Port of Shadows by Glen Cook
I stepped aside for the Lieutenant and Buzz. Neither spoke. Both looked stressed. I went outside, took a look at a low gray sky that seemed awfully busy changing shades. But the air that was all excited up there was not moving at all down here on the ground.
It was late afternoon. It would rain after sundown. Meantime, the town girls should have supper ready. The kids would be waiting impatiently. They were in a growth spurt. They ate like lumberjacks for that and to support whatever they did in the deep of the night, in the shadow of the world, while their father snored.
Sana would be serving lamb kabobs. My mouth watered. I lost interest in the Old Man’s scheming. Me knowing would change nothing.
I bumped into Candy headed for the meeting, then Silent a moment later. Neither shared anything with the Company Annalist.
They did not trust me not to record something because I remember the truth too clearly? Or might they not trust me not to talk things over with somebody that they wanted kept in the dark?
That better not be the Lady or Mischievous Rain. There was a weird-looking cat doing stretches in the shade on the east side of HQ.
I bumped into Gurdlief Speak next. Surprised, I said, “Haven’t seen you lately, kid. What’s up?”
“Got you a great new story. Plus, Firefly asked me to find you. Says if you don’t come home right now she’s going to die from hunger. And then she’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“She’s been threatening that since she got here. But she lives on. I don’t get where a kid her size puts it. I assume you’re staying.”
“Shin asked me. Sana and El said it would be all right.”
Clever lad. He had not gone hungry much since he met me.
Shin ate less than Firefly but he still scoffed down ridiculous amounts.
I continued to wonder but without much ambition.
The general down mood touched me as much as anyone.
People did cope, some with less success than others.
Sana’s kabobs were remarkable. And, oddly, even with Gurdlief’s extra mouth and the twins’ bottomless stomachs there were kabobs enough left over for the town girls to enjoy some, too.
They made the best of their situation, those girls. I did not mind. It was not my money. But I would get to barking if they started trying to take something home.
Gurdlief’s new story was about a vixen who fell in love with a man so fiercely that she appealed to the gods to turn her into a woman. The gods granted her prayer—then caused her death two weeks later. The mood of the moment left me indifferent to what, once I became aware of the weight of fox spirits in local lore, was a culturally significant myth.
Gurdlief said, “Honestly, I don’t tell it so well. Not to mention, I had to leave out the stuff you don’t want little kids to hear. A pro storyteller would have you bawling by the time he got done.”
Mention of storytelling reminded me that, before we all almost died at Charm, I had done regular readings from the Annals so my brothers could understand that they were part of something centuries deep, not just a gang come together last year that might evaporate before the winter solstice. I had not done many readings since Charm. I am not sure why. Mental trauma must be in there somewhere.
The Company had seven hundred effectives, now, and way too many camp followers. I really ought to make the new people understand that they were part of something timeless and bigger than individuals.
“I ought to take that up with the Captain.”
Several pairs of eyes considered me, puzzled.
* * *
One of the girls, Flora of the ridiculous knockers, whispered, “Sir, there is a smelly old man with an eye patch here who insists that he has to see you.” Her cheeks were red. She faced away from Gurdlief, who was old enough to appreciate her assets but not old enough to understand that he ought not to stare.
No pederast I, even I found that difficult sometimes.
Having met Flora’s mother in the course of my town practice I was sure the girl would grow into those monsters. Twenty years from now they would not draw a second glance.
So. One-Eye wanted to talk? To me specifically? “Gurdlief, do me the honor of hanging out with these savages. Don’t let them destroy the furniture or set the house on fire. I’ll see what the wizard wants.”
The twins awarded me exaggerated sour looks. Neither reminded me that they went unsupervised most of the time and an apocalypse had yet to occur. They knew I was teasing. I hoped.
Gurdlief nodded. Of course. That would give him time to further admire Flora’s outstanding cantileverage. Flora was a responsible girl. She would feel obliged to stay with the children while their father handled business.
I thought it odd that an Aloen girl could be so self-conscious, but then got that that was it. Self-consciousness is personal. What I considered to be a culture of excessively relaxed morality was not personal at all.
I found not only One-Eye but Goblin seated in the western-style chairs in the Taken’s antechamber. Both seemed fiercely uncomfortable. What the hell?
I chose my words carefully. I had no idea what was going on. I did not want to set One-Eye off.
I had no reason to trust him. His behavior lately was a dramatic improvement over what it had been before his sessions with Mischievous Rain but his temper had grown more volatile. We had not yet been able to identify his triggers. The popular wisdom was, do not provoke. Do not joke.
I looked from one untrustworthy wizard to the next. “What is it?”
Goblin seemed slightly embarrassed. “This is kind of on the down low right now. Have you noticed how everybody is kind of edgy lately?”
“Yes. Though ‘edgy’ is putting it mildly.”
Goblin grew more embarrassed. My expression may have projected my skeptical estimation of his probable innocence of anything that might be going wrong.
“We maybe figured something out.” One-Eye nodded in rare agreement. “He figured it out.” Goblin jerked an accusing thumb at One-Eye. One-Eye nodded again, maybe mildly chagrined.
Curious. One-Eye showed none of the tells that always appear when he is working a scheme.
“All right. What have you got? And why bring it to me instead of to the Old Man?”
Goblin confessed, “The Old Man ain’t so happy with us. If we could even get in to see him he would just figure that we was finagling.”
One-Eye nodded again. A real talent show, the little man. And keeping his damned mouth shut while he demonstrated it. Amazing.
“So you figure old Croaker is more gullible, eh?”
“You’re more likely to listen until we get it all told.”
“Could be. Do some talking.”
One-Eye cleared his throat. “All of us feeling like shit all the time. It’s on account of them girls.”
“The captives?”
“Only girls around, aren’t they?”
“They are. And?”
“Yeah. See, they’re all exactly like the Taken. Only they don’t know that they are. They don’t know that they probably got hidden powers. But when they rub up against each other they feed off each other emotionally. And the more of them you toss into the pot the more those emotions are gonna tangle and build up until some kind of out-of-control power explosion happens.”
“Like spontaneous combustion,” Goblin said. “If you add many more of them girls that are like over about twelve you’re gonna get you a serious blowup of totally uncontrolled sorcery.”
I studied One-Eye. Still I saw no tells. He just looked completely worried. I asked Goblin, “Is something like that possible?”
“It is. It’s as rare as frog fur pelts but it happens.”
One-Eye said, “Look up the Wasting of Habenev next time you hit your library. That happened about ninety years ago.”
Habenev was a trivial kingdom the Company had visited ages ago, long before the Wasting that One-Eye referenced. It was not likely that anyone in Aloe had ever heard of it. It got only a pas
I would see what my predecessors had to report.
I asked, “How many girls do we have?”
One-Eye shrugged. Goblin shook his head. “Ain’t you been checking them in?”
“No. I only get to see them if they get sick. Sergeant Nwynn is taking her job seriously serious. No men within rock-throwing distance unless it’s an emergency. And she gets to call the ‘emergency.’”
* * *
I paid a brief visit to the Captain. He did not ask how I had come up with the notion that we were tottering on the brink of sorcerous disaster. He said, “You could be right.” He scrawled a note on a scrap of confiscated talisman paper. “Show this to Nwynn.”
The note instructed Sergeant Nwynn to cooperate with me one hundred percent, however I chose to investigate.
* * *
Sergeant Chiba Vinh Nwynn was the foremost and most ferocious of the Company’s few female soldiers. We had lost her husband at Charm. She was stronger and scarier than most of the men.
Nwynn ruled the Tides Elba dorm. And no man was going to taint her kittens.
I presented myself to the sergeant, with my note from the Captain. She considered me with deep suspicion. “So, you been doing without your regular pussy so long that you come here shopping for a new one?”
In the normal course Nwynn and I seldom interact. She did not get sick. She was no malingerer. But when we did collide we sparked ugly. I stifled my temper. “I don’t need to see or trouble any of the girls, I just need you to talk to me.”
Nwynn studied the Captain’s note. She consulted her professional side, then her cumulative experience with the Company medical staff. “All right. What do you want?”
“Those girls are all copies of Mischievous Rain. You know that. So. Here’s the problem. It looks like they might all be sorceresses, too, only they don’t know it yet, and, despite their ignorance, they’re starting to feed off each other. The rest of us are feeling the effects. That’s why we’ve been going through the awfuls lately.”
“They are weirdly alike,” Nwynn admitted, still eying me coldly.
“How many do we have?”
“Twenty-nine. There are nine more in the wind that we know about.”
“Damn! That would mean that there are a shitload more. Give me a rundown.”
“Not sure what you’re asking for, physician.”
“You do have a girl inventory, don’t you?”
That irked her. But everything irks Chiba Vinh Nwynn, at least where a guy called Croaker is involved. I did not understand it, did not like it, and it was why I had as little to do with her as possible.
She asked, “An inventory? What are they, ammunition?”
“Call it a roster, then.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Yes. I do.” Hearty scowl of disapproval.
In fact Nwynn was making an uncharacteristic effort to get along. She did understand that I was not girl toy shopping. Maybe mention of the awful emotional weather won her over.
Nwynn had strong opinions and strange prejudices but she was an effective and useful member of the Company.
I waited. She failed to understand that I expected her to show me the aforementioned roster. I told her, “We’re trying to figure out if the universal foul mood happened because we packed your twenty-nine girls in together.”
Nwynn got it, then. A smart woman, she. Who right away suffered a thought that left her wide-eyed and snarling, “Shit!”
“What?”
“The ones that have been here the longest. The ones that are old enough to breed. Their monthlies have begun to synch up.” She drew a deep breath, exhaled dramatically. “I should of figured that, the way them pretty little bitches been making each other miserable.”
Could it be? Them falling into a natural rhythm? The whole damned clowder?
Nwynn said, “They was just eight or nine matching up in their courses this time. But if they keep synching up it’s gonna get dog-shit uglier every month from now on, I guarantee.”
My turn. “I hope that isn’t it.” While almost certain that I was whistling in the dark. “That would be ridiculous.”
“It could be just because we been clumping them all together.”
Now Nwynn sounded like she might be whistling in the dark. She said, “Let me get my cat log.”
She left me there, watched by two grim armed and ugly women. She disappeared into territories a man could only dream about penetrating. I heard a cacophony of chattering girl voices for the moment that the door was open. What was going on with that platoon of lovely young Tides Elbas back there?
I did not ask. The sentry women looked to be in a mood to honor any excuse to give me a thump. They had not yet shaken the foul-humor season. I considered blowing them kisses but refrained. Edmous Black was not yet fully qualified to deal with severe blunt-force trauma cases.
Just when I began to suspect that Nwynn had ditched me, she and a helper turned up. The latter carried a big register bound in frayed wine-colored cloth. She was Aloen. I could not recall her name. She was as wide as she was tall, all muscle, and she looked resentful, like she had been awakened untimely from a nap and her misery was all my fault.
Sergeant Nwynn said, “Here is the roster you want, sir. The entries were made chronologically. That might make finding what you’re looking for a little more difficult.”
The Aloen troll offered me the log, properly oriented.
“Thank you.” Did I have any hope of finding something useful?
To my surprise the log began with information about Mischievous Rain, including everything known about her when she was just another pretty girl in Occupoa’s temple.
So. A quick scan of some later entries. Same thing, down to an estimate to the month of the age of every captive. Each girl had been assigned a serial number according to her order of capture. Each went by the name that she had given when captured. I said, “This is excellent work, Sergeant. Please allow me to borrow it long enough to make a copy.”
Sergeant Nwynn showed me a skeptical expression but swallowed her protest.
We all have to take orders that we do not like.
* * *
“Next month is going to be a lot worse,” I told the Old Man, the Lieutenant, Candy, the wizards, and a number of other people, including Sergeant Nwynn. “By then we might have caught more girls and more girls should have their courses synched up. Plus, according to Sergeant Nwynn, some of them may be starting to realize that they aren’t your regular orphan temple girls. They all look alike and they all favor the newest Taken. Which is something they know only by hearsay.” Slight frown in Nwynn’s direction, though she and hers would have seen no need to keep that a secret. “Because the only girls who ever actually saw Mischievous Rain herself went off to the Tower with her.”
“Your point being?”
“They’ll all be as smart as Mischievous Rain so it shouldn’t be a leap for them to figure out that they might have a talent for sorcery, too.”
Nwynn nodded vigorously. I made a beckoning gesture, deferring.
She said, “Sirs, I do think that some of the older girls are experimenting. Just with little stuff. They don’t got no one to teach them and they are smart enough to understand that they’re playing with deadly fire.”
Buzzard Neck said, “There is nothing more dangerous than a self-taught sorceress, to herself more than anyone else. This could get really ugly if they’re experimenting and feeding one another emotionally at the same time.”
I said, “I made up some charts…”
Even the Old Man groaned.
I said, “I know. It can get tedious. That’s the sad harsh truth about facts. They’re never as exciting as speculations.” Then, to let them know that they were in the finest company, I said, “I presented all this to the Taken this morning. I think.” I had visited her bedroom to make my report according to instructions given me back when.
“What’s all that?” the Old Man asked, indicating my lovingly created master chart, sounding like he hoped that I would not actually explain.
We all have to suffer our disappointments. Even commanding officers. “It’s an age chart of Tides Elba girls based on Sergeant Nwynn’s information.”
All twenty-nine captives, and the Taken, were there. Mischievous Rain was example zero based on a complete absence of older versions anywhere. “These gaps mean that there might be a girl who fits there. Red dashes in the gaps indicate hearsay girls, generally those who disappeared before our patrols got there. There is a pattern. From late seventeen years old downward a new girl seems to have been born every three months. We have yet to identify any twins.”
The Captain said, “Then if your chart is right, we’ve only rounded up a third of them.”
“I’m figuring closer to half, after adjusting for disease and misadventure.” Which could be conservative. Life was hard for kids and young people, and more so for orphans. Though the Occupoan temples did take good care of their motherless children.
“But those numbers would make our current strategy pointless, wouldn’t they? There are still a shitload that we don’t control. And do we know if they’re still turning them out?”
“I am sure that they are. In their place I’d keep on, if I could, especially now that they know we know they’re up to no good. I’d keep making them so that I could always have a few more hidden, no matter what the Lady’s people did.”
Candy stirred. I had thought that he was asleep, so quiet had he been. “What about the ones that ought to come between the Taken and the seventeeners there? That would be a good ten more all perfectly aged.”
I thought he would melt under Nwynn’s ferocious gaze. But he was indifferent to her disapproval.
“Good question. But I can’t even speculate.” None of the girls knew anything about their provenance. Neither could any of the temples tell us anything useful. “Hey. Who found that Resurrectionist place that Elmo told me about? Did we get anything useful out of that?”