Soldiers Live

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## 96

### The Shadowgate:
Bad News, Bad News

I was outside the shadowgate gossiping with Panda Man and Spook, who were telling me that keeping an eye on the gate was the best duty they had ever endured. The work was easy and the locals were friendly. If the damned ugly spooks from the plain did not keep nagging you . . .

Tobo and Shukrat came through.

Almost immediately Tobo let out a cry of despair. He shouted, “There’s been a battle!” A moment later he shot into the air, headed north, black cloth streaming behind him. An instant later still Shukrat shot off in his wake, gaining slowly.

Panting, Lady asked, “Does that mean we should be worried?”

“That would be my guess. The little shit must’ve gotten something from the hidden folk.”

“And it was bad enough to set him off like that.” She looked as troubled as I felt.

No good could come of any battle fought while we were away.

She asked, “Aren’t you going to rush off and see what happened, too?”

“Don’t see the point.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the carpet, which was creaking and sagging under the weight of people we dared not trust. “There isn’t anything I could do, anyway. Look at that.” A ripple, a distortion in the fabric of reality, seemed to be running over the face of the earth, chasing after Tobo and Shukrat. “The hidden folk following their hero.”

“Why were they here?”

“Waiting around for Tobo.”

“But they should’ve been with Sleepy. They don’t do us any good hanging around the shadowgate when . . . oh. They don’t care if they do us any good.”

“Exactly. What they care about is Tobo. Anything they do that benefits the rest of us they do just to please him. Which is why two-thirds of the time I don’t have the two ravens that’re supposed to be my permanent shoulder-ornaments and messengers and far-seeing eyes. They keep forgetting to stick with me. They wander off to find the kid. Bet you they turn up before we catch up with Sleepy, though.”

“Sounds like a sucker bet to me.”

After crossing the Dandha Presh I steered a course mimicking that Sleepy had followed heading north. When Lady asked why I was not heading straight north as fast as we dared push the carpet, I told her, “Because I thought I saw something I shouldn’t have on the way down. I have to check on it. I’m hoping it was my imagination.” But my brief conversation with the guards at the shadowgate suggested that the nightmare might be real.

She was curious but did not ask. At the speeds we could make airborne a bit of circuitous flight would not delay us much.

I found what I was seeking on the path Sleepy had taken from Gharhawnes, at almost exactly the point where she had doubled back to get behind Dejagore. By then my confederates were extremely crabby.

“There!” I told Lady, catching just a glimpse of something moving fast inside a stand of scrubby oaks.

“There what?” She had not seen.

“The Nef.”

“The Nef? The Nef are in the Voroshk world. Trapped there.”

“Not according to Spook and Panda Man. They say the Nef come around every night.”

“All right. But how would they get through the shadowgate?”

“I don’t know.” I was flying in a circle now, giving up altitude. Once down to treetop level I cruised back and forth. I spotted nothing. Nor did I find a sign when I descended lower still and began to glide between the tree trunks.

I never found a thing. Not even a hint of a thing.

People began to yell down at me.

All right. They had a point. There were things we needed to do way north of where we were now.

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