She Is The Darkness - She Is The Darkness Part 10
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She Is The Darkness Part 10

"There's a war on. Come on. Get out of the way. I need the old fart so I can do my part. Go get some exercise. Eat something. Make him some soup so you can feed him when I'm done."

"You feed him when you're done, bat-breath. You're the man with the job."

"You got a real attitude problem, Kid."

"We about to try something?"

"No. We hiked five hundred goddamn miles in the middle of goddamn winter because they say the brush down here is so goddamn great for cookouts."

"Everybody acts like they're drugged."

"Could be on account of they're drugged. I don't know. Just my opinion. I could be wrong. Get out of my way. I got work to do."

The smoke was awful. And it got worse nearer the front of the army. Scant yards made a huge difference. After my first foray in that direction I decided curiosity could wait. I hung around the wagon. I ate and ate and ate. I used up most of One-Eye's water. Served him right, the way he abused me.

I thought about Sahra. I knew I would be thinking of her a lot now. Danger has a way of making you dwell on the things most important to you.

The proximity of Narayan Singh haunted me, too. The living saint of the Deceivers was less than a mile away, tending his own cookfire while the Daughter of Night looked on dreamily, well bundled against the morning chill and damp.

I started. Damn! That little reverie was almost real.

I got restless waiting to get back to Smoke. I wanted to see if Singh was making breakfast. I needed to get away from all these thoughts about Sarie.

When would the scars form around the pain? When would it stop hurting so much that I had to run away?

I stared into the fire and tried to banish the thoughts. That was like picking at a scab. The harder I tried to think about something else the more I focused on Sarie. Eventually the fire filled my entire horizon and I seemed to see my wife on the other side, rumpled and beautiful and somewhat pallid as she went about the mundane business of cooking rice. It was like I was looking back through time to a moment I had lived before.

I made a noise like a dog strangling and jumped to my feet. Not again! I was over those falls into the past...wasn't I?

One-Eye clambered down from the wagon. "All done, Kid. You can have him if you need him but you really ought to give it a break. Ain't nothing going to happen for a while, anyway."

"What're we burning in these fires? I'm having visions or something here."

One-Eye sucked in a couple gallons of air, held his breath a while, then blew it out, shook his head, disappointed. "You're imagining things."

"I never did."

I never did. That was worth thinking about. I glanced around to see who was listening. Mother Gota was at the family cookfire but her Forsberger was not good enough to give her a clue.

She had appointed herself full-time family cook. Which meant that, even with the demands made by my travels with Smoke, I was in no danger of getting fat. She still lugged her personal arsenal. She acted like she knew how to use it those rare times she troubled to practice with Thai Dei and Uncle Doj. She did not talk to me much anymore. I was not the reason she was here. I was an inconvenience and an embarrassment.

She knew none of this would have happened if love and Hong Tray had not gotten in the way of common sense and ancient custom.

I was just as happy she stayed out of my way. I had my own feelings to tame. Among them was the conviction that life might have been much better for me had Sarie's mother never come to stay with us. Sahra might even be alive still. Though there was no way I could work that out so that it fit any logic.

Much as Smoke called I decided to endure the pain. I had to get used to it sometime. So why not try walking around the camp again? I could stay away from the worst smoke.

Thai Dei materialized almost as soon as I started moving. "Your sling and splints are gone," I said. "Are you back on the job?" He nodded.

"Sure it isn't a little soon for that? You could break that arm again if you don't give it time enough to heal."

Thai Dei shrugged. He was tired of being a cripple. That was that. Tough as he was, he was probably right.

"What happened to Uncle Doj?" I had not seen the old boy for a while. If Thai Dei was back Doj might give in to an impulse to go after revenge on his own. His Path of the Sword thinking would find that perfectly reasonable. Thai Dei shrugged.

He was lucky he did not have to talk for a living. There would be even less of him than there is now.

"Help me out here, brother. I'm going to get real upset if that old man gets himself killed." Uncle Doj was not ancient. He had maybe ten years on the Old Man and was more spry than Croaker.

"He would not do that."

"Glad to hear it. Trouble is, anybody can. While we're at it, remind him to try not being so weird in front of people who don't know us. The Captain didn't survive Dejagore with us."

Thai Dei was positively loquacious all of a sudden. "He lived his own hell." Which was true but not a point I would expect Nyueng Bao to note.

"He sure did. And it twisted him. Same as Dejagore twisted us. He doesn't trust anybody anymore. That's a lonely way to be but he just can't help it. And he especially don't trust people whose beliefs and business and motives are completely opaque to him."

"Uncle?"

"You have to admit that Uncle Doj is odd even by Nyueng Bao standards."

Thai Dei grunted, conceding the point privately.

"He makes the Captain very nervous." And the Captain was a very powerful man.

"I understand."

"I hope so." Ordinarily even Doj has to pry words out of Thai Dei so I felt rewarded. He remained talkative. I learned a good deal about his childhood with Sahra, which was pretty unremarkable. He believed there was a curse on their family. His father had died when he and Sahra were children. His wife My had drowned when their son To Tan was only a few months old, early in the pilgrimage that had brought the Nyueng Bao into Dejagore just in time for the siege. Sahra had married Sam Danh Qu, who had put her through several years of hell before he died of that fever in the early days of the siege. Then the children had all died, Sahra's under the swords of Mogaba's men in Dejagore, To Tan during the Strangler raid that had ended with my wife dead and Thai Dei's arm broken.

Evidently nobody in this family ever died of old age. This dying family. Mother Gota would bear no more children. Thai Dei had the capacity to become a father again but I did not expect that to happen. I expected Thai Dei to get killed avenging his sister and son.

Thai Dei stopped being communicative when To Tan's name came up.

The army lined up so: Lady's division to the left, the Prince's in the center, the Captain's two to the right, stacked one behind the other. All our cavalry assembled in the gap between the front and trailing divisions.

Why? The reserve division belongs behind the center. That has been customary since the dawn of time.

And why did Croaker station all his specially trained units behind or beyond Lady's division?

Either the Old Man thought he could dive Mogaba berserk trying to winkle out the answers or he was letting his hatred for Blade and his paranoia define his tactics.

And why were the camp followers, voluntarily or otherwise, being gathered together right on the front line? Croaker hated camp followers. That he had not run them off weeks ago was a wonder to all who knew him.

I could not find Uncle Doj. Still.

23.

I felt it begin before any growl of drum or snarl of trumpet. I ran for the wagon, leaping rocks and fires in the mist.

I had Smoke take me up where Mogaba watched from his high tower, sensed uncertainty immediately. He knew Croaker. He knew that half what the Old Man did would be done to mess with his mind. But which half?

The knowing itself would cause a hesitation at every point of decision.

I loathed Mogaba the traitor but admired Mogaba the man. He was tall, handsome, intelligent. Just like me. But he was the perfect warrior, too.

He had no company but couriers and the two big wazoos. And they were doing a great imitation of two guys sleeping. Their strategy was to wait for Lady to make a move so one could grab her while the other one blindsided her.

Mogaba's platform provided a less than perfect view though probably the best attainable. A portion of his left flank was masked by a jumble of boulders while to his right a steep knee of stone concealed his flank there along with a portion of the Taglian left wing.

I took Smoke up amongst the crows for a vulture's eye view. The smoke was thinning out. People were stumbling uphill, unable to make an orderly advance over the rocky ground.

Now I understood why the troops had been issued calthrops.

Calthrops are like large kids' jacks, only the tips are sharp and sometimes poisoned. The calthrop is a handy tool if you have to run for it, particularly if the guys after you are going to be on horseback. You scatter calthrops where horses have to follow narrow paths and you have yourself a guaranteed head start or even grounds for a nasty ambush.

Aha! I spied the missing complimentary in-law.

Uncle Doj was dressed up in his best outfit, his holy fencing duds, like he maybe did not want us going to a whole lot of trouble when we laid him out. Hell. I would have to check with Thai Dei on Nyueng Bao funeral customs. A lot of Nyueng Bao had died around me but I never took part in what went on later.

I still resented being left out when they took care of To Tan and Sahra without me.

Uncle Doj strutted uphill till he was just fifty feet from the first line of Shadowlanders. He stopped and bellowed a challenge to Narayan Singh.

Guess who did not come out to fight? Nobody even answered. Nobody even bothered to relay the message to the Deceiver camp.

Uncle Doj began issuing a series of formal insults, belittling the Deceivers and all their allies. Trouble was, they were formal insults from a stylized school of challenge and response. He did not know how to make his presentation in a manner accessible to people who did not speak Nyueng Bao.

Poor Uncle. Forty years of intense preparation brought him to the ultimate moment and all those guys over there saw was a crazy old man.

Doj began to get it.

He began to get angry for real. He started yelling his challenges in Taglian. A few Shadowlanders understood him. His message soon reached the Deceivers. It was not well received.

I found the show as amusing as anything could be out there.

None of this was part of the Captain's plan.

Uncle kept hollering.

Over in the Deceiver camp the miniature messiah of the Stranglers told his cronies, "We will not respond. We will wait. Darkness is our time. And darkness always comes." After a pause he asked, "Who is that man?"

A wide, creepy looking guy told him, "He was in Dejagore. One of the Nyueng Bao pilgrims." The man speaking was named Sindhu. He had come into Dejagore during the siege to spy for Lady and for the Deceivers. He was a real villain. I had been sure he was dead.

The Sahras die but the Sindhus and Narayan Singhs go on. Which is why I cannot be a religious man. Unless the Gunni are right and there is a wheel of life and eventually everybody gets what they deserve.

Sindhu continued, "He was a priest of some kind and their Speaker. A member of his family eventually wed the standardbearer of the Black Company."

"It becomes clear. The Goddess is scribbling one of her subtle death plays." He glanced at the Daughter of Night. The kid sat so still it was spooky. Spookier than usual. No four-year-old could do that.

Narayan Singh seemed vaguely troubled. His goddess enjoyed the occasional death joke at the expense of her most devout followers. He did not want to become one of her pranks.

"Darkness is our time," he said again. "Darkness always comes."

Darkness always comes. Sounded like Kina's motto. I took another look at Lady and Croaker's brat. She bothered me bad. She was spookier every time I looked. If it had not been so hard to care out there I could have cried for Lady and the Old Man.

Actually, I almost could. Maybe I was becoming capable of feeling while I worked.

I drifted away, found that Mogaba was taking stronger exception to Uncle's antics than was Singh. But he remembered Uncle Doj from the bad old days. "I want that man silenced," he said. "The soldiers are watching him instead of their enemies."

When he drew no response from the Deceivers, Uncle Doj began insulting the Shadowlanders and their masters. A javelin streaked his way. In a motion too swift to follow he drew Ash Wand and brushed the missile aside. "Cowards!" he called. "Renegades! Are any of you Nar men enough to come out?" He exposed his back contemptuously, headed for friendly lines before a missile storm could devour him. A masterful move, it did not look like a withdrawal at all.

24.

All hell broke loose. Horns shrieked. Drums grumbled. A stumbling, shambling, inept, mean-spirited and poorly armed rabble headed uphill wailing, sixty thousand hungry and hard up camp followers attacking the servants of shadow. Our soldiers drove them at swordspoint.

I was stunned. I was awed. The Captain had his hard moments but I never figured him for hard enough to let camp followers accumulate and tag along so he could use them as a human avalanche. But on reflection, yes, for weeks he had been warning the soldiers not to let anyone they cared for join the march. Those who discussed it at all thought it meant that the Old Man did not expect to be successful.

Those people were going to get slaughtered. But they would hurt some Shadowlanders and grind the rest down, which would work to our advantage.

The soldiers were merciless. They whipped the camp followers into a terrified frenzy. When they hit Mogaba's center and right they actually penetrated the Shadowlander front rank.

Blade's division remained untouched.

While everyone was concentrating on our attack, Croaker's special forces left Lady's shadow and hastened into the wastes flanking the pass. Mogaba had sentries concealed in amongst those rocks, of course. Fighting broke out immediately.

Our elephants moved forward behind the troops pushing the camp followers. The Shadowlanders were too busy to bother them. The elephants used huge mallets to drive big iron spikes into the earth.

Came a shrill of brassy Shadowlander trumpets. For no reason I could discern Blade's division suddenly moved out, left oblique, downhill, at an angle that would take it around our right flank. I marvelled at how well his men maintained formation crossing that rough ground.

Now I got to witness one of Longshadow's epic rages. "You have gone too far this time!" he thundered at Mogaba, once he controlled himself enough to manage a coherent sentence. "What the hell do you think you're doing, making moves like that without consulting me? At least explain your thinking!" While he yelled he stamped around the rough platform, shaking, clawing at his mask till I thought he might show the world the face he kept hidden except when he was alone.

"I have no idea what he's doing." Mogaba ignored the Shadowmaster's rage. He leaned on the platform rail, stared at Blade's division and looked as confused as ever I had seen. "Be quiet."

Howler punctuated the racket with a series of shrieks.

Longshadow became incoherent again.