Soldiers Live

70 Midway Between: The Capture

The cage was inside a halfway collapsed tent. Several fireballs had ripped through the fabric but had failed to set it afire. I told everyone, “Be extremely careful here. If there was ever a time when Soulcatcher would try to spring something on us this would be it.”

Sleepy had her henchmen push curious soldiers back. We were already closer to the tent than Lady liked—though that had as much to do with who we expected to meet here as it had to do with concern about sorcerous deadfalls.

Nobody had yet been able to sense anything active in that line.

Lady told Tobo, “Go over everything three more times. Then check it again. Howler, you go over it, too.” Of no one in particular she asked, “Where’s Goblin?” When she got no answer she turned on the men who had found the tent, all of whom were in perfect health despite having taken time to scrounge souvenirs before they reported their find. “Where’s the little man? The one who got away at Nijha.”

Shrugs. They might not know what she was talking about. But one brave soul did say, “There’s another cage under there. It’s tipped over and broken. Maybe he got away.”

Lady and I exchanged glances. Why would Goblin leave without the girl?

He would not.

Tobo called out, “There’s no danger here.”

Howler tried to concur but his voice gurgled off into a scream.

I said, “Something definitely ain’t right. Tobo, send your unseen pals out to scout around. We especially need to know where Goblin and Soulcatcher are. As soon as we can. We have to keep after them.”

Sleepy nodded irritated agreement.

Lady and I approached the tent warily.

Booby traps come in many forms.

As we had been warned, one broken cage was empty. The other lay on its side, door downward. One fine-looking woman lay sort of splattered all over inside, wearing not a stitch.

Lady stunned me by starting to rush forward saying something about her poor baby. I caught her arm. “Easy.” The body looked, to me, like it had been posed. It would excite Soulcatcher’s sense of humor for decades if she could get us to jump to our deaths over a child who had no more feeling for us than she did for the horses, cattle, and whatnot that passed through her life.

Lady paused but would not remain patient long. “What?”

“That isn’t Booboo. I don’t think.” But that naked flesh could not be an illusion, could it? Goblin used to do that sort of thing... But Tobo said nothing magical was going on.

I squatted, groaning as my knees creaked, reached through the bars and pulled dark hair away from the woman’s neck, which it had concealed.

I pulled Lady down beside me. Her knees popped as badly as mine had. “Look there. I do pretty good work, don’t I? You can hardly see the scars.” I exaggerated. The scarring was ugly. But not all that ugly for somebody who had had her head sewn back on.

“Check the foot. Which foot got hurt? The right one, wasn’t it?”

I uncovered the woman’s right foot. The injury done by Goblin’s booby trap, and Soulcatcher’s own crude self-repairs, were immediately obvious.

“I hate her even more than I used to,” Lady said. “Except for that heel and her scars she’s still looking just as sleek as she did on her nineteenth birthday. What’s wrong with her?”

I said, “I can’t tell from here. But I’m not getting any closer till I know it’s safe. Where’d Tobo and Howler go? Get them back here.” This remained a potentially explosive situation, even if no sorcery was active. Soulcatcher would be in a foul temper when she regained consciousness.

Lady mused, “The child must have a low opinion of our intelligence if she thought this would fool us.”

I wondered. Maybe we just showed up before the trap could be fully prepared.

When Tobo returned he told us, “Cat Sith just spotted Soulcatcher at the north edge of the woods. She has Goblin on a leash. She’s rallied some soldiers and has them building earthworks.” He became increasingly distracted as he stared at my sister-in-law.

Now was that not an interesting set of developments?

Sleepy blurted, “The Daughter of Night is pretending that she’s the Protector?”

Tobo almost reeled back when he realized that he was lusting after a woman five hundred years his senior.

Lady, always an advocate for swift and decisive action when she had been in command, insisted, “We need to press her. Whoever’s in charge. Every second she gets to pull things together will mean more casualties and difficulties for us later.”

Sleepy did not disagree. It was hard to argue with the truth. She went off to restore order and resume the advance. It was weird that the Taglians, already broken twice and neither well-trained nor motivated, would be rallying. But Tobo insisted that they were doing so and he was not subject to fantasies. Of that sort.

It seemed unlikely that the Taglians would be well-armed. Most of the Taglian soldiers had thrown down their weapons the first time they fled.

Lady gripped my hand for a moment. “Think we’ll ever really get to see her?”

“You begin to wonder if she’s any closer, or any more real, than Khatovar, don’t you?”

Willow Swan came bounding up. “Is it true? Have we caught Soulcatcher again?”

“News spreads fast,” I said. “Yes. That’s her. I’m pretty sure. You’re welcome to join me while I examine her. To make sure.” He had gotten closer to her than I ever had as her one-time physician and surgeon. He would have a better chance of spotting physical evidence that this was one of Soulcatcher’s elaborate tricks. If he remembered anything at all after five years away.

I did not believe this was a trick. There was something badly wrong with my honey’s little sister. I felt that before I got my close-up look.

Swan examined and grumbled. He had no happy recollections of the way Soulcatcher had used him way back when.

But he was not driven by any particular hatred of her, either. Sleepy said, “You keep what this woman did to you firmly in mind, Willow Swan. I don’t want to see it happen again. And if I do get a whiff, you can count on getting kneecapped before you score.”

Swan wanted to rage and protest that there was no damned way that witch was going to get inside his head again. But he did not. He was only flesh and he recognized that that flesh was incapable of rational thought around any female who shared Soulcatcher’s family blood.

His record spoke for itself.

“Then why don’t we just kill her?” he asked. Wounded pride burned through his cool. “Right here. Right now. While we’ve got the best chance we’ll ever get. End it all forever.”

“We won’t because we don’t know what Goblin and Booboo did to her,” I snapped when Lady seemed strangely reluctant to disappoint a fellow whose passion had fixed upon her originally. She would not be developing a sense of compassion at this late date, would she? Or of family? She and her sister were one another’s oldest surviving enemies. “Soulcatcher won’t help us more than she absolutely has to but she will help. For a while.”

Lady nodded. Her sister was insane but her insanity was pragmatic.

Sister Soulcatcher showed no signs of recovering.

I did not say so but my outburst was part whistling past the graveyard. I was increasingly certain that there was something gravely wrong with Soulcatcher. I feared she might be dying. This was the thing that had claimed Sedvod. And nobody else saw it.

The others were all too excited by the prospect of having her at our mercy.