Mischievous Rain said, “My husband is thinking that there are always survivors. I want to find a few that will bear witness to Ghost Country history back to the time of the coming of the first refugees from the fall of the Domination.”
All of the Taken and several score senior sorcerers were on hand for this strategy session. They all heard her statement about our relationship. The Taken were all aghast, with Whisper either dreadfully distraught or deeply apoplectic. Limper had him some kind of shaking, sputtering fit. My dearly beloved pretended not to notice any of that.
The un-Taken sorcerers were indifferent, however—excepting those from the Black Company: Buzzard Neck Tesch, Two Dead Chodroze, and Silent. They were croggled. Two Dead was prostrate with amazement.
Oh, I was going to take me some shit somewhen down the road.
Mischievous Rain said, “Those of you with necromantic skills should look for a ghost, a fetch, a revenant, or any similar entity that might be able to offer a peek into the minutiae of the last few centuries.”
She did not explain, though even the numb of skull could get that she wanted to know something about some particular past event. Something, no doubt, that had to do with that unlikely fortress.
She must have concluded that the castle’s true weak point must be hidden inside its history.
She would not tell anyone what she was after. That would be an anonymous flake of gold hidden in a bucket of pyrite chips.
Was her reticence a control thing? Or could a bit of specific revelation put her at risk somehow? Or might the suggestion of a hunt for something specific blind any hunters to some alternate windfall?
Could it be all those things and something more?
One thing for certain. Mischievous Rain’s approach told the other Taken that there was something worthwhile to be found.
The gathering broke up without anyone having said much more.
I never ceased being amazed by the fact that all those people just did whatever they were told, never offering suggestions unless they were asked.
Mischievous Rain’s final remarks were, “Spread out. Check every acre of the Ghost Country. Whatever you find, I want to see it right away. Or be told about it if you can’t bring it to me. Now go. Now hunt.”
That drew further attention to the chance that there might be something more precious than gold concealed inside Ghost Country history.
Deliberate false trail?
I would ride that pony and see. I would learn nothing from my wife.
Firefly muttered, “She’s playing with fire now,” thinking out loud. She followed up by giving me a worried look.
I pretended not to have heard. She for sure could not read my mind. She decided that she had gotten away with something.
Mischievous Rain called in the Taken orbiting the granite fortress. Baku, Shin, and Ankou replaced them. Shadow walkers could deliver information faster than the fastest carpet rider.
* * *
This gets more difficult not just by the day but by the hour. How long before I lose everything that I do not record instantly and reread daily? I would suspect early-onset senility were I alone in my forgetfulness, but lately even some of the Taken have been struggling.
I wish that I had brought Sana along to remember for me.
Why did I write that?
Why am I not more focused, especially where the future is concerned? I am here to record my wife’s … ah … what?
What, indeed? I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing. Certainly not patching anybody up. Nobody ever needs patching.
It is all scary and confusing. If it was not for my daughter’s unwavering love and support I would not be … I would have no notion …
* * *
Any supernatural survivors were disinclined to be sucked into the maelstrom of today’s power contests. “They’re out there but they don’t want to be found,” my wife confided during supper. “But they will be found and they will be questioned. And they will tell us what we want to know.”
My woman just stating the facts.
In a bold moment I observed, “And four centuries from now some megalomaniac will call up our shades so he can force us to do something for him. Or for her.” Said entity might be the megalomaniac who had initiated our invasion of the Ghost Country, backed by a new generation of henchfolk.
Mischievous Rain cast a speculative eye my way, her expression less than affable.
It was in such moments that Firefly normally came up with some wiseass crack. Or Kuroneko offered some pithy and not quite apropos comment. Neither said a word now. So. Maybe I had stepped in it again.
I did not care. I was wasted physically and exhausted emotionally. The stress that began when Mischievous Rain named me her husband in public would not let up, though I did know that it was stupid to obsess about it.
After an extended silence, during which nobody met anyone’s eye, Mischievous Rain said, “Darling, you and I will be going for a long walk after supper.”
“If that is what you wish.”
“Oh, it is, my love. It is. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Shit! Oh, hell yes! I was afraid! I was, I was. Very afraid. There might be a painful do-it-yourself divorce coming up.
* * *
My woman and I strolled up to the pits. Those now lacked tenants. They were filled with water from the storm. The cages were gone. They had been broken up for firewood.
Mischievous Rain said nothing during our walk but once we arrived she stunned me by grasping my left hand with her right.
She stared into a flooded pit. I thought confused thoughts. I was absurdly conscious of her touch.
My apprehension began to fade.
She felt me relax. She edged closer, till we were in contact at hip and shoulder. I succumbed to a whole new set of insecurities.
What the hell was she doing?
I was about to melt like a slug freshly blessed with a shower of salt.
She said, “I laid awake all night thinking.” There followed a ten-second eternity during which I could have gone into cardiac arrest but did not, then she continued, “The geology of the Ghost Country is all wrong.”
Huh? Fut the wuck?
“There are all those granite hills, some of them baby mountains. But granite country isn’t usually dense evergreen forest country, let alone hardwood forest country. Right?”
“If you say so.” I had no idea.
“Granite country anywhere else is mostly bare rock and poor soil. Thin, rocky soil when the ground is relatively level. Vegetation usually consists of scraggly pines and scragglier brush. Hardly like most of this. Parts of this forest are plain lush. Parts of it are hardwood. And a granite country forest shouldn’t have open meadows where you can dig sod blocks from black soil that goes down fifteen feet or more, either, guaranteed.”
I had no idea what she was on about or how I ought to respond. Trying to be clever, I said nothing, just stood there looking expectant.
“In real granite country a clearing in the forest is there because the rock under the soil is so near the surface that trees can’t put down decent roots.”
That might be true. I did not know. If you asked me I would guess that trees did not grow where they could not get the nutrients they needed to get on about their tree business.
My beloved sniffed at that and let most of it slide on past. She was not interested in trees. She was interested in that unlikely fortress.
Somehow, someway, the boy child of shadow and the cat of shadow had found the truth that my love so earnestly wanted to claim. But it would be a while before the mushroom man learned about that.
It would be a while before anyone did.
30
In Modern Times: Dayfall
Another family breakfast. My kids were present. The hunter girls were, too. Mischievous Rain sat beside me, in touching distance. My left knee and her right were, in fact, in contact. Firefly was on my right and gloomy, like she had contracted old man grumbly an
d that would break out publicly at any moment. My wife smoldered, pervy, like she was inclined to rape me but was holding back because there were too many witnesses.
I do have me a lively imagination.
I was no more optimistic than my daughter was. How could I be? I was oppressed by a sense that we were drifting into our personal end of days.
And then I found myself wondering what the hell was I thinking when I imagined that? How did that even make any sense?
Whatever else, we had us a castle to reduce.
* * *
Somebody located a ghost for my darling. I did not get to audit their conversation. I was, in fact, invited to take myself far away. Not one but two Taken got told off to make sure that I complied.
How come?
The Taken, thankfully, did not include Whisper or the Limper. Feather and Journey still pretended to be human. They were young, as Taken go, and did not yet fully revel in their badassery.
With them babysitting, neither Ankou, Shin, nor Blessed Baku had to stay to wrangle me. Kuroneko and Shironeko did come along with, though probably to support the Taken if I went bugfuck or made a break for it. Unless they were along to keep an eye on the Taken, on the off chance that those two had caught a case of the unfriendlies from Whisper and Limper.
This was as close as ever I had been to those two Taken. They were not chatty. And I did not have what it took to focus and get a read on them as people. I learned nothing that was not general knowledge: they were young, male, female, lovers, that both before and after their Taking.
My head evidently had room only for Mischievous Rain and her captive ghost, and my kids. In particular.
Knowing what they must be, intellectually, did not keep me from wanting to shield them from horrible reality.
And I felt ridiculous whenever I caught myself thinking that way.
My banishment did not last long, though a subjective age passed before my reprieve came through.
* * *
Mischievous Rain told the assembly of heavyweights, “The call for the dead was successful. I confirmed the suspicion that I developed based on the odd geology of the Ghost Country, which, I now know, is a legacy of the conflict that took place here in ancient times.”
She sounded a little pedantic but also excited behind an effort to appear calm. Which, if I could see that, had to be screamingly obvious to the other Taken.
“They tunneled under the bottom of the protective dome!”
They? Who they? What was she talking about?
“And the tunnel is still there. It saw occasional use until maybe twelve years ago. The storm flooded it and caused a couple of small collapses but we should be able to restore it and use it exactly the way the Resurrectionists did. Although, by now, they may have remembered their solution to conquering the barrier and be worried that we might work it out ourselves.”
I wanted to squeal and shriek. What the hell was she yammering about? If Resurrectionists did not build that place, who the hell did? Who got that castle taken away from them?
Blessed Baku settled beside me and snuggled up while her mother was talking. I whispered, “What is she talking about?”
I did not expect an answer. None of them ever answered that kind of question.
So Firefly surprised me, but only by telling me what I had figured out for myself. “The Resurrectionists didn’t build the castle, Dad. They took it away from the people who did.”
So then I just sat there with my mouth open, wondering if I had known that before but had forgotten. My memory problems worsened by the hour. I strove desperately to record everything as soon as I could.
Maybe I should record everything in present tense, to get happening stuff down before it surrenders to the fade.
Firefly squeezed my arm and wiggled closer. “It’s all right, Dad. You don’t need to worry about it.”
She seemed sad.
Mischievous Rain said, “Let’s go!”
* * *
My wife’s command turned out to be something less than a call for immediate action. Eight days passed. Nobody did much that was obvious. My wife started taking me along on her aerial travels, which consisted mostly of inspection tours along the roads to the world and to the granite castle. The former was complete and being proved up. The latter was good enough to let two men, shoulder to shoulder, march up to the castle’s protective barrier without them having to clamber over anything or having to deal with brambles or obnoxious underbrush.
The hunter girls accompanied us everywhere. They were warming, some, to the old man who hung out with their boss. Firefly tagged along most of the time, too, looking like the hunter girls’ little sister.
We kept doing nothing in particular and nothing spectacular, except that my wife ordered a half-ass resumption of demonstrations against the castle’s shields. It did not seem likely that the people inside would take those attacks seriously.
They were not busywork, though. Taken who were able worked day and night hauling supplies in if they had no other obligation. The attacks must have tactical value.
* * *
I told Firefly, “Those people in there have got to figure that we’re up to something.”
“Well, duh.”
We sat side by side on a rotten log in a chunk of Ghost Country that had not been damaged during the recent disturbances. Men from one of Whisper’s battalions were entertaining us with their efforts to reopen the tunnel that Mischievous Rain had uncovered.
That was not an enjoyable or exciting show.
The kid added, “They’d never believe that we just packed up and left. They probably figure that we’ll come at them exactly the way that we are. You think about it, it’s really the only way.”
“All right. Yeah. Probably. Hey! We know who’s in there now but not who was in there before. Who built that place?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t really care.”
Her attitude was not unusual. It was, in fact, almost universal. None of our people cared enough to ask why about almost anything. They just got on with doing whatever they were told to do.
I, of course, belonged to a gang whose calling it was to stomp on people who demanded answers and explanations.
The mine head for the tunnel lay a half mile outside the castle barrier, behind a hummock crowned with lightly singed trees and brush. The original miners had chosen the site because it could not be seen from the castle. It remained masked now but with so much nearby cover burned away I reckoned the castle folks would see enough activity to understand what was happening.
The work for the soldiers was nasty. They had to clear out mud and water and tangles of roots while installing supports to keep the tunnel from collapsing. They got filthy fast. I was so glad that I did not have to participate. I got rocky just thinking about having to creep through so much tight and cold, damp and darkness.
The soldiers worked in short rotations. After those they enjoyed hot baths and ate better than the other troops. That kept the complaints down.
Me being on the scene and handy to fix up anybody who got hurt boosted morale, too.
The fighting was over. The roads had been completed. There was very little work for the mass of the men to do—though Mischievous Rain did have busywork projects going on out in the wilderness, projects that I was not allowed to audit.
Mischievous Rain was in a quandary. She wanted to return several regiments to their home bases but at the same time she feared that she might need every sword and spear after she passed the castle’s barrier. Logically, there could not be many enemies in there but we had no intelligence to that effect. None of our prisoners had ever visited the castle. They considered the insiders a separate tribe who had as little to do with other Resurrectionists as was possible. The prisoners were convinced that the Port of Shadows would be found in there, and might have been already. And even possibly opened.
That chance ignited no urgency in Mischievous Rain or Charm. Near as I could tell, the Lady
had lost interest in the Ghost Country, being confident that her satraps could handle the denouement.
I grumbled, “I wish there was a way to know what’s happening in there.”
“Inside the castle? You and everybody else, Dad. But the barrier is too strong. You can’t even do divinations about what’s inside. Mom is actually excited about that.”
Yes. She had mentioned that it would be absolutely dandy to know how to build such a masterpiece of a barrier.
I said, “I just had an idea. Remind me to tell Mom.”
“Uhm?”
“She keeps fussing about having the soldiers all stay here. I just figured out why we don’t need to.”
“Uhm?”
“Those people in there haven’t done anything to make the barrier stronger. That has to mean that they don’t want us to see how weak they really are.”
“No, Dad, what it means is, they don’t know how to make it stronger because they didn’t create it.”
“Oh.” Did I feel dumb. That was so obvious.
Silent sat down on the log on the other side of Firefly. My daughter signed, “Hello, Uncle. How are you today?”
Silent signed back, “I am doing well. You signed that perfectly.”
My kid grinned, pleased. Her father shivered.
Evidently Baku had been learning sign from “Uncle” Silent.
I should keep that in mind. It was one more way that the kid could keep an eye on me.
I said, “The original miners definitely wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t get found out early, starting from way out here.”
Silent signed, “They could not know what awaited them. There were few of them left when they started.”
Most of them, I supposed, stayed busy holding off the hungry spooks of the Ghost Country. I said, “A surprise attack. Makes sense. But there are plenty of us now. Why don’t we just cut a trench underneath?”
Silent frowned slightly, like he wondered if hanging around with the hotties had broiled my brain. He signed, “That would offer them a point defense opportunity, though that would not be needed because the barrier would sag into the trench as the diggers removed the earth.” He made a downward push motion with his right hand.