goblin’s fire found a chore that had to be handled right away somewhere else. Everyone but Goblin’s Nyueng Bao bodyguard, who was a man so unobtrusive I had yet to learn his full name. It was Thane, Trine, something like that. This man merely moved to a place more
