“Exactly like that.”
“But nothing happened with it. It was a waste of time.”
He was not right, not even a little. I had to stick up for my kids. Or kid. The jars were Beloved Shin’s thing. “And that was because you followed the jar regime exactly as you were instructed.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“Would I shit my favorite turd?”
“All right, ass-wipe…”
“Gentlemen!” The Old Man refused to let us divert ourselves.
“Yes, sir. I don’t know how it works but the jars are full of concentrated shadows. The Taken’s kids are all about shadows. They can reach out anywhere through shadows … They might not really be kids—even if I am their father somehow—but their jars definitely work. Candy avoided some seriously ugly shit because he followed their instructions.”
Candy admitted, “I did do what I was told. What’s to lose? After all these years I know that’s usually best even when I don’t have half a frigging clue what’s actually happening. I reckoned Croaker got his inspiration from the Tower somehow.”
The Lieutenant asked, “What kind of ugly? And how do you know?”
I said, “Candy was south of Emeru, headed for Rabbit Creek. He had prisoners. He mistakenly set up camp at the foot of a cliff, beside a river running fast and loud with meltwater. The Rebels tracking him launched a night attack, intending to rescue their friends.”
The Captain raised a hand, stared at Candy hard. “With nowhere to run? And with ambient noise?”
Candy confessed, “I got lazy, boss. I got overconfident. It won’t happen again.”
The Old Man dropped his hand. I continued, “The Rebel gang included two small-time wizards who were supposed to handle our sentries. But Candy had the jar out. Something came out of the jar, something so awful that the Rebels didn’t even try to defend themselves. They just ran. In the dark.”
Now Candy asked, “And how do you know all that?”
“The kids told me. Like they were eyewitnesses.” I produced two silver rings given me by Beloved Shin, rings of the sort that Rebel officers wore.
The Old Man would not touch them. They might be cursed. The others exchanged glances but said nothing. Shadows haunted the room. Who knew what might be lurking within them? Maybe a six-year-old who might not be human, inclined to report back to the Tower? Or a cat that was not really a cat?
Mischievous Rain insisted that the twins were real kids. She insisted that she was their mother. That might be true but that truth might be only a fraction of the whole truth.
And I was on the hook for being their father, somehow, though that could not be the whole truth, either. Those brats for sure had a healthy dose of devil in them.
The Old Man demanded, “Croaker? You still here?”
“I am. Though sometimes I wonder.”
“Sometimes you wander. Get it together. I need you focused.”
“Is there something you’re not telling us?”
“Not us, no, but you, yes.”
“But…”
“Need to know, Croaker. You write things down.”
Candy said, “Someday your Annals are going to get nabbed by somebody that doesn’t like us. And they’ll use them against us.”
It could happen. It would not be a first. A lot of eyewitness Company history has gone missing over the years, to be recalled only at second or third hand in those Annals that did survive.
But as for the Annals being used against us, that was superstitious dread on the part of the illiterate. There is little in these pages that could benefit any enemy going forward.
* * *
Superstition dons innumerable forms and faces.
We began fielding multiple patrols, each with a wizard along. Skirmishes went badly for our enemies. Encounters became less common. Our patrols ranged farther afield. The surviving Rebel hardcore retreated into the deep wilderness. Less-committed types abandoned the insurrection business altogether. A few came over to us because soldiering was the only life they knew.
Our patrols kept finding more Tides Elba girls. Those ranged from two to fifteen years old. Every religious establishment, whether a basilica or a coffin-size shrine, seemed to have been blessed with at least one.
We collected them all. The older girls cared for the younger. Those that I saw all owned personalities and attitudes little different from those of Mischievous Rain. They all coped well even when they were terrified.
The scale of the roundup forced construction of a dormitory and mess hall for the girls. Sergeant Chiba Vinh Nwynn and several other female soldiers took charge of the girl collection. But, as Goblin wondered, who would protect the girls from their guardians? Chiba Vinh Nwynn had a reputation.
Nwynn and her cohorts were sure to have adventures, riding herd on those girls while surrounded by hundreds of horny young men.
The Old Man proclaimed a schedule of draconian punishments for any idiot who broke dangle discipline and tried to get at the girls. He made certain that no one failed to understand that the Lady herself was taking an interest. And he reminded all hands that Mischievous Rain would return before long and was extremely unlikely to be sympathetic to any young soldier’s erotic ambitions.
She would be back soon? The prophesied duration of her Tower visit had expired weeks ago. And I enjoyed no respite from the single-father curse. Nor did I hear anything from the Tower, though there were late-night moments when I imagined that I heard distant wind chimes.
The children were not happy anymore, either. They became ever less adventurous, ever more withdrawn, and ever more disinclined to interact with anyone but me and Gurdlief Speak. That was a major change. Right after their mother left they had gone at it hard, trying to make themselves Company mascots.
Firefly, a miniature of her mother (which caused occasional complications because we held all those look-alike internee girls), could lay on a blaze of little-girl charm when she wanted. She had claimed herself several adoptive uncles, including Elmo and Otto.
Shin was popular because he was behind the shadow pots. No casualties occurred if a patrol handled its pots correctly.
Rumor said a small boy sometimes flickered through in those moments when danger was at its most intense.
I did not hear much about that. Supposedly nobody wanted me to get the idea that they were criticizing my children. However, soldiers being what they are, their ultimate motive would be to avoid inspiring me to make Shin stop.
Understandable. You always want to stack the deck in your favor.
In situations where a severe threat did develop and where someone that might have been Shin or Firefly or Ankou had been glimpsed from the corner of an eye, mutilated corpses inevitably turned up once there was daylight enough to reveal them.
So. The twins and their cat were popular, some, but at the same time they scared the shit out of anybody unprepared to be immersed in sorcery. That included almost every Company brother who joined us after the Battle at Charm, maybe barring Two Dead and Buzzard Neck. Those two were agents of darkness themselves—although they had become extremely useful Company sorcerers.
Even One-Eye was intimidated by Two Dead. Normally, that little shit was too damned dumb to be afraid of anybody but the Limper. Anybody without the sense to be scared of the Limper was guaranteed to get himself a worm’s-eye view of the daisies.
It did feel so good when the pain went away. Only … I lacked evidence but suspected that the Old Man had put Two Dead up to reining One-Eye in. Whatever, One-Eye was behaving. He had become, in effect, almost invisible.
But Two Dead was doing time in the Tower, now.
I worried about his absence. I worried about One-Eye’s unnatural silence. That little scruffleupagus might be trying to create a new legend, a reality that would exist only within the minds of the rest of us. For sure anyone who believed anything that One-Eye wanted believed would be rewarded with abiding regrets.
There are few moments on the gods??
? green earth when One-Eye is not up to something. The little shit schemes in his sleep.
* * *
“What the hell are they doing here?” Markeg Zhorab demanded, having abandoned his bar long enough to visit the table where I had settled with Elmo, Goblin, Corey, and Buzz, with my kids watching.
“Checking out what it’s like when Croaker gets a chance to relax,” I snapped. I was about ready to crack. I needed the Dark Horse. I needed me a huge dose of the Dark Horse. My brain and my sense of responsibility had been fully engaged for too long. “You got a problem with that?”
Zhorab could not have had a problem on any grounds other than that the twins were who they were.
Using the little finger and forefinger of my left hand I indicated Goblin and Buzz while checking my cards with my right hand. “They’ll keep us honest. Find the kids something to nosh.”
Markeg sighed. I tried to strategize an ugly hand. Zhorab worried because the kids might be doing something more than just observing.
“Relax, Markeg,” Goblin said, making it more of a command than a suggestion. “They’re harmless. Maybe. You. Girl. Are you peeking at my cards?”
“Yes. I am. It’s the only way I can keep my dad from getting cheated by your crooked deal.”
The game stopped. Corey asked, “Are you serious, kiddo?”
“Yes. Some of the cards came from the middle of the deck. Some came off the bottom. He has very nimble fingers.” A six-year-old talking.
Several silent seconds dribbled into the abyss of time. Then Elmo giggled. “Ha! Called out by a crumb-crunching ankle biter. Let’s check it out. I call dead hand. Everybody show your cards.”
I did not doubt Firefly’s claim that Goblin had cheated. The toad would do so if he thought he could get away with it. Maybe he figured the distraction of the kids would let him manage it unnoticed. But then I had to wonder about his motives. Nobody, Goblin himself included, laid down anything even vaguely resembling a good hand. It was almost impossible to imagine five players all having been dealt such a clutch of ugly.
A sweating Goblin seemed to be more amazed than anyone else.
Firefly looked smugly pleased with herself.
She had done something, somehow. Something way more than just nailing that toad-face rat.
I cared only a little. I was determined to achieve me some serious relaxation.
The others agreed that the stakes were not grand enough for anyone to be officially offended.
* * *
“He wasn’t really trying to rip anybody off,” Firefly told me, sitting in my lap like she was some normal kid snuggling up with her dad. “He just wanted to mess with you all.”
Blessed Baku. Firefly. My snuggly little genius. Tonk is a simple game for simple people. She figured it out in about four minutes and then did whatever she did.
“Yeah. That’s Goblin. If it was One-Eye … One-Eye would’ve been cheating so he could rob everybody.”
One-Eye might have launched a more complicated and nuanced scheme because he had to reassure himself repeatedly that he was the cleverest weasel around.
Thinking about One-Eye got me fussed all over again. He had gone so low-profile that he had stopped feuding with Goblin, nor had he tried to cozen Goblin into joining some idiot plan because the toad was so gullible. One-Eye even avoided obvious cheating on those uncommon occasions when he surfaced and joined the never-ending tonk tournament—about which I knew only secondhand.
I could not help wondering if One-Eye was not honking up his filthy sleeve because his uncharacteristic behavior had everyone anticipating a sudden prodigious rain of shit.
I did not let that stress me, nor did anyone else who had been with us since before the Company came over the Sea of Torments. One-Eye’s asshole-iness was like foul weather. It came. It went. Only a modest effort was necessary to make ready for it. One could endure it and emerge grinning, thinking, “If this little dog turd wasn’t so damned useful when there’s no way for us to get out of a fight…”
Said dog turd was all too cognizant of his value.
We all knew, One-Eye himself excepted, that one day he would overreach. And then the Captain would just sit back while fortune filled its gullet.
Meantime, I nurtured dread. Summer was coming. The Taken was away. The long, gentle Aloen sojourn, with its infrequent challenges and relative lack of existential perils, had to be approaching its end, never mind that massive triumph at Honnoh.
Really?
I have been at this all too long. I have become convinced that the good days are tossed in only to raise expectations so they can be more deeply drowned in blood and sorrow. Garrison duty can be boring but boring old tonk and barrels of beer are so much preferable to potentially lethal adventures.
I am, after all, a family man these days.
* * *
Spring did desert us. Summer slithered in. Mischievous Rain, and near-Taken Colonel Shoré Chodroze, did not return. Each day a third of the Company was away on patrol. Another third was engaged in agricultural assistance or civil engineering. The remaining third worked at improving camp defenses or plain old maintenance. No patrol or work party left the compound without a shadow pot. And none of our people suffered misfortune by night.
Our enemies were not so lucky. Whatever wickedness they tried, the results were catastrophic. The survivors finally ceded the night, which belonged to the Rebel everywhere else in the east. You could almost smell the virulently angry envy from Eastern Army HQ.
I could prove nothing but was convinced that my little dears were entirely responsible for the Rebel’s nightmare season.
The men thought so, too, though they did not talk about it where I might overhear. They were getting scared. More and more tried to stay away from the kids.
“This is so cool,” Elmo said, on returning from a patrol during which his gang had eliminated eighteen Rebel fighters, had collected three Tides Elba sisters, and had uncovered an actual Resurrectionist assembly place. “It’s like the gods themselves watched over us from dusk till dawn. We just buried those eighteen after the sun came up. They were already dead.”
Elmo was not one to be intimidated by good fortune.
“Might not be gods,” I said. “Might be a darker sort of divine.”
Elmo shrugged. He had grown up in a different country where gods and spirits were an endemic pestilence. Those divinities had not been the sort who divvied up into good guys and bad, same as people mostly do not. He said, “So we’ve got some wicked fairy godmothers looking out for us. That’s good enough for me. Only, how do I con them into sticking around for another hundred years?”
That sentiment definitely grew. I considered it unreasonable because the same people strained to avoid Shin and Baku. And the same folks had made a big effort to avoid Mischievous Rain’s notice, back when, too.
The effect was not new. I had seen it while the Company followed Soulcatcher, and more intensely still when we had had the Taken Shifter along to help with some heavy lifting. Friends can be more terrifying than enemies when they are that awful and are operating at your hip.
The old Taken, of times now gone, had been unpredictable and almost always in a foul humor. They sometimes bit whoever was nearest—and then would not forgive you if you somehow survived.
So my urchins lived in the eye of a baby cyclone of love and fear. Both emotions waxed stronger any time a jar of shadows saved a patrol.
Beneath the tension was the growing conviction that, however clever we were at neutralizing the Lady’s enemies, this would be the summer when the Company faced its next great existential challenge. Success only fed the common dread. The Old Man, the Lieutenant, and Candy never said a word. They just kept on getting jumpier. They shied from shadows despite shadows having become our most intimate friends. They did not sleep well. I had trouble sleeping myself. The Captain and several others approached me looking for some philter that would get them through the night.
The twins prospered whi
le everyone else frayed. They showed more color in their cheeks, though that could be just because they spent more time outside.
I was confident that they were not the cause of the growing malaise. But there were whispers, according to Gurdlief, that claimed they were feeding off the life forces and happiness around them. That was so bone stupid that I could not imagine how it got started without being an enemy plant.
The Rebel can make up clever lies, too.
We had plenty of prisoners and Tides Elba girls. We did not need to feed ourselves to any hungry vampires. Pointing that out, though, only generated the “Yeah, but…” response of a dope with a mind already made up.
Damn it, I needed Mischievous Rain to come home! Before somebody, maybe even me, lost it and did something that could not be taken back.
* * *
I slid in to see the Old Man. He gave definition to the adjective “haggard.” “What do you need, Croaker? Got a staff meeting in a couple.” His tone was testy.
Everybody was testy. Several disagreements had gotten physical.
“We had any news from the west? Any at all? The situation is getting serious. We’ve got guys volunteering to go on patrol just so they can relax.”
“We all have our trials, some more onerous than having to babysit six-year-olds.” He raised a beefy hand, showed me a palm. No more whining allowed. “There have been no communications concerning you or of concern to you. But they have not forgotten you.” I may have imagined the most remote merry wind-chimes tinkle. “Suck it up, Croaker. We need to be examples. This will pass. Meantime, we have seven hundred men suffering from anxiety and malaise. Time for my meeting. Go somewhere. Do something useful.” Then, as though thinking out loud rather than addressing me, he added, “We need us a good old-fashioned heads-up fight. That would blow off the tension. As long as we came out on top.”
Yes. As long as that.
He was not taking the emotional climate seriously enough. I had begun to wonder if we were not experiencing something artificially induced.
I started to ask what Whisper was up to these days. The Captain cut me off. “Shoo!”