defectors. One somehow managed to fall through the opening.
The Captain said, “Have those things start whispering that anyone who surrenders before dawn will be allowed to take their possessions with them. They’ll even be allowed to go home unharmed if they take an oath to the Prahbrindrah Drah. Captives taken after sunrise tomorrow will be conscripted into our forced labor battalions.”
We did not have forced labor battalions. But those were a part of siege warfare and were often the fate of prisoners of war and peasants who were insufficiently fleet of foot. The threat was plausible. And the Black Company had a long reputation for being unimpressed by caste, noble birth, or priestly status, too.
Once it was clear we would provide covering fire to defectors a flow developed. Usually the soldiers set to keep deserters from using the posterns were the first to come over.
The people engineering the resistance were not popular with their conscripted followers.
So some folks wanted to see the Protectorate continue but the people who had to do the work were not interested. The few I got to talk to had no real convictions in the matter. Who ruled made little difference in their lives. But it was getting on toward harvest time.
One of the great truths was getting some exposure to the light here.
Our men entered the manor early next morning. I was still asleep. Tobo’s pets spread confusion. Our men cleaned up behind them. None of our people died. There were few wounds of any consequence. Sleepy felt magnanimous. She turned most of the men of standing over to the Radisha and her brother for judgment. Only those Tobo identified as irredeemable creatures of the Protector faced the Company justice.
“Spread that around,” Sleepy told Tobo. “Make it sound a lot bigger than it was.”
“Tonight little people will be whispering in the ears of sleepers everywhere within two hundred miles.”
57
The Nether Taglian Territories:
The Resurrection
That far Taglian province shared religions with the rest of the Taglian Territories, with the majority being Gunni. It’s language was closely akin to that spoken around Dejagore. Sleepy could manage the dialect with only a little practice.
What I called a manor house was really more like a village completely enclosed within a single blockish structure. The principal building material was an unbaked brick kept carefully plastered so it would not wash away in the rain.
Inside there was an open central square with both cisterns and a good well. Stables and workshops opened on it all around. The rest of the structure was a warren of halls and rooms where people obviously lived and worked and ran shops and lived life as though the place was indeed some sort of city.
“It’s a termite mound,” Murgen told me.
“The Prince and his sis ought to feel right at home. It’s as bad as the Taglian Palace. On a miniature scale.”
“I want to know what they ate. The smell is overpowering.” The odors of spices clogged every hallway. But that was true in every Taglian city and town. These odors were just an alien mix.
Thai Dei caught up. He had actually allowed Murgen out of his sight for several minutes. Maybe he was slowing down, too. He brought a message. “Tobo says to tell you that Sleepy has decided to take a chance on wakening the Howler.”
You could tell Thai Dei was worried because that was one of the longest speeches I ever heard the man make.
Sleepy chose to undertake the awakening with full pomp, ceremony and drama. Following an evening meal we gathered in what had been a temple hall, when everyone was rested, well fed and supposedly relaxed. The place of worship was poorly lit and boasted far too many multiheaded and multiarmed idols in its corners to lead me to consider it strictly benign.
None of the idols represented Khadi but all Gunni deities make me uncomfortable.
I was present in a demigod role myself. I appeared as the creepy armored monster Widowmaker. I do not enjoy the role.
My dearly beloved, on the other hand, just loves any excuse to assume the guise of Lifetaker. For a few hours she can wear the ugly armor and pretend that these are still the good old days when she was something much more wicked than this Lifetaker thing is supposed to be now.
Our role in the proceeding was to sit there in the gloom with colorful worms of sorcery slithering over us. We were supposed to look intimidating while others got the real work done.
Tobo just came as Tobo. Hell, he did not bother putting on a clean shirt and trousers. But he did bring his Voroshk students.
The rest of the audience consisted of senior officers and regional notables who had come in, mainly, to assess the Prahbrindrah Drah and to discover what they would need to do to weather our presence.
Conquerers do come and go.
The hall was crowded. All those bodies produced a lot of heat. And I was inside that armor, sitting motionless on a stool behind the action, One-Eye’s black spear held upright in my right hand. That was supposed to be my entire part.
It mostly involved not fainting in front of witnesses.
Sleepy had set the stage pretty well, with the low lighting and enough advance rumormongering to make the audience understand that the Howler was both foaming-mouth mad and yet a sorcerer who was as powerful as the Protector.
Poor Howler. Despite his part in the Shadowmaster wars he was almost forgotten now.
The Voroshk, I noted, eventually settled right up front. Tobo was treating them as good friends, particularly the well-rounded, freckled little blonde. He chattered with her until Sleepy growled and told him to get on with it.
Even I felt a little let down by the awakening. Tobo indulged in no mumbo jumbo and no showmanship. He felt that his part was no more exciting than working in a stable.
But his effort was more impressive to thoughtful minds. A few people, maybe the right people, understood that Tobo was so good he could make something big look routine.
I thought the boy’s efforts said a lot about his character, too. His ego did not need a lot of feeding.
I noted that three out of four Voroshk got it right away. Gromovol actually got it, too, but he did have an ego disease.
Tobo freed Howler from his long trance in a matter of minutes.
I do not know the whole story. You never do with their kind of people. But I do know that Howler is ages older even than Lady. He was one of the men who helped her first husband, the Dominator, build the Domination, an empire that collapsed into the northern dust about the time the original Black Company crossed over from Khatovar. Howler’s pain and deformity are a legacy of that time. So is the kind of thinking that led Soulcatcher to proclaim herself Protector.
The woman does not have the obsessive focus and drive necessary to create a true replica of that old empire of darkness.
I never have seen Howler outside the layered rags he wears, rags so long unchanged that a whole ecology has developed between the Howler’s skin and the surrounding world. It includes numerous invertebrates, molds, mildews and a variety of small green plants.
The Howler is smaller than Goblin or One-Eye ever were but Lady insists that that was not always the case.
When Tobo finished, the almost shapeless little ragbag sucked in a deep breath, then let out one of the shrieks that had given him his name. It seemed an egalitarian mix of agony and despair. I shivered despite the heat.
