The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  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?”

  20

  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 e
xpect 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.”