Shin and Ankou, the latter back in kitty form, had them seated on the floor or furniture. The Resurrectionists stood out because they were all men and were all injured or dead. The three that remained healthy enough to pay attention stared at us in aghast horror.
Firefly murmured, in TelleKurre, “And they see their doom come upon them.”
That had to be a quotation of some sort. It did not concern me much. What did, some, was that I understood her.
I counted nine men, eight of them obviously Resurrectionists.
The rest were all female, scores of them, all but two dead ringers for Mischievous Rain at varying ages, from clearly older than Kuro and Shiro down to a few months. Several older girls were obviously pregnant. Others might be without having yet begun to show.
The Resurrectionists may have been less considerate than had we of the Company.
I felt my woman’s rage blossom.
Their doom come upon them, oh yes.
So. I now knew why the hunter girls had reacted so strongly when first we scouted the castle. A hundred of their sisters lived here.
Some of the older ones, I suspected, had been brought back once the Company began collecting Mischievous Rain look-alikes.
So many eyes looking our way.
Shadows danced around Mischievous Rain like those cast by breeze-tainted candles. Stars swarmed the surface and deeps of her yukata. Her tattoos remained as busy as a bushel of snakes.
All those girls looking at us were agape. Astonished. Dumbfounded.
I saw no fear, great or small.
I checked an islet of difference, two women in Tides Elba guise, one old, the other maybe the age of Kuro and Shiro. Hard to tell. The difference was more a feeling than anything definitive. They flanked an old, stooped man who looked like a duskier, gaunt version of them.
The only sound in the place came from people shuffling and breathing. Nobody had anything to say. The freeze stretched and stretched while everyone waited for the next thing to happen.
The mushroom man turned to stone. He wanted to be overlooked. He wanted to get everything firmly committed to memory, so it would stay fixed in his mind long enough to get committed to ink.
The elder Tides Elba suffered a sudden metamorphosis, going from total slumped disinterest to spear-shaft straight and absolutely focused. She stared at Mischievous Rain, mouth open wide. She produced a wild wide grin, then shrieked, “Koneko! You came back! You finally came back!”
She charged us.
Well, she charged Mischievous Rain.
Mischievous Rain stepped down to the floor, swept the old, old teenager into a big bear hug. “Laissa! Laissa! Yes. I did come back. I finally did.”
The two sort of danced without moving their feet while hugging. The redhead said, “Papa died, Kitten. I cried a lot. That man over there is my son, Precious Pearl. The bad men forced us to make more of me and you.”
“That’s over now, Laissa. You’re safe, now. No one will ever trouble you again.”
Their conversation was in TelleKurre but I understood every word. Something had been done to me. Why? It for sure would not last. I wished that I had pen and paper in my pockets now, because this was something that my wife would not want remembered—even if she wanted it witnessed.
Stuff just went right on not making sense.
Somewhere, somehow, some woman was using some man to somehow validate something that neither he nor she understood in their hearts. And that somewhere was here in the heart of a castle that should not be.
“Firefly, do you know what’s going on?”
“Not really. Mom doesn’t tell us much about stuff that she doesn’t tell you about. But I think that’s her sister.”
Really? A sister who had been a prisoner for ages out here while Mischievous Rain still had not yet turned twenty-one?
No. Wait. That would be Tides Elba … would it not?
Firefly clung to my arm like my touch was her last hope of life, crying quietly. She murmured something like, “It’s almost over,” in TelleKurre.
The thin man and the younger Tides Elba approached us. The elder Tides Elba repeated, “This is my son. He was just born when you went away.”
“I remember. I see a lot of Papa in him.”
The thin man bowed. “Aunt Koneko. Mother says many good things about you during those rare moments when she’s lucid.”
His mother said, “I forget things, Kitten. I even forget to be me, sometimes, for years. It probably won’t be long before I forget again now.”
The one called Precious Pearl said, “Because Papa did not start her treatment soon enough.”
“I am a lost soul again, Kitten, like I was when you came to our old house…”
Laissa froze. She frowned. Her expression turned decidedly puzzled, like she had just lost complete grasp of her thoughts. Then a light seemed to overcome her.
“Kitten! I remember! When you came to our old house. When Papa had to go out into the storm … He wrote about it in his journal but even then I couldn’t remember. But I remember now!”
Like every woman in the great hall this one wore heavy peasant homespun, crudely sewn. She added a pocketed leather apron over her floor-sweeping brown skirts. “Koneko! Your rings! I saved them for you but I forgot about them forever until now! I always treasured them, even when my mind was dark and I couldn’t remember why.”
Precious said, “Mother gets really excited when her mind works right. She tries to crowd as much into the time she has as she can. I think that she would last longer if we could keep her from getting overly agitated.”
He seemed very sad about that, whatever it meant.
I caught only a glimpse of several black and silver rings that Mischievous Rain made disappear inside her yukata. I noted her considering me considering them and suspected that she was not pleased with my attention.
Those were some ugly rings. I had seen their repugnant like before but could not recall where.
Firefly’s grip was so fierce that it hurt. And, somehow while I was focused on my wife and her sister, Ankou and Beloved Shin had joined us. The cat was at my feet, ready to do cat stuff and trip me. Shin had taken station in close on my right side.
My daughter’s cheeks were wet with tears. My son eyed the gallery with emotions grimly stifled.
I could not help a growing sense of imminence.
Despite all, I surveyed those many sad-eyed dark-haired girls, some with infants in arms, and guessed that none of their babies were male.
So. For one insane moment I felt total triumph. We had won. The Port of Shadows would never open … unless one of those fat bellies there contained a boy. But that was all under control now, was it not?
Firefly whispered, “I love you, Dad. I really do. So does Shin, even if he can’t say it. I’m sorry. We’re both sorry. I think even Mom is sorry. But what has got to be has got to be.”
Her grip on my arm tightened further.
I glanced down at Shin. He had teared up, too.
Mischievous Rain half turned, looked up, met my eye. Her tattoos swarmed. She said, “Laissa, this is my beloved husband…” and she spoke a name that I had not used since long before I met any of her kind. Not since a time when I knew only sisters. A name that no one in the Company knew, not even the Captain himself.
THE LAST
In Modern Times: Croaker in the Vertiginous Shade
The darkness began to fray. I heard distant voices, as if filtered through living water, discussing me. I had been drawn way far away, beloved of death, but then had eluded its embrace. Clever me, I slithered back to the living side of the boundary.
As my mind reconstructed shape and depth I strove desperately to reclaim my dreams. Without exception they slipped away. I salvaged only abiding sorrow and a vague recollection of a little girl crying. I did not know why she cried, though the core of me believed the incident to have been existentially important. The recovering everyday me was just baffled, wondering who the hell that
kid was.
There was something in there about a boy and a cat, too, turned even more obscure.
None of my people shed any light. Head of the roster to its foot, wall to wall, every man of the Company had endured severe intellectual impairment, and every woman, too.
Dreams. Nightmares, perhaps. Everyone suffered colorful and detailed dreams that could not be recalled once the sun came up.
I tried to get Goblin, One-Eye, and Silent to study on that. Their efforts produced nothing. They just fumbled and stumbled, too.
A communicable insanity had claimed us all.
* * *
Edmous Black told me, “I’ve done everything that I can, boss. You couldn’t be more set. But I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. If the Company was gonna stay, I’d stick. But there’s no way that I’m gonna leave Aloe, love you guys or not.”
“I understand.” I did not understand. Not that, not much of anything else anymore. I was on a slide into madness. I woke up at night weeping, in flight from dreams so genuine that I could smell and taste stuff that must once have been real … though I found nothing in the Annals to support my convictions … which ever faded like morning dew.
A stroll around the compound took me past structures that no one could recall our reasons for building. The builders themselves could not remember why we had hired them. I could wander through a women’s barracks big enough for a hundred troopers and never guess why we had needed the space when the Company had only nine female members, most of them married to Company men. My near nemesis Chiba Vinh Nwynn was more baffled than I was. She was convinced that something terrible had been done to her mind. She retained ghost memories of a time when the barracks she managed had been overcrowded.
Almost nine hundred people make up today’s Company. All of those who belonged a year ago are now cursed with confused, distorted, evaporating recollections … of something. From the Old Man down to the Third and local kid Gurdlief Speak, folks keep asking me for news they need to make sense of a time that no surviving memories make sensible. I cannot help them. My own memories have been compromised worse than anyone else’s. The Annals that might explain have all disappeared as though they never ever were.
The Old Man, the Lieutenant, Candy, those guys are not even a little stupid. They can winkle out truths just by staring down things that are not there when other people look at them. But they do not know now, either.
I suppose even a moron would conclude, based on the evidence, that the Black Company must have been smacked with a widespread, savage, and utterly, angrily deliberate memory assault.
Our top echelons are now preoccupied because we have received warning orders. The Company is to move on to a province named Tally, where the Rebel has been making a mighty comeback. When the need for preparation does not consume us we gang up and try to weave feeble recollections into a trusty portrait of what we had survived and then lost to an insidious thief.
Between us we can recall maybe ten names of people who are not now with the Company but who never graduated into Outsweeper’s keeping.
Foremost, recalled by most everyone: Mischievous Rain, hauntingly beautiful. My heart, whom I shall love forever.
Secondarily, Two Dead Shoré Chodroze, possibly a will-o’-the-wisp Taken, though I cannot quite connect with that notion myself, and, then, Tides Elba.
Names I sometimes dream include: Ankou, Beloved Shin, Blessed Baku, Koneko, Kuroneko, Shironeko, Firefly … But I do not have the least notion what those names mean. Are they people? Places? Things?
My heart wants them to be people that once I loved.
Those names surfaced in the dreamtimes and evaporated quickly once I wakened. I kept pen, paper, and ink close by my bed. I got misty-eyed during the recording, every time.
I never developed a convincing theory of why.
Sometimes I find myself missing a pet cat that I never had. More often I find myself totally, insanely paranoid, shying away from every damned shadow when there is no way that shadows can hurt me.
* * *
So there I was, ready to head out to Tally, totally confident that I was insane and almost equally confident that sanity no longer mattered.
Silent invited himself into my kingdom of crazy.
He signed, “The truth cannot be lost, Croaker. Not even your children will be able to ferret out every copy…”
He stopped, stricken by the sudden realization that I had no idea what he was talking about.
He signed, “Even I will forget, of course, but, still, there will be a few who do not.”
Sana. Of course.
Sana? That had to be somebody’s name. But whose?
I said, “I’m lost. I’m drenched in ghostly dreams of things that cannot possibly have been. I’m drowning in dreams about people and events that can’t possibly be real. And every dream totally fades within moments after I wake up. The only rational explanation is that I have gone completely mad.”
And I was not entirely uncomfortable with that.
Silent signed, “Indeed you have, but not in any way that you or I will long be able to imagine.”
I remember him signing that but do not recall why his opinion mattered, nor why he came to me to express it.
He no longer recalls the incident himself. As he had foreseen.
* * *
So what I have now is a sketchbook wherein I record any fragment that surfaces, like a bone chip working its way to the light. Scores once contributed bits but now no one bothers to report in. The forgetting is almost complete. Even I no longer jump out of bed in the night to attack my sketchbook with some sudden, unexpected recollection.
It will not be long, now.
Even the conviction that I might have lost something infinitely precious steadily grows more pale.
POSTSCRIPT
In This Age of Shadow-Soaked Days
The foregoing history was created using manuscript fragments found while Aloe strove to resurrect itself after having been devastated by a cyclone twenty-eight years after the latest events described. The most complete manuscript came from a chest that belonged to Sora Zhorab, spinster daughter of the Markeg Zhorab featured in the record. Oral history suggests that Sora never got over one of the men of the Black Company.
The testimony of Sana Ans, who actually remembers everything, corroborates what Croaker recorded.
The Company left Aloe a year or two after the subjugation of the Ghost Country. Imperial forces abandoned the Aloe facility a decade later, during a general withdrawal westward, once the Lady’s empire began to tear itself apart with wars amongst the Taken.
Scholars generally concede that what Croaker recorded was what he witnessed, within the limits of tainted memory. The man never showed any will to deceive.
However, anything that he based upon secondary sources, to be maximally generous, must be accounted unreliable. Anything concerning the Senjak family, whatever the source, must, in the vernacular, be considered utter bullshit.
None of the Senjak sisters were described accurately. None of them were identified by their correct names. Laissa could not possibly have been Dorotea Senjak because Dorotea Senjak is almost certainly the Senjak sister who became the Taken Soulcatcher.
Most scholars are skeptical about the whole death and resurrection scenario, too, preferring to believe that to be a cover story for an elopement in defiance of the Senjak family elders.
Modern thought agrees that the Bathdek of the manuscript, supposedly Credence Senjak, sometimes referred to as Kitten or Koneko, has to be the sister who became the Lady. Her time as Kitten would influence her forever after, gifting a fierce sociopath with rudimentary empathy and a ghost of a conscience that would compel her, in extremis, to make unlikely choices when the welfare of the world trumped her personal ambitions.
The manuscript delivered several other likely accurate surprises. The pedophilic proclivities of the Dominator were traditionally reckoned to be just mud flung in hatred. And the likelihood t
hat many of the original Ten Who Were Taken were related to one another, and were Senjak family outliers, unraveled several long-standing mysteries.
The modern events described by Croaker are supported by witness testimony, though not always in exactly the way that he reports them. The Black Company’s interactions with the Limper are attested nowhere else, although a copy of the imperial rescript that Croaker references is amongst the Sora Zhorab papers.
Edmous Black, Gurdlief Speak, and Sana Ans, all still living, believe the Limper stories to be true.
However, all of those three do allow that Croaker was never above adding drama when he described events, nor did he disdain to portray himself as more heroic and central to events than he actually was, despite his literary inclination toward self-deprecation.
Today’s fiercest debate revolves around the identity of Mischievous Rain. Who was she, really?
Most scholars believe that she was the Lady herself, while a minority argue that she must be one of the earliest copy girls sent to the Tower, especially trained for the Mischievous Rain role. That argument fails upon a quick skim of Croaker’s work. He reports that Mischievous Rain’s first visit to Aloe took place before any copy girls were found and relayed to the Tower.
Determined conspiracy theorists counterargue that, yes, indeed, that Mischievous Rain might have been the Lady herself, but the Mischievous Rain who came next time, who directed the campaign to cleanse the Ghost Country, had to be a different and more naive woman because she became so thoroughly infatuated with the Annalist.
A common belief at that time was that the Lady could not leave the Tower at Charm without weakening her supreme powers. That belief was, almost certainly, created through the deliberate spread of disinformation. During and after the Battle at Charm the Lady did exactly that, accompanied by Croaker himself, when she went out to hunt her sister Soulcatcher. That particular adventure did not cost her, nor did she lose her powers when later she visited the Barrowland.
Croaker is vague about the Taken of this time. He names Limper, Whisper, Feather, and Journey, and Mischievous Rain, who may not have been Taken at all. But there were others at that time, perhaps as many as five more, all of whom supposedly participated in the shriving of the Ghost Country. Some, surely, as with Whisper, Feather, and Journey, would have been recycled Rebel magic users who had been captured at Charm.