WATER SLEEPS
by Glen Cook
The Eighth Chronicle of the Black Company
In those days the Black Company did not exist. This I know because there were laws and decrees that told me so. But I did not feel entirely insubstantial.
The Company standard, its Captain and Lieutenant, its Standardbearer and all the men who had made the Company so terrible, had passed on, having been buried alive at the heart of a vast desert of stone. “Glittering stone,” they whispered in the streets and alleys of Taglios, and “Gone to Khatovar,” they proclaimed from on high, the mighty making what they had been so determined to prevent for so long over into a great triumph once the Radisha or Protector or somebody decided that people ought to believe that the Company had fulfilled its destiny.
Anyone old enough to remember the Company knew better. Only fifty people had ventured out onto that plain of glittering stone. Half of those people had not been Company. Only two of those fifty had returned to lie about what had happened. And a third who had come back to retail the truth had been killed in the Kiaulune wars, far away from the capital. But the deceits of Soulcatcher and Willow Swan fooled no one, then or now. People simply pretended to believe them because that was safer.
They might have asked why Mogaba needed five years to conquer a Company that had passed on, squandering thousands of young lives to bring the Kiaulune domains under the Radisha’s rule and into the realm of the Protector’s twisted truths. They might have mentioned that people claiming to be Black Company had held out in the fortress Overlook for years after that, until the Protector, Soulcatcher, finally became so impatient with their intransigence that she invested her own best sorceries in a two-year project that reduced that huge fortress to white powder, white rubble and white bones. They might have raised these points. But they remained silent instead. They were afraid. With cause, they were afraid.
The Taglian empire under the Protectorate is an empire of fear.
During the years of defiance, one unknown hero won Soulcatcher’s eternal hatred by sabotaging the Shadowgate, the sole gateway to the glittering plain. Soulcatcher was the most powerful sorcerer alive. She might have become a Shadowmaster to eclipse those monsters the Company had pulled down during its earlier wars on Taglios’ behalf. But with the Shadowgate sealed she could not conjure killer shadows more powerful than the few score she had controlled when she worked her treachery on the Company.
Oh, she could open the Shadowgate. One time. She did not know how to close it again, though. Meaning everything inside would be free to wriggle out and begin tormenting the world.
Meaning that for Soulcatcher, party to so few of the secrets, the choice must be all or very little. The end of the world or making do.
For the moment she is making do. And pursuing continuous researches. She is the Protector. Fear of her steeps the empire. There are no challenges to her terror. But even she knows this age of dark concord cannot endure.
Water sleeps.
In their homes, in the shadowed alleyways, in the city’s ten thousand temples, nervous whispers never cease. The Year of the Skulls. The Year of the Skulls. It is an age when no gods die and those that sleep keep stirring restlessly.
In their homes, in the shadowed alleyways or fields of grain or in the sodden paddies, in the pastures and forests and tributary cities, should a comet be seen in the sky or should an unseasonable storm strew devastation or, particularly, if the earth should shake, they murmur, “Water sleeps.” And they are afraid.
They call me Sleepy. I was withdrawn as a child, hiding from the horrors of my childhood inside the comfort and emotional safety of daydreams and nightmares. Any time I did not have to work, I went away in there to hide. The evil could not touch me there. I knew no safer place till the Black Company came to Jaicur.
My brothers accused me of sleeping all the time. They resented my ability to get away. They did not understand. They died without ever understanding. I slept on. I did not waken fully till I had been with the Company for several years.
I keep these Annals today. Somebody must and no one else can, though the Annalist title never devolved upon me formally.
There is precedent.
The books must be written. The truth must be recorded even if fate decrees that no man ever reads a word I write. The Annals are the soul of the Black Company. They recall that this is who we are. That this is who we were. That we persevere. And that treachery, as it ever has, failed to suck the last drop of our blood.
We no longer exist. The Protector tells us so. The Radisha swears it. Mogaba, that mighty general with his thousand dark honors, sneers at our memory and spits on our name. People in the streets declare us no more than an evil, haunting memory. But only Soulcatcher does not watch over both shoulders to see what might be gaining ground.
We are stubborn ghosts. We will not lie down. We will not cease to haunt them. We have done nothing for a long time but they remain afraid. Their guilt cannot stop whispering our name.
They should be afraid.
Somewhere in Taglios, every day, a message appears upon a wall, written in chalk or paint or even animal blood. Just a gentle reminder: Water Sleeps.
Everyone knows what that means. They whisper it, aware that there is an enemy out there more restless than running water. An enemy who will, somehow, someday, lurch forth from the mouth of his grave and come for those who played at betrayal. They know no power that can prevent it. They were warned ten thousand times before they gave in to temptation. No evil can preserve them.
Mogaba is afraid.
Radisha is afraid.
Willow Swan is so afraid he barely functions, like the wizard Smoke before him, whom he indicted and tormented for his cowardice. Swan knew the Company of old, in the north, before anyone here recognized it as more than a dark memory of ancient terror. The years have seen no calluses form on Swan’s fear.
Purohita Drupada is afraid.
Inspector-General Gokhale is afraid.
Only the Protector is not afraid. Soulcatcher fears nothing. Soulcatcher does not care. She mocks and defies the demon. She is mad. She will laugh and be entertained while being consumed by fire.
Her lack of fear leaves her henchmen that much more troubled. They know she will drive them before her, into the grinding jaws of destiny.
Occasionally a wall will carry another message, a more personal note: All Their Days Are Numbered.
I am in the streets every day, either going to work, going to spy, listening, capturing rumors or launching new ones within the anonymity of Chor Bagan, the Thieves’ Garden even the Greys have not yet been able to extirpate. I used to disguise myself as a prostitute but that proved to be too dangerous. There are people out there who make the Protector seem a paragon of sanity. It is the world’s great good fortune that fate denies them the power to exercise the fullest depth and sweep of their psychoses.
Mostly I go around as a young man, the way I always did. Rootless young men are everywhere since the end of the wars.
The more bizarre the new rumor, the faster it explodes out of Chor Bagan and the more strongly it gnaws the nerves of our enemies. Always, always, Taglios must enjoy a sense of grim premonition. We must provide them their ration of omens, signs and portents.
The Protector hunts us in her more lucid moments but she never remains interested long. She cannot keep her attention fixed on anything. And why should she be concerned? We are dead. We no longer exist. She herself has declared that to be the reality. As Protector, she is the great arbiter of reality for the entire Taglian empire.
But: Water Sleeps.
In those days the spine of the Company was a woman who never formally joined, the witch Ky Sahra, wife of my predecessor as Annalist, Murgen, the Standardbearer. Ky Sahra was a clever woman with a will like sharp steel. Even Goblin and One-Eye deferred to her. She would not be intimidated, not even by her wicked old Uncle Doj. She feared the Protector, the Radisha and the Greys no more than she feared a cabbage. The malice of evils as great as the deadly cult of Deceivers, their messiah the Daughter of Night and their goddess Kina, intimidated Sahra not at all. She had looked into the heart of darkness. Its secrets inspired in her no dread. Only one thing made Sahra tremble.
Her mother, Ky Gota, was the incarnation of dissatisfaction and complaint. Her lamentations and reproaches were of such amazing potency that it seemed she must be an avatar of some cranky old deity as yet undiscovered by man.
Nobody loves Ky Gota except One-Eye. And even he calls her the Troll behind her back.
Sahra shuddered as her mother limped slowly through a room gone suddenly silent. We were not in power now. We had to use the same few rooms for everything. Only a short while ago this one had been filled with loafers, some Company, most of them employees of Banh Do Trang. We all stared at the old woman, willing her to hurry. Willing her to overlook this opportunity to socialize.
Old Do Trang, who was so feeble he was confined to a wheelchair, rolled over to Ky Gota, evidently hoping a show of concern would keep her moving.
Everyone always wanted Gota to go somewhere else.
This time his sacrifice worked. She had to be in a lot of discomfort, though, not to take time to harangue all who were younger than she.
Silence persisted till the old merchant returned. He owned the place and let us use it as our operational headquarters. He owed us nothing, but nevertheless, shared our danger out of love for Sahra. In all matters his thoughts had to be heard and his wishes had to be honored.
Do Trang was not gone long. He came back rolling wearily. The man behind the liver spots seemed so fragile it had to be a miracle that he could move his chair himself.
Ancient he was, but there was an irrepressible twinkle in his eyes. He nodded. He seldom had anything to say unless someone else said something incredibly stupid. He was a good man.
Sahra told us, “Everything is in place. Every phase and facet has been double-checked. Goblin and One-Eye are sober. It’s time the Company speaks up.” She glanced around, inviting comments.
I did not think it was time. But I had said my piece when I was planning this. And had been outvoted. I treated myself to a shrug of despair.
There being no new objections, Sahra said, “Start the first phase.” She waved at her son. Tobo nodded and slipped out.
He was a skinny, scruffy, furtive youngster. He was Nyueng Bao, which meant he had to be a sneak and a thief. His every move had to be watched. In consequence he was so generally observed that no individual examined in detail what he actually did so long as his hands did not stray toward a dangling purse or some treasure in a vendor’s stall. People did not look for what they did not expect to see.
The boy’s hands stayed behind his back. While they were there, he was not considered a threat. He could not steal. No one noticed the small, discolored blobs he left on any wall he leaned against.
Gunni children stared. The boy looked so strange in his black pajama clothing. Gunni raise their children polite. Gunni are peaceable folk, in the main. Shadar children, though, are wrought of sterner stuff. They are more bold. Their religion has a warrior philosophy at its root. Some Shadar youths set out to harass the thief.
Of course he was a thief! He was Nyueng Bao. Everyone knew all Nyueng Bao were thieves.
Older Shadar called the youngsters off. The thief would be dealt with by those whose responsibility that was.
The Shadar religion has its streak of bureaucratic rectitude, too.
Even such a small commotion attracted official attention. Three tall, grey-clad, bearded Shadar peacekeepers wearing white turbans advanced through the press. They looked around constantly, intently, oblivious to the fact that they traveled in an island of open space. The streets of Taglios are packed, day and night, yet the masses always find room to shrink away from the Greys. The Greys are all men with hard eyes, seemingly chosen for their lack of patience and compassion.
Tobo drifted away, sliding through the mob like a black snake through swamp reeds. When the Greys inquired about the commotion, no one could describe him as anything but what prejudice led them to presume. A Nyueng Bao thief. And there was a plague of those in Taglios. These days the capital city boasted plenty of every kind of outlander imaginable. Every layabout and lackwit and sharpster from the length and breadth of the empire was migrating to the city. The population had tripled in a generation. But for the cruel efficiencies of the Greys, Taglios would have become a chaotic, murderous sink, a hellfire fueled by poverty and despair.
Poverty and despair existed in plentitude but the Palace did not let any disorder take root. The Palace was good at ferreting out secrets. Criminal careers tended to be short. As did the lives of most who sought to conspire against the Radisha or the Protector. Particularly against the Protector, who did not concern herself deeply with the sanctity of anyone else’s skin.
In times past, intrigue and conspiracy had been a miasmatic plague afflicting every life in Taglios. There was little of that anymore. The Protector did not approve. Most Taglians were eager to win the Protector’s approval. Even the priesthoods avoided attracting Soulcatcher’s evil eye.
At some point the boy’s black clothing came off, leaving him in the Gunni-style loincloth he had worn underneath. Now he looked like any other youngster, though with a slightly jaundiced cast of skin. He was safe. He had grown up in Taglios. He had no accent to give him away.
It was the waiting time, the stillness, the doing nothing that there is so much of before any serious action. I was out of practice. I could not lean back and play tonk or just watch while One-Eye and Goblin tried to cheat each other. And I had writer’s cramp, so could not work on my Annals.
“Tobo!” I called. “You want to go see it happen?”
Tobo was fourteen. He was the youngest of us. He grew up in the Black Company. He had a full measure of youth’s exuberance and impatience and overconfidence in his own immortality and divine exemption from retribution. He enjoyed his assignments on behalf of the Company. He was not quite sure he believed in his father. He never knew the man. We tried hard to keep him from becoming anyone’s spoiled baby. But Goblin insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to tutor the boy.
Goblin’s command of written Taglian was more limited than he would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I use a mixture recording these Annals.
Once Tobo could read, “Uncle” Goblin made him do all his reading for him, aloud.
“Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more would get more attention in the Palace.”
I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are surly at best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would have been ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed with so many “uncles” who would not tolerate that stuff. Naturally, Tobo saw all that as a grand conspiracy of adults. Publicly. In private, he was amenable to reason. Occasionally. When approached delicately by someone who was not his mother.
“Maybe a few. But it’s going to get dark soon. And then the show will start.”
“What’ll we go as? I don’t like it when you’re a whore.”
“We’ll be street orphans.” Though that had its risks, too. We could get caught by a press gang and forced into Mogaba’s army. His soldiers, these days, are little better than slaves, subject to a savage discipline. Many are petty criminals given an option of rough justice or enlistment. The rest are children of poverty with nowhere else to go. Which was the standard of professional armies men like Murgen saw in the far north, long before my time.
“Why do you worry so much about disguises?”
“If we never show the same face twice, our enemies can’t possibly know who they’re looking for. Don’t ever underestimate them. Especially not the Protector. She’s outwitted death itself more than once.”
Tobo was not prepared to believe that or much else of our exotic history. Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said—particularly if it bore any vaguely educational hue—was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good. “It’s in the Annals. Your father and the Captain didn’t make up stories.”
He did not want to believe that, either. I did not pursue it. Each of us must learn to respect the Annals in our own way, in our own time. The Company’s diminished circumstance makes it difficult for anyone to grasp tradition. Only two Old Crew brothers both survived Soulcatcher’s trap on the stone plain and the Kiaulune wars afterward. Goblin and One-Eye are haplessly inept at transmitting the Company mystique. One-Eye is too lazy and Goblin too inarticulate. And I was still practically an apprentice when the Old Crew ventured onto the plain in the Captain’s quest for Khatovar. Which he did not find. Not the Khatovar he was looking for, anyway.
I am amazed. Before long I will be a twenty-year veteran. I was barely fourteen when Bucket took me under his wing . . . But I was never like Tobo. At fourteen I was already ancient in pain. For years after Bucket rescued me, I grew younger . . . “What?”
“I asked why you look so angry all of a sudden.”
“I was remembering when I was fourteen.”
“Girls have it so easy—” He shut up. His face drained. His northern ancestry became apparent. He was an arrogant and spoiled little puke but he did have brains enough to recognize it when he stepped into a nest of poisonous snakes.
I told him what he knew, not what he did not. “When I was fourteen, the Company and Nyueng Bao were trapped in Jaicur. Dejagore, they call it here.” The rest does not matter anymore. The rest is safely in the past. “I almost never have nightmares now.”
Tobo had heard more than he ever wanted to about Jaicur already. His mother and grandmother and Uncle Doj had been there, too.
“Goblin says we’ll be impressed by these buttons,” Tobo whispered. “They won’t just make spooky lights, they’ll prick somebody’s conscience.”
“That’ll be unusual.” Conscience was a rare commodity on either side of our dispute.
“You really knew my dad?” Tobo had heard stories all his life but lately wanted to know more. Murgen had begun to matter in a more than lip-service fashion.
I told him what I had told him before. “He was my boss. He taught me to read and write. He was a good man.” I laughed weakly. “As good a man as belonging to the Black Company let him be.”
Tobo stopped. He took a deep breath. He stared at a point in the dusk somewhere above my left shoulder. “Were you lovers?”
“No, Tobo. No. Friends. Almost. But definitely not that. He didn’t know I was a woman till just before he left for the glittering plain. And I didn’t know he knew till I read his Annals. Nobody knew. They thought I was a cute runt who just never got any bigger. I let them think that. I felt safer as one of the guys.”
“Oh.”
His tone was so neutral I had to wonder. “Why did you even ask?” Surely he had no reason to believe I had behaved differently before he knew me.
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
Something must have set him off. Possibly an “I wonder if . . . ” from Goblin or One-Eye, say, while they were sampling some of their homemade elephant poison.
“I didn’t ask. Did you put the buttons behind the shadow show?”
“That’s what I was told to do.”
A shadow show uses cutout puppets mounted on sticks. Some of their limbs are manipulated mechanically. A candle behind the puppets casts their shadows on a screen of white cloth. The puppeteer uses a variety of voices to tell his story as he maneuvers his puppets. If he is sufficiently entertaining, his audience will toss him a few coins.
This particular puppeteer had performed in the same place for more than a generation. He slept inside his stage setup. In so doing, he lived better than most of Taglios’ floating population.
He was an informer. He was not beloved of the Black Company.
The story he told, as most were, was drawn from the myths. It sprang from the Khadi cycle. It involved a goddess with too many arms who kept devouring demons.
Of course it was the same demon puppet over and over. Kind of like real life, where the same demon comes back again and again.
Just a hint of color hung above the western rooftops.
There was an earsplitting squeal. People stopped to stare at a bright orange light. Glowing orange smoke wobbled up from behind the puppeteer’s stand. Its strands wove the well-known emblem of the Black Company, a fanged skull with no lower jaw, exhaling flames. The scarlet fire in its left eye socket seemed to be a pupil that stared right down inside you, searching for the thing that you feared the most.
The smoke thing persisted only a few seconds. It rose about ten feet before it dispersed. It left a frightened silence. The air itself seemed to whisper, “Water sleeps.”
Whine and flash. A second skull arose. This one was silver with a slightly bluish tint. It lasted longer and rose a dozen feet higher before it perished. It whispered, “My brother unforgiven.”
“Here come the Greys!” exclaimed someone tall enough to see over the crowd. Being short makes it easy for me to disappear in groups but also makes it tough for me to see what is happening outside them.
The Greys are never far away. But they are helpless against this sort of thing. It can happen anywhere, any time, and has to happen before they can react. Our supposed ironclad rule is that perpetrators should never be nearby when the buttons speak. The Greys understand that. They just go through the motions. The Protector must be appeased. The little Shadar have to be fed.
“Now!” Tobo murmured as four Greys arrived. A shriek erupted from behind the puppeteer’s stage. The puppeteer himself ran out, spun and leaned toward his stage, mouth wide open. There was a flash less bright but more persistent than its predecessors. The subsequent smoke image was more complex and lasted longer. It appeared to be a monster. The monster focused on the Shadar. One of the Greys mouthed the name “Niassi.”
Niassi would be a major demon from Shadar mythology. A similar demon under another form of the name exists in Gunni belief.
Niassi was a chieftain of the inner circle of the most powerful demons. Shadar beliefs, being heretical Vehdna, include a posthumous, punitive Hell but also definitely include the possibility of a Gunni-like Hell on earth, in life, managed by demons in Niassi’s employ, laid on for the particularly wicked. Despite understanding that they were being taunted, the Greys were rocked. This was something new. This was an attack from an unanticipated and sensitive direction. And it came on top of ever more potent rumors associating the Greys with vile rites supposedly practiced by the Protector.
Children disappear. Reason suggests this is inevitable and unavoidable in a city so vast and overcrowded, even if there is not one evil man out there. Babies vanish by wandering off and getting lost. And horrible things do happen to good people. A clever, sick rumor can reassign the numb evil of chance to the premeditated malice of people no one ever trusted anyway.
Memory becomes selective.
We do not mind a bit lying about our enemies.
Tobo yelled something insulting. I started to pull him away, dragging him toward our den. Others began to curse and mock the Greys. Tobo threw a stone that hit a Grey’s turban.
It was too dark for them to make out faces. They began to unlimber bamboo wands. The mood of the crowd turned ugly. I could not help but suspect that there was more to the devil display than had met the eye. I knew our tame wizards. And I knew that Taglians do not lose control easily. It takes a great deal of patience and self-control for so many people to live in such unnaturally tight proximity.
I looked around for crows, fluttering bats, or anything else that might be spies for the Protector. After nightfall all our risks soar. We cannot see what might be watching. I held onto Tobo’s arm. “You shouldn’t have done that. It’s dark enough for shadows to be out.”
He was not impressed. “Goblin will be happy. He spent a long time on that. And it worked perfectly.”
The Greys blew whistles, summoning reinforcements.
A fourth button released its smoke ghost. We missed the show. I dragged Tobo through all the shadow traps between the excitement and our headquarters. He would be explaining to some uncles soon. Those for whom paranoia remains a way of life will be those who will be around to savor the Company’s many revenges. Tobo needed more instruction. His behavior could have been exploited by a clever adversary.
Sahra summoned me as soon as we arrived, not to chastise me for letting Tobo take stupid risks but to observe as she launched her next move. It might be time Tobo walked into something that would scare some sense into him. Life underground is unforgiving. It seldom gives you more than one chance. Tobo had to understand that in his heart.
After Sahra grilled me about events outside, she made sure Goblin and One-Eye were acquainted with her displeasure, too. Tobo was not there to defend himself.
Goblin and One-Eye were not cowed. No forty-something slip of a lass could overawe those two antiques. Besides, they put Tobo up to half his mischief.
Sahra said, “I’ll raise Murgen now.” She seemed unsure about that. She had not consulted Murgen much recently. We all wondered why. She and Murgen were a genuine romantic love match straight out of legend, with all the appurtenances seen in the timeless stories, including gods defied, parents disappointed, desperate separations and reunions, intrigues by enemies and so forth. It remained only for one of them to go down into the realm of the dead to rescue the other. And Murgen was tucked away in a nice cold underground hell right now, courtesy of the mad sorceress Soulcatcher. He and all the Captured lived on, in stasis, beneath the plain of glittering stone, in a place and situation known to us only because Sahra could conjure Murgen’s spirit.
Could the problem be the stasis? Sahra got a day older every day. Murgen did not. Had she begun to fear she would be older than his mother before we freed the Captured?
Sadly, after years of study, I realize that most history may really pivot on personal considerations like that, not on the pursuit of ideals dark or shining.
Long ago Murgen learned to leave his flesh while he slept. He retained some of that ability but, sadly, it was diminished by the supernatural constraints of his captivity. He could do nothing outside the cavern of the ancients without being summoned forth by Sahra—or, conceivably, chillingly, by any other necromancer who knew how to reach him.
Murgen’s ghost was the ultimate spy. Outside our circle none but Soulcatcher could detect his presence. Murgen informed us of our enemies’ every plot—those that we suspected strongly enough to ask Sahra to investigate. The process was cumbersome and limited but still, Murgen constituted our most potent weapon. We could not survive without him.
And Sahra was ever more reluctant to call him up.
God knows, it is hard to keep believing. Many of our brothers have lost their faith and have drifted away, vanishing into the chaos of the empire. Some may be rejuvenated once we have had a flashy success or two.
The years have been painful for Sahra. They cost her three children, an agony no loving parent should have to bear. She lost their father as well but suffered little by that deprivation. No one who remembered the man spoke well of him. She suffered with the rest of us during the siege of Jaicur.
Maybe Sahra—and the entire Nyueng Bao people—had angered Ghanghesha. Or maybe the god with the several elephant heads just enjoyed a cruel prank at the expense of his worshipers. Certainly Kina got a chuckle out of pulling lethal practical jokes on her devotees.
Goblin and One-Eye were not usually present when Sahra raised Murgen. She did not need their help. Her powers were narrow but strong, and those two could be a distraction even when they tried to behave.
Those antiques being there told me something unusual was afoot. And old they are, almost beyond reckoning. Their skills sustain them. One-Eye, if the Annals do not lie, is on the downhill side of two hundred. His youthful sidekick lags less than a century behind.
Neither is a big man. Which is being generous. Both are shorter than me. And never were taller, even long before they became dried-up old relics. Which was probably when they were about fifteen. I cannot imagine One-Eye ever having been anything but old. He must have been born old. And wearing the ugliest, filthiest black hat that ever existed.
Maybe One-Eye goes on forever because of the curse of that hat. Maybe the hat uses him as its steed and depends on him for its survival.
That crusty, stinking glob of felt rag will hit the nearest fire before One-Eye’s corpse finishes bouncing. Everyone hates it.
Goblin, in particular, loathes that hat. He mentions it whenever he and One-Eye get into a squabble, which is about as often as they see one another.
One-Eye is small and black and wrinkled. Goblin is small and white and wrinkled. He has a face like a dried toad’s.
One-Eye mentions that whenever they get into a squabble, which is about as often as there is an audience but nobody to get between them.
They strain to be on their best behavior around Sahra, though. The woman has a gift. She brings out the best in people. Except her mother. Though the Troll is much worse away from her daughter.
Lucky us, we do not see Ky Gota much. Her joints hurt her too bad. Tobo helps care for her, our cynical exploitation of his special immunity from her vitriol. She dotes on the boy—even if his father was foreign slime.
Sahra told me, “These two claim they’ve found a more effective way to materialize Murgen. So you can communicate directly.” Usually Sahra had to talk for Murgen after she raised him up. I do not have a psychic ear.
I said, “If you bring him across strong enough so the rest of us can see and hear him, then Tobo ought to be here, too. He’s suddenly got a lot of questions about his father.”
Sahra peered at me oddly. I was saying something but she did not get what I meant.
“Boy ought to know his old man,” One-Eye rasped. He stared at Goblin, waiting to be contradicted by a man who did not know his. That was their custom. Pick a fight and never mind trivia like facts or common sense. The debate about whether or not they were worth the trouble they caused went back for generations.
This time Goblin abstained. He would make his rebuttal when Sahra was not around to embarrass him with an appeal to reason.
Sahra nodded to One-Eye. “But first we have to see if your scheme really works.”
One-Eye began to puff up. Somebody dared suggest that his sorcery needed field-testing? Come on! Forget the record! This time—
I told him, “Don’t start.”
Time had caught up with One-Eye. His memory was no longer reliable. And lately he tended to nod off in the middle of things. Or to forget what had gotten him exercised when he roared off on a rant. Sometimes he ended up contradicting himself.
He was a shadow of the dried-up old relic he was when first I met him, though he got around under his own power still. But halfway through any journey, he was likely to forget where he was bound. Occasionally that was good, him being One-Eye, but mostly it was a pain. Tobo usually got the job of keeping him headed in the right direction when it mattered. One-Eye doted on the kid, too.
The little wizard’s increasing fragility did make it easier to keep him inside, away from the temptations of the city. One moment of indiscretion could kill us all. And One-Eye never quite caught on to what it meant to be discreet.
Goblin chuckled as One-Eye subsided. I suggested, “Could you two concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing?” I was haunted by the dread that one day One-Eye would doze off in the midst of a deadly spell and leave us all up to our ears in demons or bloodsucking insects distraught about having been plucked from some swamp a thousand miles away. “This is important.”
“It’s always important,” Goblin grumbled. “Even when it’s just ‘Goblin, give me a hand here, I’m too lazy to polish the silver myself,’ they make it sound like the world’s about to end. Always important? Hmmph!”
“I see you’re in a good mood tonight.”
“Gralk!”
One-Eye heaved himself out of his chair. Leaning on his cane, muttering unflattering remarks about me, he shuffled over to Sahra. He had forgotten I was female. He was less unpleasant when he remembered, though I expect no special treatment because of that unhappy chance of birth. One-Eye became dangerous in a whole new way the day he adopted that cane. He used it to swat people. Or to trip them. He was always falling asleep between here and there but you never knew for sure if his nap was the real thing. That cane might dart out to tangle your legs if he was pretending.
The dread we all shared was that One-Eye would not last much longer. Without him, our chances to continue avoiding detection would plummet. Goblin would try hard but he was just one small-time wizard. Our situation offered work for more than two in their prime.
“Start, woman,” One-Eye rasped. “Goblin, you worthless sack of beetle snot, would you get that stuff over here? I don’t want to hang around here all night.”
Sahra had had a table set up for them. She used no props herself. At a fixed time she would concentrate on Murgen. She usually made contact quickly. At her time of the month, when her sensitivity went down, she would sing in Nyueng Bao. Unlike some of my Company brothers, I have a poor ear for languages. Nyueng Bao mostly eludes me. Her songs seem to be lullabies. Unless the words have double meanings. Which is entirely possible. Uncle Doj talks in riddles all the time but insists he makes perfect sense if we would just listen.
Uncle Doj is not around much. Thank God. He has his own agenda—though even he does not seem clear on what that is anymore. The world keeps changing on him, not in ways he likes.
Goblin brought a sack of objects without challenging One-Eye’s foul manners. He deferred to One-Eye more lately, if only for efficiency’s sake. He wasted no time making his opinions known if work was not involved, though.
Even though they were cooperating, laying out their tools, they began bickering about the placement of every instrument. I wanted to paddle them like they were four-year-olds.
Sahra began singing. She had a beautiful voice. It should not have been buried this way. Strictly speaking, she was not employing necromancy. She was not laying an absolute compulsion on Murgen, nor was she conjuring his shade—Murgen was still alive out there. But his spirit could escape his tomb when summoned.
I wished the other Captured could be called up, too. Especially the Captain. We needed inspiration.
A cloud of dust formed slowly between Goblin and One-Eye, who stood on opposite sides of the table. No, it was not dust. Nor was it smoke. I stuck a finger in, tasted. That was a fine, cool, water mist. Goblin told Sahra, “We’re ready.”
She changed tone. She began to sound almost wheedling. I could pick out even fewer words.
Murgen’s head materialized between the wizards, wavering like a reflection on a rippling pond. I was startled, not by the sorcery but by Murgen’s appearance. He looked just like I remembered him, without one new line in his face. None of the rest of us looked the same.
Sahra had begun to look something like her mother had back in Jaicur. Not as heavy. Not with the strange, rolling waddle caused by problems of the joints. But her beauty was going fast. In her, that had been a wonder, stretching on way past the usual early, swift-fading characteristic of Nyueng Bao women. She did not talk about it but it preyed upon her. She had her vanity. And she deserved it.
Time is the most wicked of all villains.
Murgen was not happy about being called up. I feared he suffered the malaise afflicting Sahra. He spoke. And I had no trouble hearing him, though his words were an ethereal whisper.
“I was dreaming. There is a place . . . ” His irritation faded. Pale horror replaced it. And I knew he had been dreaming in the place of bones he described in his own Annals. “A white crow . . . ” We had a problem indeed if he preferred a drift through Kina’s dreamscapes to a glimpse of life.
Sahra told him, “We’re ready to strike. The Radisha ordered the Privy Council convened just a little while ago. See what they’re doing. Make sure Swan is there.” Murgen faded from the mist. Sahra looked sad. Goblin and One-Eye began excoriating the Standardbearer for running away.
“I saw him,” I told them. “Perfectly. I heard him, too. Exactly like I always imagined a ghost would talk.”
Grinning, Goblin told me, “That’s because you hear what you expect to hear. You weren’t really listening with your ears, you know.”
One-Eye sneered. He never explained anything to anybody. Unless maybe to Gota if she caught him sneaking back in in the middle of the night. Then he would have a story as convoluted as the history of the Company itself.
Sounding like a woman pretending not to be bitter, Sahra said, “You can bring Tobo in. We know there won’t be any explosions or fires, and you melted only two holes through the tabletop.”
“A base canard!” One-Eye proclaimed. “That happened only because Frogface here—”
Sahra ignored him. “Tobo can record what Murgen has to say. So Sleepy can use it later. It’s time for us to turn into other people. Send a messenger if Murgen finds out anything dangerous.”
That was the plan. I was even less enthusiastic about it now. I wanted to stay and talk to my old friend. But this thing was bigger than a bull session. Bigger than finding out if Bucket was keeping well.
Murgen drifted through the Palace like a ghost. He found that thought vaguely amusing, though nothing made him laugh anymore. A decade and a half in the grave destroyed a man’s sense of humor.
The rambling stone pile of the Palace never changed. Well, it got dustier. And it needed repairs ever more desperately. Credit that to Soulcatcher, who did not like having hordes of people underfoot. Most of the original vast professional staff had been dismissed and replaced by occasional casual labor.
The Palace crowned a sizable hill. Each ruler of Taglios, generation after generation, tagged on an addition, not because the room was needed but because that was a memorial tradition. Taglians joked that in another thousand years there would be no city, just endless square miles of Palace. Mostly in ruin.
The Radisha Drah, having accepted that her brother, the Prahbrindrah Drah, had been lost during the Shadowmaster wars, and galvanized by the threat of the Protector’s displeasure, had proclaimed herself head of state. Traditionalists in the ecclesiastical community did not want a woman in the role, but the world knew this particular woman had been doing the job practically forever anyway. Her weaknesses existed mainly in the ambitions of her critics. Depending who did the pontificating, she had made one of two great mistakes. Or possibly both. One would be betraying the Black Company when it was a well-known fact that nobody ever profited from such treachery. And the other error, of particular popularity with the senior priests, would be that she had erred in employing the Black Company in the first place. The terror of the Shadowmasters being expunged in the interim, by agency of the Company, did not present a counterargument of any current merit.
Unhappy people shared the meeting chamber with the Radisha. The eye automatically went to the Protector first. Soulcatcher looked exactly as she always had, slimly androgynous, yet sensual, in black leather, a black mask, a black helmet and black leather gloves. She occupied a seat slightly to the left of and behind the Radisha, within a curtain of shadow. She did not put herself forward but there was no doubt who made the ultimate decisions. Every hour of every day the Radisha found another reason to regret having let this particular camel shove her nose into the tent. The cost of having tried to get around fulfilling an unhappy promise to the Black Company was insupportable already.
Surely, keeping her promises could not have been so painful. What possibly could have happened that would be worse than what she suffered now had she and her brother helped the Captain find the way to Khatovar?
At desks to either hand, facing one another from fifteen feet, stood scribes who struggled valiantly to record anything said. One group served the Radisha. The other was in Soulcatcher’s employ. Once upon a time there had been disagreements after the fact about decisions made during a Privy Council meeting.
A table twelve feet long and four wide faced the two women. Four men sat behind its inadequate bulwark. Willow Swan was situated at the left end. His once-marvelous golden hair had gone grey and stringy. At higher elevations, it had grown extremely sparse. Swan was a foreigner. Swan was a bundle of nerves. Swan had a job he did not want but could not give up. Swan was riding the tiger.
Willow Swan headed up the Greys. In the public eye. In reality, he was barely a figurehead. If his mouth opened, the words that came out were pure Soulcatcher. Popular hatred deservedly belonging to the Protector settled upon Willow Swan instead.
Seated with Swan were three running-dog senior priests who owed their standing to the Protector’s favor. They were small men in large jobs. Their presence at Council meetings was a matter of form. They would not take part in any actual debate, though they might receive instructions. Their function was to agree with and support Soulcatcher if she happened to speak. Significantly, all three represented Gunni cults. Though the Protector used the Greys to enforce her will, the Shadar had no voice in the Council. Neither did the Vehdna. That minority simmered continuously because Soulcatcher arrogated to herself much that properly applied only to God, the Vehdna being hopelessly monotheistic and stubborn about keeping it that way.
Swan was a good man inside his fear. He spoke for the Shadar when he could.
There were two other men, of more significance, present. They were positioned behind tall desks located back of the table. They perched atop tall stools and peered down at everyone like a pair of lean old vultures. Both antedated the coming of the Protector, who had not yet found a suitable excuse for getting rid of either, though they irritated her frequently.
The right-hand desk belonged to the Inspector-General of the Records, Chandra Gokhale. His was a deceptive title. He was no glorified clerk. He controlled finances and most public works. He was ancient, hairless, lean as a snake and twice as mean. He owed his appointment to the Radisha’s father. Until the latter days of the Shadowmaster wars, his office had been a minor one. The wars caused that office’s influence and power to expand. And Chandra Gokhale was never shy about snatching at any strand of bureaucratic power that came within reach. He was a staunch supporter of the Radisha and a steadfast enemy of the Black Company. He was also the sort of weasel who would change all that in an instant if he saw sufficient advantage in so doing.
The man behind the desk on the left was more sinister. Arjana Drupada was a priest of Rhavi-Lemna’s cult but there was not one ounce of brotherly love in the man. His official title was Purohita, which meant, more or less, that he was the Royal Chaplain. In actuality, he was the true voice of the priesthoods at court. They had forced him upon the Radisha at a time she was making desperate concessions in order to gain support. Like Gokhale, Drupada was more interested in control than he was in doing what was best for Taglios. But he was not an entirely cynical manipulator. His frequent moral bulls got up the Protector’s nose more often even than the constant, quibbling financial caveats of the Inspector-General. Physically, Drupada was known for his shock of wild white hair. That clung to his head like a mad haystack, the good offices of a comb being completely unfamiliar.
Only Gokhale and Drupada seemed unaware that their days had to be numbered. The Protector of All the Taglias was not enamored of them at all.
The final member of the Council was absent. Which was not unusual. The Great General, Mogaba, preferred to be in the field, harrying those designated as his enemies. He viewed the infighting in the Palace with revulsion.
None of which mattered at the moment. There had been Incidents. There were Witnesses to be Brought Forward. The Protector was not pleased.
Willow Swan rose. He beckoned a Grey sergeant out of the gloom behind the two old men. “Ghopal Singh.” Nobody remarked on the unusual name. Possibly he was a convert. Stranger things were happening. “Singh’s patrol watches an area immediately outside the Palace, on the north side. This afternoon one of his patrolmen discovered a prayer wheel mounted on one of the memorial posts in front of the north entrance. Twelve copies of this sutra were attached to the arms of the wheel.”
Swan made a show of turning a small paper card so the light would fall upon the writing there. The lettering appeared to be in the ecclesiastical style. Swan failed to appreciate his own ignorance of Taglian letters, though. He was holding the card inverted. He did not, however, make any mistakes when he reported what the prayer card had to say.
“Rajadharma. The Duty of Kings. Know you: Kingship is a trust. The King is the most exalted and conscientious servant of the people.”
Swan did not recognize the verse. It was so ancient that some scholars attributed it to one or another of the Lords of Light in the time when the gods still handed down laws to the fathers of men. But the Radisha Drah knew it. The Purohita knew it. Someone outside the Palace had leveled a chiding finger.
Soulcatcher understood it, too. Its object, she said, “Only a Bhodi monk would presume to chastise this house. And they are very few.” That pacifistic, moralistic cult was young and still very small. And it had suffered during the war years almost as terribly as had the followers of Kina. The Bhodi refused to defend themselves. “I want the man who did this.” The voice she used was that of a quarrelsome old man.
“Uh . . . ” Swan said. It was not wise to argue with the Protector but that was an assignment beyond the capacities of the Greys.
Among Soulcatcher’s more frightening characteristics was her seeming ability to read minds. She could not, really, but never insisted that she could not. In this instance she found it convenient to let people believe what they wanted. She told Swan, “Being Bhodi, he will surrender himself. No search will be necessary.”
“Hunh?”
“There is a tree, sometimes called the Bhodi Tree, in the village of Semchi. It is a very old and highly honored tree. The Bhodi Enlightened One made his reputation loafing in the shade of this tree. The Bhodi consider it their most holy shrine. Tell them I will make kindling wood out of the Bhodi Tree unless the man who rigged that prayer wheel reports to me. Soon.” Soulcatcher employed the voice of a petty, vindictive old woman.
Murgen made a mental note to send Sahra a suggestion that the guilty man be prevented from reaching the Protector. Destruction of a major holy place would create thousands of new enemies for Soulcatcher.
Willow Swan started to speak but Soulcatcher interrupted. “I do not care if they hate me, Swan. I care that they do what I tell them to do when I tell them to do it. The Bhodi will not raise a fist against me, anyway. That would put a stain on their kharma.”
A cynical woman, the Protector.
“Get on with it, Swan.”
Swan sighed. “Several more of those smoke shows appeared tonight. One was much bigger than any seen before. Once again the Black Company sigil was part of all of them.” He brought forward another Shadar witness, who told of being stoned by the mob but did not mention the demon Niassi.
The news was no surprise. It was one of the reasons the Council had been convened. With no real passion, the Radisha demanded, “How could that happen? Why can’t you stop it? You have men on every street corner. Chansdra?” She appealed to the man who knew just how much it cost to put all those Greys out there.
Gokhale inclined his head imperially.
As long as the Radisha did the questioning, Swan’s nerve stood up. She could not hurt him in ways he had not been hurt before. Not the way the Protector could. He asked, “Have you been out there? You should disguise yourself and go. Like Saragoz in the fairy tale. Every street is clogged with people. Thousands sleep where others have to walk over them. Breezeways and alleyways are choked with human waste. Sometimes the press is so thick you could murder somebody ten feet from one of my men and never be noticed. The people playing these games aren’t stupid. If they’re really Company survivors, they’re especially not stupid. They’ve already survived everything ever thrown at them. They’re using the crowds for cover exactly the way they’d use the rocks and trees and bushes out in the countryside. They don’t wear uniforms. They don’t stand out. They’re not outlanders anymore. If you really want to nail them, put out a proclamation saying they all have to wear funny red hats.” Swan’s nerve had peaked high. That was not directed at the Radisha. Soulcatcher, speaking through her, had issued several proclamations memorable for their absurdity. “Being steeped in Company doctrine, they wouldn’t be anywhere around when the smoke emblems actually formed. So far, we haven’t even figured out where they come from.”
Soulcatcher unleashed a deep-throated grunt. It said she doubted that Swan could figure out much of anything. His nerve guttered like a dying lamp. He began to sweat. He knew he walked a tightrope with the madwoman. He was tolerated like a naughty pet for reasons clear only to the sorceress, who sometimes did things for no better reason than a momentary whim. Which could reverse itself an instant later.
He could be replaced. Others had been. Soulcatcher did not care about facts, insurmountable obstacles or mere difficulties. She cared about results.
Swan offered, “On the plus side there’s no evidence, even from our most eager informants, that suggests this activity is anything but a low-grade nuisance. Even if Black Company survivors are behind it—and even with tonight’s escalation.”
Soulcatcher said, “They’ll never be anything but a nuisance.” Her voice was that of a plucky teenage girl. “They’re going through the motions. They lost heart when I buried all their leaders.” That was all spoken in a powerful male voice, by someone accustomed to unquestioning obedience. But those words amounted to an oblique admission that Company members might, after all, still be alive, and the final few words included in a rising inflection betraying potential uncertainty. There were questions about what had happened on the plain of glittering stone that Soulcatcher herself could not answer. “I’ll worry when they call them back from the dead.”
She did not know.
In truth, little had gone according to anyone’s plan out there. Her escape, with Swan, had been pure luck. But Soulcatcher was the sort who believed Fortune’s bright countenance was her born due.
“Probably true. And only marginally significant if I understood your summons.”
“There are Other Forces Afoot,” Soulcatcher said. This voice was a sybil’s, rife with portent.
“The Deceivers have been heard from,” the Radisha announced, causing a general startled reaction that included the disembodied spy. “Lately we’ve had reports from Dejagore, Meldermhai, Ghoja and Danjil about men having been slain in classic Strangler fashion.”
Swan had recovered. “In classic Strangler work, only the killers know that it happened. They aren’t assassins. The bodies would go through their religious rites and be buried in some holy place.”
The Radisha ignored his remarks. “Today there was a strangling here. In Taglios. Perhule Khoji was the victim. He died in a joy house, an institution specializing in young girls. Such places aren’t supposed to exist anymore, yet they persist.” That was an accusation. The Greys were charged with crushing that sort of exploitation. But the Greys worked for the Protector and the Protector did not care. “I gather that anything you can imagine can still be found for sale.”
Some people blamed a national moral collapse on the Black Company. Others blamed the ruling family. A few even blamed the Protector. Fault did not matter, nor did the fact that most of the nastier evils had existed almost since the first mud hut went up alongside the river. Taglios had changed. And desperate people will do what they must to survive. Only a fool would expect the results to be pretty.
Swan asked, “Who was this Perhule Khoji?” He glared over his shoulder. He had a scribe of his own recording the meeting back there in the darkness. Plainly, he wondered why the Radisha was familiar with this particular murder when he was not. “Sounds like the guy got something he had coming. You sure it wasn’t just his adventure with the little girls gone bad?”
“Quite possibly Khoji did deserve what happened,” the Radisha said with bitter sarcasm. “He was Vehdna, so he’ll be talking it over with his god about now, I would imagine. His morals don’t interest us, Swan. His position does. He was one of the Inspector-General’s leading assistants. He collected taxes in the Checca and east waterfront areas. His death will cause problems for months. His areas were some of our best revenue producers.”
“Maybe somebody who owed—”
“His child companion survived. And he did call for help. The sort of men who handle troublemakers in those places arrived while it was happening. Stranglers did it. It was an initiation killing. The Strangler candidate was inept. Nevertheless, with the help of his arm-holders, he managed to break Khoji’s neck.”
“So they were captured.”
“No. The one they call Daughter of Night was there. Overseeing the initiation.”
So the strong-arm guys would have been scared witless once they recognized her. No Gunni or Shadar wanted to believe the Daughter of Night was just a nasty young woman, not a mythic figure. Few Taglians of those religions would find the courage to interfere with her.
“All right,” Swan conceded. “That would mean real Stranglers. But how did they recognize the Daughter of Night?”
Exasperated, Soulcatcher snapped, “She told them who she was, you ninny! ‘I am the Daughter of Night. I am the Child of Darkness Forthcoming. Come to my mother or become prey for the beasts of devastation in the Year of the Skulls.’ Typically portentous stuff.” Soulcatcher’s voice had become the mid-range monotone of an educated skeptic. “Not to mention that she was vampire-white and a prettier duplicate of my sister as a child.”
The Daughter of Night feared no one and nothing. She knew that her spiritual parent, Kina the Destroyer, the Dark Mother, would shelter her—even though that goddess had stirred not at all for more than a decade. Rumors about the Daughter of Night had run through the underside of society for years. A lot of people believed she was what she claimed. Which only added to her power over the popular imagination.
Another rumor, losing currency with time, credited the Black Company with having forestalled Kina’s Year of the Skulls back about the time the Taglian state chose to betray its hired protectors.
The Deceivers and Company alike had a psychological strength vastly exceeding their numbers. Being social ghosts made both groups more frightening.
What signified most was that the Daughter of Night had come to Taglios itself. And that she had shown herself publicly. And where the Daughter of Night went, the chieftain of all Deceivers, the living legend, the living saint of the Stranglers, Narayan Singh, surely followed like a faithful jackal and worked his evils, too.
Murgen considered aborting his mission to warn Sahra to call everything off till this news could be assessed. But it would be too late to stop everything now, whatever else was happening.
Narayan Singh was the most hated enemy of the Black Company still standing upright. Not Mogaba, nor even Soulcatcher, who was an old, old adversary, were as eagerly hunted as was Narayan Singh. Nor did Singh harbor any love for the Company. He had gotten himself caught once. And had spent a long time being made uncomfortable by people overburdened with malice. He had debts he would love to collect, should it please his goddess to permit that.
The Privy Council, as was customary, degenerated into nagging and finger-pointing soon afterward, with the Purohita and Inspector-General both maneuvering to get a rung up on one another, and maybe on Swan. The Purohita could count on the backing of the three tame priests—unless Soulcatcher had other ideas. The Inspector-General usually enjoyed the support of the Radisha.
These squabbles were generally prolonged but trivial, more symbol than substance. The Protector would let nothing she disapproved of come out of them.
As Murgen started to leave, his presence never having been detected, two Royal Guards rushed into the chamber. They headed for Willow Swan, though he was not their captain. Perhaps their news was something they did not care to share with the unpredictable Protector, their official commander. Swan listened for a moment, then slammed a fist onto the tabletop. “Damn it! I knew it had to be more than a nuisance.” He bulled past the Purohita, giving the man a look of contempt. There was no love lost there.
It has started already, Murgen thought. Back to Do Trang’s warehouse, then. He could prevent nothing already in motion, but he could get word to those still at headquarters so they could get after Narayan and the Daughter of Night as soon as possible.
Sahra changed faces as easily as an actor swaps masks. Sometimes she was the cruel, cunning, coldly calculating necromancer who conspired with the Captured. Sometimes she was just the near-widow of the Standardbearer and official Annalist of the Company. Sometimes she was just Tobo’s doting mother. And whenever she went out into the city, she was Minh Subredil, another being entirely.
Minh Subredil was an outcast, the half-breed by-blow of a priest of Khusa and a Nyueng Bao whore. Minh Subredil knew more about her antecedents than did half the people on the streets of Taglios. She talked to herself about them all the time. She would tell anyone she could trap into listening.
Minh Subredil was a woman so pathetic, so shunned by fortune, that she was an old, bent thing decades before her time. Her signature, which made her recognizable to people who never had encountered her, was the small statue of Ghanghesha she carried everywhere. Ghanghesha, who was the god in charge of good luck in Gunni and some Nyueng Bao belief. Minh Subredil talked to Ghanghesha when there was nobody else who would listen.
Widowed, Minh Subredil supported her one child by doing scut-work day labor at the Palace. Each morning well before dawn she joined the assembly of unfortunates who gathered at the northern servants’ postern in hopes of gaining work. Sometimes she was joined by her dead husband’s retarded sister Sawa. Sometimes she brought her daughter, though seldom anymore. The girl was getting old enough to be noticed.
Subassistant housekeeper Jaul Barundandi would come out and announce the number of positions available for the day, then would select the people to fill them. Barundandi always chose Minh Subredil because, though she was too ugly to demand sexual favors of, she could be counted upon to kick back a generous percentage of her salary. Minh Subredil was a desperate creature.
Barundandi was amused by Subredil’s omnipresent statue. A devout Gunni of the cult of Khusa, he often included in his prayers a petition that he be spared Subredil’s sort of luck. He would never admit it to his henchmen but he did favor Subredil some because of her poor choice of a father. Like most villains, he was wicked only most of the time and mainly in small-minded ways.
Subredil, as Ky Sahra, never prayed. Ky Sahra had no use for gods. Unaware of his tiny soft spot, she did have in mind a destiny for Jaul Barundandi. When the time came. The subassistant would have ample opportunity to regret his predations.
There would be many, many regrets, spanning the length and breadth of the Taglian empire. When the time came.
We went out through the maze of confusion and distraction spells Goblin and One-Eye have spent so many years weaving throughout the neighborhood, a thousand layers of gossamer deception so subtle only the Protector herself might notice them. If she was looking. But Soulcatcher does not roam the streets looking for enemy hideouts. She has the Greys and her shadows and bats and crows to do that work. And those are too dim to notice that they are being guided away from or subtly ushered through the area in a manner that left it seeming no more remarkable than any other. The two little wizards spent most of their time maintaining and expanding their maze of confusion. People not trusted no longer got within two hundred yards of our headquarters. Not without being led.
We had no trouble. We wore strands of yarn tied around our left wrists. These enchanted loops softened the confusion spells. They let us see the truth.
Thus we often knew what the Palace intended before plans went into motion. Minh Subredil, or sometimes Sawa, listened in while the plans were being made.
I muttered, “Isn’t it awfully early for us to be out?”
“Yes. But there will be others already there when we take our place.” There are a lot of desperate people in Taglios. Some will camp as near the Palace as the Greys will allow.
We did reach the Palace area hours earlier than ever before. But there were rounds of the darkness to make, brothers of the Company to visit in their hiding places. In each instance the voice of the witch came out of the wreckage that was Minh Subredil. Sawa tagged along behind and drooled out of the corner of her twisted mouth.
Most of the men did not recognize us. They did not expect to do so. They expected to receive a code word from those in charge that would expose us as messengers. They got that word. Chances were good they were in some disguise themselves. Every Company brother was supposed to create several characters he could assume in public. Some did better than others. The worst were called upon to risk the least.
Subredil glanced at the fragment of moon sneaking a peek through a crack in the clouds. “Minutes to go.”
I grunted, nervous. It had been a while since I had been involved in anything directly dangerous. Other than wandering around the Palace or going to the library, of course. But nobody was likely to stick me with sharp objects there.
“Those clouds look like the kind that come right before the rainy season.” If they were, that season would be early. Which was not a pleasant thought. During the rainy season that is what it does, in torrents, every day. The weather can be truly ferocious, with dramatic temperature shifts and hailstorms, and thunder like all the gods of the Gunni pantheon are drunk and brawling. But mainly I do not like the heat.
Taglians divide their year into six seasons. Only during the one they call winter is there any sustained relief from the heat.
Subredil asked, “Would Sawa even notice the clouds?” She was a stickler for staying in character. In a city ruled by darkness you never knew what eyes watched from the shadows, what unseen ears were pricked to overhear.
“Uhm.” That was about as intelligent a thing as Sawa ever said.
“Come.” Subredil took my arm, guiding me, which was what she always did when we went to work at the Palace. We approached the main north entrance, which was only two-score yards from the service postern. A single torch burned there. It was supposed to show the Guards who might be outside. But it was situated so poorly it only helped them see the honest people. As we drew closer, someone who had sneaked in along the foot of the wall jumped up and enveloped the torch in a sack of wet rawhide.
The crude, startled remark of one of the guards carried clearly. Now, would he be incautious enough to come see what had happened?
There was no reason to believe he would not. The Royal Guards had had no trouble for almost a generation.
The sliver of moon vanished behind a cloud. As it went, something moved at the Palace entrance.
Now came the tricky part, making it look like we screwed up a sure thing by going in right at a shift change. A sound of scuffling. A startled cry. Somebody else demanding what was going on. A rattle and clatter as people rushed the gate. Clang of metal. A scream or two. Whistles. Then within fifteen seconds, answering whistles from several directions. Exactly according to plan. In moments the whistles from the Palace entrance became shrilly desperate.
When first the idea was broached, there had been serious debate about whether or not the attack should be the real thing. It seemed likely taking the entrance would be easy. A strong faction, made up of men tired of waiting, just wanted to bust in and kill everybody. While that might have offered a certain amount of satisfaction, there was little chance Soulcatcher could be destroyed, and such wholesale murder would do nothing to liberate the Captured, which was supposed to be our primary mission. I had convinced everyone that we needed to launch an old-fashioned, Annals-based game of misdirection. Make the enemy think we were up to one thing when actually we wanted to accomplish something else entirely. Get them running hard to head us off in one direction when we were following a completely different course.
With Goblin and One-Eye now so old, our deceits have to be increasingly intellectual. Those two do not have the strength or stamina to create and maintain massive battlefield illusions. And, though willing to share their secrets, they had not been able to arm Sahra for the struggle. Her talent did not extend in that direction.
The first Greys charged out of the darkness, into the ambushes waiting to receive them. For a while it was a vicious slaughter. But, somehow, a few managed to get through to support the Guards barely hanging on at the Palace entrance.
Subredil and I moved into position against the foot of the wall, between the big entrance and the servants’ postern. Subredil hugged her Ghanghesha and whimpered. Sawa clung to Subredil and drooled and made strange little frightened noises.
Though the attackers piled up heaps of Greys, they never quite managed to break through the defense of the entry-way. Then help arrived from inside. Willow Swan and a platoon of Royal Guards burst through the gateway. The attackers scattered instantly. So fast, in fact, that Swan screeched, “Hold up! There’s something wrong!”
The night lit up. The air filled with hurtling fireballs. Their like had not been seen since the heavy fighting at the end of the Shadowmaster wars. Lady had created those weapons in vast numbers and a few had been husbanded carefully since then. The men employing them had not been involved in the attack on the entrance. They clung to the fire plan, which counted on everyone being able to pick Swan out from amongst the Guards and Greys.
His life depended on it.
Fire fell to the side of the group away from Subredil and me. Willow was afraid. When fire swiftly shifted to fall on the entry and cut him off, he was supposed to retreat toward the service entrance. Past us.
Good old Swan. He must have read my script. As his men were being torn apart by fireballs just yards away, he skittered along, hand against the wall, staying just steps ahead of destruction. Molten stone and chunks of burning flesh flew over his head and ours and I realized that I had underestimated the fury of my weapons, perhaps fatally. It was definitely a mistake to have committed so many.
Swan stumbled over Minh Subredil’s ankle. Somehow, when he hit the cobblestones, he found himself face-to-face with a drooling idiot. Who had a dagger’s point neatly positioned under his chin. “Don’t even breathe,” she whispered.
Fireballs hitting the Palace wall melted their way right in. The wooden gateway was on fire. There was plenty of light by which our brothers could see us signal that we had gotten our man. Fire became more accurate. The resistance to the Greys coming to help became less porous. A second apparent attack came forward. A couple of those brothers collected Swan. They kicked and cursed us. And took our weapons with them when they went away, part of a general retreat as the attack wave fled from no evident resistance.
As they disappeared into the darkness, the thing that we had feared most occurred.
Soulcatcher came out on the battlements above to see what was happening. Subredil and I knew because all fighting ceased within seconds once somebody spotted her. Then a storm of fireballs flashed her way.
We were lucky. She was sufficiently unprepared that she could do nothing but duck. Our brothers then did what they were supposed to do. They got the heck out of there. They got downhill and lost amongst the population before the Protector could release her bats and crows.
It was my belief that the activity would have all the nearby part of the city in an uproar within minutes. The men were supposed to help that along by launching absurd rumors. If they remained calm enough.
Subredil and Sawa moved two dozen yards closer to the servants’ postern. We had just settled down to drool and be held and whimper while we watched the corpses burn when a frightened voice demanded, “Minh Subredil. What are you doing here?”
Jaul Barundandi. Our boss. I did not look up. And Subredil did not respond until Barundandi stirred her with a toe and asked again, not unkindly. She told him, “We were going to be here early. Sawa needs to work bad.” She looked around. “Where are the others?”
There had been others. Four or five even more eager to be first in line. They had fled. That might mean trouble. No telling what they might have seen before they ran. An early stray fireball was supposed to have panicked and scattered them before Swan got to us but I could not recall that having happened.
Subredil turned more toward Barundandi. I held on to her tighter and whimpered. She patted my shoulder and murmured something indistinct. Barundandi seemed to buy it, particularly when Subredil discovered that one of her Ghanghesha’s trunks had broken off, and she began to cry and search our surroundings.
Several of Barundandi’s associates were out as well, looking around, asking one another what happened. The same thing was going on at the main entrance, where stunned Guards and sleep-fuddled functionaries asked one another what had happened and what they should do and, holy shit! some of those fires burned all the way through the wall and it was six or eight feet thick! Shadar from as far as a mile away were arriving, gathering dead and wounded Greys and also trying to figure out what had happened.
Jaul Barundandi’s voice gentled further. He beckoned his assistants. “Help these two inside. Be gentle. The high and the mighty may want to talk to them.”
I hoped my start did not give us away. I had counted on getting inside early but it had not occurred to me that anyone might be interested in what two near-untouchables might have seen.
I need not have worried. We were interviewed by a seriously distracted Guard sergeant who seemed to be going through the motions mainly as a sop to Jaul Barundandi. The subassistant had evidently suffered an overinspiration of ambition in thinking he could win favor by providing eyewitnesses to the tragedy.
His solicitude began to fade once he had little to gain. A few hours after we were taken inside, while excitement still gripped the Palace and a thousand outrageous rumors circulated, while leading Guardsmen and Greys kept bringing in more and more trusted armed men and sending out more and more spies to watch the regular soldiers in their barracks, just in case they were in on the attack somehow, Minh Subredil and her idiot sister-in-law were already hard at work. Barundandi had them cleaning the chamber where the Privy Council met. A huge mess had been left there. Somebody had lost her temper and had worked out her anger by tearing the place up.
Barundandi told us, “Expect to work very hard today, Minh Subredil. Few workers showed up this morning.” He sounded bitter. He would not garner much kickback because of the raid. It did not occur to him to be thankful he was still alive. “Is she all right?” He meant me. Sawa. I was still doing a credible job of shaking.
“She will manage as long as I stay close. It would not be good to put her anyplace where she cannot see me today.”
Barundandi grunted. “So be it. There’s work enough here. Just don’t get in anybody’s way.”
Minh Subredil bowed slightly. She was good at being unobtrusive. She seated me at a wide table about a dozen feet long, piled up lamps and candlesticks and whatnot that had gotten thrown around. I invoked Sawa’s narrow focus and went to work cleaning them. Subredil began cleaning floors and furniture.
People came and went, many of them important. None of them noticed us except the Inspector-General of the Records, Chandra Gokhale, who kicked Subredil irritably because she was scrubbing the floor where he wanted to walk.
Subredil got back onto her knees, bowing and begging pardon. Gokhale ignored her. She began cleaning up spilled water, showing no emotion whatsoever. Minh Subredil took that sort of thing. But I suspect Ky Sahra had just formed a definite opinion about which of our enemies should follow Willow Swan into captivity.
The Radisha appeared. The Protector was with her. They settled into their places. Jaul Barundandi appeared soon afterward, meaning to get us out of there. Sawa seemed to notice nothing. Her focus on a candlestick was too narrow. A tall Shadar captain bustled in. He announced, “Your Highness, the preliminary tally shows ninety-eight dead and one hundred twenty-six injured. Some of those will die from their wounds. Minister Swan hasn’t been found but many of the bodies are burned too badly to identify. Many that were hit by fireballs caught fire and burned like greasy torches.” The captain had trouble remaining calm. He was young. Chances were good he had not seen the consequences of battle before.
I kept working hard to shove myself way down deep into character. I had not been this close to Soulcatcher since she held me prisoner outside Kiaulune fifteen years ago. Those were not happy memories. I prayed she did not remember me.
I went all the way down into my safe place. I had not been there since my captivity. The hinges on the door were rusty. But I got inside and got comfortable while remaining Sawa. I had just enough attention left to catch most of what was happening around me. The Protector suddenly asked, “Who are these women?”
Barundandi fawned. “Pardon, Great Ones. Pardon. My fault. I did not know the chamber was to be used.”
“Answer the question, Housekeeper,” the Radisha ordered.
“Certainly, Great One.” Barundandi kowtowed halfway to the floor. “The woman scrubbing is Minh Subredil, a widow. The other is her idiot sister-in-law, Sawa. They are outside staff employed as part of the Protector’s charity program.”
Soulcatcher said, “I feel I have seen one or both of them before.”
Barundandi bowed deeply again. The attention frightened him. “Minh Subredil has worked here for many years, Protector. Sawa accompanies her when her mind is clear enough for her to accomplish repetitive tasks.”
I felt him trying to decide whether or not to volunteer the news that we had witnessed the morning’s attack from up close. I clung to my safe place so hard that I did not catch what happened during the next few minutes.
Barundandi chose not to volunteer us for questioning. Perhaps he reasoned that too intensive an attention paid to us might expose the fact that he was charging us half our feeble salaries for the right to work our hands into raw, aching crabs.
The Radisha finally told him, “Go away, Housekeeper. Let them work. The fate of the empire will not be decided here today.”
And Soulcatcher waved a gloved hand, shooing Barundandi out, but then halted him to demand, “What is that the woman has on the floor beside her?” Meaning Subredil, of course, since I was seated at the table.
“Uh? Oh. A Ghanghesha, Great One. The woman never goes anywhere without it. It’s an obsession with her. It—”
“Go away now.”
So it was that Sahra, at least, sat in on almost two hours of the innermost powers’ responses to our assault.
After a while I came forward again, enough to follow most of it. Couriers came and went. A picture of generally upright behavior by the army and people took shape. Which was to be expected. Neither had any real reason to rise up right now. Which was nothing but good news to the Radisha.
Positive intelligence just made the Protector more suspicious, though. The old cynic.
“No prisoners taken,” she said. “No corpses left behind. Quite possibly no serious casualties suffered. Nor any great risks endured, if you examine it closely. They fled as soon as there was a chance someone would hit back. What were they up to? What was their real purpose?”
Reasonably, Chandra Gokhale pointed out, “The attack appears to have been sustained with exceptional ferocity till you yourself appeared on the battlements. Only then did they run.”
The Shadar captain volunteered, “Several survivors and witnesses report that the bandits argued amongst themselves about your presence, Protector. It seems they expected you to be away from the Palace. Evidently the attack would not have been undertaken had they known you were here.”
One of my touches of misdirection. I hoped it did some good.
“That makes no sense. Where would they get that idea?” She did not expect an answer and did not wait for one. “Have you identified any of the burned bodies?”
“Only three, Protector. Most are barely recognizable as human.”
The Radisha asked, “Chandra, how bad was the physical damage? Do you have an assessment yet?”
“Yes, Radisha. It was bad. Extremely bad. The wall appears to have suffered some structural damage. The full extent is being determined right now. It’s certain to be a weak point for a while. You might consider putting up a wooden curtain-wall in front of what is going to become a construction area. And think hard about bringing in troops.”
“Troops?” the Protector demanded. “Why troops?” Her voice, long neutral, became suspicious. When you have no friends at all, paranoia is an even more natural outlook than it is for brothers of the Black Company.
“Because the Palace is too big to defend with the people you have here now. Even if you arm the household staff. An enemy doesn’t need to use any of the regular entrances. He could climb the outside wall where no one is watching and attack from inside.”
The Radisha said, “If he tried that, he’d need maps to get around. I’ve never seen anyone but Smoke, who was our court wizard a long time ago, who could get around this place without one. You have to have an instinct.”
The Inspector-General observed, “If the attack was undertaken by elements descended from the old Black Company—and the employment of fireball weapons would suggest some connection, even though we know that the Company was exterminated by the Protector—then they may have access to hallway maps created when the Liberator and his staff were quartered here.”
The Radisha insisted, “You can’t chart this place. I know. I’ve tried.”
Thank Goblin and One-Eye for that, Princess. Long, long ago the Captain had those two old men scatter confusion spells liberally, everywhere. There were things he had not wanted the Radisha to find. Things that remained hidden still, among them those ancient volumes of the Annals that supposedly explain the Company’s secret beginnings but which have been a complete disappointment so far. Minh Subredil knows how to get to them. Whenever she gets the chance, Minh Subredil tears out a few pages and smuggles them out to me. Then I sneak them into the library and when no one is watching, I translate them a few words at a time, looking for that one phrase that will show us how to open the way for the Captured.
Sawa cleaned brass and silver. Minh Subredil cleaned floor and furniture. The Privy Council and their associates came and went. The level of panic declined as no new attacks developed. Too bad we did not have the numbers to stir them up again every few hours.
Soulcatcher remained uncharacteristically quiet. She had known the Company longer than anyone but the Captain, Goblin and One-Eye, though from the outside. She would accept nothing at face value. Not yet.
I hoped she broke a mental sprocket trying to figure it out, though I feared she had already done so, because she kept wondering about the burned bodies and Willow Swan. Could I have planned so obviously that she was confused only because she kept looking for something beyond the kidnapping?
I finished the last candlestick. I did not look around, did not say anything, just sat there. It was difficult to focus my thinking away from the danger seated across the room when my fingers were not busy. I gave praise to God, silently, as I had learned was proper for a woman when I was little. Equal praise was due Sahra’s insistence on staying in character.
Both served me well.
At some point Jaul Barundandi came back. Under the eyes of the Great Ones, he was not an unkind boss. He told Subredil it was time to leave. Subredil bestirred Sawa. As I got to my feet, I made some sounds of distress.
“What is that?” Barundandi asked.
“She’s hungry. We haven’t eaten all day.” Usually the management did provide a few scraps. That was one of the perks. Subredil and Sawa sometimes husbanded some of their share and took it home. That established and sustained the women’s habit of carrying things out of the Palace.
The Protector leaned forward. She stared intently. What had we done to tickle her suspicion? Was she just so ancient in her paranoia that she needed no clue stronger than intuition? Or was it possible that she really could read minds, just a touch?
Barundandi said, “We’ll go to the kitchen, then. The cooks overprepared badly today.”
We shuffled out behind him, each step like leaping another league out of winter toward spring, out of darkness into light. Four or five paces outside the meeting chamber, Barundandi startled us by running a hand through his hair and gasping. He told Subredil, “Oh, it feels good to get out of there. That woman gives me the green willies.”
She gave me the green willies, too. And only the fact that I had gone deep into character to deal with them saved me giving myself away. Who would suspect that much humanity in Jaul Barundandi? I got a grip on Subredil’s arm and shook.
Subredil responded to Barundandi softly, submissively agreeing that the Protector might be a great horror.
The kitchens, normally off limits to casual labor, was a dragon’s hoard of edible treasures. With the dragon evicted. Subredil and Sawa ate till they could barely waddle. They loaded themselves with all the plunder they thought they would be allowed to carry off. They collected their few coppers and headed for the servants’ postern before anyone could think of something else for them to do, before any of Barundandi’s cronies realized that the customary kickbacks had been overlooked.
There were armed guards outside the postern. That was new. They were Greys rather than soldiers. They did not seem particularly interested in people going out. They did not bother with the usual cursory search casuals had to endure so nobody carried off the royal cutlery.
I wish our characters had more curiosity in them. I could have used a closer look at the damage we had done. They were putting up scaffolding and erecting a wooden curtain-wall already. The glimpses I did catch awed me. I had only read about what the later versions of those fireball throwers could do. The face of the Palace looked like a model of dark wax that someone had stuck repeatedly with a white-hot iron rod. Not only had stone melted and run, some had been vaporized. We had been released much earlier than usual. It was only mid-afternoon. I tried to walk too fast, eager to get away. Subredil refused to be rushed. Ahead of us stood quiet crowds who had come to stare at the Palace. Subredil murmured something about “ . . . ten thousand eyes.”
I erred. That mass of people had not come just to examine our night’s work and marvel that the Protector’s dead men could be so frisky. They were interested in four Bhodi disciples at the memorial posts that stood a dozen yards in front of the battered entrance, outside the growing curtain-wall. One disciple was mounting a prayer wheel onto one of the posts. Another two were spreading an elaborately embroidered dark red-orange cloth on the cobblestones. The fourth, shaved balder and shinier than a polished apple, stood before a Grey who was sixteen at the oldest. The Bhodi disciple had his arms folded. He looked through the youngster, who seemed to be having trouble getting across the message that these men had to stop doing what they were doing. The Protector forbade it.
This was something that would interest even Minh Subredil. She stopped walking. Sawa clung to her arm with one hand and cocked her head so she could watch, too.
I felt terribly exposed standing out there, a dozen yards from the silent gawkers.
Reinforcements for the young Grey arrived in the person of a grisled Shadar sergeant who seemed to think the Bhodi’s problem was deafness. “Clear off!” he shouted. “Or you’ll be cleared.”
The Bhodi with folded arms said, “The Protector sent for me.”
Not having gotten Murgen’s report yet, Sahra and I had no idea what this was about.
“Huh?”
The disciple preparing the prayer wheel announced its readiness. The Sergeant growled, swatted it off the post with the back of his hand. The responsible disciple bent, picked it up, began remounting it. They were not violent people, the Bhodi disciples, nor did they resist anything, but they were stubborn.
The two spreading the prayer rug were satisfied with their work. They spoke to the man with folded arms. He bowed his head slightly, then raised his eyes to meet those of the elder Shadar. In a voice loud but so calm it was disturbing, he proclaimed, “Rajadharma. The Duty of Kings. Know you: Kingship is a trust. The King is the most exalted and conscientious servant of the people.”
Not one witness had any trouble hearing and understanding those words.
The speaker settled himself on the prayer rug. His robes were an almost identical shade. He seemed to fade into a greater whole.
One of the secondary disciples passed him a large jar. He raised that as though in offering to the sky, then dumped its contents over himself. The Shadar sergeant looked as rattled as the youngster. He peered around for help.
The prayer wheel was back in place. The disciple responsible set it spinning, then backed off with the two who had spread the prayer rug.
The disciple on the rug struck flint to steel and vanished in a blast of flame just as I recognized the odor of naphtha. Heat hit me like a blow. I was in character strongly enough to whimper and grab Subredil with both hands. She resumed moving, eyes wide, stunned.
The man inside the flames never cried out, never moved till all life was gone and the charred husk left behind toppled over.
Crows circled above, cursing in their own tongue. So Soulcatcher knew. Or soon would.
We continued moving, into the now-animated crowd and through, heading home. The Bhodi disciples who had helped prepare the ritual suicide had disappeared already, while all eyes were fixed on the burning man.
I can’t believe he did that!” I said, still climbing out of Sawa’s smelly rags and crippled personality. Word had beaten us home. The suicide was all anyone wanted to discuss. Our own nighttime effort had become secondary. That was over and they had survived.
Tobo definitely did not believe it. He mentioned that in passing and insisted on telling us everything his father had seen inside the Palace last night. He referred to notes he had made with Goblin’s help. He was thoroughly proud of the job he had done and wanted to rub our noses in it. “But I couldn’t really get him to talk to me, Mom. Anything I asked seemed to be just an irritation. It was like he just wanted to get it over with so he could go away.”
“I know, dear,” Sahra said. “I know. He’s that way with me, too. Here’s some nice bread they let us bring home. Eat something. Goblin. What did they do with Swan? Is he healthy?”
One-Eye cackled. He said, “Healthy as a man with cracked ribs can be. Scared shitless, though.” He cackled again.
“Cracked ribs? Explain.”
Goblin told her, “Somebody with a grudge against the Greys got overexcited. But don’t worry about it. The guy is going to have plenty of opportunity to be sorry he let his feelings get the best of him.”
“I’m exhausted,” Sahra said. “We spent the whole day in the same room as Soulcatcher. I thought I would burst.”
“You did? It was all I could do not to run out of there screaming. I concentrated so hard on being Sawa that I missed half of what they said.”
“What didn’t get said might be more important. Soulcatcher was really suspicious about the attack.”
“I told you, go for the throat!” One-Eye barked. “While they still didn’t believe in us. Kill them all and you wouldn’t have to sneak around trying to figure out how to get the Old Man out. You could make those guys at the library do your research for you.”
“We’d’ve just gotten killed,” Sahra said. “Soulcatcher was already looking for trouble. The news about the Daughter of Night did that. Speaking of whom, I want you two looking for her, and Narayan, too.”
“Too?” Goblin asked.
“Soulcatcher will hunt them with a great deal of enthusiasm, I expect.”
I observed, “Kina must be stirring again. Narayan and the girl wouldn’t come to Taglios unless they were confident of her protection. Which means the girl will start copying the Books of the Dead again, too. Sahra, tell Murgen to keep an eye on them.” Those terrible, ancient volumes were buried in the same cavern as the Captured. “I had a thought while we were up there—after I ran out of candlesticks and didn’t have anything else to do. It’s been a long time since I read Murgen’s Annals. It didn’t seem like they had much bearing on what we’re trying to do. Being so modern. But when I was sitting there, just a few feet from Soulcatcher, I got a really creepy feeling that I had missed something. And it’s been so long since I studied those things, I can’t guess what.”
“You should have time. We’ll need to lie pretty low for a few days.”
“You’ll be going to work, won’t you?”
“It would be suspicious if I didn’t.”
“I’m going to the library. I located some histories that go back to the earliest days of Taglios.”
“Yeah?” One-Eye croaked, jerked himself out of a half-sleep. “Then find out for me why the hell the ruling gang are only princes. The territories they rule are bigger than most kingdoms around here.”
“A question that never would have occurred to me,” I said politely. “Or to any native of this end of the world, probably. I’ll ask.” If I remembered.
Nervous laughter came from the shadows in the back of the warehouse. Willow Swan. Goblin said, “He’s playing tonk with some guys he knew in the old days.”
Sahra said, “We should get him out of the city. Where can we keep him?”
“I need him here,” I said. “I need to ask him about the plain. That’s why we grabbed him first. And I’m not going off to some place in the country when I’ve finally started getting somewhere at the library.”
“Soulcatcher might have him marked somehow.”
“We’ve got two half-ass wizards of our own. Have them check him over. They add up to one competent—”
“You watch your mouth, Little Girl.”
“I forget myself, One-Eye. You two together add up to half as much as either one alone.”
“Sleepy has a point. If Soulcatcher marked him, you two ought to be able to find out.”
One-Eye snapped, “Use your head! If she’d marked him, she’d already be here. She wouldn’t be up there asking her lackeys if they’d found his bones yet.” The little man climbed out of his chair, creaking and groaning. He headed for the shadows at the rear of the warehouse but not toward Swan’s voice.
I said, “He’s right.” I headed to the back myself. I had not seen Swan up close for fifteen years. Behind me, Tobo started grilling his mother about Murgen. He was upset because his father had been indifferent.
Seemed to me there was a good chance Murgen did not understand who Tobo was. He had trouble with time. He had had that problem since the siege of Jaicur. He might think it was still fifteen years ago and he was stumbling away into a possible future.
Swan stared at me for a few seconds after I stepped into the light of the lamp illuminating the table where he was playing cards with the Gupta brothers and a corporal we called Slink. “Sleepy, right? You haven’t changed. Goblin or One-Eye put some kind of hex on you?”
“God is good to the pure of heart. How are your ribs?”
Swan ran fingers through the remnants of his hair. “So that’s the story.” He touched his side. “I’ll live.”
“You’re taking it well.”
“I needed a vacation. Nothing’s in my hands now. I can relax until she finds me again.”
“Can she do that?”
“You the Captain now?”
“The Captain is the Captain. I design ambushes. Can she find you?”
“Well, son, this looks like the fabled collision between the unstoppable whatsis and the immovable thingee. I don’t know where to lay my bets. Over here we got the Black Company with four hundred years of bad and tricky. Over there you got Soulcatcher with four centuries of mean and crazy. It’s a toss-up, I guess.”
“She doesn’t have you marked somehow?”
“Only with scars.”
The way he said that made me feel I knew exactly what he meant. “You want to come over to our side?”
“You’re kidding. You pulled all that stuff this morning just to ask me to join the Black Company?”
“We pulled all that stuff this morning to show the world that we’re still here and that we could do what we want, whenever we want, Protector or no Protector. And to take you so I can question you about the plain of glittering stone.”
He looked at me for several seconds, then checked his cards. “There’s a subject that hasn’t come up in a while.”
“You going to be stubborn about it?”
“You kidding? I’ll talk your ear off. But I’ll bet you don’t learn a damned thing you didn’t already know.” He discarded a black knave.
Slink jumped on the card, laid down a nine-queen spread, discarded a red queen and grinned. He needed to see One-Eye about those teeth.
“Shit!” Swan grumbled. “I missed this game. How did you people learn? It’s the simplest damn game in the world but I never met a Taglian who could figure it out.”
I observed, “You learn fast when you play with One-Eye. Scoot over, Sin. Let me play while I pick this guy’s brain.” I pulled up a stool, studying Swan every second. The man knew how to get into a character. This was not the Willow Swan that Murgen wrote about or the Swan that Sahra saw when she visited the Palace. I picked up my five cards from the next deal. “This ain’t a hand, it’s a foot. How come you’re so relaxed, Swan?”
“No stress. You can’t have a worse hand than mine. I don’t got no two cards of the same suit.”
“No stress?”
“As of today I got nothing to do but lean back and take it easy. Just play tonk till my honey comes and takes me home.”
“You’re not afraid? Reports I’ve had said you’re shakier than Smoke used to be.”
His features hardened. That was not a comparison he liked. “The worst has happened, hasn’t it? I’m in the hands of my enemies. But I’m still healthy.”
“There’s no guarantee you’ll stay that way. Unless you cooperate. Darn! I’m going to have to rob a poor box if this keeps on.” Play had not gotten all the way back to me before the hand ended. I did not win.
“I’ll sing like a trained crow,” Swan said. “Like a chorus. But I can’t do you much good. I was never as close to the center as you may think.”
“Possibly.” I watched his hands closely as he dealt. It seemed like a moment when a skilled manipulator’s ego might compel him to show himself how good he was at pulling fast moves. If he had any moves, he would not get them by me. I learned the game from One-Eye, too. “Prove it. Tell me how Soulcatcher kept you two alive long enough to get off the plain.”
“That’s an easy one.” He completed a straight deal. “We ran away faster than the ghosts chasing us could run. We were riding those black horses the Company brought down from the north.”
I had ridden those enchanted beasts a few times myself. That could be the answer. They could outdistance any normal horse and could run almost forever without tiring. “Maybe. Maybe. She didn’t have any special talisman?”
“Not that she mentioned to me.”
I looked down at another terrible hand. Grilling Swan could get expensive. I am not one of the better tonk players in the gang. “What happened to the horses?”
“Far as I know, they’re all dead. Time or magic or wounds got them. And the queen bitch wasn’t happy about that, either. She don’t like walking and she ain’t fond of flying.”
“Flying?” Startled, I discarded a card I should have kept. That allowed one of the Guptas to go down and take me for another couple of coppers.
Swan said, “I think I’m going to like playing with you. Yeah. Flying. She’s got a couple of them carpets that was made by the Howler. And she just ain’t real good with them. I can tell you that from personal experience. Your deal. Ain’t nothing like falling off of one of them suckers while it’s hauling ass, even if you’re only five feet high.”
One-Eye materialized. He looked about as bright and alert as he ever did these days. “Room for one more?” His breath smelled of alcohol.
Swan grumbled, “I know that voice. No. I figured you out twenty-five years ago. I thought we got your ass at Khadighat. Or maybe it was Bhoroda or Nalanda.”
“I’m quick on my feet.”
Slink said, “You’re in only if you show some money up front and you agree not to deal.”
“And you keep your hands on top of the table all the time,” I added.
“You smite me to the heart, Little Girl. People might get the idea you don’t trust me not to cheat.”
“Good. That’ll save them a lot of time and pain.”
“Little girl?” Swan asked. There was a whole different look in his eye suddenly.
“One-Eye’s got diarrhea of the mouth. Sit down, old man. Swan was just telling us about Soulcatcher’s magic carpets and how she doesn’t like flying. And I’m wondering if we couldn’t find some way to take advantage of that.”
Swan looked from one of us to the other. I watched One-Eye’s hands as he picked up his first bunch of cards. Just in case he might have done something to this deck sometime in the past. “Little girl?”
“Is there an echo in here?” Slink asked.
“Is that suddenly a problem?” I asked.
“No! No.” Swan showed me the palm of his free hand. “I’m just getting a lot of surprises here. Soulcatcher thought she was pretty solid on the Company survivors. But I’ve already run into four people who are known to be dead, including the world’s ugliest wizard and that Nyueng Bao woman who acts like she’s in charge.”
One-Eye growled, “Don’t you go talking about Goblin that way. He’s my pal. I’ll have to stand up for him. Someday.” He snickered.
Swan ignored him. “And you. That we had down as a man.” ’
I shrugged. “Not many knew. And it’s not important. The dope with the eye patch and smelly hat should’ve had sense enough not to mention it in front of an outsider.” I glared.
One-Eye grinned, drew a card from the pile, discarded. “She’s feisty, Swan. Smart, too. Designed the plan that pulled you in. You started on another one, Little Girl?”
“Several. I think Sahra will want the Inspector-General next, though.”
“Gokhale? He can’t tell us anything.”
“Say it’s personal. Swan. You know anything about Gokhale? He dabble in little girls like Perhule Khoji used to?”
One-Eye gave me an evil look. Swan stared. My mess-up this time. I had given something away.
Too late to fuss about it. “Well?”
“Actually, yes.” Swan was pale. He focused on his cards, having trouble keeping his hands steady. “Those two and several others in that office. Common interests brought them together. The Radisha doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.” He discarded out of turn. He had lost his zest for the game.
I realized what the problem was. He thought my speaking freely meant I expected to elevate him to a higher plane before long. “You’re all right, Swan. Long as you behave. Long as you answer questions when you’re asked. Hell, I got to save you. There’s a bunch of guys buried under the glittering plain that want to talk to you about that when they get back.” Might be interesting to watch him talk it over with Murgen.
“They’re still alive?” The idea seemed to stun him.
“Very alive. Just frozen in time. And getting angrier by the minute.”
“I thought . . . Great God . . . shit.”
“Do not speak so on the name of God!” Slink growled.
Slink was Jaicuri Vehdna, too. And much less lapsed than I. He managed prayers at least once a day and temple several times a month. The local Vehdna thought he was a Dejagoran refugee employed by Banh Do Trang because he had done the Nyueng Bao favors during the siege there. Most of our brothers endured genuine employment and worked hard to resemble pillars of the local community.
Swan swallowed, said, “You people ever eat? I ain’t had nothing since yesterday.”
“We eat,” I said. “But not like you’re used to. It’s true what they say about Nyueng Bao. They don’t eat anything but fish heads and rice. Eight days a week.”
“Fish will do right now. I’ll save the bitching till my belly’s full.”
“Slink,” I said. “We need to send a kill team down to Semchi to watch the Bhodi Tree. The Protector’s probably going to try to smash it. We could make some friends if we save it.” I explained about the Bhodi disciple who burned himself and Soulcatcher’s threat to turn the Bhodi Tree into kindling. “I’d like to go myself, just to see if the Bhodi non-violent ethic is strong enough to make them stand around while somebody destroys their most holy shrine. But I have too much work to do here.” I tossed my cards in. “In fact, I have work to do now.”
I was tired but figured I could study Murgen’s Annals for a few hours before I passed out.
As I walked away, Swan whispered, “How the hell does she know all that? And is she really a she?”
“Never checked personally,” Slink said. “I have a wife. But she’s definitely got some female habits on her.”
What the devil did that mean? I am just one of the guys.
These were exciting times. I found myself eager to be up and outside, where things were happening. The impact of our boldness would have reached every cranny of the city by now. I gobbled cold rice and listened to Tobo complain, again, that his father had paid him no attention.
“Is there something I can do about that, Tobo?”
“Huh?”
“Unless you think I can go back there and tell him to shape up and talk to his kid, you’re wasting your time and mine bitching about it. Where’s your mother?”
“She left for work. A long time ago. She said they’d be suspicious if she didn’t show up today.”
“Probably would be. They’ll be real edgy about everything for a while. How about instead of fussing about what’s happened already, you spend some time thinking about what you’ll do next time you see your father? And in the meantime, you can stay out of trouble by keeping notes for me whenever anybody questions the prisoner.”
His glower told me he was no more excited about being offered work than any boy his age would be. “You’re going out, too?”
“I have to go to work.” It would be a good day to get to the library early. The scholars were supposed to be gone most of the day. There was supposed to be a big meeting of the bhadrhalok, which was a loosely associated group of educated men who did not like the Protector and who found the institution of the Protectorate objectionable. Jokingly, they referred to themselves as a band of intellectual terrorists. Bhadrhalok means, more or less, “the respectable people” and that was exactly what they thought they were. They were all educated, high-caste Gunni, which meant, right away, that a vast majority of the Taglian population regarded them with no sympathy at all. Their biggest problem with the Protector was that she held their self-confident, arrogant assumption of superiority in complete contempt. As revolutionaries and terrorists, they were less incandescent than any of the low-caste social clubs that existed on every residential block in the city. I doubt that Soulcatcher wasted two spies watching them. But they had great fun, fulminating and crying on one another’s shoulders about the world going to hell in a goat cart driven by the demon in black. And every week or so it got most of the library crew out of my way.
I did what I could to encourage their seditious fervor.
I got off to a slow start. Not thirty yards from the warehouse exit I ran into two of our brothers doing donkey work for Do Trang while standing lookout. One made gestures indicating that they had something to report. Sighing, I strolled over. “What’s the story, River?” The men called him Riverwalker. I did not know him by any other name.
“We got shadowtraps that’s been sprung. We got ourselves some new pets.”
“Oh, no. Darn.” I shook my head.
“That’s not good?”
“Not good. Run, report it to Goblin. I’ll stick with Ran till you get back. Don’t dawdle. I’m late for work.” Not true, but Taglians have little sense of urgency, and the concept of punctuality is alien to most.
Shadows in the shadowtraps. Not a good eventuation, for sure. Near as we could determine, Soulcatcher had no more than two dozen manageable shadows left under control. As many more had gone feral in the remote south and were developing reputations as rakshasas, which were demons or devils but not quite like those my northern forebrethren knew. Northern demons seemed to be solitary beings of considerable power. Rakshasas are communal and pretty weak individually. But deadly. Very deadly.
In ancient myth, of course, they are much more powerful. They swat each other over the head with mountaintops, grow two heads for every one chopped off by a hero, and collect the beautiful wives of kings who are really gods incarnate but do not remember that fact. Things must have been much more exciting in olden times—even if they did not make a lot of sense from day to day.
Catcher would keep a close eye on her shadows. They were her most valuable resource. Which meant that if they had been sent out to spy, she should know exactly where each was supposed to have gone. At least that is the way I would have done it if I were committing irreplaceable resources. I did that for every single man we committed to Willow Swan’s capture. I knew how they were going to get to their places and how they were going to get home and everything they were supposed to do in between. And just like I figured Soulcatcher might, I would have gone looking for them personally if they had failed to return home.
Goblin came hobbling into the early morning light, cursing all the way. He wore the all-covering brown wool of a veyedeen dervish. He hated the outfit, however necessary it was to disguise himself when he was outside. I did not blame him. The wool was hot. It was supposed to remind the holy men of the hell they were escaping by devoting themselves to chastity, asceticism and good works. “What the hell is this shit?” he growled. “It’s hot enough to boil eggs out here already.”
“The boys say we’ve caught something in our shadow-traps. I thought you might want to do something about that before Mama comes looking for her babies.”
“Shit. More work—”
“Old man, you just had something in your mouth I wouldn’t even want in my hand.”
“Vehdna priss. Get the flock out of here before I give you a real language lesson. And bring home something decent to eat when you come back. Like maybe a cow.”
More than once he and One-Eye had conspired to kidnap one of the sacred cattle that wander the city. To date, their efforts have come to naught because none of the men will go along. The majority have Gunni backgounds.
It took no time at all to learn that our shadow captives were not the only shadows that had run wild just before dawn. Rumor was rife. The stories of the murders the shadows committed banished news of the attack on the Palace and the self-immolation of the Bhodi disciple. The killings were closer to home and closer in time. And they were grotesque. The corpse of a man whose life has been devoured by a shadow is a twisted husk of the creature that was.
I insinuated myself into the crowd surrounding the doorway of a family where there had been multiple deaths. You can do that when you are little and limber and know how to use your elbows. I arrived just in time to watch them bring the bodies out. I was hoping they would be exposed to the public eye. Not that I wanted to see them myself. I saw plenty of those kinds of bodies during the Shadowmaster wars. I just thought the people ought to see what Soulcatcher could do. She needed all the enemies she could get.
The bodies were enshrouded already. But there was talk.
I traveled on, learning that most of the dead had been people who lived on the streets. And there had been a lot of those, taken in no obvious pattern whatsoever. It looked like Soulcatcher had sent the shadows out just to demonstrate that she had the power and the will to kill.
The deaths had evoked no great fear. People thought it was over. Most of them did not know any of the dead so were not angry, either. Curiosity and revulsion were the common emotions.
I considered turning back to tell Goblin to fix the captured shadows so they would go out killing again tonight and every night thereafter, till Soulcatcher tracked them down. She would not look for trappers if she thought her pets had gone rogue. And the shadows would create a lot more enemies for her before their terror ended.
At first it seemed the Greys had faded from the streets. They were less in evidence than usual. But as I skirted Chor Bagan, it became evident why. They had the place under siege, apparently on the assumption that any Black Company survivers, having been branded bandits by the Protector, would hide themselves amongst Taglios’ homegrown thieves and villains. Amusing.
Sahra and I insist that we have as little to do with the criminal element as possible—over One-Eye’s objections. And ignoring Banh Do Trang’s occasional lapses. That element included folk of dubious morals and discipline who might serve us up for enough blood money to buy one more jar of illegal wine. I hoped they and the Greys had fun. I hoped somebody forgot the rules and their day turned bloody. That would make life easier for me and mine.
Any trip across town exposes you to the cruel truth about Taglios. Beggary exists there like nowhere else in the world. Were someone to sweep the city clean and organize the beggars into regiments, they would number more than the biggest army the Captain put together in the days of the Shadowmaster wars. If you look the least bit foreign or prosperous, they come at you in waves. Every attempt is made to exploit your pity. Not far from Do Trang’s warehouse there is a boy with neither hands nor lower legs. Somehow, blocks of wood have been affixed in their place. He crawls around with a bowl in his mouth. Every cripple over the age of fifteen claims to be a wounded hero of the wars. The children are the worst. Often they have been maimed deliberately, their limbs deformed evilly. They are sold to men who then feel they own them because they feed them a handful of toasted grain every few days.
A new mystery of the city is that men of that stripe seem to run the risk of cruel tortures and their own careers as deformed beggars. If they do not watch their backs very, very carefully.
My route took me near one such. He had one arm he could use to drag himself around. The rest of his limbs were twisted ruins. His bones had been crushed to gravel but he had been kept alive by a dedicated effort. His face and exposed skin were covered with burn scars. I paused to place one small copper in his bowl.
He whimpered and tried to crawl away. He could still see out of one eye.
Everywhere you looked, life proceeded in the unique Taglian fashion. Every vehicle in motion had people hanging off it, sponging a ride. Unless it was the ricksha of a rich man, perhaps a banker from Kowlhri Street, who could afford outrunners armed with bamboo canes to keep people off. Shopkeepers often sat on top of their tiny counters because there was no other space. Workmen jogged hither and yon with backbreaking loads, violently cursing everyone in their way. The people argued, laughed, waved their arms wildly, simply stepped to the side of the street where no one was lying to defecate when the need came upon them. They bathed in the water in the gutters, indifferent to the fact that a neighbor was urinating in the same stream fifteen feet away.
Taglios is an all-out, relentless assault upon all the senses but engages none so much as it does the sense of smell. I hate the rainy season but without its protracted sluicings-out, Taglios would become untenable even for rats. Without the rains, the endemic cholera and smallpox would be far worse than they are—though the rainy times bring outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever. Disease of every sort is common and accepted stoically.
And then there are the lepers, whose plight gives new depth of meaning to horror and despair. Never do I find my faith in God so tested as when I consider the lepers. I am as terrified by them as anyone but I do know enough about some individuals to realize that very few are being visited by a scourge they deserve. Unless the Gunni are right and they are paying for evils done in previous lives.
Up above it all are the kites and crows, the buzzards and vultures. For the eaters of carrion, life is good. Till the dead wagons come to collect the fallen.
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess.
When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing.
The library, created by and bequeathed to the city by an earlier mercantile prince who was much impressed by learning, strikes me as a symbol of knowledge rearing up to shed its light into the surrounding darkness of ignorance. Some of the city’s worst slums wash right up against the wall enclosing its ground. The beggars are bad around its outer gates. Why is a puzzlement. I have never seen anyone toss them a coin.
There is a gateman but he is not a guard. He lacks even a bamboo cane. But a cane is unnecessary. The sanctity of the place of knowledge is observed by everyone. Everyone but me, you might say.
“Good morning, Adoo,” I said as the gateman swung the wrought iron open for me. Though I was a glorified sweeper and fetch-it man, I had status. I appeared to enjoy the favor of some of the bhadrhalok.
Status and caste grew more important as Taglios became more crowded and resources grew less plentiful. Caste has become much more rigidly defined and observed in just the last ten years. People are desperate to cling to the little that they have already. Likewise, the trade guilds have grown increasingly powerful. Several have raised small, private armed forces that they use to make sure immigrants and other outsiders do not trample on their preserves, or that they sometimes hire out to temples or others in need of justice. Some of our brothers have done some work in that vein. It generates revenue and creates contacts and allows us glimpses inside otherwise closed societies.
Outside, the library resembles the more ornate Gunni temples. Its pillars and walls are covered with reliefs recalling stories both mythical and historical. It is not a huge place, being just thirty yards on its long side and sixty feet the other way. Its main floor is elevated ten feet above the surrounding gardens and monuments, which themselves cap a small knoll. The building proper is tall enough that inside there is a full-size hanging gallery all the way around at the level where a second floor should be, then an attic of sorts above that, plus a well-drained basement below the main floor. I find that interior much too open for comfort. Unless I am way down low or way up high, everyone can watch what I am doing.
The main floor is an expanse of marble, brought from somewhere far away. Upon it, in neat rows, stand the desks and tables where the scholars work, either studying or copying decaying manuscripts. The climate is not conducive to the longevity of books. There is a certain sadness to the library, a developing air of neglect. Scholars grow fewer each year. The Protector does not care about the library because it cannot brag that it contains old books full of deadly spells. There is not one grimoire in the place. Though there is a lot of very interesting stuff—if she bothered to look. But that sort of curiosity is not part of her character.
There are more glass windows in the library than anywhere else I have ever seen. The copyists need a lot of light. Most of them, these days, are old and their sight is failing. Master Santaraksita often goes on about the library having no future. No one wants to visit it anymore. He believes that has something to do with the hysterical fear of the past that began to build soon after the rise of the Shadowmasters, when he was still a young man. Back when fear of the Black Company gained circulation, before the Company ever appeared.
I stepped into the library and surveyed it. I loved the place. In another time I would gladly have become one of Master Santaraksita’s acolytes. If I could have survived the close scrutiny endured by would-be students.
I was not Gunni. I was not high caste. The former I could fake well enough to get by. I had been surrounded by Gunni all my life. But I did not know caste from within. Only the priestly caste and some selected commercial-caste folks were permitted to be literate. Though familiar with the vulgate and the High Mode both, I could never pretend to have grown up in a priestly household fallen on hard times. I had not grown up in much of any kind of household.
I had the place entirely to myself. And there was no obvious cleaning that needed doing right away.
It ever amazed me that no one actually lived in the library. That it was more holy or more frightening than a temple. The kangali—the parentless and homeless and fearless boys of the street, who run in troops of six to eight—see temples as just another potential resource. But they would not trouble the library.
To the unlettered, the knowledge contained in books was almost as terrible as the knowledge bound up in the flesh of a creature as wicked as Soulcatcher.
I had one of the best jobs in Taglios. I was the main caretaker at the biggest depository and replicatory of books within the Taglian empire. It had taken three and a half years of scheming and several carefully targeted murders to put me into a position I enjoyed way too much. Always before me was the temptation to forget the Company. The temptation might have gotten me had I had the social qualifications to be anything but a janitor who sneaked peeks into books when nobody was looking.
In quick order I conjured the tools of my purported trade, then hurried to one of the more remote copying desks. It was out of the way, yet offered a good line of vision and good acoustics so I would not be surprised doing something both forbidden and impossible.
I had gotten caught twice already, luckily both times with Tantric books illuminated with illustrations. They thought I was sneaking peeks at dirty pictures. Master Santaraksita himself suggested I go study temple walls if that sort of thing appealed to me. But I could not help feeling that he began to harbor a deep suspicion after the second incident.
They never threatened me with dismissal or even punishment, but they made it clear I was out of line, that the gods punish those who exceed caste and station. They were, of course, unaware of my origins or associations, or of my disinclination to accept the Gunni religion with all its idolatry and tolerance for wickedness.
I dug out the book that purported to be a history of Taglios’ earliest days. I would not have been aware of it had I not noticed it being copied from a manuscript so old that much of it had appeared to be in a style of calligraphy resembling that of the old Annals I was having so much trouble deciphering. Old Baladitya, the copyist, had had no difficulty rendering the text in modern Taglian. I have salvaged the moldy, crumbling original. I had it hidden. I had a notion that by comparing versions I could get a handle on the dialect of those old Annals.
If not, Girish could be offered a chance to translate for the Black Company, an opportunity he ought to pounce on considering the alternative available at that point.
I already knew that the books I wanted to translate were copies of even earlier versions, at least two of which had been transcribed originally in another language entirely—presumably that spoken by our first brothers when they came down off the plain of glittering stone.
I started at the beginning.
It was an interesting story.
Taglios began as a collection of mud huts beside the river. Some of the villagers fished and dodged crocodiles, while others raised a variety of crops. The city grew for no obvious reason beyond its being the last viable landing before the river lost itself in the pestilential delta swamps, in those days not yet inhabited by the Nyueng Bao. Trade from upriver continued overland to “all the great kingdoms of the south.” Not a one of those was mentioned by name. Taglios began as a tributary of Baladiltyla, a city great in oral histories and no longer in existence. It is sometimes associated with some really ancient ruins outside the village of Videha, which itself is associated with the intellectual achievements of a “Kuras empire” and is the center of ruins of another sort entirely. Baladiltyla was the birthplace of Rhaydreynak, the warrior king who nearly exterminated the Deceivers in antiquity and who harried the handful of survivors into burying their sacred texts, the Books of the Dead, in that same cavern where Murgen now lay entombed with all the old men in their cobwebs of ice.
Not all this was information from the book I was reading. As I went, I made connections with things I had read or heard elsewhere. This was very exciting stuff. For me.
Here was an answer for Goblin. The princes of Taglios could not be kings because they honored as their sovereigns the kings of Nhanda, who raised them up. Of course Nhanda was no more and Goblin would want to know why, in that case, the Taglian princes could not just crown themselves. There were plenty of precedents. From the looks of the history of the centuries before the coming of the Black Company, that had been the favorite pastime of anybody who could get three or four men to follow him around.
I overcame a powerful urge to rush ahead and look for the era when the Free Companies of Khatovar exploded upon the world. What had happened before that would help explain what had happened when they did.
A sudden, startled thrill ran through me. I was not alone anymore. A long time had passed. The sun had swung several hours across the sky. The quality of the light within the library had changed. It had become a much paler version of its morning self. Presumably the clouds had passed away.
I did not jump or, I hope, show any immediate outward reaction. But I did have to respond visibly to my awareness of the presence of whoever was standing behind me. Perhaps it was his breath that alerted me. The curry and garlic were strong. Certainly I never heard a sound.
I brought my heartbeat under control, smoothed my features, turned.
The Master of the Library, my boss, Surendranath Santaraksita, met my gaze. “Dorabee. I believe you were reading.” At the library they know me as Dorabee Dey Banerjae. An honorable name. A man of that name died beside me in a skirmish near the Daka Woods a long time ago. He did not need it anymore and I would do it no harm.
I did not speak. The truth would be hard to deny if the Master had been there long. I was halfway through the book, which was of the bound sort and contained no illustrations whatsoever, not even one Tantric passage.
“I have been watching you for some time, Dorabee. Your interest and skill are both evident. It’s clear that you read better than most of my copyists. Yet it’s equally obvious that you aren’t of the priestly caste.”
My face was still as old cheese. I was wondering if I should kill him and how I could dispose of the corpse if I did. Perhaps the Stranglers could be framed . . . No. Master Santaraksita was old but still hale enough to throw me around if I tried to throttle him. Being small has definite disadvantages at times. He had eight inches on me but at the moment that seemed like several feet. And someone else was moving around at the other end of the library. I heard voices.
I did not drop my eyes the way a menial should. Master Santaraksita already knew I was more than a curious sweeper, though a good one. I kept the place spotless. That was a Company rule. Our public characters had to be morally straight and excellent workers. Which did not make some of the men at all happy.
I waited. Master Santaraksita would decide his own fate. He would decide the fate of the library that he loved.
“So. Our Dorabee is a man of more talents than we suspected. What else do you do that we don’t know about, Dorabee? Can you write, as well?” I did not answer, of course. “Where did you learn? It has long been the contention of many of the bhadrhalok that those not of the priestly caste do not have the mental facility to learn the High Mode.”
Still I did not speak. Eventually he would commit to movement in some direction. I would respond accordingly. I hoped I could avoid destroying him and his brethren and stripping the library of whatever might be useful. That was the course One-Eye wanted to follow years ago. Never mind being subtle. Never mind not alerting Soulcatcher to what was happening right under her nose.
“You have nothing to say? No defense?”
“A pursuit of knowledge needs no defense. Sri Sondhel Ghosh the Janaka declared that in the Garden of Wisdom there is no caste.” Albeit in an age when caste had much less meaning.
“Sondhel Ghosh spoke of the university at Vikramas, where all the students had to pass an exhaustive examination before they were allowed to enter the grounds.”
“Do we suppose many students of any caste were admitted who were unable to read the Panas and Pashids? Sondhel Ghosh was not called the Janaka for nothing. Vikramas was the seat of Janai religious study.”
“A janitor who knows about a religion long dead. We are indeed entering the Age of Khadi, where all is turned upon its head.” Khadi is the favored Taglian name for Kina, in one of her less vicious aspects. The name Kina is seldom spoken, lest the Dark Mother hear and respond. Only the Deceivers want her to come around. “Where did you acquire this skill? Who taught you?”
“A friend started me out a long time ago. After we buried him, I continued to teach myself.” My gaze never left his face. For a goofy old boffin, whose stuffiness was grist for the mockery of the younger copyists, he seemed remarkably flexible mentally. But then, he might be brighter than he seemed. He might realize that he could buy himself a float downriver to the swamps if the wrong words passed his lips.
No. Master Surendranath Santaraksita did not yet live in a world where one who read and cherished sacred texts also cut throats and trafficked with sorcerers, the dead and rakshasas. Master Surenranath Santaraksita did not think of himself that way, but he was a sort of holy hermit, self-consecrated to preserve all that was good in knowledge and culture. This much I had discovered already, through continuous observation. I had figured out, also, that we might not often agree on what was good.
“You just wish to learn, then.”
“I lust after knowledge the way some men lust after pleasures of the flesh. I’ve always been that way. I can’t help it. It’s an obsession.”
Santaraksita leaned a little closer, studying me with myopic eyes. “You are older than you seem.”
I confessed. “People think I’m younger than I am because I’m small.”
“Tell me about yourself, Dorabee Dey Banerjae. Who was your father? Of what family was your mother?”
“You will not have heard of them.” I considered refusing to elaborate. But Dorabee Dey Banerjae did have a story. I had been rehearsing it for seven years. If I just stayed in character, it would all be true.
Stay in character. Be Dorabee caught reading. Let Sleepy worry about what to do when it was time for Sleepy to come back onstage.
“You denigrate yourself overmuch,” Santaraksita said at one point. “I may have known your father . . . if he was the same Dollal Dey Banerjae who could not resist the Liberator’s call for recruits when he raised the original legion that triumphed at Ghoja Ford.”
I had named dead Dorabee’s father already. I could not take that back now. How could he know Dollal, anyway? Banerjae was one of the oldest and most common of traditional Taglian surnames. Banerjaes were mentioned in the text I had been reading till moments ago. “That may have been him. I never knew him well. I do recall him boasting that he was one of the first to enroll. He marched off with the Liberator to defeat the Shadowmasters. He never came back from Ghoja Ford.” I did not know much more about Dorabee’s family. Not even his mother’s name. In all Taglios how could it be possible I would encounter anyone who remembered the father? Fortune is indeed a goddess filled with caprice. “Did you know him well?” If that was so, the librarian might have to go—just that would make my exposure inevitable.
“No. Not well. Not well at all.” Now Master Santaraksita seemed disinclined to say more. He seemed worrisomely thoughtful. After a moment he told me, “Come with me, Dorabee.”
“Sir?”
“You brought up the university at Vikramas. I have a list of the questions the gate guards put to those who wanted to enroll. Curiosity impels me to subject you to the same examination.”
“I know little about Janai, Master.” If the truth were told, I was a bit shaky on the tenets of my own religion, always having been afraid to examine it too closely. Other religions do not stand up to the rigorous application of reason, for all we have things like Kina stalking the earth, and I really did not want to find myself stumbling over any boulders of absurdity protruding from the bedrock of my own faith.
“The examination was not religious in nature, Dorabee. It tested the prospective student’s morals, ethics and ability to think. Janaka monks did not wish to educate potential leaders who would come to their calling with the stain of darkness upon their souls.”
That being the case, I had to get into character very deeply indeed. Sleepy, the Vehdna soldier girl from Jaicur, had stains on her soul blacker than a shadow of all night falling.
Then what did you do?” Tobo asked.
Around a mouthful of spicy Taglian-style rice, I told him, “Then I went out and made sure the library was clean.” And Surendranath Santaraksita remained where he was, stunned into immobility by the answers he had received from a lowly sweeper. I could have told him that anyone who paid attention to the storytellers in the street, the sermons of mendicant priests, and the readily available gratuitous advice of hermits and yogis, could have satisfied most of the Vikramas questions. Darn it, a Vehdna woman from Jaicur could do it.
“We got to kill him,” One-Eye said. “How you want to do it?”
“That’s always your solution these days, isn’t it?” I asked.
“The more we get rid of now, the fewer there’ll be around to aggravate me in my old age.”
I could not tell if he was joking. “When you start getting old, we’ll worry about it.”
“Guy like that will be easy, Little Girl. He won’t be looking for it. Bam! He’s gone. And nobody’ll care. Strangle his ass. Leave a rumel on him. Blame it on our old buddy Narayan. He’s in town, we need to put all kinds of shit off on him.”
“Language, old man.” One-Eye babbled on, putting a name to animal waste in a hundred tongues. I turned my back. “Sahra? You’ve been very quiet.”
“I’ve been trying to digest what I picked up today. By the way, Jaul Barundandi was distraught because you stayed home. Tried to take your kickback out of my wages. He finally found Minh Subredil’s limit. I threatened to scream. He would’ve called my bluff if his wife hadn’t been around somewhere. Are you sure it’s safe to let this librarian live? If it looked natural, no one would suspect—”
“It may not be safe but it could pay dividends. Master Santaraksita wants to make some kind of experiment out of me. To see if a low-caste dog really can be taught to roll over and play dead. What about Soulcatcher? What about the shadows? Did you learn anything?”
“She loosed everything she had. Just an impulse. No master plan except to remind the city of her power. She expected the victims to be immigrants who live in the streets. No one much cares about them. Only a handful of shadows got back before dawn. Our captives won’t be missed until tomorrow.”
“We could go catch a few more—”
“Bats,” Goblin said, inviting himself to take a seat. One-Eye appeared to have dozed off. He still had hold of his cane, though. “Bats. There’s bats out there tonight.”
Sahra offered a confirming nod.
Goblin said, “Back before we marched against the Shad-owmasters, we killed all the bats. Had bounties on them big enough for bat hunters to make a living. Because the Shadowmasters used them to spy.”
I recalled a time when crows were murdered relentlessly because they might be acting as Soulcatcher’s far-flying eyes. “You’re saying we should stay in tonight?”
“Mind like a stone ax, this old gal.”
I asked Sahra, “What did Soulcatcher think about our attack?”
“It didn’t come up where I could hear.” She pushed some sheets from the old Annals across. “The Bhodi suicide bothered her more. She’s afraid it might start a trend.”
“A trend? There could be more than one monk goofy enough to set himself on fire?”
“She thinks so.”
Tobo asked, “Mom, are we going to call up Dad tonight?”
“I don’t know right now, dear.”
“I want to talk to him some more.”
“You will. I’m sure he’s interested in talking to you, too.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
I asked Goblin, “Would it be possible for you to keep that mist thing going all the time so we could keep Murgen connected and any time we wanted, we could just send him where we needed to know about something?”
“We’re working on it.” He took off on a technical rant. I did not understand a word but I let him roll. He deserved to feel good about something.
One-Eye began to snore. The smart would stay out of reach of his cane anyway.
I said, “Tobo could keep notes all the time . . . ” I had had this sudden vision of the son of the Annalist taking over for the father, the way it goes in Taglian guilds, where trades and tools pass down generation after generation.
“In fact,” One-Eye said, as though no time had passed since the last remark, and as though he had not been faking sleep a moment ago, “right now’s the time you could play you a really great big ol’ hairy-assed, old-time Company dirty trick, Little Girl. Send somebody down to the silk merchants’ exchange. Have them get you some silk, different colors. Big enough to make up copies of them scarves the Stranglers use. Them rumels. Then we start picking off the guys we don’t like anyway. Once in a while we leave one of them scarves behind. Like with that librarian.”
I said, “I like that. Except the part about Master Santaraksita. That’s a closed subject, old man.”
One-Eye cackled. “Man’s got to stand by what he believes.”
“It would get a lot of fingers pointing,” Goblin said.
One-Eye cackled again. “It would point them in some other direction, too, Little Girl. And I’m thinking we don’t want much more attention coming our way right now. I’m thinking maybe we’re closer to figuring things out than any of us realizes.”
“Water sleeps. We have to be taken seriously.”
“That’s what I’m saying. We use them scarves to take out informants and guys who know too much. Librarians, for instance.”
“Would I be correct in my suspicion that you’ve been thinking about this for a while and by chance you just happen to have a little list all ready to go?” Very likely any such list would include all the people responsible for his several failed attempts to establish himself in the Taglian black markets.
He cackled. He took a swipe at Goblin with his cane. “And you said she’s got a mind like a flint hatchet.”
“Bring me the list. I’ll discuss it with Murgen next time I see him.”
“With a ghost? They got no sense of perspective, you know.”
“You mean maybe he’s seen everything and knows what you’re really up to? Sounds like a perspective to me. Makes me wonder how far the Company might’ve gone if our fore-brethren had had a ghost to keep an eye on you.”
One-Eye grumbled something about how unfair and unreasonable the world was. He had been singing that song the whole time I had known him. He would keep it up after he became a ghost himself.
I mused, “You think we could get Murgen to winkle out the source of the stink that keeps coming from the back, there, where Do Trang hides his crocodile skins? I know it’s not them. Croc hides have a flavor all their own.”
One-Eye scowled. He was ready to change the subject now. The odor in question came from his beer- and liquor-manufacturing project, hidden in a cellar he and Do Trang thought nobody knew about. Banh Do Trang, once our benefactor for Sahra’s sake, now was practically one of the gang because he had a powerful taste for One-Eye’s product, a huge hunger for illegal and shadowy income, and he liked having tough guys on the payroll who would work hard for very little money. He thought his vice was a secret he shared only with One-Eye and Gota. The three of them got drunk together twice a week.
Alcohol is a definite Nyueng Bao weakness.
“I’m sure it’s not worth the trouble, Little Girl. It’s probably dead rats. Bad rat problem in this town. Do Trang puts rat poison out all the time. By the pound. No need to waste Murgen’s time chasing rodents. You’ve both got better things to do.”
I would be talking over a lot of things with Murgen if I could deal with him directly. If we could catch and keep his attention. I would like to know firsthand everything that ordinarily came to me through other people. I imply no malice, particularly from Sahra, but people do reshape information according to their own prejudices. Including even me, possibly, though until now, my objectivity has been peerless. All my predecessors, though . . . their reports must be read with a jaundiced eye.
Of course, most of them made the same observation in regard to their own predecessors. So we are all in agreement. Everyone is a liar but us. Only Lady was unabashedly self-congratulating. She missed few opportunities to remind those who came later how brilliant and determined and successful she was, turning the tide of the Shadowmaster wars when she had nothing to begin building upon but herself. Murgen was, putting it charitably, less than sane much of the time. Because I lived through many of the times and events he recollected, I have to say he did pretty good. Most of what he recorded could be true. I cannot contradict him. But a lot he set down does seem fanciful.
Fanciful? Last night I had a long chat with his ghost. Or spirit. Or ka. Whatever that was. If that was really Murgen and not some trick played on us by Kina or Soulcatcher.
We can never be one-hundred-percent certain that anything is exactly what it appears to be. Kina is the Mother of Deceit. And Soulcatcher, to quote a man far wiser and more foul of mouth than I, is a mudsucking lunatic.
This is excellent,” I enthused again as Sahra summoned Murgen once more. She herself betrayed no enthusiasm for the task. Tobo’s hovering did nothing to improve her temper. “Before he does anything else, I want to have him check on Surendranath Santaraksita.”
“So you don’t trust the librarian after all,” One-Eye said. He chuckled.
“I think he’s all right but why hand him a chance to break my heart if I can avoid it by keeping an eye on him?”
“How come it’s got to be my eye?”
“There’s not a sharper one available, is there? And you already turned down a chance to work on the Annals. I’ve got to do some heavy studying in those tonight. I might be on the track of something.”
The little wizard grunted.
“I think I found something at the library today. If Santaraksita doesn’t trip me up, I may have an outside view of the first coming of the Company by the end of the week.” An independent historical source has been a goal almost as long as has been our desire for a look at uncontaminated editions of the earliest three volumes of the Annals.
Sahra had something else on her mind. “Barundandi wants me to bring Sawa to work, Sleepy.”
“No. Sawa is on hiatus. She’s sick. She has cholera, if that’s what it takes. I’m finally starting to make some real headway. I’m not going to let that slide now.”
“He’s also been asking about Shiki.” Back when Tobo had accompanied his mother to the Palace occasionally, she had called him Shikhandini, which was a joke Jaul Barundandi never got because he was not the sort to pay attention to historical mythology. One of the kings of legendary Hastinapur had had a senior wife who seemed to be barren. A good Gunni, he prayed and made sacrifice faithfully, and eventually one of the gods stepped down from heaven to tell him he could have what he wanted, which was a son, but he was going to get it the hard way, for the son would be born a daughter. And, as they say, it came to pass that the wife brought forth a daughter whom the king then named Shikhandin, a name that also existed in the female form Shikhandini. It is a long and not that interesting story, but the girl grew up to become a mighty warrior.
The trouble started when it came time for the prince to take a bride.
Many of our public characters have obscure allusions or jokes built into them. That helped make things more interesting for the brothers playing the roles.
I asked, “Do we have any reason to snatch Barundandi? Other than his general sliminess?” I thought he was most useful right where he was. Any replacement was sure to be as venal and unlikely to be as kind to Minh Subredil. “And could we even get him out where we could touch him?”
Nobody suggested a strategic reason for grabbing the man. Sahra wanted to know, “Why do you ask?”
“Because I do think we could lure him. If we dress Tobo up pretty, then refuse to cooperate unless Barundandi meets him outside . . . ”
Sahra was not offended. The ruse is a legitimate weapon of war. She looked thoughtful. “Maybe Gokhale instead?”
“Perhaps. Though he might want someone younger. We can ask Swan. I was thinking of catching Gokhale in that place where the Deceivers killed that other one.” The enemy’s leading personalities seldom left the Palace. Which was why we had chosen to go get Willow Swan.
Sahra began to sing. Murgen was reluctant again tonight. I said, “Murgen should look at that joy house, too. He’d be the best way for us to check it out.” Though, no doubt, we could find several brothers willing to risk themselves in an extended recon.
Sahra nodded, did not break the rhythm of her lullaby.
“We might even . . . ” No. We could not just burn the place once Gokhale had been inside long enough to become seriously engaged. Nobody would understand why I wanted to waste a perfectly good whorehouse—though a few might find a deadly fire highly amusing.
One-Eye looked like he was sleeping again but was not. Without opening his eyes, he asked, “You know where you’re going, Little Girl? You got some kind of overall plan?”
“Yes.” I was surprised to find that I really believed that. Intuitively, somewhere inside, though I had not known it consciously, I had engineered a master plan for the liberation of the Captured and the resurrection of the Company. And it was starting to come together. After all these years.
Murgen showed up muttering about a white crow. He was distracted. I asked the wizards, “You figured out how to anchor him here yet?”
“Always some damned thing,” One-Eye grumbled. “Whatever you do, it’s never enough.”
“It can be done,” Goblin admitted. “But I still don’t see why we would want to.”
“He hasn’t been very cooperative. He doesn’t want to be here. He’s losing his connection to the real world. He’d rather sleep and wander those caverns.” I took a stab in the dark. “And put on his white wings. Be Khadi’s messenger.”
“White wings?”
They did not read the Annals. “The albino crow that turns up sometimes. Sometimes Murgen is inside it. Because Kina puts him there. Or used to put him there and now he keeps stumbling back in, the way he kept stumbling around in time once Soulcatcher got him started.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read sometimes. And once in a while I even read the Annals and try to figure out what Murgen didn’t tell us. What he might not actually have known himself. Right now he may be enamored of being the white crow because that way he gets into actual flesh that ranges outside the caverns. Or he may just be falling under the influence of Kina as she wakes up again. But none of that ought to matter much right now. Right now we have a bunch of spying we need him to do. I want to be able to twist his arm if I have to.”
The mission comes first. Murgen himself taught me that.
Sahra said, “Sleepy’s right. Anchor him. Then I’ll grab him by the nose and kick his behind until I’ve got his undivided attention.” She seemed suddenly optimistic, as though taking a direct approach with her husband was some totally new concept fraught with unexpected hope.
She went straight to outright confrontation, drawing Tobo in to support her.
Maybe she could rebuild Murgen’s ties with the outside world.
I turned to the others. “I found another Kina myth this morning. In this one her father didn’t trick her into going to sleep. She died. Then her husband got so upset that—”
“Husband?” Goblin squeaked. “What husband?”
“I don’t know, Goblin. The book didn’t name names. It was written for people who grew up in the Gunni religion. It assumes you know who they’re talking about. When Kina died, her husband was so grief-stricken he grabbed up her corpse and started doing that stomping dance Murgen talks about her doing in his visions. He got so violent that the other gods were afraid he would destroy the world. So her father threw an enchanted knife that cut her up into about fifty pieces and every place one of the chunks fell became a holy place for Kina’s worshippers. Just reading between the lines and guessing, I’d say Khatovar is where her head hit the ground.”
“I got a notion One-Eye was on the right track back when he was going to desert and retire.”
One-Eye gawked. Goblin saying something positive about anything he ever did? “The hell I was. I just had an attack of juvenile angst. I got over it and got responsible again.”
“There’s a new concept,” I observed. “One-Eye responsible.”
“For catastrophes and afflictions, maybe,” Goblin said.
One-Eye said, “I don’t get the Kina story. If she died back at the beginning of the world, how could she be giving us trouble for the last twenty or thirty years?”
“It’s religion, dimwit,” Goblin barked. “It don’t got to make sense.”
“Kina is a goddess,” I said. “I guess gods can’t ever be completely dead. I don’t know, One-Eye. I didn’t make it up, I just reported it. Look, the Gunni don’t believe anybody dies really. Their soul goes on.”
“Heh-heh-heh,” Goblin chuckled. “If these Gunni got it right, you’re in deep shit, runt boy. You got to keep going ’round on the Wheel of Life till you get it right. You got a lot of karma to work off.”
“Stop. Now,” I snapped. “We’re supposed to be working.”
Work. Not the favorite swear word of either man.
I told them, “You get Murgen nailed down. Or chained down. Whatever it takes to keep him under control. Then you help Sahra try to get through to him. I have a suspicion things are going to get exciting before long and we’ll need him wide awake and cooperative.”
One-Eye grumbled, “Sounds to me like you don’t plan to be here looking over our shoulders.”
I was up already. “Clever man. I have some reading and some translating to do. You can manage without me. If you concentrate.”
One-Eye told Goblin, “We got to get that little bit into the sack with some guy’ll pork her brains out.” His cure for all ills, even at his age.
I paused to say, “When he’s given everything else the once-over, have him search for Narayan and the Daughter of Night.” I did not need to explain how badly we needed to keep those two from achieving their ends.
I’ve got it!” I shouted, running back to the corner where Murgen’s friends and family were trying to torment him into taking a broader interest in the world of the living. “I found it! I’ve got it!”
“I hope you ain’t gonna give it to me,” One-Eye grumbled.
My excitement was so loud and intense even Murgen, who was caught in the mist and being a real pain about his situation, paused to study me.
“I had a feeling, an intuition the other day, that the answer was in the Annals. In Murgen’s Annals. And I’d just overlooked it. Maybe because it had been so long since I read them and I wouldn’t have thought to look for it back then.”
“And, behold!” One-Eye sneered. “There it was. In ink of gold on myrex-tinted paper, with little scarlet arrows saying, ‘Here it is, Little Girl. The secret of the—’ ”
“Stuff it, dustbag,” Goblin snapped. “I want to hear what Sleepy found.” Though it would have been him doing the sarcasm if One-Eye had not beat him to it.
“It’s the whole thing with the Nyueng Bao. Well, maybe not all of it,” I said as Sahra scowled at me. “But the part with Uncle Doj and Mother Gota and why they came out of the swamp when they didn’t have a debt of honor like your brother, Sahra.” Sahra’s brother Thai Dei was under the glittering plain with Murgen, serving as his bodyguard because of what Murgen and the Company had done to help the Nyueng Bao during the siege of Jaicur. “Sahra, you must know some of this.”
“That may be true, Sleepy. But you’ll have to tell us what you’re talking about first.”
“I’m talking about whatever it was that The Thousand Voices stole from the Temple of Ghanghesha sometime between the end of the siege and when Uncle Doj and your mother invited themselves to come stay with you here in Taglios. Murgen touches on it over and over, lightly, but I don’t think he ever really caught on completely. Whatever it was that The Thousand Voices stole, Uncle Doj called it ‘the Key.’ From other internal evidence, I think it had to be another key to the Shadowgate, like the Lance of Passion.” The Thousand Voices was what the Nyueng Bao called Soulcatcher. “I think if we had that key, we could open the way for the Captured.”
If I was guessing right here, I had created a whole new line of inquiry: Why the Nyueng Bao?
Sahra began shaking her head slowly.
“Am I wrong? What is the Key, then?”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Sleepy. I’m saying I don’t want you to be right. There are things I wouldn’t want to be true.”
“What? Why?”
“Myths and legends, Sleepy. Ugly myths and legends. Some of them I’m not supposed to know. And I know I don’t know them all. Probably none of the worst. Doj was their curator and keeper. As you are for the Black Company. But Doj never shared his secrets. Tobo, find your grandmother. Bring her here. Get Do Trang, too, if he’s here.”
Bewildered, the boy shuffled away.
A spectral whisper came out of the device where Murgen waited. “Sleepy may be right. I recall suspecting something like that and wondering if I could find a good history of the Nyueng Bao so I could figure it out. You’ll need to question Willow Swan, too.”
I said, “I’ll do that later. Separately. Swan doesn’t need to know what’s happening. Are you paying attention now, Standardbearer? Do you have any idea where we’re at and what we’re doing?”
“I do.” His tone was resigned, though. Like mine when I know I have to get up in the morning, want to or not.
“Tell me about the Temple of Ghanghesha, then. Both of you. Why would this Key have been kept there?”
Sahra did not want to talk about it. Her whole body said she was caught up in a ferocious internal struggle.
“Why is this so hard?” I asked.
“There is old evil in my people’s past. I’m only vaguely familiar with it. Doj knows the whole truth. The rest of us just understand that our ancestors were guilty of a great sin and until we expiate it, our whole race is condemned to live in bitter destitution in the swamp. The temple was a holy place long before some Nyueng Bao began to adopt Gunni beliefs. It protected something. Possibly the Key you mentioned. The thing Uncle Doj has been looking for.”
“Where did the Nyueng Bao come from, Sahra?” That question had intrigued me since childhood. Each few years hundreds of those strange people would pass through Jaicur on pilgrimage. They were quiet and orderly and stayed to themselves. And a year after they arrived from the north, they would pass through again, going back that way. Even at the height of the power of the Shadowmasters, that cycle had continued. Nobody knew where they went. Nobody ever cared.
“Out of the south somewhere, a long time ago.”
“From beyond the Dandha Presh?” I could not imagine subjecting little children and old folks to the rigors of a journey of that magnitude. The pilgrimage had to be very important indeed.
“Yes.”
“But there are no pilgrimages anymore.” The one that had ended up with hundreds of Nyueng Bao dying in Jaicur was the last of which I was aware.
“The Shadowmaster and the Kiaulune wars made the next few times impossible. There’s supposed to be a pilgrimage every four years. Each Nyueng Bao De Duang has to make the pilgrimage at least once as an adult. For a while the lack was no problem. But now the Protector will not permit the people to meet their obligations,” Banh Do Trang rasped from his wheelchair, having arrived in time to catch the drift of my interrogation. “There are things we do not discuss with those who aren’t Nyueng Bao.”
I got the feeling he was saying the same thing twice at one time, one way for my benefit and another for Sahra’s. This could be ticklish. We dared not offend Banh Do Trang, whose friendship we needed. If we lost him, we also risked losing Sahra, whose value to the Company could not be calculated.
Nothing is ever simple and straightforward.
I told the old man the way I had it figured. Ky Gota waddled in just as I started. My eyes widened as One-Eye gallantly offered her his seat. It is a world just chock-full of wonders. The little wizard went and got another seat, which he set next to Gota’s. The two of them sat there leaning on their canes like a couple of temple gargoyles. A ghost of ancient beauty peeked out of the wide, permanent scowl that Gota used for a face.
I explained the situation. “But here’s the mystery. Where is the Key today?”
Nobody volunteered that information.
“I’d think that if The Thousand Voices still had it, she’d be running down to Kiaulune every month to round up a new gaggle of killer shadows. It if could open the Shadowgate safely. And if Uncle Doj had it, he wouldn’t be roaming around looking for it. He’d be back in the swamp blithely letting the rest of us go to al-Sheil in a handcart. Am I wrong? Mother Gota? You know the man. You must be able to offer something.”
Able, perhaps. Willing, of course not. The big thing that stands out, to my ear, about the Company’s sojourn in the south, is the stubborn silence of so many people. About everything. Like if we even discovered our own birthdays, that would be something we could use against them. The fact that the Company now consists almost entirely of native soldiers has not helped at all. Our life does not attract the knowledgeable, educated portion of the population. If a priest offered to sign on, we would send him downriver, knowing for certain that he was a spy.
“You got the damned gimmick?” One-Eye asked.
“Who?”
“You, Little Girl. The villainess, you. I didn’t forget that you were Soulcatcher’s guest for a while, when she caught you on the road coming back from running that message for Murgen. I haven’t forgotten that when our sweet old Uncle Doj rescued you it was incidental. He was looking for his missing trinket, the Key. Not so?”
“That’s all true. But I didn’t bring anything away from that. Except a few new scars and the rags on my back.”
“What we need to know then is has Soulcatcher been looking for the Key?”
“We don’t know for sure. But she does fly down south occasionally and patrols the old ground like she’s looking for something.” We knew that, courtesy of Murgen. Though till now, her behavior had made no sense.
“So who else could’ve snatched this prize?” One-Eye did not press Gota for any information. The way to get around Gota was to ignore her. In time, she would insist that she be noticed.
I remembered a pale, ragged little girl who, though just four years old, had seemed ageless, silent and patient, confidently unfrightened by her captivity. The Daughter of Night. She never spoke to me once. She acknowledged my existence only when she had to, because if she irritated me too much, I might take all of what little food Soulcatcher allowed us. I should have strangled her then. But at that time I did not know who she was.
At that time I was having trouble remembering who I was. Soulcatcher had drugged me and gone down inside me and found half what made me me, then had tried being me in order to infiltrate the Company. I still wonder how well she really knows me. Certainly I do not want her to find out that I survived the Kiaulune wars. She might have the emotional weapons to crush me.
“Narayan came to get the Daughter of Night,” I mused aloud. “But I caught only glimpses of him. An extremely skinny little man in a filthy loincloth who didn’t look anything like the terrible monster he was supposed to be. It didn’t occur to me it was him till I realized I wasn’t going to be released, too. Since I couldn’t see what they were doing, I don’t know if they took anything with them. Murgen, you saw them then. I have it written down that you did. Did they take anything away that might have been this key?”
“I don’t know. Believe it or not, you really do miss some things out here.” He seemed piqued.
I realized I had not bothered to hear what he had to report. I asked.
“Not much useful,” Sahra told me, cutting Murgen off before he could retell everything from the beginning.
“Can you find them now?” I foresaw trouble. There was an unwilling connection to Kina. If the dark goddess was stirring again, he would have to be careful not to attract divine attention. “We have these priorities regarding the Daughter of Night: Kill her. Failing that: Kill her sidekick. Failing that: Make sure she can’t copy the Books of the Dead, which I’m sure she’ll start doing again as soon as she develops a reliable connection with Kina. Finally: Recapture anything she and Singh might have carried off when Narayan rescued her.”
One-Eye stopped nodding off long enough to clap his hands lazily. “Tear ’em up, Little Girl. Tear ’em up.”
“Sarky old reprobate.” One-Eye snickered.
Goblin said, “You want another angle, find out from your library pals who makes bound blank books. Go to them and find out who’s ordered some recently. Or bribe them to let you know when anybody does.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Somebody who actually uses his brain to think. The delight of the world is that its wonders never cease. Where the devil did Murgen go?”
Sahra said, “You just told him to find Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night.”
“I didn’t mean right this second. I wanted to know if he found out anything about Chandra Gokhale we can use.”
“Pressure getting to you, Little Girl?” One-Eye’s tone was so sweet I wanted to pop him. “Relax. Now’s the time when you don’t want to force anything.”
A couple of men from the duty crew, Runmust Singh and a Shadowlander dubbed Kendo Cutter by his squad mates, invited themselves into the staff meeting. Kendo reported, “There’s all kinds of screaming going on out there tonight. I sent out word everybody should hole up someplace where there’s plenty of light.”
Sahra said, “The shadows are hunting.”
I said, “We’ll be all right here. But just to be safe, Goblin, why don’t you make the rounds with Kendo and Runmust? We don’t want any surprise. Sahra, will Soulcatcher let the shadows run completely wild?”
“To make her point? You’re the Annalist. What do the books say about her?”
“They say she’s capable of anything. She has no connection with the humanity of anyone else. It must be very lonely to be her.”
“What?”
“We agree our next target should be Chandra Gokhale?”
Sahra eyed me oddly. That had been decided already. Unless some better opportunity fell into our laps, we would eliminate the Inspector-General, without whom the tax system and the bureaucratic side of government would stumble and stagger. He also seemed the most vulnerable of our enemies. And his removal would leave the Radisha more isolated than ever, cut off by the Protector on one hand, the priests on the other, and unable to turn anywhere because she was the Radisha, the Princess unapproachable, in some respects a demi-goddess.
It had to be lonely to be her, too.
Subtlety and finesse.
I asked, “What did we do today to frighten the world?” Then I realized that I knew the answer. It had been part of the plan for capturing Swan. All the brotherhood would have avoided any risks. Tonight there would be shows from buttons previously planted. There would be more again tomorrow night. Smoke-and-light shows proclaiming “Water sleeps,” or “My brother unforgiven,” or “All their days are numbered.” There would be more, somewhere, every evening from now on.
Sahra mused, “Someone who wasn’t one of us brought in another prayer wheel and mounted it on a memorial post outside the north entrance. It hadn’t been noticed yet when I left.”
“Same message?”
“I presume.”
“That’s scary. That could be a potent one. Rajadharma.”
“It has the Radisha thinking already. That monk burning himself definitely got her attention.”
Story of my life. Here I spend months working out every tiny detail of a marvelous plan and I get upstaged by a lunatic with a fire fetish.
“So those Bhodi nuts found a good message. You think we could steal some of their thunder?”
One-Eye chuckled evilly.
“What?” I demanded.
“Sometimes I amaze myself.”
Goblin, about to leave with Runmust and Kendo, observed, “You been amazed at yourself for two hundred years. Mainly ’cause nobody else bothers to get interested in insects.”
“You better not go to sleep any time soon, Frogface—”
“Gentlemen?” Sahra said. Gently. Yet she grabbed the attention of both wizards. “Can we stick to business? I need some sleep.”
“Absolutely!” Goblin said. “Absolutely! If the old fart has an idea, let’s get it out here before it dies of loneliness.”
“You may continue your assignment.”
Goblin stuck out his tongue but left.
“Amaze the rest of us, One-Eye,” I suggested. I did not want him dozing off before he shared his wisdom.
“Next time one of those Bhodi loons lights himself up, we have the smoke and flames carry our message. ‘Water Sleeps.’ And a new one I thunk up, ‘Nor Even Death Destroy.’ You got to admit, that’s got a nice religious ring to it.”
“Indeed,” I agreed. “What the heck does it mean?”
“Little Girl, don’t you start in on me.”
The ghost of evils past whispered, “I found them.”
Murgen was back.
I did not ask who. “Where?”
“The Thieves’ Garden.”
“Chor Bagan? The Greys have it under siege.”
And they were still serious about getting the place cleaned out, Murgen said.
Sahra wakened me well before dawn, which is not my best time of day. When I opted for a military career, we were besieged in my hometown. I just knew that once we got out of there, we would sleep till noon, we would eat fresh food all the time and there would be plenty of it and never, ever, would we have to go out in the rain again. In the meantime, I took the best I could get, which was the Black Company during the siege, with the water fifty feet deep. The only thing resembling fresh food was the long pig Mogaba and his Nar friends were enjoying. Unless you counted the occasional lame rat or slow-witted crow.
“What?” I grumbled. Personally, I am convinced that even the priests of happy-go-lucky old Ghanghesha are not required to be pleasant before an hour much closer to noon than this was.
“I have to go to the Palace. You have to appear at the library. If we want to snatch Narayan and the girl right in front of the Greys, we need to start planning right now.”
She was right. But that did not mean I had to accept it gracefully.
Every Company member inside Do Trang’s complex, and Banh himself, gathered over a crude breakfast. Only Tobo and Mother Gota were absent. But they would have no part in any of this. I thought.
Nobody from outside could be included now, because shadows were on the prowl.
“We got a plan all worked out,” One-Eye announced proudly.
“I’m sure it’s one stroke of genius after another,” I replied as I made a groggy effort to collect a bowl of cold rice, a mango and a bowl of tea.
“First thing, Goblin goes up there in his dervish outfit. Then Tobo comes strutting along . . . ”
“Good morning, Adoo,” I murmured distractedly as the gateman admitted me to the library grounds. I was worried about leaving Goblin and One-Eye to operate on their own. My mother instinct at work, they said, both showing nasty teeth as they reminded me that every hen has to trust her chicks on their own sometime. A point well made. Though few hens have to worry about their chicks getting drunk, forgetting what they are doing and wandering off in search of adventure in a city where there is not even one other skinny little black man or ugly little white character.
Adoo nodded his greeting. He never had anything to say.
Inside the library I went to work immediately, though only a couple of copyists had arrived before me. Sometimes Dorabee focused as intently as Sawa did. That helped turn off the worries.
“Dorabee? Dorabee Dey Banerjae!”
I started awake, amazed that I had fallen asleep. I had squatted down on my heels in a corner, in a fashion common amongst Gunni and Nyueng Bao but not common among Vehdna, Shadar or many of the ethnic minorities. We Vehdna favor sitting on the floor or on a cushion, cross-legged. Shadar like low chairs or stools. Not owning at least a crude stool is the truest mark of poverty amongst the Shadar.
I was in character even in my sleep.
“Master Santaraksita?”
“Are you ill?” He sounded concerned.
“Tired. I didn’t sleep well. The skildirsha were hunting last night.” I used the Shadowlander name for the shadows. That did not trouble Santaraksita. It had become part of the language under the Protectorate. “The screams kept waking me up.”
“I understand. I did not enjoy a sound sleep myself, though not for that reason. I was unaware of the horror till I saw its marks this morning.”
“The skildirsha show a proper respect for the priestly class, then.”
The faintest twitch of his lip told me he had not missed the joke. “I am properly appalled, Dorabee. This is evil unlike any we have ever known. The blind misfortune of flood or plague or disaster we must endure stoically. And against the darkness even the gods themselves sometimes contend in vain. But to send out a pack of these shadows to do murder randomly and often, and for no reason even an insane man can comprehend, that is evil of the sort the northerners used to preach.”
Dorabee managed a credible job of looking slack-jawed.
“I’m sorry. I’m exercised. You probably never saw any of the outsiders.” He placed the same stress on “outsiders” that many Taglians used when they meant the Black Company specifically.
“I did. I saw the Liberator himself once when I was little. And I saw the one they called the Lieutenant after she came back from Dejagore. I was pretty far away but I remember it because that was the same day she killed all the priests. And the Protector. I saw her a couple of times.” I was making it up as I went but that was the sort of thing most adult Taglians could claim. The Company had been in and out of the city for years before the final campaign against Longshadow and the fortress Overlook. I rose. “I’ll get back to work now.”
“You do your job well, Dorabee.”
“Thank you, Master Santaraksita. I try.”
“Indeed.” He seemed to be having trouble getting something out. “I have decided that you will be allowed access to any books not in the restricted section.” Restricted books were those not available in multiple copies. Only the most favored scholars were allowed near those. So far, I had been able to determine only a handful of the titles of the books so set aside. “When you have no other obligations.” Part of my day, every day, I spent just waiting to be told about something I needed to do.
“Thank you, Master Santaraksita!”
“I’ll expect you to be able to discuss them.”
“Yes, Master Santaraksita.”
“We have set our feet upon an unknown road, Dorabee. An exciting and frightening journey lies ahead.” His prejudices were such that he actually meant what he said. Me reading had twisted his universe all out of shape and now he was going to conspire in this perverted vermiculation.
I took my broom in hand. Exciting and frightening things would be happening elsewhere in my universe. And I hated every second that I was not there to control them.
The little dervish in brown wool seemed completely lost inside himself. He was busy talking to himself, paying no attention to the surrounding world. Most likely he was quoting to himself from the sacred texts of the Vehdna, as understood by his peculiar splinter sect. Though tired and irritable, the Greys did not challenge him immediately. They had been taught to honor all holy men, not just those already secure within the Shadar truths. Any devoted stalker after wisdom would find his path leading him to enlightenment eventually.
Tolerance of such seekers was common to all Taglians. The welfare of the soul and the spirit were of grave concern to most. The Gunni, indeed, considered the seeking of enlightenment to be one of the four key stages of an ideally lived life. Once a man successfully raised up and provided for his children, he should put all things material, all ambition and pleasure, aside. He should go into a forest to live as a hermit or become a mendicant seeker or in some other way should live out his final years looking for the truth and purifying his soul. Many of the greatest names in Taglian and southern history are those of kings and rich men who chose just such a path.
But human nature being human nature . . .
The Greys did not, however, let the dervish follow his quest into Chor Bagan. A sergeant intercepted him. His associates surrounded the holy man. The sergeant said, “Father, you cannot go in that direction. This street has been closed to traffic by order of Minister Swan.” Even dead, Swan had to take the blame for Soulcatcher’s policies.
The dervish apparently failed to notice the Greys till he actually collided with the sergeant. “Huh?”
The younger Greys laughed. Men enjoy seeing their prejudices confirmed. The sergeant repeated his message. He added, “You must turn right or left. We’re rooting out the evils infesting what lies straight ahead.” He possessed a touch of wit.
The dervish looked first right, then left. He shivered, then announced, “All evil is the result of metaphysical error,” in a raspy little voice and started along the street to the right. It was a very strange street. It was almost empty of humanity. In Taglios that was something seldom seen.
A moment later the Shadar sergeant squealed in surprise and pain. He began slapping his side.
“What’s the matter?” another Grey asked.
“Something bit me . . . ” He squealed again, which indicated that he was in a great deal of agony, for Shadar were proud of their ability to endure pain without outcry or even flinching.
Two of the sergeant’s men tried to lift his shirt while a third clung to his arm in an effort to keep him immobile. He shrieked again.
Smoke began to boil out of his side.
The Greys were so startled they backed away. The sergeant went down. He went into convulsions. Smoke continued to boil up. It assumed a form none of the Greys wanted to see.
“Niassi!”
The demon Niassi began to whisper secrets no Shadar wanted to hear.
Grinning to himself, Goblin slipped into Chor Bagan. He disappeared long before anyone wondered if there might not be a connection between the sergeant’s discomfort and the veyedeen dervish.
Greys arrived from all directions. Officers barked and cursed and drove them back to their stations before the denizens of Chor Bagan seized the opportunity to escape. Obviously this was a distraction meant to give their prey the chance to run.
A crowd had begun to gather, too. Among them was a Nyueng Bao boy who picked his moment, cut a purse and fled past the Greys, one of whom recalled him from the evening when one of their own got stoned. Discipline began to collapse.
The Grey officers tried. And managed rather well, considering. Only a few people escaped Chor Bagan. And a half-dozen slipped inside, among them a skinny little old man in the all-enveloping yellow of a leper.
One-Eye was not pleased. He was sure strategy had had nothing to do with it being him who had to assume the yellow. Goblin was up to something wicked.
The six raiders approached the target tenement from front and rear, in loose teams of three. One-Eye was around front. People cleared off fast when they saw the yellow. Lepers were held in absolute terror.
None of the men wanted to carry out a raid in broad daylight. It was not the Company way. But darkness was denied us till Soulcatcher pulled her shadows back off the streets. And the consensus of the Annalists and wizards was that it was less likely that the Daughter of Night could summon Kina’s help during daylight. Daytime also offered a better chance of taking her by surprise.
Each team paused to make sure every man still wore his yarn bracelet before they stormed into the tenement. Each wizard set loose an array of previously prepared low-grade confusion spells that buzzed through the ramshackle structure like a swarm of drunken mosquitoes. The attackers passed inside, stepping over and around frightened, shivering families who, till now, had considered themselves wildly fortunate to have a roof over their heads, even if that meant renting floor space in a hallway. Both teams posted a man who would make sure no one went outside. Another two men met at the foot of the rickety stair. They would prevent movement up or down. Goblin and One-Eye met at the cellar entrance and shared a few complaints about being desperately undermanned, then a few exaggerated courtesies as each offered the other the opportunity to go down into the enemy’s den first.
Goblin finally accepted on the basis of superior youth, quickness and alleged intelligence. He launched a couple of luminary floating stars into the pit, where the darkness was blacker than Kina’s heart.
“Here!” Goblin said. “Ha! We’ve got—”
Something like a flaming tiger burst out of nowhere. It leaped at Goblin. A shadow drifted in from the side. It flicked something long and thin that looped around the little wizard’s neck.
One-Eye’s cane came down on Narayan’s wrist hard enough to crack bone. The living saint of the Stranglers lost his rumel, which flew across the cellar.
One-Eye’s off hand tossed something over Goblin’s head, toward the source of the tiger. A ghostly light floated up like a wisp of luminescent swamp gas. It moved suddenly, enveloping a young woman. She began to slap at herself, trying to wipe it off.
Goblin did something quick, while she was distracted. She collapsed. “Goddamn! Goddamn! It worked. I’m a genius. Admit it. I’m a fucking genius.”
“Who’s a genius? Who came up with the plan?”
“Plan? What plan? Success is in the details, runt. Who came up with the details? Any damned fool could’ve said let’s go catch them two.”
Both men tied limbs as they nattered.
One-Eye said, “Plan the details on this. We got to get out of here with these people. Through all the Greys in the world.”
“Already covered. They’ve got so much trouble they won’t have time to worry about any damned lepers.” He started trying to get a yellow outfit over the head of the Daughter of Night. “Remind me to warn them back at the shop that this one can put together an illusion or two.”
“I know that’s the way its supposed to go.” One-Eye began dragging Narayan Singh into another yellow outfit. In a moment Goblin would trade his brown for yellow, too. Upstairs, the four Company brothers, all of Shadar origin, were turning themselves into Greys. “I’m saying it ain’t got a prayer of working.”
“That because I planned it?”
“Absolutely. You’re beginning to catch on. Welcome to reality.”
“It goes to shit in our hands, you can blame it on Sleepy, not me. It was her idea.”
“We got to do something about that girl. She thinks too damned much. Will you quit farting around? Them goddamn Greys out there are going to have time to go home for lunch.”
“Don’t hit him so hard. You want him to walk out of here under his own power.”
“You talking to me? What the hell you doing with . . . get your hand out of there, you old pervert.”
“I’m putting a control amulet over her heart, you dried-up old turd. So she won’t embarrass us before we get her home.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure you are. But why don’t I look on the bright side? At least you’re interested in girls again. She built as nice as her mother?”
“Better.”
“Watch your mouth. The place might be haunted. And I got a suspicion maybe some of those ghosts can talk to each other, no matter what Murgen claims.” One-Eye began to bully the groggy Narayan Singh up the steps.
“I do believe this is going to work,” One-Eye crowed. The combination of Greys and lepers seemed the perfect device for exiting the Thieves’ Garden—particularly now that the real Greys were running around distracted.
“I don’t want to break your heart, old-timer,” Goblin said. “But I think we done been fished.” He was looking over his shoulder.
One-Eye looked back. “Shit!”
A small flying carpet dropped toward them, accompanied by crows making no sounds at all. Soulcatcher. And her very stance suggested mischievous glee.
She threw something.
“Spread out!” Goblin barked. “Don’t let those two get away.” He faced the descending carpet, heart in this throat. If it came to a direct face-off, he was going to get splattered like a stomped egg. He extended a gloved hand, caught the falling black globule, whipped his arm in a circle and launched the missile back into the sky.
Soulcatcher shrieked, outraged. The people of Taglios did not have that kind of nerve. She drove the carpet to one side, avoiding the black globe. And well she moved when she did.
Her luck had served her yet again. A screaming fireball ripped right through the space she had vacated, the same kind of fireball that had eaten all those holes in the Palace wall and had set the bodies of so many men burning like bad fat candles. She continued to dive. Two more fireballs barely missed her. She put a tenement between herself and the sharpshooters. She was extremely angry but did not let rage cloud her thinking.
Above her, her crows began bursting like soundless fireworks. Blood, flesh and feathers rained down.
In seconds she figured it out, conversing with herself in a committee of voices.
They had not been hiding inside Chor Bagan after all. She could not have caught anyone trying to slip away like this if they had not come in to retrieve something they did not want found. “They’re here in the city. But we haven’t found them. We haven’t seen a trace or heard a rumor that they didn’t want to reach our ears. Until now. That takes wizardry. That bold little one. That was the toad man. Goblin. Though the Great General of the Armies Mogaba assures us that he saw the body himself. Who else is alive? Could the Great General himself be less trustworthy than he would like us to believe?”
That was not possible. Mogaba had no other friends. He was committed in perpetuity.
Soulcatcher brought her carpet to earth, stepped off, folded its light bamboo frame, rolled the carpet around that, surveyed the street. They had come down this way. From up there. What could they have wanted desperately enough to have exposed themselves so thoroughly? Anything they thought that important would be something she was bound to find very interesting herself.
It took just one whispered word of power to illuminate the cellar. The squalor was appalling. Soulcatcher turned slowly. A man and his daughter, apparently. An old man and a young woman, anyway. One lamp. Discarded clothing. A few handfuls of rice. Some fish meal. Why the writing instruments and ink? What was this? A book. Somebody had just begun writing in it in an unfamiliar alphabet. She caught a spot of black movement in the corner of her eye. She whirled, crouching, fearing an attack by a rogue shadow. The skildirsha maintained an especially potent hatred for those who dared command them.
A rat fled, dropping the object of its curiosity. Soulcatcher knelt, picked up a long strip of black silk with an antique silver coin sewn into one corner. “Oh. I see.” She began to laugh like a young girl catching on late to the meaning of an off-color joke. She collected the book, surveyed the scene once more before leaving. “Dedication sure doesn’t pay.”
Once in the street again, she reassembled her carpet, unconcerned about snipers. Those people would be long gone and far away. They knew their business. But crows should be tracking them.
She froze, staring upward but not really seeing the white crow on the peak of the tenement roof. “How did they find out where those two were?”
What happened?” Sahra demanded as soon as she came in, before she began shedding Minh Subredil’s rags.
I was still Dorabee Dey Banerjae myself. “We lost Murgen somehow. Goblin thought they had him anchored, but he went away while we were all out and I don’t know how to get him back.”
“I meant what happened in the Thieves’ Garden. Soulcatcher was out there. Whatever she tried to pull didn’t work out but she came back a different person. I didn’t get to hear everything she told the Radisha but I do know she found something or figured out something that changed her whole attitude. Like everything suddenly stopped being fun.”
I said, “Oh. I don’t know. Maybe Murgen can tell us. If we can get him back here.”
Goblin joined us. He was pushing a sleeping One-Eye in Banh Do Trang’s spare wheelchair. He announced, “They’re resting peacefully. Drugged. Narayan was distraught. The girl took it pretty calmly. We need to worry about her.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, indicating One-Eye.
“He’s worn out. He’s an old man. I want to see you have half the energy he does when you get to be half his age.”
Sahra asked, “Why do we need to worry about the girl?”
“Because she’s her mother’s daughter. She doesn’t have much skill with it yet because she hasn’t had anybody to teach her, but she’s got the natural ability to become a substantial sorceress. Maybe even as powerful as her mother but without Lady’s rudimentary sense of ethics. It reeks off her—”
“ ’Tain’t the only thing she reeks of, neither,” One-Eye chirped. “First thing you do with that little honey, you throw her in a vat of hot water. Then throw in a couple, four lumps of lye soap and let her soak for a week.”
Sahra and I exchanged glances. If she was bad enough to offend One-Eye, she had to be ripe indeed.
Goblin grinned from ear to ear but eschewed temptation.
I said, “I hear you ran into the Protector.”
“She was on a roof or somewhere waiting for something to happen. She didn’t get what she expected. A couple of fireballs and she ducked and stayed ducked.”
“You made it home without being followed?” I knew the answer because I knew they knew the stakes. They would not have come anywhere near here had they had the slightest doubt that that was safe.
I had to ask, even knowing that if they had failed, the warehouse would be buried in Greys already.
“We were ready to deal with the crows.”
“All but one,” One-Eye grumbled.
“What?”
“I saw a white one up there. It didn’t try to follow us, though.”
Once again Sahra and I exchanged glances. Sahra said, “I’m going to change and relax and get something to eat. Let’s meet in an hour. If you could find it in your heart, Goblin, you might try to get Murgen back here.”
“You’re the necromancer.”
“You’re the one who claimed he anchored him. One hour.”
Goblin began grumbling to himself. One-Eye chuckled and made no offer to help. He asked me, “You ready to kill your librarian yet?”
I did not tell him so but I was slightly more open to the suggestion tonight. Surendranath Santaraksita seemed to suspect that Dorabee Dey Banerjae was something more than he pretended. Or maybe I was just paranoid enough to hear things Santaraksita never intended to say. “You don’t worry about Master Santaraksita. He’s being very good to me. Today he told me I can look at any book I want. Unless it’s in the restricted stacks.”
“Woo!” One-Eye breathed. “Somebody finally found the way to her heart. Who’d’a thunk a book would do it? Name the first one after me, Little Girl.”
I waved a fist under his nose. “I’d knock out your last tooth and call you Mushy but I was brought up to respect my elders—even if they’re rambling, demented and senile.” For all its One True God focus, my religion contains a strong taint of ancestor worship. Every Vehdna believes his forefathers can hear his prayers and can intercede with God and his saints. If he feels he has been properly treated. “I’m going to follow Sahra’s example.”
“You holler if you want to get in practice for your new boyfriend.” His cackle ended abruptly as Gota limped around me. When I glanced back, One-Eye appeared to be sound asleep again. Must have been some other old fool running his mouth.
During the siege of Jaicur, I announced that never again would I be picky about what I ate. That I would respond to anything offered me with a smile of gratitude and a spoken “Thank you.” But time has a way of wearing away at such vows. I was nearly as sick of rice and smoked fish as Goblin and One-Eye were. Breaking the tedium with the occasional supper of rice and fish meal did not seem to help. I am confident that it is their diet that makes the Nyueng Bao such a humorless people.
I ran into Sahra, who had bathed and let her hair down and relaxed, looking a decade younger, so that it was easy to see how, a decade earlier still, she could have been every young man’s fantasy. “I still have a little money I took off somebody who picked the wrong side down south,” I told her, waving a tiny piece of fish caught between two bamboo chopsticks. Nyueng Bao refuse to adopt innovative utensils that have been in common use amongst everyone else in this part of the world for centuries. Those who did the cooking in Do Trang’s complex were all Nyueng Bao.
“What?” Sahra was completely baffled.
“I’ll give it up. If we can buy a pig with it.” Vehdna are not supposed to eat pork. But I made the mistake of being born female, so I probably do not have a seat reserved in Paradise anyway. “Or anything else that doesn’t go through the water like this.” I made a wiggly motion with one hand.
Sahra did not understand. Food was a matter of indifference to her—so long as she got some. Fish and rice forever were perfectly fine. And she was probably right. There are plenty of people out there who have to eat chhatu because they cannot afford rice. And others cannot afford any food at all. Though Soulcatcher seemed to be thinning those out now.
Sahra started to tell me something about a rumor that another Bhodi disciple was going to present himself at the entrance to the Palace and demand an audience with the Radisha. But we were approaching the lighted area where we worked our wickednesses of evenings and she saw something there that made her stop.
I started to say, “Then we need to get somebody next to him—”
Sahra growled, “What the hell is he doing here?”
I saw it now. Uncle Doj was back, probably determined to invite himself into our lives again. His timing seemed interesting and suspect.
I also found it interesting that Sahra spoke Taglian when she was stressed. She had some definite points of contention with her own people, though around the warehouse nobody used Nyueng Bao except Mother Gota, who did so only to remain a pain.
Uncle Doj was a wide little man who, though on the brink of seventy, was mostly muscle and gristle, and in recent years, bad temper. He carried a long, slightly curved sword he called Ash Wand. Ash Wand was his soul. He had told me so. He was some sort of priest but would not bother to explain. His religion involved martial arts and holy swords, though. He was nobody’s uncle in reality. Uncle was a title of respect among Nyueng Bao, and they all seemed to consider Doj a man worthy of the greatest respect.
Uncle Doj has meandered in and out of our lives since the siege of Jaicur, always more distraction than contribution. He could be underfoot for years at a stretch, then would disappear for weeks or months or years. This latest time he had been out of the way for more than a year. When he did turn up, he never bothered reporting what he had been doing or where he had been, but judging from Murgen’s observations and my own, he was still searching for his Key diligently.
Curious, him materializing so suddenly after my epiphany. I asked Sahra, “Did your mother happen to leave the warehouse today?”
“That question occurred to me, too. It might be worth pursuit.”
Very little warmth existed between mother and daughter. Murgen was not the cause but absolutely had become the symbol.
Uncle Doj was supposed to be a minor wizard. I never saw any evidence to support that, other than his uncanny skill with Ash Wand. He was old and his joints were getting stiff. His reflexes were fading. But I could not think of anyone who would remotely be his match. Nor have I ever heard of anyone else dedicating his life to a piece of steel the way he has.
Maybe I did have evidence of his being a wizard, I reflected. He never had any trouble getting through the mazes Goblin and One-Eye had created to save us the embarrassment of unexpected walk-ins. Those two ought to tie him down till he explained how he did that.
I asked Sahra, “How do you want to handle this?”
Her voice was edged with flint. “Far as I’m concerned, we can lump him right in there with Singh and the Daughter of Night.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy, huh?”
“I never liked Doj much. By Nyueng Bao standards he’s a great and honorable man, a hero due great respect. And he’s the embodiment of everything I find distasteful about my people.”
“Secretive, huh?”
She betrayed a hint of a smile. In that she was as guilty as any other Nyueng Bao. “That’s in the blood.”
Tobo noticed us watching and talking. He darted over. He was excited enough to forget he was a surly young man. “Mom. Uncle Doj is here.”
“So I see. He say what he wants this time?”
I touched her arm gently, cautioning her. No need to start butting heads.
Doj, of course, was aware of our presence. I never saw a man so intensely aware of his environment. He might have heard every word we whispered, too. I put no store in the chance that time had weathered his sense of hearing. He gobbled rice and paid us no heed.
I told Sahra, “Go say hello. I need a second to put my face on.”
“I ought to send for the Greys. Have them raid the place. I’m too tired for this.” She did not bother to keep her voice down.
“Mom?”
I held Doj’s eye. My face was cold. My voice held no emotion whatsoever as I asked, “What is the Key?” Bound, gagged, Narayan Singh and Daughter of Night watched and waited their turn.
The faintest flicker of surprise stirred in Doj’s eyes. I was not the sort he expected to be a questioner.
I was in character again, a borrowed one based on a gang enforcer who had offended us a few years ago, Vajra the Naga. The gang was out of business and Vajra the Naga had gone on to a better world but his legacy occasionally proved useful.
Doj enjoyed the reasonable expectation that he would not be tortured. I had no intention of taking it that far. With him. The Company’s fortunes and those of the Nyueng Bao had become so intermingled that I could not brutalize Doj without alienating our most useful allies.
Doj volunteered nothing. Nor did I expect him to be any more vocal than a stone. I told him, “We need to open the way onto the glittering plain. We know you don’t have the Key. We do know where to start looking for it. We’ll be pleased to return it to you once we release our brothers.” I paused, giving him time to surprise me by replying. He did not.
“You are, perhaps, philosophically opposed to opening the way. We’re going to disappoint you on that. The way will open. Somehow. You have only the option of participating or not participating.”
Doj’s eyes shifted, just for an instant. He wanted to read Sahra’s stance.
Hers was plain. She had a husband trapped under the glittering plain. The wishes of the lone priest of some obscure, never-explained cult carried no weight with her.
Not even Banh Do Trang or Ky Gota offered demonstrative support, though both would favor him mainly out of decades of inertia.
“If you don’t cooperate, then we won’t return the Key when we’re done with it. And we will determine what constitutes cooperation. The first step is to put an end to all of the normal Nyueng Bao equivocation and evasion and selective deafness.”
Vajra the Naga was not a character I liked to adopt too often. A naga was a mythical serpent being that lived beneath the earth and had no sympathy whatever for anything human. The trouble with the character was that I could slip into it like it had been tailored for me. It would take only a small emotional distortion to turn me into Vajra the Naga.
“You have something we want. A book.” I was betting a lot on my having reasoned out or intuited the course of various hidden events based upon what I had gotten from Murgen and his Annals. “It’s about so-by-so and this thick, bound in tan vellum. The writing inside is in an untrained hand in a language no one has spoken for seven centuries. Specifically, it is a nearly complete copy of the first volume of the Books of the Dead, the lost sacred texts of the Children of Kina. Chances are you didn’t know that.”
Narayan and even the Daughter of Night reacted to that.
I continued, “The book was stolen from the fortress Overlook by the sorcerer called the Howler. He concealed it because he didn’t want Soulcatcher to get it, nor did he want the child to have it. You either saw him hide it or stumbled onto it soon after he did. You concealed it somewhere you feel is safe. Ignoring the fact that nothing can remain hidden forever. Some eyes will discover anything eventually.”
Once again I allowed Doj time for remarks. He chose to pass on the opportunity.
“You have a choice in all this. I remind you, though, that you’re getting old, that your chosen successor is buried under the plain with my brothers, and that you have no allies more favorable than Gota, whose enthusiasm has to be suspect at this late date. You may choose to say nothing, ever, in which case truth will follow you into the darkness. But the Key will remain here. In other hands. Have you had enough to eat? Has Do Trang been a good host? Will somebody help our guest find something to drink? We shouldn’t be scorned for our failures of hospitality.”
“You didn’t get a word out of him,” One-Eye complained as soon as Doj was out of earshot.
“I didn’t expect to. I just wanted him to have something to think about. Let’s talk to these two. Scoot Singh over here, take the gag off and turn him so he can’t get cues from the girl.” She was spooky. Even bound and gagged, she radiated a disturbingly potent presence. Put her in the company of people already prepared to believe that she was touched by the dark divine and it was easy to understand why the Deceiver cult was making a comeback. Interesting, though, that that was a recent phenomenon. That for a decade she and Narayan had been fugitives painstakingly taking control of the few surviving Deceivers and evading the Protector’s agents, and now, just as we feel we are up to tugging a few beards, they began making their survival known, too.
I had no trouble seeing where the Gunni imagination would find connections and portents and wild harbingers of the Year of the Skulls.
“Narayan Singh,” I said in my Vajra the Naga voice. “You’re a stubborn old man. You should have been dead long ago. Perhaps Kina does favor you. Which would suggest that here in my hands is where the goddess wants you to be.” We Vehdna are good at blaming everything on God. Nothing can happen that is not the will of God. Therefore, He has already measured the depth of the brown stuff and has decided to toss you in. “And these are bloody hands, make no mistake.”
Singh looked at me. He did not fear much. He did not recognize me. If our paths had crossed before, I had been too minor an annoyance for him to recall.
The Daughter of Night remembered me, though. She was thinking that I was a mistake she would not be making again. I was thinking maybe she was a mistake we ought not to make, however useful a tool she might become. She almost scared Vajra the Naga, who had been too dense to comprehend fear in personal terms.
“You’re troubled by events but aren’t afraid. You rely upon your goddess. Good. Let me provide assurances. We won’t harm you. Assuming you cooperate. However much we owe you.”
He did not believe a word of that and I did not blame him. That was the usual sort of “hold out a feather of hope” a torturer used to leverage cooperation from the doomed. “In this case, the pain will all be directed elsewhere.” He tried to turn to look at the girl. “Not just there, Narayan Singh. Not only there. Though that’s where we’ll start. Narayan, you have something we want. We have several things we believe to be of value to you. I’m prepared to make an exchange, sworn in the names of all our gods.”
Narayan had nothing to say. Yet. But I began to sense that his ears might be open to the right words.
The Daughter of Night sensed that, too. She squirmed. She tried to make some kind of noise. She was going to be as stubborn and crazy as her mother and aunt. Must be the blood.
“Narayan Singh. In another life you were a vegetable seller in the town called Gondowar. Every other summer you would go off to lead your company of tooga.” Singh looked uncomfortable and puzzled. This was nothing he expected. “You had a wife, Yashodara, whom you called Lily in private. You had a daughter, Khaditya, which was maybe just a little too clever a naming. You had three sons: Valmiki, Sugriva and Aridatha. Aridatha you’ve never seen because he wasn’t born until after the Shadowmasters carried the able men of Gondowar off into captivity.”
Narayan looked more uncomfortable and troubled than ever. His life before the coming of the Shadowmasters was a lost episode. Since his unexpected salvation, he had dedicated himself solely to his goddess and her Daughter.
“Those times were so unsettled that you have since proceeded on the reasonable assumption that nothing of your former life survived the coming of the Shadowmasters. But that assumption is a false one, Narayan Singh. Yashodara bore you that third son, Aridatha, and lived to see him become a grown man. Though she endured great poverty and despair, your Lily survived until just two years ago.” In fact, until just after we located her. I still did not know for certain if some of my brothers had not grown overly zealous in their eagerness to locate Narayan. “Of your sons, Aridatha and Sugriva still live, as does your daughter Khaditya, though she has used the name Amba since she learned, to her horror, that her very father was the Narayan Singh of such widespread infamy.”
By stealing Lady’s baby, Narayan had ensured that his name would live on amongst those of the great villains. Everyone over a certain age knew the name and a score of evil stories burdening it—the majority of them fabrications or accretions of stories formerly attached to some other human demon whose ignominy had been nibbled up by time.
I had his attention despite his determination to remain indifferent. Family is critically important to all but a handful of us.
“Sugriva continues in the produce business, although his desire to escape your reputation led him first to move to Ayodahk, then to Jaicur when the Protector decided she wanted the city repopulated. He felt everyone would be strangers there and he could create a more favorable past for himself.”
Both captives noted my unfortunate use of “Jaicur.” Which did not give them anything they could use but which did tell them I was not Taglian. No Taglian would call that city anything but Dejagore.
I continued, “Aridatha grew into a fine young man, well-formed and beautiful. He’s a soldier now, a senior noncommissioned officer in one of the City Battalions. His rise has been rapid. He has been noticed. There’s a good chance he’ll be chosen to become one of the career commissioned officers the Great General had been imposing on the army.” I fell silent. No one else spoke. Some were hearing this for the first time, though Sahra and I had started looking for those people a long time ago.
I got up and went out, got myself a large cup of tea. I cannot abide the Nyueng Bao tea-making ceremonies. I am, of course, a barbarian in their eyes. I do not like the tiny little cups they use, either. When I have some tea, I want to get serious about it. Make it strong and bitter and toss in a glob of honey.
I seated myself in front of Narayan again. No one had spoken in my absence. “So, living saint of the Stranglers, have you truly put aside all the chains of the earth? Would you like to see your Khaditya again? She was little when you left. Would you like to see your grandchildren? There are five of them. I can say the word and inside a week we can have one of them here.” I sipped tea, looked Singh in the eye and let his imagination toy with the possibilities. “But you are going to be all right, Narayan. I’m going to see to that personally.” I showed him my Vajra the Naga smile. “Will somebody show these two to their guest rooms?”
“That all you’re going to do?” Goblin asked once they were gone.
“I’m going to let Singh think about the life he never lived. I’ll let him think about losing what’s left of that. And about losing his messiah. When he can avoid all those tragedies just by telling us where to find the souvenir he carried away from Soulcatcher’s hideout down by Kiaulune.”
“He won’t take a deep breath without getting permission from the girl.”
“We’ll see how he handles having to make his own decisions. If he stalls too long and we get pressed, you can put a glamour on me that’ll make him think I’m her.”
“What about her?” One-Eye asked. “You going to personally work on her, too?”
“Yes. Starting right now. Put some of those choke spells on her. One on each wrist and ankle. And double them up around her neck.” We had done some herding, amongst other things, over the years and One-Eye and Goblin, being incredibly lazy, had developed choke spells that constricted tighter and tighter as an animal moved farther away from a selected marker point. “She’s a resourceful woman with a goddess on her side. I’d prefer to kill her and be done with it but we won’t get any help from Singh if we do. If she does manage to escape, I want complete success to be fatal. I want near success to render her unconscious from lack of air. I don’t want her having regular contact with any of our people. Remember what her aunt, Soulcatcher, did to Willow Swan. Tobo. Has Swan said anything that might interest us?”
“He just plays cards, Sleepy. He does talk all the time but he never says anything. Kind of like Uncle One-Eye.”
Whisper. “You put him up to that, didn’t you, Frogface?”
“Sounds like Swan to me,” I said. I shut my eyes, began massaging my brow between thumb and forefinger, trying to make Vajra the Naga go away. His reptilian lack of connection was seductive. “I’m so tired—”
“Then why the hell don’t we all just retire?” One-Eye croaked. “For a whole goddamned generation it was the Captain and his next year in Khatovar shit that beat us into the ground. Now it’s you two women and your holy crusade to resurrect the Captured. Find yourself a guy, Little Girl. Spend a year screwing his brains out. We’re not going to get those people out of there. Accept that. Start believing that they’re dead.”
He sounded exactly like the traitor in my soul that whispered in my mind every night before I fell asleep. The part about accepting that the Captured were never going to be coming back, anyway. I asked Sahra, “Can we call up our favorite dead man? One-Eye, ask him what he thinks of our plan.”
“Bah! Frogface, you deal with this. I need a little medicinal pick-me-up.”
Almost smiling despite her aching joints, Gota waddled out behind One-Eye. We would not see those two for a while. If we were lucky, One-Eye would get drunk fast and pass out. If we were not, he would come staggering out looking to feud with Goblin and we would have to restrain him. That could turn into an adventure.
“Well. Here’s our prodigal.” Sahra finally had Murgen back in the mist box.
I told him, “Tell me about the white crow.”
Puzzled, “I go there sometimes. It’s not voluntary.”
“We took Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night out of Chor Bagan today. There was a white crow there. You weren’t here.”
“I wasn’t there.” More puzzled. Even troubled. “I don’t remember being there.”
“I think Soulcatcher noticed it. And she knows her crows.”
Murgen continued, “I wasn’t there but I remember things that happened. This can’t be happening to me again.”
“Just calm down. Tell us what you know.”
Murgen proceeded to report everything Soulcatcher said and did after she ducked our snipers. He would not tell us how he knew. I do not think he could.
Sahra said, “She does know that we have Singh and the girl.”
“But did she guess why? The Company has an old grudge with those two.”
“She’ll need to see bodies to be convinced there was nothing more to it than that. She’s still not completely satisfied that Swan is dead. A very suspicious woman, the Protector.”
“A Narayan corpse would be easy—if we could make it credible. There’re a million skinny, filthy little old men with green teeth out there. But we’d sure come up short on beautiful twenty-year-old women with blue eyes and skin paler than ivory.”
“The Greys will definitely become more active now,” Sahra said. “Whatever she suspects or doesn’t, the Protector wants no one going about any tricky business in her city.”
“A point the Radisha might argue. Which reminds me of something that’s been knocking around the back of my head. Listen to this and tell me what you think.”