Book 2 - She Is The Darkness Read Online Free PDF

furious encounter
between Blade and the Old Man, alcoholically enhanced, and indeed
over Blade’s too obvious interest in Lady, I still did not
understand. “But I’ll tell you, with the Prince and
Blade and Willow Swan and about every other guy in town drooling
all over themselves every time Lady walks by, I don’t know as
I blame him for finally blowing up.”
    “Just about as many guys looked at your wife the same way.
She was probably the most beautiful woman any of them ever saw. You
didn’t blow.”
    “I think that’s a compliment, Cordy. Thanks. For me
and Sarie both. You want me to be honest, I think it was more
than Lady. I think the Old Man thinks Blade was planted on us
somehow.”
    “Huh?”
    “Yeah. But you got to know his background.” Cordy
was born in my end of the world. He knew the way things were.
“He spent years dealing with the Ten Who Were Taken. Those
monsters laid out schemes that took decades to unfold.”
    “And some are still around. Why Blade in
particular?”
    “Because we don’t know anything about him. Except
that you dragged him out of an alligator pit. Or
something.”
    “And you do know about me and Willow?”
    “Yes.” I did not explain that my Company brothers
Otto and Hagop had gone all the way back to the empire and, in
passing, had rooted around in the pasts of army deserters Cordwood
Mather and Willow Swan.
    That did not leave Mather feeling comfortable.
    Too bad.
    It never hurt to have our paranoia worry somebody else so much
they behaved themselves.
    I glanced at Thai Dei. He was always there. But I never forgot
that. He might be my bodyguard and brother-in-law and might owe me
for saving the lives of some of his family and I might even like
him fairly well but I never talked about anything substantial in
front of him using Taglian or Nyueng Bao unless there was no other
choice.
    Maybe the Old Man’s paranoia was rubbing off on me. Maybe
it came from how Thai Dei and Uncle Doj and Mother Gota sometimes
seemed almost indifferent to Sahra’s murder. They acted as
though the death of Thai Dei’s son To Tan was ten times more
important . . . They had chosen to stay with
me, to take part in the journey south to extract revenge, then
seemed to give the matter little more thought. For me Sarie’s
memory is a holy thing, due its moments every day.
    Me thinking about Sarie is not a good thing, though. Every time
I do I want to run to Smoke. But Smoke is not there for me now.
One-Eye did get him out of town and even with the little wizard
unlikely to be in a hurry the ghostwalker was getting farther and
farther away.
     
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7
    Croaker sent word that he wanted to see me. I went to his hole
in the wall, started to knock but heard voices inside. I paused,
glanced at Thai Dei. He was not big and not handsome and was always
so impassive you could not begin to guess what he was thinking. At
the moment, though, he did not appear to have heard anything he
should not. He just stood there scratching around the splints on
his broken arm.
    Then there was a raucous outbreak that sounded like crows
squabbling.
    I pounded on the door.
    The noise stopped instantly. “Enter.”
    I did so in time to see a huge crow flap out the one small
window in Croaker’s cell. A twin of the first perched atop a
coatrack that looked like it had been rescued from the gutter.
Croaker did not much care about material things.
    “You wanted me?”
    “Yeah. Couple of things.” He spoke Forsberger from
the start. Thai Dei would not get it but Cordy Mather would if he
happened to be listening. And so would the crows.
“We’re going to pull out before sunrise. I’ve
decided. A few of the top priests are starting to think I
won’t do them the way Lady did, so they’re trying to
push a little here and there, test the waters. I figure we’d
better hit the road before they get me tied up in knots.”
    That did not sound quite like him. When he made deaf-mute signs
as he finished I knew the