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demands satisfaction. Until its gossamer thread of
terror, pain, cruelty and revenge has been spun, Khatovar is going
to remain nothing but an excuse, not a destination.
    Croaker eyed me uncertainly. “How could you know about the
grove?”
    “I came back knowing.” Which was true. But the two
of us would not give the same meaning to “back.”
    “You’ll take the men out there?”
    “I can’t not.”
    Goblin eyed me weirdly, too, now.
    I would do it. And I knew how it would go but I could not tell
them that. There were two minds inside my head. The one doing this
thinking wasn’t the one heaving on the running lines and
reefing the sails.
    “I’m all right now,” I told them. And,
“I think there is a way to keep me from falling back. At
least, to keep me from going so far back. But I can’t get it
out.” I would have shared gladly. I did not want to keep
stumbling off the edge of time to fall back into those too real
dark dreams of Dejagore’s past. Not even if I tumbled into a
viewpoint almost blind to the horror and cruelty everywhere
then.
    Croaker started to say something.
    I interrupted. “I’ll be down for the staff meeting
in ten minutes.”
    I could not tell them anything directly but maybe I could get
something out sideways.
    But I knew nothing would change. The worst of all horrors was
waiting up ahead and I was powerless to avert it.
    I’d still do my best in the grove. Just in case this time
that would come out differently. If I could remember the future
well enough to make the right moves.
    You. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. You keep dragging me to
the wellsprings of pain. Why do you do that? What do you want? Who
are you? What are you?
    As always, you give me no answers.
     
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14
    The goddamned wind had teeth. We huddled in our blankets,
shivering, as unmotivated as guys get without hanging it up.
Weren’t many of us wanted to be in that haunted grove in the
first place.
    Yet something I could not quite catch, some elusive emotion deep
inside me, told me this was critical, that this had to be done just
right. That more than I could imagine hinged upon that.
    Unseen trees creaked and cracked. The wind groaned and whined.
It was easy to let your imagination get away and brood on the fact
that thousands had been tortured and murdered there. You might hear
their moans inside the wind, their pleas for mercy ignored even
now. You might expect to see broken corpses rising up to demand
vengeance on the living.
    I faked being a hero. I could not stop shaking, though. I pulled
my blanket tighter. That did not help, either.
    “Candyass!” One-Eye sneered. Like the little shit
wasn’t about to have a seizure himself. “That bonehead
Goblin don’t quit farting around and get his dead ass back
here I’m gonna go strip him barebutt and nail him to a chunk
of ice.”
    “That’s creative.”
    “Don’t be no wiseass, Kid.
I’ll . . . ”
    An especially exuberant gust took off with what he would.
    It wasn’t just the cold making us shake, though nobody
would admit that. It was the place and the mission and the fact
that heavy cloud cover robbed us of even the meager comradeship of
starlight.
    It was goddamned dark. And these Stranglers might now be friends
with the man who ran shadows. A little bird said. Actually, a big
black bird said.
    “We spend too much time in town,” I grumbled.
One-Eye didn’t respond. Thai Dei did, though, with a grunt.
But that was a speech for this particular Nyueng Bao.
    The wind brought the creak of a stealthy footfall. One-Eye
barked, “Goddamnit, Goblin! Quit stomping around. You want
the whole damned world to know we’re here?” Never mind
that Goblin could not be heard five feet away, dancing. One-Eye
refuses to be constrained by mundane reason or consistency.
    Goblin drifted into place in front of me, squatted. His little
yellow teeth chattered. “All set,” he murmured.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
    “We’d better do it, then.