Water Sleeps (8 page)

A sudden, startled thrill ran through me. I was not alone anymore. A long time
had passed. The sun had swung several hours across the sky. The quality of the
light within the library had changed. It had become a much paler version of its
morning self. Presumably the clouds had passed away.

I did not jump or, I hope, show any immediate outward reaction. But I did have
to respond visibly to my awareness of the presence of whoever was standing
behind me. Perhaps it was his breath that alerted me. The curry and garlic were
strong. Certainly I never heard a sound.

I brought my heartbeat under control, smoothed my features, turned.

The Master of the Library, my boss, Surendranath Santaraksita, met my gaze.

“Dorabee. I believe you were reading.” At the library they know me as Dorabee
Dey Banerjae. An honorable name. A man of that name died beside me in a skirmish
near the Daka Woods a long time ago. He did not need it anymore and I would do
it no harm.

I did not speak. The truth would be hard to deny if the Master had been there
long. I was halfway through the book, which was of the bound sort and contained
no illustrations whatsoever, not even one Tantric passage.

“I have been watching you for some time, Dorabee. Your interest and skill are
both evident. It’s clear that you read better than most of my copyists. Yet it’s
equally obvious that you aren’t of the priestly caste.”

My face was still as old cheese. I was wondering if I should kill him and how I
could dispose of the corpse if I did. Perhaps the Stranglers could be framed . .

. No. Master Santaraksita was old but still hale enough to throw me around if I
tried to throttle him. Being small has definite disadvantages at times. He had
eight inches on me but at the moment that seemed like several feet. And someone
else was moving around at the other end of the library. I heard voices.

I did not drop my eyes the way a menial should. Master Santaraksita already knew
I was more than a curious sweeper, though a good one. I kept the place spotless.

That was a Company rule. Our public characters had to be morally straight and
excellent workers. Which did not make some of the men at all happy.

I waited. Master Santaraksita would decide his own fate. He would decide the
fate of the library that he loved.

“So. Our Dorabee is a man of more talents than we suspected. What else do you do
that we don’t know about, Dorabee? Can you write, as well?” I did not answer, of
course. “Where did you learn? It has long been the contention of many of the
bhadrhalok that those not of the priestly caste do not have the mental facility
to learn the High Mode.”

Still I did not speak. Eventually he would commit to movement in some direction.

I would respond accordingly. I hoped I could avoid destroying him and his
brethren and stripping the library of whatever might be useful. That was the
course One-Eye wanted to follow years ago. Never mind being subtle. Never mind
not alerting Soulcatcher to what was happening right under her nose.

“You have nothing to say? No defense?”

“A pursuit of knowledge needs no defense. Sri Sondhel Ghosh the Janaka declared
that in the Garden of Wisdom there is no caste.” Albeit in an age when caste had
much less meaning.

“Sondhel Ghosh spoke of the university at Vikramas, where all the students had
to pass an exhaustive examination before they were allowed to enter the
grounds.”

“Do we suppose many students of any caste were admitted who were unable to read
the Panas and Pashids? Sondhel Ghosh was not called the Janaka for nothing.

Vikramas was the seat of Janai religious study.”

“A janitor who knows about a religion long dead. We are indeed entering the Age
of Khadi, where all is turned upon its head.” Khadi is the favored Taglian name
for Kina, in one of her less vicious aspects. The name Kina is seldom spoken,

lest the Dark Mother hear and respond. Only the Deceivers want her to come
around. “Where did you acquire this skill? Who taught you?”

“A friend started me out a long time ago. After we buried him, I continued to
teach myself.” My gaze never left his face. For a goofy old boffin, whose
stuffiness was grist for the mockery of the younger copyists, he seemed
remarkably flexible mentally. But then, he might be brighter than he seemed. He
might realize that he could buy himself a float downriver to the swamps if the
wrong words passed his lips.

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 Surenranath 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.”

“Sir?”

“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.

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 Shad-owmasters, 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 fore-brethren 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.