I hurried as much as darkness allowed. Once we reached camp I told Narayan, "That was neatly done. I want to learn that trick with the cloth."

The notion surprised him. He didn't say anything.

"Collect the ten best squads. Arm them. Also the twenty men you think best able to handle horses. Ram!"

Ram arrived as I began readying my armor. He grew troubled. "What's the matter now?" Then I saw what he'd done to my helmet. "What the h.e.l.l is this? I told you clean it, not destroy it."

He was like a shy boy as he said, "This apes one aspect of the G.o.ddess Kina, Mistress. One of her names is Lifetaker. You see? In that avatar her aspect is very like this armor."

"Next time, ask. Help me into this."

Ten minutes later I stood at the center of the group I'd had Narayan a.s.semble. "We're going to attack them. The point isn't glory or victory. We just want to discourage them from attacking us. We're going in, we're doing a little damage, then we're getting out."

I described the encampment, gave a.s.signments, drawing in the dirt beside a fire. "In and out. Don't waste time trying to kill them. Just hurt somebody. A dead man can be left where he falls but a wounded man becomes a burden to his comrades. Whatever happens, don't go beyond the far edge of their camp. We'll retreat when they start getting organized. Grab any weapon you can. Ram, capture every horse you can. Everybody. If you can't grab weapons grab food or tools. n.o.body risk anybody's life trying to grab just one more thing. And, lastly, be quiet. We're all dead if they hear us coming."

Narayan reported the dead sentries still undiscovered. I sent him forward to eliminate as many more as he and Sindhu could manage. I had the main party cover the last two hundred yards in driblets. A hundred twenty men moving at once, no matter how they try, make noise.

I looked into the camp. Men were stirring. Looked like it was near time to change the guard.

Ram's bunch joined us. I donned my helmet, turned my back on my men, walked toward the only shelter in the camp. It would belong to the commander. I set the witchfires playing over me, unsheathed my sword.

Fires ran out its blade.

It was coming back.

The few southerners awake gawked.

The men poured into the camp, stabbed the sleeping, overwhelmed those who were awake. I struck a man down, reached the tent, hacked it apart as the man within reacted to the uproar. I wound up two-handed and struck off his head, grabbed it by the hair, held it high, turned to check the progress of the raid.

The southerners were making no effort to defend themselves. Two hundred must have died already. The rest were trying to get away. Could I have routed them so easily?

Sindhu and Narayan came running, prostrated themselves, banged their heads on the ground and gobbled at me in that cant they used. Crows fluttered through the trees, raucous. My men hurtled around hacking and slashing, spending the wealth of fear they'd carried through the night.

"Narayan. See what the survivors are doing. Quickly. Before they mount a counterattack. Sindhu. Help me control these men."

Narayan ran off. He came back in a few minutes. "They've started gathering a quarter mile down the road. They think a demon attacked them. They don't want to come back. Their officers are telling them they can't survive if they don't recover their camp and animals."

That was true. Maybe another glimpse of the demon would encourage them to stay away.

I got the men into a ragged line, advanced to the edge of the wood. Narayan and Sindhu sneaked ahead. I wanted warning if the southerners were inclined to fight. I'd back off.

They fled again. Narayan said they killed those officers who tried to rally them.

"Fortune smiles," I recall murmuring. I'd have to take a closer look at this demon Kina. She must have some reputation. I wondered why I'd never heard of her.

I withdrew to the captured encampment. We'd come into a lot of useful material. "Ram, get the rest of the band. Have them bring the stakes from the embankment. Narayan, think about which men are least deserving of receiving arms." There would be enough to go around now, almost.

Arms would be a trust and honor to be earned.

The change was dramatic. You'd have thought it was another Ghoja triumph. Even those who hadn't partic.i.p.ated gained confidence. I saw it everywhere. These men had a new feeling of self-worth. They were proud to be part of a desperate enterprise and they gave me my due place in it. I walked through the camp dropping hints that soon they would be part of something with power.

That had to be nurtured, and continually fertilized with suspicion and distrust of everyone outside the band.

It takes time to forge a hammer. More time than I would get, probably. It takes years, even decades, to create a force like the Black Company, which had been carried forward on the crest of a wave of tradition.

Here I was trying to magic up a Golden Hammer, something gaudy but with no real substance, deadly only to the ignorant and unprepared.

It was time for a ceremony alienating them from the rest of the world. Time for a blood rite that would bind them to one another and me.

I had the stakes from the embankment planted along the road south of the wood. Then I had all the dead southerners decapitated and their heads placed atop the stakes, facing southward, ostensibly warning travellers who shared their ambitions.

Narayan and Sindhu were delighted. They hacked off heads with great enthusiasm. No horror touched them.

None touched me, either. I'd seen everything in my time.

Chapter Ten.

Swan lay in the shade on the bank of the Main, lazily watching his bobber float on a still, deep pool. The air was warm, the shade was cool, the bugs were too lazy to bother him. He was half asleep. What more could a man ask?

Blade sat down. "Catch anything?"

"Nope. Don't know what I'd do if I did. What's up?"

"The Woman wants us." He meant the Radisha, whom they had found waiting when they'd reached Ghoja-much to Smoke's dismay. "She's got a job for us."

"Don't she always? You tell her to stick it in her ear?"

"Thought I'd save you that pleasure." "I'd rather you'd saved me the walk. I'm comfortable."

"She wants us to drag Smoke somewhere he don't want to go."

"Why didn't you say so?" Swan pulled his line out of the water. There was no bait on his hook. "And I thought there weren't any fish in that crick." He left his pole against a tree, a statement of sorts. "Where's Cordy?"

"Probably there waiting. He was watching Jah. I told him already."

Swan looked across the river. "I'd kill for a pint of beer." They'd been in the brewery business in Taglios before the excitement swept them up.

Blade snorted, headed for the fortress overlooking Ghoja ford.

The fort stood on the south bank of the Main. It had been built by the Shadowmasters after their invasion of Taglios had been repulsed, to defend their conquests south of the river. The fortress had been overwhelmed by the Black Company after the victory north of the river. Taglian artisans were reinforcing it and beginning a companion fortress on the north bank.

Swan scanned the scabrous encampment west of the fortress. Eight hundred men lived there. Some were construction workers. Most were fugitives from the south. One large group particularly irked him. "Think Jah has figured out that the Woman is here?"

Jahamaraj Jah was a powerhungry Shadar priest. He had commanded the mounted auxiliaries during the southern expedition. His flight north had been so precipitous he'd beaten Swan's party to the ford by several days.

"I think he's guessed. He tried to sneak a messenger across last night." The Radisha, through Swan, ad forbidden anyone to cross the river. She didn't want news of the disaster reaching Taglios before its dimensions were known. "Uhm?"

"Messenger drowned. Cordy says Jah thinks he made it." Blade chuckled wickedly. He hated priests. Baiting them was his favorite sport. All priests, of whatever faith.

"Good. That'll keep him out of our hair till we figure out what to do with him."

"I know what to do."

"Political consequences," Swam cautioned. "That your solution to everything? Cut somebody's throat?"

"Always slows them down."

The guards at the fortress gate saluted. They were favorites of the Radisha and, though neither Blade nor Swan nor Mather wanted it, they commanded Taglios' defenses now.

Swan said, "I got to learn to think in the long term, Blade. Never thought we'd be back at this after the Black Company showed."

"You got a lot to learn, Willow."

Cordy and Smoke waited outside the room where the Radisha holed up. Smoke looked like he had a bad stomach. Like he'd make a run for it if he got a chance.

Swan said, "You're looking grim, Cordy." "Just tired. Mostly of playing with the runt." Swan raised an eyebrow. Cordy was the calm one, the patient guy, the one who poured oil on the waters. Smoke must have provoked him good. "She ready?" "Whenever."

"Let's do it. I got a river full of fish waiting." "Better figure on them getting grey hair before you get back." Mather knocked, pushed the wizard ahead of him.

The Radisha entered the room from the side as Swan closed the door. Here, in private, with men not from her own culture, she didn't pretend to a traditional s.e.x role. "Did you tell them, Cordy?"

Willow exchanged glances with Blade. Their old buddy on a nickname basis with the Woman? Interesting. What did he call her? She didn't look like a Cuddles. "Not yet." "What's up?" Swan asked.

The Radisha said, "I've had my men mixing with the soldiers. They've heard rumors that the woman who was the Lieutenant of the Black Company survived. She's trying to pull the survivors together south of here."

"Best news I've heard in a while," Swan said. He winked at Blade.

"Is it?"

"I thought it was a crying shame to lose such a resource."

"I'll bet. You have a low mind, Swan."

"Guilty. Hard not to once you've had a gander at her. So she made it. Great. Gets us three off the hook. Gives you a professional to carry on."

"That remains to be seen. There'll be difficulties. Cordy. Tell them."

"Twenty-some men from the Second just came in. They'd stayed off the road to avoid the Shadowmasters' patrols. About seventy miles south of here they took a couple prisoners. The night before our guys grabbed them Kina and a ghost army supposedly attacked their camp and killed most of them."

Swan looked at Blade, at the Radisha, at Cordy again. "I missed something. Who's Kina? And what's got into Smoke?" The wizard was shaking like somebody had dunked him in icewater. Mather and Blade shrugged. They didn't know. The Radisha sat down. "Get comfortable." She chewed her lip. "This will be difficult to tell." "Then just go straight at it," Swan said. "Yes. I suppose." The Radisha collected herself. "Kina is the fourth side of the Taglian religious triangle. She belongs to none of the pantheons but terrifies everybody. She isn't named lest naming invoke her. She's very unpleasant. Fortunately, her cult is small. And proscribed. Membership is punishable by death. The penalty is deserved. The cult's rites always involve torture and murder. Even so, it persists, its members awaiting someone called the Foretold and the Year of the Skulls. It's an old, dark religion that knows no national or ethnic bounds. Its members hide behind masks of respectability. They sometimes call themselves the Deceivers. They live normal lives among the rest of the community. Anyone could belong. Few of the common people know they exist anymore."

Swan didn't get it and said so. "Don't sound much different from the Shadar Hada or Khadi avatars."

The Radisha smiled grimly. "Those are ghosts of the reality." Hada and Khadi were two aspects of the Shadar death G.o.d. "Jah could show you a thousand ways Khadi is a kitten compared to Kina." Jahamaraj Jah was a devotee of Khadi.

Swan shrugged, doubting he could tell the difference if they drew pictures. He'd given up trying to understand the welter of Taglian G.o.ds, each with his or her ten or twenty different aspects and avatars. He indicated Smoke. "What's with him? He shakes any more we'll have to change his diaper."

"Smoke predicted a Year of Skulls-a time of chaos and bloodshed-if we employed the Black Company. He didn't believe it would come. He just wanted to scare my brother out of doing something that scared him. But he's on record as having predicted it. Now there's a chance it might come."

"Sure. Come on." Swan frowned, still lost. "Let me get this straight. There's a death cult around that makes Jah and his Khadi freaks look like a bunch of nancy boys? That scares the guano out of anybody who knows who they are?"

"Yes."

"And they worship a G.o.ddess named Kina?"

"That is the most common of many names."

"Why aren't I surprised? Is there any G.o.d down here without more aliases than a two-hundred-year-old con man?"

"Kina is the name given her by the Gunni. She has been called Patwa, Kompara, Bhomahna, and other names. The Gunni, the Shadar, the Vehdna, all find ways to accept her into their belief systems. Many Shadar who become her followers, for example, take her to be the true form of Hada or Khadi, who is just one of her Deceits."

"Gah. All right. I'll bite. There's a bad-a.s.s in the weeds called Kina. So how come me and Cordy and Blade never heard of her before?"

The Radisha appeared mildly embarra.s.sed. "You were shielded. You're outsiders. From the north."

"Maybe so." What did the north have to do with it? "But why the panic? One garbled thing about this Kina from a prisoner who's got no reason to tell the truth? And Smoke goes to wetting his pants? And you start foaming at the mouth? I got a little trouble taking you serious."

"Point taken. You shouldn't have been shielded. I'm sending you to check out the story."

Swan grinned. He had a lever. "Not without you stop jacking us around. Tell us the whole story. Bad enough you messed with the Black Company. You think you're going to mess us around because we weren't born in Taglios...."

"Enough, Swan." The Radisha wasn't pleased.

Smoke made a whining noise. He shook his head.

"What's with him?" Willow demanded. Much more of that weirdness and he was going to strangle the old guy.

"Smoke sees a ghost in every shadow. In your case he's afraid you're spies sent ahead by the Black Company."

"Sure. Moron! That's another thing. How come everybody is so d.a.m.ned twitchy about those guys? They maybe kicked a.s.s around here heading north but that was back at the dawn of time, practically. Four hundred years ago."

The Radisha ignored that. "Kina's antecedents are uncertain. She's a foreign G.o.ddess. The legends say a prince of Shadow tricked the most handsome of the Lords of Light out of his physical aspect for a year. While he wore that he seduced Mahi, G.o.ddess of Love, and sired Kina on her. Kina grew up more beautiful than her mother but empty, without a soul, without love or compa.s.sion, but hungry to possess them. Her hunger couldn't be satisfied. She preyed upon men and G.o.ds alike, Shadow and Light. Among her names are Eater of Souls and Vampire G.o.ddess. She so weakened the Lords of Light that the Shadows thought to conquer them and sent a horde of demons against them. The Lords of Light were so pressed they begged Kina for help. She did help, though why she did isn't explained. She met the demons in battle, overthrew them, and devoured them and all their wickedness."

The Radisha paused a moment. Then, "Kina became much worse than she had been, gaining the names Devourer, Destroyer, Destructor. She became a force beyond the G.o.ds, outside the balance of Light and Shadow, enemy of all. She became a terror so great Light and Shadow joined forces against her. Her father himself tricked her into falling into an enchanted sleep."

Blade muttered, "Makes as much sense as the story of any other G.o.d. Meaning it don't."

Squeaking, Smoke said, "Kina is a personification of that force some call entropy." To the Radisha, "Correct me if I'm wrong."

The Radisha ignored him. "Before Kina fell asleep she realized she'd been tricked. She took a huge breath, exhaled a minute fraction of her soul-essence, no more than a ghost of a ghost. That specter wanders the world in search of living vessels it can possess and use to bring on the Year of the Skulls. If that avatar can free enough souls and cause enough pain, Kina can be wakened."

Swan chuckled like an old woman scolding. "You believe any of that stuff?"