It was the waiting
time, the stillness, the doing nothing that there is so much of
before any serious action. I was out of practice. I could not lean
back and play tonk or just watch while One-Eye and Goblin tried to
cheat each other. And I had writer’s cramp, so could not work
on my Annals.
“Tobo!” I called. “You want to go
see it happen?”
Tobo was fourteen. He was the youngest of us.
He grew up in the Black Company. He had a full measure of
youth’s exuberance and impatience and overconfidence in his
own immortality and divine exemption from retribution. He enjoyed
his assignments on behalf of the Company. He was not quite sure he
believed in his father. He never knew the man. We tried hard to
keep him from becoming anyone’s spoiled baby. But Goblin
insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to
tutor the boy.
Goblin’s command of written Taglian was more limited than
he would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday
vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the
High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I
use a mixture recording these Annals.
Once Tobo could read, “Uncle” Goblin made him do all
his reading for him, aloud.
“Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more
would get more attention in the Palace.”
I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are
surly at best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would
have been ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed
with so many “uncles” who would not tolerate that
stuff. Naturally, Tobo saw all that as a grand conspiracy of
adults. Publicly. In private, he was amenable to reason.
Occasionally. When approached delicately by someone who was not his
mother.
“Maybe a few. But it’s going to get dark soon. And
then the show will start.”
“What’ll we go as? I don’t like it when
you’re a whore.”
“We’ll be street orphans.” Though that had its
risks, too. We could get caught by a press gang and forced into
Mogaba’s army. His soldiers, these days, are little better
than slaves, subject to a savage discipline. Many are petty
criminals given an option of rough justice or enlistment. The rest
are children of poverty with nowhere else to go. Which was the
standard of professional armies men like Murgen saw in the far
north, long before my time.
“Why do you worry so much about disguises?”
“If we never show the same face twice, our enemies
can’t possibly know who they’re looking for.
Don’t ever underestimate them. Especially not the Protector.
She’s outwitted death itself more than once.”
Tobo was not prepared to believe that or much else of our exotic
history. Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage
where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders
said—particularly if it bore any vaguely educational hue—was worth
hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would
do no good. “It’s in the Annals. Your father and the
Captain didn’t make up stories.”
He did not want to believe that, either. I did not pursue it.
Each of us must learn to respect the Annals in our own way, in our
own time. The Company’s diminished circumstance makes it
difficult for anyone to grasp tradition. Only two Old Crew brothers
both survived Soulcatcher’s trap on the stone plain and the
Kiaulune wars afterward. Goblin and One-Eye are haplessly inept at
transmitting the Company mystique. One-Eye is too lazy and Goblin
too inarticulate. And I was still practically an apprentice when
the Old Crew ventured onto the plain in the Captain’s quest
for Khatovar. Which he did not find. Not the Khatovar he was
looking for, anyway.
I am amazed. Before long I will be a twenty-year veteran. I was
barely fourteen when Bucket took me under his
wing . . . But I was never like Tobo. At
fourteen I was already ancient in pain. For years after Bucket
rescued me, I grew
younger . . . “What?”
“I asked why you look so angry all of a sudden.”
“I was remembering when I was fourteen.”
“Girls have it so easy—” He shut up. His face
drained. His northern ancestry became apparent. He was an arrogant
and spoiled little puke but he did have brains enough to recognize
it when he stepped into a nest of poisonous snakes.
I told him what he knew, not what he did not. “When I was
fourteen, the Company and Nyueng Bao were trapped in Jaicur.
Dejagore, they call it here.” The rest does not matter
anymore. The rest is safely in the past. “I almost never have
nightmares now.”
Tobo had heard more than he ever wanted to about Jaicur already.
His mother and grandmother and Uncle Doj had been there, too.
“Goblin says we’ll be impressed by these
buttons,” Tobo whispered. “They won’t just make
spooky lights, they’ll prick somebody’s
conscience.”
“That’ll be unusual.” Conscience was a rare
commodity on either side of our dispute.
“You really knew my dad?” Tobo had heard stories all
his life but lately wanted to know more. Murgen had begun to matter
in a more than lip-service fashion.
I told him what I had told him before. “He was my boss. He
taught me to read and write. He was a good man.” I laughed
weakly. “As good a man as belonging to the Black Company let
him be.”
Tobo stopped. He took a deep breath. He stared at a point in the
dusk somewhere above my left shoulder. “Were you
lovers?”
“No, Tobo. No. Friends. Almost. But definitely not that.
He didn’t know I was a woman till just before he left for the
glittering plain. And I didn’t know he knew till I read his
Annals. Nobody knew. They thought I was a cute runt who just never
got any bigger. I let them think that. I felt safer as one of the
guys.”
“Oh.”
His tone was so neutral I had to wonder. “Why did you even
ask?” Surely he had no reason to believe I had behaved
differently before he knew me.
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
Something must have set him off. Possibly an “I wonder
if . . . ” from Goblin or One-Eye, say,
while they were sampling some of their homemade elephant
poison.
“I didn’t ask. Did you put the buttons behind the
shadow show?”
“That’s what I was told to do.”
A shadow show uses cutout puppets mounted on sticks. Some of
their limbs are manipulated mechanically. A candle behind the
puppets casts their shadows on a screen of white cloth. The
puppeteer uses a variety of voices to tell his story as he
maneuvers his puppets. If he is sufficiently entertaining, his
audience will toss him a few coins.
This particular puppeteer had performed in the same place for
more than a generation. He slept inside his stage setup. In so
doing, he lived better than most of Taglios’ floating
population.
He was an informer. He was not beloved of the Black Company.
The story he told, as most were, was drawn from the myths. It
sprang from the Khadi cycle. It involved a goddess with too many
arms who kept devouring demons.
Of course it was the same demon puppet over and over. Kind of
like real life, where the same demon comes back again and
again.
Just a hint of color hung above the western rooftops.
There was an earsplitting squeal. People stopped to stare at a
bright orange light. Glowing orange smoke wobbled up from behind
the puppeteer’s stand. Its strands wove the well-known emblem
of the Black Company, a fanged skull with no lower jaw, exhaling
flames. The scarlet fire in its left eye socket seemed to be a
pupil that stared right down inside you, searching for the thing
that you feared the most.
The smoke thing persisted only a few seconds. It rose about ten
feet before it dispersed. It left a frightened silence. The air
itself seemed to whisper, “Water sleeps.”
Whine and flash. A second skull arose. This one was silver with
a slightly bluish tint. It lasted longer and rose a dozen feet
higher before it perished. It whispered, “My brother
unforgiven.”
“Here come the Greys!” exclaimed someone tall enough
to see over the crowd. Being short makes it easy for me to
disappear in groups but also makes it tough for me to see what is
happening outside them.
The Greys are never far away. But they are helpless against this
sort of thing. It can happen anywhere, any time, and has to happen
before they can react. Our supposed ironclad rule is that
perpetrators should never be nearby when the buttons speak. The
Greys understand that. They just go through the motions. The
Protector must be appeased. The little Shadar have to be fed.
“Now!” Tobo murmured as four Greys arrived. A shriek
erupted from behind the puppeteer’s stage. The puppeteer
himself ran out, spun and leaned toward his stage, mouth wide open.
There was a flash less bright but more persistent than its
predecessors. The subsequent smoke image was more complex and
lasted longer. It appeared to be a monster. The monster focused on
the Shadar. One of the Greys mouthed the name
“Niassi.”
Niassi would be a major demon from Shadar mythology. A similar
demon under another form of the name exists in Gunni belief.
Niassi was a chieftain of the inner circle of the most powerful
demons. Shadar beliefs, being heretical Vehdna, include a
posthumous, punitive Hell but also definitely include the
possibility of a Gunni-like Hell on earth, in life, managed by
demons in Niassi’s employ, laid on for the particularly
wicked. Despite understanding that they were being taunted, the
Greys were rocked. This was something new. This was an attack from
an unanticipated and sensitive direction. And it came on top of
ever more potent rumors associating the Greys with vile rites
supposedly practiced by the Protector.
Children disappear. Reason suggests this is inevitable and
unavoidable in a city so vast and overcrowded, even if there is not
one evil man out there. Babies vanish by wandering off and getting
lost. And horrible things do happen to good people. A clever, sick
rumor can reassign the numb evil of chance to the premeditated
malice of people no one ever trusted anyway.
Memory becomes selective.
We do not mind a bit lying about our enemies.
Tobo yelled something insulting. I started to pull him away,
dragging him toward our den. Others began to curse and mock the
Greys. Tobo threw a stone that hit a Grey’s turban.
It was too dark for them to make out faces. They began to
unlimber bamboo wands. The mood of the crowd turned ugly. I could
not help but suspect that there was more to the devil display than
had met the eye. I knew our tame wizards. And I knew that Taglians
do not lose control easily. It takes a great deal of patience and
self-control for so many people to live in such unnaturally tight
proximity.
I looked around for crows, fluttering bats, or anything else
that might be spies for the Protector. After nightfall all our
risks soar. We cannot see what might be watching. I held onto
Tobo’s arm. “You shouldn’t have done that.
It’s dark enough for shadows to be out.”
He was not impressed. “Goblin will be happy. He spent a
long time on that. And it worked perfectly.”
The Greys blew whistles, summoning reinforcements.
A fourth button released its smoke ghost. We missed the show. I
dragged Tobo through all the shadow traps between the excitement
and our headquarters. He would be explaining to some uncles soon.
Those for whom paranoia remains a way of life will be those who
will be around to savor the Company’s many revenges. Tobo
needed more instruction. His behavior could have been exploited by
a clever adversary.
It was the waiting
time, the stillness, the doing nothing that there is so much of
before any serious action. I was out of practice. I could not lean
back and play tonk or just watch while One-Eye and Goblin tried to
cheat each other. And I had writer’s cramp, so could not work
on my Annals.
“Tobo!” I called. “You want to go
see it happen?”
Tobo was fourteen. He was the youngest of us.
He grew up in the Black Company. He had a full measure of
youth’s exuberance and impatience and overconfidence in his
own immortality and divine exemption from retribution. He enjoyed
his assignments on behalf of the Company. He was not quite sure he
believed in his father. He never knew the man. We tried hard to
keep him from becoming anyone’s spoiled baby. But Goblin
insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to
tutor the boy.
Goblin’s command of written Taglian was more limited than
he would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday
vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the
High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I
use a mixture recording these Annals.
Once Tobo could read, “Uncle” Goblin made him do all
his reading for him, aloud.
“Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more
would get more attention in the Palace.”
I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are
surly at best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would
have been ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed
with so many “uncles” who would not tolerate that
stuff. Naturally, Tobo saw all that as a grand conspiracy of
adults. Publicly. In private, he was amenable to reason.
Occasionally. When approached delicately by someone who was not his
mother.
“Maybe a few. But it’s going to get dark soon. And
then the show will start.”
“What’ll we go as? I don’t like it when
you’re a whore.”
“We’ll be street orphans.” Though that had its
risks, too. We could get caught by a press gang and forced into
Mogaba’s army. His soldiers, these days, are little better
than slaves, subject to a savage discipline. Many are petty
criminals given an option of rough justice or enlistment. The rest
are children of poverty with nowhere else to go. Which was the
standard of professional armies men like Murgen saw in the far
north, long before my time.
“Why do you worry so much about disguises?”
“If we never show the same face twice, our enemies
can’t possibly know who they’re looking for.
Don’t ever underestimate them. Especially not the Protector.
She’s outwitted death itself more than once.”
Tobo was not prepared to believe that or much else of our exotic
history. Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage
where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders
said—particularly if it bore any vaguely educational hue—was worth
hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would
do no good. “It’s in the Annals. Your father and the
Captain didn’t make up stories.”
He did not want to believe that, either. I did not pursue it.
Each of us must learn to respect the Annals in our own way, in our
own time. The Company’s diminished circumstance makes it
difficult for anyone to grasp tradition. Only two Old Crew brothers
both survived Soulcatcher’s trap on the stone plain and the
Kiaulune wars afterward. Goblin and One-Eye are haplessly inept at
transmitting the Company mystique. One-Eye is too lazy and Goblin
too inarticulate. And I was still practically an apprentice when
the Old Crew ventured onto the plain in the Captain’s quest
for Khatovar. Which he did not find. Not the Khatovar he was
looking for, anyway.
I am amazed. Before long I will be a twenty-year veteran. I was
barely fourteen when Bucket took me under his
wing . . . But I was never like Tobo. At
fourteen I was already ancient in pain. For years after Bucket
rescued me, I grew
younger . . . “What?”
“I asked why you look so angry all of a sudden.”
“I was remembering when I was fourteen.”
“Girls have it so easy—” He shut up. His face
drained. His northern ancestry became apparent. He was an arrogant
and spoiled little puke but he did have brains enough to recognize
it when he stepped into a nest of poisonous snakes.
I told him what he knew, not what he did not. “When I was
fourteen, the Company and Nyueng Bao were trapped in Jaicur.
Dejagore, they call it here.” The rest does not matter
anymore. The rest is safely in the past. “I almost never have
nightmares now.”
Tobo had heard more than he ever wanted to about Jaicur already.
His mother and grandmother and Uncle Doj had been there, too.
“Goblin says we’ll be impressed by these
buttons,” Tobo whispered. “They won’t just make
spooky lights, they’ll prick somebody’s
conscience.”
“That’ll be unusual.” Conscience was a rare
commodity on either side of our dispute.
“You really knew my dad?” Tobo had heard stories all
his life but lately wanted to know more. Murgen had begun to matter
in a more than lip-service fashion.
I told him what I had told him before. “He was my boss. He
taught me to read and write. He was a good man.” I laughed
weakly. “As good a man as belonging to the Black Company let
him be.”
Tobo stopped. He took a deep breath. He stared at a point in the
dusk somewhere above my left shoulder. “Were you
lovers?”
“No, Tobo. No. Friends. Almost. But definitely not that.
He didn’t know I was a woman till just before he left for the
glittering plain. And I didn’t know he knew till I read his
Annals. Nobody knew. They thought I was a cute runt who just never
got any bigger. I let them think that. I felt safer as one of the
guys.”
“Oh.”
His tone was so neutral I had to wonder. “Why did you even
ask?” Surely he had no reason to believe I had behaved
differently before he knew me.
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
Something must have set him off. Possibly an “I wonder
if . . . ” from Goblin or One-Eye, say,
while they were sampling some of their homemade elephant
poison.
“I didn’t ask. Did you put the buttons behind the
shadow show?”
“That’s what I was told to do.”
A shadow show uses cutout puppets mounted on sticks. Some of
their limbs are manipulated mechanically. A candle behind the
puppets casts their shadows on a screen of white cloth. The
puppeteer uses a variety of voices to tell his story as he
maneuvers his puppets. If he is sufficiently entertaining, his
audience will toss him a few coins.
This particular puppeteer had performed in the same place for
more than a generation. He slept inside his stage setup. In so
doing, he lived better than most of Taglios’ floating
population.
He was an informer. He was not beloved of the Black Company.
The story he told, as most were, was drawn from the myths. It
sprang from the Khadi cycle. It involved a goddess with too many
arms who kept devouring demons.
Of course it was the same demon puppet over and over. Kind of
like real life, where the same demon comes back again and
again.
Just a hint of color hung above the western rooftops.
There was an earsplitting squeal. People stopped to stare at a
bright orange light. Glowing orange smoke wobbled up from behind
the puppeteer’s stand. Its strands wove the well-known emblem
of the Black Company, a fanged skull with no lower jaw, exhaling
flames. The scarlet fire in its left eye socket seemed to be a
pupil that stared right down inside you, searching for the thing
that you feared the most.
The smoke thing persisted only a few seconds. It rose about ten
feet before it dispersed. It left a frightened silence. The air
itself seemed to whisper, “Water sleeps.”
Whine and flash. A second skull arose. This one was silver with
a slightly bluish tint. It lasted longer and rose a dozen feet
higher before it perished. It whispered, “My brother
unforgiven.”
“Here come the Greys!” exclaimed someone tall enough
to see over the crowd. Being short makes it easy for me to
disappear in groups but also makes it tough for me to see what is
happening outside them.
The Greys are never far away. But they are helpless against this
sort of thing. It can happen anywhere, any time, and has to happen
before they can react. Our supposed ironclad rule is that
perpetrators should never be nearby when the buttons speak. The
Greys understand that. They just go through the motions. The
Protector must be appeased. The little Shadar have to be fed.
“Now!” Tobo murmured as four Greys arrived. A shriek
erupted from behind the puppeteer’s stage. The puppeteer
himself ran out, spun and leaned toward his stage, mouth wide open.
There was a flash less bright but more persistent than its
predecessors. The subsequent smoke image was more complex and
lasted longer. It appeared to be a monster. The monster focused on
the Shadar. One of the Greys mouthed the name
“Niassi.”
Niassi would be a major demon from Shadar mythology. A similar
demon under another form of the name exists in Gunni belief.
Niassi was a chieftain of the inner circle of the most powerful
demons. Shadar beliefs, being heretical Vehdna, include a
posthumous, punitive Hell but also definitely include the
possibility of a Gunni-like Hell on earth, in life, managed by
demons in Niassi’s employ, laid on for the particularly
wicked. Despite understanding that they were being taunted, the
Greys were rocked. This was something new. This was an attack from
an unanticipated and sensitive direction. And it came on top of
ever more potent rumors associating the Greys with vile rites
supposedly practiced by the Protector.
Children disappear. Reason suggests this is inevitable and
unavoidable in a city so vast and overcrowded, even if there is not
one evil man out there. Babies vanish by wandering off and getting
lost. And horrible things do happen to good people. A clever, sick
rumor can reassign the numb evil of chance to the premeditated
malice of people no one ever trusted anyway.
Memory becomes selective.
We do not mind a bit lying about our enemies.
Tobo yelled something insulting. I started to pull him away,
dragging him toward our den. Others began to curse and mock the
Greys. Tobo threw a stone that hit a Grey’s turban.
It was too dark for them to make out faces. They began to
unlimber bamboo wands. The mood of the crowd turned ugly. I could
not help but suspect that there was more to the devil display than
had met the eye. I knew our tame wizards. And I knew that Taglians
do not lose control easily. It takes a great deal of patience and
self-control for so many people to live in such unnaturally tight
proximity.
I looked around for crows, fluttering bats, or anything else
that might be spies for the Protector. After nightfall all our
risks soar. We cannot see what might be watching. I held onto
Tobo’s arm. “You shouldn’t have done that.
It’s dark enough for shadows to be out.”
He was not impressed. “Goblin will be happy. He spent a
long time on that. And it worked perfectly.”
The Greys blew whistles, summoning reinforcements.
A fourth button released its smoke ghost. We missed the show. I
dragged Tobo through all the shadow traps between the excitement
and our headquarters. He would be explaining to some uncles soon.
Those for whom paranoia remains a way of life will be those who
will be around to savor the Company’s many revenges. Tobo
needed more instruction. His behavior could have been exploited by
a clever adversary.