“That plan was in place even before you people resurfaced. But she’s stayed away from the city since the beginning of that crisis. Her messages to the Great General all affirm her determination to keep after you until she’s accounted for every member of the Black Company personally. She was extremely put out because so many people who were supposed to be dead started turning up alive.”

“Believe me, I know how exasperating that is,” Lady said. “For twenty years I chased the Deceiver Narayan Singh. The man had more lives than a cat.”

Aridatha caught the past tense. “Has the living saint of the Deceivers passed to his reward, then?”

“He got away from me through the only exit he had left.” Lady sounded extremely bitter. Like she thought Singh had beaten her by cheating blatantly. Her hatred of Narayan was stronger than I had suspected.

“Then that’s one distraction that no longer needs concern us.”

“Incorrect,” Sleepy said, reclaiming control. “The Daughter of Night is still out there. And Kina still hopes to bring on the Year of the Skulls. Whatever else happens, Kina and her followers still have to be managed. Tell my associates why we should trust anything you tell us, Aridatha.”

“I am, of course, damned to walk in the shadow of a man I met only once in my life, after I was a grown man, and then for only a few minutes, several years ago, in your presence. That’s the legacy of the Deceivers. The cult destroys trust. My answer is, all men should be judged by one standard: their behavior. By the deeds they do. The gesture of good faith I have to make in this instance is, I think, generous.”

Sleepy interrupted. “Aridatha has a brother who lives in Jaicur. Under an assumed name. This brother, real name Sugriva, is going to help us take the city. He’ll scout out the best gate for us to get at in the middle of the night. We’ll use it to prance in and take over before anyone can put up a fight.”

I opened my mouth to argue but stopped before anything stupid came out. Sleepy’s mind was made up. All I could do was my best to make sure everything worked out right. “Soulcatcher has an army between here and there. One that outnumbers us, I hear.”

“And one that’s little better than a rabble, according to Aridatha. Some of the poorer soldiers are armed only with hammers, pitchforks, sickles and such.”

“A guy goes away for a few decades, everything turns to shit,” I said. “I had everybody tall enough to reach his mother’s hand armed up, once upon a time. What happened to all those weapons?”

Riverwalker explained, “When the Protector took over, times got so bad that almost anybody with anything to sell sold it. Weapons were a glut on the market. The steel got forged into other things.”

“And the Protector didn’t care,” Aridatha said. “The Great General finally gave up trying to make her see the point of maintaining arsenals in peacetime. I think it won’t be long now until she understands what he was talking about.”

Sleepy told us, “It isn’t necessary to trust Aridatha or Mogaba to test Jaicur’s defenses. We’re expected to swing west toward the Naghir River. We’ll make a show of doing just that. But Blade, with the light cavalry, will split off the rear of the column and loop back around eastward. The hidden folk will find a route along which the horsemen can approach Jaicur unobserved. In the meantime, the main force will turn again and head for the Rock Road north of Jaicur. That ought to stir up an ant’s nest. And make Soulcatcher forget Jaicur completely for a few days.”

Why had Sleepy bothered calling the rest of us in? She had it all worked out already. And pretty soundly, I thought.

Tobo said, “We do have a more immediate problem than that, Sleepy. You brought General Singh in during the reanimation ceremony. And he’s been seen around camp. It’s inevitable that some of our outside visitors will be Soulcatcher’s creatures. And it’s possible one of them recognized him.”

Sleepy admitted, “I didn’t think fast enough. I’m open to corrective suggestions.”

“I’m already working on it. But I do want to warn you. I don’t think I can be a hundred percent successful in identifying them and cutting them off.”

“Then you’d better consider what would be the best way to warn the other conspirators in Taglios, hadn’t you?”

Aridatha said, “Ghopal and the Great General won’t be taken unawares. The Protector possesses no means of traveling faster than the rumor of her coming. When she heads for Taglios they’ll know before she gets there. And what she brings with her will betray her intentions.”

I nodded. The reasoning seemed sound. And you did have to be really sneaky to outfox Mogaba. Soulcatcher was not sneaky these days. She had developed the habit of just bulling straight ahead because she was the biggest power around.

Sleepy elected to assume a stance which made it look like we were just going to sit and rest. But Tobo scouted the country north of Gharhawnes in ever greater detail, sometimes even going out in person, when he went flying with Shukrat.

The two of them were getting very chummy.

In private I observed, “This is getting distinctly weird. We’re allies with Soulcatcher against our daughter and Kina. We’re allies with the traitor Mogaba against your sister. We’re allies with a demigod whose price for supporting us is that we murder him.”

Lady chuckled weakly. “You did say it has a mythic ring.”

“You know something? It’s got me scared.”

She stared at nothing, waiting for me to explain.

“Scared in a generalized way, not scared like when we’re in a fight. Scared of the shape the future might take.” I had a bad, bad feeling. Because on the surface everything looked just too marvelous for the Black Company.

The Goblin creature proved difficult to catch. What should have taken just a few days took two weeks and, in the end, necessitated Soulcatcher’s personal intervention—with, to her chagrin, considerable coaching from the shadowy cat thing she could never quite see and never quite ambush and bind to her own service.

In the meantime she amused herself with the girl.

The Daughter of Night was imprisoned in a cage inside Soulcatcher’s tent. That was the largest and most ostentatious tent in the midway camp. The girl had been stripped naked, then had been decorated with a variety of chains and charms. She would not be guarded by or even approached by anyone male. Soulcatcher knew only too well how men could be manipulated by the women of her blood.

Though the girl did not seem interested in listening, Soulcatcher said, “To this day I’m not quite sure how you and that old man managed to get away from me. But I have some suspicions. And it won’t happen again. You’re far too important to your mother to be running around loose.” The voice Soulcatcher selected was annoyingly pedantic.

The girl did not respond. She was alone in her own reality. This was not her first time as a prisoner of someone who planned to use her. She could be patient. Her moment would come. Someone would slip up. An impressionable guard would be assigned. Something. Somewhere, sometime, she would have an opportunity to deceive someone into loving her long enough to want to set her free.

The girl’s continued indifference pricked Soulcatcher into trying to hurt her with news she had wanted to reserve. “He’s dead, you know. Your old man. Narayan Singh. He was strangled. They threw his body in a cesspit.”

That blow did strike home. But after an initial flinch and a brief, black look the Daughter of Night lowered her eyes and settled back into her pose of patient indifference.

Soulcatcher laughed. “Your freak Goddess has abandoned you.”