The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company)

by Glen Cook

  “You smite me to the heart, Little Girl. People might get the idea you don’t trust me not to cheat.”

  “Good. That’ll save them a lot of time and pain.”

  “Little girl?” Swan asked. There was a whole different look in his eye suddenly.

  “One-Eye’s got diarrhea of the mouth. Sit down, old man. Swan was just telling us about Soulcatcher’s magic carpets and how she doesn’t like flying. And I’m wondering if we couldn’t find some way to take advantage of that.”

  Swan looked from one of us to the other. I watched One-Eye’s hands as he picked up his first bunch of cards. Just in case he might have done something to this deck sometime in the past. “Little girl?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” Slink asked.

  “Is that suddenly a problem?” I asked.

  “No! No.” Swan showed me the palm of his free hand. “I’m just getting a lot of surprises here. Soulcatcher thought she was pretty solid on the Company survivors. But I’ve already run into four people who are known to be dead, including the world’s ugliest wizard and that Nyueng Bao woman who acts like she’s in charge.”

  One-Eye growled, “Don’t you go talking about Goblin that way. He’s my pal. I’ll have to stand up for him. Someday.” He snickered.

  Swan ignored him. “And you. That we had down as a man.”

  I shrugged. “Not many knew. And it’s not important. The dope with the eye patch and smelly hat should’ve had sense enough not to mention it in front of an outsider.” I glared.

  One-Eye grinned, drew a card from the pile, discarded. “She’s feisty, Swan. Smart, too. Designed the plan that pulled you in. You started on another one, Little Girl?”

  “Several. I think Sahra will want the Inspector-General next, though.”

  “Gokhale? He can’t tell us anything.”

  “Say it’s personal. Swan. You know anything about Gokhale? He dabble in little girls like Perhule Khoji used to?”

  One-Eye gave me an evil look. Swan stared. My mess-up this time. I had given something away.

  Too late to fuss about it. “Well?”

  “Actually, yes.” Swan was pale. He focused on his cards, having trouble keeping his hands steady. “Those two and several others in that office. Common interests brought them together. The Radisha doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.” He discarded out of turn. He had lost his zest for the game.

  I realized what the problem was. He thought my speaking freely meant I expected to elevate him to a higher plane before long. “You’re all right, Swan. Long as you behave. Long as you answer questions when you’re asked. Hell, I got to save you. There’s a bunch of guys buried under the glittering plain that want to talk to you about that when they get back.” Might be interesting to watch him talk it over with Murgen.

  “They’re still alive?” The idea seemed to stun him.

  “Very alive. Just frozen in time. And getting angrier by the minute.”

  “I thought … Great God … shit.”

  “Do not speak so on the name of God!” Slink growled.

  Slink was Jaicuri Vehdna, too. And much less lapsed than I. He managed prayers at least once a day and temple several times a month. The local Vehdna thought he was a Dejagoran refugee employed by Banh Do Trang because he had done the Nyueng Bao favors during the siege there. Most of our brothers endured genuine employment and worked hard to resemble pillars of the local community.

  Swan swallowed, said, “You people ever eat? I ain’t had nothing since yesterday.”

  “We eat,” I said. “But not like you’re used to. It’s true what they say about Nyueng Bao. They don’t eat anything but fish heads and rice. Eight days a week.”

  “Fish will do right now. I’ll save the bitching till my belly’s full.”

  “Slink,” I said. “We need to send a kill team down to Semchi to watch the Bhodi Tree. The Protector’s probably going to try to smash it. We could make some friends if we save it.” I explained about the Bhodi disciple who burned himself and Soulcatcher’s threat to turn the Bhodi Tree into kindling. “I’d like to go myself, just to see if the Bhodi nonviolent ethic is strong enough to make them stand around while somebody destroys their most holy shrine. But I have too much work to do here.” I tossed my cards in. “In fact, I have work to do now.”

  I was tired but figured I could study Murgen’s Annals for a few hours before I passed out.

  As I walked away, Swan whispered, “How the hell does she know all that? And is she really a she?”

  “Never checked personally,” Slink said. “I have a wife. But she’s definitely got some female habits on her.”

  What the devil did that mean? I am just one of the guys.

  11

  These were exciting times. I found myself eager to be up and outside, where things were happening. The impact of our boldness would have reached every cranny of the city by now. I gobbled cold rice and listened to Tobo complain, again, that his father had paid him no attention.

  “Is there something I can do about that, Tobo?”

  “Huh?”

  “Unless you think I can go back there and tell him to shape up and talk to his kid, you’re wasting your time and mine bitching about it. Where’s your mother?”

  “She left for work. A long time ago. She said they’d be suspicious if she didn’t show up today.”

  “Probably would be. They’ll be real edgy about everything for a while. How about instead of fussing about what’s happened already, you spend some time thinking about what you’ll do next time you see your father? And in the meantime, you can stay out of trouble by keeping notes for me whenever anybody questions the prisoner.”

  His glower told me he was no more excited about being offered work than any boy his age would be. “You’re going out, too?”

  “I have to go to work.” It would be a good day to get to the library early. The scholars were supposed to be gone most of the day. There was supposed to be a big meeting of the bhadrhalok, which was a loosely associated group of educated men who did not like the Protector and who found the institution of the Protectorate objectionable. Jokingly, they referred to themselves as a band of intellectual terrorists. Bhadrhalok means, more or less, “the respectable people” and that was exactly what they thought they were. They were all educated, high-caste Gunni, which meant, right away, that a vast majority of the Taglian population regarded them with no sympathy at all. Their biggest problem with the Protector was that she held their self-confident, arrogant assumption of superiority in complete contempt. As revolutionaries and terrorists, they were less incandescent than any of the low-caste social clubs that existed on every residential block in the city. I doubt that Soulcatcher wasted two spies watching them. But they had great fun, fulminating and crying on one another’s shoulders about the world going to hell in a goat cart driven by the demon in black. And every week or so it got most of the library crew out of my way.

  I did what I could to encourage their seditious fervor.

  I got off to a slow start. Not thirty yards from the warehouse exit I ran into two of our brothers doing donkey work for Do Trang while standing lookout. One made gestures indicating that they had something to report. Sighing, I strolled over. “What’s the story, River?” The men called him Riverwalker. I did not know him by any other name.

  “We got shadowtraps that’s been sprung. We got ourselves some new pets.”

  “Oh, no. Darn.” I shook my head.

  “That’s not good?”

  “Not good. Run, report it to Goblin. I’ll stick with Ran till you get back. Don’t dawdle. I’m late for work.” Not true, but Taglians have little sense of urgency, and the concept of punctuality is alien to most.

  Shadows in the shadowtraps. Not a good eventuation, for sure. Near as we could determine, Soulcatcher had no more than two dozen manageable shadows left under control. As many more had gone feral in the remote south and were developing reputations as rakshasas, which were demons or devils but not quite
like those my northern forebrethren knew. Northern demons seemed to be solitary beings of considerable power. Rakshasas are communal and pretty weak individually. But deadly. Very deadly.

  In ancient myth, of course, they are much more powerful. They swat each other over the head with mountaintops, grow two heads for every one chopped off by a hero, and collect the beautiful wives of kings who are really gods incarnate but do not remember that fact. Things must have been much more exciting in olden times—even if they did not make a lot of sense from day to day.

  Catcher would keep a close eye on her shadows. They were her most valuable resource. Which meant that if they had been sent out to spy, she should know exactly where each was supposed to have gone. At least that is the way I would have done it if I were committing irreplaceable resources. I did that for every single man we committed to Willow Swan’s capture. I knew how they were going to get to their places and how they were going to get home and everything they were supposed to do in between. And just like I figured Soulcatcher might, I would have gone looking for them personally if they had failed to return home.

  Goblin came hobbling into the early morning light, cursing all the way. He wore the all-covering brown wool of a veyedeen dervish. He hated the outfit, however necessary it was to disguise himself when he was outside. I did not blame him. The wool was hot. It was supposed to remind the holy men of the hell they were escaping by devoting themselves to chastity, asceticism and good works. “What the hell is this shit?” he growled. “It’s hot enough to boil eggs out here already.”

  “The boys say we’ve caught something in our shadowtraps. I thought you might want to do something about that before Mama comes looking for her babies.”

  “Shit. More work—”

  “Old man, you just had something in your mouth I wouldn’t even want in my hand.”

  “Vehdna priss. Get the flock out of here before I give you a real language lesson. And bring home something decent to eat when you come back. Like maybe a cow.”

  More than once he and One-Eye had conspired to kidnap one of the sacred cattle that wander the city. To date, their efforts have come to naught because none of the men will go along. The majority have Gunni backgounds.

  It took no time at all to learn that our shadow captives were not the only shadows that had run wild just before dawn. Rumor was rife. The stories of the murders the shadows committed banished news of the attack on the Palace and the self-immolation of the Bhodi disciple. The killings were closer to home and closer in time. And they were grotesque. The corpse of a man whose life has been devoured by a shadow is a twisted husk of the creature that was.

  I insinuated myself into the crowd surrounding the doorway of a family where there had been multiple deaths. You can do that when you are little and limber and know how to use your elbows. I arrived just in time to watch them bring the bodies out. I was hoping they would be exposed to the public eye. Not that I wanted to see them myself. I saw plenty of those kinds of bodies during the Shadowmaster wars. I just thought the people ought to see what Soulcatcher could do. She needed all the enemies she could get.

  The bodies were enshrouded already. But there was talk.

  I traveled on, learning that most of the dead had been people who lived on the streets. And there had been a lot of those, taken in no obvious pattern whatsoever. It looked like Soulcatcher had sent the shadows out just to demonstrate that she had the power and the will to kill.

  The deaths had evoked no great fear. People thought it was over. Most of them did not know any of the dead so were not angry, either. Curiosity and revulsion were the common emotions.

  I considered turning back to tell Goblin to fix the captured shadows so they would go out killing again tonight and every night thereafter, till Soulcatcher tracked them down. She would not look for trappers if she thought her pets had gone rogue. And the shadows would create a lot more enemies for her before their terror ended.

  At first it seemed the Greys had faded from the streets. They were less in evidence than usual. But as I skirted Chor Bagan, it became evident why. They had the place under siege, apparently on the assumption that any Black Company survivors, having been branded bandits by the Protector, would hide themselves amongst Taglios’ homegrown thieves and villains. Amusing.

  Sahra and I insist that we have as little to do with the criminal element as possible—over One-Eye’s objections. And ignoring Banh Do Trang’s occasional lapses. That element included folk of dubious morals and discipline who might serve us up for enough blood money to buy one more jar of illegal wine. I hoped they and the Greys had fun. I hoped somebody forgot the rules and their day turned bloody. That would make life easier for me and mine.

  Any trip across town exposes you to the cruel truth about Taglios. Beggary exists there like nowhere else in the world. Were someone to sweep the city clean and organize the beggars into regiments, they would number more than the biggest army the Captain put together in the days of the Shadowmaster wars. If you look the least bit foreign or prosperous, they come at you in waves. Every attempt is made to exploit your pity. Not far from Do Trang’s warehouse there is a boy with neither hands nor lower legs. Somehow, blocks of wood have been affixed in their place. He crawls around with a bowl in his mouth. Every cripple over the age of fifteen claims to be a wounded hero of the wars. The children are the worst. Often they have been maimed deliberately, their limbs deformed evilly. They are sold to men who then feel they own them because they feed them a handful of toasted grain every few days.

  A new mystery of the city is that men of that stripe seem to run the risk of cruel tortures and their own careers as deformed beggars. If they do not watch their backs very, very carefully.

  My route took me near one such. He had one arm he could use to drag himself around. The rest of his limbs were twisted ruins. His bones had been crushed to gravel but he had been kept alive by a dedicated effort. His face and exposed skin were covered with burn scars. I paused to place one small copper in his bowl.

  He whimpered and tried to crawl away. He could still see out of one eye.

  Everywhere you looked, life proceeded in the unique Taglian fashion. Every vehicle in motion had people hanging off it, sponging a ride. Unless it was the ricksha of a rich man, perhaps a banker from Kowlhri Street, who could afford outrunners armed with bamboo canes to keep people off. Shopkeepers often sat on top of their tiny counters because there was no other space. Workmen jogged hither and yon with backbreaking loads, violently cursing everyone in their way. The people argued, laughed, waved their arms wildly, simply stepped to the side of the street where no one was lying to defecate when the need came upon them. They bathed in the water in the gutters, indifferent to the fact that a neighbor was urinating in the same stream fifteen feet away.

  Taglios is an all-out, relentless assault upon all the senses but engages none so much as it does the sense of smell. I hate the rainy season but without its protracted sluicings-out, Taglios would become untenable even for rats. Without the rains, the endemic cholera and smallpox would be far worse than they are—though the rainy times bring outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever. Disease of every sort is common and accepted stoically.

  And then there are the lepers, whose plight gives new depth of meaning to horror and despair. Never do I find my faith in God so tested as when I consider the lepers. I am as terrified by them as anyone but I do know enough about some individuals to realize that very few are being visited by a scourge they deserve. Unless the Gunni are right and they are paying for evils done in previous lives.

  Up above it all are the kites and crows, the buzzards and vultures. For the eaters of carrion, life is good. Till the dead wagons come to collect the fallen.

  The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess.

  When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease
to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing.

  12

  The library, created by and bequeathed to the city by an earlier mercantile prince who was much impressed by learning, strikes me as a symbol of knowledge rearing up to shed its light into the surrounding darkness of ignorance. Some of the city’s worst slums wash right up against the wall enclosing its ground. The beggars are bad around its outer gates. Why is a puzzlement. I have never seen anyone toss them a coin.

  There is a gateman but he is not a guard. He lacks even a bamboo cane. But a cane is unnecessary. The sanctity of the place of knowledge is observed by everyone. Everyone but me, you might say.

  “Good morning, Adoo,” I said as the gateman swung the wrought iron open for me. Though I was a glorified sweeper and fetch-it man, I had status. I appeared to enjoy the favor of some of the bhadrhalok.

  Status and caste grew more important as Taglios became more crowded and resources grew less plentiful. Caste has become much more rigidly defined and observed in just the last ten years. People are desperate to cling to the little that they have already. Likewise, the trade guilds have grown increasingly powerful. Several have raised small, private armed forces that they use to make sure immigrants and other outsiders do not trample on their preserves, or that they sometimes hire out to temples or others in need of justice. Some of our brothers have done some work in that vein. It generates revenue and creates contacts and allows us glimpses inside otherwise closed societies.

  Outside, the library resembles the more ornate Gunni temples. Its pillars and walls are covered with reliefs recalling stories both mythical and historical. It is not a huge place, being just thirty yards on its long side and sixty feet the other way. Its main floor is elevated ten feet above the surrounding gardens and monuments, which themselves cap a small knoll. The building proper is tall enough that inside there is a full-size hanging gallery all the way around at the level where a second floor should be, then an attic of sorts above that, plus a well-drained basement below the main floor. I find that interior much too open for comfort. Unless I am way down low or way up high, everyone can watch what I am doing.