The hours of ceremony ground me down. I wanted to put myself away for another long nap. But I refused to give the Queen of Darkness any further respite.
“These are them,” Arkana told me in perfectly colloquial bad Taglian, indicating eight bitty wooden kegs. “Eight different men took turns crawling in there and stuffing papers—and everything else they could find—into a keg. Which I had sealed up as soon as the man came out. By an illiterate cooper.”
“You are a treasure indeed, daughter dear. Gentlemen, let’s build us a bonfire.” I had brought a couple of carts loaded with wood purchased from a wood seller whose usual customers were people who needed firewood for funeral ghats. I had been surprised to find he had any stock left, considering recent events.
The gentlemen I spoke to all hailed from Hsien. They knew only that the eight kegs contained the hopes of life of a monster more blackhearted than the legendary Shadowmasters who had tortured the Land of Unknown Shadows. And that was all they needed to know.
The pyre went up quickly, the kegs scattered throughout it. A fraction of me bemoaned the fate of the latest incarnation of the Books of the Dead. I hate seeing any book destroyed. But I did not interfere when the oil splashed and the fireballs zipped in.
My reluctance might be Kina trying to manipulate me. I stayed there until I was confident that my natural daughter’s life’s work had been consumed completely by the flames. In some myths Hagna, god of fire, is Kina’s mortal enemy. In others, when she is in her Destroyer avatar, he is her ally.
The more I am exposed to the Gunni pantheon the more confused I become.
“What task now?” I wondered aloud. Everyone but Arkana and a few curious street kids, the near-feral ones called jengali, had moved along. A ragged, bemused white crow had been hanging around, too, but it had nothing to say. It had been doing a lot of sticking close and keeping its beak shut lately.
“Time to wake somebody up, Pop. Your wife, your daughter or the Khadidas.”
I surveyed the workmen clearing rubble. Most were civilians now, supervised by soldiers there just to keep them from stealing any treasures they unearthed.
The masonry had stopped collapsing. The fires had burned out. The popular consensus was that an all-new palace should be erected, once the old structures had been cleared away.
I could not imagine what treasures and surprises might surface if they did demolish and remove the whole rambling monster. No one ever knew the palace in its entirety. No one but a long-dead wizard named Smoke.
The death pyre of the Books of the Dead attracted more jengali, who wanted to take advantage of the warmth.
Shukrat glowered at Arkana. Seemed Arkana was not doing her share of Booboo watching. And Arkana did not care if Shukrat was pissed off.
I noticed a change in Lady. She did not seem to be in a sort of coma anymore. She seemed to be in a normal but deep sleep. I threw open a window. I am a firm believer in the health benefits of fresh air. The scruffy white crow appeared almost immediately. I asked, “How long has this been going on?” I had my back to Booboo. Cleaned and groomed and dressed in decent clothing she was quite the sleeping beauty. I tried not to look at her long. Seeing her still ripped at my heart.
“What?” Shukrat asked. She stuck her tongue out at Arkana.
“The snoring. Lady didn’t snore before.” I meant since she had fallen under the spell. Before, she had snored for as long as I had been sleeping with her. Though she refused to believe it.
Shukrat said, “She started right after we brought the Daughter of Night in. I didn’t think anything about it.”
“No reason you should.”
Arkana nodded. “I never noticed her not snoring.”
The white crow chuckled from the window sill. I asked, “Did she snore when she was a kid?”
The crow made a noise. The girls looked at me, then at the bird. No dummies, they realized right away that it was not just an albino with bad personal habits. Being sorceresses they soon understood that it was a genuine crow, too, rather than some creature whose usual form was no form, and out of sight.
“Assuming she is sleeping, she’s been there a long time. You’d think she would’ve wakened on her own.” I touched my wife gently. She did not respond. I shook her, much less tenderly. She groaned, muttered, rolled onto her side, pulled her knees up. I said, “Don’t give me that stuff. It’s time to get up.”
The girls smiled. They felt my relief.
She was just sleeping now, even if that had been going on for a long time and might go on for a while more.
“Come on, woman! We’ve got work to do. You’ve had enough sleep for ten people.”
“She’s sure been getting my share.”
Lady cracked an eyelid. At the same time she muttered something incoherent that sounded suspiciously like one of her traditional early morning threats.
I said, “All that rest hasn’t improved her disposition any. I’ll remember this next time she claims lack of sleep is why she’s cranky.”
“You want me to dump a bucket of cold water on her?” Arkana asked. She could be a presumptuous little witch.
“She does need a bath.”
Lady growled again, but this time in a lame attempt to be cheerful.
I told her, “Don’t even try to be nice.” The way the human body works, returning from a coma in a good humor is flat impossible.
Her throat was dry and tight. After we dealt with that, she asked, “Where are we? How long was I down this time?”
I had lost track.
“Fifteen days? At least. Probably more,” Shukrat said. “You were sleeping for all of us. We were all too busy.”
Lady examined her surroundings. She knew she had not been here before. She could not see Booboo from where she sat.
I told her, “The war is over. We won. Sort of. Aridatha Singh surrendered. We offered them good terms.”
Lady grunted, mind not working swiftly. “Mogaba let him do that?”
“The Great General isn’t with us anymore.”
“I need to talk to you about that, Pop,” Shukrat said. “I went out to that sandbar.”
I signed her to silence. Something from the hidden realm would be around somewhere. I continued talking to Lady. “A lot of people aren’t with us anymore. Including almost everybody who went to town with us the night you got hit. Sleepy, too, later on. In an ambush. Suvrin took over. He’ll be all right. He’ll grow into it. As long as we help him.”
Arkana added, “Don’t forget the Prince and General Chu. And Mihlos. I miss him.”
“Because he panted around behind you like a horny hound dog,” Shukrat sneered. “And you just led him on.”
“And who went out of her way to make sure she wiggled and jiggled whenever he was around?”
“Girls?”
“What?”
“I’m just jealous. Where were you when I was Mihlos’s age?”
Lady interrupted. “What else do I need to know?”
“The Palace fell down. We’ve occupied the city. Aridatha Singh is in charge now and gets Arkana wiggling and jiggling whenever he comes around. We don’t know how the succession will work out. We captured Booboo and the Khadidas. We destroyed the Books of the Dead. Again. Booboo is right over there. If you want to see her.” I extended a hand to help her rise. If she wanted. “She’s pretty.”
“I want. But I won’t be able to stand up by myself. I don’t think I’ll even be able to sit up for long without help.”
The crow snickered.
Lady gave the bird a long, hard look. Then she offered me its twin.
I asked, “How’s your connection with Kina?”
“What do you mean, how is my connection?”
“Did I stutter? Is it still there? Is it stronger? Is it weaker?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know. Why not answer me?”
The girls were startled. They looked like they wished they were anywhere else. But they spread out.
“She didn’t take me over while I was sleeping, if that’s what you’re after. I did have some awful nightmares, though. It was like I was trapped inside her imagination for an age. But she ignored me. She had something on her mind.” She came close to grinding her teeth with each word. She did not want to open up. “The nightmare went away a while ago.”
I could understand. The only place I want to reveal myself, even a little, is here, where hardly anyone will ever notice.
“Did you have any sense of time? I’m thinking maybe something happening here changed what you were going through there.”
“Sense of time? It was forever. And no time at all. Kina doesn’t experience time the way we do. I don’t think. She sure doesn’t let it oppress her. Come on. Show me my baby. Before I collapse.” She strained to get up.
Shukrat and Arkana got hold of her arms and helped her up. Arkana asked, “She always this cranky when she wakes up, Pop?”
“You’re going to become part of the family, get used to it. You will if you don’t take it personal.” I chuckled when Lady asked me how I would like it if she stopped getting personal. “She’s not bad today.”
The crow hissed. Clearly, it did not care if Lady figured it out. In fact, what it said sounded like, “Sister, sister.” Which was the taunt Lady had employed a few years ago, when she was looking out from behind the eyes of another crow.
Curious, the white crows. There has been one around, off and on, since the siege of Dejagore. Back then Murgen had been the mind behind the bird’s eyes. Most of the time. Apparently. But was Shivetya the mind behind the crow-riding minds? Could he have had that much power to affect events outside the glittering plain?
That would explain a good deal. Maybe even Murgen’s former difficulties with his place in time. But that would mean that Soulcatcher was not responsible for much of what we believed were her crimes. I was not sure I wanted it to be that way.
The bird snickered. Like it could read my mind.
Soulcatcher always had had a knack for reading me.
“We lost Murgen, too,” I said as we moved into position facing one another over the unconscious girl.
“I understood that. From your having told me how many we lost. That would be everyone not wearing Voroshk clothing. Correct?”
“Except for one damned lucky soldier from Hsien who managed to be behind the right person at the right time. Lucky is now Tarn Do’s official nickname.”
“Must be in the blood,” Lady muttered, forcing herself to look at the girl. “The women of my blood are fated to spend most of their existence trapped and asleep.” She rested her weight more fully on the girls, extended a hand to touch Booboo’s cheek. She lapsed into the language of the Jewel Cities. “Asleep like this was the only way I ever saw my mother. She was the one they told the first Sleeping Beauty stories about. Her Prince Charming never came. My father did. And he was content with her the way she was.”
Now there was a slice of horror to lug around in the back of your brain: knowing that your mother was not even aware that you had been born.
And we like to whine about how cruel the world is today.
They were giants in the olden days.
We will be giants ourselves five hundred years from now.
“So this is our baby.” She stared. “Conceived on a battlefield.” Her emotions were plain upon her face. Never had I seen her looking more vulnerable.
“This is our baby.”
“Shall we wake her up?”
“I don’t think so. Not now, anyway. Life is insane enough right now without asking for more trouble.”
That did not set well. Not at all. Lady wanted to establish some kind of emotional dialog with this flesh of her flesh. For my part, I found that now I had been exposed directly, the emotional distress was fading away. I do not believe my thoughts were skewed by might-have-beens and wish-that-weres.
Lady did concede that it might not be a good plan to waken Booboo without Tobo there for backup.
She did not do anything untoward but she did have the girls breathing nervously for a while.