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  It was all pretty amusing — unless you were one of the Nine determined to make a reputation for the File, or you were a crow with hopes of getting fat. Amusing but handy. I was tired of waiting for a chance to slip away. My need to settle with the Bowalk monster had grown pretty powerful, though I hid it well. I have a number of obsessions that I do not let show.

  Officially, the Eleventh Battalion was rotating up to guard the shadowgate. In reality, the Eleventh would be started through to the fortress at the heart of the plain, after nightfall. My gang would be up there much earlier, swiftly moving beyond any hope of Sleepy turning us around. Tobo would cover our backtrail.

  I made a sign I hoped would be seen and passed along. We needed to move faster. Sleepy is a resourceful little witch. If there was any way to beat me out of this she might have it figured out already.

  It did seem like she was out there by herself on the Bowalk question. One-Eye had a lot more friends dead than he had had while he was alive.

  Tobo was at the shadowgate. But he was supposed to be keeping an eye on his mother and the Captain. Before I could say anything, though, he told me, “They’re safe. The meet is a face-saving scheme by the Nine. They’ve realized what they did was stupid. There’ll be a lot of ceremony but no admission of anything, like even that they’ve got an army over there that wanted to do us evil, and before they’re done they’ll give Mom a bull that grants the Company permission to find and use the shadowgate secrets.” He grinned, a kid excited. “I don’t think they’ve been getting enough sleep.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “I have family going through. Don’t I?”

  Of course he did. I was on edge. “Let’s keep moving, people.” With Nyueng Bao, old Company hands, my wife and whatnot, I would have just over forty people joining my hunt. For a while. If it dragged on I might not be able to hold them together.

  Tobo told me, “Make camp at the first circle. Even if it seems like you can cover a lot more ground before it gets dark.” He told Lady, “It’s important. Keep him in check. The first circle. So I can catch up when I get away.”

  Willow Swan called, “Hey, Croaker. If you stand right here and look just right out of the side of your eye, you can see the Nef. In broad daylight.”

  Swan was on the other side of the Hsien shadowgate. His voice had a dampened, distant quality.

  I gave him my best scowl. “Don’t forget plain discipline.” Shivetya might be our ally and the soul of the plain but there were perils up there even he could not master. The Unforgiven Dead were as hungry for life as ever. Only the roads and circles were safe. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid piercing the protective boundaries. Their master spells would repair them if you did. But you would not be alive to enjoy the result. All that would be left of you was a desiccated husk that had taken a while dying, screaming all the way.

  Lately there seemed to be less shadow activity than in the past. Possibly Shivetya had found a way to control them. Maybe even to destroy them. They were a later accretion. He had no use for them. He would love to be rid of them.

  Which would be as wonderful for those sad but deadly monsters as it would be for us. They would achieve the release of death at least. A release Shivetya understood. It was a release he yearned for himself.

  I started barking at people. “Let’s get that equipment out and moving! Where are those mules? I thought I sent them up here last week.” When a lot of people agree with you, you can move a lot of material without drawing much attention. I started work on this as soon as I was sure Sleepy did not intend to pursue it herself.

  “Calm down,” Tobo told me. And I did. Stunned. Because a kid was saying it to a veteran. And was right. “Come here. Lady, you too.” He stepped away from the road, to a rudely made wooden box balanced precariously atop a jagged boulder.

  “This same rock is over on the home side,” I said. “Your father had a bunker right over there where that bush is. What have you got?”

  The box contained what looked like four black glass cylinders a foot long, two inches in diameter, equipped with a metal handle on one end.

  “These are keys. Like the Lance of Passion was. The kind you need to get on and off the plain. I made new ones. It’s not hard if you have the specifications. Blade has one key. Suvrin has two. One is in place in this gate here. We’ll take it away when we leave. Two more are with a couple of the battalion commanders who went up already. You’re going to take two with you. Just in case.”

  He handed me one cylinder and gave the other to Lady. Mine seemed heavier than an object its size ought to be. The handle was silver. I asked, “You just drop it into the hole in the plain, right?”

  “Exactly. Remember your repair lessons?” He faced Lady when he asked that. I did sit in on the classes but my wife had gotten a lot better understanding of the process. It would have to be a major emergency before we counted on me doing anything even vaguely related to sorcery.

  A stream of mules and men passed through the shadowgate. Each got checked by a sergeant who must have spent his formative years at Sleepy’s headquarters. He wanted to make note of every man, every animal, every fireball thrower and other major item of equipment or weaponry. The Nyueng Bao, not really belonging to the Company, were rude to him. I went over and was rude myself. “You’re gumming up the works, Sergeant. Go away. Or I’ll ask Tobo to sic one of the Black Hounds on you.”

  The pack was not far off. Nobody could see them, of course, but they made plenty of racket when they quarreled among themselves. And that never stopped.

  My threat had the desired effect. The keeper of inventories departed so fast there was almost a whoosh. He would file an official complaint. But that would end up far down the list of my delinquencies.

  Tobo overtook me. Most of my gang were through now. The kid bowed to his father, formally polite. He and Murgen had a mutual problem. Neither knew quite how to bridge the gap left by Murgen having been buried during most of the years Tobo was growing up.

  The boy told me, in a voice his father was intended to hear, “You’d better push it now. Mom just got word of what you’re doing. She’ll keep her mouth shut for Gota’s sake. For now. But when she hears that Dad is in on it she’s going to boil over and head straight for the Captain.”

  I gave Murgen an ugly look. Didn’t tell the old lady you were going out with the guys, eh? How did Tobo know what his mother had just found out? The kid snapped his fingers, made a series of hand gestures, said something obscure, apparently to empty air.

  A pair of shadows raced across the slope, slanting down from the southwest. They headed straight toward us. I saw nothing to cast them. Then, suddenly, I had a face full of flapping wings, weights on my shoulders and what felt like dragon’s talons trying to rip the meat off my collarbones. Ravens.

  “They only look like crows,” Tobo said. “Don’t ever forget that they’re not.” I shuddered. I have lived with this stuff all around me, decade after decade, but being exposed to it has not made it any less creepy.

  Tobo told me. “At my request they’ve agreed to assume this shape. They’ll be your eyes and ears wherever you have to operate without me. They won’t have the strategic range you were used to with Dad but they can cover a few hundred miles, fast, and they’ll give you a strong tactical advantage. Besides scouting they can carry messages. Be sure to frame those carefully, clearly, without ambiguity, and try to keep them short. Give them an absolutely crystal clear address. Name names and make sure they know who the names belong to.”

  I turned my head right and left, caught glimpses from the sides of my eyes. It was disconcerting, having those cruel beaks so close. The eyes are the first things the Choosers of the Slain go for on the battlefield.

  One bird was black, the other white. They were bigger than the local breed of raven. And the white one had not gotten the shape quite right. It looked like one of its parents had been a startled pigeon instead of a crow.

  “If it turns out that I can’t c
atch up and you need to get in touch, they can find me easily.”

  I am sure I looked grim.

  Grinning, Tobo told me, “And I thought they’d go great with your costume. Mom told me you always had ravens on your shoulders when you did Widowmaker, years ago.”

  I sighed. “Those were real crows. And they belonged to Soulcatcher. The two of us had a sort of understanding in those days. Enemy of my enemy kind of thing.”

  “You did bring the Widowmaker armor with you, didn’t you? And One-Eye’s spear? You know you won’t be able to come back for anything you leave behind.”

  “Yes, yes. I have it.” This Widowmaker costume armor was not the same outfit that I had worn decades ago. That had gotten lost during Sleepy and Sahra’s Kiaulune wars. Soulcatcher probably had it in her trophy chamber. This armor, though mainly for show, came from Hsien’s finest armories and had a distinct native flavor. Its black, chitinous lacquer surface boasted inlays of gold and silver symbols that Hsien associated with sorcery and evil and darkness. Some reproduced arcane characters of power once associated with the Shadowmasters. Others went back to an age when Hsien’s now-extinct Kina cult was sending out Deceiver companies on crusade. All those symbols were scary, at least in the world where first they had been imagined.

  Lady’s reconstituted Lifetaker armor was uglier than mine. The stuff on its exterior was less clearly defined and much more creepy because she had insisted on being involved in its design and creation. The inside of her head is filled with spiders.

  She did not get any pretend-to-be Choosers of the Slain. She got several ornate little teak boxes and a thin stack of sheets of the strange rice paper preferred by the monks of Khang Phi.

  “You have to go. I’ll see that they don’t send a messenger to order you back.”

  I grunted. Except for Uncle Doj, who paused to murmur with Tobo, I was the last of my gang through the Hsien shadowgate. Lady squeezed my hand when I joined her on the risky side. She said, “We’re off, darling. Again.” She seemed excited.

  “Again.” I could not recall ever being excited by moving out.

  Murgen asked, “You want to show the standard now?”

  “Not until we’re on the plain itself. We’re renegades here. Let’s don’t make Sleepy look small.” I had an idea, then. If I could come up with some material... we could run up the old Company standard. From before we adopted Soulcatcher’s firebreathing skull.

  “Good,” Doj told me, stepping through the gate. “A bit of wisdom. That’s really good.”

  I began the climb to the plain somewhat numbed by the realization that I was the only living member of the company who recalled our original banner. It had been no more cheerful than today’s was but it had been a lot busier. A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.

  There was nothing in the Annals to suggest when or why that banner had been adopted.

  20

  Glittering Stone:

  Mystic Roads

  Different stars tonight,” Willow Swan said, lying back, staring at the sky.

  “Different everything,” Murgen replied. “Find me Little Boy or the Dragon’s Eye.”

  There was no moon. There is always a moon up in the Land of Unknown Shadows.

  The sky on the plain... is changeable. It may not boast the same constellation two nights running.

  The weather is usually benign. Cold, of course. But seldom rainy, or worse. In my experience. But I was not concerned about rain or snow. Shadow weather worried me.

  The sixteen shadowgates are equally spaced around the perimeter of the plain. From each a road of stone of a different color from the plain runs inward to the nameless fortress like a spoke in a wagon wheel. I had seen only two of the roads. One was darker than the surrounding plain, the other slightly lighter. At six-mile intervals along the spokes there were large circles of appropriately shaded material. Those got used as campgrounds though that might not have been their original function. The plain has changed with the ages. Man cannot leave anything alone. The roads were once just mystical routes between worlds. Now they are the only safety out there when the sun sets. When darkness falls the killer shadows leave their hiding places. As we gagged down our rough supper the little light glowing from charcoal fires revealed dozens of black stains oozing over the invisible dome protecting the circle.

  “The Slugs of Doom,” Murgen said through a mouthful of bread, waving at a nearby shadow. “Much better than the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.”

  “The man’s suddenly developing a sense of humor,” Cletus said. “This worries me.”

  His brother Loftus said, “Be afraid, people. Very afraid. The End Days are upon us.”

  “You saying it’s bad jokes going to bring on the Year of the Skulls?”

  I observed, “If that was the case we’d’ve been dead twenty years ago and the only thing you’d see up there is Kina’s ugly face.”

  “Speaking of ugly.” Lady pointed.

  We had staked our few square feet of turf at the edge of the circle, where the road to the heart of the plain departed it. I had placed the key given to me by Tobo in the socket in the stone where circle and road came together. Every circle had the sockets. The key sealed the road off. It would keep shadows who got past the protective barriers anywhere else from being able to get us.

  “The Nef,” Murgen said.

  The three creatures at the barrier were plain for everyone to see. They were bipedal but their heads were dissimilar masses of ugliness other Annalists have said they hoped were masks. I could see why — though, seeing them, I got a powerful sense of déjà vu. Maybe I ran into them in a dream. I must have had a few while I was buried. I said, “You know these guys, Murgen. See if you can talk to them.”

  “Yeah. And after I do that I’ll fly off to the sun.” No one had yet managed to communicate with the Nef, though it was obvious the creatures desperately wanted to talk. We were so alien to each other that communication was impossible.

  “We must be getting a better grasp. We’re seeing them when we’re awake. We are awake, aren’t we?” Historically, the Nef appeared only in dreams. Only in the past year did guards at the shadowgate report catching glimpses the way troops elsewhere made sightings of Tobo’s pets.

  Murgen ambled over warily. I observed. But I also started keeping an eye on my ravens. Until nightfall they had been almost somnolent, entirely indifferent to the world. The appearance of shadows on the barrier turned them restless, even bellicose. They hissed and coughed and produced a whole range of uncorvine noises. Some form of communication was going on because the shadows responded — though, clearly, not the way the ravens wanted.

  The Unknown Shadows of Hsien did share a common ancestry with the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.

  Murgen marveled, “I think I’m actually getting what they’re trying to tell me.”

  “What’s that?” My wife, I noticed, was watching the Nef intently. Could they be making sense to her, too? But she had no previous experience with the dreamwalkers. Unless while she was a sort of dreamwalker herself, while we were buried.

  No, it had to be those three. They had studied us long enough to figure out how to get through. Maybe.

  Murgen said, “They want us not to keep heading toward the center of the plain. They’re saying we should take the other road.”

  “Based on what’s in the Annals, I’d say they’ve been trying to get us to do something besides what we want from the first time anybody dreamed them. They’re just never able to make themselves clear.”

  “That would’ve been me,” Murgen said. “And you’re right. What I’ve never figured out, though, is whether they’re trying to save us trouble or are pushing their own agenda. It seems to work out both ways.”

  The tiniest hiss escaped my
black raven. A warning. I turned. Uncle Doj had appeared behind Murgen, two steps back, fully armed, staring at the Nef. After watching them for a minute he drifted around the circle to the right, not quite a quarter of the way. Then he shuffled back and forth, squatted, rose up on his toes.

  Then Lady went over there. She checked the view from multiple angles herself. “There is a ghost of a road, Croaker.” She came back, dug out the key Tobo had given her. I walked back with her. A socket for the key had appeared in the stone surface when no one was watching. It was not there earlier. I had done a one-hundred percent walkaround of the perimeter before we settled down.

  Doj said, “The boy told me not to let you waste time trying to make time. Perhaps this is why.”

  “Murgen. You know about shortcuts and side roads on the plain?”

  “They’re supposed to exist. Sleepy saw them.”

  Vaguely, now, I recalled something from my own first passage across the plain.

  Lady wanted to plug in her key. I held her back. I said, “All right. If you feel comfortable. Doj? What do you think? Is it safe?” He was as near a real wizard as we had here.

  “It doesn’t feel wrong.”

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But good enough.

  Lady lowered the key into place. In moments the ghost road became more substantial, began to give the impression of a golden glow that was not quite there when you tried to see it. My shoulder ornaments were not pleased. They hissed and spat and retreated to the far side of the circle, where they got into a squabble with something large and dark oozing across the surface of our protection.

  Murgen said, “I think they want to enter the circle, Captain. I think they want to cut across.”

  “Yeah?” The auxiliary road was now more plainly seen than the main way. I mused, “We could hike straight across to the first circle right behind the Khatovar shadowgate.” I went and started getting my gear together.