She Is The Darkness tbc-8 Read online

  What a shadow could snake through so could I. And Swan had not done that good a job.

  The golem, or whatever it was, still hung above the glowing abyss. I ignored it. I had something to panic about. My body was not where I had left it. There were no bodies around. I had to close my astral eyes and let my flesh draw me to it.

  I should have seen it coming. I should have known. I had been only loosely anchored in time for years. And so many of the faces had seemed to be those of men I knew.

  My return to awareness, though not actually in flesh yet, took place in the caverns of the old men and the ice cocoons. And I found myself there, at the end of the line, sitting against the cavern wall with the standard across my lap. The Lancehead seemed to whisper and murmur to itself. The rest were everybody who had clambered through that final crack, Old Crew guys, Nyueng Bao, Cordy Mather, Blade, the Prahbrindrah Drah, Isi and Ochiba. Every last fool, including Lady and the Old Man. Little sister and woman scorned had invested the extra minutes to arrange those two, holding hands, heads leaning together, in mockery. Lady radiated rage. This was the second time she had been buried alive, the second husband with whom she had shared a grave.

  The Old Man radiated despair.

  So did the rest. This was the end of the dream, little as it had been.

  I fluttered on up the cavern, between stalactites and stalagmites, webs and lacy structures of ice, to where, an age before the appearance of the Free Companies, desperate, hunted followers of Kina had hidden her holy Books of the Dead from the murderous warlord Rhaydreynak. Rhaydreynak had not found the books nor had Kina’s children survived to return to them.

  It could be worse than it was already. Soulcatcher could have found and taken those grim books.

  She had not. They remained safe upon their lecterns, open to early passages.

  I hustled back to the gang.

  Some of them sensed me moving. They focused their anger upon me. Which was maybe good. Water sleeps, I thought at them. They were locked in some sorcerous stasis. I was trapped only in my flesh, presumably because I had been away at a convenient time.

  Water sleeps. Catcher might be the darkness but she would learn. Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.

  In the night, when the wind no longer whines through a fortress that was there before the plain that was there before the first Free Company marched, stone whispers. Stone sprouts. Stone grows. Stone buds and stone flowers. A thousand pillars rise where no pillar has stood before. Moonlight sweeps the plain, setting aglitter the characters taking form, remembering a few of the fallen.

  It is immortality of a sort.

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  Document ID: 64ba63e6-cc22-4d0f-845a-4aa3ef67ede4

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 05 July 2009

  Created using: ABC Amber LIT Converter, FB Editor v2.0, AlReader2 software

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