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.”
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.”