Water Sleeps: A Novel of the Black Company (Glittering Stone) Read Online Free Page B

summoned.
    I wished the other Captured could be called up, too. Especially the Captain. We needed inspiration.
    A cloud of dust formed slowly between Goblin and One-Eye, who stood on opposite sides of the table. No, it was not dust. Nor was it smoke. I stuck a finger in, tasted. That was a fine, cool, water mist. Goblin told Sahra, “We’re ready.”
    She changed tone. She began to sound almost wheedling. I could pick out even fewer words.
    Murgen’s head materialized between the wizards, wavering like a reflection on a rippling pond. I was startled, not by the sorcery but by Murgen’s appearance. He looked just like I remembered him, without one new line in his face. None of the rest of us looked the same.
    Sahra had begun to look something like her mother had back in Jaïcur. Not as heavy. Not with the strange, rolling waddle caused by problems of the joints. But her beauty was going fast. In her, that had been a wonder, stretching on way past the usual early, swift-fading characteristic of Nyueng Bao women. She did not talk about it but it preyed upon her. She had her vanity. And she deserved it.
    Time is the most wicked of all villains.
    Murgen was not happy about being called up. I feared he suffered the malaise afflicting Sahra. He spoke. And I had no trouble hearing him, though his words were an ethereal whisper.
    “I was dreaming. There is a place…” His irritation faded. Pale horror replaced it. And I knew he had been dreaming in the place of bones he described in his own Annals. “A white crow…” We had a problem indeed if he preferred a drift through Kina’s dreamscapes to a glimpse of life.
    Sahra told him, “We’re ready to strike. The Radisha ordered the Privy Council convened just a little while ago. See what they’re doing. Make sure Swan is there.” Murgen faded from the mist. Sahra looked sad. Goblin and One-Eye began excoriating the Standardbearer for running away.
    “I saw him,” I told them. “Perfectly. I heard him, too. Exactly like I always imagined a ghost would talk.”
    Grinning, Goblin told me, “That’s because you hear what you expect to hear. You weren’t really listening with your ears, you know.”
    One-Eye sneered. He never explained anything to anybody. Unless maybe to Gota if she caught him sneaking back in in the middle of the night. Then he would have a story as convoluted as the history of the Company itself.
    Sounding like a woman pretending not to be bitter, Sahra said, “You can bring Tobo in. We know there won’t be any explosions or fires, and you melted only two holes through the tabletop.”
    “A base canard!” One-Eye proclaimed. “That happened only because Frogface here—”
    Sahra ignored him. “Tobo can record what Murgen has to say. So Sleepy can use it later. It’s time for us to turn into other people. Send a messenger if Murgen finds out anything dangerous.”
    That was the plan. I was even less enthusiastic about it now. I wanted to stay and talk to my old friend. But this thing was bigger than a bull session. Bigger than finding out if Bucket was keeping well.

6
    Murgen drifted through the Palace like a ghost. He found that thought vaguely amusing, though nothing made him laugh anymore. A decade and a half in the grave destroyed a man’s sense of humor.
    The rambling stone pile of the Palace never changed. Well, it got dustier. And it needed repairs ever more desperately. Credit that to Soulcatcher, who did not like having hordes of people underfoot. Most of the original vast professional staff had been dismissed and replaced by occasional casual labor.
    The Palace crowned a sizable hill. Each ruler of Taglios, generation after generation, tagged on an addition, not because the room was needed but because that was a memorial tradition. Taglians joked that in another thousand years there would be no city, just endless square miles of Palace. Mostly in ruin.
    The Radisha Drah, having accepted that her brother, the Prahbrindrah Drah, had