Uncle Doj closed his eyes. They stayed that way for a while. When the old priest opened them again, he glared at me. “Come walking with me, Stone Soldier.”

Chandra Gokhale, Inspector-General of the Records and favorer of very young girls, chose that moment to groan. I told Doj, “Indulge me for a few minutes, Uncle. I have a guest to entertain. I promise not to take too long.”

Goblin knelt beside the minister, patted his face gently, helped Gokhale to a sitting position. The Inspector-General began to puff up for a bluster storm. As his mouth opened, I leaned down to whisper, “Water sleeps.”

Gokhale’s head jerked around. In a moment he recalled where he had seen me before. Goblin told him, “All their days are numbered, buddy. And it looks like some of you got a few less days than some others do.” Gokhale recognized him, too, though he was supposed to be dead. And when he remembered where he had seen Sahra before, he began to tremble.

Sahra asked, “Would you recall abusing Minh Subredil on several occasions? Subredil certainly remembers. What I think we’ll do to requite that is to return it fivefold. The brothers will install you in a tiger cage in a moment. You’ll be well treated otherwise. And in a few days maybe we’ll bring in the Purohita to keep you company.” She chuckled so wickedly I felt a chill. “For all the rest of their days, call-ing the Heaven and the Earth and the Day and the Night, like brothers, Chandra Gokhale and Arjuna Drupada.”

Part of that was some Nyueng Bao formula I didn’t understand. But I got the point. And so did Gokhale. He would be caged all the rest of his days with the man he most loathed.

Sahra chuckled again.

She made me nervous when she got like that.

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.”