“Why do you worry so much about disguises?”
“If we never show the same face twice, our enemies can’t possibly know who they’re looking for. Don’t ever underestimate them. Especially not the Protector. She’s outwitted death itself more than once.”
Tobo was not prepared to believe that or much else of our exotic history. Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said — particularly if it bore any vaguely educational hue — was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good. “It’s in the Annals. Your father and the Captain didn’t make up stories.”
He did not want to believe that, either. I did not pursue it. Each of us must learn to respect the Annals in our own way, in our own time. The Company’s diminished circumstance makes it difficult for anyone to grasp tradition. Only two Old Crew brothers both survived Soulcatcher’s trap on the stone plain and the Kiaulune wars afterward. Goblin and One-Eye are haplessly inept at transmitting the Company mystique. One-Eye is too lazy and Goblin too inarticulate. And I was still practically an apprentice when the Old Crew ventured onto the plain in the Captain’s quest for Khatovar. Which he did not find. Not the Khatovar he was looking for, anyway.
I am amazed. Before long I will be a twenty-year veteran. I was barely fourteen when Bucket took me under his wing... But I was never like Tobo. At fourteen I was already ancient in pain. For years after Bucket rescued me, I grew younger... “What?”
“I asked why you look so angry all of a sudden.”
“I was remembering when I was fourteen.”
“Girls have it so easy —” He shut up. His face drained. His northern ancestry became apparent. He was an arrogant and spoiled little puke but he did have brains enough to recognize it when he stepped into a nest of poisonous snakes.
I told him what he knew, not what he did not. “When I was fourteen, the Company and Nyueng Bao were trapped in Jaicur. Dejagore, they call it here.” The rest does not matter anymore. The rest is safely in the past. “I almost never have nightmares now.”
Tobo had heard more than he ever wanted to about Jaicur already. His mother and grandmother and Uncle Doj had been there, too.
“Goblin says we’ll be impressed by these buttons,” Tobo whispered. “They won’t just make spooky lights, they’ll prick somebody’s conscience.”
“That’ll be unusual.” Conscience was a rare commodity on either side of our dispute.
“You really knew my dad?” Tobo had heard stories all his life but lately wanted to know more. Murgen had begun to matter in a more than lip-service fashion.
I told him what I had told him before. “He was my boss. He taught me to read and write. He was a good man.” I laughed weakly. “As good a man as belonging to the Black Company let him be.”
Tobo stopped. He took a deep breath. He stared at a point in the dusk somewhere above my left shoulder. “Were you lovers?”
“No, Tobo. No. Friends. Almost. But definitely not that. He didn’t know I was a woman till just before he left for the glittering plain. And I didn’t know he knew till I read his Annals. Nobody knew. They thought I was a cute runt who just never got any bigger. I let them think that. I felt safer as one of the guys.”
“Oh.”
His tone was so neutral I had to wonder. “Why did you even ask?” Surely he had no reason to believe I had behaved differently before he knew me.
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
Something must have set him off. Possibly an “I wonder if...” from Goblin or One-Eye, say, while they were sampling some of their homemade elephant poison.
“I didn’t ask. Did you put the buttons behind the shadow show?”
“That’s what I was told to do.”
A shadow show uses cutout puppets mounted on sticks. Some of their limbs are manipulated mechanically. A candle behind the puppets casts their shadows on a screen of white cloth. The puppeteer uses a variety of voices to tell his story as he maneuvers his puppets. If he is sufficiently entertaining, his audience will toss him a few coins.
This particular puppeteer had performed in the same place for more than a generation. He slept inside his stage setup. In so doing, he lived better than most of Taglios’ floating population.
He was an informer. He was not beloved of the Black Company.
The story he told, as most were, was drawn from the myths. It sprang from the Khadi cycle. It involved a goddess with too many arms who kept devouring demons.
Of course it was the same demon puppet over and over. Kind of like real life, where the same demon comes back again and again.
Just a hint of color hung above the western rooftops.
There was an earsplitting squeal. People stopped to stare at a bright orange light. Glowing orange smoke wobbled up from behind the puppeteer’s stand. Its strands wove the well-known emblem of the Black Company, a fanged skull with no lower jaw, exhaling flames. The scarlet fire in its left eye socket seemed to be a pupil that stared right down inside you, searching for the thing that you feared the most.
The smoke thing persisted only a few seconds. It rose about ten feet before it dispersed. It left a frightened silence. The air itself seemed to whisper, “Water sleeps.”
Whine and flash. A second skull arose. This one was silver with a slightly bluish tint. It lasted longer and rose a dozen feet higher before it perished. It whispered, “My brother unforgiven.”
“Here come the Greys!” exclaimed someone tall enough to see over the crowd. Being short makes it easy for me to disappear in groups but also makes it tough for me to see what is happening outside them.
The Greys are never far away. But they are helpless against this sort of thing. It can happen anywhere, any time, and has to happen before they can react. Our supposed ironclad rule is that perpetrators should never be nearby when the buttons speak. The Greys understand that. They just go through the motions. The Protector must be appeased. The little Shadar have to be fed.
“Now!” Tobo murmured as four Greys arrived. A shriek erupted from behind the puppeteer’s stage. The puppeteer himself ran out, spun and leaned toward his stage, mouth wide open. There was a flash less bright but more persistent than its predecessors. The subsequent smoke image was more complex and lasted longer. It appeared to be a monster. The monster focused on the Shadar. One of the Greys mouthed the name “Niassi.”
Niassi would be a major demon from Shadar mythology. A similar demon under another form of the name exists in Gunni belief.
Niassi was a chieftain of the inner circle of the most powerful demons. Shadar beliefs, being heretical Vehdna, include a posthumous, punitive Hell but also definitely include the possibility of a Gunni-like Hell on earth, in life, managed by demons in Niassi’s employ, laid on for the particularly wicked. Despite understanding that they were being taunted, the Greys were rocked. This was something new. This was an attack from an unanticipated and sensitive direction. And it came on top of ever more potent rumors associating the Greys with vile rites supposedly practiced by the Protector.
Children disappear. Reason suggests this is inevitable and unavoidable in a city so vast and overcrowded, even if there is not one evil man out there. Babies vanish by wandering off and getting lost. And horrible things do happen to good people. A clever, sick rumor can reassign the numb evil of chance to the premeditated malice of people no one ever trusted anyway.
Memory becomes selective.
We do not mind a bit lying about our enemies.
Tobo yelled something insulting. I started to pull him away, dragging him toward our den. Others began to curse and mock the Greys. Tobo threw a stone that hit a Grey’s turban.
It was too dark for them to make out faces. They began to unlimber bamboo wands. The mood of the crowd turned ugly. I could not help but suspect that there was more to the devil display than had met the eye. I knew our tam
e wizards. And I knew that Taglians do not lose control easily. It takes a great deal of patience and self-control for so many people to live in such unnaturally tight proximity.
I looked around for crows, fluttering bats, or anything else that might be spies for the Protector. After nightfall all our risks soar. We cannot see what might be watching. I held onto Tobo’s arm. “You shouldn’t have done that. It’s dark enough for shadows to be out.”
He was not impressed. “Goblin will be happy. He spent a long time on that. And it worked perfectly.”
The Greys blew whistles, summoning reinforcements.
A fourth button released its smoke ghost. We missed the show. I dragged Tobo through all the shadow traps between the excitement and our headquarters. He would be explaining to some uncles soon. Those for whom paranoia remains a way of life will be those who will be around to savor the Company’s many revenges. Tobo needed more instruction. His behavior could have been exploited by a clever adversary.
5
Sahra summoned me as soon as we arrived, not to chastise me for letting Tobo take stupid risks but to observe as she launched her next move. It might be time Tobo walked into something that would scare some sense into him. Life underground is unforgiving. It seldom gives you more than one chance. Tobo had to understand that in his heart.
After Sahra grilled me about events outside, she made sure Goblin and One-Eye were acquainted with her displeasure, too. Tobo was not there to defend himself.
Goblin and One-Eye were not cowed. No forty-something slip of a lass could overawe those two antiques. Besides, they put Tobo up to half his mischief.
Sahra said, “I’ll raise Murgen now.” She seemed unsure about that. She had not consulted Murgen much recently. We all wondered why. She and Murgen were a genuine romantic love match straight out of legend, with all the appurtenances seen in the timeless stories, including gods defied, parents disappointed, desperate separations and reunions, intrigues by enemies and so forth. It remained only for one of them to go down into the realm of the dead to rescue the other. And Murgen was tucked away in a nice cold underground hell right now, courtesy of the mad sorceress Soulcatcher. He and all the Captured lived on, in stasis, beneath the plain of glittering stone, in a place and situation known to us only because Sahra could conjure Murgen’s spirit.
Could the problem be the stasis? Sahra got a day older every day. Murgen did not. Had she begun to fear she would be older than his mother before we freed the Captured?
Sadly, after years of study, I realize that most history may really pivot on personal considerations like that, not on the pursuit of ideals dark or shining.
Long ago Murgen learned to leave his flesh while he slept. He retained some of that ability but, sadly, it was diminished by the supernatural constraints of his captivity. He could do nothing outside the cavern of the ancients without being summoned forth by Sahra — or, conceivably, chillingly, by any other necromancer who knew how to reach him.
Murgen’s ghost was the ultimate spy. Outside our circle none but Soulcatcher could detect his presence. Murgen informed us of our enemies’ every plot — those that we suspected strongly enough to ask Sahra to investigate. The process was cumbersome and limited but still, Murgen constituted our most potent weapon. We could not survive without him.
And Sahra was ever more reluctant to call him up.
God knows, it is hard to keep believing. Many of our brothers have lost their faith and have drifted away, vanishing into the chaos of the empire. Some may be rejuvenated once we have had a flashy success or two.
The years have been painful for Sahra. They cost her three children, an agony no loving parent should have to bear. She lost their father as well but suffered little by that deprivation. No one who remembered the man spoke well of him. She suffered with the rest of us during the siege of Jaicur.
Maybe Sahra — and the entire Nyueng Bao people — had angered Ghanghesha. Or maybe the god with the several elephant heads just enjoyed a cruel prank at the expense of his worshipers. Certainly Kina got a chuckle out of pulling lethal practical jokes on her devotees.
Goblin and One-Eye were not usually present when Sahra raised Murgen. She did not need their help. Her powers were narrow but strong, and those two could be a distraction even when they tried to behave.
Those antiques being there told me something unusual was afoot. And old they are, almost beyond reckoning. Their skills sustain them. One-Eye, if the Annals do not lie, is on the downhill side of two hundred. His youthful sidekick lags less than a century behind.
Neither is a big man. Which is being generous. Both are shorter than me. And never were taller, even long before they became dried-up old relics. Which was probably when they were about fifteen. I cannot imagine One-Eye ever having been anything but old. He must have been born old. And wearing the ugliest, filthiest black hat that ever existed.
Maybe One-Eye goes on forever because of the curse of that hat. Maybe the hat uses him as its steed and depends on him for its survival.
That crusty, stinking glob of felt rag will hit the nearest fire before One-Eye’s corpse finishes bouncing. Everyone hates it.
Goblin, in particular, loathes that hat. He mentions it whenever he and One-Eye get into a squabble, which is about as often as they see one another.
One-Eye is small and black and wrinkled. Goblin is small and white and wrinkled. He has a face like a dried toad’s.
One-Eye mentions that whenever they get into a squabble, which is about as often as there is an audience but nobody to get between them.
They strain to be on their best behavior around Sahra, though. The woman has a gift. She brings out the best in people. Except her mother. Though the Troll is much worse away from her daughter.
Lucky us, we do not see Ky Gota much. Her joints hurt her too bad. Tobo helps care for her, our cynical exploitation of his special immunity from her vitriol. She dotes on the boy — even if his father was foreign slime.
Sahra told me, “These two claim they’ve found a more effective way to materialize Murgen. So you can communicate directly.” Usually Sahra had to talk for Murgen after she raised him up. I do not have a psychic ear.
I said, “If you bring him across strong enough so the rest of us can see and hear him, then Tobo ought to be here, too. He’s suddenly got a lot of questions about his father.”
Sahra peered at me oddly. I was saying something but she did not get what I meant.
“Boy ought to know his old man,” One-Eye rasped. He stared at Goblin, waiting to be contradicted by a man who did not know his. That was their custom. Pick a fight and never mind trivia like facts or common sense. The debate about whether or not they were worth the trouble they caused went back for generations.
This time Goblin abstained. He would make his rebuttal when Sahra was not around to embarrass him with an appeal to reason.
Sahra nodded to One-Eye. “But first we have to see if your scheme really works.”
One-Eye began to puff up. Somebody dared suggest that his sorcery needed field-testing? Come on! Forget the record! This time —
I told him, “Don’t start.”
Time had caught up with One-Eye. His memory was no longer reliable. And lately he tended to nod off in the middle of things. Or to forget what had gotten him exercised when he roared off on a rant. Sometimes he ended up contradicting himself.
He was a shadow of the dried-up old relic he was when first I met him, though he got around under his own power still. But halfway through any journey, he was likely to forget where he was bound. Occasionally that was good, him being One-Eye, but mostly it was a pain. Tobo usually got the job of keeping him headed in the right direction when it mattered. One-Eye doted on the kid, too.
The little wizard’s increasing fragility did make it easier to keep him inside, away from the temptations of the city. One moment of indiscretion could kill us all. And One-Eye never quite caught on to what it meant to be discreet.
Goblin chuckled as O
ne-Eye subsided. I suggested, “Could you two concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing?” I was haunted by the dread that one day One-Eye would doze off in the midst of a deadly spell and leave us all up to our ears in demons or bloodsucking insects distraught about having been plucked from some swamp a thousand miles away. “This is important.”
“It’s always important,” Goblin grumbled. “Even when it’s just ‘Goblin, give me a hand here, I’m too lazy to polish the silver myself,’ they make it sound like the world’s about to end. Always important? Hmmph!”
“I see you’re in a good mood tonight.”
“Gralk!”
One-Eye heaved himself out of his chair. Leaning on his cane, muttering unflattering remarks about me, he shuffled over to Sahra. He had forgotten I was female. He was less unpleasant when he remembered, though I expect no special treatment because of that unhappy chance of birth. One-Eye became dangerous in a whole new way the day he adopted that cane. He used it to swat people. Or to trip them. He was always falling asleep between here and there but you never knew for sure if his nap was the real thing. That cane might dart out to tangle your legs if he was pretending.
The dread we all shared was that One-Eye would not last much longer. Without him, our chances to continue avoiding detection would plummet. Goblin would try hard but he was just one small-time wizard. Our situation offered work for more than two in their prime.
“Start, woman,” One-Eye rasped. “Goblin, you worthless sack of beetle snot, would you get that stuff over here? I don’t want to hang around here all night.”
Sahra had had a table set up for them. She used no props herself. At a fixed time she would concentrate on Murgen. She usually made contact quickly. At her time of the month, when her sensitivity went down, she would sing in Nyueng Bao. Unlike some of my Company brothers, I have a poor ear for languages. Nyueng Bao mostly eludes me. Her songs seem to be lullabies. Unless the words have double meanings. Which is entirely possible. Uncle Doj talks in riddles all the time but insists he makes perfect sense if we would just listen.