The Many Deaths of the Black Company

  “The Nef,” Murgen said.

  The three creatures at the barrier were plain for everyone to see. They were bipedal but their heads were dissimilar masses of ugliness other Annalists have said they hoped were masks. I could see why—though, seeing them, I got a powerful sense of déjà vu. Maybe I ran into them in a dream. I must have had a few while I was buried. I said, “You know these guys, Murgen. See if you can talk to them.”

  “Yeah. And after I do that I’ll fly off to the sun.” No one had yet managed to communicate with the Nef, though it was obvious the creatures desperately wanted to talk. We were so alien to each other that communication was impossible.

  “We must be getting a better grasp. We’re seeing them when we’re awake. We are awake, aren’t we?” Historically, the Nef appeared only in dreams. Only in the past year did guards at the Shadowgate report catching glimpses the way troops elsewhere made sightings of Tobo’s pets.

  Murgen ambled over warily. I observed. But I also started keeping an eye on my ravens. Until nightfall they had been almost somnolent, entirely indifferent to the world. The appearance of shadows on the barrier turned them restless, even bellicose. They hissed and coughed and produced a whole range of uncorvine noises. Some form of communication was going on because the shadows responded—though, clearly, not the way the ravens wanted.

  The Unknown Shadows of Hsien did share a common ancestry with the Host of the Unforgiven Dead.

  Murgen marveled, “I think I’m actually getting what they’re trying to tell me.”

  “What’s that?” My wife, I noticed, was watching the Nef intently. Could they be making sense to her, too? But she had no previous experience with the dreamwalkers. Unless while she was a sort of dreamwalker herself, while we were buried.

  No, it had to be those three. They had studied us long enough to figure out how to get through. Maybe.

  Murgen said, “They want us not to keep heading toward the center of the plain. They’re saying we should take the other road.”

  “Based on what’s in the Annals, I’d say they’ve been trying to get us to do something besides what we want from the first time anybody dreamed them. They’re just never able to make themselves clear.”

  “That would’ve been me,” Murgen said. “And you’re right. What I’ve never figured out, though, is whether they’re trying to save us trouble or are pushing their own agenda. It seems to work out both ways.”

  The tiniest hiss escaped my black raven. A warning. I turned. Uncle Doj had appeared behind Murgen, two steps back, fully armed, staring at the Nef. After watching them for a minute he drifted around the circle to the right, not quite a quarter of the way. Then he shuffled back and forth, squatted, rose up on his toes.

  Then Lady went over there. She checked the view from multiple angles herself. “There is a ghost of a road, Croaker.” She came back, dug out the key Tobo had given her. I walked back with her. A socket for the key had appeared in the stone surface when no one was watching. It was not there earlier. I had done a one-hundred percent walkaround of the perimeter before we settled down.

  Doj said, “The boy told me not to let you waste time trying to make time. Perhaps this is why.”

  “Murgen. You know about shortcuts and side roads on the plain?”

  “They’re supposed to exist. Sleepy saw them.”

  Vaguely, now, I recalled something from my own first passage across the plain.

  Lady wanted to plug in her key. I held her back. I said, “All right. If you feel comfortable. Doj? What do you think? Is it safe?” He was as near a real wizard as we had here.

  “It doesn’t feel wrong.”

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But good enough.

  Lady lowered the key into place. In moments the ghost road became more substantial, began to give the impression of a golden glow that was not quite there when you tried to see it. My shoulder ornaments were not pleased. They hissed and spat and retreated to the far side of the circle, where they got into a squabble with something large and dark oozing across the surface of our protection.

  Murgen said, “I think they want to enter the circle, Captain. I think they want to cut across.”

  “Yeah?” The auxiliary road was now more plainly seen than the main way. I mused, “We could hike straight across to the first circle right behind the Khatovar Shadowgate.” I went and started getting my gear together.

  Doj told me, “Not before morning. Tobo told you that we have to stay here overnight.”

  I glanced around. Obviously, the only way I would get anybody moving again tonight would be by making myself extremely unpopular.

  Khatovar had been there for ages. It would be there after the sun came up. My interest in Lisa Daele Bowalk went back farther than my interest in that place, to a city called Juniper, before she made the acquaintance of a Taken known as Shapeshifter. Justice delayed a few hours more would not set the universe wobbling.

  I sighed, dropped my stuff. I shrugged. “After breakfast, then.”

  “Let them go through,” Lady said.

  “The Nef? You kidding?”

  “Doj and I can handle them.”

  Interesting, her confidence. But it was misplaced. She knew nothing about the Nef. Unless she had met them in her dreams.

  I moved people away from potential trouble, creating a clear path. “Everyone ready? Pull the key, then, Murgen.” It would be intriguing to see if the plain would let him.

  Doj swung Ash Wand around in front of him, exposed eight inches of blade.

  The key came out of its seat. Murgen jumped back. The Nef leapt into the circle. And streaked straight across, to the side road. They hit it and never looked back.

  “That’s definitely weird,” Willow Swan said. The dreamwalkers were in a hurry but nobody dwindles that fast. Nor, normally, do they grow transparent as they go. “Slid right back into dreamland.”

  I wondered, “You suppose I would’ve slid into dreamland if I’d tried that road?” The road itself began to fade.

  Nobody disagreed. Doj mused, “Tobo did say to stay put.”

  * * *

  Middle of the night. Something wakened me. Felt like a tiny earthquake. The stars above were dancing. After another jiggle they settled down. And were no longer the stars that had been up there when I laid down. This was a different sky altogether.

  * * *

  “That way!” Doj insisted. It was morning, we were up and Doj insisted on heading back the way we had come.

  “The fortress is that way.”

  “We don’t want to go to the fortress,” Lady reminded me. “We want to go to Khatovar.”

  “Which isn’t back that way … is it?” Tobo had not caught up. I was not thrilled about that.

  Willow Swan suggested, “You can go look, Croaker. It wouldn’t take that long.”

  I was tired of arguing, particularly in front of a crowd. I did not want my right to lead to become more questionable than it was already. We all possessed guilty hearts. Me more than any because I bought the Company mystique more than any. “I’ll take Swan’s advice.” I pointed here, there, choosing companions. “You guys get to go with me. Mount up. Let’s go.”

  So we were off to the mule races.

  * * *

  “I don’t believe it.” I did not. Could not. My eyes had to be liars.

  Lying at the rim of the glittering plain I stared down at another landscape with topography resembling that at Kiaulune and at the Abode of Ravens. But here there was no bustling, recovering Kiaulune. There was no fallen castle Overlook, formerly equipped with towers from which Longshadow could look down onto the glittering plain and see what was coming to get him. Nor was there a whitewashed army town with neat ranks of fields on the slopes below it. This country was feral. This country was much more damp than the other two. Wild brush and scraggly trees advanced to within yards of the crippled Shadowgate. The works around that were the only recognizable human handiwork visible, and they were in ruins.

  ?
??Stay low,” Doj advised when I started to rise, which would silhouette me above the skyline. I knew better than that. People who do know better generally get skragged that one time they forget or let something slide. Which is why we pound it in and pound it in and pound it in. “That jungle doesn’t mean that there aren’t eyes watching.”

  “You’re right. I almost did a stupid. Anybody want to guess how old that scrub down there is? I’d say between fifteen and twenty with a bet that it’s a lot closer to twenty.”

  Murgen wondered, “What difference does it make?”

  “The forvalaka broke through this Shadowgate about nineteen years ago. She got away. Soulcatcher was too busy burying our asses to chase her, shadows did get after her.…”

  “Oh. Yeah. She didn’t go out alone when she went.”

  “That’s my guess. Shadows got out behind her and wiped out everything we can see from here.”

  Murgen grunted. Lady nodded, as did Doj. They saw it the same.

  Khatovar. My destination for an age. My obsession. Destroyed because we had not had the good sense to cut a young woman’s throat in a place now long ago and far away.

  The quality of mercy has left me a great, sour role in the theater of my own despair.

  Though it is true that it had not seemed important at the time, and we were real busy trying to get out of there with our asses still attached.

  21

  Taglios: The Great General

  Mogaba leaned back, smiling. “I can’t help wishing Narayan Singh continued luck.” Relaxed, content, for the first time in years, he found life good. The Protector was in the provinces indulging her passion for religious persecution. Therefore, she was not around the Palace making life miserable for those who actually hauled on the reins, riding the tiger whilst trying to keep the mundane work of government simmering.

  His mention of the living saint made Aridatha Singh flinch. It was subtle but the reaction was there. And it was unique. Other Singhs did not react to the name, other than with an obligatory curse, perhaps. This demanded further examination.

  Mogaba asked, “Any trouble out there?”

  Aridatha said, “It’s quiet. You have the Protector out of town, making no ridiculous demands, things settle down. People get too busy making a living to act up.”

  Ghopal was less upbeat. The Greys were out in the streets and alleys every day. “Graffiti keeps turning up more and more. ‘Water Sleeps’ most often.”

  “And?” Murgen asked. His voice was soft but intense, his eyes narrow.

  “The other traditional taunts are all there. ‘All Their Days Are Numbered.’ ‘Rajadharma.’”

  “And?” Mogaba seemed to have shifted characters the way Soulcatcher did. Perhaps he was aping her style.

  “That one, too. ‘My Brother Unforgiven.’”

  That harsh indictment again. That accusation which always disturbed the incomplete slumber of the part of him guilty about betraying the Black Company to advance his own ambitions. No good had come of it. His life had become enslaved by it. His punishment was to move from one villain to another, always serving wickedness, like a loose woman passing from man to man down a long decline.

  Aridatha Singh, eager to move away from talk about Narayan Singh and the Deceivers, interjected, “One of my officers reported a new one yesterday. ‘Thi Kim is coming.’”

  “Thi Kim? What is that? Or who?”

  Ghopal observed, “It sounds Nyueng Bao.”

  “We don’t see much of those people these days.”

  “Since somebody snatched the Radisha right out of the Palace…” Ghopal stopped. Mogaba had begun to darken again, though that failure belonged to the Greys, not to the army. He had been in the territories at the time.

  “So. All the old slogans. But the Company all fled through the Shadowgate. And perished on the other side because they never came back.”

  Ghopal knew little about the world outside his own narrow, filthy streets. “Maybe some of them did survive and we just don’t know about it.”

  “No. They didn’t. We would’ve heard. The Protector’s had people down there harvesting shadows since they left.” People who had been lured into her service by cruelly false promises to teach them her ways and make them captains in her great, unrevealed enterprise.

  None of those collaborators survived long. Shadows were clever and persistent. Quite a few found ways to escape from novices long enough to destroy their tormenters and be destroyed themselves.

  Soulcatcher made sure conditions for disaster remained ripe.

  Mogaba closed his eyes, leaned back again, steepled his dark fingers. “I’ve enjoyed not having the Protector around.” Getting those words out casually was difficult. His throat was tight. His chest felt like a huge weight was pressing in on it. He was afraid. Soulcatcher terrified him. And for that he hated her. And for that he loathed himself. He was Mogaba, the Great General, the purest, smartest, strongest of the Nar warriors produced by Gea-Xle. For him fear was supposed to be a tool by which he managed the weak. He was not supposed to know it personally.

  Silently, within, Mogaba repeated his warrior’s mantras, knowing habits ingrained since birth would hold the fear at bay.

  Ghopal Singh was a functionary. Very good at managing the Greys but not a natural conspirator. That was one attribute that had recommended him to the Protector. He did not apprehend the message lurking on the edges of the Great General’s statement. Aridatha Singh, in some ways, was as naive as he was handsome. But he did understand that Mogaba was sneaking up on something that could be a great watershed in all their lives.

  Mogaba had championed Aridatha’s elevation because of his naivete concerning the complex motives of others and because of his enthusiastic idealism. Rajadharma was a lever that Mogaba was sure would move Aridatha Singh.

  Aridatha peered around nervously. He had heard the old saying that in the Palace the very walls have ears.

  Mogaba leaned forward, lit a cheap tallow candle from a lamp and took the fire to a stoneware bowl filled with a dark liquid. Ghopal held his tongue even though the animal product offended him religiously.

  The bowl’s contents proved to be flammable, though they produced more unpleasant black smoke than they did flame or light. The smoke spread out across the ceiling, then crept down the walls and flowed out the doors. Its progress was marked by squeaks and chitterings and an occasional complaint from an unseen crow.

  Mogaba said, “We may have to get down on the floor for a few minutes, till the smoke thins out.”

  Aridatha whispered, “Are you really proposing what I think you’re proposing?”

  Mogaba murmured, “You may not have the same reasons I do but I think we’d all be better off if the Protector no longer held her position. Particularly the Taglian people. What do you think?”

  Mogaba had expected Aridatha to agree easily. The soldier believed in his obligation to the people he served. And he did nod.

  Ghopal Singh was his main worry. Ghopal had no obvious reason to want change. The Greys were all members of the Shadar religion, traditionally with little influence in government. Their alliance with the Protector had given them power out of proportion to their numbers. They would be reluctant to lose that power.

  Ghopal glanced around nervously, completely failing to note Mogaba’s intense examination. He blurted, though in a whisper, “She has to go. The Greys have believed that for a long time. The Year of the Skulls couldn’t be much more terrible than what we’ve suffered from her. But we don’t know how to get rid of her. She’s too powerful. And too smart.”

  Mogaba relaxed. So the Greys were not enamored of their benefactor. Interesting. Excellent.

  “But we’ll never get rid of her. She always knows what everyone around her is thinking. And we’ll never be able not to think about it because we’ll be so scared. She’ll sniff it out in about ten seconds. Really, we’re walking dead men now, just for having considered it.”

  “Then get your family out of town
now,” Mogaba told him. It was Soulcatcher’s habit to exterminate her enemies root and branch. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I think that the only way it could be managed would be to have everything in place and strike before she has a chance to look around and pick up clues. We might engineer it so that she arrives exhausted. That might give us the edge we need.”

  Aridatha mused, “Whatever it is, it will have to be sudden and massive and a complete surprise.”

  “She’ll begin to suspect,” Ghopal said. “There are too many people loyal to her, because without her they’ll be dead themselves. They’ll warn her.”

  “Not if we don’t get carried away. If just us three know what’s happening. We’re in charge. We can give any orders we want. People won’t question us. There’s trouble on the streets and it’s getting worse. People will expect us to do something about it. Plenty of others hate the Protector. They’ll feel free to act up while she’s away. That gives us an excuse to do almost anything we want. If we mainly use people whose loyalty to the Protector is absolute, letting them do most of the work and carry the messages, there’s no reason she should suspect anything until it’s too late.”

  Ghopal looked at him like he was whistling in the dark. Maybe he was. Mogaba said, “I’ve opened my mouth here. I’ve committed myself. And I have nowhere to run.” They were natives. They could vanish into the territories. There was nowhere he could hide. And a return to Gea-Xle had been out of the question for twenty-five years. The Nar back home knew all about what he had done.

  Aridatha mused, “Then every day in every way we should do our jobs to the utmost on the Protector’s behalf—until we create a rattrap we can close like this.” He clapped his hands.

  “We’ll only get one chance,” Mogaba said. “Five seconds after we fail we’ll all be praying for death.” He waited a moment during which he checked the smoke. Its usefulness was almost exhausted. “Are you in?”

  Both Singhs nodded but neither showed an unbound eagerness. The truth was, it was a poor bet that any of them would survive this adventure.