“Narayan Singh,” I said in my Vajra the Naga voice. “You’re a stubborn old man. You should have been dead long ago. Perhaps Kina does favor you. Which would suggest that here in my hands is where the goddess wants you to be.” We Vehdna are good at blaming everything on God. Nothing can happen that is not the will of God. Therefore, He has already measured the depth of the brown stuff and has decided to toss you in. “And these are bloody hands, make no mistake.”
Singh looked at me. He did not fear much. He did not recognize me. If our paths had crossed before, I had been too minor an annoyance for him to recall.
The Daughter of Night remembered me, though. She was thinking that I was a mistake she would not be making again. I was thinking maybe she was a mistake we ought not to make, however useful a tool she might become. She almost scared Vajra the Naga, who had been too dense to comprehend fear in personal terms.
“You’re troubled by events but aren’t afraid. You rely upon your goddess. Good. Let me provide assurances. We won’t harm you. Assuming you cooperate. However much we owe you.”
He did not believe a word of that and I did not blame him. That was the usual sort of “hold out a feather of hope” a torturer used to leverage cooperation from the doomed. “In this case, the pain will all be directed elsewhere.” He tried to turn to look at the girl. “Not just there, Narayan Singh. Not only there. Though that’s where we’ll start. Narayan, you have something we want. We have several things we believe to be of value to you. I’m prepared to make an exchange, sworn in the names of all our gods.”
Narayan had nothing to say. Yet. But I began to sense that his ears might be open to the right words.
The Daughter of Night sensed that, too. She squirmed. She tried to make some kind of noise. She was going to be as stubborn and crazy as her mother and aunt. Must be the blood.
“Narayan Singh. In another life you were a vegetable seller in the town called Gondowar. Every other summer you would go off to lead your company of tooga.” Singh looked uncomfortable and puzzled. This was nothing he expected. “You had a wife, Yashodara, whom you called Lily in private. You had a daughter, Khaditya, which was maybe just a little too clever a naming. You had three sons: Valmiki, Sugriva and Aridatha. Aridatha you’ve never seen because he wasn’t born until after the Shadowmasters carried the able men of Gondowar off into captivity.”
Narayan looked more uncomfortable and troubled than ever. His life before the coming of the Shadowmasters was a lost episode. Since his unexpected salvation, he had dedicated himself solely to his goddess and her Daughter.
“Those times were so unsettled that you have since proceeded on the reasonable assumption that nothing of your former life survived the coming of the Shadowmasters. But that assumption is a false one, Narayan Singh. Yashodara bore you that third son, Aridatha, and lived to see him become a grown man. Though she endured great poverty and despair, your Lily survived until just two years ago.” In fact, until just after we located her. I still did not know for certain if some of my brothers had not grown overly zealous in their eagerness to locate Narayan. “Of your sons, Aridatha and Sugriva still live, as does your daughter Khaditya, though she has used the name Amba since she learned, to her horror, that her very father was the Narayan Singh of such widespread infamy.”
By stealing Lady’s baby, Narayan had ensured that his name would live on amongst those of the great villains. Everyone over a certain age knew the name and a score of evil stories burdening it — the majority of them fabrications or accretions of stories formerly attached to some other human demon whose ignominy had been nibbled up by time.
I had his attention despite his determination to remain indifferent. Family is critically important to all but a handful of us.
“Sugriva continues in the produce business, although his desire to escape your reputation led him first to move to Ayodahk, then to Jaicur when the Protector decided she wanted the city repopulated. He felt everyone would be strangers there and he could create a more favorable past for himself.”
Both captives noted my unfortunate use of “Jaicur.” Which did not give them anything they could use but which did tell them I was not Taglian. No Taglian would call that city anything but Dejagore.
I continued, “Aridatha grew into a fine young man, well-formed and beautiful. He’s a soldier now, a senior noncommissioned officer in one of the City Battalions. His rise has been rapid. He has been noticed. There’s a good chance he’ll be chosen to become one of the career commissioned officers the Great General had been imposing on the army.” I fell silent. No one else spoke. Some were hearing this for the first time, though Sahra and I had started looking for those people a long time ago.
I got up and went out, got myself a large cup of tea. I cannot abide the Nyueng Bao tea-making ceremonies. I am, of course, a barbarian in their eyes. I do not like the tiny little cups they use, either. When I have some tea, I want to get serious about it. Make it strong and bitter and toss in a glob of honey.
I seated myself in front of Narayan again. No one had spoken in my absence. “So, living saint of the Stranglers, have you truly put aside all the chains of the earth? Would you like to see your Khaditya again? She was little when you left. Would you like to see your grandchildren? There are five of them. I can say the word and inside a week we can have one of them here.” I sipped tea, looked Singh in the eye and let his imagination toy with the possibilities. “But you are going to be all right, Narayan. I’m going to see to that personally.” I showed him my Vajra the Naga smile. “Will somebody show these two to their guest rooms?”
“That all you’re going to do?” Goblin asked once they were gone.
“I’m going to let Singh think about the life he never lived. I’ll let him think about losing what’s left of that. And about losing his messiah. When he can avoid all those tragedies just by telling us where to find the souvenir he carried away from Soulcatcher’s hideout down by Kiaulune.”
“He won’t take a deep breath without getting permission from the girl.”
“We’ll see how he handles having to make his own decisions. If he stalls too long and we get pressed, you can put a glamour on me that’ll make him think I’m her.”
“What about her?” One-Eye asked. “You going to personally work on her, too?”
“Yes. Starting right now. Put some of those choke spells on her. One on each wrist and ankle. And double them up around her neck.” We had done some herding, amongst other things, over the years and One-Eye and Goblin, being incredibly lazy, had developed choke spells that constricted tighter and tighter as an animal moved farther away from a selected marker point. “She’s a resourceful woman with a goddess on her side. I’d prefer to kill her and be done with it but we won’t get any help from Singh if we do. If she does manage to escape, I want complete success to be fatal. I want near success to render her unconscious from lack of air. I don’t want her having regular contact with any of our people. Remember what her aunt, Soulcatcher, did to Willow Swan. Tobo. Has Swan said anything that might interest us?”
“He just plays cards, Sleepy. He does talk all the time but he never says anything. Kind of like Uncle One-Eye.”
Whisper. “You put him up to that, didn’t you, Frogface?”
“Sounds like Swan to me,” I said. I shut my eyes, began massaging my brow between thumb and forefinger, trying to make Vajra the Naga go away. His reptilian lack of connection was seductive. “I’m so tired —”
“Then why the hell don’t we all just retire?” One-Eye croaked. “For a whole goddamned generation it was the Captain and his next year in Khatovar shit that beat us into the ground. Now it’s you two women and your holy crusade to resurrect the Captured. Find yourself a guy, Little Girl. Spend a year screwing his brains out. We’re not going to get those people out of there. Accept that. Start believing that they’re dead.”
He sounded exactly like the traitor in my soul that whispered in my mind every night before I fell asleep. The part about
accepting that the Captured were never going to be coming back, anyway. I asked Sahra, “Can we call up our favorite dead man? One-Eye, ask him what he thinks of our plan.”
“Bah! Frogface, you deal with this. I need a little medicinal pick-me-up.”
Almost smiling despite her aching joints, Gota waddled out behind One-Eye. We would not see those two for a while. If we were lucky, One-Eye would get drunk fast and pass out. If we were not, he would come staggering out looking to feud with Goblin and we would have to restrain him. That could turn into an adventure.
“Well. Here’s our prodigal.” Sahra finally had Murgen back in the mist box.
I told him, “Tell me about the white crow.”
Puzzled, “I go there sometimes. It’s not voluntary.”
“We took Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night out of Chor Bagan today. There was a white crow there. You weren’t here.”
“I wasn’t there.” More puzzled. Even troubled. “I don’t remember being there.”
“I think Soulcatcher noticed it. And she knows her crows.”
Murgen continued, “I wasn’t there but I remember things that happened. This can’t be happening to me again.”
“Just calm down. Tell us what you know.”
Murgen proceeded to report everything Soulcatcher said and did after she ducked our snipers. He would not tell us how he knew. I do not think he could.
Sahra said, “She does know that we have Singh and the girl.”
“But did she guess why? The Company has an old grudge with those two.”
“She’ll need to see bodies to be convinced there was nothing more to it than that. She’s still not completely satisfied that Swan is dead. A very suspicious woman, the Protector.”
“A Narayan corpse would be easy — if we could make it credible. There’re a million skinny, filthy little old men with green teeth out there. But we’d sure come up short on beautiful twenty-year-old women with blue eyes and skin paler than ivory.”
“The Greys will definitely become more active now,” Sahra said. “Whatever she suspects or doesn’t, the Protector wants no one going about any tricky business in her city.”
“A point the Radisha might argue. Which reminds me of something that’s been knocking around the back of my head. Listen to this and tell me what you think.”
21
As the Bhodi disciples made their way through the crowds, more than one onlooker reached out to slap their backs. The disciples took that with poor grace. It told them that many of the witnesses were there to be entertained.
The rite proceeded as before, but more quickly as it was evident that the Greys anticipated trouble and had instructions to head it off.
The kneeling priest in orange burst into flames just as the Greys began manhandling his assistants out of the way.
A gout of smoke leaped upward. A Black Company skull formed inside it, an evil eye seeming to stare deep into the souls of all the witnesses. A voice filled the morning. “All their days are numbered.”
And the wooden curtain-wall shielding the reconstruction came to life. Glowing lime characters as tall as a man proclaimed “Water Sleeps,” and “My Brother Unforgiven.” They crawled slowly back and forth.
Soulcatcher herself materialized on the ramparts overhead. Her rage was palpable.
A second and larger cloud of smoke burst off the burning disciple. A face — the best representation of the Captain’s that One-Eye and Goblin could manage — told the awed and silent thousands, “Rajadharma! The Duty of Kings. Know you: Kingship is a Trust. The King is the most exalted and conscientious servant of the people.”
I began to slide away from there. This was sure to sting the Protector into some impulsive and self-defeating response.
Or maybe not. She did nothing obvious, though a sudden breeze came along. It blew the smoke away. But it fanned the flames consuming the Bhodi disciple. The smell of burning flesh spread out downwind.
22
When Master Santaraksita wanted to know why I was late, I told the truth. “Another Bhodi disciple set himself on fire in front of the Palace. I went to watch. I couldn’t help myself. There was sorcery involved.” I described what I had seen. As so many of the actual eyewitnesses also had, Santaraksita seemed both repelled and intrigued.
“Why do you suppose those disciples are doing that, Dorabee?”
I knew why they were doing it. It took no genius to fathom their motives. Only their determination remained a puzzle. “They’re trying to tell the Radisha that she’s not fulfilling her obligations to the Taglian people. They consider the situation so desperate that they’ve chosen to send their message by a means that can’t be ignored.”
“I, too, believe that to be the case. The question remains: What can the Radisha do? The Protector won’t go away just because some people believe she’s bad for Taglios.”
“I have a great deal to do today, Sri, and I’m starting late.”
“Go. Go. I must assemble the bhadrhalok. It’s possible we can present the Radisha with some means of shaking the Protector’s grip.”
“Good luck, Sri.” He would need it. Only the most outrageous good luck since the beginning of time was going to give him and his cronies the tools to undo Soulcatcher. Chances were good the bhadrhalok had no idea how dangerous an opponent they had chosen.
I dusted and mopped and checked the rodent traps and after a while noticed that most everyone had gone away. I asked old Baladitya the copyist where everyone was. He told me that the other copyists had ducked out as soon as the senior librarians had gone off to their bhadrhalok meeting. They knew that the bhadrhalok would do nothing but it would take them hours of grumbling and talking and arguing to get it done, so they made themselves a holiday.
It was not an opportunity to be refused. I began examining books, even going so far as to penetrate the restricted stacks. Baladitya knew nothing. He could not see three feet in front of his face.
23
Jaul Barundandi partnered Minh Subredil with a young woman named Rahini and sent them to work in the Radisha’s own quarters, under the direction of a woman named Narita, a fat, ugly creature possessed by an inflated conception of her own importance. Narita complained to Barundandi, “I need six more women. I’m supposed to clean the council chamber again after I complete the royal suite.”
“Then I suggest you pick up a broom yourself. I’ll be back in a few hours. I expect to see progress. I’ve given you the best workers available.” Barundandi went elsewhere to be unpleasant to someone else.
The fat woman took it out on Subredil and Rahini. Subredil did not know who Narita was. The woman had not worked in the royal chambers before. As Subredil steered a mop around, she whispered, “Who is this woman who is so bitter?” She stroked her Ghanghesha.
Rahini glanced right and left but did not raise her eyes. “You must understand her. She is Barundandi’s wife.”
“You two! You aren’t being paid to gossip.”
“Pardon, ma’am,” Sahra said. “I didn’t understand what to do and didn’t want to trouble you.”
The fat woman scowled for a moment but then turned her displeasure in another direction. Rahini smiled softly, whispered, “She’s in a good mood today.”
As the hours passed and her knees and hands and muscles began to ache, Sahra realized that she and Rahini had been delivered to Barundandi’s wife more for who they were than for the work they could do. They were not bright and they were not among the more attractive workers. Barundandi wanted Narita to believe that these were the kind of women he always employed. Elsewhere, no doubt, he and his chief assistants would take full advantage of their bit of power over the unfortunate and the desperate.
It was not a good day for exploring. There was more work than three women could possibly complete. Sahra got no chance to collect additional pages from the hidden Annals. Then, not many hours after the day started, conditions within the Palace became much less relaxed. The high and the mighty began to show t
hemselves, moving rapidly here and there. Rumor came, apparently passing right through stone walls. Another Bhodi disciple had burned himself to death outside and the Radisha was completely distraught. Narita herself confided, “She’s very frightened. Many things are happening over which she has no control. She has gone to the Anger Chamber. She does so almost every day now.”
“The Anger Chamber?” Sahra murmured. She had not heard of this before, but till recently she never worked this close to the heart of the Palace. “What is that, ma’am?”
“A room set aside where she can tear her hair and clothing and rage and weep without having her emotions poison surroundings used for other purposes. She won’t come out until she can face the world in complete calm.”
Subredil understood: It was a Gunni thing. Only Gunni would come up with an idea like that. Gunni religion personified everything. It had a god or goddess or demon, a deva or rakshasa or yaksha or whatever for everything, usually with several aspects and avatars and differing names, none of whom were seen much nowadays but who had been very busy way back when.
Only an extremely wealthy Gunni would come up with a conceit like an Anger Chamber — a Gunni cursed with a thousand rooms she did not know how to use.
Later in the day Subredil contrived to be allowed to service the freshly evacuated Anger Chamber. It was small and contained nothing but a mat on a polished wooden floor and a small shrine to ancestors. The smoke was thick and the smell of incense was overpowering.
24
A good thing I didn’t have any pages on me, too,” Sahra told me. “The Greys started searching us going out. That woman Vancha tried to steal a little silver oil lamp. She’ll spend all morning tomorrow being ‘punished’ by Jaul Barundandi.”
“Does Barundandi’s boss know what he does?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“We could trick him into betraying himself. Get him tossed out.”