Water Sleeps

45

I found the Radisha lost inside herself. Not asleep, not meditating, just wandering around inside, probably feeling immensely guilty about having been relieved by her recent lack of stress. I felt a moment of compassion. She and her brother might be our foes but they were sound people at heart. Rajadharma had been bred into them.

"Ma'am?" She was due respect but I could not use princely titles. "I need to speak to you."

She raised her eyes slowly. They seemed to be knowing, caring eyes even in despair. "Were all of my household staff my enemies?"

"We didn't choose to become your enemies. And even today we honor and respect the royal office."

"You would, of course. To remind me of my folly. Like the Bhodi and their self-immolations."

"Our quarrel with you won't ever be as great as our quarrel with the Protector. We could never find a path to peace with her. You'd never unleash the skildirsha on the city. She would. And the depth of her evil is such that she doesn't see the wickedness in what she's doing."

"You're right. Do you have a name? If she was safely a few hundred years in the past, we might consider her a goddess. A power capable of smashing kingdoms out of whimsy, the way a child might kick over an anthill just to see the bugs scramble."

"I'm called Sleepy. I'm the Annalist of the Black Company. I'm also the villain who plans most of your misfortunes. This situation wasn't an intentional part of the master plan but the opportunity presented itself. Now it looks like we might've outmaneuvered ourselves."

The Radisha had become focused. "Go on."

"The Protector has chosen to cover up your disappearance. Officially you're in your Anger Chamber purifying yourself and asking the gods and your ancestors to calm your heart and give you wisdom in the coming troubled times. You have taken breaks to issue some fairly bewildering rescripts, though. My brothers brought back these two. My brothers are illiterate, so they couldn't select for content. But these are probably representative. I'll have more brought in if you like."

The Radisha read the announcement of rewards first. It was straightforward and sensible. "This must make you uncomfortable."

"It does."

"She doesn't have the money. What is this? A ten-percent reduction in the rice allowance? We don't have a rice ration. We don't need to ration rice."

"No, you don't. Though everybody who wants rice can't afford it. And some of us who would be happy to see the last of the stuff don't get to eat anything else."

"You know what this is?" The Radisha pounded her right forefinger against the rescript like she was trying to peck a hole through. "I'll bet. All those strange personalities. They don't just come out as voices. Or she was in an especially strange humor when she dictated these. She has those spells. When the voices seem to take over completely. They never last long."

Ah, I said to myself. This is an interesting tidbit, worth pursuing later. "Would you care to counter with something more sound? I don't have the manpower to cover the entire city but I can see that new rescripts are posted in the more important places."

"How do you prove they're genuine? Anyone can take a piece of treated naada and write something on it."

"I'm working on that. We have a guest, a highly respected soldier from one of the City Battalions. We brought him in to visit another prisoner. I thought he might pass the word that you're our prisoner, too."

"Interesting. You know what she'll do, don't you? Call your bluff. Produce an imitation or illusory version of me and challenge you to produce your Radisha. Which you won't do because you're not really interested in getting killed. Correct?"

"We can deal with that. The Protector has a serious handicap. Nobody believes anything she says. They've started thinking that way about you, too, because you're beginning to come across as her stooge. Why did you always have such a hateful and treacherous attitude toward the Company?"

"I'm not her stooge. You have no idea how many of her mad schemes I've managed to stifle."

I did not tell her that we did. I had her angry enough to talk, but prodded just a little more. "Why did you hate my brothers before they ever came down the river?"

"I didn't hate—"

"Maybe I chose the wrong word. There was something. The Annalists before me all sensed it and knew you'd turn on the Company as soon as you felt safe from the Shadowmasters. You weren't as obsessed as Smoke was but you shared his disease."

"I don't know. I've wondered about that a lot the last decade. It went away after I gave the order to turn on you. But Smoke and I weren't the only ones. The whole principality felt the same. There was a memory of a time before, when the Company—"

"There was no such time. Not that anybody bothered to record in the histories and documents of those days. The little I've been able to decipher of our own Annals from back then is dully routine. The only terrible battle I found came when the Company was three generations old. It took place not far from here and the Company lost. It was almost wiped out. Its three volumes of Annals fell into enemy hands. They've been in Taglian libraries ever since. From the moment the Company returned to Taglios, access to those has been denied us. All kinds of crazy things were done to keep us from getting to those books. People died because of those books. And from all I can see, the real secret that's hidden there, that had to be kept at all cost, was that nothing extraordinary happened during those early years. It was not an age of rapine and endless bloodshed."

"How could all the people of a dozen states remember something that never happened and become terrified that it was going to happen again?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. We'll ask Kina how she did it. Right before we kill her."

The Radisha's expression told me she was thinking she was not alone in her ability to believe the impossible.

I said, "You want to shake loose from your lunatic friend? You want to get off the hook with us? You want to get your brother back?" Presumably the possibility that the Prahbrindrah Drah still lived had grown significant in her recent thoughts.

The Radisha opened and closed her mouth several times. Never an attractive woman, age and present circumstances conspired to make her almost repulsive.

I should condemn? Time was doing no favors for me, either.

I said, "It can be managed. All of it."

"My brother is dead."

"No, he's not. No one outside the Company knows. Not even Soulcatcher. But the people she trapped out there under the plain are frozen in time. Sort of. I don't understand the mystic science involved. The point is, they're there, they're healthy, and they can be brought back out. I've just made a deal that will give us the Key we need to open the way."

"You can bring my brother back?"

"Cordy Mather, too."

The light was not good but I detected the rush of color to her neck. "There are no secrets from you people, are there?"

"Not many."

"What do you want from me?"

I never expected to be at this point with the Woman. Despite her down-to-earth, sensible, businesslike reputation. So I didn't have a ready answer. But I did manage to come up with a wish list quickly. "You could step out in public someplace where a whole lot of people would see you and recognize you and repudiate the Protector. You could exculpate the Black Company. You could fire the Great General. You could announce that you've been under Soulcatcher's evil spell for fifteen years but now you've finally made your escape. You could make us the good guys again."

"I don't know if I can do that. I've been afraid of the Black Company for too long. I'm still afraid."

"Water sleeps," I said. "What's the Protector done for you?"

The Radisha had no answer for that.

"We can bring back your brother. Think of the pressure that would take off you. Rajadharma."

In a tightly controlled voice, the Radisha snapped, "Don't say that! That tears my entrails out and strangles me with them."

Exactly what I had wished on her a time or two when I was in a less forgiving mood.

Aridatha Singh looked at me oddly. "He wasn't anything like I thought Narayan Singh would be." Seeing his sovereign had not impressed him nearly so much as seeing his father had.

"Not many people are once you get to know them. River, you want to take this man back where you found him?" It was night, yes, but we still had those two protective amulets left over from the Shadowmaster wars. They definitely looked like they were still good. I wished we had another hundred but Goblin and One-Eye could not make them anymore. I am not sure why. They shared no trade secrets with me. I suppose they were just too old.

I worry a lot when I consider a future without them in it. And a future without One-Eye cannot be far away.

O Lord of Hosts, preserve him until the Captured are delivered and all our quarrels are resolved.