The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  What to do about the Shadowmaster had never been a significant issue to us because there were always more immediate obstacles to overcome before he could become a major concern.

  Sahra said as much. “If we can’t open the way, there’s no point in worrying about how we can keep it closed to those not in our favor.”

  “I wonder how the Shadowmasters did it? Brute force? The Black Company was still in the far north and the Lance of Passion was up there with them.” I stared at Uncle Doj. Others began to do so, too. I wondered aloud, “Could it be that the great shame of the Nyueng Bao isn’t nearly as ancient as I thought? Could it be that it just goes back a couple of generations? To about the time that the Shadowmasters appeared, practically manifesting themselves overnight?”

  Uncle Doj closed his eyes. They stayed that way for a while. When the old priest opened them again, he glared at me. “Come walking with me, Stone Soldier.”

  Chandra Gokhale, Inspector-General of the Records and favorer of very young girls, chose that moment to groan. I told Doj, “Indulge me for a few minutes, Uncle. I have a guest to entertain. I promise not to take too long.”

  Goblin knelt beside the minister, patted his face gently, helped Gokhale to a sitting position. The Inspector-General began to puff up for a bluster storm. As his mouth opened, I leaned down to whisper, “Water sleeps.”

  Gokhale’s head jerked around. In a moment he recalled where he had seen me before. Goblin told him, “All their days are numbered, buddy. And it looks like some of you got a few less days than some others do.” Gokhale recognized him, too, though he was supposed to be dead. And when he remembered where he had seen Sahra before, he began to tremble.

  Sahra asked, “Would you recall abusing Minh Subredil on several occasions? Subredil certainly remembers. What I think we’ll do to requite that is to return it fivefold. The brothers will install you in a tiger cage in a moment. You’ll be well treated otherwise. And in a few days maybe we’ll bring in the Purohita to keep you company.” She chuckled so wickedly I felt a chill. “For all the rest of their days, calling the Heaven and the Earth and the Day and the Night, like brothers, Chandra Gokhale and Arjuna Drupada.”

  Part of that was some Nyueng Bao formula I didn’t understand. But I got the point. And so did Gokhale. He would be caged all the rest of his days with the man he most loathed.

  Sahra chuckled again.

  She made me nervous when she got like that.

  32

  I watched the old priest closely as we eased through the spell net surrounding the warehouse. He did not have a yarn amulet. His head twitched and jerked. His feet kept wanting to change direction but his will hacked a way through the illusions. Possibly that was a result of his training on the Path of the Sword. I recalled, though, that Lady had insisted he was a minor wizard.

  “Where are we going, Uncle? And why are we going there?”

  “We go where no Nyueng Bao ear will hear what I tell you. Old Nyueng Bao would label me a traitor. Young Nyueng Bao would call me a lying fool. Or worse.”

  And I? I was generally a proponent of the latter view whenever I heard him preaching about his path to inner peace through obsessively continuous preparation for combat. His philosophy had appealed only to a very few of Banh Do Trang’s employees, all Nyueng Bao, all too young to have witnessed actual warfare. I understood that the Path of the Sword was not militaristic, but others had trouble grasping that fact.

  “You want to maintain your image as an old stiff-neck who wouldn’t be caught dead helping a subhuman jengali fall and break her skull.”

  It was too dark to tell but I thought he smiled. “That’s an extreme way of stating it but it approximates the facts.” His Taglian, never poor, improved now that he had no other audience.

  “Are you overlooking the fact that every bit of darkness out here might harbor a bat or crow or rat, or even one of the Protector’s shadows?”

  “I have nothing to fear from those things. The Thousand Voices already knows everything I’m going to tell you.”

  But she might not want me to know, too.

  We walked in silence for a long time.

  Taglios seldom fails to amaze me. Doj cut across a wealthy section, where whole families fort up in estates surrounded by guarded walls. Their youths were out on Salara Road, which grew up ages ago to provide them with their diversions. Reason insisted that beggars ought to be plentiful where the wealth was concentrated, but that was not the case. The extremely poor were not allowed to offend the sight of the mighty with their presence.

  There, as everywhere, odors assailed the nostrils but these scents were sandalwood, cloves and perfumes.

  After that, Doj led me into the dark, crowded streets of a temple district. We stepped aside to let a band of Gunni acolytes pass. The boys were bullying the people living in the streets. I thought we might have trouble with them, too, which would have ended with them suffering a lot of pain, but a brake on their misbehavior saved them from its consequences. That arrived in the form of three Greys.

  The Shadar do not disdain the caste system entirely but they do hold to the notion that the highest caste must include not just the priests and men qualified by birth to become priests, but also, certainly, any men of the Shadar faith. And that faith, which is an extremely heretical and Gunni-infected bastard offshoot of my own One True Faith, contains a strong strain of charity toward the weak and the unfortunate.

  The Greys methodically applied their bamboo canes and invited the youths to take up any complaints with the Protector. The acolytes were smarter than they pretended. They got the hell out of there before the Greys used their whistles to invite all their friends to the caning.

  All part of night in the city. Doj and I drifted onward.

  Eventually he led me to a place called the Deer Park, which is an expanse of wilderness near the center of the city. It had been created by some despot of centuries past.

  I told Doj, “I really don’t need all this exercise.” I wondered if he had some goofball plan to murder me and leave the body under the trees. But what would be the point?

  Doj was Doj. With him, you never knew.

  “I feel more comfortable here,” he said. “But I never stay long. There is a company of rangers charged with keeping squatters out. They consider anyone not Taglian and high caste a squatter. This is good. This log has shaped itself to my posterior.”

  The log in question tripped me. I got back onto my feet and said, “I’m listening.”

  “Sit. This will take a while.”

  “Leave out the begats.” Which was a Jaicuri Vehdna colloquialism having to do with difficulties memorizing scripture, which you have to do as a child. I meant, “Don’t bother telling me whose fault it was and why they’re such bloody villains for it. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water.”

  “I do have to go to work tomorrow.”

  “As you will. You are aware, are you not, that the Free Companies of Khatovar and the roving bands of Stranglers who murder for the glory of Kina share a common ancestry?”

  “There’s enough suggestion in our recent Annals to allow for that interpretation,” I admitted. Caution seemed indicated.

  “My place amongst the Nyueng Bao would correspond roughly with yours as Annalist of the Black Company. It includes, as well, the role of the priest in the Strangler band—whose secondary obligation is to maintain a sound oral history of the band. Over the centuries the toog have lost their respect for education.”

  My own studies suggested that a great deal of evolution had taken place in my Company during those same centuries. Probably a lot more than had been the case with the Deceiver bands. They had stayed inside one culture that had not changed a lot. Meanwhile, the Black Company kept moving into stranger and stranger lands, old soldiers being replaced by young foreigners who had no connection with the past and no idea that Khatovar even existed.

  Doj se
emed to echo my thoughts. “The Strangler bands are pale imitations of the original Free Companies. The Black Company retains the name and some of the memories, but you’re philosophically much farther from the original than the Deceivers are. Your band is ignorant of its true antecedents and has been kept that way willfully, mainly through the manipulations of the goddess Kina, but also, to a lesser extent, by others who didn’t want your Company to become what it had been in another time.”

  I waited. He did not volunteer to explain. Doj was difficult that way.

  He did, I suppose, do something that was even harder for him. He told the truth about his own people. “Nyueng Bao are the almost pure-blooded descendants of the people of one of the Free Companies. One that chose not to go back.”

  “But the Black Company is supposed to be the only one that didn’t go back. The Annals say—”

  “They tell you only what those who recorded them knew. My ancestors arrived here after the Black Company finished laying the land to waste and moved on north, already having lost sight of its divine mission. Deserting in its own way, through ignorance of what it was supposed to be. By then it was already three generations old and had made no effort to maintain the purity of its blood. It had just fought the war which is the first that your Annalists remember and was almost completely destroyed. That seems to be the fate of the Black Company. To be reduced to a handful, then to reconstitute itself. Again and again. Losing something of its previous self each time.”

  “And the fate of your Company?” I noted that he did not mention a name. No matter, really. No name would mean anything to me.

  “To sink ever deeper into ignorance itself. I know the truth. I know the secrets and the old ways. But I’m the last. Unlike other Companies, we brought our families with us. We were a late experiment. We had too much to lose. We deserted. We went and hid in the swamps. But we’ve kept our lineage pure. Almost.”

  “And the pilgrimages? The old people who died in Jaicur? Hong Tray? And the great, dark, terrible secret of the Nyueng Bao that Sahra worries about so much?”

  “The Nyueng Bao have many dark secrets. All the Free Companies had dark secrets. We were instruments of the darkness. The Soldiers of Darkness. The Bone Warriors charged with opening the way for Kina. Stone Soldiers warring for the honor of being remembered for all eternity by having our names written in golden letters in glittering stone. We failed because our ancestors were imperfect in their devotion. In every company there were those who were too weak to bring on the Year of the Skulls.”

  “The old people?”

  “Ky Dam and Hong Tray. Ky Dam was the last elected Nyueng Bao captain. There was no one to take his place. Hong Tray was a witch with the curse of foresight. She was the last true priest. Priestess.”

  “Curse of foresight?”

  “She never foresaw anything good.”

  I sensed that he did not want to get into that subject. I recalled that Hong Tray’s final prophecy involved Murgen and Sahra, which certainly was an offense to all right-thinking Nyueng Bao—and was not yet a prophecy completely fulfilled, probably.

  “The great sin of the Nyueng Bao?”

  “You had that idea from Sahra, of course. And she, like all those born after the coming of the Shadowmasters, believes that ‘sin’ is what caused the Nyueng Bao to flee into the swamps. She believes wrongly. That flight involved no sin, but survival. The true black sin occurred within my own lifetime.” His voice tightened up. He had strong feelings about this.

  I waited.

  “I was a small boy just taking my first small steps on the Path of the Sword when the stranger came. He was a personable man of middle years. His name was Ashutosh Yaksha. In the oldest form of the language Ashutosh meant something like Despair of the Wicked. Yaksha meant much the same as it does in Taglian today.” Which was “good spirit.” “People were prepared to believe he was a supernatural being because he had a white skin. A very pale, white skin, lighter than Goblin or Willow Swan, who sometimes get some sunlight. He wasn’t an albino, though. He had normal eyes. His hair wasn’t quite as blond as Swan’s is. In sum, he was a magical creature to most Nyueng Bao. He spoke the language oddly but he did speak it. He said he wanted to study at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple, the fame of which had reached him far away.

  “When pressed about his origins, he insisted that he hailed from ‘The Land of Unknown Shadows, beneath the stars of the Noose.’”

  “He claimed to have come off the glittering stone?”

  “Not quite. That was never clear. There or beyond. No one pressed him hard. Not even Ky Dam or Hong Tray, though he troubled them. Very early we learned that Ashutosh was a powerful sorcerer. And in those days many of the older people still knew about the origins of the Nyueng Bao. It was feared that he might have been sent to summon us home. That proved to be untrue. For a long time Ashutosh seemed to be nothing but what he claimed, a student who wanted to absorb whatever wisdom had accumulated at the temple of Ghanghesha. Which had been a holy place since the Nyueng Bao first entered the swamp.”

  “But there’s a but. Right? The man was a villain after all?”

  “He was indeed. In fact, Ashutosh was the man you knew later as Shadowspinner. He was there to find our Key, sent by his teacher and mentor, whom you came to know as Longshadow. At a young age this man had stumbled across rumors that not all the Free Companies had returned to Khatovar. What he understood from that, that nobody else realized, was that each Company still outside must possess a talisman capable of opening and closing the Shadowgate. An ambitious man could use that talisman to recruit rakshasas he could send out to do evil for him. The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.”

  “So this Ashutosh Yaksha found the Key?”

  “He only assured himself that it existed. He wormed his way into the confidence of the senior priests. One day someone let something drop. Soon afterward, Ashutosh announced that he had received word that his teacher, mentor and spiritual father, Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, impressed by his reports on the temple, had chosen to come visit. Dhumraksha turned out to be a tall, incredibly skinny man who always wore a mask, apparently because his face was deformed.”

  “You heard a name like Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha and you didn’t suspect something?”

  I could not see Doj in the darkness but I could feel his unhappy frown. He said, “I was a small child.”

  “And the Nyueng Bao aren’t interested in anything not their own. Yes. I’m Vehdna, Uncle, but I recognize the names Manthara and Dhumraksha as those of legendary Gunni demons. Even though you walk amongst lesser beings, you might keep your ears open. That way, when a nasty jengali sorcerer pulls your leg, you’ll at least have a clue.”

  Doj grunted. “He had a golden tongue, Dhumraksha did. When he discovered that each decade, as the custom was then, a band of the leading men undertook a pilgrimage south—”

  “He invited himself along and tricked somebody into letting him examine the Key.”

  “Close. But not quite. Yes. You did guess correctly. The pilgrimage went to the very Shadowgate. The pilgrims would spend ten days there waiting for a sign. I don’t believe anyone knew what that might be anymore. But the traditions had to be observed. The pilgrims, however, never took the actual Key with them. They carried a replica charged with a few simple spells meant to fool an inattentive thief. The real Key stayed home. The old men didn’t really want a sign from the other side.”

  “Longshadow got in a hurry.”

  “He did. When the pilgrims arrived at the Shadowgate, they found Ashutosh Yaksha and a half-dozen other sorcerers waiting. Several were fugitives from that northern realm of darkness where the Black Company was then in service. When Dhumraksha used the false key, his band found themselves under attack from the other side of the Shadowgate. Before the gateway could be stopped up, using the power of Longshadow’s true name, three of the would-be Shadowmasters had perished. The one called the Ho
wler, cruelly injured, had fled. The survivors quickly became the feuding, conquering monsters your brothers found in place when they arrived. And the same disaster caused the Mother of Night to reawaken and begin scheming toward a Year of the Skulls once more.”

  “And that’s the great sin of the Nyueng Bao? Letting themselves be hoodwinked by sorcerers?”

  “In those days there was little contact with the world outside the swamp. Banh Do Trang’s family managed all outside trade. Once a decade a handful of the older men traveled to the Shadowgate. About as frequently, Gunni ascetics would enter the swamp hoping to purify their souls. These Gunni hermits were obviously crazy or they wouldn’t have come into the swamps in the first place. They were always tolerated. And Ghanghesha found a home.”

  “Where does The Thousand Voices fit?”

  “She learned the story from the Howler around the time we were trapped in Dejagore. Or soon afterward. She came to the temple soon after we returned, the best of us exhausted, our old men all dead, including our Captain and Speaker, and witch Hong Tray with them. There was no one but me left who knew everything—though Gota and Thai Dei knew some, and Sahra a little, they being of the family of Ky Dam and Hong Tray. The Thousand Voices went to the temple while I was away. She used her power to intimidate and torture the priests until they surrendered the mysterious object that had been given them for safekeeping ages ago. They didn’t even know what it was anymore. They really can’t be blamed but I can’t help blaming them. And there you have it. All the secrets of the Nyueng Bao.”

  I doubted that. “I doubt that seriously. But it’s a basis from which to work. Are you going to cooperate? If we get Narayan Singh to divulge what he did with the Key?”

  “If you’ll undertake a promise never to tell anyone what I told you here tonight.”

  “I swear it on the Annals.” This was too easy. “I won’t say a word to a soul.” But I did not say anything about not writing it down.