Glen Cook: Soldiers Live

He had been patient for ten thousand years. Now, suddenly, his patience began to wilt.

I became aware of it first while I was sleeping. On a night when the Nef were almost getting through, my dreams filled unexpectedly with a presence that pushed in like a whale driving through a pod of dolphins. A big, unseen thing that approached like the darkness itself but without containing a thread of evil. Just a vast, slow thing that was.

I knew what it was and understood that it was trying to make a mind-to-mind contact the way it had with others before me. But my mind had a hard shell around it. It was difficult for ideas to get through.

Good thing Goblin and One-Eye were no longer around. They could have gotten hours of joy out of a straight line like that.

A couple sleeps more, though, and my mind had become a sieve. Me and Shivetya were yukking it up like a couple of old tonk buddies. The white crow was put out because she did not have a job translating anymore. I guess the demon had the sheer mental brute force to make contact with anyone.

I learned from the golem in the way that Baladitya had learned before me. I learned by being taken inside the demon’s living dream, where past was almost indistinguishable from present. Where the wondrous pageant of the plain’s history, and the history of the worlds it connected, were all remembered, in as much detail as Shivetya had cared to witness at the time. There was a great deal about the Black Company. He had chosen the Company as the instrument of his escape a very long time ago, long before Kina chose Lady to become her instrument inside the enemy force and the vessel that would birth the Daughter of Night, who was the intended instrument of her own liberation. Long before any of us were the least aware of all the pitfalls we were going to encounter on our road to Khatovar. But Shivetya chose better than did Kina. The Goddess failed to look closely enough at Lady’s character. Lady was too damned stubborn and selfish to be anyone’s tool for long.

There were just seven of us when some inexplicable urge made me decide to retrace the Company’s olden journeys. And of those seven, now there is just me.

Soldiers live.

The Black Company is in Suvrin’s hands now. Such as it is. It is headed south now, according to Shivetya’s dreams, satisfactorily avenged, planning to cross the glittering plain back to the Land of Unknown Shadows. There are only a handful of Taglians and Dejagorans and Sangelis left to miss our world. The Company will become a new thing in a new world. And pudgy little Suvrin will be its creator.

Never before had there been anyone of the Black Company who had survived so long that he could see how vast are the changes time will sculpt even upon a band determined to stay one with its past.

When my thoughts ranged those bleak marches Shivetya always filled my head with ripples of amusement. Because those were almost invisible changes when compared with those that he had witnessed in his time. He had seen empires, civilizations, entire races, come and go. He remembered the gods themselves, the ugly builders of the plain, and all the powers that had come into and changed his estate and then had faded away again. He even recalled a time when he was not alone in the fortress with no name, a time when his devotion to duty caused his mates to nail him to his throne so they could desert without him interfering.

At long last I began to understand what had happened to Murgen in those long ago days when he had had so much trouble clinging to his place in time. Murgen was crazy, some, and Soulcatcher was involved, some—those were the days when Soulcatcher had found her way onto the plain—and Murgen never had a clue himself what was happening but behind everything else was Shivetya, carefully setting up his path into retirement. And, of course, Shivetya does not see time like the rest of us. Unless we demand his attention right here at the vanguard he floats everywhere, everywhen, reexperiencing rather than remembering.

Gods, how I envied him! The entire histories of sixteen worlds were his to know . Not just to study and interpret but pretty much to live whenever the mood took him.

I did have a question. The question of supreme importance if I was going to set the demon free. He had to answer it to my satisfaction if he wanted me to fulfill our agreement.

What would happen to the glittering plain if he was no longer here to manage it?

Shivetya was never as powerful as Kina but he was a whole hell of a lot faster on his mental feet. It had taken the sleeping Goddess years to impact the world outside and create a vast paranoia concerning the Black Company. Shivetya it took just weeks. It would not have taken that long had he not reached out for a specific someone with a mind shell thicker than mine: Shukrat.

The demon was disinclined to connect with Tobo. Tobo had been his good buddy before but Tobo’s behavior recently hinted at potentially troublesome character flaws.

Shukrat finally began to get the idea that there might be a problem causing the prolonged absence of Arkana and her beloved adopted daddy. Even when she did start to worry, though, she did not want to leave Tobo. Tobo was less popular with the Children of the Dead than he was with the Unknown Shadows. The men from Hsien might not give their utmost to pull him through.

The boy’s health kept suffering one setback after another complication. The fact that the army was moving would not help his recovery.

Shivetya could show me the Company’s southward progress. And did regularly. But I would not look in on Lady. My wife’s condition was more grim than Tobo’s. There was nothing I could do about it but it upset me so I just did not go where the pain was going to get me. Sometimes the blind eye is the least terrible way of suffering what we cannot make right.

Then there was Arkana.

The little blonde had run off in accordance with her own stated doctrine. Home to the world of the Voroshk. She used the key we had brought to enter the plain to make her exit. Because Shivetya was interested the once shattered Voroshk shadowgate was almost completely whole again.

In Arkana’s homeworld the war with the shadows continued, but sporadically. The shadows had been reduced to a tenth of their original number. The Voroshk had suffered as badly. Their world had been all but destroyed. Not one in a hundred peasants had survived an invasion so enthusiastic it is almost impossible to find a shadow on the plain these days.

Shadows kill. They prefer people but will prey on anything they run into. Even things you find under rocks. People are smart enough to figure out ways to get through the night. Not much else can.

The few survivors in the Voroshk world were starving. They had lost so many draft animals they could not plant. Their livestock had all been taken, if not by the shadows then by the Voroshk themselves. The Voroshk had no intention of sharing the common suffering.

Arkana had gone, had seen, had changed her uncertain mind. This was not what she wanted. But she had waited too long to turn back.

She was seen. Family closed in fast. And deprived her of her post and clothing. She became a prisoner of her relatives, who began formulating big breeding plans immediately.

The shadowgate disaster had left the Voroshk with few women of childbearing age.

Arkana got elected to become queen ant for a whole new mob.

She would do what she had to do to survive. She would bide her time once again. Her uncles had confiscated her key to the shadowgates but were unaware what it was. And she was not talking. They were the sort of men who would abandon the disaster they had created and go coursing off in search of new worlds to conquer. So much easier than rebuilding.