He looked at me for a dozen seconds. I looked back. Sahra came to stand beside me. Behind us, To Tan giggled as he played with his grandmother. The old man shifted his look to Sahra. For a moment he seemed to be staring into yesterday. He shivered. His expression grew more inscrutable. “We can.”
“Good. Do it while I’m with them.” I jerked a thumb uphill. “I’ll get word to Doj. He’ll find you.”
Tarn Dak continued to stare cooly. Not inimically at all, just without comprehension. I was not behaving like a proper foreigner.
“Good luck.” I returned to Rudy. “Here’s the deal. The Nyueng Bao need to take a powder. I’ll go with Swan. I’ll stall around when I get to his camp. You see that the Nyueng Bao get moved out, then make this mess look like we were setting up for the guys coming over tonight.”
The old man overheard every word.
I continued, “As far as anybody around here goes, these people never existed.”
“But...”
“Do it. And let them have most of the food. We can sponge off Lady’s gang.” I hoped.
Rudy looked at Sahra. Everybody seemed to think that she was the key. He shrugged. “You’re the boss. I guess I don’t need to understand. How are you going to explain her?”
“I don’t have to.” I headed toward where Swan’s patrol was surrounded.
Sahra came right along after pausing to grab up To Tan.
“Stay here,” I told her. She looked at me blankly, smitten by sudden deafness. I took a few steps. She matched them. “You need to stay with your own people.”
A little smile teased her lips. She shook her head.
Hong Tray was not the only witch in this family.
“Ky Gota...”
Boom!
“You! Soldier of Darkness! You her ruin, now is not good enough for you? Cruel witch was my mother but...” She became incomprehensible but not the least bit quiet. I checked Tarn Dak. He remained inscrutable but I would have bet my shot at heaven he wanted to laugh.
“Fuck this. Rudy! Find out what belongs to Sahra and see that it stays in our tent. Come on, woman.”
80
“Holy shit,” Swan murmured when I stepped out where he could see me. “No wonder you went back.”
“Hands off, pretty boy. Ay, Nyueng Bao! If you are out there go see Tam Dak. It’s important. Taglians. See Rudy from the Company.” I turned back to Swan. “There. We’re down to a few snipers. Just in case.”
He stopped staring at Sahra. “Sorry. You really stumbled into the sweet shit, didn’t you?” He did have the courtesy to make his remarks in Forsberger.
“Yeah. I did. What’s going on? I wake up the other day, after my wizards did an experiment on me, and I find out that somebody has been inside my head, messing with my memories. I find out I’m back over there in hell’s kitchen hunting rats and fighting cannibals when all the time my so-called friends are sitting around out here not even letting me know the Shadowmaster is dead.”
Swan gave me a dumb look. “But... You knew that, Murgen. You was over here when we killed the bastard. You was here for a week after that.”
“Killed him?”
It began to dawn. “You didn’t insist on going back? She said you...”
“No. I didn’t. When I found myself headed that way I thought I was escaping from Shadowspinner. I really believed that I hadn’t gotten to you people. I think.” It got more confused as I tried to figure it out.
Somebody called out something in Nyueng Bao. My troops had not followed orders. Someone else, in Taglian, called, “Can you come up here please, Mr. Murgen?”
I told Swan, “I don’t know what’s up. You better stand fast. These guys are real touchy.”
“I got nothing else to do with my life.”
“I mean it. They’re paranoid in a big way. If you had spent the last several months in there you’d understand,” I clambered up a steep slope to where one Taglian knelt in some scraggly brush with a Nyueng Bao about fifteen years old.
The boy pointed, eager to be the first to deliver bad news.
Fresh smoke rose from Dejagore. From, near as I could tell, the north barbican. It looked like there was fighting there.
A mauve flash told me One-Eye or Goblin was involved.
Mogaba must be trying to recover the barbican.
I spied flickers around the west gate, too.
“Damned Mogaba. Thanks, guys. Nothing we can do about it, though.” I hoped One-Eye and Goblin carved Mogaba a new poop chute. “Get on back to camp, will you? There’s stuff that’s got to get done.”
Lady was gone. Blade was in charge and just sitting around collecting refugees from the city, keeping them from reporting back with news about Shadowspinner. He admitted that. “That’s what she wants done.” He seemed indifferent to Sahra, unlike every other man in camp.
“She’s lucky she’s not here,” I grumbled. “I’d turn her over my knee.”
Since there was nothing else going on I sat around with him and Swan and Mather until it started to get dark. Somebody found a puppy for To Tan to play with. When it got late I said, “We’d better get back to our people. They’ll be getting nervous.”
“No can do, buddy,” Mather told me.
Blade agreed. “She said no exceptions.”
The warmth went out of the air. I gave each one what I thought of as the Nyueng Bao look. Swan and Mather averted their eyes. Blade took it but with a twitch.
Sahra seemed untroubled. I suppose, after Dejagore, it was hard to imagine a turn for the worse. She even smiled.
“I assume the prison pen is where I left it?” I remembered that part of my previous visit perfectly.
“We will keep you more comfortably,” Blade promised.
Mather volunteered, “I’ll show you where to bunk.”
We were far enough away not to overhear, Swan thought. He told Blade, “You look at her good? That’s one spooky woman.”
I glanced at Sahra. I assumed she heard, too, but her expression told me nothing.
If Blade answered Swan he spoke more softly.
I continued to study Sahra, wondering what Swan had seen.
81
The tent was decent. It must have belonged to a middle-grade Shadowlander officer. We were not unhonored guests. And the tent came with a man assigned to make us comfortable and bring us our supper. Blade’s troops were foraging successfully, it seemed. I ate better than I had for a long time.
“What I want more than anything in the world,” I told our man, whose name I never learned, “is a bath.” Sahra hit him with a smile guaranteed to melt armor plate. She was enthusiastic about that idea. “I’m so filthy my fleas have lice,” I said.
Must have been a real ration of guilt going around at high levels. An hour later several soldiers showed up humping a looted stone horse trough. With them came guys lugging buckets of hot water. I told Sahra, “We must of died and come back as princes.”
Our tent was big enough to contain the trough and water with room left over.
Swan turned up. “What do you think of that, eh?”
“If I didn’t have friends over there fighting and dying I’d ask for a life sentence.”
“Take it easy, Murgen. It’ll all work out.”
“I know that, Swan. I know that. But some of us aren’t going to be happy how it does.” “Yeah, well. Good night.”
It was. Beginning with the bath Sahra made it clear her definition of our relationship was exactly what others feared or suspected. She astounded me with her ability to communicate without spoken words, amazed me that in the midst of such unrelenting hell a flower of such beauty could bloom and defy the night.