A dark nimbus clutched itself to Longshadow’s crystal tower. Kina had little strength she could project into this world but it was all focused now. I made Smoke move higher so I could look down into the chamber.
The Daughter of Night had recovered from the attack of the shadow. She used the strength lent her by her goddess to drive the thing back at the Shadowmaster.
Longshadow, of course, had been completely mad from the beginning, as paranoid as they come. He never trusted Howler. About all he and the little stinker had in common was their hatred of the Company. Mutual hatred for somebody else never has been sound grounds for a marriage.
The Shadowmaster had planned for a moment like this though he had not anticipated Soulcatcher being there to help the turncoat, nor had he expected the Strangler and his brat to contribute distractions of their own. Nevertheless, he had been thorough. He had overengineered by a large factor. It might be enough. If they had underestimated him.
The towertop chamber became a bizarre pot filled with growls and shrieks, bits of smoke that came and went too fast for the eye to track, changing colors, knives of pure energy that slashed stone and crystal and ricocheted off stubborn protective spells and never considered the loyalty of anyone who got in the way.
Soulcatcher cried out like a child suddenly injured. She dropped to one knee, whimpering, but did not abandon the fight. Howler howled. The Daughter of Night babbled passages from the first Book of the Dead. The stench of Kina was awful in the ghostworld but the child had not finished copying the book before Howler stole it. She could not bring Kina all the way home without all of it.
Longshadow edged toward the doorway. It looked like he might actually get out. Presumably once he did the chamber would implode or in some other fashion destroy everybody still inside. That was the sort of trap I would have set.
They called Singh a living saint. He was, supposedly, the best of his kind of his generation. A dubious distinction in most of our eyes, but every man should be lucky enough to discover the one thing he can do better than anyone else alive.
The Shadowmaster thought no more of Narayan than he did of a mouse. The Deceiver was just there.
He was there one moment and here the next. His strangling cloth encircled the Shadowmaster’s throat like black lightning.
A black rumel man becomes a master Strangler in part by mastering his own fear and excitement in times of stress. Narayan Singh had that knack though he had had little opportunity to exercise it recently. He had done so now. He remained calm enough not to break the Shadowmaster’s neck. He understood the cost.
Strangulation is a slow process. Its victim seldom cooperates. Singh shouted, “I need armholders!” At first he said that in Deceiver cant. Only the child understood. She did not have the strength to restrain the Shadowmaster.
She told Soulcatcher, “You! Take his right arm and pull. You. The smelly one. Take hold of his left arm. Now. In the name of my mother.”
Catcher snapped, “In the name of your real mother, who happens to be my pain-in-the-ass sister, you’re going to get a paddling as soon as we finish with this piece of shit.” The voice she used was a dead ringer for that of somebody I used to know who had been a devout believer in not sparing the rod.
Longshadow was one stubborn fish. He thrashed a lot longer than I thought any human could without air. The kid told the others, “Make sure you don’t kill him.”
“Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, brat.” This time Catcher’s voice was identical to Goblin’s. I felt a sudden fear for the little wizard.
Longshadow collapsed. “Tie him and gag him and put him in that chair of his,” Catcher told Howler. “Fix him good. Then look around for any more surprises he may have here.” The shadow had vanished, either out the cracked door, into hiding or destroyed.
Howler, panting, asked, “And what’ll you be doing, O mighty one?”
“Setting the pecking order straight.” She grabbed the Daughter of Night, dropped to one knee, bent the struggling child over the other, mouthed a spell that flung Narayan Singh across the room hard enough to knock him cold, then yanked the kid’s pants down and proceeded to apply a well-deserved tanning.
The child never cried but tears filled her eyes once Catcher finished. She felt both humiliated and deserted. Again she faced a crisis of faith. The stench of Kina had faded as soon as the kid got too busy to mess with her incomplete summoning.
Catcher said, “You give me any more crap, sweetheart, and next time you get intimately acquainted with a willow switch. You got him tied up good?”
“I’m working on it. You’ve waited this long you don’t need to get in any big damned hurry now.”
“I want to get control of his shadows. They’re not going to sit still—”
“I know the plan. I helped write it.” Howler screeched. There was a world of irritation in his cry.
I had to see the Old Man.
65
“They’re squabbling among themselves already,” I told Croaker after he shooed everybody outside. “But they definitely have Longshadow on the hook. Catcher intends to make him do whatever she wants.”
“She going to do a Taking?”
I had not thought of that. That kind of stuff had happened only way, way back. “Would she know how?”
“She might. But she might not have enough to work with where Longshadow is concerned. She might need to know his true name. We know he’s got that hidden in the Shadowgate spell.”
“What’s going on here?”
“I’ve ordered the New Division to move over to the Shadowgate and relieve the Old Division. If I get them entangled with the shadows before they understand what the Prahbrindrah Drah is doing, they won’t be able to participate. All they’ll have time for is fighting shadows.”
“What excuse did you give them?”
“The Old Division doesn’t have enough bamboo.”
On a night like tonight no general was going to let his men surrender their bamboo to another outfit.
“Also, that I want the Old Division to attack Overlook from the south. Those are the orders I actually sent to get them started. They won’t get their real orders till after they separate.”
We had rehearsed a move from the Shadowgate to the south wall several times. Maybe the Old Man was still thinking way ahead of everybody else.
“I think I was able to warn Lady.” I told him what I had done. “It seemed like the right call in the circumstances. I know she’ll ask questions later.”
“Oh, she will. And she’ll crap bricks when she gets her answers.”
“You don’t seem particularly terrified.”
“I was her prisoner in the Tower at Charm before she learned to love me. I used up my scared then.”
I would not count on her love if I was him. They had not been much of a loving couple lately. Guys like me never stop loving their Saries but other people do fall out of love when there is a lot of stress for a long time. I said, “I have to check on Goblin. I had a really ugly thought while I was watching them fight over there. If Catcher was as thorough as I think she’d be, old One-Eye might be an orphan.”
“Shit,” Croaker said softly. “I overlooked that angle completely. Look, while you’researching for that little shit tell Smoke ‘white wedding’ and ‘white knight’ every little bit. Alternate them. That’ll make Goblin easier to spot.”
“I figured there was something—”
“And any time you see crows, anywhere, panic them. We need to blind Catcher as much as we can.”
“She fooled you, eh?”
“Say I underestimated her ambitions. Obviously, now, she’s up to more than just getting even with Lady. Go on.”
The “white wedding, white knight” mantra worked wonders. Smoke and I found Goblin almost immediately. And he was in deep shit, just as I feared, only it was not nearly as deep as some probably hoped. When Smoke and
