Soldiers Live (4 page)

Well, something. She had not had much at the time and her prospects had been
grim. “What the hell is that?”

“Alarm horns.” Sleepy bolted out of her seat. She was spry for a woman treading
hard on the heels of middle age. On the other hand, of course, she was so short
she did not have a lot of real getting up to do. “I didn’t order any drills.”

She had an ugly habit of doing that. Only the traitor Mogaba, when he had been
with us, had had as determined an attitude about preparedness.

Sleepy was too serious about everything.

Tobo’s unknown shadows began raising their biggest uproar yet.

“Come on!” Sleepy snapped. “Why aren’t you armed?” She was. She always was,

although I never have seen her use a weapon more substantial than guile.

“I’m retired. I’m a paper pusher these days.”

“I don’t see you wearing a tombstone for a hat.”

“I had an attitude problem once upon a time, myself, but . . . ”

“Speaking of which. I want a reading in the officers’ mess before lights out.

Something that tells us all about the wages of indolence and the neglect of
readiness. Or about the fate of ordinary mercenaries.” She was in brisk motion,

headed for the main exit, overtaking staffers who were not dawdling themselves.

“Make a hole, people. Make a hole. Coming through.”

Outside, people were pointing and babbling. The moonlight and a lot of fire
betrayed a pillar of black, oily smoke boiling up from just below the gate to
the glittering plain. I stated the obvious. “Something’s happened.” Clever me.

“Suvrin’s up there. He has a level head.”

Suvrin was a solid young officer with maybe just a tad of worship for his
captain. You could be confident that neither accidents nor stupid mistakes would
happen on Suvrin’s watch.

Runners gathered, ready to carry Sleepy’s instructions. She gave the only order
she could till we knew more. Be alert. Even though to a man we believed that
there was no way major trouble could come at us from off the plain.

The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

An Abode of Ravens:

Suvrin’s News
Suvrin did not arrive until after midnight. By then even our dullards understood
that there was significance to the agitation of the hidden folk and the crows
whose presence gave our settlement its local name. Arms had been issued. Men
with fireball poles now perched on every rooftop. Tobo had warned his
supernatural friends to stay out of town lest taut human nerves snap and cause
them harm.

Everyone of stature available gathered to await Suvrin’s report. A couple of
subalterns took turns running up to the headquarters’ roof to check the progress
of the torches descending the long scarp from the shadowgate. Local boys, they
seemed to feel that their great adventure had begun at last.

They were fools.

An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering
from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people
with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that,

playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop.

Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people.

If the new blood remain blind to reality after we move out I guarantee that
their naivete will not long survive their first encounter with my sister-in-law,

Soulcatcher.

Suvrin finally arrived, accompanied by the runner Sleepy had sent to meet him.

He seemed surprised by the size of the assembly awaiting him.

“Get up front and talk,” Sleepy told him. Always direct and to the point, my
successor.

Silence fell. Suvrin looked around nervously. He was short, dark, slightly
pudgy. His family had been minor nobility. Sleepy had taken him prisoner of war
four years ago, just before the Company climbed onto the glittering plain,

headed this way. Now he commanded an infantry battalion and seemed destined for
bigger things because the Company was growing. He told us, “Something came
through the shadowgate.”

Jabber jabber, question question.

“I don’t know what. One of my men came to tell me he thought he’d seen something
sneaking around in the rocks on the other side of the gate. I went to look.

After four years of nothing happening I assumed it would be just a shadow or one
of the Nef. The dreamwalkers visit us all the time. I was wrong. I never got a
good look at the thing but it seemed to be a large animal, black and extremely
fast. Not as big as Big Ears or Cat Sith but definitely faster. It was able to
pass through the shadowgate without help.”

I felt a chill. I tried to reject my immediate suspicion. It was not possible.

Nevertheless, I said, “Forvalaka.”

“Tobo, where are you?” Sleepy demanded.

“Here.” He sat with several Children of the Dead, officers in training.

“Find this thing. Catch it. If it’s what Croaker said, I want you to kill it.”

“That’ll be easier said than done. It’s already squabbled with the Black Hounds.

They backed off. They’re just trying to keep track of it now.”

“Then kill it, Tobo.” There was no “try to” or “do whatever you can” with this
Captain.

I told him, “Ask Lady to help you. She knows those things. But before anybody
does anything, we need to set up some kind of protection for One-Eye.” If it was
a shape-shifting, man-eating werepanther from our homeworld, it could be only
one monster. And that creature hated One-Eye with the deepest and most abiding
passion imaginable because One-Eye had slain the only wizard capable of helping
it regain its human form.

“You think it really is Lisa Bowalk?” Sleepy asked.

“I get that feeling. But you told me it escaped from the plain through the
Khatovar gate. And it couldn’t get back.”

Sleepy shrugged. “That’s what Shivetya showed me. It’s possible that I just
assumed it couldn’t get back onto the plain.”

“Or maybe it made new friends out there.”

The little woman spun, barked, “Suvrin?”

Suvrin understood. “I left them on maximum alert.”

I said, “Tobo will have to check the seals on the gate. We don’t want it leaking
shadows because whatever it was broke through.” Though the boy would not be able
to do much to stem a real flood. That honor would have to go to his hidden folk
friends. Lack of technical knowledge about shadowgates was the main reason we
continued to reside in the Land of Unknown Shadows.

“I understand that, Croaker. Can I get to work here?”

I was underfoot. Being considered useless is irksome.

That condition was familiar to most of us whom Soulcatcher had beguiled and
captured and managed to leave buried for fifteen years. Our Company had changed
during our slumber. Even Lady and Murgen, who had maintained tenuous connections
with the outside world, found themselves marginalized now. Murgen did not mind.

The culture of the Company has become quite alien. Almost no northern flavor
remains. Just a few little quirkss in how things are done, and my own proud
legacy, an interest in hygiene that is completely foreign to these climes.

These southerners did not enjoy a proper terror of the forvalaka. They insisted
on picturing it as just another spooky nightstalker like Big Ears or Paddlefoot,

which they consider essentially harmless. Near as I can tell they appear
harmless only because their victims seldom survive to report any contrary facts.

“A reading from the First Book of Croaker,” I told the assembly. It was after
midnight. There had been no uproar for a while. The shadowgate was not leaking
the Unforgiven Dead. Tobo was trying to pinpoint the intruder but was having
difficulties. It was moving around a lot, scouting, plainly unsure how it should
view the fact that it had fallen right in among us. “In those days the Company
was in service to the Syndic of Beryl.”

I told them about another forvalaka, long ago and far away and way more cruel
than this one ever could be. I wanted them to worry.

An Abode of Ravens:

Night Visitor
Lady and I sat up with One-Eye. Gota had been laid out in the same room. Candles
surrounded her. “I see no obvious change in the woman.”

“Croaker! Hush!”

“I hear a difference, though. She hasn’t complained about anything since we got
here.”

Playing deaf, One-Eye took a long drink of his product, closed his eye, nodded
off. Lady whispered, “It’s probably best if he naps.”

“Not very lively bait.”

“Carrion’s good enough to draw this thing. What it wants to kill really only
exists inside itself. One-Eye is just its symbol.” She rubbed her eyes.

I winced. She looked so old, my love. Grey hair. Wrinkles. Jowls developing.

Broadening in the beam. The deterioration had been swift since Sleepy rescued
us.

Lucky for me there was no mirror handy. I really do not like to look at that
fat, old, bald guy who goes around claiming to be Croaker.

The shadows in the room were restless. They made me nervous. From the beginning
of our association with Taglios, shadows have been cause for terror. A shadow in
motion meant death could have hold of you any moment. Those sad but cruel
monsters off the plain had been the lethal instruments by which the
Shadowmasters had earned their fame and had enforced their wills. But here, in
the Land of Unknown Shadows, the hidden folk who lurked in the dark were shy but
not ordinarily unfriendly—if treated with respect. And even those manifestations
owning a history of wickedness and malice now worshipped Tobo and harmed no
mortal closely associated with the Company. Unless that mortal was dim enough to
irk Tobo somehow.

Tobo lived as much in the world of the hidden folk as he did in ours.

In the distance the spectral cat Big Ears again mouthed his unique call. Native
legend says only the creature’s prospective victims ever hear that chilling cry.

A couple of the Black Hounds bayed. Legend suggests you do not want to hear
their voices, either. Interviews with locals lead me to believe that before Tobo
arrived only ignorant peasants really believed in most such perils of the night
and the wild. Educated folk at Khang Phi and Quang Ninh had been stunned by what
the boy had summoned from the shadows.

I glanced at the spear above the door. One-Eye had worked on that for decades.

It was as much work of art as weapon. “Hon. Didn’t One-Eye start crafting that
spear because of Bowalk?”

She paused in her knitting, stared up at the spear, mused, “Seems to me Murgen
wrote that One-Eye intended to use it on one of the Shadowmasters but ended up
sticking Bowalk with it instead. During the siege. Or was that? . . . ”

My knees creaked as I rose. “Whatever. Just in case.” I took the spear down.

“Damn. It’s heavy.”

“If the monster does get this far, try to keep in mind that we’d rather catch it
than kill it.”

“I know. It was my bright idea.” The wisdom of which I had begun to doubt. I
thought it might be interesting to see what would happen if we could force it to
change back into the woman it had been before it had become fixed in its cat
shape. I wanted to ask her questions about Khatovar.

Always assuming that the invader was the dread forvalaka, Lisa Daele Bowalk.

I sat down again. “Sleepy says she’s ready to send spies and scouts across.”

“Uhm?”

“We’ve been avoiding the facts a long time.” This was hard. It had taken me an
age to work up to it. “The girl . . . Our child . . . ”

“Booboo?”

“You, too?”

“We have to call her something. The Daughter of Night is so unwieldy. Booboo
works without being an emotional calthrop.”

“We have to make some decisions.”

“She’ll . . . ”

Black Hounds, Cat Sith, Big Ears and numerous other hidden folk began to give
voice. I said, “That’s inside the wall.”

“Headed this way.” She set her knitting aside.

One-Eye’s head rose.

The door exploded inward before I finished turning to face it.

A plank floated toward me in slow motion, slapped me across the belly hard
enough to set me down on the floor on my butt. Something huge and black with
blazing angry eyes followed the board but lost interest in me in midleap. Still
falling backward onto my back I scored its flank with One-Eye’s spear. Flesh
parted. Rib bones appeared. I tried to thrust on into the beast’s belly but did
not have enough leverage. It screamed but could not alter its momentum.

Burning pain seared deep into my left shoulder, not three inches from the side
of my neck. The forvalaka was not responsible, though. Friendly fire was. My
sweet wife had discharged a fireball projector while I was between her and her
target. There was plenty of fire left, though, when that ball, its flight path
altered, clipped the panther’s tail two inches from its root.

The monster’s scream continued. It flung its head back while still airborne. Its
whole frame was in the position heralds call rampant.

It hit One-Eye.

The old man made no obvious effort to defend himself. His chair went over. It
shattered into kindling wood. One-Eye skidded along the dirt floor. The
forvalaka ploughed into Gota, tipping the table on which she had been laid out.

Lady loosed another fireball. It missed. I fought to get around onto my hands
and knees, then to get the head of the spear up, between me and the monster. It
fought for its footing while trying to turn at the same time. It slammed into
the far wall. I got my feet under me, started to stumble around.

Lady missed again.

“No!” I shrieked. My feet tangled. I came close to landing on my face again. I
tried to do three things at once and, naturally, did none of them well. I wanted
to get hold of One-Eye, I wanted to get my spearhead back up, I wanted to get
the hell out of that house.

Lady did not miss again. But this fireball was a puny one, a near dud. It hit
the monster right between the eyes. And just ricocheted off, taking a few square
inches of skin along with it, leaving a patch of skull bone exposed.

The forvalaka screamed again.

Then One-Eye’s still blew up. Which is what I had expected from the moment
Lady’s fireball had gone through the wall.