Water Sleeps (16 page)

I watched the old priest closely as we eased through the spell net surrounding
the warehouse. He did not have a yarn amulet. His head twitched and jerked. His
feet kept wanting to change direction but his will hacked a way through the
illusions. Possibly that was a result of his training on the Path of the Sword.

I recalled, though, that Lady had insisted he was a minor wizard.

“Where are we going, Uncle? And why are we going there?”

“We go where no Nyueng Bao ear will hear what I tell you. Old Nyueng Bao would
label me a traitor. Young Nyueng Bao would call me a lying fool. Or worse.”

And I? I was generally a proponent of the latter view whenever I heard him
preaching about his path to inner peace through obsessively continuous
preparation for combat. His philosophy had appealed only to a very few of Banh
Do Trang’s employees, all Nyueng Bao, all too young to have witnessed actual
warfare. I understood that the Path of the Sword was not militaristic, but
others had trouble grasping that fact.

“You want to maintain your image as an old stiff-neck who wouldn’t be caught
dead helping a subhuman jengali fall and break her skull.”

It was too dark to tell but I thought he smiled. “That’s an extreme way of
stating it but it approximates the facts.” His Taglian, never poor, improved now
that he had no other audience.

“Are you overlooking the fact that every bit of darkness out here might harbor a
bat or crow or rat, or even one of the Protector’s shadows?”

“I have nothing to fear from those things. The Thousand Voices already knows
everything I’m going to tell you.”

But she might not want me to know, too.

We walked in silence for a long time.

Taglios seldom fails to amaze me. Doj cut across a wealthy section, where whole
families fort up in estates surrounded by guarded walls. Their youths were out
on Salara Road, which grew up ages ago to provide them with their diversions.

Reason insisted that beggars ought to be plentiful where the wealth was
concentrated, but that was not the case. The extremely poor were not allowed to
offend the sight of the mighty with their presence.

There, as everywhere, odors assailed the nostrils but these scents were
sandalwood, cloves and perfumes.

After that, Doj led me into the dark, crowded streets of a temple district. We
stepped aside to let a band of Gunni acolytes pass. The boys were bullying the
people living in the streets. I thought we might have trouble with them, too,

which would have ended with them suffering a lot of pain, but a brake on their
misbehavior saved them from its consequences. That arrived in the form of three
Greys.

The Shadar do not disdain the caste system entirely but they do hold to the
notion that the highest caste must include not just the priests and men
qualified by birth to become priests, but also, certainly, any men of the Shadar
faith. And that faith, which is an extremely heretical and Gunni-infected
bastard offshoot of my own One True Faith, contains a strong strain of charity
toward the weak and the unfortunate.

The Greys methodically applied their bamboo canes and invited the youths to take
up any complaints with the Protector. The acolytes were smarter than they
pretended. They got the hell out of there before the Greys used their whistles
to invite all their friends to the caning.

All part of night in the city. Doj and I drifted onward.

Eventually he led me to a place called the Deer Park, which is an expanse of
wilderness near the center of the city. It had been created by some despot of
centuries past.

I told Doj, “I really don’t need all this exercise.” I wondered if he had some
goofball plan to murder me and leave the body under the trees. But what would be
the point?

Doj was Doj. With him, you never knew.

“I feel more comfortable here,” he said. “But I never stay long. There is a
company of rangers charged with keeping squatters out. They consider anyone not
Taglian and high caste a squatter. This is good. This log has shaped itself to
my posterior.”

The log in question tripped me. I got back onto my feet and said, “I’m
listening.”

“Sit. This will take a while.”

“Leave out the begats.” Which was a Jaicuri Vehdna colloquialism having to do
with difficulties memorizing scripture, which you have to do as a child. I
meant, “Don’t bother telling me whose fault it was and why they’re such bloody
villains for it. Just tell me what happened.”

“Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water.”

“I do have to go to work tomorrow.”

“As you will. You are aware, are you not, that the Free Companies of Khatovar
and the roving bands of Stranglers who murder for the glory of Kina share a
common ancestry?”

“There’s enough suggestion in our recent Annals to allow for that
interpretation,” I admitted. Caution seemed indicated.

“My place amongst the Nyueng Bao would correspond roughly with yours as Annalist
of the Black Company. It includes, as well, the role of the priest in the
Strangler band—whose secondary obligation is to maintain a sound oral history of
the band. Over the centuries the toog have lost their respect for education.”

My own studies suggested that a great deal of evolution had taken place in my
Company during those same centuries. Probably a lot more than had been the case
with the Deceiver bands. They had stayed inside one culture that had not changed
a lot. Meanwhile, the Black Company kept moving into stranger and stranger
lands, old soldiers being replaced by young foreigners who had no connection
with the past and no idea that Khatovar even existed.

Doj seemed to echo my thoughts. “The Strangler bands are pale imitations of the
original Free Companies. The Black Company retains the name and some of the
memories, but you’re philosophically much farther from the original than the
Deceivers are. Your band is ignorant of its true antecedents and has been kept
that way willfully, mainly through the manipulations of the goddess Kina, but
also, to a lesser extent, by others who didn’t want your Company to become what
it had been in another time.”

I waited. He did not volunteer to explain. Doj was difficult that way.

He did, I suppose, do something that was even harder for him. He told the truth
about his own people. “Nyueng Bao are the almost pure-blooded descendants of the
people of one of the Free Companies. One that chose not to go back.”

“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.”