much more excited about us carrying off their flying log than they were about us taking the girl. Maybe she was not anyone important. Or maybe they figured she was old enough to look out for herself.
One of the elders stepped away from that fluttering black crowd. He had a small book in his hand. He turned a couple of pages, found the one he wanted, ran a finger along a few lines as he read. A second elder nodded and apparently repeated what he had to say, with gestured accompaniment. After a moment the third elder took it up, his gestures similar but not in step with those of the other two.
“It’s a round,” I told Lady. We had overtaken the slowest of our people. “Row row row.” I made some gestures myself. “You do anything you’re going to be sorry.”
The Voroshk all spun, presenting their backs to us.
The flash was so bright it blinded me for a moment. When my sight returned another of those hundred-legged starfish of brownish-grey smoke had materialized. This one was not upstairs. This one was right where the shadowgate had been. Centered right where I had hidden the captured flying post under some “abandoned” tenting.
“Warned you,” I murmured.
“How did you know?” Lady asked.
“I’m not sure. A hunch, I guess. Uninhibited intuition.”
“They’ve just killed themselves.” There was almost a hint of compassion in her voice. “They’ll never stop the shadows from flooding through that.”
Some of the Voroshk already recognized the magnitude of the disaster still unfolding. Black fluttering shapes scattered like roaches suddenly exposed to the light. Flying posts took to the air, streaked northward so violently that bits of black cloth ripped off and fluttered down like dark autumn leaves.
The three elders held their positions. They stared our way. I wondered what was happening inside their heads. Almost certainly not any recognition of the fact that the disaster was a direct result of the magnitude of Voroshk arrogance. I have never met one of their kind who would admit any fallibility whatsoever.
I was sure there would be some grand squabbles over where to fix the blame during the time they had left. Human nature at work.
“What are you thinking?” Lady asked.
I realized that I was no longer moving, that I was just watching the Voroshk watch me. “Just looking around inside me, trying to figure out why this doesn’t bother me the way it would have years ago. Why I recognize the pain more easily now but am not touched by it nearly so much.”
“You know what One-Eye used to say about you? You think too much. He was right. You don’t have any more obligation to him. Let’s go back to our own world, see about spanking our little girl and getting my baby sister straightened up.” Her voice changed severely as her thoughts turned. “One thing I demand. Still. Narayan Singh. I want him. He’s mine.”
I winced inside my helmet. Poor Narayan. I said, “I still have one thing to do here.”
“What?” she snapped.
“After those three leave. I have to get Tobo’s friends back.”
She grunted and resumed walking. She had to make sure the road across the plain could be closed behind us, so that we would not become victims of the explosion, too.
32
The Shadowlands:
The Protector of All the Taglias
Soulcatcher’s survival instincts had been honed to a razor’s edge by centuries of adventures among peoples who considered her continued good health a liability. She sensed a change in the world long before she had any idea what that change might be, good or ill or indifferent, and ages before she dared hazard a guess as to its cause.
At first it was just that sense. Then, gradually, it became the pressure of a thousand eyes. But she could discover nothing. Her crows could find nothing either, other than the occasional, unpredictable, flickering glimpse of their quarry, the two Deceivers. That was ancient news.
Soulcatcher abandoned the hunt immediately. It would not be difficult to get close to the Deceivers again.
She learned nothing more before nightfall—except that her crows were extremely unsettled, getting more and more nervous, less and less tractable and increasingly inclined to jump at shadows. They could not make clear the nature of their malaise because they did not understand it themselves.
That began to grow clearer as the twilight gathered. Messengers interrupted Soulcatcher’s meditations to inform her that several of the murder had fallen prey to a sudden illness. “Show me.”
She made no effort to disguise herself as she followed her birds to the nearest feathered corpse. She picked it up, rolled it carefully in her gloved hands.
It was obvious what had killed the crow. Not illness but a killer shadow. No cadaver looked like one did after a shadow finished with it. But that could not be. It was still light out. Her tame shadows were all in hiding and there were no rogue shadows around anymore. Nor would wild shadows have wasted themselves on a crow when there was human game in the vicinity. She should have heard Narayan Singh and that wretched niece of hers screaming long before any crow... There had been no sound from the bird whatsoever. Nor had there been from any of a half dozen others the murder knew to be gone. The survivors had plenty to say. Including stating plainly that they were not about to stray away from her protection.
“How can I fight this if I don’t know what it is? If you won’t find out for me?”
The crows would not be bullied or cajoled. They were geniuses for birds. Which meant they were just bright enough to have noticed that every one of the dead had been completely alone when evil had befallen them.
Soulcatcher cursed them, then calmed herself and convinced the most valiant birds that they had to, therefore, do their scouting in threes and fours until darkness closed in completely. At that point she would have bats and owls and her own shadows available to take over.
Darkness came. As the Deceivers correctly observe, the darkness always comes.
With nightfall came a silent but horribly vicious warfare with Soulcatcher poised at the eye of the storm.
Initially she had to hold on desperately against unknown assailants until her own shadows could bring in enough swift reinforcements. Then, spending shadows profligately, she took the offensive. And when dawn came, and she was almost without supernatural allies because of the cost of the struggle, she gave way to exhaustion, having gained a knowledge of a portion of the truth.
They were back. The Black Company were, with new formations, new allies, new sorceries, and still without a dram of mercy in their hearts. These were not the Company she had known in younger years but they were the spiritual children of the cold killers of the olden days. No matter what you tried, it seemed, you could kill only men. The ideal lived on.
Ha! An end to the boredom of empire stood at hand.
Bravado and pretense did not lessen the inexplicable fear. They had fled onto the plain. And now they were back. That had to mean much more. She needed to interrogate shadows who had existed on the glittering stone during those silent years. When there was time. Before she did anything else she had to do what she always did so well: survive.
She was out here hundreds of miles from any support. She was besieged by things that would not yield to her will or sorcery and which she could detect, it seemed, only through her own shadows or when one of them attacked her directly. They were as fierce as shadows but strange. They were more otherworldly than her spirit slaves and seemed possessed of a higher order of intelligence.
Each one she extinguished personally infected her with both a vast sorrow and with the certainty that she was battling only the most feeble of their kind. Always there was a powerful presentiment of demons or demigods to come.
What she could not comprehend was why all this frightened her so. There was nothing here more deadly or threatening or bizarre than a thousand perils she had faced before. Nothing here matched the sheer dark menace of
