Goblin came hobbling into the early morning light, cursing all the way. He wore the all-covering brown wool of a veyedeen dervish. He hated the outfit, however necessary it was to disguise himself when he was outside. I did not blame him. The wool was hot. It was supposed to remind the holy men of the hell they were escaping by devoting themselves to chastity, asceticism and good works. “What the hell is this shit?” he growled. “It’s hot enough to boil eggs out here already.”
“The boys say we’ve caught something in our shadow-traps. I thought you might want to do something about that before Mama comes looking for her babies.”
“Shit. More work —”
“Old man, you just had something in your mouth I wouldn’t even want in my hand.”
“Vehdna priss. Get the flock out of here before I give you a real language lesson. And bring home something decent to eat when you come back. Like maybe a cow.”
More than once he and One-Eye had conspired to kidnap one of the sacred cattle that wander the city. To date, their efforts have come to naught because none of the men will go along. The majority have Gunni backgounds.
It took no time at all to learn that our shadow captives were not the only shadows that had run wild just before dawn. Rumor was rife. The stories of the murders the shadows committed banished news of the attack on the Palace and the self-immolation of the Bhodi disciple. The killings were closer to home and closer in time. And they were grotesque. The corpse of a man whose life has been devoured by a shadow is a twisted husk of the creature that was.
I insinuated myself into the crowd surrounding the doorway of a family where there had been multiple deaths. You can do that when you are little and limber and know how to use your elbows. I arrived just in time to watch them bring the bodies out. I was hoping they would be exposed to the public eye. Not that I wanted to see them myself. I saw plenty of those kinds of bodies during the Shadowmaster wars. I just thought the people ought to see what Soulcatcher could do. She needed all the enemies she could get.
The bodies were enshrouded already. But there was talk.
I traveled on, learning that most of the dead had been people who lived on the streets. And there had been a lot of those, taken in no obvious pattern whatsoever. It looked like Soulcatcher had sent the shadows out just to demonstrate that she had the power and the will to kill.
The deaths had evoked no great fear. People thought it was over. Most of them did not know any of the dead so were not angry, either. Curiosity and revulsion were the common emotions.
I considered turning back to tell Goblin to fix the captured shadows so they would go out killing again tonight and every night thereafter, till Soulcatcher tracked them down. She would not look for trappers if she thought her pets had gone rogue. And the shadows would create a lot more enemies for her before their terror ended.
At first it seemed the Greys had faded from the streets. They were less in evidence than usual. But as I skirted Chor Bagan, it became evident why. They had the place under siege, apparently on the assumption that any Black Company survivers, having been branded bandits by the Protector, would hide themselves amongst Taglios’ homegrown thieves and villains. Amusing.
Sahra and I insist that we have as little to do with the criminal element as possible — over One-Eye’s objections. And ignoring Banh Do Trang’s occasional lapses. That element included folk of dubious morals and discipline who might serve us up for enough blood money to buy one more jar of illegal wine. I hoped they and the Greys had fun. I hoped somebody forgot the rules and their day turned bloody. That would make life easier for me and mine.
Any trip across town exposes you to the cruel truth about Taglios. Beggary exists there like nowhere else in the world. Were someone to sweep the city clean and organize the beggars into regiments, they would number more than the biggest army the Captain put together in the days of the Shadowmaster wars. If you look the least bit foreign or prosperous, they come at you in waves. Every attempt is made to exploit your pity. Not far from Do Trang’s warehouse there is a boy with neither hands nor lower legs. Somehow, blocks of wood have been affixed in their place. He crawls around with a bowl in his mouth. Every cripple over the age of fifteen claims to be a wounded hero of the wars. The children are the worst. Often they have been maimed deliberately, their limbs deformed evilly. They are sold to men who then feel they own them because they feed them a handful of toasted grain every few days.
A new mystery of the city is that men of that stripe seem to run the risk of cruel tortures and their own careers as deformed beggars. If they do not watch their backs very, very carefully.
My route took me near one such. He had one arm he could use to drag himself around. The rest of his limbs were twisted ruins. His bones had been crushed to gravel but he had been kept alive by a dedicated effort. His face and exposed skin were covered with burn scars. I paused to place one small copper in his bowl.
He whimpered and tried to crawl away. He could still see out of one eye.
Everywhere you looked, life proceeded in the unique Taglian fashion. Every vehicle in motion had people hanging off it, sponging a ride. Unless it was the ricksha of a rich man, perhaps a banker from Kowlhri Street, who could afford outrunners armed with bamboo canes to keep people off. Shopkeepers often sat on top of their tiny counters because there was no other space. Workmen jogged hither and yon with backbreaking loads, violently cursing everyone in their way. The people argued, laughed, waved their arms wildly, simply stepped to the side of the street where no one was lying to defecate when the need came upon them. They bathed in the water in the gutters, indifferent to the fact that a neighbor was urinating in the same stream fifteen feet away.
Taglios is an all-out, relentless assault upon all the senses but engages none so much as it does the sense of smell. I hate the rainy season but without its protracted sluicings-out, Taglios would become untenable even for rats. Without the rains, the endemic cholera and smallpox would be far worse than they are — though the rainy times bring outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever. Disease of every sort is common and accepted stoically.
And then there are the lepers, whose plight gives new depth of meaning to horror and despair. Never do I find my faith in God so tested as when I consider the lepers. I am as terrified by them as anyone but I do know enough about some individuals to realize that very few are being visited by a scourge they deserve. Unless the Gunni are right and they are paying for evils done in previous lives.
Up above it all are the kites and crows, the buzzards and vultures. For the eaters of carrion, life is good. Till the dead wagons come to collect the fallen.
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess.
When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing.
12
The library, created by and bequeathed to the city by an earlier mercantile prince who was much impressed by learning, strikes me as a symbol of knowledge rearing up to shed its light into the surrounding darkness of ignorance. Some of the city’s worst slums wash right up against the wall enclosing its ground. The beggars are bad around its outer gates. Why is a puzzlement. I have never seen anyone toss them a coin.
There is a gateman but he is not a guard. He lacks even a bamboo cane. But a cane is unnecessary. The sanctity of the place of knowledge is observed by everyone. Everyone but me, you might say.
“Good morning, Adoo,” I said as the gateman swung the wrought iron open for me. Though I was a glorified sweeper and fetch-it man, I had status. I appeared to enjoy the favor of some of the bhadrhalok.
Status and caste grew more important as Taglios became more crowded and resources grew less plentiful. Caste has become much more rigidly defined and observed in just the last ten years. People are desperate to cling to the little that
they have already. Likewise, the trade guilds have grown increasingly powerful. Several have raised small, private armed forces that they use to make sure immigrants and other outsiders do not trample on their preserves, or that they sometimes hire out to temples or others in need of justice. Some of our brothers have done some work in that vein. It generates revenue and creates contacts and allows us glimpses inside otherwise closed societies.
Outside, the library resembles the more ornate Gunni temples. Its pillars and walls are covered with reliefs recalling stories both mythical and historical. It is not a huge place, being just thirty yards on its long side and sixty feet the other way. Its main floor is elevated ten feet above the surrounding gardens and monuments, which themselves cap a small knoll. The building proper is tall enough that inside there is a full-size hanging gallery all the way around at the level where a second floor should be, then an attic of sorts above that, plus a well-drained basement below the main floor. I find that interior much too open for comfort. Unless I am way down low or way up high, everyone can watch what I am doing.
The main floor is an expanse of marble, brought from somewhere far away. Upon it, in neat rows, stand the desks and tables where the scholars work, either studying or copying decaying manuscripts. The climate is not conducive to the longevity of books. There is a certain sadness to the library, a developing air of neglect. Scholars grow fewer each year. The Protector does not care about the library because it cannot brag that it contains old books full of deadly spells. There is not one grimoire in the place. Though there is a lot of very interesting stuff — if she bothered to look. But that sort of curiosity is not part of her character.
There are more glass windows in the library than anywhere else I have ever seen. The copyists need a lot of light. Most of them, these days, are old and their sight is failing. Master Santaraksita often goes on about the library having no future. No one wants to visit it anymore. He believes that has something to do with the hysterical fear of the past that began to build soon after the rise of the Shadowmasters, when he was still a young man. Back when fear of the Black Company gained circulation, before the Company ever appeared.
I stepped into the library and surveyed it. I loved the place. In another time I would gladly have become one of Master Santaraksita’s acolytes. If I could have survived the close scrutiny endured by would-be students.
I was not Gunni. I was not high caste. The former I could fake well enough to get by. I had been surrounded by Gunni all my life. But I did not know caste from within. Only the priestly caste and some selected commercial-caste folks were permitted to be literate. Though familiar with the vulgate and the High Mode both, I could never pretend to have grown up in a priestly household fallen on hard times. I had not grown up in much of any kind of household.
I had the place entirely to myself. And there was no obvious cleaning that needed doing right away.
It ever amazed me that no one actually lived in the library. That it was more holy or more frightening than a temple. The kangali — the parentless and homeless and fearless boys of the street, who run in troops of six to eight — see temples as just another potential resource. But they would not trouble the library.
To the unlettered, the knowledge contained in books was almost as terrible as the knowledge bound up in the flesh of a creature as wicked as Soulcatcher.
I had one of the best jobs in Taglios. I was the main caretaker at the biggest depository and replicatory of books within the Taglian empire. It had taken three and a half years of scheming and several carefully targeted murders to put me into a position I enjoyed way too much. Always before me was the temptation to forget the Company. The temptation might have gotten me had I had the social qualifications to be anything but a janitor who sneaked peeks into books when nobody was looking.
In quick order I conjured the tools of my purported trade, then hurried to one of the more remote copying desks. It was out of the way, yet offered a good line of vision and good acoustics so I would not be surprised doing something both forbidden and impossible.
I had gotten caught twice already, luckily both times with Tantric books illuminated with illustrations. They thought I was sneaking peeks at dirty pictures. Master Santaraksita himself suggested I go study temple walls if that sort of thing appealed to me. But I could not help feeling that he began to harbor a deep suspicion after the second incident.
They never threatened me with dismissal or even punishment, but they made it clear I was out of line, that the gods punish those who exceed caste and station. They were, of course, unaware of my origins or associations, or of my disinclination to accept the Gunni religion with all its idolatry and tolerance for wickedness.
I dug out the book that purported to be a history of Taglios’ earliest days. I would not have been aware of it had I not noticed it being copied from a manuscript so old that much of it had appeared to be in a style of calligraphy resembling that of the old Annals I was having so much trouble deciphering. Old Baladitya, the copyist, had had no difficulty rendering the text in modern Taglian. I have salvaged the moldy, crumbling original. I had it hidden. I had a notion that by comparing versions I could get a handle on the dialect of those old Annals.
If not, Girish could be offered a chance to translate for the Black Company, an opportunity he ought to pounce on considering the alternative available at that point.
I already knew that the books I wanted to translate were copies of even earlier versions, at least two of which had been transcribed originally in another language entirely — presumably that spoken by our first brothers when they came down off the plain of glittering stone.
I started at the beginning.
It was an interesting story.
Taglios began as a collection of mud huts beside the river. Some of the villagers fished and dodged crocodiles, while others raised a variety of crops. The city grew for no obvious reason beyond its being the last viable landing before the river lost itself in the pestilential delta swamps, in those days not yet inhabited by the Nyueng Bao. Trade from upriver continued overland to “all the great kingdoms of the south.” Not a one of those was mentioned by name. Taglios began as a tributary of Baladiltyla, a city great in oral histories and no longer in existence. It is sometimes associated with some really ancient ruins outside the village of Videha, which itself is associated with the intellectual achievements of a “Kuras empire” and is the center of ruins of another sort entirely. Baladiltyla was the birthplace of Rhaydreynak, the warrior king who nearly exterminated the Deceivers in antiquity and who harried the handful of survivors into burying their sacred texts, the Books of the Dead, in that same cavern where Murgen now lay entombed with all the old men in their cobwebs of ice.
Not all this was information from the book I was reading. As I went, I made connections with things I had read or heard elsewhere. This was very exciting stuff. For me.
Here was an answer for Goblin. The princes of Taglios could not be kings because they honored as their sovereigns the kings of Nhanda, who raised them up. Of course Nhanda was no more and Goblin would want to know why, in that case, the Taglian princes could not just crown themselves. There were plenty of precedents. From the looks of the history of the centuries before the coming of the Black Company, that had been the favorite pastime of anybody who could get three or four men to follow him around.
I overcame a powerful urge to rush ahead and look for the era when the Free Companies of Khatovar exploded upon the world. What had happened before that would help explain what had happened when they did.
13
A sudden, startled thrill ran through me. I was not alone anymore. A long time had passed. The sun had swung several hours across the sky. The quality of the light within the library had changed. It had become a much paler version of its morning self. Presumably the clouds had passed away.
I did not jump or, I hope, show any immediate outward reaction. But I did have to respond visibly to my awareness of the presence of whoever was
standing behind me. Perhaps it was his breath that alerted me. The curry and garlic were strong. Certainly I never heard a sound.
I brought my heartbeat under control, smoothed my features, turned.
The Master of the Library, my boss, Surendranath Santaraksita, met my gaze. “Dorabee. I believe you were reading.” At the library they know me as Dorabee Dey Banerjae. An honorable name. A man of that name died beside me in a skirmish near the Daka Woods a long time ago. He did not need it anymore and I would do it no harm.
I did not speak. The truth would be hard to deny if the Master had been there long. I was halfway through the book, which was of the bound sort and contained no illustrations whatsoever, not even one Tantric passage.
“I have been watching you for some time, Dorabee. Your interest and skill are both evident. It’s clear that you read better than most of my copyists. Yet it’s equally obvious that you aren’t of the priestly caste.”
My face was still as old cheese. I was wondering if I should kill him and how I could dispose of the corpse if I did. Perhaps the Stranglers could be framed... No. Master Santaraksita was old but still hale enough to throw me around if I tried to throttle him. Being small has definite disadvantages at times. He had eight inches on me but at the moment that seemed like several feet. And someone else was moving around at the other end of the library. I heard voices.
I did not drop my eyes the way a menial should. Master Santaraksita already knew I was more than a curious sweeper, though a good one. I kept the place spotless. That was a Company rule. Our public characters had to be morally straight and excellent workers. Which did not make some of the men at all happy.