Soldiers Live

127

Taglios: And My Baby

The soldiers created a precarious opening through which someone might wriggle. I asked for a lantern, meaning to be first inside, but Tobo seized it when it arrived. I did not argue. He was better equipped than I.

Seconds after the boy began to duckwalk a blast of urine-colored light ripped through the opening. It glanced off Tobo, hit a block of stone, scattered. It was a potent blast. Stone melted. And one stray ricochet found the Prahbrindrah Drah.

The results were ugly. And instantly fatal.

"That was it," Tobo called back, unaware of the disaster. "That's all he had. He's out of it now. Croaker, help me drag them out."

The Radisha began to wail.

The boy recognized the scope of the disaster immediately. The Taglian empire was, as of this moment, without an acceptable helmsman. Was without legitimate direction. "It'll have to wait a minute," I said. "The Prince is hurt. I want to get him to medical care right now." Maybe, just one more time, we could pretend the supreme authority was fine but staying out of sight. Soulcatcher got away with it. The Great General got away with it. Why not my own band of opportunists?

I feared there had been too many witnesses, though Suvrin and Aridatha took up the pretense immediately and the Radisha herself joined me after only a few heartbeats. She put on a creditable show of threatening me with serious unpleasantness if her brother happened to die.

Now aware that political disaster threatened, Tobo launched some glitzy distraction. To which I paid little attention because I was desperate to get the Prince out of the public eye. There was a lot of flash behind me, and changing colors playing through the ruins. A big bunch of masonry went down. And Shukrat began helping Tobo pull the Khadidas out of the ground.

Aridatha's men hauled the Prince's litter away. The prince seen to, Arkana and I began to ease through the rubble toward the hole. I beckoned more stretcher-bearers. The thing being dragged into the light did not look dangerous. It looked like an old, worn-out version of a Goblin who was already dead.

"You want these now?" Arkana asked.

"Hang on just another minute. Get him over here, guys. On the stretcher. Easy. Easy! Tobo. Can you wake him up? Just for a second? Long enough for him to recognize me and what I'm doing?"

"Probably. If you want to risk it." There was a choke in the boy's voice. He looked at the spear and the ugly hat and wanted to believe that I had a way to reach the Goblin trapped inside the Khadidas. The Goblin who was always like an uncle to him.

"Oh, shit!" I said. "Wait! Wait!"

"What?"

"I just had an ugly thought. About how Kina might react through Lady if we drive the devil out of Goblin."

Tobo sucked in a bucket of air, released it. "I don't see how she could work that. But why take a chance? She is the Mother of Deception. Shuke, honey, do me a favor. Get the small carpet from my room. Just fold it up and bring it back. We'll use that to haul them away."

Shukrat jumped onto her post and zipped away. While he waited Tobo had an awning erected to keep potential rain off Goblin, then snaked back into the hole. He did not ask for help so I stood back with Aridatha and Arkana, insides turning over, awaiting my first glimpse of Booboo.

I asked Singh, "The fires under the rubble never go out. What the hell keeps burning?"

"Five hundred years worth of archives. Everything that belonged to the Inspector General of the Records. It'll make for interesting times when we try to put things back together."

Shukrat, the little darling, obviously knew her way around Tobo's quarters. She was back with a small, folded flying carpet before the kid himself poked his head back out of the hole. With Arkana's help she snapped the frame into position, stretched the fabric taut.

Arkana finally found nerve enough to speak to Aridatha directly, in a nonbusiness capacity. "You think it's going to rain?"

You could see she wanted to melt like a slug freshly sprinkled with salt. All that work to find the nerve to speak and something that feeble was all she could get out. When fat raindrops had begun plunking down at random intervals nearly a minute before.

She was just a kid.

They had the Khadidas on the flying carpet now. And a couple of soldiers, one Taglian and one from Hsien, had hold of a pair of ankles.

"You all right, Pop?" Arkana asked, holding onto my left arm.

"She looks just like Lady did the first time we met." In a time of terror. There was terror here, now, but of an entirely different sort.

"Then your wife must have had some filthy hygiene habits in her younger days."

"Ah, but she was eager to learn. Tobo, can you make sure Booboo doesn't wake up until I want her to?" I did not want to have to cope with her witchery. "And let's keep these two away from each other from now on. We don't need them getting their heads together."

"We don't need them, period," someone muttered. Shukrat, I realized. Shukrat did not like the way Tobo kept eyeballing the Daughter of Night.

Nor did my other adopted offspring particularly approve of the contemplative stares of Aridatha Singh.

Tobo called, "Croaker, you want to wake up yourself? Just for a minute? So you can take a look at her? See if anything's missing or broken?"

One of the city soldiers told another that everything looked just fine to him. A little soap and some clean clothes...

I never thought I would be a father and have to pretend not to hear such remarks.

The man was right. She was a beautiful child. Exactly like her mother. And like Lady's, most of her beauty lay right on the surface. I had to remind myself not to be taken in by what I saw or by what I wanted to feel. My emotions would not be trustworthy. They might not be my own. The Mother of Deceit had not left the game.

I knelt beside my daughter. My emotions were engaged indeed. I felt a thousand years old and utterly powerless. It took a major application of will to touch her.

Her skin felt cold.

In moments I reported, "She's got lots of bruises and scrapes but there isn't any serious damage. Nothing permanent. She is dehydrated." She shook each time I touched her, as though I was massaging her with pieces of ice. "She'll recover, if we take care of her. Put her in with Lady."

Tobo said, "You'll need somebody to stay with her. Somebody who can control her."

"I will."

"I will."

Shukrat and Arkana both volunteered.

Well. Were they that concerned about competition from a beat-up, unconscious woman who knew absolutely nothing about men?

I would bet Tobo was grinning when he said, "All right, ladies. Work yourselves out a schedule. Croaker, what do you plan to do about Goblin?"

Suvrin seemed a little irked. Events were going forward without consulting the new Captain of the Black Company. But in matters concerning Booboo and the Khadidas he was no expert.

"Stash him. I'll wait till I'm well-rested to deal with him. Meantime, we need somebody to crawl into that hole and collect up all of Booboo's scribblings. Somebody from Hsien, preferably. Somebody illiterate. We'll take no chance anybody will read that stuff. I'll take care of it. But right now I'm going to go take a nap. I'm totally exhausted."