The Many Deaths of the Black Company Read online

  The Protector hunts us in her more lucid moments but she never remains interested long. She cannot keep her attention fixed on anything. And why should she be concerned? We are dead. We no longer exist. She herself has declared that to be the reality. As Protector, she is the great arbiter of reality for the entire Taglian empire.

  But: Water Sleeps.

  3

  In those days the spine of the Company was a woman who never formally joined, the witch Ky Sahra, wife of my predecessor as Annalist, Murgen, the Standardbearer. Ky Sahra was a clever woman with a will like sharp steel. Even Goblin and One-Eye deferred to her. She would not be intimidated, not even by her wicked old Uncle Doj. She feared the Protector, the Radisha and the Greys no more than she feared a cabbage. The malice of evils as great as the deadly cult of Deceivers, their messiah the Daughter of Night and their goddess Kina, intimidated Sahra not at all. She had looked into the heart of darkness. Its secrets inspired in her no dread. Only one thing made Sahra tremble.

  Her mother, Ky Gota, was the incarnation of dissatisfaction and complaint. Her lamentations and reproaches were of such amazing potency that it seemed she must be an avatar of some cranky old deity as yet undiscovered by man.

  Nobody loves Ky Gota except One-Eye. And even he calls her the Troll behind her back.

  Sahra shuddered as her mother limped slowly through a room gone suddenly silent. We were not in power now. We had to use the same few rooms for everything. Only a short while ago this one had been filled with loafers, some Company, most of them employees of Banh Do Trang. We all stared at the old woman, willing her to hurry. Willing her to overlook this opportunity to socialize.

  Old Do Trang, who was so feeble he was confined to a wheelchair, rolled over to Ky Gota, evidently hoping a show of concern would keep her moving.

  Everyone always wanted Gota to go somewhere else.

  This time his sacrifice worked. She had to be in a lot of discomfort, though, not to take time to harangue all who were younger than she.

  Silence persisted till the old merchant returned. He owned the place and let us use it as our operational headquarters. He owed us nothing, but nevertheless, shared our danger out of love for Sahra. In all matters his thoughts had to be heard and his wishes had to be honored.

  Do Trang was not gone long. He came back rolling wearily. The man behind the liver spots seemed so fragile it had to be a miracle that he could move his chair himself.

  Ancient he was, but there was an irrepressible twinkle in his eyes. He nodded. He seldom had anything to say unless someone else said something incredibly stupid. He was a good man.

  Sahra told us, “Everything is in place. Every phase and facet has been double-checked. Goblin and One-Eye are sober. It’s time the Company speaks up.” She glanced around, inviting comments.

  I did not think it was time. But I had said my piece when I was planning this. And had been outvoted. I treated myself to a shrug of despair.

  There being no new objections, Sahra said, “Start the first phase.” She waved at her son. Tobo nodded and slipped out.

  * * *

  He was a skinny, scruffy, furtive youngster. He was Nyueng Bao, which meant he had to be a sneak and a thief. His every move had to be watched. In consequence he was so generally observed that no individual examined in detail what he actually did so long as his hands did not stray toward a dangling purse or some treasure in a vendor’s stall. People did not look for what they did not expect to see.

  The boy’s hands stayed behind his back. While they were there, he was not considered a threat. He could not steal. No one noticed the small, discolored blobs he left on any wall he leaned against.

  Gunni children stared. The boy looked so strange in his black pajama clothing. Gunni raise their children polite. Gunni are peaceable folk, in the main. Shadar children, though, are wrought of sterner stuff. They are more bold. Their religion has a warrior philosophy at its root. Some Shadar youths set out to harass the thief.

  Of course he was a thief! He was Nyueng Bao. Everyone knew all Nyueng Bao were thieves.

  Older Shadar called the youngsters off. The thief would be dealt with by those whose responsibility that was.

  The Shadar religion has its streak of bureaucratic rectitude, too.

  Even such a small commotion attracted official attention. Three tall, grey-clad, bearded Shadar peacekeepers wearing white turbans advanced through the press. They looked around constantly, intently, oblivious to the fact that they traveled in an island of open space. The streets of Taglios are packed, day and night, yet the masses always find room to shrink away from the Greys. The Greys are all men with hard eyes, seemingly chosen for their lack of patience and compassion.

  Tobo drifted away, sliding through the mob like a black snake through swamp reeds. When the Greys inquired about the commotion, no one could describe him as anything but what prejudice led them to presume. A Nyueng Bao thief. And there was a plague of those in Taglios. These days the capital-city boasted plenty of every kind of outlander imaginable. Every layabout and lackwit and sharpster from the length and breadth of the empire was migrating to the city. The population had tripled in a generation. But for the cruel efficiencies of the Greys, Taglios would have become a chaotic, murderous sink, a hellfire fueled by poverty and despair.

  Poverty and despair existed in plentitude but the Palace did not let any disorder take root. The Palace was good at ferreting out secrets. Criminal careers tended to be short. As did the lives of most who sought to conspire against the Radisha or the Protector. Particularly against the Protector, who did not concern herself deeply with the sanctity of anyone else’s skin.

  In times past, intrigue and conspiracy had been a miasmatic plague afflicting every life in Taglios. There was little of that anymore. The Protector did not approve. Most Taglians were eager to win the Protector’s approval. Even the priesthoods avoided attracting Soulcatcher’s evil eye.

  At some point the boy’s black clothing came off, leaving him in the Gunni-style loincloth he had worn underneath. Now he looked like any other youngster, though with a slightly jaundiced cast of skin. He was safe. He had grown up in Taglios. He had no accent to give him away.

  4

  It was the waiting time, the stillness, the doing nothing that there is so much of before any serious action. I was out of practice. I could not lean back and play tonk or just watch while One-Eye and Goblin tried to cheat each other. And I had writer’s cramp, so could not work on my Annals.

  “Tobo!” I called. “You want to go see it happen?”

  Tobo was fourteen. He was the youngest of us. He grew up in the Black Company. He had a full measure of youth’s exuberance and impatience and overconfidence in his own immortality and divine exemption from retribution. He enjoyed his assignments on behalf of the Company. He was not quite sure he believed in his father. He never knew the man. We tried hard to keep him from becoming anyone’s spoiled baby. But Goblin insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to tutor the boy.

  Goblin’s command of written Taglian was more limited than he would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I use a mixture recording these Annals.

  Once Tobo could read, “Uncle” Goblin made him do all his reading for him, aloud.

  “Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more would get more attention in the Palace.”

  I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are surly at best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would have been ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed with so many “uncles” who would not tolerate that stuff. Naturally, Tobo saw all that as a grand conspiracy of adults. Publicly. In private, he was amenable to reason. Occasionally. When approached delicately by someone who was not his mother.

  “Maybe a few. But it’s going to get dark soon. And then the show will start.”


  “What’ll we go as? I don’t like it when you’re a whore.”

  “We’ll be street orphans.” Though that had its risks, too. We could get caught by a press gang and forced into Mogaba’s army. His soldiers, these days, are little better than slaves, subject to a savage discipline. Many are petty criminals given an option of rough justice or enlistment. The rest are children of poverty with nowhere else to go. Which was the standard of professional armies men like Murgen saw in the far north, long before my time.

  “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 o
ne 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 tame 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 shadowtraps 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.