Everything we did
must have been seen by somebody,” I told the gathered troops.
“When word gets out that the Radisha has vanished, all those
people are going to remember and try to help. Soulcatcher is
supposed to have a knack for separating wheat from
chaff.”
“Also a knack for calling up the kind of supernatural
assistance that can pick your particular trail out of a
thousand,” Willow Swan volunteered. He was present because he
had agreed to take care of the Radisha. She was going to be in a
state when she awakened and discovered that her demons had caught
up with her at last.
Banh Do Trang wanted to know, “Are you going to flee or
not?” The old man was at the edge of collapse. He had been
working since before dawn.
“Can we?” I asked.
“You could go this instant if the situation became totally
desperate. It will be a few hours yet before the barges are
completely provisioned, however.”
Nobody wanted to go, though. Not just yet. A lot of the men had
developed ties. Everyone had unfinished business. That was life.
The same situation had come up time and again over the course of
the Company’s history.
Sahra said, “You still haven’t gotten Narayan to
give you the Key.”
“I’ll talk to him. Is River back yet? No? What about
Kendo? How about Pooch and Spiff?” We had people running all
over on special assignments. Good old One-Eye had sent our last two
men, the barely competent Pooch and Spiff, to assassinate Adoo the
gateman because Murgen had been able to determine that it had been
he who had caused all the excitement at the library. More, Adoo
knew the general neighborhood where I lived.
One-Eye informed me, “Kendo Cutter is coming through the
web right now. Arjana Drupada appears to be reasonably healthy for
a man with a dozen knife wounds. Hang on.”
Murgen was whispering something. It was thundering and hailing
outside. I could not hear a word.
“It’s started at Semchi, Murgen says. Slink hit them
just as they were starting to pitch camp. Cut them off from their
weapons.”
“Darn!” I swore. “Darn-darn-darn!”
“What’s the matter with you, Little Girl?”
“He should’ve waited until they tried to do something
to the Bhodi Tree. This way, nobody will know why we jumped
them.”
“There’s why you don’t have you a
man.”
“What?”
“You ask too much. You sent Slink out there to kill some
people. Unless you told him it’s got to be a show, all our
guys allowed to fight only left-handed or something, he’s
going to do it fast and dirty and with as little risk to our own
guys as he can.”
“I thought he understood—”
“Did you assume, Little Girl? At this late stage in your
career? You, who’s got to run a checklist on lacing your own
boots?”
He had me. And he had me good. I tried to change the subject.
“If we decide to evacuate, we’re going to have to run
somebody out there to warn Slink and tell him where to
rendezvous.”
“Don’t try to change the subject.”
I turned
away. “Kendo. Does he need medical attention?”
“Drupada? He’s not bleeding that much anymore.”
“Then let’s take him back to meet his new
roommate.” One-Eye catching me out had me feeling
particularly evil. This seemed like a good time to take it out on
the enemy. “The rest of you, take real good care of the
Radisha. We don’t want her coming up with a hangnail anybody
can blame on us.”
Cutter bobbed his head and muttered something under his
breath.
“Hey, pervert!” I called to the Inspector-General of
the Records. “I don’t want you ever to say that the
Black Company don’t cater to its guests, so here’s your
very own human play toy. Maybe a little longer in the tooth than
you prefer but it’s only until the Protector gets around to
rescuing you.”
Kendo planted a boot in Drupada’s behind and shoved. Into
the cage the Purohita went. He and Gokhale backed off into opposite
corners and glared at one another. Human nature being what it is,
each man probably thought the other was responsible for his
dismay.
I told Kendo, “Relax now. Get something to eat. Take a
nap. But stay away from the girl.”
“Hey, I got it the first time, Sleepy. And more so now
she’s started sleepwalking. So ease up.”
“Give me a reason.”
“Why don’t we just skrag her?”
“Because we need Singh to help open the way through the
Shadowgate. And he won’t unless he feels confident that
we’ll be good to the Daughter of Night.”
“I don’t know any of the Captured that well.
Don’t feel like you’ve got to save them on my
account.”
“I feel like we have to save them on the Company’s
account, Kendo. Just the same as we’d be doing if it was you
out there.”
“Sure. Right.” Kendo Cutter was one of those people
who tended to look on the dark side no matter what.
“Get some rest.” I went to talk with Narayan while I
waited for Murgen to generate some report on what was happening
inside the Palace.
I did not want to run away but knew it was very close to time
for the Company to go. We had to see what Soulcatcher’s
reaction to the kidnapping would be. And we had to get Goblin out
of the Palace.
If Soulcatcher did not come after us like a screaming monsoon
storm, I was going to get really worried about what she was up
to.
“I’ve had a real good day, thank you, Mr. Singh. A
whole lot of planning and a little inspired improvisation fell into
place all at once. Just one thing more could make the day
perfect.” I sniffed the air. It smelled like One-Eye and
friends were cooking up a new batch. Probably so they could take a
little something along when we had to run.
I kicked a bundle of hides of some kind over beside the bars of
Singh’s cage, settled myself. I caught him up on the latest
gossip. Including, “None of your people seem to be worried
about you two. Maybe you were just a little too secretive. Be kind
of pathetic if the whole cult faded away because everyone just sat
around waiting to find out what was going on.”
“I’ve been told that I’m free to deal with
you.” There was no cringe to the man tonight. He had gotten a
little backbone somewhere. “I’m prepared to discuss the
object you seek if I receive absolute assurances that the Black
Company will never do the Daughter of Night any harm.”
“Never is an awful long time. You’re out of
luck.” I got up. “Goblin’s been wanting to work
on her just forever. I’m going to let him pull a few fingers
off now to show you we have no conscience or remorse where certain
old enemies are concerned.”
“I offered you what you asked.”
“You offered me a delayed death warrant. If I agree to
that kind of nonsense, ten years from now the blackhearted witch
will start poisoning us and we’ll be stuck with the
disastrous choice of keeping our word and accepting destruction or
breaking our word and seeing our reputation destroyed. I’m
certain you don’t know much northern mythology. There’s
an old religion up there that tells how a leading god allowed
himself to be slain so his family would no longer be bound by a
promise he made foolishly to an enemy, who wore it like a
turtle’s shell.”
Narayan stared at me, cold as a cobra, waiting for me to crack.
And I did, a little, because I bothered to explain. One-Eye has
told me a hundred times that I should not explain. “I just
don’t want that artifact badly enough to commit my people to
the level of vulnerability that you’re asking. In particular,
I won’t undertake commitments for those of us who are buried.
On the other hand, maybe you’d like to undertake commitments
whereby, assuming you get out of this alive, you guarantee never to
be a pain in the Company neck ever again. Whereby you agree to go
to the Captain and the Lieutenant and beg their forgiveness for
stealing their child.”
The very suggestion appalled the living saint of the Deceivers.
“She’s the Child of Kina. The Daughter of Night. Those
two are irrelevant.”
“Evidently we don’t have anything to talk about yet.
I’ll send you a few fingers for breakfast.”
I went to see if Surendranath Santaraksita was being a good
fellow and pursuing the tasks I had suggested he could use to help
overcome the tedium of his captivity. To my surprise I found him
hard at work, with old Baladitya assisting, translating what I had
presumed to be the first volume of the lost Annals. They had a
whole stack of sheets already done.
“Dorabee!” Master Santaraksita said.
“Excellent. Your friend the foreigner keeps telling us we
can’t have any more real vellum when we’re done with
these last few sheets. He wants us to use those ridiculous bark
books they still employ out in the swamps.”
Before there were modern paper and vellum and parchment, there
was bark. I do not know what kind of tree it came from, just that
the inner bark was removed carefully, treated and pressed and used
to write on. To make a book, you stacked the bark sheets, drilled a
hole down through the upper-left-hand corner of the stack, then
bound everything together with a cord or ribbon or length of very
light chain. Banh Do Trang would favor bark because it was both
cheap, traditional and hardier than animal products.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“There’s nothing earthshaking in there,
Dorabee.”
“My name is Sleepy.”
“Sleepy isn’t a name. It’s a disease, or a
misfortune. I prefer Dorabee. I’ll use Dorabee.”
“Use whatever you like. I’ll know who you’re
talking to.” I read a couple of sheets. He was right.
“This is tedious stuff. This looks like an account
book.”
“That’s what it is, mainly. The things you want to
know are just the things the writer assumes any reader of his own
time would know already. He wasn’t writing for the ages, or
even for another generation. He was keeping track of horseshoe
nails, lance shafts and saddles. All he has to say about their
battle is that the lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned
officers failed to demonstrate an adequate enthusiasm for
appropriating weapons lost or abandoned by the defeated enemy,
preferring to wait till the next dawn to begin gleaning. As a
consequence, stragglers and the local peasantry managed to scavenge
all the best.”
“I notice he doesn’t bother to name a single name,
person or place.” I had begun reading while the Master
talked. I could listen and read at the same time even though I was
a woman.
“He does give mileage and dates. The context suggests the
appropriate systems of measure. It can be figured out. But what
I’ve already started to wonder, Dorabee, is why we’ve
all been deathly afraid of these people all our lives. This book
gives us no reason to be afraid. This book is about a troop of
crabby little men who marched off somewhere they didn’t want
to go for reasons they didn’t understand, fully believing
that their unstated mission would last only several weeks or, at
most, a few months. Then they would be able to go home. But the
months piled into years and the years into generations. And still
they didn’t really know.”
The material also suggested we needed to revise our old belief
that the Free Companies exploded into the world at the same time,
in a vast orgy of fire and bloodshed. The only other company
mentioned was noted to have returned years before the Black Company
marched, and in fact, several senior Company noncoms had served as
private soldiers in that earlier, unnamed band.
“I can see it,” I grumbled. “We’re going
to translate these things, find out all sorts of things, and not be
an inch closer to understanding anything.”
Santaraksita said, “This’s much more exciting than a
meeting of the bhadrhalok, Dorabee.”
Then Baladitya spoke for the first time. “Do we have to
starve to death here, Dorabee?”
“Nobody’s brought you anything to eat?”
“No.”
“I’ll just see about that. Don’t be startled
if you hear me shouting. I hope you enjoy fish and rice.”
I took care of that, then hid in my corner for a while. I was
feeling a little depressed after having seen Master
Santaraksita’s work. I suppose that sometimes I invest too
much in my goals, then suffer a correspondingly huge disappointment
when things do not work out.
Everything we did
must have been seen by somebody,” I told the gathered troops.
“When word gets out that the Radisha has vanished, all those
people are going to remember and try to help. Soulcatcher is
supposed to have a knack for separating wheat from
chaff.”
“Also a knack for calling up the kind of supernatural
assistance that can pick your particular trail out of a
thousand,” Willow Swan volunteered. He was present because he
had agreed to take care of the Radisha. She was going to be in a
state when she awakened and discovered that her demons had caught
up with her at last.
Banh Do Trang wanted to know, “Are you going to flee or
not?” The old man was at the edge of collapse. He had been
working since before dawn.
“Can we?” I asked.
“You could go this instant if the situation became totally
desperate. It will be a few hours yet before the barges are
completely provisioned, however.”
Nobody wanted to go, though. Not just yet. A lot of the men had
developed ties. Everyone had unfinished business. That was life.
The same situation had come up time and again over the course of
the Company’s history.
Sahra said, “You still haven’t gotten Narayan to
give you the Key.”
“I’ll talk to him. Is River back yet? No? What about
Kendo? How about Pooch and Spiff?” We had people running all
over on special assignments. Good old One-Eye had sent our last two
men, the barely competent Pooch and Spiff, to assassinate Adoo the
gateman because Murgen had been able to determine that it had been
he who had caused all the excitement at the library. More, Adoo
knew the general neighborhood where I lived.
One-Eye informed me, “Kendo Cutter is coming through the
web right now. Arjana Drupada appears to be reasonably healthy for
a man with a dozen knife wounds. Hang on.”
Murgen was whispering something. It was thundering and hailing
outside. I could not hear a word.
“It’s started at Semchi, Murgen says. Slink hit them
just as they were starting to pitch camp. Cut them off from their
weapons.”
“Darn!” I swore. “Darn-darn-darn!”
“What’s the matter with you, Little Girl?”
“He should’ve waited until they tried to do something
to the Bhodi Tree. This way, nobody will know why we jumped
them.”
“There’s why you don’t have you a
man.”
“What?”
“You ask too much. You sent Slink out there to kill some
people. Unless you told him it’s got to be a show, all our
guys allowed to fight only left-handed or something, he’s
going to do it fast and dirty and with as little risk to our own
guys as he can.”
“I thought he understood—”
“Did you assume, Little Girl? At this late stage in your
career? You, who’s got to run a checklist on lacing your own
boots?”
He had me. And he had me good. I tried to change the subject.
“If we decide to evacuate, we’re going to have to run
somebody out there to warn Slink and tell him where to
rendezvous.”
“Don’t try to change the subject.”
I turned
away. “Kendo. Does he need medical attention?”
“Drupada? He’s not bleeding that much anymore.”
“Then let’s take him back to meet his new
roommate.” One-Eye catching me out had me feeling
particularly evil. This seemed like a good time to take it out on
the enemy. “The rest of you, take real good care of the
Radisha. We don’t want her coming up with a hangnail anybody
can blame on us.”
Cutter bobbed his head and muttered something under his
breath.
“Hey, pervert!” I called to the Inspector-General of
the Records. “I don’t want you ever to say that the
Black Company don’t cater to its guests, so here’s your
very own human play toy. Maybe a little longer in the tooth than
you prefer but it’s only until the Protector gets around to
rescuing you.”
Kendo planted a boot in Drupada’s behind and shoved. Into
the cage the Purohita went. He and Gokhale backed off into opposite
corners and glared at one another. Human nature being what it is,
each man probably thought the other was responsible for his
dismay.
I told Kendo, “Relax now. Get something to eat. Take a
nap. But stay away from the girl.”
“Hey, I got it the first time, Sleepy. And more so now
she’s started sleepwalking. So ease up.”
“Give me a reason.”
“Why don’t we just skrag her?”
“Because we need Singh to help open the way through the
Shadowgate. And he won’t unless he feels confident that
we’ll be good to the Daughter of Night.”
“I don’t know any of the Captured that well.
Don’t feel like you’ve got to save them on my
account.”
“I feel like we have to save them on the Company’s
account, Kendo. Just the same as we’d be doing if it was you
out there.”
“Sure. Right.” Kendo Cutter was one of those people
who tended to look on the dark side no matter what.
“Get some rest.” I went to talk with Narayan while I
waited for Murgen to generate some report on what was happening
inside the Palace.
I did not want to run away but knew it was very close to time
for the Company to go. We had to see what Soulcatcher’s
reaction to the kidnapping would be. And we had to get Goblin out
of the Palace.
If Soulcatcher did not come after us like a screaming monsoon
storm, I was going to get really worried about what she was up
to.
“I’ve had a real good day, thank you, Mr. Singh. A
whole lot of planning and a little inspired improvisation fell into
place all at once. Just one thing more could make the day
perfect.” I sniffed the air. It smelled like One-Eye and
friends were cooking up a new batch. Probably so they could take a
little something along when we had to run.
I kicked a bundle of hides of some kind over beside the bars of
Singh’s cage, settled myself. I caught him up on the latest
gossip. Including, “None of your people seem to be worried
about you two. Maybe you were just a little too secretive. Be kind
of pathetic if the whole cult faded away because everyone just sat
around waiting to find out what was going on.”
“I’ve been told that I’m free to deal with
you.” There was no cringe to the man tonight. He had gotten a
little backbone somewhere. “I’m prepared to discuss the
object you seek if I receive absolute assurances that the Black
Company will never do the Daughter of Night any harm.”
“Never is an awful long time. You’re out of
luck.” I got up. “Goblin’s been wanting to work
on her just forever. I’m going to let him pull a few fingers
off now to show you we have no conscience or remorse where certain
old enemies are concerned.”
“I offered you what you asked.”
“You offered me a delayed death warrant. If I agree to
that kind of nonsense, ten years from now the blackhearted witch
will start poisoning us and we’ll be stuck with the
disastrous choice of keeping our word and accepting destruction or
breaking our word and seeing our reputation destroyed. I’m
certain you don’t know much northern mythology. There’s
an old religion up there that tells how a leading god allowed
himself to be slain so his family would no longer be bound by a
promise he made foolishly to an enemy, who wore it like a
turtle’s shell.”
Narayan stared at me, cold as a cobra, waiting for me to crack.
And I did, a little, because I bothered to explain. One-Eye has
told me a hundred times that I should not explain. “I just
don’t want that artifact badly enough to commit my people to
the level of vulnerability that you’re asking. In particular,
I won’t undertake commitments for those of us who are buried.
On the other hand, maybe you’d like to undertake commitments
whereby, assuming you get out of this alive, you guarantee never to
be a pain in the Company neck ever again. Whereby you agree to go
to the Captain and the Lieutenant and beg their forgiveness for
stealing their child.”
The very suggestion appalled the living saint of the Deceivers.
“She’s the Child of Kina. The Daughter of Night. Those
two are irrelevant.”
“Evidently we don’t have anything to talk about yet.
I’ll send you a few fingers for breakfast.”
I went to see if Surendranath Santaraksita was being a good
fellow and pursuing the tasks I had suggested he could use to help
overcome the tedium of his captivity. To my surprise I found him
hard at work, with old Baladitya assisting, translating what I had
presumed to be the first volume of the lost Annals. They had a
whole stack of sheets already done.
“Dorabee!” Master Santaraksita said.
“Excellent. Your friend the foreigner keeps telling us we
can’t have any more real vellum when we’re done with
these last few sheets. He wants us to use those ridiculous bark
books they still employ out in the swamps.”
Before there were modern paper and vellum and parchment, there
was bark. I do not know what kind of tree it came from, just that
the inner bark was removed carefully, treated and pressed and used
to write on. To make a book, you stacked the bark sheets, drilled a
hole down through the upper-left-hand corner of the stack, then
bound everything together with a cord or ribbon or length of very
light chain. Banh Do Trang would favor bark because it was both
cheap, traditional and hardier than animal products.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“There’s nothing earthshaking in there,
Dorabee.”
“My name is Sleepy.”
“Sleepy isn’t a name. It’s a disease, or a
misfortune. I prefer Dorabee. I’ll use Dorabee.”
“Use whatever you like. I’ll know who you’re
talking to.” I read a couple of sheets. He was right.
“This is tedious stuff. This looks like an account
book.”
“That’s what it is, mainly. The things you want to
know are just the things the writer assumes any reader of his own
time would know already. He wasn’t writing for the ages, or
even for another generation. He was keeping track of horseshoe
nails, lance shafts and saddles. All he has to say about their
battle is that the lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned
officers failed to demonstrate an adequate enthusiasm for
appropriating weapons lost or abandoned by the defeated enemy,
preferring to wait till the next dawn to begin gleaning. As a
consequence, stragglers and the local peasantry managed to scavenge
all the best.”
“I notice he doesn’t bother to name a single name,
person or place.” I had begun reading while the Master
talked. I could listen and read at the same time even though I was
a woman.
“He does give mileage and dates. The context suggests the
appropriate systems of measure. It can be figured out. But what
I’ve already started to wonder, Dorabee, is why we’ve
all been deathly afraid of these people all our lives. This book
gives us no reason to be afraid. This book is about a troop of
crabby little men who marched off somewhere they didn’t want
to go for reasons they didn’t understand, fully believing
that their unstated mission would last only several weeks or, at
most, a few months. Then they would be able to go home. But the
months piled into years and the years into generations. And still
they didn’t really know.”
The material also suggested we needed to revise our old belief
that the Free Companies exploded into the world at the same time,
in a vast orgy of fire and bloodshed. The only other company
mentioned was noted to have returned years before the Black Company
marched, and in fact, several senior Company noncoms had served as
private soldiers in that earlier, unnamed band.
“I can see it,” I grumbled. “We’re going
to translate these things, find out all sorts of things, and not be
an inch closer to understanding anything.”
Santaraksita said, “This’s much more exciting than a
meeting of the bhadrhalok, Dorabee.”
Then Baladitya spoke for the first time. “Do we have to
starve to death here, Dorabee?”
“Nobody’s brought you anything to eat?”
“No.”
“I’ll just see about that. Don’t be startled
if you hear me shouting. I hope you enjoy fish and rice.”
I took care of that, then hid in my corner for a while. I was
feeling a little depressed after having seen Master
Santaraksita’s work. I suppose that sometimes I invest too
much in my goals, then suffer a correspondingly huge disappointment
when things do not work out.