Soldiers Live

21 Taglios: The Great General

Mogaba leaned back, smiling. “I can’t help wishing Narayan Singh continued luck.” Relaxed, content, for the first time in years, he found life good. The Protector was in the provinces indulging her passion for religious persecution. Therefore, she was not around the Palace making life miserable for those who actually hauled on the reins, riding the tiger whilst trying to keep the mundane work of government simmering.

His mention of the living saint made Aridatha Singh flinch. It was subtle but the reaction was there. And it was unique. Other Singhs did not react to the name, other than with an obligatory curse, perhaps. This demanded further examination.

Mogaba asked, “Any trouble out there?”

Aridatha said, “It’s quiet. You have the Protector out of town, making no ridiculous demands, things settle down. People get too busy making a living to act up.”

Ghopal was less upbeat. The Greys were out in the streets and alleys every day. “Graffiti keeps turning up more and more. ‘Water Sleeps’ most often.”

“And?” Murgen asked. His voice was soft but intense, his eyes narrow.

“The other traditional taunts are all there. ‘All Their Days Are Numbered.’ ‘Rajadharma .’”

“And?” Mogaba seemed to have shifted characters the way Soulcatcher did. Perhaps he was aping her style.

“That one, too. ‘My Brother Unforgiven.’”

That harsh indictment again. That accusation which always disturbed the incomplete slumber of the part of him guilty about betraying the Black Company to advance his own ambitions. No good had come of it. His life had become enslaved by it. His punishment was to move from one villain to another, always serving wickedness, like a loose woman passing from man to man down a long decline.

Aridatha Singh, eager to move away from talk about Narayan Singh and the Deceivers, interjected, “One of my officers reported a new one yesterday. ‘Thi Kim is coming.’”

“Thi Kim? What is that? Or who?”

Ghopal observed, “It sounds Nyueng Bao.”

“We don’t see much of those people these days.”

“Since somebody snatched the Radisha right out of the Palace...” Ghopal stopped. Mogaba had begun to darken again, though that failure belonged to the Greys, not to the army. He had been in the territories at the time.

“So. All the old slogans. But the Company all fled through the shadowgate. And perished on the other side because they never came back.”

Ghopal knew little about the world outside his own narrow, filthy streets. “Maybe some of them did survive and we just don’t know about it.”

“No. They didn’t. We would’ve heard. The Protector’s had people down there harvesting shadows since they left.” People who had been lured into her service by cruelly false promises to teach them her ways and make them captains in her great, unrevealed enterprise.

None of those collaborators survived long. Shadows were clever and persistent. Quite a few found ways to escape from novices long enough to destroy their tormenters and be destroyed themselves.

Soulcatcher made sure conditions for disaster remained ripe.

Mogaba closed his eyes, leaned back again, steepled his dark fingers. “I’ve enjoyed not having the Protector around.” Getting those words out casually was difficult. His throat was tight. His chest felt like a huge weight was pressing in on it. He was afraid. Soulcatcher terrified him. And for that he hated her. And for that he loathed himself. He was Mogaba, the Great General, the purest, smartest, strongest of the Nar warriors produced by Gea-Xle. For him fear was supposed to be a tool by which he managed the weak. He was not supposed to know it personally.

Silently, within, Mogaba repeated his warrior’s mantras, knowing habits ingrained since birth would hold the fear at bay.

Ghopal Singh was a functionary. Very good at managing the Greys but not a natural conspirator. That was one attribute that had recommended him to the Protector. He did not apprehend the message lurking on the edges of the Great General’s statement. Aridatha Singh, in some ways, was as naive as he was handsome. But he did understand that Mogaba was sneaking up on something that could be a great watershed in all their lives.

Mogaba had championed Aridatha’s elevation because of his naivete concerning the complex motives of others and because of his enthusiastic idealism. Rajadharma was a lever that Mogaba was sure would move Aridatha Singh.

Aridatha peered around nervously. He had heard the old saying that in the Palace the very walls have ears.

Mogaba leaned forward, lit a cheap tallow candle from a lamp and took the fire to a stoneware bowl filled with a dark liquid. Ghopal held his tongue even though the animal product offended him religiously.

The bowl’s contents proved to be flammable, though they produced more unpleasant black smoke than they did flame or light. The smoke spread out across the ceiling, then crept down the walls and flowed out the doors. Its progress was marked by squeaks and chitterings and an occasional complaint from an unseen crow.

Mogaba said, “We may have to get down on the floor for a few minutes, till the smoke thins Out.”

Aridatha whispered, “Are you really proposing what I think you’re proposing?”

Mogaba murmured, “You may not have the same reasons I do but I think we’d all be better off if the Protector no longer held her position. Particularly the Taglian people. What do you think?”

Mogaba had expected Aridatha to agree easily. The soldier believed in his obligation to the people he served. And he did nod.

Ghopal Singh was his main worry. Ghopal had no obvious reason to want change. The Greys were all members of the Shadar religion, traditionally with little influence in government. Their alliance with the Protector had given them power out of proportion to their numbers. They would be reluctant to lose that power.

Ghopal glanced around nervously, completely failing to note Mogaba’s intense examination. He blurted, though in a whisper, “She has to go. The Greys have believed that for a long time. The Year of the Skulls couldn’t be much more terrible than what we’ve suffered from her. But we don’t know how to get rid of her. She’s too powerful. And too smart.”

Mogaba relaxed. So the Greys were not enamored of their benefactor. Interesting. Excellent.

“But we’ll never get rid of her. She always knows what everyone around her is thinking. And we’ll never be able not to think about it because we’ll be so scared. She’ll sniff it out in about ten seconds. Really, we’re walking dead men now, just for having considered it.”

“Then get your family out of town now,” Mogaba told him. It was Soulcatcher’s habit to exterminate her enemies root and branch. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I think that the only way it could be managed would be to have everything in place and strike before she has a chance to look around and pick up clues. We might engineer it so that she arrives exhausted. That might give us the edge we need.”

Aridatha mused, “Whatever it is, it will have to be sudden and massive and a complete surprise.”

“She’ll begin to suspect,” Ghopal said. “There are too many people loyal to her, because without her they’ll be dead themselves. They’ll warn her.”

“Not if we don’t get carried away. If just us three know what’s happening. We’re in charge. We can give any orders we want. People won’t question us. There’s trouble on the streets and it’s getting worse. People will expect us to do something about it. Plenty of others hate the Protector. They’ll feel free to act up while she’s away. That gives us an excuse to do almost anything we want. If we mainly use people whose loyalty to the Protector is absolute, letting them do most of the work and carry the messages, there’s no reason she should suspect anything until it’s too late.”

Ghopal looked at him like he was whistling in the dark. Maybe he was. Mogaba said, “I’ve opened my mouth here. I’ve committed myself. And I have nowhere to run.” They were natives. They could vanish into the territories. There was nowhere he could hide. And a return to Gea-Xle had been out of the question for twenty-five years. The Nar back home knew all about what he had done.

Aridatha mused, “Then every day in every way we should do our jobs to the utmost on the Protector’s behalf—until we create a rattrap we can close like this.” He clapped his hands.

“We’ll only get one chance,” Mogaba said. “Five seconds after we fail we’ll all be praying for death.” He waited a moment during which he checked the smoke. Its usefulness was almost exhausted. “Are you in?”

Both Singhs nodded but neither showed an unbound eagerness. The truth was, it was a poor bet that any of them would survive this adventure.

Mogaba sat in his quarters staring out at a full moon. He wondered if it had been too easy. Were the Singhs genuinely interested in ridding Taglios of the Protector? Or had they just played along, sensing that he was the more deadly threat at the moment?

If they were not committed he would learn the truth only when Soulcatcher sank her teeth into his throat.

He was going to be an intimate acquaintance of fear for a long time to come.