Book 2 - She Is The Darkness Read Free Page A

traveling,
especially during wintertime. “I’m not really looking
forward to this.”
    “Hey. I’m older and fatter than you are.”
    “But you’ll be going toward something. Lady is down
there.”
    He grunted unenthusiastically. Any more you had to wonder about
his commitment to his woman. Ever since the trouble with
Blade . . . None of my business. “Good
night, Murgen.”
    “Yeah. Same to you, chief.” He did not want to be
civil, that was fine with me.
    I headed for my apartment, though there was nothing for me there
but a bed that would give me no rest. With Sarie gone the place was
a wasteland of the heart.
    I closed the door behind me, looked around like maybe she would
jump out laughing and tell me it was all a bad joke. But the joke
was not over yet. Mother Gota still had not finished cleaning up
the mess left by the Strangler raid. And, pushy though she was, she
had not touched anything in my work area, where I was still sorting
the burned remains of several of these Annals.
    I must have gone drifting with my thoughts. Suddenly I was aware
that I was not alone. I got a knife out in half a heartbeat.
    I was not in trouble. The three people staring at me belonged by
family right. They were my in-laws, Sarie’s brother Thai Dei
with his arm in a sling, Uncle Doj and Mother Gota. Of the three
only the old woman ever said much. And nothing she said was ever
anything I wanted to hear. She could find the bad side of anything
and complain about it forever. “What?” I asked.
    Uncle Doj countered, “Did you drift away again?” He
sounded troubled. “When did you go? Dejagore?”
    “It wasn’t that. That hasn’t happened for a
while.” All three continued to stare at me like I had
something hanging out of my nose. “What?”
    Uncle Doj said, “There is something different about
you.”
    “Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant
more to me than—” I clamped down on the rage. I turned toward
the door. No good. Smoke was in a wagon headed south. They
continued to stare at me.
    It was like this every time I came back after going out without
letting Thai Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of
their sight.
    That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of
feeling Croaker got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao.
Sarie being gone left a vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my
heart. She had been the soul that made this weird bunch work.
    Uncle Doj asked, “Do you wish to walk the Path of the
Sword?”
    The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises
associated with his two-handed longsword style of fighting could
become almost as restful and free of pain as was walking with the
ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me since I became part
of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into the sort of
trance the Path requires.
    “Not now. Not tonight. I’m tired. Every one of my
muscles aches.” Yet another way I was going to miss Sarie.
That green-eyed angel had been an artist at massaging out the
accumulated tensions of the day.
    We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well.
    Now Mother Gota demanded, “What you doing, you, you hide
from your own?” in her abominable Taglian. She refuses to
believe she does not speak the language like a native.
    “Work.” Even without the Old Man’s paranoia I
would have kept Smoke to myself. Hell, I’m taking a huge risk
just mentioning him in these pages even though I’m scribbling
them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let alone
reads.
    Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her
discovering Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha
and the Shadowmaster away.
    Catcher was in the Palace not long ago. She stole those Annals
that Smoke hid before his disaster. I am pretty sure she did not
notice Smoke himself. The network of confusion spells around him is
supposedly extremely subtle on its fringes, so that even a player
as