I hoped my start did not give us away. I had counted on getting inside early but it had not occurred to me that anyone might be interested in what two near-untouchables might have seen.
8
I need not have worried. We were interviewed by a seriously distracted Guard sergeant who seemed to be going through the motions mainly as a sop to Jaul Barundandi. The subassistant had evidently suffered an overinspiration of ambition in thinking he could win favor by providing eyewitnesses to the tragedy.
His solicitude began to fade once he had little to gain. A few hours after we were taken inside, while excitement still gripped the Palace and a thousand outrageous rumors circulated, while leading Guardsmen and Greys kept bringing in more and more trusted armed men and sending out more and more spies to watch the regular soldiers in their barracks, just in case they were in on the attack somehow, Minh Subredil and her idiot sister-in-law were already hard at work. Barundandi had them cleaning the chamber where the Privy Council met. A huge mess had been left there. Somebody had lost her temper and had worked out her anger by tearing the place up.
Barundandi told us, “Expect to work very hard today, Minh Subredil. Few workers showed up this morning.” He sounded bitter. He would not garner much kickback because of the raid. It did not occur to him to be thankful he was still alive. “Is she all right?” He meant me. Sawa. I was still doing a credible job of shaking.
“She will manage as long as I stay close. It would not be good to put her anyplace where she cannot see me today.”
Barundandi grunted. “So be it. There’s work enough here. Just don’t get in anybody’s way.”
Minh Subredil bowed slightly. She was good at being unobtrusive. She seated me at a wide table about a dozen feet long, piled up lamps and candlesticks and whatnot that had gotten thrown around. I invoked Sawa’s narrow focus and went to work cleaning them. Subredil began cleaning floors and furniture.
People came and went, many of them important. None of them noticed us except the Inspector-General of the Records, Chandra Gokhale, who kicked Subredil irritably because she was scrubbing the floor where he wanted to walk.
Subredil got back onto her knees, bowing and begging pardon. Gokhale ignored her. She began cleaning up spilled water, showing no emotion whatsoever. Minh Subredil took that sort of thing. But I suspect Ky Sahra had just formed a definite opinion about which of our enemies should follow Willow Swan into captivity.
The Radisha appeared. The Protector was with her. They settled into their places. Jaul Barundandi appeared soon afterward, meaning to get us out of there. Sawa seemed to notice nothing. Her focus on a candlestick was too narrow. A tall Shadar captain bustled in. He announced, “Your Highness, the preliminary tally shows ninety-eight dead and one hundred twenty-six injured. Some of those will die from their wounds. Minister Swan hasn’t been found but many of the bodies are burned too badly to identify. Many that were hit by fireballs caught fire and burned like greasy torches.” The captain had trouble remaining calm. He was young. Chances were good he had not seen the consequences of battle before.
I kept working hard to shove myself way down deep into character. I had not been this close to Soulcatcher since she held me prisoner outside Kiaulune fifteen years ago. Those were not happy memories. I prayed she did not remember me.
I went all the way down into my safe place. I had not been there since my captivity. The hinges on the door were rusty. But I got inside and got comfortable while remaining Sawa. I had just enough attention left to catch most of what was happening around me. The Protector suddenly asked, “Who are these women?”
Barundandi fawned. “Pardon, Great Ones. Pardon. My fault. I did not know the chamber was to be used.”
“Answer the question, Housekeeper,” the Radisha ordered.
“Certainly, Great One.” Barundandi kowtowed halfway to the floor. “The woman scrubbing is Minh Subredil, a widow. The other is her idiot sister-in-law, Sawa. They are outside staff employed as part of the Protector’s charity program.”
Soulcatcher said, “I feel I have seen one or both of them before.”
Barundandi bowed deeply again. The attention frightened him. “Minh Subredil has worked here for many years, Protector. Sawa accompanies her when her mind is clear enough for her to accomplish repetitive tasks.”
I felt him trying to decide whether or not to volunteer the news that we had witnessed the morning’s attack from up close. I clung to my safe place so hard that I did not catch what happened during the next few minutes.
Barundandi chose not to volunteer us for questioning. Perhaps he reasoned that too intensive an attention paid to us might expose the fact that he was charging us half our feeble salaries for the right to work our hands into raw, aching crabs.
The Radisha finally told him, “Go away, Housekeeper. Let them work. The fate of the empire will not be decided here today.”
And Soulcatcher waved a gloved hand, shooing Barundandi out, but then halted him to demand, “What is that the woman has on the floor beside her?” Meaning Subredil, of course, since I was seated at the table.
“Uh? Oh. A Ghanghesha, Great One. The woman never goes anywhere without it. It’s an obsession with her. It —”
“Go away now.”
So it was that Sahra, at least, sat in on almost two hours of the innermost powers’ responses to our assault.
After a while I came forward again, enough to follow most of it. Couriers came and went. A picture of generally upright behavior by the army and people took shape. Which was to be expected. Neither had any real reason to rise up right now. Which was nothing but good news to the Radisha.
Positive intelligence just made the Protector more suspicious, though. The old cynic.
“No prisoners taken,” she said. “No corpses left behind. Quite possibly no serious casualties suffered. Nor any great risks endured, if you examine it closely. They fled as soon as there was a chance someone would hit back. What were they up to? What was their real purpose?”
Reasonably, Chandra Gokhale pointed out, “The attack appears to have been sustained with exceptional ferocity till you yourself appeared on the battlements. Only then did they run.”
The Shadar captain volunteered, “Several survivors and witnesses report that the bandits argued amongst themselves about your presence, Protector. It seems they expected you to be away from the Palace. Evidently the attack would not have been undertaken had they known you were here.”
One of my touches of misdirection. I hoped it did some good.
“That makes no sense. Where would they get that idea?” She did not expect an answer and did not wait for one. “Have you identified any of the burned bodies?”
“Only three, Protector. Most are barely recognizable as human.”
The Radisha asked, “Chandra, how bad was the physical damage? Do you have an assessment yet?”
“Yes, Radisha. It was bad. Extremely bad. The wall appears to have suffered some structural damage. The full extent is being determined right now. It’s certain to be a weak point for a while. You might consider putting up a wooden curtain-wall in front of what is going to become a construction area. And think hard about bringing in troops.”
“Troops?” the Protector demanded. “Why troops?” Her voice, long neutral, became suspicious. When you have no friends at all, paranoia is an even more natural outlook than it is for brothers of the Black Company.
“Because the Palace is too big to defend with the people you have here now. Even if you arm the household staff. An enemy doesn’t need to use any of the regular entrances. He could climb the outside wall where no one is watching and attack from inside.”
The Radisha said, “If he tried that, he’d need maps to get around. I’ve never seen anyone but Smoke, who was our court wizard a long time ago, who could get around this place without one. You have to have an instinct.”
The Inspector-General observed, “If the attack was undertaken by elements descended from the old Black Company
— and the employment of fireball weapons would suggest some connection, even though we know that the Company was exterminated by the Protector — then they may have access to hallway maps created when the Liberator and his staff were quartered here.”
The Radisha insisted, “You can’t chart this place. I know. I’ve tried.”
Thank Goblin and One-Eye for that, Princess. Long, long ago the Captain had those two old men scatter confusion spells liberally, everywhere. There were things he had not wanted the Radisha to find. Things that remained hidden still, among them those ancient volumes of the Annals that supposedly explain the Company’s secret beginnings but which have been a complete disappointment so far. Minh Subredil knows how to get to them. Whenever she gets the chance, Minh Subredil tears out a few pages and smuggles them out to me. Then I sneak them into the library and when no one is watching, I translate them a few words at a time, looking for that one phrase that will show us how to open the way for the Captured.
Sawa cleaned brass and silver. Minh Subredil cleaned floor and furniture. The Privy Council and their associates came and went. The level of panic declined as no new attacks developed. Too bad we did not have the numbers to stir them up again every few hours.
Soulcatcher remained uncharacteristically quiet. She had known the Company longer than anyone but the Captain, Goblin and One-Eye, though from the outside. She would accept nothing at face value. Not yet.
I hoped she broke a mental sprocket trying to figure it out, though I feared she had already done so, because she kept wondering about the burned bodies and Willow Swan. Could I have planned so obviously that she was confused only because she kept looking for something beyond the kidnapping?
I finished the last candlestick. I did not look around, did not say anything, just sat there. It was difficult to focus my thinking away from the danger seated across the room when my fingers were not busy. I gave praise to God, silently, as I had learned was proper for a woman when I was little. Equal praise was due Sahra’s insistence on staying in character.
Both served me well.
At some point Jaul Barundandi came back. Under the eyes of the Great Ones, he was not an unkind boss. He told Subredil it was time to leave. Subredil bestirred Sawa. As I got to my feet, I made some sounds of distress.
“What is that?” Barundandi asked.
“She’s hungry. We haven’t eaten all day.” Usually the management did provide a few scraps. That was one of the perks. Subredil and Sawa sometimes husbanded some of their share and took it home. That established and sustained the women’s habit of carrying things out of the Palace.
The Protector leaned forward. She stared intently. What had we done to tickle her suspicion? Was she just so ancient in her paranoia that she needed no clue stronger than intuition? Or was it possible that she really could read minds, just a touch?
Barundandi said, “We’ll go to the kitchen, then. The cooks overprepared badly today.”
We shuffled out behind him, each step like leaping another league out of winter toward spring, out of darkness into light. Four or five paces outside the meeting chamber, Barundandi startled us by running a hand through his hair and gasping. He told Subredil, “Oh, it feels good to get out of there. That woman gives me the green willies.”
She gave me the green willies, too. And only the fact that I had gone deep into character to deal with them saved me giving myself away. Who would suspect that much humanity in Jaul Barundandi? I got a grip on Subredil’s arm and shook.
Subredil responded to Barundandi softly, submissively agreeing that the Protector might be a great horror.
The kitchens, normally off limits to casual labor, was a dragon’s hoard of edible treasures. With the dragon evicted. Subredil and Sawa ate till they could barely waddle. They loaded themselves with all the plunder they thought they would be allowed to carry off. They collected their few coppers and headed for the servants’ postern before anyone could think of something else for them to do, before any of Barundandi’s cronies realized that the customary kickbacks had been overlooked.
There were armed guards outside the postern. That was new. They were Greys rather than soldiers. They did not seem particularly interested in people going out. They did not bother with the usual cursory search casuals had to endure so nobody carried off the royal cutlery.
I wish our characters had more curiosity in them. I could have used a closer look at the damage we had done. They were putting up scaffolding and erecting a wooden curtain-wall already. The glimpses I did catch awed me. I had only read about what the later versions of those fireball throwers could do. The face of the Palace looked like a model of dark wax that someone had stuck repeatedly with a white-hot iron rod. Not only had stone melted and run, some had been vaporized. We had been released much earlier than usual. It was only mid-afternoon. I tried to walk too fast, eager to get away. Subredil refused to be rushed. Ahead of us stood quiet crowds who had come to stare at the Palace. Subredil murmured something about “... ten thousand eyes.”
9
I erred. That mass of people had not come just to examine our night’s work and marvel that the Protector’s dead men could be so frisky. They were interested in four Bhodi disciples at the memorial posts that stood a dozen yards in front of the battered entrance, outside the growing curtain-wall. One disciple was mounting a prayer wheel onto one of the posts. Another two were spreading an elaborately embroidered dark red-orange cloth on the cobblestones. The fourth, shaved balder and shinier than a polished apple, stood before a Grey who was sixteen at the oldest. The Bhodi disciple had his arms folded. He looked through the youngster, who seemed to be having trouble getting across the message that these men had to stop doing what they were doing. The Protector forbade it.
This was something that would interest even Minh Subredil. She stopped walking. Sawa clung to her arm with one hand and cocked her head so she could watch, too.
I felt terribly exposed standing out there, a dozen yards from the silent gawkers.
Reinforcements for the young Grey arrived in the person of a grisled Shadar sergeant who seemed to think the Bhodi’s problem was deafness. “Clear off!” he shouted. “Or you’ll be cleared.”
The Bhodi with folded arms said, “The Protector sent for me.”
Not having gotten Murgen’s report yet, Sahra and I had no idea what this was about.
“Huh?”
The disciple preparing the prayer wheel announced its readiness. The Sergeant growled, swatted it off the post with the back of his hand. The responsible disciple bent, picked it up, began remounting it. They were not violent people, the Bhodi disciples, nor did they resist anything, but they were stubborn.
The two spreading the prayer rug were satisfied with their work. They spoke to the man with folded arms. He bowed his head slightly, then raised his eyes to meet those of the elder Shadar. In a voice loud but so calm it was disturbing, he proclaimed, “Rajadharma. The Duty of Kings. Know you: Kingship is a trust. The King is the most exalted and conscientious servant of the people.”
Not one witness had any trouble hearing and understanding those words.
The speaker settled himself on the prayer rug. His robes were an almost identical shade. He seemed to fade into a greater whole.
One of the secondary disciples passed him a large jar. He raised that as though in offering to the sky, then dumped its contents over himself. The Shadar sergeant looked as rattled as the youngster. He peered around for help.
The prayer wheel was back in place. The disciple responsible set it spinning, then backed off with the two who had spread the prayer rug.
The disciple on the rug struck flint to steel and vanished in a blast of flame just as I recognized the odor of naphtha. Heat hit me like a blow. I was in character strongly enough to whimper and grab Subredil with both hands. She resumed moving, eyes wide, stunned.
The man inside the flames never cried out, never moved till all life was gone and the charred husk left behind toppled over.
>
Crows circled above, cursing in their own tongue. So Soulcatcher knew. Or soon would.
We continued moving, into the now-animated crowd and through, heading home. The Bhodi disciples who had helped prepare the ritual suicide had disappeared already, while all eyes were fixed on the burning man.
10
I can’t believe he did that!” I said, still climbing out of Sawa’s smelly rags and crippled personality. Word had beaten us home. The suicide was all anyone wanted to discuss. Our own nighttime effort had become secondary. That was over and they had survived.
Tobo definitely did not believe it. He mentioned that in passing and insisted on telling us everything his father had seen inside the Palace last night. He referred to notes he had made with Goblin’s help. He was thoroughly proud of the job he had done and wanted to rub our noses in it. “But I couldn’t really get him to talk to me, Mom. Anything I asked seemed to be just an irritation. It was like he just wanted to get it over with so he could go away.”
“I know, dear,” Sahra said. “I know. He’s that way with me, too. Here’s some nice bread they let us bring home. Eat something. Goblin. What did they do with Swan? Is he healthy?”
One-Eye cackled. He said, “Healthy as a man with cracked ribs can be. Scared shitless, though.” He cackled again.
“Cracked ribs? Explain.”
Goblin told her, “Somebody with a grudge against the Greys got overexcited. But don’t worry about it. The guy is going to have plenty of opportunity to be sorry he let his feelings get the best of him.”
“I’m exhausted,” Sahra said. “We spent the whole day in the same room as Soulcatcher. I thought I would burst.”
“You did? It was all I could do not to run out of there screaming. I concentrated so hard on being Sawa that I missed half of what they said.”
“What didn’t get said might be more important. Soulcatcher was really suspicious about the attack.”