Book 4 - Soldiers Live Read Free

paper as an excuse to keep
hanging around with the living. Sleepy is the boss.”
    “Still. Management.”
    “I’m about to manage your scruffy old
ass . . . ” I trailed off. His eye had
closed. He made a statement by beginning to snore.
    Another hoot and holler arose outside, some close by, more far
away toward the shadowgate. The snail shells creaked and rustled
and, though I never saw a one touched by anything, rocked and spun
around. Then I heard the distant bray of a horn.
    I rose and retreated, not turning my back. One-Eye’s lone
remaining pleasure—other than staying drunk—was tripping the unwary
with his cane.
    Tobo reappeared. He looked ghastly.
“Captain . . . Croaker. Sir. I
misunderstood what he tried to tell me.”
    “What?”
    “It wasn’t him. It was Nana Gota.”
     
----

----

3

An Abode of Ravens:
A Labor of Love
    T obo’s
grandmother, Ky Gota, had died happy. As happy as the Troll could
die, which was drunker than three owls drowned in a wine cask. She
had enjoyed a vast quantity of extremely high-potency product
before she went. I told the boy, “If it’s any
consolation she probably didn’t know a thing.” Although
the evidence suggested she knew exactly what was happening.
    I did not fool him. “She knew it was coming. The Greylings
were here.” Something behind the still chittered softly in
reponse to the sound of his voice. Like the baobhas, the greylings
are a harbinger of death. One of a great many in Hsien. Some of the
things that had been howling in the wilderness earlier would have
been, too.
    I said the things you say to the young. “It was probably a
blessing. She was in constant pain and there was nothing I could do
for her anymore.” The old woman’s body had been a
torment to her for as long as I had known her. Her last few years
had been hell.
    For a moment Tobo looked like a sad little boy who wanted to
bury his face in his mother’s skirt and shed some tears. Then
he was a young man whose control was complete again. “She did
live a long life and a fulfilled one, no matter how much she
complained. The family owes One-Eye for that.”
    Complain she had, often and loudly, to everyone about everything
and everyone else. I had been fortunate enough to miss much of the
Gota era by having gotten myself buried alive for a decade and a
half. Such a clever man am I. “Speaking of family,
you’ll have to find Doj. And you’d better send word to
your mother. And as soon as you can you’ll need to let us
know about funeral arrangements.” Nyueng Bao funerary customs
seem almost whimsical. Sometimes they bury their dead, sometimes
they burn them, sometimes they wrap them and hang them in trees.
The rules are unclear.
    “Doj will make the arrangements. I’m sure the
Community will demand something traditional. In which case my place
is somewhere out of the way.”
    The Community consists of those Nyueng Bao associated with the
Black Company who have not enlisted formally and who have not yet
disappeared into the mysterious reaches of the Land of Unknown
Shadows.
    “No doubt.” The Community are proud of Tobo but
custom demands that they look down on him for his mixed blood and
lack of respect for tradition. “Others will need to know,
too. This’ll be a time of great ceremony. Your grandmother is
the first female from our world to pass away over here. Unless you
count the white crow.” Old Gota seemed much less formidable
in death.
    Tobo’s thoughts were moving obliquely to mine.
“There’ll be another crow, Captain. There’ll
always be another crow. They feel at home around the Black
Company.” Which is why the Children of the Dead call our town
the Abode of Ravens. There
are
always crows, real or unknown.
    “They used to stay fat.”
    The unknown shadows were all around us now. I could see them
easily myself, though seldom clearly and seldom for more than an
instant. Moments of intense emotion draw them out of the shells
where Tobo taught them to