She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 speech was for other consumption even if it was factual.
    Croaker pushed a folded scrap of paper across. “Take care of that before we go.
    Make sure you don’t leave any evidence to tie it to us.”
    “What?” That did not sound good at all.
    “Be ready to move. If you really have to drag the in-laws along have them ready
     to go, too. I’ll send word.”
    “Your pets tell you anything I need to know?” Like I did not know that they were
     not his pets at all but spies or messengers from Soulcatcher.
    “Not lately. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be the first to know.”
    This was one of those points where the paranoia grabbed me. I could not be sure
     of the actual relationship between Croaker, Soulcatcher and those crows. I had
     to take him completely on faith at a time when my faith in everything was being
     tested severely on every hand.
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it. Make sure you’ve got everything you need. It won’t be long.”
    I opened the scrap of paper by the light of one of the few lamps illuminating
     the corridor between Croaker’s apartment and mine. I made no attempt to keep
     Thai Dei from seeing it. He is illiterate. Plus the note was written in the
     formal language of Juniper, as though to a bright six-year-old. Which was lucky
     for me since I have only a vague familiarity with the language, from documents
     dating back to the time the Company spent there, before I joined.
    Soulcatcher was dead in those days. I suppose that is why Croaker chose to use
     that language. It was one he felt she was unlikely to know.
    The message itself was simple. It instructed me to take the Annals I had
     recaptured from Soulcatcher, who had stolen them from where Smoke had had them
     hidden from us, and conceal them in the room where we had kept Smoke hidden.
    I wanted to go back and argue. I wanted to keep them with us. But I grasped his
     reasoning. Soulcatcher and everyone else with an interest in keeping us and
     those Annals apart would assume that we would keep them close till we could
     decipher them. Out there in the field we would not have time to worry about
     protecting them. So we might as well hide them in a place that, right now, only
     the Radisha knew existed.
    “Shit,” I said softly, in Taglian. No matter how many languages I learn I always
     find that word useful. It has pretty much the same meaning in every tongue.
    Thai Dei did not ask. Thai Dei almost never does.
    Behind me, more than the next lamp away, Croaker came out of his cell with a
     black blob perched on his shoulder. That meant he was going to see somebody
     native. He thought the crows intimidated the Taglians.
    I told Thai Dei, “This is something I have to handle myself. Go tell Uncle Doj
     and your mother that we’ll be leaving sometime during the night. The Captain has
     decided.”
    “You must accompany me partway. I cannot find my way in this great tomb.” He
     sounded like he meant it, too.
    Nyueng Bao