understood why Murgen picked Sleepy, either. Yet he had chosen well. She had brought the Company through the Kiaulune wars and the era of the Captivity. And there had been a lot of raised eyebrows when I had chosen Murgen to become Annalist. And Murgen had managed despite never having been quite certain of his sanity.
Sleepy saw something.
Suvrin did not agree. Suvrin insisted that he was going to leave us. But I noted that he had passed up several wonderful opportunities to do so already.
As was her right, being Thai Dei’s closest surviving relative, Sahra asked Murgen to join her and Tobo in placing the torches into Thai Dei’s pyre. Fitting, I thought, although the old men grumbled. Murgen and Thai Dei had been as close as brothers for a long, long time.
Sahra asked no one but Tobo to help bring the fire to Doj.
Even I saluted the dead swordmaster, though in life I never trusted him.
Lady leaned against me from my left. “I suppose you’ll have to admit that he was trustworthy now.” Mind reading.
“I don’t have to admit any such thing. He just kicked off before he could screw us over.”
“No fool like an old fool.”
I stopped arguing. She would win every debate by dint of outliving me. I changed the subject. “You still feel like you’re getting stronger?” For an age now she had been able to steal almost no supernatural power from Kina. But long ago she had been able to parasitize enough to come close to being Soulcatcher’s equal. She believed Goblin’s attack on the Goddess was why there was so little power left to steal.
It seemed reasonable to me that Goblin returning as Kina’s tool would mean fresh power available but it had not worked that way. Not until Goblin and the girl had entered the Grove of Doom.
“It’s coming. Little by little.” She sounded like she did not want to wait. “I can do a few parlor tricks now.” The way she thought, that might mean she was limited to destroying small villages with a single wink. “I need to get closer to see what helps.”
I did not follow up. I could feel her excitement. She hid it well but if I got her going she would drive me nuts talking about stuff that was entirely beyond me.
I could do that, too, either going on with my theories about diseases or about the Company’s history.
Definitely a match made in heaven.
I told her, “Soon as we’re done paying our respects, how about you see Howler? Find out if my idea gets him moving on the carpets any faster.”
“If you give him what he wants now he won’t have any incentive to stay with us.”
“Where’s he gonna run to?”
“He’ll find somewhere. He always has.”
And, somehow, that always ended up in our way. “Then I expect we’ll push him hard to get us a couple, three carpets. And you can hang around playing apprentice while he does, sister Shukrat.”
“Yech! No way! He’s creepy. He stinks. And he has more hands than some of those four-armed Gunni gods.”
“He’s little,” Tobo called from the chair we had brought along so he could rest between ceremonial stints. “Spank him.”
“That’s probably what he wants.”
“Get somebody to carry me around and I’ll go with you,” Tobo told Shukrat. “I make the Howler nervous. Croaker. What’ll we call him if Shivetya cures his screaming?”
“Stinky might work. Or the Stinker for formal.”
The flames of the funeral pyres leapt higher. Tobo ignored me now. I let it drop, too. Time to say goodbye, old man. They never took the oath but Thai Dei and Doj were brothers in their hearts. They stories were warp and woof of the Company tapestry.
82
With the Company:
Going South
Sleepy always saw idleness as a vacuum in need of filling. No way was she going to put up with ten thousand men sitting around, maybe spending an hour or two each day training. When they were feeling particularly ambitious.
Just miles away stood a perfectly ugly wood desperately in need of clear-cutting.
You put a whole lot of people to work on a place like that, starting from the outside and working inward, making sure you get even the tiniest twigs and shoots, you can get some great bonfires burning. The evening of the second day the soldiers had one entire horizon hidden behind ramparts of smoke.
Sleepy was
I had doubts about the wisdom of that. Sleepy was not impressed enough with the fact that Goblin had a slice of Kina stuffed inside him. And Kina’s bad-ass reputation was well-deserved.
But I was not the boss. I could advise but I could not make anyone listen. My worries just earned me one of Sleepy’s enigmatic smiles.
“You ready to go for a fly?” Lady asked. “Howler’s got a carpet ready.”
“You in a hurry?”
“You told me Sileth’s only got a week. That was three days ago.”
“I did, didn’t I? How big is that carpet?”
“Big enough.”
“I mean it, hon. It’s got to have room for six people.”
She stared. After several seconds she said, “I don’t think I’m even going to ask. Except maybe who.”
“You and Soulcatcher. Howler. Gromovol. Arkana if she wants to go.”
“Still playing games, Love?”
“No game. Progress. We lost the most promising one of those kids when Magadan got killed. That was a bad career move on his part. Gromovol is as useless as teats on a bull. I’d just as soon kill him. But if we give him back to those two old Voroshk demons Shivetya’s got tied up down there we might score a point or two.”
She frowned.
“Thought you were the master manipulator of the greatest empire...” She pointed a finger. An invisible darning needle began to sew my lips together. She
“There’s the man I married.”
Bullshit. But I was not going to argue. “We got the top two Voroshk locked up out there on the plain. They’ve got no home anymore, far as we know. As far as Shivetya is letting anybody know. They have no future, nowhere to go. An apparent act of kindness might add a couple of heavyweights to our ranks just when it would be handy to have them.”
“You’re evil.”
“I try. Let me go blow in Arkana’s ear.”
“You do and you’ll wake up in the morning wondering how long before you get your first hot flash.”
Well, well. Maybe that explained some recent crankiness. Hers. Mine was caused by the iron-strapped, rock- headed obtuseness of the people who insisted on tangling my feet. That was a whole different hunk of monkey meat.
I went to blow in Arkana’s ear. Verbally.
“I’m not going to give Gromovol a choice,” I told Arkana. “This is a chance for me to maybe make peace with his old man. Which is the only good that can ever come of the idiot. If I keep him here he’ll eventually do something stupider than anything he’s done already. I’ve told you before, I’ve been in this racket a long time. When you come up with a liability as big as Gromovol you look for a way to use him. Or you kill him. I’ve been getting soft in my twilight years.”
