“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 Shadow-masters. 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 corne 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.

Men were charging everywhere around the warehouse. Some were continuing frenetic preparations for the Company’s evacuation. Some were getting ready to accompany Narayan and me to the Grove of Doom to collect the Nyueng Bao Key. The Nyueng Bao, Do Trang’s confederates and the handful still attached to the Company somehow, seemed to be doing a lot of nervous moving around just to be moving. They were scared and worried.

Banh Do Trang had suffered a stroke during the night. One-Eye’s prognosis was not encouraging.

I told Goblin, “I’m not saying she had anything to do with it but Do Trang was the first one to realize that the girl was roaming around outside her flesh.”

“He’s just old, Sleepy. Nobody did it to him. You ask me, he’s really way overdue. He hung on here because he cares about Sahra. She’s all right now. It looks like her husband might actually be freed. And he’s too old to run away. Soul-catcher is going to find this place eventually, once Mogaba arrives and starts searching. I wouldn’t be surprised if Do Trang just decided that dying was the best thing he could do for everyone right now.”

I did not want Do Trang to go, for all the reasons none of us like to see those close to us die, but also because he was, in his quiet way, the best friend the Company had had in generations.

Like everyone else, I tried to lose myself in work. I told Goblin, “Even if she’s totally innocent, I want the girl fixed so she can’t wander. Whatever you have to do short of permanently crippling or killing her.”

Goblin sighed. Lately that was all he did when someone gave him more work. I guess he was too tired to squawk anymore.

“Where is One-Eye?”

“Uh-” Furtive look around. A whisper. “Don’t say I said anything. I think he’s trying to figure out how to take his equipment with us.”

I shook my head and walked away.

Santaraksita and Baladitya called out to me. They had accepted their situation and were applying themselves with a will. The Master Librarian seemed particularly excited about facing a real academic challenge for the first time in years. He said, “Dorabee, in all the excitement I forgot to mention that I did get an answer to your question about a written Nyueng Bao language. There was one. And not only was there one, this oldest book is written in an antique dialect of that language. The others were recorded in an early Taglian dialect, although the original of the third volume does so employing the foreign alphabet instead of native characters.”