Soldiers Live

71 Midway Between: Unpleasant Truth

Getting Soulcatcher awake and aware enough to understand and begin suffering because of her circumstances preoccupied Lady and Swan for some time. Murgen and Thai Dei, Sahra and Uncle Doj joined them. In time they meant to strong-arm Soulcatcher into assisting us but first they wanted to fatten up on a feast of gloating.

Soulcatcher did not cooperate. She remained steadfastly unaware, exactly the way Sedvod had done.

The racket of skirmishing rose and fell in the distance, never becoming intense. Our guys did not sound much more ambitious than were our enemies. I did not blame them for a disinclination to get killed when the battle’s outcome had been determined already.

Riverwalker jogged into sight. “The Captain’s compliments and could you all come up and help her? She has a situation. She’d like some advice.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything.”

“What kind of situation?” Murgen asked. He was not distracted by Soulcatcher. He understood that when the word “situation” was used this way it meant that his son was about to be asked to jump into something particularly hot.

“We’re having trouble coming to grips with what’s left of the enemy.”

I suggested, “Why not just leave them the hell alone now? They’re on the run.” Riverwalker ignored me.

“At about a hundred yards the soldiers start losing interest. The few who do manage to go on and get within fifty yards say they find themselves thinking how awful they are for interfering with Her and that they really ought to be helping Her fulfill Her holy destiny. ‘Her’ not being defined but they assume they’re thinking about the Protector because the Protector is the devil they know and the devil they thought they were supposed to be chasing.”

Lady waved me closer. She murmured, “I’ll handle this end. Take the carpet and posts up and bombard the Taglian command from outside spell range.”

“We’re almost out of fireballs again.”

“So drop rocks. Or burning brush. Or anything else that will make her concentrate on staying out of the way. Every time she moves a few more of her troops will drift outside the spell. Whereupon they’ll suddenly get smart and run away.”

Her confident prescription suggested that this was an effect she knew of old.

I told everyone, “First thing we do is load up on arrows. We’ll just drop them from higher than she can reach. From five hundred feet up they ought to be good and deadly.” My gut knotted. I was talking about bombarding my own flesh and blood.

But part of me was certain that the girl would avoid personal damage. And part believed that a confrontation had been inherent in the situation from the moment Narayan Singh had snatched our baby from Lady’s arms.

It did work. The girl, wearing her aunt’s costume, darted around, followed by Goblin. The last few fireballs and firebombs got spent. Their infallible lack of accuracy refreshed my cynical view of our chances of catching a break.

The pair tried to fight back. Whenever a flier descended below a certain level a string of urine-colored lights flung upward. But I kept them too busy skipping out of harm’s way to concentrate on their marksmanship. I could not tell which was the source of the deadly light.

I noted that the girl seemed unaware that the guy overhead in the ugly suit was her doting papa.

Our soldiers grasped the situation quickly and seized those opportunities offered by the shifting perimeter around the Taglian forces.

The Daughter of Night was no soldier but she was quick and decisive and did have a source of advice in a man who had spent more than a century soldiering.

Goblin told her to attack, to get what use she could out of the troops she held in thrall. She did attack. Straight toward Sleepy, ignoring the missiles falling around her. Our people had no choice but to run from her while trying to weaken her from extreme rage. Anybody who got too close underwent a sudden change of heart and took up arms on behalf of the Deceiver messiah, without understanding what was happening.

Because she was indifferent to how many of her helpers perished, Booboo was able to chase around everywhere, breaking up everything before it got organized, gaining a recruit for each two or three men she lost, making it emotionally ever more difficult for our archers to hurl missiles at soldiers who had been comrades not that long before. The girl even came near recapturing Soulcatcher.

Then Tobo screwed up.

He assumed that his strength, combined with that of the Howler, would be enough to overpower an untrained girl if they came at her suddenly, from an unexpected direction. And maybe he was right. But he forget that her companion was not the Goblin he had grown up around. This Goblin was infected with wicked godhood.

That urine-colored light caught the flying carpet a glancing blow just before the Howler and Tobo cut loose with the best they had. A chunk of carpet turned into fluttering black scraps. Howler and Tobo and the rest of the carpet hurtled ahead, safe from spells but not from a brutal beating by the branches of the trees into which they plunged. The Howler got off a couple of heartfelt shrieks.

The urine-colored bar of light did the magical equivalent of jostling the mystical elbows of the young sorcerer and the ancient one alike. Their spells did a lot of damage to Booboo’s defenders. They even managed to stun their intended targets. But because the spellcasters were bouncing around in the branches in the woods, instead of reporting in, the rest of us never got a chance to take advantage.