“I didn’t notice that, no. Mostly I’ve kept busy watching Goblin. The little shit speaks a bit of the language. He’s been sneaking around talking to them.”

Tobo chewed and nodded and looked thoughtful. “You ask him about it?”

“Hardly. I don’t trust that guy, Tobo. One-Eye told me not to just before he passed.”

“Nobody is going to trust Goblin for a long time, Croaker. And he knows that as well as anybody else does. He’ll be the carefulest Goblin you ever saw. You won’t even recognize him.”

“We’re talking about Goblin here. He can’t help himself.”

“He got into most of what he got into because One-Eye dragged him along. Think about it, Croaker. If he’s somehow turned into Kina’s tool, his assignment will be a long-term one. ‘Bring on the Year of the Skulls’ kind of stuff. He won’t get himself killed trying something trivial.”

I grunted. That made perfect sense on a rational level but I remained unconvinced. Goblin was Goblin. I had known him for a long time. The things he did did not always make sense, even to him. I asked, “What’ll we do with the Voroshk?”

“I’m going to educate them.”

Damn! I did not like the way he said that.

He replaced my guards with his own cronies, Taglians led by a senior sergeant called Riverwalker. All these guards were fluent in the language of Hsien and possessed a working knowledge of Nyueng Bao, which was a close cousin of the language spoken in the Land of Unknown Shadows.

Tobo instructed the guards, then the prisoners. Through me. Explaining the facts of life. “These men will be your teachers. They will teach you languages and the skills you will need to get along in this world. They will expose you to our religions and laws and the ways we have for getting along with one another.”

The boy doing the translating started to protest.

Riverwalker smacked him in the back of the head hard enough to knock him down.

Tobo continued, “You have to understand that you’re guests. You bought passage out of Khatovar with your knowledge. Your lives will be as comfortable as we can make them so long as you cooperate. But we are at war with ancient and powerful enemies. We won’t be inclined toward patience with anyone who doesn’t cooperate. Our patience will be especially short with people we consider dangerous. Do you understand?”

Tobo waited for me to finish translating. I asked an extra time to make sure the kids really grasped the gravity of the situation. Youngsters have a hard time getting it when the cruel and deadly applies to them personally. They also tend to agree to almost anything just to stop hearing about it.

Tobo had me tell them, “The rest of today and tonight you can rest. Tomorrow you’ll begin an intensive education in Taglian. While we’re hurrying to catch up with the rest of our army. I’ll travel with you and will help you as much as I can.”

The leader boy wanted to argue again. He had not listened closely enough to what he was translating. Riverwalker knocked him down again. Tobo told me, “That one’s going to be trouble.”

“There’s a good chance they all will be. They couldn’t get along at home.” They had to be misfits. Shifting languages, I told the kids, “If you make yourselves more trouble than you’re worth these people will kill you. Come on. I think I see some chow waiting to make our acquaintance.”

One of the girls said something in her own language. The captive, not the one who had come along with the boys.

I responded to the whine. “Tell her she can’t go home. It’s too late for that.”

Meantime, Tobo remarked, “But everybody here is running away from something.”

“Some,” I stipulated. “How soon do you think we’ll get a chance to sit down somewhere? I’ve got a lot of writing to catch up on.”

Tobo laughed. “You’d better stage a coup, you want a chance to sit down. Sleepy won’t take time off until the corpses are piled high enough to make fences.”

The Voroshk seemed to enjoy their evening meal. They were hungry enough to appreciate anything. We started teaching them Taglian nouns. Tobo studied both them and the wonders they had brought with them. He seemed less impressed by their flying posts than he was by the clothing they were no longer permitted to wear.

He told me, “Those posts look like a variation on the same sorcery Howler uses to operate his flying carpets. I should be able to work it out eventually. If I can get around some spells that’re meant to make the posts destroy themselves if they fall into the wrong hands.”

I told him about the two I had seen explode.

“Pretty potent self-destruct, then. I’ll be careful.”

“Be careful of those girls, too. I think the little one’s already staked you out.”

Come morning the leader kid could not be wakened. He was alive, all right, but no one could rouse him. “What did you do?” I asked Tobo, whispering, having leapt to a conclusion involving Tobo wanting the potential troublemaker out of the way without us losing access to his post and clothing.

“I had nothing to do with it.”

Lady examined the boy after I did. She said, “This looks a lot like the coma Smoke went into for so long.”

I agreed. But Soulcatcher had been responsible for that, we believed. And there was no way this could be her doing. The Unknown Shadows knew every move she made. And would turn aside any monsters she sent against us. I wondered aloud, “Were any of your invisible friends around here last night? Maybe they saw something.”

“I’ll check.”

By dint of ferocity I got the unconscious kid’s brother to admit that he could communicate. I made him understand that they needed to bind his brother onto one of their posts. Otherwise he would get left behind when we moved out.

The kids were terrified.

“Handy disaster,” Lady remarked.

“Yeah. But for whom?”

Mogaba swore softly but virulenty, foully and steadily. Crows had been arriving for over an hour, each bird carrying a fragment of a long message from the Protector. Being birdbrained, no one crow could carry much of the whole. And because they were vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes, every fragment had to be sent again and again.

The Great General hated putting these puzzles together and this one was the worst ever, by an order of magnitude. There should not be this many crows in the whole world.

He had twenty scribes working on the message already.

Some points became clear quickly.

He sent for Aridatha Singh and Ghopal Singh. This message would affect all of them.

By the time the others arrived, enough of the puzzle had come clear for Mogaba to reveal what, for him, was the most critical detail. “They’re back.”

Aridatha jumped, startled by Mogaba’s intensity. “Back? Who’s back?”

“The Black Company. The Protector destroyed them. Right? Root and branch. Right? But now she says they’re back. They’re patching her message together in the next room right now.”

Ghopal asked, “What are you talking about?”

“There’s a huge message coming in from our employer. She’s given up her quest. She’s on the run, headed home. The Black Company is pouring through the shadowgate. Thousands strong. Well-armed, well-clad, well-trained. With the Radisha Drah and Prahbrindrah Drah in their train and blessing them. And we have nothing much in their way for hundreds of miles. She’s headed back here. She expects to lose her ability to watch them shortly. They have some unfamiliar kind of supernatural help coming off the plain with them. Evidently something like the shadows but more dangerous because they’re smarter.”

Aridatha observed, “Sounds like pretty good intelligence gathering for somebody who’s on the run from an enemy who knows her capabilities.” Singh’s handsome face had lost some of its color. His voice had gone husky.