Glen Cook - Soldiers Live

Arkana added, “Don’t forget the Prince and General Chu. And Mihlos. I miss him.”

“Because he panted around behind you like a horny hound dog,” Shukrat sneered. “And you just led him on.”

“And who went out of her way to make sure she wiggled and jiggled whenever he was around?”

“Girls?”

“What?”

“I’m just jealous. Where were you when I was Mihlos’s age?”

Lady interrupted. “What else do I need to know?”

“The Palace fell down. We’ve occupied the city. Aridatha Singh is in charge now and gets Arkana wiggling and jiggling whenever he comes around. We don’t know how the succession will work out. We captured Booboo and the Khadidas. We destroyed the Books of the Dead. Again. Booboo is right over there. If you want to see her.” I extended a hand to help her rise. If she wanted. “She’s pretty.”

“I want. But I won’t be able to stand up by myself. I don’t think I’ll even be able to sit up for long without help.”

The crow snickered.

Lady gave the bird a long, hard look. Then she offered me its twin.

I asked, “How’s your connection with Kina?”

“What do you mean, how is my connection?”

“Did I stutter? Is it still there? Is it stronger? Is it weaker?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know. Why not answer me?”

The girls were startled. They looked like they wished they were anywhere else. But they spread out.

“She didn’t take me over while I was sleeping, if that’s what you’re after. I did have some awful nightmares, though. It was like I was trapped inside her imagination for an age. But she ignored me. She had something on her mind.” She came close to grinding her teeth with each word. She did not want to open up. “The nightmare went away a while ago.”

I could understand. The only place I want to reveal myself, even a little, is here, where hardly anyone will ever notice.

“Did you have any sense of time? I’m thinking maybe something happening here changed what you were going through there.”

“Sense of time? It was forever. And no time at all. Kina doesn’t experience time the way we do. I don’t think. She sure doesn’t let it oppress her. Come on. Show me my baby. Before I collapse.” She strained to get up.

Shukrat and Arkana got hold of her arms and helped her up. Arkana asked, “She always this cranky when she wakes up, Pop?”

“You’re going to become part of the family, get used to it. You will if you don’t take it personal.” I chuckled when Lady asked me how I would like it if she stopped getting personal. “She’s not bad today.”

The crow hissed. Clearly, it did not care if Lady figured it out. In fact, what it said sounded like, “Sister, sister.” Which was the taunt Lady had employed a few years ago, when she was looking out from behind the eyes of another crow.

Curious, the white crows. There has been one around, off and on, since the siege of Dejagore. Back then Murgen had been the mind behind the bird’s eyes. Most of the time. Apparently. But was Shivetya the mind behind the crow-riding minds? Could he have had that much power to affect events outside the glittering plain?

That would explain a good deal. Maybe even Murgen’s former difficulties with his place in time. But that would mean that Soulcatcher was not responsible for much of what we believed were her crimes. I was not sure I wanted it to be that way.

The bird snickered. Like it could read my mind.

Soulcatcher always had had a knack for reading me.

“We lost Murgen, too,” I said as we moved into position facing one another over the unconscious girl.

“I understood that. From your having told me how many we lost. That would be everyone not wearing Voroshk clothing. Correct?”

“Except for one damned lucky soldier from Hsien who managed to be behind the right person at the right time. Lucky is now Tarn Do’s official nickname.”

“Must be in the blood,” Lady muttered, forcing herself to look at the girl. “The women of my blood are fated to spend most of their existence trapped and asleep.” She rested her weight more fully on the girls, extended a hand to touch Booboo’s cheek. She lapsed into the language of the Jewel Cities. “Asleep like this was the only way I ever saw my mother. She was the one they told the first Sleeping Beauty stories about. Her Prince Charming never came. My father did. And he was content with her the way she was.”

Now there was a slice of horror to lug around in the back of your brain: knowing that your mother was not even aware that you had been born.

And we like to whine about how cruel the world is today.

They were giants in the olden days.

We will be giants ourselves five hundred years from now.

“So this is our baby.” She stared. “Conceived on a battlefield.” Her emotions were plain upon her face. Never had I seen her looking more vulnerable.

“This is our baby.”

“Shall we wake her up?”

“I don’t think so. Not now, anyway. Life is insane enough right now without asking for more trouble.”

That did not set well. Not at all. Lady wanted to establish some kind of emotional dialog with this flesh of her flesh. For my part, I found that now I had been exposed directly, the emotional distress was fading away. I do not believe my thoughts were skewed by might-have-beens and wish-that-weres.

Lady did concede that it might not be a good plan to waken Booboo without Tobo there for backup.

She did not do anything untoward but she did have the girls breathing nervously for a while.

Tobo was there to help when I wakened my old friend Goblin, who had become the unwilling vessel of the Khadidas.

It was not that difficult once Tobo’s controlling spells had been cancelled. Tobo shook Goblin while I stood by. And once the little shit began to stir Tobo stood by while I nagged.

The little man’s eyelids snapped open. The eyes behind them were not the eyes of the hedge wizard Goblin. I was looking straight into large chips of the darkness. Those eyes seemed to want to suck me in.

The mouth of the Khadidas opened, preparing to vent some infamy or blasphemy. I interposed One-Eye’s ragged old hat between Kina’s slave and myself. The effect was electric. The Goblin body convulsed as though I had whacked it with a hot poker. I slapped the hat down on its head.

“Lift,” I told Tobo, who had placed himself at the head of Goblin’s cot, out of the Khadidas’s field of vision. I held the hat in place while Tobo raised Goblin into a sitting position. “It works. Better than I hoped.”

“Better than I thought it would, for sure.”

“One-Eye always did underplay it when he did something right.” The wicked light had left Goblin’s eyes. Now he just looked empty. Not even a thousand-yard stare, there. More like nobody at home at all.

“Do the spear.”

I did the spear. But, man, was I reluctant to trust the wisdom of a dead man when it came to putting that potent a tool into the hands of a devil.

I stood it up in front of Goblin, its butt between his heels. I wrapped his hands around the black shaft. Then I shoved One-Eye’s filthy felt relic down onto his head even more solidly. Then I gripped his hands hard, squeezing them onto the silver-and-black wood.

Life began to enter his eyes.

I told Tobo, “Not as dramatic as watching a baby being born but dramatic enough.” Even a dummy like me did not need a map to see that we were conjuring up the real Goblin.

A Goblin in pain so deep I was aware immediately that only Lady could begin to understand.

I settled myself on a stool. Tobo eased Goblin onto a chair with an upright back, then planted himself on the edge of the cot. Goblin kept turning from one of us to the other, tears streaming but unable to speak, however hard he tried. He reached out to Tobo in a silent plea for contact.