Glen Cook: Soldiers Live

I have not yet encountered a true believer who could resist an opportunity to expostulate upon his particular truth. Booboo was no exception, though she was a slow starter.

I did not interrupt until near the end. Until that point she did not mention anything I had not heard before, somewhere, in some version. “Excuse me,” I said. “I think I missed something. The Year of the Skulls isn’t the end of the world?”

Suruvhija’s oldest boy, Bhijar, arrived with food and drink. I made sure Booboo got served first. She sucked down a pint of water before telling me, “Yes, it is the end of the world. Of this world, the way it is now. It’s a cleansing. A time when all evil and corruption get swept away and only those souls with a genuine chance of redemption get left on the Wheel of Life.”

I felt confused. I felt lost. I did not understand. I knew the Deceivers wanted to hasten the coming of the Year of the Skulls. That was pretty much what their cult was all about. I knew most Gunni wanted the opposite, but believed that the coming of the Year of the Skulls was inevitable. Someday. It was one of the Ages of Creation, the Fourth Age, ordained at the dawn of time. But this was the first I ever heard that there was supposed to be something on the other side. Particularly something apparently positive.

I murmured to myself, “All evil dies there an endless death.” Then I asked, “You’re telling me Kina’s ultimate task was to clear away all the human dross so that good and righteous men can pass on to paradise?”

Exasperated by my density, she shook her head violently, then went to work trying to explain.

I whispered to Arkana, “Have them bring my wife.”

I am not as dim as I pretended with my daughter that evening but I admit I never did get what she was trying to explain. However, I did realize that she truly believed that by destroying Kina I had deprived the world of any opportunity to get past its current age of sin and corruption into an age of enlightenment.

I guess Kina had been meant to devour all the demons again, only this time those would have been the devils of human kind who make life and history over into torture chambers.

The Lords of Light were going to have to take it from the top, hatching themselves a whole new scheme for worldly redemption. Assuming they were still around somewhere themselves.

Lady arrived, accompanied by Bhijar. She melted the moment she saw that Booboo was awake.

I watched, numb, as she took my place on her knees in front of the Daughter of Night. This was my wife? This clump of raw sentimentality was the woman who used to be the Lady, once able to inspire an entire empire with the terror of her name?

I did not listen. I have to admit that I was embarrassed by her behavior. Because I had not realized that there was so much sloppy emotion bottled up inside her. Around me Lady always clung to shreds of her old image... whenever she was not lost in her own realm of self-pity.

The whole scene seemed to amaze the Daughter of Night. She did not know what to make of it.

Suruvhija became embarrassed, too. She hustled her brood out of the room. The boys went quickly, unable to stand so much sentiment. Suruvhija herself offered me a look of commiseration before she shut the door.

I tried to tell Suruvhija I was thirsty. My throat was too dry. I went after her. I stumbled as I crossed the room. Not that that made any difference. Mental clumsiness was my real downfall.

I stepped into the corridor and called after Suruvhija, “Please bring some more drinking water. We’re all still dry.”

She nodded her understanding. She was embarrassed again, this time because she was alone with a man who was not her husband. I was about to say something to spare her when Arkana yelled at me.

It took me a moment to get back through the doorway.

Booboo had a rumel, a Deceiver strangling scarf, wrapped around her mother’s throat. Her eyes were dark with the last ghost of Kina. Her strength was, obviously, supernatural. Arkana was having no luck breaking her hold. And that little blonde was no weakling.

I needed not die to get sent to hell. I had an instant to pick which torture I wanted to suffer for the rest of my existence.

I slapped Booboo with my bad hand. She did not let up. I punched her. She rocked. Blood gushed from her nose. She did not ease up on the yellow silk cloth. I drew the dagger that is with me all the time, that normally gets used only when I am eating. I reached out and pricked the skin right under her left eye.

And still she did not stop.

The white crow said, “This is Kina’s revenge, Croaker.”

Which hell?

Lady was almost gone.

I stabbed the girl in the arm.

She hardly even bled.

I stabbed again, trying for the elbow joint.

No good.

I tried to cut the tendons in her wrists.

All the while Arkana was still trying to pull her off from behind or to break her grip on the silk cloth or to cut that cloth.

I launched as violent a blow as I could manage. When that did nothing but rock the girl’s head back again I lost control. As the saying goes, I saw red.

When Arkana finally stopped me I had stabbed my own daughter more than twenty times. I had not killed her, though. Yet. But she had given up her hold on the strangling cloth.

Possibly too late. Lady was hacking and gasping, still choking. I got down and started trying to clear her windpipe. There seemed to be some damage to her larynx.

Arkana remained calm. She summoned help.

“Where did Booboo get the strangling scarf?” I asked. “She didn’t have it before we went south.” She had been stripped naked, scrubbed down, and dressed in new clothing. Then she had been placed in this room. So someone had brought her the rumel. A secret Deceiver. “We need to find out exactly who visited her.” I did not want it to be Suruvhija, though she was instantly the logical suspect. Except for the fact that she was a woman. Hitherto, my wife and daughter had been the only women we knew to have been admitted to the secret brotherhood.

Still, this was a time of great changes. Suruvhija’s sorrow and slowness of wit could be an act.

They do not call them Deceivers for nothing.

The villain was not a Deceiver after all. He did not understand what a Deceiver was. He being Suruvhija’s son Bhijar, whom Booboo had pulled in with her “love me” effect, working him only when no one else was around. She had sent him to a secret member of the Strangler brotherhood. He had gotten the killing scarf there. That had happened while we were in the air, coming home from the glittering plain.

The boy received only what punishment his mother thought was appropriate. The Deceiver who supplied the rumel, though, soon went the way of his Goddess. Along with a number of friends. There would be no mercy for Stranglers until the last was dead.

While others rooted out the truth I stayed busy with Lady and Booboo. I soon realized that I did not have the skills to save either. I summoned the best physicans from the Land of Unknown Shadows. To a man they told me what I did not want to hear.

Sorcery was the only hope for either woman. And Tobo was the only one with a command of the appropriate sorcery. Arkana and Shukrat could not help much. They knew little about the healing arts.

I told Suvrin, “Regardless of my personal motives, the boy is one of us. We can’t leave him in a Taglian cell.”

Suvrin had a little too much of the politician in him. Too much of the kind of mind willing to let an individual go so the rest will not be inconvenienced. He wanted to avoid a confrontation with Aridatha Singh.

I continued, “You do need to get into the Annals, Captain. You need to understand completely what it means to be a brother of the Black Company.”