I need not have
worried. We were interviewed by a seriously distracted Guard
sergeant who seemed to be going through the motions mainly as a sop
to Jaul Barundandi. The subassistant had evidently suffered an
overinspiration of ambition in thinking he could win favor by
providing eyewitnesses to the tragedy.
His solicitude began to fade once he had little to gain. A few
hours after we were taken inside, while excitement still gripped
the Palace and a thousand outrageous rumors circulated, while
leading Guardsmen and Greys kept bringing in more and more trusted
armed men and sending out more and more spies to watch the regular
soldiers in their barracks, just in case they were in on the attack
somehow, Minh Subredil and her idiot sister-in-law were already
hard at work. Barundandi had them cleaning the chamber where the
Privy Council met. A huge mess had been left there. Somebody had
lost her temper and had worked out her anger by tearing the place
up.
Barundandi told us, “Expect to work very hard today, Minh
Subredil. Few workers showed up this morning.” He sounded
bitter. He would not garner much kickback because of the raid. It
did not occur to him to be thankful he was still alive. “Is
she all right?” He meant me. Sawa. I was still doing a
credible job of shaking.
“She will manage as long as I stay close. It would not be
good to put her anyplace where she cannot see me today.”
Barundandi grunted. “So be it. There’s work enough
here. Just don’t get in anybody’s way.”
Minh Subredil bowed slightly. She was good at being unobtrusive.
She seated me at a wide table about a dozen feet long, piled up
lamps and candlesticks and whatnot that had gotten thrown around. I
invoked Sawa’s narrow focus and went to work cleaning them.
Subredil began cleaning floors and furniture.
People came and went, many of them important. None of them
noticed us except the Inspector-General of the Records, Chandra
Gokhale, who kicked Subredil irritably because she was scrubbing
the floor where he wanted to walk.
Subredil got back onto her knees, bowing and begging pardon.
Gokhale ignored her. She began cleaning up spilled water, showing
no emotion whatsoever. Minh Subredil took that sort of thing. But I
suspect Ky Sahra had just formed a definite opinion about which of
our enemies should follow Willow Swan into captivity.
The Radisha appeared. The Protector was with her. They settled
into their places. Jaul Barundandi appeared soon afterward, meaning
to get us out of there. Sawa seemed to notice nothing. Her focus on
a candlestick was too narrow. A tall Shadar captain bustled in. He
announced, “Your Highness, the preliminary tally shows
ninety-eight dead and one hundred twenty-six injured. Some of those
will die from their wounds. Minister Swan hasn’t been found
but many of the bodies are burned too badly to identify. Many that
were hit by fireballs caught fire and burned like greasy
torches.” The captain had trouble remaining calm. He was
young. Chances were good he had not seen the consequences of battle
before.
I kept working hard to shove myself way down deep into
character. I had not been this close to Soulcatcher since she held
me prisoner outside Kiaulune fifteen years ago. Those were not
happy memories. I prayed she did not remember me.
I went all the way down into my safe place. I had not been there
since my captivity. The hinges on the door were rusty. But I got
inside and got comfortable while remaining Sawa. I had just enough
attention left to catch most of what was happening around me. The
Protector suddenly asked, “Who are these women?”
Barundandi fawned. “Pardon, Great Ones. Pardon. My fault.
I did not know the chamber was to be used.”
“Answer the question, Housekeeper,” the Radisha
ordered.
“Certainly, Great One.” Barundandi kowtowed halfway
to the floor. “The woman scrubbing is Minh Subredil, a widow.
The other is her idiot sister-in-law, Sawa. They are outside staff
employed as part of the Protector’s charity
program.”
Soulcatcher said, “I feel I have seen one or both of them
before.”
Barundandi bowed deeply again. The attention frightened him.
“Minh Subredil has worked here for many years, Protector.
Sawa accompanies her when her mind is clear enough for her to
accomplish repetitive tasks.”
I felt him trying to decide whether or not to volunteer the news
that we had witnessed the morning’s attack from up close. I
clung to my safe place so hard that I did not catch what happened
during the next few minutes.
Barundandi chose not to volunteer us for questioning. Perhaps he
reasoned that too intensive an attention paid to us might expose
the fact that he was charging us half our feeble salaries for the
right to work our hands into raw, aching crabs.
The Radisha finally told him, “Go away, Housekeeper. Let
them work. The fate of the empire will not be decided here
today.”
And Soulcatcher waved a gloved hand, shooing Barundandi out, but
then halted him to demand, “What is that the woman has on the
floor beside her?” Meaning Subredil, of course, since I was
seated at the table.
“Uh? Oh. A Ghanghesha, Great One. The woman never goes
anywhere without it. It’s an obsession with her.
It—”
“Go away now.”
So it was that Sahra, at least, sat in on almost two hours of
the innermost powers’ responses to our assault.
After a while I came forward again, enough to follow most of it.
Couriers came and went. A picture of generally upright behavior by
the army and people took shape. Which was to be expected. Neither
had any real reason to rise up right now. Which was nothing but
good news to the Radisha.
Positive intelligence just made the Protector more suspicious,
though. The old cynic.
“No prisoners taken,” she said. “No corpses
left behind. Quite possibly no serious casualties suffered. Nor any
great risks endured, if you examine it closely. They fled as soon
as there was a chance someone would hit back. What were they up to?
What was their real purpose?”
Reasonably, Chandra Gokhale pointed out, “The attack
appears to have been sustained with exceptional ferocity till you
yourself appeared on the battlements. Only then did they
run.”
The Shadar captain volunteered, “Several survivors and
witnesses report that the bandits argued amongst themselves about
your presence, Protector. It seems they expected you to be away
from the Palace. Evidently the attack would not have been
undertaken had they known you were here.”
One of my touches of misdirection. I hoped it did some good.
“That makes no sense. Where would they get that
idea?” She did not expect an answer and did not wait for one.
“Have you identified any of the burned bodies?”
“Only three, Protector. Most are barely recognizable as
human.”
The Radisha asked, “Chandra, how bad was the physical
damage? Do you have an assessment yet?”
“Yes, Radisha. It was bad. Extremely bad. The wall appears
to have suffered some structural damage. The full extent is being
determined right now. It’s certain to be a weak point for a
while. You might consider putting up a wooden curtain-wall in front
of what is going to become a construction area. And think hard
about bringing in troops.”
“Troops?” the Protector demanded. “Why
troops?” Her voice, long neutral, became suspicious. When you
have no friends at all, paranoia is an even more natural outlook
than it is for brothers of the Black Company.
“Because the Palace is too big to defend with the people
you have here now. Even if you arm the household staff. An enemy
doesn’t need to use any of the regular entrances. He could
climb the outside wall where no one is watching and attack from
inside.”
The Radisha said, “If he tried that, he’d need maps
to get around. I’ve never seen anyone but Smoke, who was our
court wizard a long time ago, who could get around this place
without one. You have to have an instinct.”
The Inspector-General observed, “If the attack was
undertaken by elements descended from the old Black Company—and the
employment of fireball weapons would suggest some connection, even
though we know that the Company was exterminated by the
Protector—then they may have access to hallway maps created when
the Liberator and his staff were quartered here.”
The Radisha insisted, “You can’t chart this place. I
know. I’ve tried.”
Thank Goblin and One-Eye for that, Princess. Long, long ago the
Captain had those two old men scatter confusion spells liberally,
everywhere. There were things he had not wanted the Radisha to
find. Things that remained hidden still, among them those ancient
volumes of the Annals that supposedly explain the Company’s
secret beginnings but which have been a complete disappointment so
far. Minh Subredil knows how to get to them. Whenever she gets the
chance, Minh Subredil tears out a few pages and smuggles them out
to me. Then I sneak them into the library and when no one is
watching, I translate them a few words at a time, looking for that
one phrase that will show us how to open the way for the
Captured.
Sawa cleaned brass and silver. Minh Subredil cleaned floor and
furniture. The Privy Council and their associates came and went.
The level of panic declined as no new attacks developed. Too bad we
did not have the numbers to stir them up again every few hours.
Soulcatcher remained uncharacteristically quiet. She had known
the Company longer than anyone but the Captain, Goblin and One-Eye,
though from the outside. She would accept nothing at face value.
Not yet.
I hoped she broke a mental sprocket trying to figure it out,
though I feared she had already done so, because she kept wondering
about the burned bodies and Willow Swan. Could I have planned so
obviously that she was confused only because she kept looking for
something beyond the kidnapping?
I finished the last candlestick. I did not look around, did not
say anything, just sat there. It was difficult to focus my thinking
away from the danger seated across the room when my fingers were
not busy. I gave praise to God, silently, as I had learned was
proper for a woman when I was little. Equal praise was due
Sahra’s insistence on staying in character.
Both served me well.
At some point Jaul Barundandi came back. Under the eyes of the
Great Ones, he was not an unkind boss. He told Subredil it was time
to leave. Subredil bestirred Sawa. As I got to my feet, I made some
sounds of distress.
“What is that?” Barundandi asked.
“She’s hungry. We haven’t eaten all
day.” Usually the management did provide a few scraps. That
was one of the perks. Subredil and Sawa sometimes husbanded some of
their share and took it home. That established and sustained the
women’s habit of carrying things out of the Palace.
The Protector leaned forward. She stared intently. What had we
done to tickle her suspicion? Was she just so ancient in her
paranoia that she needed no clue stronger than intuition? Or was it
possible that she really could read minds, just a touch?
Barundandi said, “We’ll go to the kitchen, then. The
cooks overprepared badly today.”
We shuffled out behind him, each step like leaping another
league out of winter toward spring, out of darkness into light.
Four or five paces outside the meeting chamber, Barundandi startled
us by running a hand through his hair and gasping. He told
Subredil, “Oh, it feels good to get out of there. That woman
gives me the green willies.”
She gave me the green willies, too. And only the fact that I had
gone deep into character to deal with them saved me giving myself
away. Who would suspect that much humanity in Jaul Barundandi? I
got a grip on Subredil’s arm and shook.
Subredil responded to Barundandi softly, submissively agreeing
that the Protector might be a great horror.
The kitchens, normally off limits to casual labor, was a
dragon’s hoard of edible treasures. With the dragon evicted.
Subredil and Sawa ate till they could barely waddle. They loaded
themselves with all the plunder they thought they would be allowed
to carry off. They collected their few coppers and headed for the
servants’ postern before anyone could think of something else
for them to do, before any of Barundandi’s cronies realized
that the customary kickbacks had been overlooked.
There were armed guards outside the postern. That was new. They
were Greys rather than soldiers. They did not seem particularly
interested in people going out. They did not bother with the usual
cursory search casuals had to endure so nobody carried off the
royal cutlery.
I wish our characters had more curiosity in them. I could have
used a closer look at the damage we had done. They were putting up
scaffolding and erecting a wooden curtain-wall already. The
glimpses I did catch awed me. I had only read about what the later
versions of those fireball throwers could do. The face of the
Palace looked like a model of dark wax that someone had stuck
repeatedly with a white-hot iron rod. Not only had stone melted and
run, some had been vaporized. We had been released much earlier
than usual. It was only mid-afternoon. I tried to walk too fast,
eager to get away. Subredil refused to be rushed. Ahead of us stood
quiet crowds who had come to stare at the Palace. Subredil murmured
something about “ . . . ten thousand
eyes.”
I need not have
worried. We were interviewed by a seriously distracted Guard
sergeant who seemed to be going through the motions mainly as a sop
to Jaul Barundandi. The subassistant had evidently suffered an
overinspiration of ambition in thinking he could win favor by
providing eyewitnesses to the tragedy.
His solicitude began to fade once he had little to gain. A few
hours after we were taken inside, while excitement still gripped
the Palace and a thousand outrageous rumors circulated, while
leading Guardsmen and Greys kept bringing in more and more trusted
armed men and sending out more and more spies to watch the regular
soldiers in their barracks, just in case they were in on the attack
somehow, Minh Subredil and her idiot sister-in-law were already
hard at work. Barundandi had them cleaning the chamber where the
Privy Council met. A huge mess had been left there. Somebody had
lost her temper and had worked out her anger by tearing the place
up.
Barundandi told us, “Expect to work very hard today, Minh
Subredil. Few workers showed up this morning.” He sounded
bitter. He would not garner much kickback because of the raid. It
did not occur to him to be thankful he was still alive. “Is
she all right?” He meant me. Sawa. I was still doing a
credible job of shaking.
“She will manage as long as I stay close. It would not be
good to put her anyplace where she cannot see me today.”
Barundandi grunted. “So be it. There’s work enough
here. Just don’t get in anybody’s way.”
Minh Subredil bowed slightly. She was good at being unobtrusive.
She seated me at a wide table about a dozen feet long, piled up
lamps and candlesticks and whatnot that had gotten thrown around. I
invoked Sawa’s narrow focus and went to work cleaning them.
Subredil began cleaning floors and furniture.
People came and went, many of them important. None of them
noticed us except the Inspector-General of the Records, Chandra
Gokhale, who kicked Subredil irritably because she was scrubbing
the floor where he wanted to walk.
Subredil got back onto her knees, bowing and begging pardon.
Gokhale ignored her. She began cleaning up spilled water, showing
no emotion whatsoever. Minh Subredil took that sort of thing. But I
suspect Ky Sahra had just formed a definite opinion about which of
our enemies should follow Willow Swan into captivity.
The Radisha appeared. The Protector was with her. They settled
into their places. Jaul Barundandi appeared soon afterward, meaning
to get us out of there. Sawa seemed to notice nothing. Her focus on
a candlestick was too narrow. A tall Shadar captain bustled in. He
announced, “Your Highness, the preliminary tally shows
ninety-eight dead and one hundred twenty-six injured. Some of those
will die from their wounds. Minister Swan hasn’t been found
but many of the bodies are burned too badly to identify. Many that
were hit by fireballs caught fire and burned like greasy
torches.” The captain had trouble remaining calm. He was
young. Chances were good he had not seen the consequences of battle
before.
I kept working hard to shove myself way down deep into
character. I had not been this close to Soulcatcher since she held
me prisoner outside Kiaulune fifteen years ago. Those were not
happy memories. I prayed she did not remember me.
I went all the way down into my safe place. I had not been there
since my captivity. The hinges on the door were rusty. But I got
inside and got comfortable while remaining Sawa. I had just enough
attention left to catch most of what was happening around me. The
Protector suddenly asked, “Who are these women?”
Barundandi fawned. “Pardon, Great Ones. Pardon. My fault.
I did not know the chamber was to be used.”
“Answer the question, Housekeeper,” the Radisha
ordered.
“Certainly, Great One.” Barundandi kowtowed halfway
to the floor. “The woman scrubbing is Minh Subredil, a widow.
The other is her idiot sister-in-law, Sawa. They are outside staff
employed as part of the Protector’s charity
program.”
Soulcatcher said, “I feel I have seen one or both of them
before.”
Barundandi bowed deeply again. The attention frightened him.
“Minh Subredil has worked here for many years, Protector.
Sawa accompanies her when her mind is clear enough for her to
accomplish repetitive tasks.”
I felt him trying to decide whether or not to volunteer the news
that we had witnessed the morning’s attack from up close. I
clung to my safe place so hard that I did not catch what happened
during the next few minutes.
Barundandi chose not to volunteer us for questioning. Perhaps he
reasoned that too intensive an attention paid to us might expose
the fact that he was charging us half our feeble salaries for the
right to work our hands into raw, aching crabs.
The Radisha finally told him, “Go away, Housekeeper. Let
them work. The fate of the empire will not be decided here
today.”
And Soulcatcher waved a gloved hand, shooing Barundandi out, but
then halted him to demand, “What is that the woman has on the
floor beside her?” Meaning Subredil, of course, since I was
seated at the table.
“Uh? Oh. A Ghanghesha, Great One. The woman never goes
anywhere without it. It’s an obsession with her.
It—”
“Go away now.”
So it was that Sahra, at least, sat in on almost two hours of
the innermost powers’ responses to our assault.
After a while I came forward again, enough to follow most of it.
Couriers came and went. A picture of generally upright behavior by
the army and people took shape. Which was to be expected. Neither
had any real reason to rise up right now. Which was nothing but
good news to the Radisha.
Positive intelligence just made the Protector more suspicious,
though. The old cynic.
“No prisoners taken,” she said. “No corpses
left behind. Quite possibly no serious casualties suffered. Nor any
great risks endured, if you examine it closely. They fled as soon
as there was a chance someone would hit back. What were they up to?
What was their real purpose?”
Reasonably, Chandra Gokhale pointed out, “The attack
appears to have been sustained with exceptional ferocity till you
yourself appeared on the battlements. Only then did they
run.”
The Shadar captain volunteered, “Several survivors and
witnesses report that the bandits argued amongst themselves about
your presence, Protector. It seems they expected you to be away
from the Palace. Evidently the attack would not have been
undertaken had they known you were here.”
One of my touches of misdirection. I hoped it did some good.
“That makes no sense. Where would they get that
idea?” She did not expect an answer and did not wait for one.
“Have you identified any of the burned bodies?”
“Only three, Protector. Most are barely recognizable as
human.”
The Radisha asked, “Chandra, how bad was the physical
damage? Do you have an assessment yet?”
“Yes, Radisha. It was bad. Extremely bad. The wall appears
to have suffered some structural damage. The full extent is being
determined right now. It’s certain to be a weak point for a
while. You might consider putting up a wooden curtain-wall in front
of what is going to become a construction area. And think hard
about bringing in troops.”
“Troops?” the Protector demanded. “Why
troops?” Her voice, long neutral, became suspicious. When you
have no friends at all, paranoia is an even more natural outlook
than it is for brothers of the Black Company.
“Because the Palace is too big to defend with the people
you have here now. Even if you arm the household staff. An enemy
doesn’t need to use any of the regular entrances. He could
climb the outside wall where no one is watching and attack from
inside.”
The Radisha said, “If he tried that, he’d need maps
to get around. I’ve never seen anyone but Smoke, who was our
court wizard a long time ago, who could get around this place
without one. You have to have an instinct.”
The Inspector-General observed, “If the attack was
undertaken by elements descended from the old Black Company—and the
employment of fireball weapons would suggest some connection, even
though we know that the Company was exterminated by the
Protector—then they may have access to hallway maps created when
the Liberator and his staff were quartered here.”
The Radisha insisted, “You can’t chart this place. I
know. I’ve tried.”
Thank Goblin and One-Eye for that, Princess. Long, long ago the
Captain had those two old men scatter confusion spells liberally,
everywhere. There were things he had not wanted the Radisha to
find. Things that remained hidden still, among them those ancient
volumes of the Annals that supposedly explain the Company’s
secret beginnings but which have been a complete disappointment so
far. Minh Subredil knows how to get to them. Whenever she gets the
chance, Minh Subredil tears out a few pages and smuggles them out
to me. Then I sneak them into the library and when no one is
watching, I translate them a few words at a time, looking for that
one phrase that will show us how to open the way for the
Captured.
Sawa cleaned brass and silver. Minh Subredil cleaned floor and
furniture. The Privy Council and their associates came and went.
The level of panic declined as no new attacks developed. Too bad we
did not have the numbers to stir them up again every few hours.
Soulcatcher remained uncharacteristically quiet. She had known
the Company longer than anyone but the Captain, Goblin and One-Eye,
though from the outside. She would accept nothing at face value.
Not yet.
I hoped she broke a mental sprocket trying to figure it out,
though I feared she had already done so, because she kept wondering
about the burned bodies and Willow Swan. Could I have planned so
obviously that she was confused only because she kept looking for
something beyond the kidnapping?
I finished the last candlestick. I did not look around, did not
say anything, just sat there. It was difficult to focus my thinking
away from the danger seated across the room when my fingers were
not busy. I gave praise to God, silently, as I had learned was
proper for a woman when I was little. Equal praise was due
Sahra’s insistence on staying in character.
Both served me well.
At some point Jaul Barundandi came back. Under the eyes of the
Great Ones, he was not an unkind boss. He told Subredil it was time
to leave. Subredil bestirred Sawa. As I got to my feet, I made some
sounds of distress.
“What is that?” Barundandi asked.
“She’s hungry. We haven’t eaten all
day.” Usually the management did provide a few scraps. That
was one of the perks. Subredil and Sawa sometimes husbanded some of
their share and took it home. That established and sustained the
women’s habit of carrying things out of the Palace.
The Protector leaned forward. She stared intently. What had we
done to tickle her suspicion? Was she just so ancient in her
paranoia that she needed no clue stronger than intuition? Or was it
possible that she really could read minds, just a touch?
Barundandi said, “We’ll go to the kitchen, then. The
cooks overprepared badly today.”
We shuffled out behind him, each step like leaping another
league out of winter toward spring, out of darkness into light.
Four or five paces outside the meeting chamber, Barundandi startled
us by running a hand through his hair and gasping. He told
Subredil, “Oh, it feels good to get out of there. That woman
gives me the green willies.”
She gave me the green willies, too. And only the fact that I had
gone deep into character to deal with them saved me giving myself
away. Who would suspect that much humanity in Jaul Barundandi? I
got a grip on Subredil’s arm and shook.
Subredil responded to Barundandi softly, submissively agreeing
that the Protector might be a great horror.
The kitchens, normally off limits to casual labor, was a
dragon’s hoard of edible treasures. With the dragon evicted.
Subredil and Sawa ate till they could barely waddle. They loaded
themselves with all the plunder they thought they would be allowed
to carry off. They collected their few coppers and headed for the
servants’ postern before anyone could think of something else
for them to do, before any of Barundandi’s cronies realized
that the customary kickbacks had been overlooked.
There were armed guards outside the postern. That was new. They
were Greys rather than soldiers. They did not seem particularly
interested in people going out. They did not bother with the usual
cursory search casuals had to endure so nobody carried off the
royal cutlery.
I wish our characters had more curiosity in them. I could have
used a closer look at the damage we had done. They were putting up
scaffolding and erecting a wooden curtain-wall already. The
glimpses I did catch awed me. I had only read about what the later
versions of those fireball throwers could do. The face of the
Palace looked like a model of dark wax that someone had stuck
repeatedly with a white-hot iron rod. Not only had stone melted and
run, some had been vaporized. We had been released much earlier
than usual. It was only mid-afternoon. I tried to walk too fast,
eager to get away. Subredil refused to be rushed. Ahead of us stood
quiet crowds who had come to stare at the Palace. Subredil murmured
something about “ . . . ten thousand
eyes.”