She Is the Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company Read Online Free Page A

Narayan Singh and the child his Deceivers called the Daughter of Night.
    Longshadow met her eye only for a moment. He turned to look out over the
     devastation north of Overlook. A few fires still burned in the ruins.
    The child was barely four but her eyes were windows to the very heart of
     darkness. It seemed almost as if her monster goddess Kina sat behind those
     hollow pupils.
    She was almost as frightening as those living wisps of darkness that, because he
     could command them, gave him the title Shadowmaster. She was a child only in
     flesh. The thing inside was ages older and darker than the dirty, skinny little
     man who served as her guardian.
    Narayan Singh had nothing to say. He stood at the edge of the parapet and
     shuddered in the chill wind. The child joined him. She did not speak, either,
    but she showed no interest in the ruined city. Her attention was on him.
    For half a heartbeat Longshadow feared she could read his mind.
    He stirred his long, bony frame toward the stairwell, concerned that Howler was
     leaving him alone too long with these bizarre creatures. He was startled to find
     the Nar general Mogaba, his leading commander, coming up the steps behind the
     little sorcerer, engaged in a vigorous conversation in an unfamiliar tongue.
    “Well?”
    The Howler was floating in the air, as he often did even when not piloting his
     carpet. He spun himself around. “The story is the same from here to the Plain of
     Charandaprash. And east and west as well. The quake spared no one. Though the
     damage becomes smaller the farther north one travels.”
    Longshadow turned instantly, stared south. Even in winter’s advancing gloom that
     plain up there seemed to glitter. Now it even seemed to mock him, and for a
     moment he regretted the impulse that had led him to challenge it so many years
     ago. He had gained all the power he had dreamed of then and had not known a
     moment of peace since.
    By its very existence the place beyond Shadowgate taunted him. Root of his
     power, it was also his bane.
    He saw no evidence that the quake had disturbed anything there. The gate, he
     believed, should be proof against all disasters. Only one tool could open the
     way from the outside in.
    He turned back to find the child smiling, one white tooth showing like a
     diminutive vampire fang. She combined the scariest effects of both her mothers.
    Howler shrieked a shriek he cut short partway through. “The destruction leaves
     us no choice but to defer the labors of empire till the populace can sustain
     them once more.”
    Longshadow raised a bony, gloved hand to his face, to adjust the mask he always
     wore in company. “What did you say?” He must have heard wrong.
    “Consider the city before you, my friend. A city which exists only to build this
     fortress ever taller and stronger. But those who live there must eat in order to
     have the strength to work. They must have shelter from the elements, else they
     weaken and die. They must have some warmth and water that does not lead them to
     their deaths with dysentery.”
    “I will not coddle them. Their only purpose is to serve me.”
    “Which they can’t do if they’re dead,” the black general observed. “The gods
     have taken a dislike to us lately. This earthquake hurts us more than all the
     armies of Taglios have in all the years of this war.”
    That was a hearty exaggeration, Longshadow knew. His three fellow Shadowmasters
     were dead. Their great armies had perished with them. But he got the message.
    The situation was grim.
    “You came to tell me that?” It was presumptuous of the general to come to
     Overlook unbidden. But Longshadow forgave him. He had a soft spot in his heart
     for Mogaba, who seemed much like his own younger self. He indulged the Nar where
     he would have endured far less from his other captains.
    “I came to ask you one more time to reconsider your orders forcing me to remain
     immobile at Charandaprash. After this disaster,