I waited. He did not volunteer to explain. Doj was difficult that way.

He did, I suppose, do something that was even harder for him. He told the truth about his own people. “Nyueng Bao are the almost pure-blooded descendants of the people of one of the Free Companies. One that chose not to go back.”

“But the Black Company is supposed to be the only one that didn’t go back. The Annals say-”

“They tell you only what those who recorded them knew.

My ancestors arrived here after the Black Company finished laying the land to waste and moved on north, already having lost sight of its divine mission. Deserting in its own way, through ignorance of what it was supposed to be. By then it was already three generations old and had made no effort to maintain the purity of its blood. It had just fought the war which is the first that your Annalists remember and was almost completely destroyed. That seems to be the fate of the Black Company. To be reduced to a handful, then to reconstitute itself. Again and again. Losing something of its previous self each time.”

“And the fate of your Company?” I noted that he did not mention a name. No matter, really. No name would mean anything to me.

“To sink ever deeper into ignorance itself. I know the truth. I know the secrets and the old ways. But I’m the last. Unlike other Companies, we brought our families with us. We were a late experiment. We had too much to lose. We deserted. We went and hid in the swamps. But we’ve kept our lineage pure. Almost.”

“And the pilgrimages? The old people who died in Jai-cur? Hong Tray? And the great, dark, terrible secret of the Nyueng Bao that Sahra worries about so much?”

“The Nyueng Bao have many dark secrets. All the Free Companies had dark secrets. We were instruments of the darkness. The Soldiers of Darkness. The Bone Warriors charged with opening the way for Kina. Stone Soldiers warring for the honor of being remembered for all eternity, by having our names written in golden letters in glittering stone. We failed because our ancestors were imperfect in their devotion. In every company there were those who were too weak to bring on the Year of the Skulls.”

“The old people?”

“Ky Dam and Hong Tray. Ky Dam was the last elected Nyueng Bao captain. There was no one to take his place. Hong Tray was a witch with the curse of foresight. She was the last true priest. Priestess.”

“Curse of foresight?”.

“She never foresaw anything good.”

I sensed that he did not want to get into that subject. I recalled that Hong Tray’s final prophecy involved Murgen and Sahra, which certainly was an offense to all right-thinking Nyueng Bao-and was not yet a prophecy completely fulfilled, probably.

“The great sin of the Nyueng Bao?”

“You had that idea from Sahra, of course. And she, like all those born after the coming of the Shadowmasters, believes that ’sin’ is what caused the Nyueng Bao to flee into the swamps. She believes wrongly. That flight involved no sin, but survival. The true black sin occurred within my own lifetime.” His voice tightened up. He had strong feelings about this.

I waited.

“I was a small boy just taking my first small steps on the Path of the Sword when the stranger came. He was a personable man of middle years. His name was Ashutosh Yak-sha. In the oldest form of the language Ashutosh meant something like Despair of the Wicked. Yaksha meant much the same as it does in Taglian today.” Which was “good spirit.” “People were prepared to believe he was a supernatural being because he had a white skin. A very pale, white skin, lighter than Goblin or Willow Swan, who sometimes get some sunlight. He wasn’t an albino, though. He had normal eyes. His hair wasn’t quite as blond as Swan’s is. In sum, he was a magical creature to most Nyueng Bao. He spoke the language oddly but he did speak it. He said he wanted to study at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple, the fame of which had reached him far away.”

“When pressed about his origins, he insisted that he hailed from ‘The Land of Unknown Shadows, beneath the stars of the Noose.’”

“He claimed to have come off the glittering stone?”

“Not quite. That was never clear. There or beyond. No one pressed him hard. Not even Ky Dam or Hong Tray, though he troubled them. Very early we learned that Ashutosh was a powerful sorcerer. And in those days many of the older people still knew about the origins of the Nyueng Bao. It was feared that he might have been sent to summon us home. That proved to be untrue. For a long time Ashutosh seemed to be nothing but what he claimed, a student who wanted to absorb whatever wisdom had accumulated at the temple of Ghanghesha. Which had been a holy place since the Nyueng Bao first entered the swamp.”

“But there’s a but. Right? The man was a villain after all?”

“He was indeed. In fact, Ashutosh was the man you knew later as Shadowspinner. He was there to find our Key, sent by his teacher and mentor, whom you came to know as Longshadow. At a young age this man had stumbled across rumors that not all the Free Companies had returned to Khatovar. What he understood from that, that nobody else realized, was that each Company still outside must possess a talisman capable of opening and closing the Shadowgate. An ambitious man could use that talisman to recruit rak-shasas he could send out to do evil for him. The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.” . “So this Ashutosh Yaksha found the Key?”

“He only assured himself that it existed. He wormed his way into the confidence of the senior priests. One day someone let something drop. Soon afterward, Ashutosh announced that he had received word that his teacher, mentor and spiritual father, Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, impressed by his reports on the temple, had chosen to come visit. Dhumraksha turned out to be a tall, incredibly skinny man who always wore a mask, apparently because his face was deformed.”

“You heard a name like Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha and you didn’t suspect something?”

I could not see Doj in the darkness but I could feel his unhappy frown. He said, “I was a small child.”

“And the Nyueng Bao aren’t interested in anything not their own. Yes. I’m Vehdna, Uncle, but I recognize the names Manthara and Dhumraksha as those of legendary

Gunni demons. Even though you walk amongst lesser beings, you might keep your ears open. That way, when a nasty jengali sorcerer pulls your leg, you’ll at least have a clue.”

Doj grunted. “He had a golden tongue, Dhumraksha did. When he discovered that each decade, as the custom was then, a band of the leading men undertook a pilgrimage south-”

“He invited himself along and tricked somebody into letting him examine the Key.”

“Close. But not quite. Yes. You did guess correctly. The pilgrimage went to the very Shadowgate. The pilgrims would spend ten days there waiting for a sign. I don’t believe anyone knew what that might be anymore. But the traditions had to be observed. The pilgrims, however, never took the actual Key with them. They carried a replica charged with a few simple spells meant to fool an inattentive thief. The real Key stayed home. The old men didn’t really want a sign from the other side.”

“Longshadow got in a hurry.”

“He did. When the pilgrims arrived at the Shadowgate, they found Ashutosh Yaksha and a half-dozen other sorcerers waiting. Several were fugitives from that northern realm of darkness where the Black Company was then in service. When Dhumraksha used the false key, his band found themselves under attack from the other side of the Shadow-gate. Before the gateway could be stopped up, using the power of Longshadow’s true name, three of the would-be Shadowmasters had perished. The one called the Howler, cruelly injured, had fled. The survivors quickly became the feuding, conquering monsters your brothers found in place when they arrived. And the same disaster caused the Mother of Night to reawaken and begin scheming toward a Year of the Skulls once more.”