The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (11 page)

No. Master Surendranath Santaraksita did not yet live in a world where one who read and cherished sacred texts also cut throats and trafficked with sorcerers, the dead and rakshasas. Master Surendranath Santaraksita did not think of himself that way, but he was a sort of holy hermit, self-consecrated to preserve all that was good in knowledge and culture. This much I had discovered already, through continuous observation. I had figured out, also, that we might not often agree on what was good.

“You just wish to learn, then.”

“I lust after knowledge the way some men lust after pleasures of the flesh. I’ve always been that way. I can’t help it. It’s an obsession.”

Santaraksita leaned a little closer, studying me with myopic eyes. “You are older than you seem.”

I confessed. “People think I’m younger than I am because I’m small.”

“Tell me about yourself, Dorabee Dey Banerjae. Who was your father? Of what family was your mother?”

“You will not have heard of them.” I considered refusing to elaborate. But Dorabee Dey Banerjae did have a story. I had been rehearsing it for seven years. If I just stayed in character, it would all be true.

Stay in character. Be Dorabee caught reading. Let Sleepy worry about what to do when it was time for Sleepy to come back onstage.

“You denigrate yourself overmuch,” Santaraksita said at one point. “I may have known your father … if he was the same Dollal Dey Banerjae who could not resist the Liberator’s call for recruits when he raised the original legion that triumphed at Ghoja Ford.”

I had named dead Dorabee’s father already. I could not take that back now. How could he know Dollal, anyway? Banerjae was one of the oldest and most common of traditional Taglian surnames. Banerjaes were mentioned in the text I had been reading till moments ago. “That may have been him. I never knew him well. I do recall him boasting that he was one of the first to enroll. He marched off with the Liberator to defeat the Shadowmasters. He never came back from Ghoja Ford.” I did not know much more about Dorabee’s family. Not even his mother’s name. In all Taglios how could it be possible I would encounter anyone who remembered the father? Fortune is indeed a goddess filled with caprice. “Did you know him well?” If that was so, the librarian might have to go—just that would make my exposure inevitable.

“No. Not well. Not well at all.” Now Master Santaraksita seemed disinclined to say more. He seemed worrisomely thoughtful. After a moment he told me, “Come with me, Dorabee.”

“Sri?”

“You brought up the university at Vikramas. I have a list of the questions the gate guards put to those who wanted to enroll. Curiosity impels me to subject you to the same examination.”

“I know little about Janai, Master.” If the truth were told, I was a bit shaky on the tenets of my own religion, always having been afraid to examine it too closely. Other religions do not stand up to the rigorous application of reason, for all we have things like Kina stalking the earth, and I really did not want to find myself stumbling over any boulders of absurdity protruding from the bedrock of my own faith.

“The examination was not religious in nature, Dorabee. It tested the prospective student’s morals, ethics and ability to think. Janaka monks did not wish to educate potential leaders who would come to their calling with the stain of darkness upon their souls.”

That being the case, I had to get into character very deeply indeed. Sleepy, the Vehdna soldier girl from Jaicur, had stains on her soul blacker than a shadow of all night falling.

14

“Then what did you do?” Tobo asked.

Around a mouthful of spicy Taglian-style rice, I told him, “Then I went out and made sure the library was clean.” And Surendranath Santaraksita remained where he was, stunned into immobility by the answers he had received from a lowly sweeper. I could have told him that anyone who paid attention to the storytellers in the street, the sermons of mendicant priests, and the readily available gratuitous advice of hermits and yogis, could have satisfied most of the Vikramas questions. Darn it, a Vehdna woman from Jaicur could do it.

“We got to kill him,” One-Eye said. “How you want to do it?”

“That’s always your solution these days, isn’t it?” I asked.

“The more we get rid of now, the fewer there’ll be around to aggravate me in my old age.”

I could not tell if he was joking. “When you start getting old, we’ll worry about it.”

“Guy like that will be easy, Little Girl. He won’t be looking for it. Bam! He’s gone. And nobody’ll care. Strangle his ass. Leave a rumel on him. Blame it on our old buddy Narayan. He’s in town, we need to put all kinds of shit off on him.”

“Language, old man.” One-Eye babbled on, putting a name to animal waste in a hundred tongues. I turned my back. “Sahra? You’ve been very quiet.”

“I’ve been trying to digest what I picked up today. By the way, Jaul Barundandi was distraught because you stayed home. Tried to take your kickback out of my wages. He finally found Minh Subredil’s limit. I threatened to scream. He would’ve called my bluff if his wife hadn’t been around somewhere. Are you sure it’s safe to let this librarian live? If it looked natural, no one would suspect—”

“It may not be safe but it could pay dividends. Master Santaraksita wants to make some kind of experiment out of me. To see if a low-caste dog really can be taught to roll over and play dead. What about Soulcatcher? What about the shadows? Did you learn anything?”

“She loosed everything she had. Just an impulse. No master plan except to remind the city of her power. She expected the victims to be immigrants who live in the streets. No one much cares about them. Only a handful of shadows got back before dawn. Our captives won’t be missed until tomorrow.”

“We could go catch a few more—”

“Bats,” Goblin said, inviting himself to take a seat. One-Eye appeared to have dozed off. He still had hold of his cane, though. “Bats. There’s bats out there tonight.”

Sahra offered a confirming nod.

Goblin said, “Back before we marched against the Shadowmasters, we killed all the bats. Had bounties on them big enough for bat hunters to make a living. Because the Shadowmasters used them to spy.”

I recalled a time when crows were murdered relentlessly because they might be acting as Soulcatcher’s far-flying eyes. “You’re saying we should stay in tonight?”

“Mind like a stone ax, this old gal.”

I asked Sahra, “What did Soulcatcher think about our attack?”

“It didn’t come up where I could hear.” She pushed some sheets from the old Annals across. “The Bhodi suicide bothered her more. She’s afraid it might start a trend.”

“A trend? There could be more than one monk goofy enough to set himself on fire?”

“She thinks so.”

Tobo asked, “Mom, are we going to call up Dad tonight?”

“I don’t know right now, dear.”

“I want to talk to him some more.”

“You will. I’m sure he’s interested in talking to you, too.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

I asked Goblin, “Would it be possible for you to keep that mist thing going all the time so we could keep Murgen connected and any time we wanted, we could just send him where we needed to know about something?”

“We’re working on it.” He took off on a technical rant. I did not understand a word but I let him roll. He deserved to feel good about something.

One-Eye began to snore. The smart would stay out of reach of his cane anyway.

I said, “Tobo could keep notes all the time.…” I had had this sudden vision of the son of the Annalist taking over for the father, the way it goes in Taglian guilds, where trades and tools pass down generation after generation.

“In fact,” One-Eye said, as though no time had passed since the last remark, and as though he had not been faking sleep a moment ago, “right now’s the time you could play you a really great big ol’ hairy-assed, old-time Company dirty trick, Little Girl. Send somebody down to the silk merchants’ exchange. Have them get you some silk, different colors. Big enough to make up copies of them scarves the Stranglers use. Them rumels. Then we start picking off the guys we don’t like anyway. Once in a while we leave one of them scarves behind. Like with that librarian.”

I said, “I like that. Except the part about Master Santaraksita. That’s a closed subject, old man.”

One-Eye cackled. “Man’s got to stand by what he believes.”

“It
would
get a lot of fingers pointing,” Goblin said.

One-Eye cackled again. “It would point them in some other direction, too, Little Girl. And I’m thinking we don’t want much more attention coming our way right now. I’m thinking maybe we’re closer to figuring things out than any of us realizes.”

“Water sleeps. We have to be taken seriously.”

“That’s what I’m saying. We use them scarves to take out informants and guys who know too much. Librarians, for instance.”

“Would I be correct in my suspicion that you’ve been thinking about this for a while and by chance you just happen to have a little list all ready to go?” Very likely any such list would include all the people responsible for his several failed attempts to establish himself in the Taglian black markets.

He cackled. He took a swipe at Goblin with his cane. “And you said she’s got a mind like a flint hatchet.”

“Bring me the list. I’ll discuss it with Murgen next time I see him.”

“With a ghost? They got no sense of perspective, you know.”

“You mean maybe he’s seen everything and knows what you’re really up to? Sounds like a perspective to me. Makes me wonder how far the Company might’ve gone if our forebrethren had had a ghost to keep an eye on you.”

One-Eye grumbled something about how unfair and unreasonable the world was. He had been singing that song the whole time I had known him. He would keep it up after he became a ghost himself.

I mused, “You think we could get Murgen to winkle out the source of the stink that keeps coming from the back, there, where Do Trang hides his crocodile skins? I know it’s not them. Croc hides have a flavor all their own.”

One-Eye scowled. He was ready to change the subject now. The odor in question came from his beer- and liquor-manufacturing project, hidden in a cellar he and Do Trang thought nobody knew about. Banh Do Trang, once our benefactor for Sahra’s sake, now was practically one of the gang because he had a powerful taste for One-Eye’s product, a huge hunger for illegal and shadowy income, and he liked having tough guys on the payroll who would work hard for very little money. He thought his vice was a secret he shared only with One-Eye and Gota. The three of them got drunk together twice a week.

Alcohol is a definite Nyueng Bao weakness.

“I’m sure it’s not worth the trouble, Little Girl. It’s probably dead rats. Bad rat problem in this town. Do Trang puts rat poison out all the time. By the pound. No need to waste Murgen’s time chasing rodents. You’ve both got better things to do.”

I would be talking over a lot of things with Murgen if I could deal with him directly. If we could catch and keep his attention. I would like to know firsthand everything that ordinarily came to me through other people. I imply no malice, particularly from Sahra, but people do reshape information according to their own prejudices. Including even me, possibly, though until now, my objectivity has been peerless. All my predecessors, though … their reports must be read with a jaundiced eye.

Of course, most of them made the same observation in regard to their own predecessors. So we are all in agreement. Everyone is a liar but us. Only Lady was unabashedly self-congratulating. She missed few opportunities to remind those who came later how brilliant and determined and successful she was, turning the tide of the Shadowmaster wars when she had nothing to begin building upon but herself. Murgen was, putting it charitably, less than sane much of the time. Because I lived through many of the times and events he recollected, I have to say he did pretty good. Most of what he recorded
could
be true. I cannot contradict him. But a lot he set down does seem fanciful.

Fanciful? Last night I had a long chat with his ghost. Or spirit. Or ka. Whatever that was. If that was really Murgen and not some trick played on us by Kina or Soulcatcher.

We can never be one-hundred-percent certain that anything is exactly what it appears to be. Kina is the Mother of Deceit. And Soulcatcher, to quote a man far wiser and more foul of mouth than I, is a mudsucking lunatic.

15

“This is excellent,” I enthused again as Sahra summoned Murgen once more. She herself betrayed no enthusiasm for the task. Tobo’s hovering did nothing to improve her temper. “Before he does anything else, I want to have him check on Surendranath Santaraksita.”

“So you don’t trust the librarian after all,” One-Eye said. He chuckled.

“I think he’s all right but why hand him a chance to break my heart if I can avoid it by keeping an eye on him?”

“How come it’s got to be my eye?”

“There’s not a sharper one available, is there? And you already turned down a chance to work on the Annals. I’ve got to do some heavy studying in those tonight. I might be on the track of something.”

The little wizard grunted.

“I think I found something at the library today. If Santaraksita doesn’t trip me up, I may have an outside view of the first coming of the Company by the end of the week.” An independent historical source has been a goal almost as long as has been our desire for a look at uncontaminated editions of the earliest three volumes of the Annals.

Sahra had something else on her mind. “Barundandi wants me to bring Sawa to work, Sleepy.”

“No. Sawa is on hiatus. She’s sick. She has cholera, if that’s what it takes. I’m finally starting to make some real headway. I’m not going to let that slide now.”

“He’s also been asking about Shiki.” Back when Tobo had accompanied his mother to the Palace occasionally, she had called him Shikhandini, which was a joke Jaul Barundandi never got because he was not the sort to pay attention to historical mythology. One of the kings of legendary Hastinapur had had a senior wife who seemed to be barren. A good Gunni, he prayed and made sacrifice faithfully, and eventually one of the gods stepped down from heaven to tell him he could have what he wanted, which was a son, but he was going to get it the hard way, for the son would be born a daughter. And, as they say, it came to pass that the wife brought forth a daughter whom the king then named Shikhandin, a name that also existed in the female form Shikhandini. It is a long and not that interesting story, but the girl grew up to become a mighty warrior.