blackhearted witch will start poisoning us and we’ll be stuck with the disastrous choice of keeping our word and accepting destruction or breaking our word and seeing our reputation destroyed. I’m certain you don’t know much northern mythology. There’s an old religion up there that tells how a leading god allowed himself to be slain so his family would no longer be bound by a promise he made foolishly to an enemy, who wore it like a turtle’s shell.”
Narayan stared at me, cold as a cobra, waiting for me to crack. And I did, a little, because I bothered to explain. One-Eye has told me a hundred times that I should not explain. “I just don’t want that artifact badly enough to commit my people to the level of vulnerability that you’re asking. In particular, I won’t undertake commitments for those of us who are buried. On the other hand, maybe you’d like to undertake commitments whereby, assuming you get out of this alive, you guarantee never to be a pain in the Company neck ever again. Whereby you agree to go to the Captain and the Lieutenant and beg their forgiveness for stealing their child.”
The very suggestion appalled the living saint of the Deceivers. “She’s the Child of Kina. The Daughter of Night. Those two are irrelevant.”
“Evidently we don’t have anything to talk about yet. I’ll send you a few fingers for breakfast.”
I went to see if Surendranath Santaraksita was being a good fellow and pursuing the tasks I had suggested he could use to help overcome the tedium of his captivity. To my surprise I found him hard at work, with old Baladitya assisting, translating what I had presumed to be the first volume of the lost Annals. They had a whole stack of sheets already done.
“Dorabee!” Master Santaraksita said. “Excellent. Your friend the foreigner keeps telling us we can’t have any more real vellum when we’re done with these last few sheets. He wants us to use those ridiculous bark books they still employ out in the swamps.”
Before there were modern paper and vellum and parchment, there was bark. I do not know what kind of tree it came from, just that the inner bark was removed carefully, treated and pressed and used to write on. To make a book, you stacked the bark sheets, drilled a hole down through the upper-left-hand corner of the stack, then bound everything together with a cord or ribbon or length of very light chain. Banh Do Trang would favor bark because it was both cheap, traditional and hardier than animal products.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“There’s nothing earthshaking in there, Dorabee.”
“My name is Sleepy.”
“Sleepy isn’t a name. It’s a disease, or a misfortune. I prefer Dorabee. I’ll use Dorabee.”
“Use whatever you like. I’ll know who you’re talking to.” I read a couple of sheets. He was right. “This is tedious stuff. This looks like an account book.”
“That’s what it is, mainly. The things you want to know are just the things the writer assumes any reader of his own time would know already. He wasn’t writing for the ages, or even for another generation. He was keeping track of horseshoe nails, lance shafts and saddles. All he has to say about their battle is that the lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers failed to demonstrate an adequate enthusiasm for appropriating weapons lost or abandoned by the defeated enemy, preferring to wait till the next dawn to begin gleaning. As a consequence, stragglers and the local peasantry managed to scavenge all the best.”
“I notice he doesn’t bother to name a single name, person or place.” I had begun reading while the Master talked. I could listen and read at the same time even though I was a woman.
“He does give mileage and dates. The context suggests the appropriate systems of measure. It can be figured out. But what I’ve already started to wonder, Dorabee, is why we’ve all been deathly afraid of these people all our lives. This book gives us no reason to be afraid. This book is about a troop of crabby little men who marched off somewhere they didn’t want to go for reasons they didn’t understand, fully believing that their unstated mission would last only several weeks or, at most, a few months. Then they would be able to go home. But the months piled into years and the years into generations. And still they didn’t really know.”
The material also suggested we needed to revise our old belief that the Free Companies exploded into the world at the same time, in a vast orgy of fire and bloodshed. The only other company mentioned was noted to have returned years before the Black Company marched, and in fact, several senior Company noncoms had served as private soldiers in that earlier, unnamed band.
“I can see it,” I grumbled. “We’re going to translate these things, find out all sorts of things, and not be an inch closer to understanding anything.”
Santaraksita said, “This’s much more exciting than a meeting of the bhadrhalok, Dorabee.”
Then Baladitya spoke for the first time. “Do we have to starve to death here, Dorabee?”
“Nobody’s brought you anything to eat?”
“No.”
“I’ll just see about that. Don’t be startled if you hear me shouting. I hope you enjoy fish and rice.”
I took care of that, then hid in my corner for a while. I was feeling a little depressed after having seen Master San-taraksita’s work. I suppose that sometimes I invest too much in my goals, then suffer a correspondingly huge disappointment when things do not work out.
39
Tobo woke me. “How can you sleep, Sleepy?” “I guess I must be tired. What do you want?” “The Protector has finally started to grumble about the Radisha. Dad wants you to come keep track yourself. So you don’t have to record anything third-hand.”
At the moment, my name felt entirely appropriate. I just wanted to lie down on my pallet and dream about finding another kind of life.
Trouble was, I had been doing this since I was fourteen. I did not know anything else. Unless Master Santaraksita was willing to let bygones by bygones and take me back at the library. Right after we buried Soulcatcher in a fifty-foot-deep hole we filled in with boiling lead.
I dragged a stool in between Sahra and One-Eye, leaned forward with my elbows on the table and stared into the mist where Murgen appeared to report when it suited him. One-Eye was fussing at Murgen even though Murgen was away. I said, “Anybody would think you were worried about Goblin, the way you’re carrying on.”
“Of course I’m worried about Goblin, Little Girl. The runt borrowed my transeidetic locuter before he went up there this morning. Not to mention he still owes me several thousands pais for... well, he owes me a bunch of money.”
My recollection had it the other way around. One-Eye always owed everyone, even when he was doing well. And several thousand pais is not exactly a fortune, a pai being a tiny seed of such uniform weight that it is used as a measure for gems and precious metals. It takes almost two thousand of them to equal a northern ounce. Since One-Eye had not specified gold or silver, the standard assumption would be that he had meant coin-grade copper. In other words, not very much.
In other words still, he was worried about his best friend but he could not say so because he had a century- long history of reviling the man in public.
If there was any such magical instrument as a transeidetic locuter, One-Eye invented it an hour before he loaned it to Goblin.
He muttered, “That ugly little turd gets himself killed, I’m gonna strangle him. He can’t leave me holding the bag on-” He realized he was thinking out loud.
Sahra and I both made mental notes to investigate the bag metaphor. It sounded like there were business plans afoot. Secret plans. Surprise, surprise.
Murgen materialized practically nose to nose with me. He murmured, “Soulcatcher is out of patience. A flock of crows just brought the news from Semchi. She’s in a complete black mood. She says she’s going into the Radisha’s Anger Chamber after her if she doesn’t come out in the next two minutes.”
“How’s Goblin?” One-Eye barked.
“Hiding,” Murgen replied. “Waiting for sunrise.” He was not going to try leaving during the night, the way we had planned originally. Soulcatcher had loosed her shadows, just to punish Taglios for irritating her. We had a few traps out, randomly distributed through likely neighborhoods, but I did not expect to catch anything. I figured our luck along those lines was about used up.
