the eunuch he already was. But it disappeared in the early excitement around Kiaulune. I suspect that Kina clouded my mind while the Deceiver Singh stole both it and my sister’s darling daughter. I can’t imagine why that rabble would want to go onto the plain after the previous disaster but if it’s something they want to do, it’s something I want to prevent. Prepare for a journey.”
“We can’t leave Taglios unsupervised for as long as it would take us to travel all the way to Shadowcatch. We don’t have the stallion anymore, even if it could carry double.”
Soulcatcher was baffled. “What?”
“The black stallion from the north. The one I’ve been using all these years. It’s vanished. It broke down its stall and ran off. I told you that last month.” She did not recall that, obviously.
“We’ll fly.”
“But-” Mogaba hated flying. In the days when he had been Longshadow’s general he had had to fly with the Howler almost daily. He still loathed those times. “I thought the larger carpet was the one that was destroyed.”
“The small one will carry both of us. It’ll be hard work. I’ll have to rest a lot. But we’ll still be able to get down there and back before these people know we’re gone and try to take advantage. A week for the round trip. Ten days at the outside.”
The Great General had a few dozen reservations but kept them behind his teeth. The Protector was worse than Long-shadow had been about suffering opinions she did not want to hear.
Soulcatcher said, “We’ll adopt disguises once we get there and go among them. I want you to keep an eye out for a hammer, so by so, made of cast iron but far heavier than it ought to be.”
Mogaba bowed slightly. He said nothing about how difficult it would be for either of them to blend in with the crowd they would be chasing.
Soulcatcher told him, “Prepare your men. They’ll have to keep Taglios under control for a cquple of weeks.”
Mogaba withdrew, saying nothing about the proposed time changing already. In his position it was necessary to do a lot of saying nothing.
The Protector watched him go, amused. He did not conceal his thinking nearly as well as he believed. But she was ancient in her wickedness and had studied the dark side of humanity so thoroughly that she could almost read minds.
65
The little fortress settled in upon itself slowly, as though made of wax only slightly overheated. As soon as I fell asleep and could not interfere, Goblin handed the magical siege work over to Tobo, who did a creditable job of rooting the enemy survivors out of their shelter. The wicked little thing had been taking lessons a lot longer than he and his teachers would admit.
The garrison was bringing out its dead and wounded when a shout awakened me. I sat up. Morning had begun to arrive. And the world had changed.
“What’s Spiff’s problem?” I asked.
One of my veterans had recognized one of theirs.
The devil himself arrived to explain. “The guy in charge. That’s Khusavir Pete, Sleepy. You remember, we thought he was killed when the Bahrata Battalion got wiped out in the ambush at Kushkhoshi.”
“I remember.” And I recalled something that Spiff did not know, a fact I shared only with Murgen, who had been the ghost in the rushes while the slaughter was taking place. Khusavir Pete, at that time a sworn brother of the Company, had led our largest surviving force of allies into a trap that efficiently took us out of the Kiaulune wars. Khusavir Pete had cut a deal. Khusavir Pete had betrayed his own brothers. Khusavir Pete was high on my list of people I wanted to meet again, though until just now I had been the only one who knew that he had survived and that his treachery had been rewarded with a high post, money and a new name. But just seeing him had some of the men figuring it out fast.
“You should’ve asked her to change your face, too,” I told him when they flung him down bleeding in front of me. “Though you’ve had a better run than you probably expected when she turned you.” I held his eyes with mine. What he saw convinced him it would not be worth his trouble to deny anything. Vajra the Naga had come out to play.
More and more of the men gathered around, most of them not getting it until I explained how Khusavir Pete had been seduced by Soulcatcher into betraying and helping destroy more than five hundred of our brothers and allies. Would-be greetings quickly became imaginative suggestions of ways whereby we might reduce the traitor’s life expectancy. I let the man listen until some of the troops tried to lay hands on. Then I told Goblin, “Hide him somewhere. We may have a use for him yet.”
The excitement was over. I had indulged in a decent meal. My attitude much improved, I took the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Master Surendranath San-taraksita. “This life seems to agree with you,” I told him as
I arrived. “You look better now than you did when we left the city.” And that was true.
“Dorabee? Lad, I thought you were dead. Despite their endless assurances.” He leaned closer and confided, “They aren’t all honest men, your comrades.”
“By some chance did Goblin and One-Eye offer to teach you to play tonk?”
The librarian managed to look a little sheepish.
“Not to play with them is a lesson everyone has to learn.”
Sheepishness transformed into impishness. “I think I taught them a little something, too. Card tricks were one of my hobbies when I was younger.”
I had to laugh at the idea of those two villains getting taken themselves. “Have you discovered anything that would be useful to me?”
“I’ve read every word in every book we brought along, including all of your company’s modern chronicles written in languages known to me. I found nothing remarkable. I have been amusing myself by trying to work backward into the chronicles I can’t read by comparing materials repeated in more than one language.”
Murgen had done a lot of that. He had had a thing about copying stuff over, in cleaner drafts, and one of his great projects had been to revise Lady’s and the Captain’s Annals for accuracy, based on evidence provided by other witnesses, while rendering them into modern Taglian. We have all done that to our predecessors, some, so that every recent volume of the Annals is really an unwilling collaboration.
I said, “We drag a lot of books around, don’t we?”
“Like snails, carrying your history on your back.”
“It’s who we are. Cute image, though. Doesn’t all that study get dull after a while?”
“The boy keeps me sharp.”
“Boy?”
“Tobo. He’s a brilliant student. Even more amazing than you were.” “Tobo?”
“I know. Who would expect it of a Nyueng Bao? You’re destroying all my preconceptions, Dorabee.”
“Mine are taking a beating, too.” Tobo? Either Santarak-sita had an unsuspected talent for inspiring students or Tobo had suffered an epiphany and had become miraculously motivated. “You sure it’s Tobo and not a changeling?”
The demon himself popped in. “Sleepy. Runmust and Riverwalker and them are on their way over. Good morning, Master Santaraksita.” Tobo actually seemed excited to be there. “I don’t have any other duties right now. Oh, Sleepy, Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Where?” Things had been happening too fast. There had been no chance to catch up with Murgen.
“Goblin’s tent. Everybody but Mom thought that would be the safest place to keep him.”
I had no trouble picturing Sahra being irritated about not being able to share the occasional private moment with her husband.
When I ducked out, the young man and the old were already settling with a book. I glared a warning at Santaraksita which, it developed, was both wasted and unnecessary.
