Soldiers Live (Glittering Stone) Read Free

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 snall 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 burytheir dead, sometimes they bum 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 hide.
    A renewed racket arose outside. The little darknesses stirred excitedly, then