Glen Cook - Water Sleeps

“Yes.” I was surprised to find that I really believed that. Intuitively, somewhere inside, though I had not known it consciously, I had engineered a master plan for the liberation of the Captured and the resurrection of the Company. And it was starting to come together. After all these years.

Murgen showed up muttering about a white crow. He was distracted. I asked the wizards, “You figured out how to anchor him here yet?”

“Always some damned thing,” One-Eye grumbled. “Whatever you do, it’s never enough.”

“It can be done,” Goblin admitted. “But I still don’t see why we would want to.”

“He hasn’t been very cooperative. He doesn’t want to be here. He’s losing his connection to the real world. He’d rather sleep and wander those caverns.” I took a stab in the dark. “And put on his white wings. Be Khadi’s messenger.”

“White wings?”

They did not read the Annals. “The albino crow that turns up sometimes. Sometimes Murgen is inside it. Because Kina puts him there. Or used to put him there and now he keeps stumbling back in, the way he kept stumbling around in time once Soulcatcher got him started.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read sometimes. And once in a while I even read the Annals and try to figure out what Murgen didn’t tell us. What he might not actually have known himself. Right now he may be enamored of being the white crow because that way he gets into actual flesh that ranges outside the caverns. Or he may just be falling under the influence of Kina as she wakes up again. But none of that ought to matter much right now. Right now we have a bunch of spying we need him to do. I want to be able to twist his arm if I have to.”

The mission comes first. Murgen himself taught me that.

Sahra said, “Sleepy’s right. Anchor him. Then I’ll grab him by the nose and kick his behind until I’ve got his undivided attention.” She seemed suddenly optimistic, as though taking a direct approach with her husband was some totally new concept fraught with unexpected hope.

She went straight to outright confrontation, drawing Tobo in to support her. Maybe she could rebuild Murgen’s ties with the outside world. I turned to the others. “I found another Kina myth this morning. In this one her father didn’t trick her into going to sleep. She died. Then her husband got so upset that -”

“Husband?” Goblin squeaked. “What husband?”

“I don’t know, Goblin. The book didn’t name names. It was written for people who grew up in the Gunni religion. It assumes you know who they’re talking about. When Kina died, her husband was so grief-stricken he grabbed up her corpse and started doing that stomping dance Murgen talks about her doing in his visions. He got so violent that the other gods were afraid he would destroy the world. So her father threw an enchanted knife that cut her up into about fifty pieces and every place one of the chunks fell became a holy place for Kina’s worshippers. Just reading between the lines and guessing, I’d say Khatovar is where her head hit the ground.”

“I got a notion One-Eye was on the right track back when he was going to desert and retire.”

One-Eye gawked. Goblin saying something positive about anything he ever did? “The hell I was. I just had an attack of juvenile angst. I got over it and got responsible again.”

“There’s a new concept,” I observed. “One-Eye responsible.”

“For catastrophes and afflictions, maybe,” Goblin said.

One-Eye said, “I don’t get the Kina story. If she died back at the beginning of the world, how could she be giving us trouble for the last twenty or thirty years?”

“It’s religion, dimwit,” Goblin barked. “It don’t got to make sense.”

“Kina is a goddess,” I said. “I guess gods can’t ever be completely dead. I don’t know, One-Eye. I didn’t make it up, I just reported it. Look, the Gunni don’t believe anybody dies really. Their soul goes on.”

“Heh-heh-heh,” Goblin chuckled. “If these Gunni got it right, you’re in deep shit, runt boy. You got to keep going ’round on the Wheel of Life till you get it right. You got a lot of karma to work off.”

“Stop. Now,” I snapped. “We’re supposed to be working.”

Work. Not the favorite swear word of either man.

I told them, “You get Murgen nailed down. Or chained down. Whatever it takes to keep him under control. Then you help Sahra try to get through to him. I have a suspicion things are going to get exciting before long and we’ll need him wide awake and cooperative.”

One-Eye grumbled, “Sounds to me like you don’t plan to be here looking over our shoulders.”

I was up already. “Clever man. I have some reading and some translating to do. You can manage without me. If you concentrate.”

One-Eye told Goblin, “We got to get that little bit into the sack with some guy’ll pork her brains out.” His cure for all ills, even at his age.

I paused to say, “When he’s given everything else the once-over, have him search for Narayan and the Daughter of Night.” I did not need to explain how badly we needed to keep those two from achieving their ends.

“I’ve got it!” I shouted, running back to the corner where Murgen’s friends and family were trying to torment him into taking a broader interest in the world of the living. “I found it! I’ve got it!”

“I hope you ain’t gonna give it to me,” One-Eye grumbled.

My excitement was so loud and intense even Murgen, who was caught in the mist and being a real pain about his situation, paused to study me.

“I had a feeling, an intuition the other day, that the answer was in the Annals. In Murgen’s Annals. And I’d just overlooked it. Maybe because it had been so long since I read them and I wouldn’t have thought to look for it back then.”

“And, behold!” One-Eye sneered. “There it was. In ink of gold on myrex-tinted paper, with little scarlet arrows saying, ’Here it is, Little Girl. The secret of the -”

“Stuff it, dustbag,” Goblin snapped. “I want to hear what Sleepy found.” Though it would have been him doing the sarcasm if One-Eye had not beat him to it.

“It’s the whole thing with the Nyueng Bao. Well, maybe not all of it,” I said as Sahra scowled at me. “But the part with Uncle Doj and Mother Gota and why they came out of the swamp when they didn’t have a debt of honor like your brother, Sahra.” Sahra’s brother Thai Dei was under the glittering plain with Murgen, serving as his bodyguard because of what Murgen and the Company had done to help the Nyueng Bao during the siege of Jaicur. “Sahra, you must know some of this.”

“That may be true, Sleepy. But you’ll have to tell us what you’re talking about first.”

“I’m talking about whatever it was that The Thousand

Voices stole from the Temple of Ghanghesha sometime between the end of the siege and when Uncle Doj and your mother invited themselves to come stay with you here in Taglios. Murgen touches on it over and over, lightly, but I don’t think he ever really caught on completely. Whatever it was that The Thousand Voices stole, Uncle Doj called it ’the Key.’ From other internal evidence, I think it had to be another key to the Shadowgate, like the Lance of Passion.” The Thousand Voices was what the Nyueng Bao called Soulcatcher. “I think if we had that key, we could open the way for the Captured.”

If I was guessing right here, I had created a whole new line of inquiry: Why the Nyueng Bao?

Sahra began shaking her head slowly.

“Am I wrong? What is the Key, then?”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Sleepy. I’m saying I don’t want you to be right. There are things I wouldn’t want to be true.”