It was very dark in there. Except for the glow from a crack in the floor about a half mile away...
Death is eternity. Eternity is stone.
“Stone is silent,” Lady said.
It is immortality of a sort.
The earth twitched. From up ahead came the scream of stone moving on stone. A hulking darkness above the reddish lightleak heaved.
Men coming through the crack behind us forced us first three forward. Longo finally arrived with the torch. It did not do much to relieve the darkness but did show us where we were putting our feet. “One-Eye says we’re walking into a trap, boss.” I began telling him and Lady about my latest night of ghostwalking.
“Whose trap is it?” Croaker demanded after a while. “That might be critical.”
I said, “I didn’t have a chance to talk it over with the little shit.”
Lady said, “It’s my sister’s trap. Have the men drag her in here. I’ll stop listening to me and start taking your advice. She can stay right here when we go back.”
I nodded as though that plan excited me. Far be it from me to remind her that she had killed Soulcatcher before.
Croaker raised an eyebrow in my direction but said nothing otherwise. He had a peace to maintain.
“Get them all in here,” Lady ordered. There were times when she was something more than the Lieutenant.
They banged Catcher around good dragging her through the crack. But the bitch kept right on smiling behind her gag. That was unnerving. Which is why she did it, I guess. Logically, she ought to be starved, thirsty, littersore and very depressed. Few of the men were gutsy enough to stand guard over her while she was allowed to eat or relieve herself. Usually the job went to Swan or Mather or the Prince if anybody bothered to remember her at all. Blade, though, would have nothing to do with Catcher. I think he hated her because Lady did and his regard for Lady was well inside the realm of obsession.
Catcher had a really dark and promising look for good old Murgen, happy or not otherwise.
“Start exploring,” Lady snapped. She knelt over Catcher but looked up at Croaker. “You’re here. What are you going to do about it?” It was obvious that she was suffering one of her mood swings.
I knew Croaker wanted to tell her that this was not Khatovar, to insist that we had not traveled halfway across the earth and had not hacked our ways through hell only for the sake of finding an abandoned rockpile already fallen into ruin. But he could not claim that because he did not know the truth.
He said nothing.
Croaker was becoming more taciturn all the time.
Lady muttered under her breath, grabbed Soulcatcher’s chin and forced her sister to look her in the eye. “You have anything you want to share with us, dear? Is there any little secret about this place that you’d trade for not getting left behind when we leave?”
Catcher winked at me. Lady did not have a hope.
I got the impression that she was willing to haul out of there right now and to hell with puttering around the rockpile trying to get the angle on everybody else.
Catcher really was in a bad mood. And Lady, too. Lucky for Kina she was divine.
Catcher smiled and smiled but never volunteered anything. She would not, not to save her own ass. Which was what I expected. All the Ten Who Were Taken were vulnerable only through their obsessions.
“Sheeit!” echoed through the darkness. “What the fuck was that? Captain! Murgen. You got to see this.”
Croaker shrugged and nodded. It did not matter what it was. It was an excuse to get away from the old lady for a minute.
I shuffled out onto a floor I could sense only by feeling it under my feet. Croaker shuffled behind me. He was muttering like an old madman, shaking his head, wanting to know what the hell he was doing here. This was not the place he had been going for the last thirty years. This was somebody’s cruel joke. This was somebody’s nightmare. This could not be the birthplace of the Free Companies of Khatovar. There was nothing here.
I felt his despair grow. And knew it would swell till it became deep and black. And then, in all likelihood, it would take a sideways turn when he convinced himself that it had all come to this because he had let himself get distracted. I had no trouble seeing the future, no sheep’s guts needed. Sometime not long after we returned to Kiaulune he would decide we went wrong because we moved before we studied those early Annals. He would decide we had to go get them. And doing that just might generate the bloodshed needed to give Kina her Year of the Skulls.
She is the darkness, all right.
I was surrounded by females, human, divine and demigod, every one of whom could drape herself in that cloak. But right now lumbering, dull old Kina seemed to have all her many sets of claws firmly locked on the title.
“Yah!” The Old Man grabbed my shoulder, stopped me just a few steps short of daydreaming my way into an unscheduled dive into an abyss with no bottom. The weak scarlet light came up from that. So did a trailer of mist. But that gap got only a glance before our attention became fixed on the cause of the recent outburst.
Now I could get a fair look at what had heaved following that last little tickle of an earth tremor. “Torches!” I bellowed. “Get some light over here. Get some more torches lit.” They did have plenty more, the brothers, but they were being frugal. “It’s a big-ass old wooden throne.” What I could not bring myself to add was that that big-ass old wooden throne had a big-ass old humanoid body nailed to it with silver knives. Throne and body were poised above the abyss, painted cruelly by the red light. I wanted torches so I could see the body better. I thought its eyes were open and I did not want that to be true.
“What the fuck is it?” somebody asked. “A giant?”
Thai Dei, lurking in my shadow as always, offered one quick phrase in Nyueng Bao. I did not understand anything but the accusation “Bone Warrior.”
“What was that?”
“It might be the golem Shivetya, Stone Soldier.” Why was he dragging that old stuff out now?
“Shivetya?” I knew what a golem was. An artificial man, commonly created from clay. In some mythologies all of us descend from such divine knickknacks.
“It is Gunni myth, Soldier of Darkness. Khadi, or Kina, when she was young, warred with everyone. She so weakened the Lords of Light that the Lords of Darkness thought to see a chance to conquer them and sent an army of demons to attack them. The fighting went so poorly for the Lords of Light that the god Fretinyahl, who is sometimes said to be Kina’s father, begged Kina for help. She agreed, but for reasons of her own. In the final battle on the stone plain Khadi grew bigger and stronger every time she devoured one of the demons.”
This much of the mythology I knew. Among other versions. Some witnesses claimed Kina was created specially for the last great battle with the demon host sent up by the Lords of Darkness. According to others she was sired by the devil Ranashya who disguised himself in the aspect of Fretinyahl and had his way with Mata, one of the forms the mother goddess takes in Gunni myth. Still others insist Kina is not native to Gunni myth at all but is a powerful outside intruder whose presence was so wicked it had to be accepted even while mostly ignored.
The key story was pretty basic. Desperate gods chose to battle evil with evil and ended up having their weapon turn and chomp on their fingers. Kina’s creator, or father, eventually tricked her into falling asleep, after which she was imprisoned until her worshippers could spring her with the Year of the Skulls. The Year of the Skulls was something that was going to come. There was no preventing it. Even though Kina was asleep and imprisoned a tiny wisp of her essence had escaped and remained in the world guiding those who would bring on the end of the age. But it could be thwarted indefinitely by the efforts of good and righteous men.
“Once they understood how they had damned themselves the other Lords of Light directed Fretinyahl to make a demon out of clay and animate it with a shard of his own soul so he would never lose control. This golem was given the name Shivety
a, which means Deathless. Shivetya is supposed to guard the gateway to Khadi’s resting place forever. I never heard anything about Shivetya being nailed into place but even the gods are cruel and unforgiving, Bone Warrior.”
“No shit. And can that crap. I didn’t like it from Gota and Doj and I sure don’t like it from you.” I looked at Croaker. “You follow that? You ever heard any of that before?”
“Some. A friendly old scholar in Taglios did tell me that while the exact meaning of Khatovar has been lost, similarities with modern dialect suggested something like ‘Place from which Khadi went forth,’ or simply ‘Khadi’s gate.’”
“And you wanted to go there anyway?” Were we walking into the realities behind the dark heart of southern myth? I did not want that. I wanted to be on my way to paradise. We were supposed to be on the road to paradise.
Croaker did not answer me.
“Tell me more,” I said to the air. A bunch of torches were burning now. Most of the gang were ranged behind me and the Old Man. More light did not stop me having to see what I did not want to see. The thing pinned to the throne had open eyes.
It did not move, though. “Shit,” Longinus said. “It’s just some kind of goddamn idol. Don’t let’s get all spooked out.”
I began to inch forward, lowering the standard so I could use it like a pike. I have no clue why I thought that might do me some good against some divine toss-off.
Croaker came with me.
We halved the distance to the throne. The engineer brothers stuck close with torches. Everybody else seemed less inclined to look at anything up close. I saw no evidence that the thing on the throne was anything but a carving. At closer view it did begin to look a little crudely made.
We halved the distance again. I could now inhale the thin vapors from the crack in the floor. They were very cold and smelled faintly of old death.
For an instant I had a sense of coming home.
It is immortality of a sort.
I jumped, looked around. Only Lady seemed to have sensed something, too.
When I looked back at the toppled throne I saw the hall as it may have appeared a thousand years ago. Or more. When a band of cruel priests were making the original shadows from prisoners of war. It was there for just an instant but that moment was long enough to tell me that this had been a very ugly place once upon a time, long before the advent of the twelve Free Companies.
“Stop right there,” Croaker whispered.
I stopped. His tone was urgent. “What?”
“Look down.”
I looked. Before us lay the dessicated remains of a crow. Just the way it lay struck terror right down to the bones of my toes. “A shadow got it. We’re not safe here.”
“We still have the standard.” He did not sound completely confident, though.
I used my toe to flip the dead bird into the crack in the floor, which was just a few feet away. The effort was pointless. Some of the men had seen the dead bird. They understood its significance.
I understood that it meant a lot more than just that shadows roamed this part of the fortress. It meant that Soulcatcher knew the place well. It meant...
Mad laughter came from back where we had entered. Soulcatcher’s laughter. Lady spun, sorceries forming around her already.
108
The earth shook. This was a bad one. The worst since we had come up onto the plain. Possibly the worst since the terrible one that destroyed whole cities and killed thousands before we ever left Taglios. I hit the floor and began to slide toward the abyss. Croaker grabbed me and Lady hung on to him. Everybody else fell down, too. Catcher stopped cackling in mid-laugh. Torches scattered around, dropped. There was nothing for them to set on fire.
Something fell from above. Something like little balls of glass or clear hailstones. Some shattered on impact, some bounced. They seemed to have nothing to do with anything. At first.
The throne with the golem aboard shifted, tilted forward until it was almost bottom up, a mouse’s breath short of plunging into the red abyss.
There was an incredible flash of white light. It blinded me momentarily. While I hugged the floor Soulcatcher cursed someone in three voices and as many languages. Rips and cracks and barks tore the air as sorceries flew. More marbles pattered around me. I began to feel weak and sleepy. It occurred to me that shiny bits of glass were exactly what crows liked to carry around and maybe hoard up someplace so their boss could have them rain down when the passion took her.
Soulcatcher had sprung her trap despite all.
I grasped the standard and went fearlessly to sleep, happily sure there was no way Catcher could get off the plain. The shadows would get her. They would get everybody as soon as the sun went down.
I could not sleep without ghostwalking. The moment I slipped loose from my flesh I ran out to try to tell One-Eye or Sleepy or somebody what had happened. When I reached the Shadowgate I found everyone shaken by the earthquake and One-Eye already having worked out a pretty good idea of what had happened. He had the troops packing to run for Overlook. In fact, that was going on everywhere, as though every man out there had had the same notion at the same time. Nobody was in a positive frame of mind.
It took hours to find Sleepy even though Uncle Doj had taken her directly to the company he had circled during the night. She was asleep when I found her, her disguise still good. I poked and prodded and nagged the best a ghost could do and finally drew a response.
I spent much of the day slowly getting a brief message across.
It was nearly sunset when I passed through the Shadowgate headed south. I was wrestling the temptation to run to Sarie. I did not want to be around her when the shadows discovered my flesh.
I do not know what bizarre reasoning moved me. I was convinced that I needed to be inside my body when I died. I might become an eternally wandering spook if I did not.
I met Soulcatcher halfway down the road. She was headed north aboard Lady’s horse at a hellbent pace. Croaker’s steed galloped a length behind, running just as hard. Its rider had his face buried in the stallion’s mane but trailed wild golden hair that betrayed him. You cannot have the woman you want, go for her little sister? Willow, Willow, you let yourself be damned over some pussy?
I jumped in front of the lead horse, sure I would be seen. My own horse had been able to see me. I would spook these guys.
It saw me fine. And ran right through me. Evidently ghosts did not scare the critters. I jumped up and tried to swat Willow as he charged past. You treacherous asshole.
Somebody had to let her loose.
How did she get to him?
I continued southward, mood bleak because of my failure. The entire plain seemed to reverberate with Soulcatcher’s laughter.
She had won. After an age, she had won. She had put her sister down. The world was her toy at last.
Darkness gathered. I hurried. I passed a ragtag bunch of men and animals in vain flight northward. They numbered fewer than half our recon company. Sindawe and Bucket were the only noteworthy names among them. I did not see the panther. When I reached that crack into the innermost room I found it blocked. Somebody had stuffed it with rags and rocks and broken masonry, I suppose so the shadows could not loose. Must have been Swan. Catcher knew shadows can slither through the tiniest pinhole. She was the new Shadowmaster.
What a shadow could snake through so could I. And Swan had not done that good a job.
The golem, or whatever it was, still hung above the glowing abyss. I ignored it. I had something to panic about. My body was not where I had left it. There were no bodies around. I had to close my astral eyes and let my flesh draw me to it.
I should have seen it coming. I should have known. I had been only loosely anchored in time for years. And so many of the faces had seemed to be those of men I knew.
My return to awareness, though not actually in flesh yet, took place in the caverns of the old men and the ice cocoons. And I found myself there, at the end of the line, sittin
g against the cavern wall with the standard across my lap. The Lancehead seemed to whisper and murmur to itself. The rest were everybody who had clambered through that final crack, Old Crew guys, Nyueng Bao, Cordy Mather, Blade, the Prahbrindrah Drah, Isi and Ochiba. Every last fool, including Lady and the Old Man. Little sister and woman scorned had invested the extra minutes to arrange those two, holding hands, heads leaning together, in mockery. Lady radiated rage. This was the second time she had been buried alive, the second husband with whom she had shared a grave.
The Old Man radiated despair.
So did the rest. This was the end of the dream, little as it had been.
I fluttered on up the cavern, between stalactites and stalagmites, webs and lacy structures of ice, to where, an age before the appearance of the Free Companies, desperate, hunted followers of Kina had hidden her holy Books of the Dead from the murderous warlord Rhaydreynak. Rhaydreynak had not found the books nor had Kina’s children survived to return to them.
It could be worse than it was already. Soulcatcher could have found and taken those grim books.
She had not. They remained safe upon their lecterns, open to early passages.
I hustled back to the gang.
Some of them sensed me moving. They focused their anger upon me. Which was maybe good. Water sleeps, I thought at them. They were locked in some sorcerous stasis. I was trapped only in my flesh, presumably because I had been away at a convenient time.
Water sleeps. Catcher might be the darkness but she would learn. Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.
In the night, when the wind no longer whines through a fortress that was there before the plain that was there before the first Free Company marched, stone whispers. Stone sprouts. Stone grows. Stone buds and stone flowers. A thousand pillars rise where no pillar has stood before. Moonlight sweeps the plain, setting aglitter the characters taking form, remembering a few of the fallen.