The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (21 page)

“But the Black Company is supposed to be the only one that didn’t go back. The Annals say—”

“They tell you only what those who recorded them knew. My ancestors arrived here after the Black Company finished laying the land to waste and moved on north, already having lost sight of its divine mission. Deserting in its own way, through ignorance of what it was supposed to be. By then it was already three generations old and had made no effort to maintain the purity of its blood. It had just fought the war which is the first that your Annalists remember and was almost completely destroyed. That seems to be the fate of the Black Company. To be reduced to a handful, then to reconstitute itself. Again and again. Losing something of its previous self each time.”

“And the fate of your Company?” I noted that he did not mention a name. No matter, really. No name would mean anything to me.

“To sink ever deeper into ignorance itself. I know the truth. I know the secrets and the old ways. But I’m the last. Unlike other Companies, we brought our families with us. We were a late experiment. We had too much to lose. We deserted. We went and hid in the swamps. But we’ve kept our lineage pure. Almost.”

“And the pilgrimages? The old people who died in Jaicur? Hong Tray? And the great, dark, terrible secret of the Nyueng Bao that Sahra worries about so much?”

“The Nyueng Bao have many dark secrets. All the Free Companies had dark secrets. We were instruments of the darkness. The Soldiers of Darkness. The Bone Warriors charged with opening the way for Kina. Stone Soldiers warring for the honor of being remembered for all eternity by having our names written in golden letters in glittering stone. We failed because our ancestors were imperfect in their devotion. In every company there were those who were too weak to bring on the Year of the Skulls.”

“The old people?”

“Ky Dam and Hong Tray. Ky Dam was the last elected Nyueng Bao captain. There was no one to take his place. Hong Tray was a witch with the curse of foresight. She was the last true priest. Priestess.”

“Curse of foresight?”

“She never foresaw anything good.”

I sensed that he did not want to get into that subject. I recalled that Hong Tray’s final prophecy involved Murgen and Sahra, which certainly was an offense to all right-thinking Nyueng Bao—and was not yet a prophecy completely fulfilled, probably.

“The great sin of the Nyueng Bao?”

“You had that idea from Sahra, of course. And she, like all those born after the coming of the Shadowmasters, believes that ‘sin’ is what caused the Nyueng Bao to flee into the swamps. She believes wrongly. That flight involved no sin, but survival. The true black sin occurred within my own lifetime.” His voice tightened up. He had strong feelings about this.

I waited.

“I was a small boy just taking my first small steps on the Path of the Sword when the stranger came. He was a personable man of middle years. His name was Ashutosh Yaksha. In the oldest form of the language Ashutosh meant something like Despair of the Wicked. Yaksha meant much the same as it does in Taglian today.” Which was “good spirit.” “People were prepared to believe he was a supernatural being because he had a white skin. A very pale, white skin, lighter than Goblin or Willow Swan, who sometimes get some sunlight. He wasn’t an albino, though. He had normal eyes. His hair wasn’t quite as blond as Swan’s is. In sum, he was a magical creature to most Nyueng Bao. He spoke the language oddly but he did speak it. He said he wanted to study at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple, the fame of which had reached him far away.

“When pressed about his origins, he insisted that he hailed from ‘The Land of Unknown Shadows, beneath the stars of the Noose.’”

“He claimed to have come off the glittering stone?”

“Not quite. That was never clear. There or beyond. No one pressed him hard. Not even Ky Dam or Hong Tray, though he troubled them. Very early we learned that Ashutosh was a powerful sorcerer. And in those days many of the older people still knew about the origins of the Nyueng Bao. It was feared that he might have been sent to summon us home. That proved to be untrue. For a long time Ashutosh seemed to be nothing but what he claimed, a student who wanted to absorb whatever wisdom had accumulated at the temple of Ghanghesha. Which had been a holy place since the Nyueng Bao first entered the swamp.”

“But there’s a but. Right? The man was a villain after all?”

“He was indeed. In fact, Ashutosh was the man you knew later as Shadowspinner. He was there to find our Key, sent by his teacher and mentor, whom you came to know as Longshadow. At a young age this man had stumbled across rumors that not all the Free Companies had returned to Khatovar. What he understood from that, that nobody else realized, was that each Company still outside must possess a talisman capable of opening and closing the Shadowgate. An ambitious man could use that talisman to recruit rakshasas he could send out to do evil for him. The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.”

“So this Ashutosh Yaksha found the Key?”

“He only assured himself that it existed. He wormed his way into the confidence of the senior priests. One day someone let something drop. Soon afterward, Ashutosh announced that he had received word that his teacher, mentor and spiritual father, Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, impressed by his reports on the temple, had chosen to come visit. Dhumraksha turned out to be a tall, incredibly skinny man who always wore a mask, apparently because his face was deformed.”

“You heard a name like Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha and you didn’t suspect something?”

I could not see Doj in the darkness but I could feel his unhappy frown. He said, “I was a small child.”

“And the Nyueng Bao aren’t interested in anything not their own. Yes. I’m Vehdna, Uncle, but I recognize the names Manthara and Dhumraksha as those of legendary Gunni demons. Even though you walk amongst lesser beings, you might keep your ears open. That way, when a nasty
jengali
sorcerer pulls your leg, you’ll at least have a clue.”

Doj grunted. “He had a golden tongue, Dhumraksha did. When he discovered that each decade, as the custom was then, a band of the leading men undertook a pilgrimage south—”

“He invited himself along and tricked somebody into letting him examine the Key.”

“Close. But not quite. Yes. You did guess correctly. The pilgrimage went to the very Shadowgate. The pilgrims would spend ten days there waiting for a sign. I don’t believe anyone knew what that might be anymore. But the traditions had to be observed. The pilgrims, however, never took the actual Key with them. They carried a replica charged with a few simple spells meant to fool an inattentive thief. The real Key stayed home. The old men didn’t really want a sign from the other side.”

“Longshadow got in a hurry.”

“He did. When the pilgrims arrived at the Shadowgate, they found Ashutosh Yaksha and a half-dozen other sorcerers waiting. Several were fugitives from that northern realm of darkness where the Black Company was then in service. When Dhumraksha used the false key, his band found themselves under attack from the other side of the Shadowgate. Before the gateway could be stopped up, using the power of Longshadow’s true name, three of the would-be Shadowmasters had perished. The one called the Howler, cruelly injured, had fled. The survivors quickly became the feuding, conquering monsters your brothers found in place when they arrived. And the same disaster caused the Mother of Night to reawaken and begin scheming toward a Year of the Skulls once more.”

“And that’s the great sin of the Nyueng Bao? Letting themselves be hoodwinked by sorcerers?”

“In those days there was little contact with the world outside the swamp. Banh Do Trang’s family managed all outside trade. Once a decade a handful of the older men traveled to the Shadowgate. About as frequently, Gunni ascetics would enter the swamp hoping to purify their souls. These Gunni hermits were obviously crazy or they wouldn’t have come into the swamps in the first place. They were always tolerated. And Ghanghesha found a home.”

“Where does The Thousand Voices fit?”

“She learned the story from the Howler around the time we were trapped in Dejagore. Or soon afterward. She came to the temple soon after we returned, the best of us exhausted, our old men all dead, including our Captain and Speaker, and witch Hong Tray with them. There was no one but me left who knew everything—though Gota and Thai Dei knew some, and Sahra a little, they being of the family of Ky Dam and Hong Tray. The Thousand Voices went to the temple while I was away. She used her power to intimidate and torture the priests until they surrendered the mysterious object that had been given them for safekeeping ages ago. They didn’t even know what it was anymore. They really can’t be blamed but I can’t help blaming them. And there you have it. All the secrets of the Nyueng Bao.”

I doubted that. “I doubt that seriously. But it’s a basis from which to work. Are you going to cooperate? If we get Narayan Singh to divulge what he did with the Key?”

“If you’ll undertake a promise never to tell anyone what I told you here tonight.”

“I swear it on the Annals.” This was too easy. “I won’t say a word to a soul.” But I did not say anything about not writing it down.

I did not extract an oath from him.

Sometime, eventually, he would face the moral dilemma that had swallowed the Radisha once it seemed that the Company would fulfill its obligation to her and it was coming time for her to deliver on her own commitments. Once Uncle Doj had his own people out from under the glittering stone, his reliability as an ally would turn to smoke.

Easily dealt with when the time came, I thought. I told Doj, “I still have to work tomorrow. And it’s a whole lot later now than it was an hour ago.”

He rose, evidently relieved that I had not asked many questions. I did have a few in mind, such as why the Nyueng Bao had risked more frequent pilgrimages to the Shadowgate once the Shadowmasters were in power, adding women and children and old people to the entourage. So I asked anyway, while we were walking.

He told me, “The Shadowmasters permitted it. It added to their feelings of superiority. And it let us keep them thinking that we didn’t have the real Key, that we were searching for it. Our own people believed that was what we were doing. Only Ky Dam and Hong Tray knew the whole truth. The Shadowmasters were hoping we’d find it for them.”

“The Thousand Voices figured it out.”

“Yes. Her crows went everywhere and heard everything.”

“And in those days she had a very sneaky demon at her beck and call.” I continued to pester him all the way back to the warehouse, cleverly trying to find his remaining secrets by coloring in more map around the blank places.

I did not fool him a bit.

Before I dragged off to bed, I visited Sahra, Murgen and Goblin one more time. “You people get all of that?”

“Most of it,” Murgen said. “This weary old slave has been doing some other chores, too.”

“Think he told the truth?”

“Mostly,” Sahra admitted. “He told no lies that I noticed, but I don’t think he told the whole truth.”

“Well, of course not. He’s Nyueng Bao right down to his twisted toe bones. And a wizard besides.”

Before Sahra got indignant, Goblin told me, “There was a white crow out there with you.”

“I saw it,” I said. “I figured it was Murgen.”

Murgen said, “It wasn’t Murgen. I was there disembodied. Same as now.”

“What was it, then?
Who
was it?”

“I don’t know,” Murgen replied.

I did not entirely believe him. Maybe it was a false intuition but I was sure he had a strong suspicion.

33

Master Santaraksita hardly waited till there were no eavesdroppers before he approached me. “Dorabee, your record is beginning to look bad. Two days ago you were late. Yesterday you didn’t show up at all. This morning you don’t look alert and ready for work.”

I was not. I would have been testy with anyone else. In this case I barely noticed that his words were not spoken in a tone in keeping with their content. I sensed relief in him at my return and a lingering whiff of a fear that I would not. I lied. “I had a fever. I couldn’t stay on my feet for more than few minutes at a time. I tried to come in but I was so weak I got lost for a while and eventually ended up just going home.”

“Should you even be here today, then?” Changing course, sounding overly worried.

“I have a little more strength today. I have a lot of work to do. I really want to keep this job, Sri. None other would put me so close to so much wisdom.”

“Where is home, Dorabee?” I had collected my broom. He was following me. Eyes were following us, some with a knowing look that told me Santaraksita may have pursued other young men in the past.

I was ready for this one because I knew he had tried to follow me. “I share a small room near the waterfront in the Sirada neighborhood with several friends from the army.” A common situation throughout Taglios, where men outnumber women almost two to one because so many men have come in from the Territories, hoping to make their fortunes.

“Why didn’t you go home when you came back, Dorabee?”

Oh-oh. “Sri?”

“Your mother, your brothers, your sisters, and their wives and husbands and children all still dwell in the same place where you lived as a child. They believed you were dead.”

Oh, darn! He had gone to see them? The busybody. “I don’t get along with those people, Sri.” Which was an outright lie on behalf of Dorabee Dey Banerjae. The man I had known had been very close to his family. “When I came back from the Kiaulune wars, I was so horribly changed that they wouldn’t have recognized me. Had I gone home, it wouldn’t have been long before they found out things about me that would’ve caused them to disown me. I preferred to let them think Dorabee was dead. The boy they remembered no longer exists anyway.”

I hoped he would interpret that according to his own wishful thinking.

He bit. “I understand.”

“I’m grateful for your concern, Sri. If you will excuse me?” I went to work.