Aridatha’s men hauled the Prince’s litter away. The prince seen to, Arkana and I began to ease through the rubble toward the hole. I beckoned more stretcher-bearers. The thing being dragged into the light did not look dangerous. It looked like an old, worn-out version of a Goblin who was already dead.

“You want these now?” Arkana asked.

“Hang on just another minute. Get him over here, guys. On the stretcher. Easy. Easy! Tobo. Can you wake him up? Just for a second? Long enough for him to recognize me and what I’m doing?”

“Probably. If you want to risk it.” There was a choke in the boy’s voice. He looked at the spear and the ugly hat and wanted to believe that I had a way to reach the Goblin trapped inside the Khadidas. The Goblin who was always like an uncle to him.

“Oh, shit!” I said. “Wait! Wait!”

“What?”

“I just had an ugly thought. About how Kina might react through Lady if we drive the devil out of Goblin.”

Tobo sucked in a bucket of air, released it. “I don’t see how she could work that. But why take a chance? She is the Mother of Deception. Shuke, honey, do me a favor. Get the small carpet from my room. Just fold it up and bring it back. We’ll use that to haul them away.”

Shukrat jumped onto her post and zipped away. While he waited Tobo had an awning erected to keep potential rain off Goblin, then snaked back into the hole. He did not ask for help so I stood back with Aridatha and Arkana, insides turning over, awaiting my first glimpse of Booboo.

I asked Singh, “The fires under the rubble never go out. What the hell keeps burning?”

“Five hundred years worth of archives. Everything that belonged to the Inspector General of the Records. It’ll make for interesting times when we try to put things back together.”

Shukrat, the little darling, obviously knew her way around Tobo’s quarters. She was back with a small, folded flying carpet before the kid himself poked his head back out of the hole. With Arkana’s help she snapped the frame into position, stretched the fabric taut.

Arkana finally found nerve enough to speak to Aridatha directly, in a nonbusiness capacity. “You think it’s going to rain?”

You could see she wanted to melt like a slug freshly sprinkled with salt. All that work to find the nerve to speak and something that feeble was all she could get out. When fat raindrops had begun plunking down at random intervals nearly a minute before.

She was just a kid.

They had the Khadidas on the flying carpet now. And a couple of soldiers, one Taglian and one from Hsien, had hold of a pair of ankles.

“You all right, Pop?” Arkana asked, holding onto my left arm.

“She looks just like Lady did the first time we met.” In a time of terror. There was terror here, now, but of an entirely different sort.

“Then your wife must have had some filthy hygiene habits in her younger days.”

“Ah, but she was eager to learn. Tobo, can you make sure Booboo doesn’t wake up until I want her to?” I did not want to have to cope with her witchery. “And let’s keep these two away from each other from now on. We don’t need them getting their heads together.”

“We don’t need them, period,” someone muttered. Shukrat, I realized. Shukrat did not like the way Tobo kept eyeballing the Daughter of Night.

Nor did my other adopted offspring particularly approve of the contemplative stares of Aridatha Singh.

Tobo called, “Croaker, you want to wake up yourself? Just for a minute? So you can take a look at her? See if anything’s missing or broken?”

One of the city soldiers told another that everything looked just fine to him. A little soap and some clean clothes... 

I never thought I would be a father and have to pretend not to hear such remarks.

The man was right. She was a beautiful child. Exactly like her mother. And like Lady’s, most of her beauty lay right on the surface. I had to remind myself not to be taken in by what I saw or by what I wanted to feel. My emotions would not be trustworthy. They might not be my own. The Mother of Deceit had not left the game.

I knelt beside my daughter. My emotions were engaged indeed. I felt a thousand years old and utterly powerless. It took a major application of will to touch her.

Her skin felt cold.

In moments I reported, “She’s got lots of bruises and scrapes but there isn’t any serious damage. Nothing permanent. She is dehydrated.” She shook each time I touched her, as though I was massaging her with pieces of ice. “She’ll recover, if we take care of her. Put her in with Lady.”

Tobo said, “You’ll need somebody to stay with her. Somebody who can control her.”

“I will.”

“I will.”

Shukrat and Arkana both volunteered.

Well. Were they that concerned about competition from a beat-up, unconscious woman who knew absolutely nothing about men?

I would bet Tobo was grinning when he said, “All right, ladies. Work yourselves out a schedule. Croaker, what do you plan to do about Goblin?”

Suvrin seemed a little irked. Events were going forward without consulting the new Captain of the Black Company. But in matters concerning Booboo and the Khadidas he was no expert.

“Stash him. I’ll wait till I’m well-rested to deal with him. Meantime, we need somebody to crawl into that hole and collect up all of Booboo’s scribblings. Somebody from Hsien, preferably. Somebody illiterate. We’ll take no chance anybody will read that stuff. I’ll take care of it. But right now I’m going to go take a nap. I’m totally exhausted.”

I was worried. I pranced from foot to foot like a little boy at a wedding who really needed to pee. It was another day and I still had not gotten started with Booboo and the Khadidas. Giving them and their Goddess any time at all was bound to lead to mischief.

But I had more immediate responsibilities. The fighting was over. Our obligation to the dead had to be handled now. And a huge city, with many dead of its own, had to be kept on a tight rein. Recent disasters would encourage plotters and conspirators.

The Children of the Dead knew how to put on a memorial for fallen comrades. Deep-voiced drums muttered and grumbled. Horns conjured forth the mood and gloom of a chilly, rainy morning despite a bright, cloudless winter sky. The soldiers paraded in all their brilliant colors, with all their thousands of banners. The locals were suitably impressed. We sent Sleepy off in more style than she could have hoped for while she lived. We said our good-byes to a great many people.

Then we stood back and rendered appropriate honors as Aridatha Singh directed equally large, if not nearly so dramatic, ceremonies honoring those who had fallen on behalf of the Protectorate. And when that was done we joined the local soldiers and the most important men of the city in honoring the Prahbrindrah Drah.

His funeral was the grandest I ever attended. I developed the distinct impression that all those leading men had gathered, however, to eyeball one another suspiciously rather than to mourn the passing of a ruler none had seen since they were young.

Aridatha Singh was popular with these men. Because Aridatha Singh had gathered to himself the loyalties of the survivors of the Second Territorial Division, the Greys, and the commanders of the rural garrisons nearest the city. Aridatha Singh had become the most powerful man in the Taglian Territories, despite having done little to acquire that power—except to be competent and a nice guy.

They say that when the hour comes, so will the man. Sometimes fate will even conspire to put a competent, honest man in the right place at the right time. Almost overnight the graffiti began giving Aridatha Mogaba’s old title, Great General.

Now, if he could just manage to get by without antagonizing the occupiers.