Water Sleeps (24 page)

R eal fear found us the morning after next, just when it seemed we had every
reason to be positive. We had made good time the day before, there were no crows
around yet, and it looked like we would reach the Grove of Doom before the
afternoon rains, which meant we could complete our business there and get clear
before night fell. I was happy.

A band of horsemen appeared on the road south of us, headed our way. As they
drew nearer, it became evident that they were uniformly clad. “What should we
do?” River asked.

“Just hope they aren’t looking for us. Keep moving.” They showed no interest in
travelers ahead of us, though they forced everyone off the road. They were not
galloping but were not dawdling, either.

Uncle Doj drifted nearer the donkey not carrying Gota. Ash Wand lay hidden
amidst the clutter of tent and tent poles that formed that animal’s burden.

Several precious fireball projectors were among the bamboo tent poles, too.

We had very few of those left now. We would have no more until we fetched Lady
out of the ground. Goblin and One-Eye could not create them themselves—though
Goblin admitted privately that the opposite would have been the case even just
ten years ago.

They were too old for almost anything that required flexible thought and,

especially, physical dexterity. The mist projector was, in all probability, the
last great contribution they would make. And most of the nonmagical construction
on that had been accomplished using Tobo’s young hands.

I caught a glint of polished steel from the horsemen. “Left side of the road,” I
told River. “I want everybody over there when we have to get out of their way.”

But I spoke too late. Point-man Iqbal had already jumped off to the right. “I
hope he has sense enough to get back across after they pass by.”

“He isn’t stupid, Sleepy.”

“He’s out here with us, isn’t he?”

“That’s a fact.”

The band of horsemen turned out to be what I expected: the forerunners of a much
larger troop which, in turn, proved to be the vanguard of the Third Territorial
Division of the Taglian Army.

The Third Territorial Division was the Great General’s personal formation. Which
meant that God had chosen to bring us face-to-face with Mogaba.

I tried not to worry about what sort of practical joke God was contemplating.

Only He knows His own heart. I just made sure my whole crowd was on the left
side of the road. I got us loosened up even more. Then I worried about which of
us might be recognizable by Mogaba or any veterans who had been around long
enough to recall the Kiaulune and Shadowmaster wars.

None of us were memorable. Few of us went back far enough to have crossed paths
with the Great General. That is, except Uncle Doj, Mother Gota, Willow Swan . .

. right! And Narayan Singh! Narayan had been a close ally of the Great General
in the days before the last Shadowmaster war. Those two had had their wicked
heads together innumerable times.

“I will need to alter my appearance.”

“What?” The skinny little Deceiver had materialized beside me, startling me. If
he could sneak up like that . . .

“This will be the Great General, Mogaba. Not so? And he might recognize me even
though it has been years since last we stood face-to-face.”

“You astonish me,” I admitted.

“I do what the goddess desires.”

“Of course.” There is no God but God. Yet every day I had to deal with a goddess
whose impact on my life was more tangible. There were times when I had to
struggle hard not to think. In Forgiveness He is Like the Earth. “Suppose you
just borrow some clothing and get rid of your turban?” Though doing nothing
struck me as the perfect solution with him. As noted before, Narayan Singh
resembled the majority of the poor male Gunni population. I thought Mogaba would
have trouble recognizing him even if they had been lovers. Unless Narayan gave
himself away. And how could he do that? He was the Master Deceiver, the living
saint of the cult.

“That might work.”

Singh drifted away. I watched him, suddenly suspicious. He could not be unaware
of his own natural anonymity. Therefore he must be trying to create a
predisposed pattern of thought inside my mind.

I wished I could just cut his throat. I did not like what he did to my thinking.

I could easily become obsessed with concerns about what he was really doing. But
we needed him. We could not collect the Key without him. Even Uncle Doj did not
know exactly what we were seeking. He had never actually seen, or even known
about, the Key before it was stolen. I hoped he would recognize it if he saw it.

I might spend a little time thinking how we could get around my having given him
such solid guarantees that he was willing to travel with us and trust us not to
murder the Daughter of Night while they were separated.

The cavalry finished clattering past. They had paid us no heed, since we had not
insisted on getting in their way. Behind them a few hundred yards came the first
battalion of infantry, as neat, clean and impressive as Mogaba could keep them
while on the march. I received several offers of temporary marriage but
otherwise the soldiers were indifferent to our presence. The Third Territorial
was a well-disciplined, professional division, an extension of Mogaba’s will and
character, nothing like the gangs of ragged outcasts that constituted the
Company.

We were a military nil anyway. We could not get together and fight our weight in
lepers today, let alone deal with formations like the Third Territorial.

Croaker’s heart would be broken when we dragged him out of the ground.

My optimism began to fade. With the soldiers hogging the road, we traveled much
slower. The landmarks showing the way to the Grove of Doom were in sight but
still hours away. The cart and the animals could not be pushed on muddy ground.

I began to watch for a place to sit out the rain, though I did not recall any
good site from previous visits to the area. Uncle Doj was no help when I asked.

He told me, “There is no significant cover closer than the grove.”

“Someone should go scout that.”

“You have reason for concern?”

“We’re dealing with Deceivers.” I did not mention that Slink and the band from
Semchi were supposed to meet us there. Doj did not need to know. And Slink might
have gotten slowed down if he had to duck around Mogaba’s army and patrols.

“I’ll go. When I can leave without arousing curiosity.”

“Take Swan. He’s the most likely to give us away.” The Radisha was a risk, too,

though thus far she had shown no inclination to yell for help. But Riverwalker
was close enough to grab her by the throat if she even took a deep breath.

She was not stupid. If she intended to betray us, she meant to wait till she
could manage it with some chance of surviving the attempt.

Uncle Doj and Willow Swan managed to drift away without attracting attention,

though Uncle had to go without Ash Wand. I joined River and the Radisha. I
noted, “This country is a lot more developed than it used to be.” When I was
young, most of the land between Taglios and Ghoja was deserted. Villages were
small and poor and supported themselves on minimal tracts of land. There were no
independent farms in those days. Now the latter seemed to be everywhere, founded
by confident and independence-minded veterans or by refugees from the tortured
lands that once lay prostrate under the heels of the Shadowmasters. Many of the
new farms crowded right up to the road right-of-way. They made getting off the
road difficult at times.

The force moving north numbered about ten thousand, men enough to occupy miles
and miles of roadway even without the train and camp followers coming on behind.

Soon it was obvious we would not reach the Grove of Doom before the rains came
and might not get there before nightfall.

Given any choice at all, I did not want to be anywhere near the place after
dark. I had gone in there by night once before, ages ago, as part of a Company
raid meant to capture Narayan and the Daughter of Night. We murdered a lot of
their friends but those two had gotten away. I remembered only the fear and the
cold and the way the grove seemed to have a soul of its own that was more alien
than the soul of a spider. Murgen once said that being in that place at night
was as bad as walking through one of Kina’s dreams. Though of this world, it had
a powerful otherworldly taint.

I tried to ask Narayan about it. Why had his predecessors chosen that particular
grove as their most holy place? How had it been different from other groves of
those times, when humanity’s impact on the face of the earth had been so much
less?

“Why do you wish to know, Annalist?” Singh was suspicious of my interest.

“Because I’m naturally curious. Aren’t you ever curious about how things came to
be and why people do the things they do?”

“I serve the goddess.”

I waited. Evidently he deemed that an adequate explanation. Being somewhat
religious myself, I could encompass it even though I did not find it satisfying.

I offered a snort of disgust. Narayan responded with a smirk. “She is real,” he
said.

“She is the darkness.”

“You see her handiwork around you every day.”

Not true. “Untrue, little man. But if she ever gets loose, I think we will.”

This discussion had become terribly uncomfortable suddenly. It put me in the
position of admitting the existence of a god other than my god, which my
religion insisted was impossible. “There is no God but God.”

Narayan smirked.

Mogaba did the one good thing he had ever done for me. By turning up in person
he saved me the rigorous and embarrassing mental gymnastics necessary to
reconfigure Kina as a fallen angel thrown down into the pit. I knew it could be
done. Elements of Kina myth could be hammered into conformity with the tenets of
the only true religion, given a quick coat of blackwash, and I would have
completed a course of religious acrobatics elegant enough to spark the pride of
my childhood teachers.

Mogaba and his staff traveled three quarters of the way toward the rear of the
column. The Great General was mounted, which was a surprise. He was never a
rider before. The greater surprise, though, was the nature of his steed.

It was one of the sorcerously bred black stallions the Company had brought down
from the north. I had thought they were all dead. I had not seen one since the
Kiaulune wars. This one not only was not dead, it was in outstanding health.

Despite its age. It also appeared bored by the business of travel.

“Don’t gape,” Riverwalker told me. “People get curious about why other people
are curious.”

“I think we can afford to stare some. Mogaba will feel like he deserves it.”

Mogaba looked every bit the Great General and mighty warrior. He was tall and
perfectly proportioned, well-muscled, well-clad, well-groomed. But for the dust
of silver in his hair, he looked little older than he had been when first I saw
him, right after the Company captured Jaicur from Stormshadow. He had had no
hair then, having preferred to shave his head. He seemed in a good humor, not a
condition I had associated with him in the past, when all his schemes had come
to frustration as the Captain just seemed to bumble around and do the one thing
that would undo all his efforts.

As the Great General came abreast, his mount suddenly snorted and tossed its
head, then shied slightly, as though it had stirred up a snake. Mogaba cursed,

although he was never in any danger of losing his seat.

Laughter dropped out of the sky. And a white crow fell right behind it,

alighting precariously atop the pole carried by the Great General’s personal
standardbearer.

Cursing still, Mogaba failed to note that his steed turned its head to watch me
as I passed.

The darned thing winked.

I had been recognized. The beast must be the very one I had ridden so long ago,

for so many hundreds of miles.

I began to get nervous.

Someone amongst Mogaba’s personal guard launched an arrow at the crow. It
missed. It fell not far from Runmust, who shouted angrily before he thought. Now
the Great General vented his spleen upon the archer.

The horse continued to watch me. I fought an urge to run. Maybe I could get
through this yet . . .

The white crow squawked something that might have been words but were just
racket to me. Mogaba’s mount jumped enough to freshen the well of vituperation.

It faced forward and began to trot. The ultimate effect was to divert attention
from us southbound scrubs.

Everybody but Iqbal’s Suruvhija stared at the ground and walked a little faster.

Soon we were past the worst danger. I drifted over beside Swan, who was still so
nervous he stuttered when he tried to crack a joke about pigeons coming to roost
on the Great General while he was still alive.

Laughter passed overhead. The crow, up high, was almost indistinguishable
against the gathering clouds. I wished I had someone along who could advise me
about that thing.

For a generation, crows have not been good omens for the Company. But this one
seemed to have done us a favor.

Could it be Murgen from another time?

Murgen would be watching, I was sure, but that crow had no way to communicate.

So maybe so . . .

If so, this encounter would have been an adventure for him, too, what with him
knowing that if we got caught, his chances for resurrection plummeted to zero.

T he passages of the Great General held us up long enough that we could not
leave the road unremarked until after the rains began falling hard enough to
conceal our movements from everyone except someone extremely close by. We left
the road unnoticed then. Our travel formation collapsed into a miserable pack.

Only Narayan Singh showed real eagerness to get to the grove. And he did not
hurry. Not often long on empathy, I found myself pitying Iqbal’s children.

Swan pointed out, “It’d be to Singh’s advantage to get us there just after night
falls.”

“Darkness always comes.”

“Uhn?”

“A Deceiver aphorism. Darkness is their time. And darkness always comes.”

“You don’t seem particularly bothered.” He was hard to hear. The rainfall was
that heavy.

“I’m bothered, buddy. I’ve been here before. It isn’t what you’d call a good
place.” I could not state that fact with sufficient emphasis. The Grove of Doom
was the heart of darkness, a spawning ground for all hopelessness and despair.

It gnawed at your soul. Unless you were a believer, apparently. It never seemed
to trouble those for whom it was a holy place.

“Places are natural, Sleepy. People are good and evil.”

“You’ll change your mind after you get there.”

“I got a sneaking suspicion I’m gonna drown first. Do we got to be out in this?”

“You find a roof, I’ll be glad to get under it.” Big thunder had begun fencing
with swords of lightning. There would be hail before long. I wished I had a
better hat. Maybe one of those huge woven-bamboo things Nyueng Bao farmers wear
in the rice paddies.

I could just make out Riverwalker and the Radisha. I followed them hoping they
were following someone they could see. I hoped we did not have anyone get
disoriented and lost. Not tonight. I hoped the guys from Semchi were where they
were supposed to be.

Iqbal appeared in the gloom as the hail began to fall. He bent over to try to
ease the sting of the missiles. I did the same. It did not help much.

Iqbal shouted, “Left, down the hill. There’s a stand of little evergreens.

Better than nothing at all.”

Swan and I dashed that way. The hailstones kept getting bigger and more numerous
as the thunder got louder and the lightning closer. But the air was cooling
down.

There is a bright side to everything.

I slipped, fell, rolled, found the trees the hard way, by sliding in amongst
them. Uncle Doj and Gota, River and the Radisha were in there already. Iqbal was
an optimist. I would not have called those darned things trees. They were bushes
suffering from overweening ambition. Not a one was ten feet tall and you had to
get down on your belly in the damp and needles to enjoy their shelter. But their
branches did break the fall of the hailstones, which rattled and roared through
the foliage. I started to ask about the animals but then heard the goats
bleating.

I felt a little guilty. I do not like animals much. I had been shirking my share
of their caretaking.

Hailstones dribbled down through the branches and rolled in from outside. Swan
picked up a huge example, brushed it off, showed it to me, grinned and popped it
into his mouth.

“This is the life,” I said. “When you’re with the Black Company, every day is a
paradise on earth.”

Swan said, “This would be a superb recruiting tool.”

As those things always do, the storm went away. We crawled out and counted heads
and discovered that not even Narayan Singh had gone missing. The living saint of
the Stranglers did not want to leave us behind. That book really was important
to him.

The rain dwindled to a drizzle. We clambered out of the muck, many communing
bluntly with their preferred gods while we formed up. We did not spread out much
now, except for Uncle Doj, who managed to disappear into a landscape with almost
no cover.

Over the next hour we ran into several landmarks I recognized from Croaker’s and
Murgen’s Annals. I kept an eye out for Slink and his companions. I did not see
them. I hoped that was a good omen rather than a bad.

The later it got, the more peachy it seemed to Narayan Singh. I was afraid he
would curse us all by betraying a genuine smile. I considered mentioning his
children’s names just to let him know he was weighing on my mind.

My divination skills were flawless. It was dusk when we reached the grove. We
were all miserable. The baby would not stop crying. I was developing a blister
from walking in wet boots. With the possible exception of Narayan, not a soul
amongst us remained mission-oriented. Everybody just wanted to drop somewhere
while somebody else got a fire going so we could dry out and get something to
eat.

Narayan insisted that we press on to the Deceiver temple in the heart of the
grove. “It’ll be dry there,” he promised.

His proposal aroused no enthusiasm. Though we were barely inside its boundary,

the smell of the Grove surrounded us. It was not a pleasant odor. I wondered how
much worse it was back in the heyday of the Deceivers, when they murdered people
there often and in some numbers.

The place possessed strong psychic character, an eerieness, a creepiness. Gunni
would blame that on Kina because this was one of the places where a fragment of
her dismembered body had fallen, or something such. Despite the fact that Kina
was also supposed to be bound in enchanted sleep somewhere on or under or beyond
the plain of glittering stone. Gunni do not have ghosts. We Vehdna do. Nyueng
Bao do. For me, the grove was haunted by the souls of all the victims who died
there for Kina’s pleasure or glory or whatever reason Stranglers kill.

Had I mentioned it, Narayan or one of the more devout Gunni would have brought
up the matter of rakshasas, those malignant demons, those evil night-rangers
jealous of men and gods alike. Rakshasas might pretend to be the spirit of
someone who had passed on, merely as a tool for tormenting the living.

Uncle Doj said, “Like it or not, Narayan is right. We should move into the best
shelter available. We would be no less safe there than here. And we would be
free of this pestilential drizzle.” The rain just would not go away.

I considered him. He was old and worn out and had less reason to want to move on
than any of us younger folks. He must have a reason to want to go on. He must
know something.

Doj always did. Getting him to share it was the big trick.

I was in charge. Time for an unpopular decision. “We’ll go ahead.”

Grumble grumble grumble.

The temple projected a presence more powerful than that of the Grove. I had no
trouble locating it without being able to see it. Walking close behind, Swan
asked me, “How come you never tore this place down when you were on top?”

I did not understand his question. Narayan, just ahead of me, overheard it and
did understand. “They tried. More than once. We rebuilt it when no one was
watching.” He launched a rambling rant about how his goddess had watched over
the builders. It sounded like a recruiting speech. He kept it up until Runmust
swatted him with a bamboo pole.

It was one of those poles, too, though Narayan did not know. The grove was a
very dark place, perfect for an ambush by shadows. Runmust was not going to go
quietly.

I could not help wondering what evils Soulcatcher was up to now that she had
complete freedom to work her will upon Taglios.

I hoped the people who stayed behind completed their missions, particularly
those tasked to penetrate the Palace again. Jaul Barundandi had to be recruited
and brought in too deep to run before his rage subsided sufficiently for reason
to reassert itself.