So the woman I saw while I was lost in the delta was a widow. I guess that explained why she was haggard and unhappy.
"You should tell me more about Nyueng Bao. I'd feel less stupid when something like this comes up."
Thai Dei's smile died. "There is no longer any need for you to know our customs, is there?"
I was not one of them, even by marriage. He was here because he had assumed an obligation, not because I was family.
I needed to think about that.
33
Croaker let everybody rest thoroughly before he launched what he hoped would be the final assault on the Shadowlander defenses. I had an ague or maybe something I picked up from the proximity of Kina for a while, hot sweats alternating with cold shakes. Consequently I did not get out to scout our enemies.
No matter. The Old Man was able to gossip with his crows.
There were no living Shadowlanders anywhere in the defensive works that Longshadow had deemed so critical. While we were being soft, sitting around on our behinds resting, Mogaba and his captains had gotten their soldiers moving. They had even tried to destroy the stores they could not drag with them but were forestalled in that by the efforts of an alert Shadar cavalry detachment.
Death is eternity. Eternity is stone. Stone is silence. Stone is broken.
In the night, when the wind no longer moans and the small shadows go into hiding, stone sometimes whispers. Stone sometimes speaks. Stone sometimes sends its children plunging into the abyss. Sometimes a tendril of colorful mist rises to caress the figure pinned to the tilting throne.
Shadows scamper playfully about the plain glittering in the moonlight, devouring one another and growing stronger. Their memories are as old as stone. They remember freedom.
Sometimes the leaning throne slips a millionth of an inch, tilting farther. This happens more and more frequently now.
Stone shudders. Eternity sneers as it devours its own tail. This cold feast is almost finished.
Even death is restless.
34
I could hear One-Eye cursing fate in general and several Vehdna Taglians in particular. One wheel of the wagon had become pinched between boulders and the soldiers were not getting it pried out fast enough to suit the little wizard. He had been in a foul temper all morning. I do believe he thought we would not continue on south after we won at Charandaprash. I do believe he thought the Old Man would be content to occupy the pass, then withdraw to warmer climes and wait for summer.
Where was Longshadow going to go? Home. And because of the earthquake home was a house that would not be completed any time soon. So where was the big hurry? What kind of tunnel-vision fanatic did not even take time out for one good drunk after winning a battle so huge and obviously unwinnable going in?
One-Eye had been saying all this and a lot more from the minute Croaker had told him to move out. One-Eye was not a happy trooper.
He was even more unhappy because I got to ride. My fever and chills thing kept coming and going. The Captain saw that as a good excuse to keep me near Smoke against whom he continued to caution me regularly. I did not tell him that walking with the ghost was becoming as unattractive as attractive, that it was getting scary out there. I had not talked it over with One-Eye yet, either. I knew I should. I would not like myself much anymore if something happened because I failed to warn them.
But I did not want to cry wolf, either. One-Eye had not mentioned running into anything unusual during his occasional trips out. Maybe I was letting my imagination get the best of me.
I was in pretty good shape for the moment. A little shaken by the ride but neither feverish nor fighting a chill. Might be an opportune time to take a look around.
Outside, One-Eye snarled something at Thai Dei. "Not a good idea, One-Eye," I snapped in Jewel Cities dialect. "He'd as soon kick your ass as look at you."
"Ha! That ought to be interesting. See what JoJo does. Might even wake him up."
Like most Company members One-Eye had a Nyueng Bao bodyguard. His was Cho Dai Cho, as unobtrusive and unambitious a bodyguard as ever lived. He was around only because the tribal elders had decreed it. He did not seem to have much interest in saving One-Eye from himself or anyone else. I had not seen Cho four times in the last month.
I could not find Soulcatcher. I knew she was there and Smoke was not fighting me but the woman was operating under a spell that hid her from even this sort of seeing. I could guess where she was roughly, though, because of the comings and goings of crows in the mountains west of us.
I looked around for One-Eye's shapeshifter friend Lisa Bowalk but there was no trace of her, either. Nor could I pinpoint Mogaba and the couple of Nar who had chosen to stand by him when he deserted the Company for service to the Shadowmaster.
This was something to think about. If people had begun to suspect we were watching... But there was Longshadow in his crystal dome atop Overlook's tallest tower, seated at a stone desk, calmly giving orders to messengers, arranging for the defense of his dwindling empire rationally and with vigor and making no effort to hide himself from me.
And down below, in a private apartment, here was an uncomfortable and weakened Narayan Singh cringing in a corner while the Daughter of Night, like a dwarf rather than a child, apparently carried on half of a conversation with her spiritual mother. There was a smell of Kina in the room but not that terrifying sense of presence I had encountered before.
I observed for a while. I ran back the hours. There was no doubt. Narayan Singh was not running anything anymore. He was an adjunct to the Daughter of Night, useful principally as a voice through which she could communicate with the Shadowmaster and the Deceivers. But Singh was beginning to suspect that his usefulness was running its course, that it would not be very much longer at all before the child would be ready to dispose of him.
When the time came she would do it with no more thought or emotion than she would discarding a well-gnawed pork rib.
Her communions with her divine parent were reshaping her fast.
Kina seemed to be in a hurry, perhaps pressed for time, so that she did not have time to wait for the child to mature into her role.
I was very uncomfortable around the kid even though she was a hundred miles away. I got out of there.
I tried tracking Howler down but caught only glimpses as he buzzed here and there on his raggedy-ass, oft-patched smaller carpet. He seemed to have upped his level of precaution dramatically, too. I could spot him only when he was in a really big hurry and, apparently, outrunning his invisibility shield.
Who would he be hiding from? If he did not know about me?
There was still the Radisha, whom I had not spied on for way too long.
In present time she was in the midst of a large audition with the chief priests of the major temples of the city. The subject was, not surprisingly, the war. In particular, the sacrilegious, atheistic, anticlerical stance of the men directing the Taglian effort. The new generation of priests were much less contentious amongst sects than had been their predecessors, who had paid for their stubbornly parochial attitudes with their lives.