The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

  The Taglian people loved their Radisha. Jaul Barundandi discovered that he had no friends but his accomplices and it was one of those who betrayed him in exchange for a partial reward (the Grey officers pocketing the bulk) and a running start.

  Jaul Barundandi suffered terrible torments and tried hard to cooperate so the pain would stop but he could tell the Protector nothing that she wanted to know. So she had him put into a cage and hung fifteen feet above the place where the Bhodi disciples generally chose to give up their lives and issued a rescript encouraging passersby to throw stones. It was her intent that he hang there indefinitely, his suffering neverending, but sometime during the first night, somehow, someone managed to toss him a piece of poisoned fruit while leaving his betrayer and a murdered Grey below, each with a piece of paper in his mouth bearing the characters for “Water Sleeps.” Crows savaged both corpses before they were discovered.

  It was the last time Black Company tokens would be seen but their appearance was sufficient to provoke the Protector almost beyond reason. For days the still-loyal remnants of the Greys remained extremely busy making arrests, most of them of people unable to guess what they had done to irk Soulcatcher.

  She never did get to the Nyueng Bao swamp despite having made necessary repairs to her remaining carpet. Taglios became more fractious by the hour. She had to devote her entire attention to keeping the city tamed.

  Then came the faithful and tattered little shadow that had made its way through mountains and forests, over lakes and rivers and plains, in order to bring her news of what was happening in the nethermost south.

  Soulcatcher screamed a scream of rage so potent that the entire city became informed of it instantly. Immigrants began to rehearse the wisdom of a return to the provinces.

  The Great General and two of his staff officers broke through the door to the Protector’s apartment, certain she needed rescuing. Instead, they found her pacing furiously and debating herself in half a dozen voices. “They have the Key. They must have the Key. They must have murdered the Deceiver. Maybe they made an alliance with Kina. Why would they go down there? Why would they go onto the plain after what happened to the last group? What keeps pulling them out there? I’ve read their Annals. There’s nothing in those. What do they know? The Land of Unknown Shadows? They cannot have developed an entirely new and independent oral tradition since they served me in the north. If it’s important one of them will record it. Why? Why? What do they know that I don’t?”

  Soulcatcher became aware of Mogaba and his men. The latter looked around nervously, trying to figure out where the voices were coming from. When Soulcatcher became excited, those seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  “You. Have you caught me any terrorists yet?”

  “No. Nor shall I unless an angry family member comes forward because he thinks it would be a good way to get even. There won’t be more than a handful left here and those probably don’t know each other. I gather, from what I overheard, that they’ve gone back to Shadowcatch.” He had worked for the Shadowmaster Longshadow. He could not get out of the habit of calling Kiaulune by the name given it by his previous employer.

  “Exactly. We’re back where we were fifteen years ago. Only now they have the Radisha and the Key.” Her tone left no doubt she placed the blame entirely on him.

  Mogaba was not bothered. Not immediately. He was accustomed to being blamed for the shortcomings of others and he did not believe the remnants of the Black Company could offer any real threat any time soon. They had been beaten down too thoroughly and had been away from it too long. They were more military than the Deceivers only inside their own fantasies. Even the comic-opera functionaries down there ought to be able to wear them down and bury them eventually. They would find no aid or sympathy in the Shadowlands. The people down there really did remember the Black Company’s last visit. “The Key? What is that?”

  “A means of passing through the Shadowgate unharmed. A talisman that makes it possible to travel on the plain.” Her voice had become pedantic. Now it became angry. “I possessed that talisman at one time. Long ago I used it to go up there and explore. Longshadow would have been unmanned had he known. More unmanned than the eunuch he already was. But it disappeared in the early excitement around Kiaulune. I suspect that Kina clouded my mind while the Deceiver Singh stole both it and my sister’s darling daughter. I can’t imagine why that rabble would want to go onto the plain after the previous disaster but if it’s something they want to do, it’s something I want to prevent. Prepare for a journey.”

  “We can’t leave Taglios unsupervised for as long as it would take us to travel all the way to Shadowcatch. We don’t have the stallion anymore, even if it could carry double.”

  Soulcatcher was baffled. “What?”

  “The black stallion from the north. The one I’ve been using all these years. It’s vanished. It broke down its stall and ran off. I told you that last month.” She did not recall that, obviously.

  “We’ll fly.”

  “But—” Mogaba hated flying. In the days when he had been Longshadow’s general he had had to fly with the Howler almost daily. He still loathed those times. “I thought the larger carpet was the one that was destroyed.”

  “The small one will carry both of us. It’ll be hard work. I’ll have to rest a lot. But we’ll still be able to get down there and back before these people know we’re gone and try to take advantage. A week for the round trip. Ten days at the outside.”

  The Great General had a few dozen reservations but kept them behind his teeth. The Protector was worse than Longshadow had been about suffering opinions she did not want to hear.

  Soulcatcher said, “We’ll adopt disguises once we get there and go among them. I want you to keep an eye out for a hammer, so by so, made of cast iron but far heavier than it ought to be.”

  Mogaba bowed slightly. He said nothing about how difficult it would be for either of them to blend in with the crowd they would be chasing.

  Soulcatcher told him, “Prepare your men. They’ll have to keep Taglios under control for a couple of weeks.”

  Mogaba withdrew, saying nothing about the proposed time changing already. In his position it was necessary to do a lot of saying nothing.

  The Protector watched him go, amused. He did not conceal his thinking nearly as well as he believed. But she was ancient in her wickedness and had studied the dark side of humanity so thoroughly that she could almost read minds.

  65

  The little fortress settled in upon itself slowly, as though made of wax only slightly overheated. As soon as I fell asleep and could not interfere, Goblin handed the magical siege work over to Tobo, who did a creditable job of rooting the enemy survivors out of their shelter. The wicked little thing had been taking lessons a lot longer than he and his teachers would admit.

  The garrison was bringing out its dead and wounded when a shout awakened me. I sat up. Morning had begun to arrive. And the world had changed.

  “What’s Spiff’s problem?” I asked.

  One of my veterans had recognized one of theirs.

  The devil himself arrived to explain. “The guy in charge. That’s Khusavir Pete, Sleepy. You remember, we thought he was killed when the Bahrata Battalion got wiped out in the ambush at Kushkhoshi.”

  “I remember.” And I recalled something that Spiff did not know, a fact I shared only with Murgen, who had been the ghost in the rushes while the slaughter was taking place. Khusavir Pete, at that time a sworn brother of the Company, had led our largest surviving force of allies into a trap that efficiently took us out of the Kiaulune wars. Khusavir Pete had cut a deal. Khusavir Pete had betrayed his own brothers. Khusavir Pete was high on my list of people I wanted to meet again, though until just now I had been the only one who knew that he had survived and that his treachery had been rewarded with a high post, money and a new name. But just seeing him had some of the men figuring it out fast.

  “You should’ve asked her to change your
face, too,” I told him when they flung him down bleeding in front of me. “Though you’ve had a better run than you probably expected when she turned you.” I held his eyes with mine. What he saw convinced him it would not be worth his trouble to deny anything. Vajra the Naga had come out to play.

  More and more of the men gathered around, most of them not getting it until I explained how Khusavir Pete had been seduced by Soulcatcher into betraying and helping destroy more than five hundred of our brothers and allies. Would-be greetings quickly became imaginative suggestions of ways whereby we might reduce the traitor’s life expectancy. I let the man listen until some of the troops tried to lay hands on. Then I told Goblin, “Hide him somewhere. We may have a use for him yet.”

  * * *

  The excitement was over. I had indulged in a decent meal. My attitude much improved, I took the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Master Surendranath Santaraksita. “This life seems to agree with you,” I told him as I arrived. “You look better now than you did when we left the city.” And that was true.

  “Dorabee? Lad, I thought you were dead. Despite their endless assurances.” He leaned closer and confided, “They aren’t all honest men, your comrades.”

  “By some chance did Goblin and One-Eye offer to teach you to play tonk?”

  The librarian managed to look a little sheepish.

  “Not to play with them is a lesson everyone has to learn.”

  Sheepishness transformed into impishness. “I think I taught them a little something, too. Card tricks were one of my hobbies when I was younger.”

  I had to laugh at the idea of those two villains getting taken themselves. “Have you discovered anything that would be useful to me?”

  “I’ve read every word in every book we brought along, including all of your company’s modern chronicles written in languages known to me. I found nothing remarkable. I have been amusing myself by trying to work backward into the chronicles I can’t read by comparing materials repeated in more than one language.”

  Murgen had done a lot of that. He had had a thing about copying stuff over, in cleaner drafts, and one of his great projects had been to revise Lady’s and the Captain’s Annals for accuracy, based on evidence provided by other witnesses, while rendering them into modern Taglian. We have all done that to our predecessors, some, so that every recent volume of the Annals is really an unwilling collaboration.

  I said, “We drag a lot of books around, don’t we?”

  “Like snails, carrying your history on your back.”

  “It’s who we are. Cute image, though. Doesn’t all that study get dull after a while?”

  “The boy keeps me sharp.”

  “Boy?”

  “Tobo. He’s a brilliant student. Even more amazing than you were.”

  “Tobo?”

  “I know. Who would expect it of a Nyueng Bao? You’re destroying all my preconceptions, Dorabee.”

  “Mine are taking a beating, too.” Tobo? Either Santaraksita had an unsuspected talent for inspiring students or Tobo had suffered an epiphany and had become miraculously motivated. “You sure it’s Tobo and not a changeling?”

  The demon himself popped in. “Sleepy. Runmust and Riverwalker and them are on their way over. Good morning, Master Santaraksita.” Tobo actually seemed excited to be there. “I don’t have any other duties right now. Oh, Sleepy, Dad wants to talk to you.”

  “Where?” Things had been happening too fast. There had been no chance to catch up with Murgen.

  “Goblin’s tent. Everybody but Mom thought that would be the safest place to keep him.”

  I had no trouble picturing Sahra being irritated about not being able to share the occasional private moment with her husband.

  When I ducked out, the young man and the old were already settling with a book. I glared a warning at Santaraksita which, it developed, was both wasted and unnecessary.

  * * *

  Goblin was not home. Of course not. He was working his way through a long list of jobs bestowed upon him by me. Chuckle.

  I found it hard to credit the possibility that one human being could make so huge a mess in a space so constricted. The inside of Goblin’s tent was barely wider than either of us was tall and twice as deep. At its peak it was tall enough for me to stand up with two inches to spare. What looked like a milkmaid’s stool, undoubtedly stolen, constituted the wizard’s entire suite of furniture. A ragged burrow of blankets betrayed where he slept. The rest of the space was occupied by a random jumble, mostly stuff that looked like it had been discarded by a procession of previous owners. There was no obvious theme to the collection.

  It had to be stuff he had acquired since his arrival here. Sahra would never have allowed him space on a barge for such junk.

  The mist projector stood at the head of Goblin’s smelly bedding, tilted precariously, leaking water. “If this is the safest place to keep that darned thing, then the whole Company is mad with delusions of adequacy.”

  A whisper came from the mist projector. I got down close to it, which offered me an opportunity to become intimately aware of the aroma permanently associated with Goblin’s bedding, some pieces of which must have been with him since he was in diapers. “What?”

  Murgen’s strongest effort was barely audible. “More water. You need to add more water or there won’t be any mist much longer.”

  I started to drag the evidence out of the tent.

  Anger gave Murgen a little more voice. “No, dammit! Bring the water to me, don’t take me to the water. If you suffer from a compulsion to drag me around, at least wait until after you water me. And don’t waste time. I’m going to lose my anchor here in a few minutes.”

  Finding a gallon of water turned out to be a challenging experience.

  * * *

  “What took you so damned long?”

  “Bit of an adventure coming up with the water. Seems it never occurred to any of these morons that we need to have some handy somewhere. Just in case the royal army decides to camp between us and the creek where we’ve been getting it, which is almost a mile away. I just unleashed several geniuses on the problem. How am I supposed to put this in here?”

  “There’s a cork in the rear. It might be of some use to you to start doing readings from the Annals. Like they do in temples. The way I used to do sometimes. Pick something situationally appropriate. ‘In those days the Company was in service’ and so on, so they have examples of why it might be useful to haul water up the hill before you have to use it, and such like. These are grown men. You can’t just bully them into doing the right things. But if you start reading to them, they’ll have heard tell of other times when the Annalist did that and they’ll recall it was always right before the big shitstorm moved in. You’ll get their attention.”

  “Tobo said you want to talk to me.”

  “I need to catch you up on what’s going on elsewhere. And I want to make suggestions about your preparations for the plain, one of which is to listen to Willow Swan but the most critical of which is, you’re going to have to upgrade discipline. The plain is deadly. Even worse than the Plain of Fear, which you don’t remember. You can’t ignore the rules and stay alive there. One idea would be for you not to burn or bury the man who was killed by the shadow last night. Make every survivor look at him and think about what will happen to all of you if even one of you screws up up there. Read them the passages chronicling our adventures. Have Swan bear witness.”

  “I could just bring a handful of reliables in to get you.”

  “You could. But the rest of the world wouldn’t be very nice to the men you leave behind. Right now there’s a shadow heading north to tell Soulcatcher where you are. She may know enough already to figure out what you’re trying to do. She definitely doesn’t want her sister and Croaker on the loose and nursing a grudge. She’ll get here as fast as she can. And aside from Soulcatcher, there’s Narayan Singh. He retains Kina’s countenance, so he’s extremely hard to trace but I do catch glimpse
s occasionally. He’s on this side of the Dandha Presh and he’s probably not far away. He wants to recapture the Daughter of Night and reunite her with the book you traded for the Key. Which, by the way, you should take away from Uncle Doj before he becomes overly tempted to try something on his own. And so Goblin can study it.”

  “Uhm?” He was a gush of information this morning, all of it carefully rehearsed.

  “There’s more to the Key than you see right away. I have a feeling the Deceiver overlooked something. Doj keeps picking at it, trying to find out what’s inside the iron. We should find out more about it before we trust it. And we need to find out fast. It won’t be all that long before that shadow gets to Taglios.”

  “River and Runmust are coming in. They’re halfway responsible people. I’ll turn some of the work over to them as soon as they’re rested up. Then I can worry about—”

  “Worry about it now. Let Swan sergeant for you. He’s experienced and he’s got no choice but to throw in with us now. Catcher will never believe that he didn’t betray her.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You don’t have to do everything yourself, Sleepy. If you’re going to take charge, you need to learn to tell people what needs doing, then get out of the way and let them do it. You keep hanging over their shoulders nagging like somebody’s mother, you aren’t going to get much cooperation. You seduced that fat boy yet?”

  “What?”

  “That local-yokel captain. The one who couldn’t keep in step if you painted his feet different colors. You got him wrapped up yet?”

  “You’re zigging when I’m zagging. You lost me completely.”

  “Let me draw you a picture. You forget to tell him Catcher is going to stop by. You get him to make a deal. He keeps his job. He helps us out so he can get us out of his hair. When he isn’t looking, you fix him up so when the shitstorm starts, he don’t have no choice but to take his chances with us.”