The ugly dreamwalkers returned after dark. They were more energetic in their efforts tonight. The rain returned, too. It was more energetic and was accompanied by thunder and lightning that made sleeping difficult. As did the cold rainwater, all of which seemed determined to collect inside the circle where we were camped. The stone did not appear to slope but water sure behaved as though it did. The animals drank their fill. Likewise, the human members of the band. Runmust and Riverwalker directed everyone to fill waterbags and top off canteens. And as soon as someone raised his voice to bless our good fortune, the first snowflakes began to fall.
What sleep I did manage was not pleasant. A full-blown tumult was underway in the ghostworld and it spilled over into my dreams. Then Iqbal’s daughter decided this would be a wonderful time to cry all night. Which got the dog started howling. Or maybe that happened the other way around.
Shadows swarmed over the face of our protection. They were more interested in us than they had been in the interlopers of Murgen’s time. He told me so himself.
The shadows remembered ages past. I was able to eavesdrop on their dreams.
On their nightmares. All they remembered were horrors from a time when men resembling Nyueng Bao tortured them to death in wholesale lots while sorcerers great and small spanked the demented souls until, when they were released eventually, they were so filled with hatred of every living thing that even a creature as slight as a roach was subject to instant attack, with great ferocity. Some shadows, already evilly predatory by nature, became so wicked they even attacked and devoured other shadows.
There had been millions so victimized. And the only virtue in their creators was that they manufactured the horrors from invaders who arrived in countless waves from a world where an insane sorcerer king had elevated himself to near godhood, then had set out to take full mastery of all the sixteen worlds.
Uncounted tens of thousands of corpses littered the glittering plain before the shadows stemmed that tide. Scores of the monsters escaped into neighboring worlds. They spread terror and havoc until the gates could be modified to prevent their passage. For centuries no traffic crossed the plain. Then came another age of halfhearted commerce, once some genius devised the protection now shielding the roads and circles.
The shadows saw everything. They remembered everything. They saw and remembered the missionaries of Kina, who had fled my own world at the pinnacle of Rhaydreynak’s fury. In every world they reached, the goddess’s dark song fell upon a few eager ears, even amongst the children of those who had created the shadows.
Commerce on a plain so constrained and dangerous perforce remained light. It took determined people to hazard the crossing. Traffic peaked when the world we recalled as Khatovar launched a flurry of expeditions to other worlds to determine which would be best suited to host the cosmic ceremony called the Year of the Skulls.
Followers of Kina from other worlds joined that quest. Companies marched and countermarched. They argued and squabbled. They accomplished very little. Eventually a consensus took shape. The sacrifice ought to be the world that had treated the Children of Kina so abominably in the first place. Rhaydreynak’s descendants should reap what he had sown.
The companies sent out were not swarms of fanatics. The plain was dangerous. Few men wanted to cross it. Most of the soldiers were conscripts, or minor criminals under the rule of a few dedicated priests. They were not expected to return. It became the custom for the conscripts’ families to hold a wake for their Bone Warriors or Stone Soldiers before they departed—even though the priests always promised they would be back in a matter of months.
The few who did return usually came back so drained and changed, so bitter and hard, they came to be known as Soldiers of Darkness.
Kina’s religion was never popular anywhere it took root. Always a minority cult, it lost what power it did have as generations passed and the early fervor faded into the inevitable, tedious rule of functionaries. One world after another abandoned Kina and turned away from the plain. Dark Ages took shape everywhere. One gate after another failed and was not restored. Those that did not fail fell into disuse. The worlds were old, worn, tired, desperately in need of renewal. The ancestors of the Nyueng Bao may have been the last large party to travel from one world to another. They seemed to have been Kina worshippers fleeing persecution at a time when the rest of their people had become insanely xenophobic and determined to expunge all alien influences. The ancestors of the Nyueng Bao, the Children of the Dead, had vowed to return to their Land of Unknown Shadows in blazing triumph. But, of course, because they were safe on the far side of the plain, their descendants soon forgot who and what they were. Only a handful of priests remembered, not entirely correctly.
A voice that did not speak aloud tickled my consciousness. Sister, sister, it said. I saw nothing, felt only that featherweight touch. But it was enough to spin my soul sideways and toss it into another place where, when I caught my spiritual breath, the stench of decay filled my nostrils. A sea of bones surrounded me. Unknown tides stirred its surface.
There was something wrong with my eyes. My vision was warped and doubled. I raised a hand to rub them . . . and saw white feathers.
No! Impossible! I could not be following Murgen’s path. I could not be losing my moorings in time. I would not stand for it! I willed myself—
Caw! Not from my beak.
A black shape popped into sight in front of me, wings spread, slowing. Talons reached toward me.
I spun, hurled myself off the dead branch where I had been perched. And was sorry instantly.
I found myself just yards from a face five feet tall. It boasted more fangs than a shark does teeth. It was darker than midnight. The odor of its breath was the stench of decaying flesh.
The triumphant grin on those wicked ebony lips faded as I evaded the swat of a gigantic, clawed hand. I, Sleepy, was in a trousers-soiling panic but something else was inside the bird with me. And it was having fun. Sister, sister, that was close. The bitch is getting sneakier. But she will never surprise me. She cannot. Nor will she understand that she cannot.
Who is “me?”
The exercise was over. I was in my body on the plain, in the rain, shuddering while my mind’s eye observed the capering dreamwalkers. I examined what I had experienced and concluded that I had been given a message, which was that Kina knew we were coming. The dreaming goddess had been pretending quiescence of recent decades. She knew patience intimately, by all its secret names. And I may have been given another message as well.
Kina still was the Mother of Deceit. Quite possibly nothing I had learned recently was entirely or even partially true if Kina had found a way to wander the shadowed reaches of my mind. I had no doubt that she could. She had managed to inform entire generations and regions with a hysterical fear of the Black Company before the advent of the Old Crew.
I swear I sensed her amusement over having quickened in me a deeper and more abiding distrust of everything around me.