“No, you don’t. Though everybody who wants rice can’t afford it. And some of us who would be happy to see the last of the stuff don’t get to eat anything else.”
“You know what this is?” The Radisha pounded her right forefinger against the rescript like she was trying to peck a hole through. “I’ll bet. All those strange personalities. They don’t just come out as voices. Or she was in an especially strange humor when she dictated these. She has those spells. When the voices seem to take over completely. They never last long.”
Ah, I said to myself. This is an interesting tidbit, worth pursuing later. “Would you care to counter with something more sound? I don’t have the manpower to cover the entire city but I can see that new rescripts are posted in the more important places.”
“How do you prove they’re genuine? Anyone can take a piece of treated naada and write something on it.”
“I’m working on that. We have a guest, a highly respected soldier from one of the City Battalions. We brought him in to visit another prisoner. I thought he might pass the word that you’re our prisoner, too.”
“Interesting. You know what she’ll do, don’t you? Call your bluff. Produce an imitation or illusory version of me and challenge you to produce your Radisha. Which you won’t do because you’re not really interested in getting killed. Correct?”
“We can deal with that The Protector has a serious handicap. Nobody believes anything she says. They’ve started thinking that way about you, too, because you’re beginning to come across as her stooge. Why did you always have such a hateful and treacherous attitude toward the Company?”
“I’m not her stooge. You have no idea how many of her mad schemes I’ve managed to stifle.”
I did not tell her that we did. I had her angry enough to talk, but prodded just a little more. “Why did you hate my brothers before they ever came down the river?”
“I didn’t hate —”
“Maybe I chose the wrong word. There was something. The Annalists before me all sensed it and knew you’d turn on the Company as soon as you felt safe from the Shadow-masters. You weren’t as obsessed as Smoke was but you shared his disease.”
“I don’t know. I’ve wondered about that a lot the last decade. It went away after I gave the order to turn on you. But Smoke and I weren’t, the only ones. The whole principality felt the same. There was a memory of a time before, when the Company-”
“There was no such time. Not that anybody bothered to record in the histories and documents of those days. The little I’ve been able to decipher of our own Annals from back then is dully routine. The only terrible battle I found came when the Company was three generations old. It took place not far from here and the Company lost. It was almost wiped out. Its three volumes of Annals fell into enemy hands. They’ve been in Taglian libraries ever since. From the moment the Company returned to Taglios, access to those has been denied us. All kinds of crazy things were done to keep us from getting to those books. People died because of those books. And from all I can see, the real secret that’s hidden there, that had to be kept at all cost, was that nothing extraordinary happened during those early years. It was not an age of rapine and endless bloodshed.”
“How could all the people of a dozen states remember something that never happened and become terrified that it was going to happen again?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll ask Kina how she did it. Right before we kill her.”
The Radisha’s expression told me she was thinking she was not alone in her ability to believe the impossible.
I said, “You want to shake loose from your lunatic friend? You want to get off the hook with us? You want to get your brother back?” Presumably the possibility that the Prahbrindrah Drah still lived had grown significant in her recent thoughts.
The Radisha opened and closed her mouth several times.
Never an attractive woman, age and present circumstances conspired to make her almost repulsive.
I should condemn? Time was doing no favors for me, either.
I said, “It can be managed. All of it.”
“My brother is dead.”
“No, he’s not. No one outside the Company knows. Not even Soulcatcher. But the people she trapped out there under the plain are frozen in time. Sort of. I don’t understand the mystic science involved. The point is, they’re there, they’re healthy, and they can be brought back out. I’ve just made a deal that will give us the Key we need to open the way.”
“You can bring my brother back?” “Cordy Mather, too.”
The light was not good but I detected the rush of color to her neck. “There are no secrets from you people, are there?”
“Not many.”
“What do you want from me?”
I never expected to be at this point with the Woman. Despite her down-to-earth, sensible, businesslike reputation. So I didn’t have a ready answer. But I did manage to corne up with a wish list quickly. “You could step out in public someplace where a whole lot of people would see you and recognize you and repudiate the Protector. You could exculpate the Black Company. You could fire the Great General. You could announce that you’ve been under Soulcatcher’s evil spell for fifteen years but now you’ve finally made your escape. You could make us the good guys again.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. I’ve been afraid of the Black Company for too long. I’m still afraid,”
“Water sleeps,” I said. “What’s the Protector done for you?”
The Radisha had no answer for that.
“We can bring back your brother. Think of the pressure that would take off you. Rajadharma.”
In a tightly controlled voice, the Radisha snapped, “Don’t say that! That tears my entrails out and strangles me with them.”
Exactly what I had wished on her a time or two when I was in a less forgiving mood.
Aridatha Singh looked at me oddly. “He wasn’t anything like I thought Narayan Singh would be.” Seeing his sovereign had not impressed him nearly so much as seeing his father had.
“Not many people are once you get to know them. River, you want to take this man back where you found him?” It was night, yes, but we still had those two protective amulets left over from the Shadowmaster wars. They definitely looked like they were still good. I wished we had another hundred but Goblin and One-Eye could not make them anymore. I am not sure why. They shared no trade secrets with me. I suppose they were just too old.
I worry a lot when I consider a future without them in it. And a future without One-Eye cannot be far away.
O Lord of Hosts, preserve him until the Captured are delivered and all our quarrels are resolved.
46
Men were charging everywhere around the warehouse. Some were continuing frenetic preparations for the Company’s evacuation. Some were getting ready to accompany Narayan and me to the Grove of Doom to collect the Nyueng Bao Key. The Nyueng Bao, Do Trang’s confederates and the handful still attached to the Company somehow, seemed to be doing a lot of nervous moving around just to be moving. They were scared and worried.
Banh Do Trang had suffered a stroke during the night. One-Eye’s prognosis was not encouraging.
I told Goblin, “I’m not saying she had anything to do with it but Do Trang was the first one to realize that the girl was roaming around outside her flesh.”
“He’s just old, Sleepy. Nobody did it to him. You ask me, he’s really way overdue. He hung on here because he cares about Sahra. She’s all right now. It looks like her husband might actually be freed. And he’s too old to run away. Soul-catcher is going to find this place eventually, once Mogaba arrives and starts searching. I wouldn’t be surprised if Do Trang just decided that dying was the best thing he could do for everyone right now.”
I did not want Do Trang to go, for all the reasons none of us like to see those close to us die, but also because he was, in his quiet way, the best friend the Company had had in generations.
Like everyone el
se, I tried to lose myself in work. I told Goblin, “Even if she’s totally innocent, I want the girl fixed so she can’t wander. Whatever you have to do short of permanently crippling or killing her.”
Goblin sighed. Lately that was all he did when someone gave him more work. I guess he was too tired to squawk anymore.
“Where is One-Eye?”
“Uh-” Furtive look around. A whisper. “Don’t say I said anything. I think he’s trying to figure out how to take his equipment with us.”
I shook my head and walked away.
Santaraksita and Baladitya called out to me. They had accepted their situation and were applying themselves with a will. The Master Librarian seemed particularly excited about facing a real academic challenge for the first time in years. He said, “Dorabee, in all the excitement I forgot to mention that I did get an answer to your question about a written Nyueng Bao language. There was one. And not only was there one, this oldest book is written in an antique dialect of that language. The others were recorded in an early Taglian dialect, although the original of the third volume does so employing the foreign alphabet instead of native characters.”
“Which argues that the invader alphabet had well-defined phonetic values that at the time must have been more precise than those of the native script. Right?”
Santaraksita gawked. After a moment he said, “Dorabee, you never cease to amaze me. Absolutely correct.”
“So have you discovered anything interesting?”
“The Black Company came off the plain, which was called Glittering Stone even then, and mostly minced around from one small principality to the next, squabbling internally over whether or not they were going to sacrifice themselves to bring on the Year of the Skulls. There was plenty of enthusiasm among the priests attached to the Company but not much among the soldiers. Many of those apparently volunteered as a way to escape something called The Land of Unknown Shadows, not because they wanted to bring on the end of the world.”
“The Land of Unknown Shadows, eh? Anything else?”
“I’ve developed some very good information on the price of horseshoe nails four centuries ago and on the scarcity of several medicinal plants that are now found in every herb garden.”
“Earthshaking stuff. Stay with it, Sir.”
I meant to tell him he had to evacuate with the rest of us but decided not to upset him right away. He was having a good time. No point making him face a choice between abduction and being put to death just yet.
Uncle Doj materialized. “Do Trang wants to see you.”
I followed him to the tiny room the old man had built for himself in a remote corner of the warehouse. On the way, Doj warned me that Do Trang was unable to speak. “He’s already seen Sahra and Tobo. I think he was fond of you, too.”
“We’re going to get married in the next life. If the Gunni are right.”
“I am ready to travel.”
I stopped. “What?”
“I’m going with you to the Grove of Doom.”
“You’d better not have some crazy idea about snatching the Key.”
“I agreed to help. I’ll help. I want to be there to make sure the Deceiver keeps his word. The Deceiver, Miss Sleepy. Deceiver. Also, I agreed to turn over that volume of the Books of the Dead. Its hiding place is on the way.”
“Very well. The presence of Ash Wand will be a comfort to me and a vexation to my enemies.”
Doj chuckled. “It will indeed.”
“We won’t be coming back here.”
“I know. When we leave, I’ll be carrying everything I wish to retain. You won’t need to pretend with Do Trang. He knows his path. Do him the honor of an honest farewell.”
I did more. I became all teary for the first time in my adult life. I rested my head on the old man’s chest for a minute and whispered my thanks for his friendship and renewed my promise to see him in the next life. A small heresy but I do not think God has been monitoring me too closely.
Banh lifted a hand weakly and stroked my hair. And after that I got up and went away somewhere to be alone with my grief for a man who, it seemed, had never been that close, yet who was going to have a major impact on the rest of my life. I understood that after the tears stopped, I would never be quite the same Sleepy again. And that that was one legacy Do Trang wanted to leave behind.
47
The biggest problem I expected with the evacuation was one that came up every time the Company picked up and moved out after having been settled in one place for a long time. Roots had to be torn up. Ties had to be severed. Men had to abandon the lives they had created for themselves. Some just would not go.
Some who did go would tell someone where they were headed.
The nominal strength of the Company was somewhat over two hundred people, a third of whom did not live in Taglios at all but maintained identities at scattered locations where they could aid brothers who were traveling. Overall, it was very much like what the Deceivers used to do. Partly that was intentional, because those people had spent centuries finding the safest ways.
Early on, couriers went out carrying code words to all our distant brothers to warn them that a time of trouble was coming. Nobody would be told what was happening, only warned that something was and that it was going to be big. Once that code word arrived, it would already be too late to drop out of anything.
Behind the couriers, eventually, would come the majority of the men, in driblets small enough not to attract attention, disguised a dozen ways, departing Taglios in what I considered their order of plausible risk. The last to leave town would be those with the heaviest entanglements. All the men would pass through a series of checkpoints and assembly points, each time being informed only of an immediate destination. The key hope, though, was that Soulcatcher would not begin to catch on until those who were going to go were well away.
Those who refused to go would be excused-if they remained loyal to the Company interests in the city. It would be useful to have a few agents on hand after the Company appeared to have gone.
That, too, was something the Deceivers had done for generations.
There would be flashy smoke shows. The demon Niassi would be much more prevalent, putting a damper on Grey efficiency. The men who stayed-I would not know who they were because I would be among the first to leave- would be expected to undertake what was supposed to look like a series of random assaults, break-ins and acts of vandalism that later would begin to appear to be part of a terror campaign meant to peak during the Druga Pavi. If Soul-catcher took the bait, she would spend her time preparing to ambush us there.
If not, every hour bought was an hour farther down the road my brothers would be before the Protector realized that we had done the unexpected again. And even then, I expected her to look in the wrong places for a long time.
48
My party was the first to leave Taglios. We went the morning Banh Do Trang died. With me went Narayan Singh, Willow Swan, the Radisha Drah, Mother Gota and Uncle Doj, Riverwalker, Iqbal Singh with his wife Suruvhija and two children and baby, and his brother Run-must. In addition, we had several goats with small packs and chickens tied to their backs, two donkeys, one or the other of which Gota rode much of the time, and an ox cart drawn by a beast we strove hard to keep looking sadder and scruffier than it really was. Most everyone adopted some form of disguise. The Shadar trimmed their hair and beards and the whole family adopted Vehdna dress. I stayed Vehdna but became a woman. The Radisha became a man. Uncle Doj and Willow Swan shaved their heads and became Bhodi disciples. Swan darkened himself with stain but there was no way to change his blue eyes. Gota had to do without Nyueng Bao fashions.
Narayan Singh remained exactly the same, virtually indistinguishable from thousands of others just like him.
We looked bizarre, but even stranger bands collected to share the rigors of the road. And we would collect together only when we camped. On the road we stretched out over half a mile, one Singh brother out front, the other in bac
k, while River stayed fairly close to me. The brothers carried a pair of devices given them by Goblin and One-Eye. If Narayan, the Radisha or Swan strayed far from a line run- ning between them, choke spells would begin constricting around their throats.
None of the three had been informed of that. We were all supposed to be friends and allies now. But I believe in trusting some of my friends more than others.
On the Rock Road that the Captain had had built between Taglios and Jaicur, we did not catch the eye at all. But a crowd like that, with a baby and an ox cart and regular Vehdna prayers and whatnot, is not swift. Nor did the season help. I became thoroughly sick of the rain.
The last time I traveled down the Rock Road I rode a giant black stallion that covered the distance between Taglios and Ghoja on the River Main in a day and a night without hurrying.
. Four days after leaving the city we were still at least that long from the bridge at Ghoja, which would be our first dangerous bottleneck. In the afternoon Uncle Doj chose to announce that we had come as close as the road would carry us to the place where he had hidden the copy of the Book of the Dead.
“Aw, darn,” I said. “I was hoping it would be way farther down the road. How are we going to explain having a book if we get stopped?”
Doj showed me his palms and a big smile. “I’m a priest. A missionary. Blame it on me.” Despite the hardships, he was happy. “Come help me dig it up.”
“What is this place?” I asked two hours later. We had come into something that might have come from one of Murgen’s old nightmares about Kina. Twenty yards of woods formed a palisade all around it.
“It’s a graveyard. During the chaos of the first Shadow-lander invasion, before the Black Company came, possibly even before you were born, one of the Shadowlander armies used this as a camp, then as a burial ground. They planted the trees to conceal the tombs and monuments from enemy eyes.” Noting my appalled expression, he added, “Down there they have different customs for dealing with the dead.”
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