She Is The Darkness

3

It is a long trail from that postern to the apartment I call home. On the way I stopped by Croaker's cell to let him know what had happened while we were getting Smoke out of the house. He asked, "You see anything besides the Shadar?"

"No. But the uproar is going to attract attention. If they hear that One-Eye was involved people interested in us will start poking around. They'll be sure something was going on even if One-Eye sells his story to the watchmen."

Croaker grunted. He stared at the papers he had been trying to read. He was bone-tired. "Nothing we can do about it now. Go get some sleep. We're going ourselves in a day or two."

"Uhn." I did not look forward to traveling, especially during wintertime. "I'm not really looking forward to this."

"Hey. I'm older and fatter than you are."

"But you'll be going toward something. Lady is down there."

He grunted unenthusiastically. Any more you had to wonder about his commitment to his woman. Ever since the trouble with Blade... None of my business. "Good night, Murgen."

"Yeah. Same to you, chief." He did not want to be civil, that was fine with me.

I headed for my apartment, though there was nothing for me there but a bed that would give me no rest. With Sarie gone the place was a wasteland of the heart.

I closed the door behind me, looked around like maybe she would jump out laughing and tell me it was all a bad joke. But the joke was not over yet. Mother Gota still had not finished cleaning up the mess left by the Strangler raid. And, pushy though she was, she had not touched anything in my work area, where I was still sorting the burned remains of several of these Annals.

I must have gone drifting with my thoughts. Suddenly I was aware that I was not alone. I got a knife out in half a heartbeat.

I was not in trouble. The three people staring at me belonged by family right. They were my in-laws, Sarie's brother Thai Dei with his arm in a sling, Uncle Doj and Mother Gota. Of the three only the old woman ever said much. And nothing she said was ever anything I wanted to hear. She could find the bad side of anything and complain about it forever. "What?" I asked.

Uncle Doj countered, "Did you drift away again?" He sounded troubled. "When did you go? Dejagore?"

"It wasn't that. That hasn't happened for a while." All three continued to stare at me like I had something hanging out of my nose. "What?"

Uncle Doj said, "There is something different about you."

"Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant more to me than—" I clamped down on the rage. I turned toward the door. No good. Smoke was in a wagon headed south. They continued to stare at me.

It was like this every time I came back after going out without letting Thai Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of their sight.

That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of feeling Croaker got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao. Sarie being gone left a vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my heart. She had been the soul that made this weird bunch work.

Uncle Doj asked, "Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?"

The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises associated with his two-handed longsword style of fighting could become almost as restful and free of pain as was walking with the ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me since I became part of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into the sort of trance the Path requires.

"Not now. Not tonight. I'm tired. Every one of my muscles aches." Yet another way I was going to miss Sarie. That green-eyed angel had been an artist at massaging out the accumulated tensions of the day.

We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well.

Now Mother Gota demanded, "What you doing, you, you hide from your own?" in her abominable Taglian. She refuses to believe she does not speak the language like a native.

"Work." Even without the Old Man's paranoia I would have kept Smoke to myself. Hell, I'm taking a huge risk just mentioning him in these pages even though I'm scribbling them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let alone reads.

Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her discovering Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha and the Shadowmaster away.

Catcher was in the Palace not long ago. She stole those Annals that Smoke hid before his disaster. I am pretty sure she did not notice Smoke himself. The network of confusion spells around him is supposedly extremely subtle on its fringes, so that even a player as powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the misdirection unless she was really focused on finding something like it.

I told them, "I just talked to the Captain. He said the headquarters group will leave tomorrow or the next day. You're still determined to go?"

Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me, "We too have a debt to repay."

The few material possessions the three shared were packed and piled by the apartment door already. They had been ready to go for days. I was the one who needed to focus and finalize my preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had said I was ready to travel.

"I'm going to bed now. Don't wake me up for anything but the end of the world."