She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company (49 page)

For an instant I had a sense of coming home.

It is immortality of a sort.

I jumped, looked around. Only Lady seemed to have sensed something, too.

When I looked back at the toppled throne I saw the hall as it may have appeared
a thousand years ago. Or more. When a band of cruel priests were making the
original shadows from prisoners of war. It was there for just an instant but
that moment was long enough to tell me that this had been a very ugly place once
upon a time, long before the advent of the twelve Free Companies.

“Stop right there,” Croaker whispered.

I stopped. His tone was urgent. “What?”

“Look down.”

I looked. Before us lay the dessicated remains of a crow. Just the way it lay
struck terror right down to the bones of my toes. “A shadow got it. We’re not
safe here.”

“We still have the standard.” He did not sound completely confident, though.

I used my toe to flip the dead bird into the crack in the floor, which was just
a few feet away. The effort was pointless. Some of the men had seen the dead
bird. They understood its significance.

I understood that it meant a lot more than just that shadows roamed this part of
the fortress. It meant that Soulcatcher knew the place well. It meant . . .

Mad laughter came from back where we had entered. Soulcatcher’s laughter. Lady
spun, sorceries forming around her already.

The earth shook. This was a bad one. The worst since we had come up onto the
plain. Possibly the worst since the terrible one that destroyed whole cities and
killed thousands before we ever left Taglios. I hit the floor and began to slide
toward the abyss. Croaker grabbed me and Lady hung on to him. Everybody else
fell down, too. Catcher stopped cackling in mid-laugh. Torches scattered around,

dropped. There was nothing for them to set on fire.

Something fell from above. Something like little balls of glass or clear
hailstones. Some shattered on impact, some bounced. They seemed to have nothing
to do with anything. At first.

The throne with the golem aboard shifted, tilted forward until it was almost
bottom up, a mouse’s breath short of plunging into the red abyss.

There was an incredible flash of white light. It blinded me momentarily. While I
hugged the floor Soulcatcher cursed someone in three voices and as many
languages. Rips and cracks and barks tore the air as sorceries flew. More
marbles pattered around me. I began to feel weak and sleepy. It occurred to me
that shiny bits of glass were exactly what crows liked to carry around and maybe
hoard up someplace so their boss could have them rain down when the passion took
her.

Soulcatcher had sprung her trap despite all.

I grasped the standard and went fearlessly to sleep, happily sure there was no
way Catcher could get off the plain. The shadows would get her. They would get
everybody as soon as the sun went down.

I could not sleep without ghostwalking. The moment I slipped loose from my flesh
I ran out to try to tell One-Eye or Sleepy or somebody what had happened. When I
reached the Shadowgate I found everyone shaken by the earthquake and One-Eye
already having worked out a pretty good idea of what had happened. He had the
troops packing to run for Overlook. In fact, that was going on everywhere, as
though every man out there had had the same notion at the same time. Nobody was
in a positive frame of mind.

It took hours to find Sleepy even though Uncle Doj had taken her directly to the
company he had circled during the night. She was asleep when I found her, her
disguise still good. I poked and prodded and nagged the best a ghost could do
and finally drew a response.

I spent much of the day slowly getting a brief message across.

It was nearly sunset when I passed through the Shadowgate headed south. I was
wrestling the temptation to run to Sarie. I did not want to be around her when
the shadows discovered my flesh.

I do not know what bizarre reasoning moved me. I was convinced that I needed to
be inside my body when I died. I might become an eternally wandering spook if I
did not.

I met Soulcatcher halfway down the road. She was headed north aboard Lady’s
horse at a hellbent pace. Croaker’s steed galloped a length behind, running just
as hard. Its rider had his face buried in the stallion’s mane but trailed wild
golden hair that betrayed him. You cannot have the woman you want, go for her
little sister? Willow, Willow, you let yourself be damned over some pussy?

I jumped in front of the lead horse, sure I would be seen. My own horse had been
able to see me. I would spook these guys.

It saw me fine. And ran right through me. Evidently ghosts did not scare the
critters. I jumped up and tried to swat Willow as he charged past. You
treacherous asshole.

Somebody had to let her loose.

How did she get to him?

I continued southward, mood bleak because of my failure. The entire plain seemed
to reverberate with Soulcatcher’s laughter.

She had won. After an age, she had won. She had put her sister down. The world
was her toy at last.

Darkness gathered. I hurried. I passed a ragtag bunch of men and animals in vain
flight northward. They numbered fewer than half our recon company. Sindawe and
Bucket were the only noteworthy names among them. I did not see the panther.

When I reached that crack into the innermost room I found it blocked. Somebody
had stuffed it with rags and rocks and broken masonry, I suppose so the shadows
could not loose. Must have been Swan. Catcher knew shadows can slither through
the tiniest pinhole. She was the new Shadowmaster.

What a shadow could snake through so could I. And Swan had not done that good a
job.

The golem, or whatever it was, still hung above the glowing abyss. I ignored it.

I had something to panic about. My body was not where I had left it. There were
no bodies around. I had to close my astral eyes and let my flesh draw me to it.

I should have seen it coming. I should have known. I had been only loosely
anchored in time for years. And so many of the faces had seemed to be those of
men I knew.

My return to awareness, though not actually in flesh yet, took place in the
caverns of the old men and the ice cocoons. And I found myself there, at the end
of the line, sitting against the cavern wall with the standard across my lap.

The Lancehead seemed to whisper and murmur to itself. The rest were everybody
who had clambered through that final crack, Old Crew guys, Nyueng Bao, Cordy
Mather, Blade, the Prahbrindrah Drah, Isi and Ochiba. Every last fool, including
Lady and the Old Man. Little sister and woman scorned had invested the extra
minutes to arrange those two, holding hands, heads leaning together, in mockery.

Lady radiated rage. This was the second time she had been buried alive, the
second husband with whom she had shared a grave.

The Old Man radiated despair.

So did the rest. This was the end of the dream, little as it had been.

I fluttered on up the cavern, between stalactites and stalagmites, webs and lacy
structures of ice, to where, an age before the appearance of the Free Companies,

desperate, hunted followers of Kina had hidden her holy Books of the Dead from
the murderous warlord Rhaydreynak. Rhaydreynak had not found the books nor had
Kina’s children survived to return to them.

It could be worse than it was already. Soulcatcher could have found and taken
those grim books.

She had not. They remained safe upon their lecterns, open to early passages.

I hustled back to the gang.

Some of them sensed me moving. They focused their anger upon me. Which was maybe
good. Water sleeps, I thought at them. They were locked in some sorcerous
stasis. I was trapped only in my flesh, presumably because I had been away at a
convenient time.

Water sleeps. Catcher might be the darkness but she would learn. Water sleeps,

but Enemy never rests.

In the night, when the wind no longer whines through a fortress that was there
before the plain that was there before the first Free Company marched, stone
whispers. Stone sprouts. Stone grows. Stone buds and stone flowers. A thousand
pillars rise where no pillar has stood before. Moonlight sweeps the plain,

setting aglitter the characters taking form, remembering a few of the fallen.

It is immortality of a sort.