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

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 powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the
     misdirection unless she was really focused on finding something like it.
    I told them, “I just talked to the Captain. He said the headquarters group will
     leave tomorrow or the next day. You’re still determined to go?”
    Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me, “We too have a
     debt to repay.”
    The few material possessions the three shared were packed and piled by the
     apartment door already. They had been ready to go for days. I was the one who
     needed to focus and finalize my preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had
     said I was ready to travel.
    “I’m going to bed now. Don’t wake me up for anything but the end of the world.”

Black Company GS 7 - She is Darkness
    4
    Sleep is not an escape from pain. In sleep there are dreams. In sleep I go
     places more horrible than those I walk when I am awake.
    In dreams I still go back to Dejagore, to the death and disease, the murder and
     the cannibalism and the darkness. In dreams Sarie still lives, whatever the
     horror of the place she walks.
    That night my dreams did not restore me to the wonder of Sarie’s company.
    I remember only one. It came first as a shadow, an all enveloping malice full of
     playful cruelty, as though I was sinking into the soul of a spider that enjoyed
     tormenting its victims. The malice did not take note of me. I passed through to
     its other side. And there the dream wrenched sideways, twisted, and took on
     life, though it was a life entirely of black and white and greys.
    I was in a place of despair and death. The sky was lead. Bodies rotted around
     me. The stench was strong enough to drive the buzzards away. The sick vegetation
     was coated with what looked like thick grasshopper spit. Only one thing moved, a
     distant flock of mocking crows.
    Even amidst my horror and revulsion I felt that the scene was familiar. I tried
     to hang on to that thought, to pursue it, to sustain my sanity by ferreting out
     why I would know a place I had never been. I stumbled and tripped across a plain
     of bones. Pyramids of skulls were my milemarks.
    My foot slipped on a baby’s skull that spun and went rattling off to the side. I
     fell. And fell. And then I was in another place.
    I am here. I am the dream. I am the way to life.
    Sarie was there.
    She smiled at me, then she was gone, but I clung to her smile as the only thing
     capable of letting me keep my head above the waters of a sea of insanity.
    I was in that other place. It was a place of golden caverns where old men sat
     beside the way, frozen in time, alive but unable to move so much as an eyelash.
    Their insanity slashed the air like a million dueling razors. Some were covered
     with glittering webs of ice, as though a million fairy silkworms had spun them
     into cocoons of delicate threads of frozen water. An enchanted forest of icicles
     hung from the cavern roof.
    I tried to dash forward, past the old men, to get out of that place. I ran as
     you run in dreams, slowly going nowhere.
    And then the horror worsened as I realized that I knew some of those mad old
     men.
    I ran harder, into the treacly resistance of animate evil laughter.
    I swung wildly at whoever was touching me, flung my hand under my pillow to
     recover the dagger hidden there. A powerful blow slammed my wrist as it came
     into the light. A strong voice snapped, “Murgen.”
    I focused. Uncle Doj stood over me. He looked grave, troubled. Thai Dei stood