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Widowmaker armor and me lugging the bloody standard while Thai Dei tagged
along behind like he was trying to become some sort of clown sidekick. We
found the prisoner's ice cave. Near as we could tell, it was a real treasure
trove. The earthquake had dropped an avalanche down its throat. The good
people of the province had been trying to open it back up. We relieved them of
all that hard work and left a troop to await the coming of reinforcements
hungry enough to dig for their supper. We continued on toward Kiaulune and
Overlook, managing to sustain ourselves and avoid trouble until we were just
forty miles north of the stricken city.
The countryside there was unmarred by disaster, quiet, orderly, almost pretty
but a little too wintry for my taste. Suddenly, without warning, despite the
Old Man's crows, we ran into Shadowlander cavalry and not a man among them was
in a good mood. Their charge broke us into half a dozen clumps. Whereupon a
horde of infantry types tried to horn in. Lucky for us they were regional
militia, poorly armed, completely inexperienced peasants. Unfortunately, it is
true that some totally untrained and inexperienced dickhead can get lucky and
kill you just as dead as a martial arts priest like Uncle Doj can.
I managed to get the standard set atop a knoll, the Old Man there with me
inside a circle of friendly folks. "The one day you don't wear the damned
costume," I yelled. 'They wouldn't have had the balls for this shit if you'd
dressed up." Who knows? It might have been true.
"It was getting heavy. And it's cold and it stinks." He shrugged into the
hideous, grotesque armor. As he lowered the nasty winged helmet onto his head
a pair of monster crows dropped onto his shoulders. Traceries of scarlet fire
began crawling all over him. A few thousand more crows began zooming around
overhead, every one bitching his little heart out.
After a chance to take in the crows, Widowmaker and the Company standard most
of our attackers decided to take the rest of the day off.
The stories had to be really bad down here.
The cavalrymen were made of sterner stuff. They continued fighting. They were
veterans. And Longshadow probably had them convinced we were going to roast
their wives and rape their babies, then turn the rest of them into dog food
and shoe leather.
But we scattered them. Before the soldiers could get carried away chasing
them, the Old Man headed south again, declaring, "We have bridges to capture
and chokepoints to clear."
A few men did not heed the recall. I asked, "What about them?"
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"They have a chance to serve as a valuable object lesson. Those that survive
can catch up." He was feeling hard.
He did not think about arranging care and protection for the wounded. That was
not something he had overlooked ever before.
It might be that there were no Company brothers among the wounded even though
we had nearly a dozen with us.
That consideration often seemed to lie at the root of his decisions, yet never
so blatantly that outsiders were conscious of it. I hoped he would keep it low
key. We had troubles enough.
I had seen Shadowcatch a hundred times in Smoke's dreams. I had spent
cumulative days prowling Overlook. I thought I knew the city and the fortress
about as well as anyone who lived there. But I was not prepared for a reality
unfiltered by Smoke's thoughtless mind.
The remains of Kiaulune were plain hell. Famine and disease had claimed almost
everyone who had not been killed by the earthquake. Longshadow, taking
unwanted advice, had tried to help. Too late. But he had allowed refugees to
establish themselves in the shadow of Overlook and had been making provision
to care for them. In turn, those people were replacing the lost workers who
had been building Overlook before the earthquake.
Very little work had gotten done since the disaster. Even Longshadow had been
forced to stipulate that survival demands superseded his desire to complete
his invulnerable fastness.
There were no children. Some arrangement had been made to care for them
elsewhere. A clever step, uncharacteristic of the Shadowmaster. That idea had
to have originated with someone else. In fact, I could think of no one in
Longshadow's coterie to whom such a thing would occur.
It looked as though the little construction effort put out lately had been
directed principally at providing housing.
This would not keep up once the pressure was off. To Longshadow all the people
of the Shadowlands were his to use and dispose of as he saw fit. He just
wanted to keep them alive long enough to be used.
"Hell really is leaking into the world," Croaker observed. He stared at the
bleak, stinking, unwalled remains of Kiaulune. He paid no attention to the
gleaming magnificence beyond the city.
I did. "We're too damned close here, boss. We don't have Lady to cover us."
That did not seem to trouble him. The only time he paid Overlook any attention
was when he paused once to glare and say, "You didn't get it done in time, did
you, you son of a bitch?"
From the limited point of view of someone seeing the fortress with mundane
eyes the place seemed immeasurably huge. Mostly the towering walls had been
constructed of a grey-white stone but in places blocks of different colors had
been worked in, along with silver, copper and gold, to scrawl the whole with
cabalistic patterns.
What forces had Longshadow gathered to defend those ramparts since last I
walked with the ghost? Did it matter? Could any army scale those incredible
walls if the construction scaffolding was cast down?
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Most of that was still in place.
Croaker mused, "You may be right. I shouldn't rub their noses in the fact that
I'm out here personally." He turned a little more and looked past Overlook, at
the escarpment in the distance. "Have you ever gotten up there?"
I looked around. No one was there to hear. Not even a crow. "No. I can get
about halfway across the space between Overlook and a place on the road where
there's a landslide that seems to be what they call the Shadowgate around
here. Not much to look at. But that's all the farther Smoke will go."
"I've never done better. Let's get out of here."
We withdrew and pitched camp north of Kiaulune. The soldiers were not
comfortable there. None of them wanted to set up housekeeping so close to the
last and craziest Shadowmaster.
I tended to agree.
Croaker said, "You could be right. I'd feel better myself if Smoke was down
here and you could do some scouting." Then he grinned. "But I do believe that
we have a guardian angel better than Lady looking out for us."
"What? Who?"
"Catcher. She's as goofy as a squirrel with three nuts but she's predictable.
You been able to get close to her?" Like he was sure I would try.
"Not really. Smoke won't go."
"You have to remember how determined she is to use me to get even with Lady
for having kept her from getting even before. That means she has to take care
of me."
"Oh." Dumb me. I had not thought about how he could be using Catcher. "You're
willing to bet your life on Catcher?"
"Hell no. She's still Soulcatcher. She could get interested in something else
and just walk out on everything here."
"But she does have a score to settle with Longshadow, too."
"That she does." He grinned. He was pleased about the way things were going.
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