Glen Cook - Surrender to the will of the night

“Not yet. Men less lucky than me have gotten killed by the dream.”

“Enough. There’ll be serious trouble in the city soon. Be prepared to take advantage.”

“I could take particular advantage of your special talents.”

“My special talents are employed to the limit, now. I’m an old man, Piper. And I don’t get to spend my days lounging around a posh villa. You know these people have their own heated bath?”

“I do. I haven’t been. My people haven’t. I’ve made life hard enough for the Bruglioni already.”

The Ninth Unknown cataloged some of the mischief he hoped to work over the next few days, said he would be gone at least two, then turned sideways. Leaving Lila.

“Hey! You forgot Lila.”

“It’s all right. I can get back on my own.” The girl met his eye momentarily, clearly something she found hard to do. “I’m good at it. And he wants me to do some of the work after he goes back north.”

“But you’re just a kid.”

“I’m almost fifteen. What were you doing when you were almost fifteen?”

Campaigning with the Sha-lug. Not for the first time. But that was different. Yet the only argument he could make was that she was a girl.

Lila said, “You worry too much about us. Except Anna, maybe. She had the sheltered life. She can’t believe in really wicked people.”

That used up all the courage the girl had. She would not look at him anymore. Again, he was stricken by how pale, how spectral, she seemed.

“I can’t help worrying, Lila. I made you my family but I’m never there.”

“You make me feel bad when you worry. I don’t deserve it. I try. Hard. But I’m always scared that I’ll lose it and turn back into what I was.”

He understood why Februaren wanted Lila here. She was desperate for reassurance.

“Don’t let the past rule you. You did what you had to do. This is now. Be what you want to be.” Lila was at a fragile point. She needed to be needed. Desperately. She needed to be needed, she needed to be trusted, she needed to be forgiven. Given all that, she might forgive herself for having walked the roads of hell and returned. She might concede that she had value and deserved to survive. She might start to believe that she was not a soul already damned.

Hecht wanted to hold her while he reassured her but feared there would be an emotional risk. A hug would work with Vali. Vali would not misconstrue because Vali lacked Lila’s haunts.

Hecht and Lila talked more than ever they had since he had sent her to live with Anna.

Before Lila left Hecht gave her a note for Anna, suggesting he might see her before long.

His left wrist began to itch. “You’d better go. Something is about to happen.”

“Yes. I feel it. Thank you. Father.”

He did hug her then, for an instant, careful to use one arm and not press.

Lila turned sideways and disappeared.

Hecht scratched his wrist. It suggested a serious probe by an Instrumentality of some weight.

The usual wards protected the estate, supplemented by those of the Righteous and those of Katrin’s lifeguard. The latter were truly brawny. But something fierce and powerful wanted in. It kept looking for a weakness.

It was not alone. Scores of lesser Night things accompanied it.

It failed to break through. But Hecht did not get much sleep.

After breakfast and morning reports Hecht collected Kait Rhuk and went hunting.

The Instrumentality, not quite bogon in magnitude, was dismayed by how easily the Godslayer found the fox’s den where it had holed up for the day. It did not have long to enjoy its dismay.

Next night more entities came, all smaller and all frightened. Veterans who had learned their trade in the hunt for Instrumentalities in the Connec trapped and exterminated the lesser entities where they could. They took the opportunity to teach the subtleties of god killing to men with no experience. The knowledge might be critical to their survival sometime later.

Hecht did what he could to create conflicting reports. He knew information would get back to Serenity, despite his trappers. These entities were like mosquitoes. However many you swatted, there were more.

Cloven Februaren failed to return as promised. He did not return at all. Lila did, late the third afternoon of the occupation of the Bruglioni estate. She materialized behind the screen that Hecht had acquired at Heris’s suggestion. She had been paying attention. But she arrived while Hecht was engaged in conversation with Hagan Brokke, who had just arrived with several hundred Righteous and Imperials from beyond the Vieran Sea. Titus Consent and Rivademar Vircondelet were there making notes.

Lila stepped out from behind the screen before assessing the situation.

Consent gasped. Vircondelet jumped to his feet. He did not know the girl. He leapt to the wicked conclusion. The Commander of the Righteous liked them young and skinny.

Brokke just looked confused.

Lila froze, horrified.

Hecht managed, “This is business, Lila. Stay in the other room till we finish.”

She was quick. She had survived on her wits. “Yes, Father.”

Clever girl. That and Titus’s testimony would ease the speculation. Some.

Hecht said, “What we need to look at is how best to use this new strength. I’m afraid the Empress will insist on a demonstration. She doesn’t understand that the Shades was a onetime thing.”

Brokke rumbled, “Give them a miracle and they figure you can do it to order.”

Misfortune tightened its grip on the Windwalker. Slowly, inevitably, the Instrumentality became more anchored to the present, though still with enough grasp of potential futures to see that few could turn out favorable.

His sense of this world, as a whole, and of the broad vistas of the Night had grown intensely feeble. His brethren, his hated brethren, were all failing in their returns, too. It would not require the concentrated bile of those who had imprisoned them to abort their rebirth. Human indifference and the failure of the wells of life would be sufficient.

The seeds had sprouted after lying dormant for ages. But their revenant shoots had emerged into ferocious drought.

For the first time in an existence that stretched back to a time before memory, the Instrumentality discovered emotions not intimately entwined with lust, hunger, rage, and hatred. Once he wasted his secret reserve creating a Krepnight, the Elect, that some feeble imitation of an Instrumentality crushed like a roach, he began to know despair. And fear.

For the first time in millennia, if not epochs or even aeons, Kharoulke the Windwalker conceived the possibility of an utter, permanent, inalterable end to the cosmic consciousness known as, and known to itself as, Kharoulke the Windwalker.

If only summer would end. 40. Alten Weinberg: Princess Apparent Circumstance had thrust the mantle of empire onto Helspeth again. Katrin, now quietly being called “the Mad Empress,” was far away with her private army, prosecuting her private war.

News of Jaime’s death met Helspeth on the road from Glimpsz to Alten Weinberg. She knew Katrin would not respond rationally.

That was the universal expectation.

Helspeth came home and immediately suffered the attentions of lords and knights who wanted permission to rush into Firaldia. Katrin’s pro-Brothen cronies had turned invisible. Anti-Patriarchals were everywhere, busy getting ready to do what they had wanted since Johannes was Emperor.

That pressure eased once official word came saying Katrin did intend to turn everyone loose on Serenity for having deprived her of a husband. Told to get rolling, the Imperial war machine sparked up and ran itself.

Everyone told Helspeth she was doing a marvelous job, standing in for Katrin.