The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company)

by Glen Cook

  They needed a lot of opening. She had spent most of her life cooped up inside the Palace.

  The white crow turned up every few days but its darker kinfolk did not. Maybe the Protector was preoccupied elsewhere.

  I wished I had Murgen’s talent for leaving his body. I had not had so much as a good dream since leaving the Grove of Doom. I knew exactly as little as everyone else. And that was extremely frustrating after having had easy access to secrets from afar for so long.

  Nights in the mountains get really cold. I told Swan I was tempted to take up his suggestion that we go off somewhere and set up housekeeping in our own tavern and brewery. When it got really cold, a few lesser sins did not seem to matter.

  57

  The timing of events in Taglios is uncertain because the principal reporter, Murgen, had maintained such a casual relationship with the concept for the last decade and a half. But his sketchy descriptions of events in the city following our departure are of more than passing interest.

  At first the Protector suspected nothing. The stay-behinds planted smoke buttons and started rumors but with a declining enthusiasm the Taglian peoples began to sense. At the same time, though, the populace developed an abiding suspicion that the Protector had done away with the reigning Princess. The people became less tractable by the hour.

  The arrival of the Great General and his forces guaranteed the peace. Moreover, it freed the Protector to go hunting enemies instead of spending her time making sure her friends remained intimidated enough to continue supporting her. In just days she found the Nyueng Bao warehouse on the waterfront, empty now except for a few cages occupied by missing members of the Privy Council, none of whom were in shape to resume their duties. An armamentarium of booby traps came with the prodigal ministers, of course, but none of those were clever enough to inconvenience Soulcatcher herself. Quite a few Greys were not so fortunate. The Protector took rather a heartless view of those who did fall victim to the Company legacy. “Better to get the dimwits winnowed out now, when the broader risk is minimal,” she told Mogaba. The Great General’s attitude complemented hers precisely.

  Questions asked in the neighborhood produced no information of substance, however vigorously they were put. The Nyueng Bao merchants had been careful to maintain a veil around themselves and their businesses. They had even employed the magical in their quest for greater anonymity. Wisps of confusion spells persisted yet.

  “I smell those two wizards,” Soulcatcher muttered. “But you promised me that they were dead, didn’t you, Great General?”

  “I saw them die myself.”

  “You’d better hope you don’t irritate me so much you don’t survive to see them die again, for real.” Her voice was that of a spoiled child.

  The Great General did not respond. If Soulcatcher frightened him, he showed no sign. Neither did he betray any anger. He waited, reasonably confident that he was too valuable to become the victim of an evil caprice. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he thought the Protector was not equally valuable.

  “There’s no trace of them,” Soulcatcher mumbled later, in a voice academically cool. “They’re gone. Yet the impression of their presence persists, as bold as a bucket of blood thrown against a wall.”

  “Illusion,” Mogaba said. “I’m sure you’d find a hundred instances in the Black Company Annals of where they drew an enemy’s eye in one direction while they moved in another. Or made someone believe their numbers were far greater than they actually were.”

  “You’d find as many instances in my diaries. If I bothered to keep any. I don’t, because books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.” The voice she used now was the antithesis of academic. It was that of a man who knew, from painful experience, that education just taught people sneakier ways to rob you. “They aren’t here anymore but they may have left spies.”

  “Of course they did. It’s doctrine. But you’ll have a hell of a time finding them. They won’t be people anyone else would suspect.”

  Jaul Barundandi and two of his assistants laid out a dinner while the Protector and her champion talked. Their presence attracted no notice. Paranoid though she was, Soulcatcher paid little heed to the furniture. Every staffer had been interrogated in the hours following the Radisha’s disappearance and no inside accomplices had been found.

  The Protector was not unaware that she was not as beloved of the staff as the Radisha had been. But she was not troubled. No mundane attacker had any genuine hope of penetrating her personal defenses. And these days she had no peer in this world. Sheer perversity and protracted elusiveness had put her in a position to elect herself queen of the world. If she wanted to bother.

  Someday, when she got her head organized, she was going to have to think about that.

  Halfway through a rare meal Soulcatcher paused in mid-chew. She told Mogaba, “Find me a Nyueng Bao. Any Nyueng Bao. Right now. Right away.”

  The lean black man showed no emotion as he rose. “May I ask why?”

  “Their headquarters was inside a Nyueng Bao warehouse. Nyueng Bao have been associated with the Company since the fighting at Dejagore. The last Annalist married one of them. He had a child by her. The association may be more than historical happenstance.” She knew a great deal more about Nyueng Bao than she was willing to share, of course.

  Mogaba inclined his upper body in a ghost of a bow. Mostly he was comfortable working with Soulcatcher. Mostly he approved of her thinking. He went in search of someone who could catch him a couple of swamp monkeys.

  The servants hovered around the Protector, perfectly attentive. Idly, she noted that these three were among the same half dozen who struggled to make her life easier wherever she happened to be in the Palace. In fact, one or more always followed her on her exploratory safaris into the maze of abandoned corridors that made up the majority of the Palace, just in case she needed something. Lately they had brought life into her personal quarters, which for so long had been as chill and barren and dusty as the empty sectors.

  It was their nature. It was bred into them. They must serve. Without the Radisha to fulfill their need for a master, they had had to turn to her.

  Mogaba was away hours longer than she liked. When the man did deign to return, her voice of choice was spoiled-brat querulous. “Where have you been? What took you so long?”

  “I’ve been demonstrating how hard it is to catch the wind. There are no Nyueng Bao anywhere in the city. The last time anyone can remember seeing any of them was the day before yesterday, in the morning. They were going aboard a barge that later headed downriver, toward the swamps. Evidently the swamp people have been leaving Taglios since before the Radisha disappeared and you hurt your heel.”

  Soulcatcher growled. She did not want to be reminded that she had been tricked. The heel itself was reminder enough.

  “The Nyueng Bao are a stubborn people.”

  “Famous for it,” Mogaba agreed.

  “I’ve visited them twice before. Each time they failed to appreciate my full message. I suppose I’ll have to go preach to them again. And round up any fugitives they’ve taken in.” It was an obvious conclusion, that the Company survivors had retreated into the swamps. The Nyueng Bao had taken in fugitives before. And supportive evidence was available if the Protector cared to dig. The barges carrying the majority of the Company had gone downriver. You had to go down into the delta to get to the Naghir River, which was the principal navigable waterway leading into the south.

  Soulcatcher popped up. She rushed out with the bounce and enthusiasm of a teenager. Mogaba settled down to contemplate the remains of his meal, which had not yet been cleared away. One of the servants murmured, “We thought you might wish to continue, sir. Should you prefer otherwise, we will clear away instantly.”

  Mogaba looked up into a bland face that projected eagerness to serve. Nevertheless, he had a momentary impression that the man was measuring his back for a dagger.

  “Take it aw
ay. I’m not hungry.”

  “As you wish, sir. Girish, take the leftovers to the charity postern. Make certain the beggars there know that the Protector is thinking of them.”

  Mogaba watched the servants depart. He wondered what had given him the impression that that man was insincere. The truth supposedly lay in a man’s deeds, and that one never behaved as anything less than a totally devoted servant.

  * * *

  Soulcatcher stamped into her personal suite. The more she thought about the Nyueng Bao, the more enraged she became. What would it take to teach those people? That seemed like something they could work out between them before the sun came up. A night of shadow-terror ought, at the very least, to put them into a mood to pay attention.

  Soulcatcher understood herself better than outsiders believed she did. She wondered why she was in so foul a temper, which seemed to go beyond her usual caprice and irritability. She belched, hammered her chest with a fist to loosen another burp. Maybe it was the spicy food. She sensed bad heartburn coming. She felt a little light-headed, too.

  She climbed to the parapet where she kept the only two flying carpets left in the world. That could be reached only by the route she followed. She would go down there and make those swamp monkeys pay for the heartburn, too. Dinner had been a Nyueng Bao ethnic specialty consisting of big, ugly mushrooms, uglier eels, and unidentifiable vegetables in a blisteringly spicy sauce, served upon a bed of rice. It had been a favorite of the Radisha’s, served often. The kitchens had not changed their routines, because the Protector did not care about the menu.

  The Protector belched again. The growing heartburn seared her insides.

  She jumped on the larger carpet. It creaked under her weight. She ordered it to head downriver. Fast.

  A few miles out, four hundred feet above the rooftops, streaking faster than a racing pigeon, sabotaged frame members under the carpet began to snap. Once the first went, the stress became too much for the others. The carpet disintegrated in seconds.

  A burst of light flared, bright enough to be seen by half the city. The last thing Soulcatcher saw, as she arced toward the surface of the river, was a huge circle of characters declaring “Water Sleeps.”

  * * *

  Just before the flash leaped through his window, a bemused Mogaba discovered a folded, sealed letter on his spartan cot. Belching, glad he had eaten no more of that spicy food, he broke the wax and read “My brother unforgiven.” Then the unexpected lightning grabbed his attention. He read the slogan in the sky, too. All the labor he had invested in learning to read over the past few years was to be rewarded thus?

  What now? If the Protector was gone? Pretend she was in hiding, too, and make the deceit a double veil?

  He belched again, settled down on his cot. He did not feel well at all. That was a baffling new feeling for him. He never got sick.

  58

  A chatty youngster of native stock and a more than customarily ambitious disposition interviewed us at the military control point we encountered at the southern end of the pass. He was not yet old enough to be pompously officious but he would get there. Personally, he seemed more interested in foreign news than in contraband or wanted men. “What’s going on up north?” he wanted to know. “We’ve seen a lot of refugees lately.” He examined our meager possessions without ever looking inside anything.

  Gota and Doj rattled at one another in Nyueng Bao and pretended not to understand the young man’s accented Taglian. I shrugged and responded in Jaicuri at first, which is close enough to Taglian for the two peoples to understand one another most of the time, but here it only frustrated the young official. I had no desire to stand around gossiping with a functionary. “I do not know about others. We have had nothing but decades of misfortune and suffering. We heard there were opportunities down here so we abandoned the Land of Our Sorrows and came.”

  The official assumed I meant a particular country, as I had hoped, rather than recognizing that the Land of Our Sorrows was the Vehdna way of describing where a convert lived before he became acquainted with God.

  “You say there are many others doing the same as us?” I tried to sound troubled.

  “Recently, yes. Which is why I feared something might be afoot.”

  He feared for the stability of the empire to which he had attached himself. I could not resist a prank. “There were rumors that the Black Company had surfaced in Taglios and was warring with the Protector. But there are always crazy stories about the Black Company. They never mean anything. And they had nothing to do with our decision.”

  The young man became more unhappy. He passed us through without further interest. I did not bother commending him but he was the only official we had encountered since leaving Taglios who was making a serious effort to perform his duties. And he was doing it only in hopes of getting ahead.

  I never had to bring out the richly complex legend I have invented for our foursome, in which Swan was my second husband, Gota the mother of my deceased first spouse and Doj her cousin, all of us survivors of the wars. The story would have played in any region where there had been any extended fighting. Splatchcobbled family survival teams were not at all uncommon.

  I complained, “I worked on weaving us a history all the way down here and I never got to use it. Not once. Nobody’s doing their job.”

  Doj smiled and winked and vanished into the broken ground beside the road, off to reclaim the weapons we had hidden before approaching the checkpoint.

  “Somebody should do something about that,” Swan declared. “Next vice-regal subofficer I see, I’ll march right up and give him a piece of my mind. We all pay taxes. We have a right to expect more effort from our officials.”

  Gota woke up long enough to call Swan an idiot in Taglian and Nyueng Bao. She told him he ought to shut up before even the God of Fools renounced him. Then she closed her eyes and resumed snoring. Gota had begun to concern me. She had shown less life every day for the past few months. Doj seemed to think she believed she no longer had anything to live for.

  Maybe Sahra could get her going again. We should be joining up with the others before long. Maybe Sahra could get her excited about rescuing Thai Dei and the Captured.

  I was troubled about consequences. All these years I had striven toward the undertaking we would launch before long, and now, for the first time, I had begun to wonder what success might really mean. Those people buried out there never were paragons of sanity and righteousness. They had had almost two decades to ferment in their own juices. They were unlikely to entertain much brotherly love toward the rest of the world.

  And then there was the guardian demon Shivetya and, somewhere, the enchanted and enchained thing worshipped by Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night. Not to mention the mysteries and dangers of the plain itself. And all the perils we did not yet know.

  Only Swan had any experience of that. He had nothing positive to report. Nor had Murgen at any time over the years, though his experiences had been dramatically different from Swan’s. Murgen had experienced the glittering plain in two worlds at once. Swan seemed to have experienced the version in our world in sharper focus. Even after so many years he could describe particular landmarks in exquisite detail.

  “How come you never talked about this before?”

  “I never hid it, Sleepy. But there just don’t seem to be much percentage in volunteering anything in this world. If I admit anything I know about that place, next thing I’ll know is, good old Willow Swan is elected to go back up there as the guide for a gang of invaders guaranteed to irritate the shit out of whatever spirits haunt the place. Am I right? Or am I right?”

  “You aren’t as stupid as you let on. I thought you didn’t see any spirits.”

  “Not the way Murgen claimed he saw them but that don’t mean I didn’t feel them creeping around. You’ll find out. You try to sleep at night when you feel hungry shadows calling you from a few feet away. It’s like being inside a zoo with all the predators in the world slaver
ing just the other side of the bars. Bars that you can’t see and can’t even feel and so have no way of knowing if they’re trustworthy. And all this jabber ain’t doing my nerves any good at all, neither, Sleepy.”

  “We may never have to go up there, Swan—if the Key we’ve got is a fake or isn’t any good anymore. Then there won’t be anything we can do but maybe set up your brewery and pretend we never heard of the Protector or the Radisha or the Black Company.”

  “Be still, my heart. You know goddamn well that thing’s going to be the true Key. Your god, my gods, somebody’s gods have got a boner for Willow Swan and they’re gonna keep making sure that whatever happens, it’s gonna be the worst possible thing and it’s gonna happen to me. I oughta run out on you now. I oughta turn you in to the nearest royal official. Only that would let Soulcatcher know that I’m still alive. Then she’d get real nasty, asking me why I didn’t turn you in three, four months ago.”

  “Not to mention you’d probably get yourself dead long before you could unearth an official who cared enough to listen to you.”

  “There’s that, too.”

  Doj came back with the weapons. We passed them around, resumed traveling. Swan continued eloquently describing himself as the firstborn son of Misfortune.

  He went through these spells of high drama.

  * * *

  A half mile down the road we encountered a small peasants’ market. A few old folks and youngsters who could not contribute much on the farm waited to take advantage of travelers still shaking from the miseries of the mountains. Fresh foods in season were their hot sellers but they retailed gossip at no charge as long as you contributed a few snippets of your own. They found doings beyond the Dandha Presh particularly intriguing.

  I asked a young girl, who looked like she could be the little sister of the customs official back up the road, “Do you remember many of the people who came through here? My father was supposed to have come down ahead of us, to find us a place to settle.” I proceeded to describe Narayan Singh in detail.