"One of the young women was blond and about my size, so an idea struck me. I put on her dress and took out my braid, so I might be mistaken for her. I gave the one girl some of the men's clothes to wear and told them both to run for the hills, in the opposite direction of the Sister, and not to look back. I didn't have to tell them twice. Then I sat down on a stool outside the barn.
"Sure enough, in a while the Sister came back. She saw me sitting there, hanging my head, pretending to be crying. She thought the other woman was still inside, with the men. She said, 'It's time those foolish bastards in there were done with you and your friend. His Excellency wants a report, and he wants it now-he's ready to move. »
Verna came up out of her chair. "You heard her say that?"
"Yes."
"Then what?" General Meiffert asked.
"Then the Sister made for the side door into the barn. When she stormed past me, I rose up behind her and cut her throat with one of the men's knives."
General Meiffert leaned toward Rikka. "You cut her throat? You didn't use your Agiel?"
Rikka gave him a look that suggested she thought he hadn't been paying attention. "Like the Prelate said, an Agiel doesn't work very well on those the dream walker controls. So I used a knife. Dream walker or not, cutting her throat worked just fine."
Rikka lifted the head before Verna again. One of the reports stuck to the bottom of it as it swung by the hair. "I sliced the knife through her throat and around her neck. She was thrashing about quite a bit, so I had a good hold on her as she died. All of a sudden, there was an instant when the whole world went black-and I mean black, black as the Keeper's heart. It was as if the underworld had suddenly taken us all."
Verna looked away from the head of a Sister she had known for a very long time and had always believed was devoted to the Creator, to the light of life. She had been devoted, instead, to death.
"The Keeper came to claim one of his own," Verna explained in a quiet voice.
"Well," Rikka said, rather sarcastically, Verna thought, "I didn't think that when a Sister of the Light died such a thing happened. I told you it was a Sister of the Dark."
Verna nodded. "So you did."
General Meiffert gave the Mord-Sith a hurried clap on the back of the shoulder. "Thanks, Rikka. I'd better spread the word. If Jagang is starting to move, it won't be many days before he's here. We need to be sure the passes are ready when his force finally gets here."
"The passes will hold," Verna said. She let out a silent sigh. "At least for a while."
The Order had to come across the mountains if they were to conquer D'Hara. There were few ways across those formidable mountains.
Verna and the Sisters had shielded and sealed those passes as well as it was possible to seal them. They had used magic to bring down walls of rock in places, making the narrow roads impassable. In other places, they had used their power to cleave away roads cut into the steep sides of mountains, leaving no way through, except to clamber over rubble. To prevent that, and in other places, the men had worked all winter constructing stone walls across the passes. Atop those walls were fortifications from which they could rain down death on the narrow passes below. Additionally, in every one of those places, the Sisters had set snares of magic so deadly that coming through would be a bloody ordeal that would only get worse, and that was before they encountered the walls lined with defenders.
Jagang had Sisters of the Dark to try to undo the barriers of both magic and stone, but Verna was more powerful, in the Additive anyway, than any of them. Besides that, she had joined her power with other Sisters in order to invest in those barriers magic that she knew would prove formidable.
Still, Jagang would come. Nothing Verna, her Sisters, and the D'Haran army could do would ultimately be able to withstand the numbers Jagang would throw at them. If he had to command his men to march through passes filled a hundred feet deep with their fallen comrades, he would not flinch from doing so. Nor would it matter to him if the corpses were a thousand feet deep.
"I'll be back a little later, Verna," the general said. "We'll need to get the officers and some of the Sisters together and make sure everything is ready."
"Yes, of course," Verna said.
Both General Meiffert and Rikka started to leave.
"Rikka," Verna called. She gestured down at the desk. "Take the dear departed Sister with you, would you please?"
Rikka sighed, which nearly spilled her bosom out of the dress. She made a long-suffering face before snatching up the head and vanishing out of the tent behind the general.
Verna sat down and put her head in her hands. It was going to start all over again. It had been a long and peaceful, if bitterly cold, winter.
