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

by Glen Cook

  Shiki was going already. Not more than a minute later, she called, “I found her, Mother.”

  When the rest of the women arrived, they found Sawa seated against a wall, brass lamp in her lap, unconscious, with vomit all over her. “Oh, no!” Subredil cried. “Not again.” And in a whirlwind of nonsense and apparently vain efforts to get Sawa’s attention, she got across the hint of a fear that Sawa might be pregnant after having been abused by one of the Palace staff.

  Narita was away in seconds, fuming. Subredil and Shiki were right behind her, supporting Sawa between them, heading for the servants’ postern. Nobody noticed that none of the women were carrying their Ghangheshas, not even the one that Subredil had forgotten the day before.

  Because of the state Sawa was in, and the state Narita was in, and the imminent explosion of displeasure expected from the Protector, the women managed to draw their pay, then to escape without having to deal with Barundandi’s kickback lieutenant. Again.

  They were able to lay Sawa inside a covered ox cart not long after they got into the twisty streets downhill from the Palace. Subredil had to caution Shiki repeatedly against celebration.

  38

  “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.

  39

  Tobo woke me. “How can you sleep, Sleepy?”

  “I guess I must be tired. What do you want?”

  “The Protector has finally started to grumble about the Radisha. Dad wants you to come keep track yourself. So you don’t have to record anything third-hand.”

  At the moment, my name felt entirely appropriate. I just wanted to lie down on my pallet and dream about finding another kind of life.

  Trouble was, I had been doing this since I was fourteen. I did not know anything else. Unless Master Santaraksita was willing to let bygones be bygones and take me back at the library. Right after we buried Soulcatcher in a fifty-foot-deep hole we filled in with boiling lead.

  I dragged a stool in between Sahra and One-Eye, leaned forward with my elbows on the table and stared into the mist where Murgen appeared to report when it suited him. One-Eye was fussing at Murgen even though Murgen was away. I said, “Anybody would think you were worried about Goblin, the way you’re carrying on.”

  “Of course I’m worried about Goblin, Little Girl. The runt borrowed my transeidetic locuter before he went up there this morning. Not to mention he still owes me several thousands pais for … well, he owes me a bunch of money.”

  My recollection had it the other way around. One-Eye always owed everyone, even when he was doing well. And several thousand pais is not exactly a fortune, a pai being a tiny seed of such uniform weight that it is used as a measure for gems and precious metals. It takes almost two thousand of them to equal a northern ounce. Since One-Eye had not specified gold or silver, the standard assumption would be that he had meant coin-grade copper. In other words, not very much.

  In other words still, he was worried about his best friend but he could not say so because he had a century-long history of reviling the man in public.

  If there was any such magical instrument as a transeidetic locuter, One-Eye invented it an hour before he loaned it to Goblin.

  He muttered, “That ugly little turd gets himself killed, I’m gonna strangle him. He can’t leave me holding the bag on—” He realized he was thinking out loud.

  Sahra and I both made mental notes to investigate the bag metaphor. It sounded like there were business plans afoot. Secret plans. Surprise, surprise.

  Murgen materialized practically nose to nose with me. He murmured, “Soulcatcher is out of patience. A flock of crows just brought the news from Semchi. She’s in a complete black mood. She says she’s going into the Radisha’s Anger Chamber after her if she doesn’t come out in the next two minutes.”

  “How’s Goblin?” One-Eye barked.

  “Hiding,” Murgen replied. “Waiting for sunrise.” He was not going to try leaving during the night, the way we had planned originally. Soulcatcher had loosed her shadows, just to punish Taglios for irritating her.
We had a few traps out, randomly distributed through likely neighborhoods, but I did not expect to catch anything. I figured our luck along those lines was about used up.

  Goblin was armed with a shadow-repellent amulet left over from the Shadowmaster wars but did not know if it was any good anymore. Being bright and full of forethought, it had not occurred to any of us to test it on real shadows while we had some in stock.

  You cannot think of everything.

  But you should make the effort.

  * * *

  One of the Royal Guards actually tried to stop the Protector when her patience failed and she went to dig the Radisha out of her hideaway. He went down without a sound, stricken by a casual touch. He would recover eventually. The Protector was not feeling particularly vindictive. For the moment.

  She crashed through the door of the Anger Chamber. And howled in frustration before the pieces finished falling. “Where is she?” The power of her rage wilted the onlookers.

  A subassistant chamberlain, bowing almost double, continuing to bob and get lower, whined, “She was in there, O Great One!”

  Someone else insisted, “We never saw her leave. She has to be in there.”

  From somewhere, echoing, almost as if coming from some distance in time as well as place, there was the sound of brief laughter.

  Soulcatcher turned slowly, her stare a cruel spear. “Come closer. Tell me again.” Her voice was compelling, chilling, terrible. She stared into one pair of eyes after another, making full use of the fear so many had that she could read the deepest secrets in their minds.

  None of the Radisha’s people changed their stories.

  “Out of here. Out of this whole apartment. Something happened here. I want no distractions. I want nothing disturbed.” She turned again, slowly, extending a sorceress’s senses to feel the shape of the past. It was more difficult than she anticipated. She had been loafing for too long, falling out of practice and getting out of shape.