“Warn One-Eye. Make him understand. She’s already on to him.”
One-Eye is the most valuable man amongst us when the Company stumbles into the deep shit. The rest of the time you want to drown his ass because you know how good it will feel once the pain goes away.
We separated, Goblin going off to confer with his occasional partner in crime, me to check construction progress.
I hoped my situation would become less familial once the Taken had a place of her own. That hope proved vain.
* * *
The boss carpenter was grumbling. “More changes. It never ends. It’s always more ‘Make it bigger!’” The Old Man, not compelled to invest Company funds, refused to be niggardly. Mischievous Rain’s new shack would be a major permanent structure that could be handed over to the locals when the Company moved along.
That won us some new friends, as did our profligate spending for materials and craftsmen.
He being him, the Captain doubtless had a reason for letting outsiders roam freely inside the compound. Maybe he wanted Rebel spies thinking that they had eyeballed all of our secrets, although we did not have any, really. Or maybe he just wanted to watch outsiders react to Mischievous Rain and her kids.
She could not avoid notice while determinedly maintaining a death watch over me. I was out and about all the time.
I confess, there were times when I was flattered that people thought this homely old fart was worth the attention.
* * *
The day’s last would-be malingerer shuffled off, muttering because I had prescribed vigorous exercise. Mischievous Rain tinkled. I had come near forgetting that she was watching. She could be as still and quiet as death. She asked, “How did the in-town clinic go this morning?”
“The cold epidemic has broken.” Her kids had not suffered despite regular exposure to Gurdlief Speak. “A few scrapes. A cut that didn’t need suturing but that I stitched up anyway to make a point. Boys shouldn’t play stupid games with knives.”
“So now you’re a plague-smashing hero.”
“Clever me. I didn’t tell them that they’d get over it just as fast without seeing me.”
“The essence of the trade, yes? Taking credit for Nature’s handiwork.”
“Thou art a cynic, woman. A cynic thou art.” Then my heart did a flip. I was bantering with one of the Taken.
She showed me her mind reader’s smile but said only, “Gurdlief Speak hasn’t been around much lately. I had hoped to see more of him.”
“Don’t be upset. But he thinks your kids are creepy.”
She tinkled, not happily. “Why is that?”
“They’re supposed to be six years old,” though she had yet to define their ages exactly. “But they act older and colder and do weird things.”
“They’re curious. Children are naturally curious. You must have been a child, once, who wanted to know about things.”
“Children are curious. Yes. But normal kids don’t squat in one place and watch people do nothing for hours on end. Real kids have no attention span. They go on to the next thing almost as soon as they start whatever they’re doing now. Firefly and Shin creep out even old hands like Two Dead and Silent.” I held back on Ankou. The demon cat had made himself universally loathed, with no one able to say exactly why.
“The more reason to get them socialized, yes? Before Gurdlief they never met another child.”
“How protective will you be?”
Tinkle tinkle. Less angry but definitely still not merry.
I suggested, “Send them into town. The kids there will whip the weird out of them.” Actually, they would teach Baku and Shin to keep their weirdness hidden.
“Not a good idea. Another thing they don’t know well is self-restraint.”
I got that in one. They might be children but they were deadly dangerous junior Taken, too.
“On a separate matter, why are you determined to know every little thing that I do?” There. The question finally asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You, the kids, the cat, one of you is always within a few feet. Always watching.”
A quick smile and merry tinkle. “No one was there when you told Goblin to warn One-Eye not to do anything stupid. And you have your trips to town to yourself.”
I did not believe that. I had gotten more than one earful about a weird Company cat that would not let anyone approach it.
Mischievous Rain shrugged. That generated an extended rattle of chimes. I wondered how the sound happened, what it meant, and why someone who arrived with luggage enough to stash clothes for a female regiment never wore anything but the one midnight yukata.
She did not explain when I asked. She just looked sad.
I did not understand but I had spent time in the Tower, too. No one comes away unchanged. Mischievous Rain’s big problem, I was sure after ten days, was a too-human concern for children there was no reasonable way that she could have borne and brought to their current age.
* * *
The hovel the Old Man tossed up for the Taken was a mansion by any standard. It had room for offices she could never use and an absurd acreage of private space as well. There was purpose-provided office space for the Company Annalist even though he was fully satisfied with his cramped little corner in Admin. His space included an apartment where he could nap or overnight if he lacked the ambition to stroll on back to his clinic. And then there was still another two thousand square feet of floored ground-level space that the Company could use any way it wanted.
Mischievous Rain would take up residence on the second floor. The third floor would allow servants to be quartered and junk to be stored.
Two thousand square feet on the ground. The Old Man, that crafty bastard, had made us a shitload of prime indoor space at zero cost to the Company.
Which explained his smugly cooperative attitude.
Even Gurdlief was thrilled. Mischievous Rain had asked for a children’s playroom. Gurdlief Speak was welcome to visit whenever he wanted.
On reviewing my recent scribbling I see that I have become more of a historian than a participating observer, more bland, more neutral, less focused on personalities and less concerned about the who, how, and why instead of the what. I am sure that that is a function of the Annalist being compelled to live a sedentary life in a safe environment.
* * *
“All right,” the Old Man said. “You have five minutes to whine. Begin by explaining why I should give a rat’s ass.”
“This thing with the Taken. What is it?”
“What thing?”
“You have pushed us together from the moment her feet hit the ground.”
“You think so? I don’t agree. Availabilities have been provided for convenience’s sake. There is no need for you to have…”
His remarks went on to make even less sense.
“Some guys are accusing us of living together.”
“Ah. Now the real whining begins. Could it be that you are?”
In a strictly literal sense, maybe, since we resided in the same building, but … “If that was what I wanted … To me it looks like somebody wants to make it happen.” I gave him the hard-eye.
A minute passed. The Old Man offered no response. Finally, he did say, “We are all of us obliged to execute the orders that we receive. That’s how the soldiering business works.” Meaning, maybe, that my discomfiture was being engineered from the Tower.
Maybe. The Old Man was exactly the kind of son of a bitch who would use the Lady as a tool with which to manipulate me. But … Why the hell would he? Where was the upside for him?
I was not emotionally prepared to accept the obvious, that he might be thinking the other way round.
* * *
Weird shit began happening. Weirder than the usual weird shit.
I began to hear more than normally superstitious muttering. People kept seeing spooks or monsters or spirits. Local folks believed that divinities and spirits inhabited every rock, pond, and
tree, and most of those spirits loved nothing so much as messing with their human neighbors. Which could be frustrating when you wanted to do something but the locals held you up for an age while they placated the appropriate spooks.
Aloens could be cold-blooded pragmatic one minute and foaming-at-the-mouth superstitious the next. Even after a year I did not get how it all worked.
Gurdlief Speak, and Markeg Zhorab of the Dark Horse, were my resources for Aloen myth and legend. They were not much help with this.
Paper strips began to appear on doors in town and inside the Company compound. Thirty strips turned up the first night. Each stood sixteen inches tall and was three inches wide. Each boasted thirteen unfamiliar black characters that had been inscribed with a slim brush and special ink. Locals called the strips “talismans,” which apparently made them monstrously important.
There was no pattern to where they appeared. One defaced the door of my own town clinic. I grumbled obscenities as I stripped it off.
Bam! Which was no more a true bang than Mischievous Rain’s tinkling was a true wind-chimes song. A flash and smoke did accompany that not quite sound, though.
Characters previously brushed on the paper were now burned into the face of my door.
That happened whenever and wherever anyone removed a strip.
The Old Man turned out the Company wizards. One and all professed ignorance and bewilderment. He then conjured the Taken.
“No, I can’t read the characters,” she told us. “They’re foreign to me, too. They might be meant to create a barrier to keep someone or something in, or someone or something out. Because there’s not always anyone or anything inside the places where the talismans turn up, it follows that they must be meant to keep something out.”
“Something?” I asked.
“Pressed, I would guess that someone is creating spirit barriers.”
Yeah. Sure. But who? And why slap the strips up so randomly, all inscribed in an unknown alphabet?
There was an answer.
There was a reason.
Mischievous Rain was, likely, both. Somebody wanted her distracted while they searched for the Port of Shadows.
Still, even stipulating that, the talismans were an odd angle of attack. They did nothing obvious. Ankou and the twins were not affected. No one ever suffered any real inconvenience, in town or in camp.
But the talismans definitely gnawed at the composure of the superstitious.
So. Stuff happening in town was easily understood, but how did a Resurrectionist get into the compound to slap paper strips all over without getting caught? Security was sloppy, sure, we so seldom had trouble. But security was not that lax.
Sorcery had to be involved, of a sort that made witnesses fail to take note of a vandal in action.
* * *
Mischievous Rain led me to the hog pen, a noisy and noisome acre west of the compound, on the side away from town. Two talismans sealed the pen gate. That made less sense than any other talisman I had seen the past two mornings.
She told me, “You’re almost there, aren’t you?”
“Ma’am?”
Gust front tinkle. Hard-eyed look. It got sudden cold out. Really cold. What did you do now, Croaker?
Somewhere, Ankou unlimbered a mighty yowl.
“‘Ma’am’? What’s that? You’re twenty years my senior, Annalist.”
It was closer to ten but I was not going to argue.
Candy, Elmo, Two Dead, and several other sets of curious eyes trailed us. Some foul beast snickered. A second beast choked on his attempt to suppress his laughter. Mischievous Rain turned. “Go away.” Her tone was conversational but the chimed accompaniment was ferocious. The stars on her yukata danced.
I said, “Wow. I’ve never seen…”
“Be silent.”
I took the suggestion to heart. She was in a sudden foul mood and I could not help suspecting that it might be my fault. My advanced age would not protect me. If I did anything more I might get a chance to make my third mistake from six feet under the clover.
She snatched the talismans off the gate. They burst into flames. She used her free hand to draw the smoke to her nose. “Yes. I thought so.”
I ached, so desperately did I want to ask. My training in the Tower left me just barely able to restrain my curiosity.
“You may speak, now.”
A bit of grovel might be in order. “What did I do? So that I never offend again.”
“I can’t explain in words that you will understand. You are you. You are what you are: the sum of your lifetime experiences. The only women you ever knew were family or whores. And her, in the Tower, who might know less of men than you know of women.”
Well, maybe. But that did seem pretty cryptic.
She cursed and shook her fingers, having held a burning talisman a moment too long. “Let’s go.” And so ended Mischievous Rain’s first incursion into the world outside the Company compound, her purpose apparently forgotten.
A pigpen to remember, though.
Despite having permission to speak I kept Croaker confined to the interior of the obsessively inquisitive physician-Annalist-historian.
* * *
I sat in the background while Mischievous Rain interviewed potential servants. She wanted four girls. Her requirements remained mysterious except that she wanted no males nor any girl who had served in the temple. Maybe she wanted to avoid anyone who had known Tides Elba.
Only six girls asked for the work. None of them really wanted it. Their elders probably figured it was time they started supplementing the family income—unless, of course, they were meant to become spies. They were all very young, the oldest being thirteen. It might be hard to find many girls older who had not done time in the temple.
Mischievous Rain sent them home with a promise to decide quickly. She asked me, “Which four would you add to your personal collection?”
“That question is both unfair and based on the absurd assumption that I lust after children.”
Big grin. Merry tinkle. My sin at the pigpen gate had been forgiven.
“Remember, I know only my sisters and comfort women.”
“And me, now, sort of.”
“You are unusual.”
“Oh yes, I am indeed. Let’s have supper.”
“Huh?” Was she messing with me?
I followed her upstairs. Her quarters were in showplace order. Just what a single young mother’s establishment ought to look like—assuming she was incredibly powerful and owned inexhaustible resources.
Each minute I spent with her left me wondering more what the Lady was thinking.
Mischievous Rain had two young soldiers serve supper. She and I and the kids sat at a small square table with her across from me. Beloved Shin sat to my left, Firefly to my right. Demon cat Ankou feasted on raw fish in the least trafficked corner of the room.
Yet again I find myself recording details outside the customary. Why must I chronicle my slow descent into domesticity?
The soldiers were locals, borrowed with the Captain’s connivance. What the hell? Was the Taken working a game on me?
On Croaker the man? Or on Croaker the Company physician? Or possibly on Croaker the Company Annalist?
Sometimes people do try to influence how I remember them. But why would Mischievous Rain give a rat’s ass how she looked in the Annals?
Made no sense that I could see.
How about a game on the imagined consort of the monster of the Tower? That had a certain absurd plausibility given a gargantuan dose of suspension of disbelief.
Or, plunging headfirst into thoroughly imaginative conspiracy theory, was Croaker being leveraged into the minds of the Lady’s enemies, who might be the sort of whack jobs who went around slapping combustible talismans onto the gates of pigpens?
“You think too much,” she told me after the dessert course, and after the soldiers had taken their leave, probably to retail vastly inventive eyewitness reports in exchange for dri
nks at the Dark Horse. “And you worry way too much. Almost nothing really means much. Most everything is exactly what it appears to be.”
I had no clue.
“Lean back. Relax. Let it happen. Take it for what it is.”
No clue at all.
Mischievous Rain told the children to get ready for bed. Neither kid took that with good grace. I reminded them to brush their teeth. All that handled, the Taken told me, “It’s well after dark. Let’s you and me go find out what the talisman business is all about.”
Determined to cooperate and thereby stay healthy, I joined her for a moonlight stroll. She left the compound for only the second time. This time she made it all the way into town.
* * *
The stroll proper lasted a single turn around the side of the new building. It ended at a tall, narrow white door not yet tagged with a talisman. In fact, no talisman had appeared within the compound after the first night. That was suggestive, but I was not sure of what, other than that somebody did not want to get noticed during a heightened state of alert.
A half-moon lurked thirty degrees above the western horizon, behind scattered stripes of cloud. It looked particularly silvery and cold.
“Give me a hand, here, Annalist.”
Mischievous Rain had the skinny door open, revealing her carpet standing on edge. She wanted to bring it out without dragging it. She made it float until we could tip it down.
She stepped aboard the carpet. It settled. She said, “I know you’ve done this before. Let’s go.”
“Um.” A grunt, not thrilled. “It’s been a while.”
She tinkled. “Hang on tight, then. I’m still learning myself.”
I said nothing about her having managed to make it to Aloe without losing Ankou, her kids, or her plunder—which triumph buoyed my own confidence. Just a little.
The carpet stirred, rose, leaned, turned. I ground my teeth. She told me, “I’m going to stay low. You’ll only have time for one good scream before you hit the ground.”
Sure. Right. Truth be told, I was more troubled by her friendly attitude than by the prospect of a sudden desperate need to learn to walk on moonshine.
Up we rose, then scooted southwest, leaving startled shouts behind. Somebody was alert. We headed away from town first. There was moonlight enough to show me swiftly changing ground features that were way too far down below. Mischievous Rain’s low flight was still high enough to avoid treetops and, later, man-made obstacles when we got to town.