Glen Cook - Water Sleeps

“You denigrate yourself overmuch,” Santaraksita said at one point. “I may have known your father... if he was the same Dollal Dey Banerjae who could not resist the Liberator’s call for recruits when he raised the original legion that triumphed at Ghoja Ford.”

I had named dead Dorabee’s father already. I could not take that back now. How could he know Dollal, anyway? Banerjae was one of the oldest and most common of traditional Taglian surnames. Banerjaes were mentioned in the text I had been reading till moments ago. “That may have been him. I never knew him well. I do recall him boasting that he was one of the first to enroll. He marched off with the Liberator to defeat the Shadowmasters. He never came back from Ghoja Ford.” I did not know much more about Dorabee’s family. Not even his mother’s name. In all Taglios how could it be possible I would encounter anyone who remembered the father? Fortune is indeed a goddess filled with caprice. “Did you know him well?” If that was so, the librarian might have to go-just that would make my exposure inevitable.

“No. Not well. Not well at all.” Now Master Santaraksita seemed disinclined to say more. He seemed worrisomely thoughtful. After a moment he told me, “Come with me, Dorabee.”

“Sir?”

“You brought up the university at Vikramas. I have a list of the questions the gate guards put to those who wanted to enroll. Curiosity impels me to subject you to the same examination.”

“I know little about Janai, Master.” If the truth were told, I was a bit shaky on the tenets of my own religion, always having been afraid to examine it too closely. Other religions do not stand up to the rigorous application of reason, for all we have things like Kina stalking the earth, and I really did not want to find myself stumbling over any boulders of absurdity protruding from the bedrock of my own faith.

“The examination was not religious in nature, Dorabee. It tested the prospective student’s morals, ethics and ability to think. Janaka monks did not wish to educate potential leaders who would come to their calling with the stain of darkness upon their souls.”

That being the case, I had to get into character very deeply indeed. Sleepy, the Vehdna soldier girl from Jaicur, had stains on her soul blacker than a shadow of all night falling.

“Then what did you do?” Tobo asked. Around a mouthful of spicy Taglian-style rice, I told him, “Then I went out and made sure the library was clean.” And Surendranath Santaraksita remained where he was, stunned into immobility by the answers he had received from a lowly sweeper. I could have told him that anyone who paid attention to the storytellers in the street, the sermons of mendicant priests, and the readily available gratuitous advice of hermits and yogis, could have satisfied most of the Vikramas questions. Darn it, a Vehdna woman from Jaicur could do it.

“We got to kill him,” One-Eye said. “How you want to do it?”

“That’s always your solution these days, isn’t it?” I asked.

“The more we get rid of now, the fewer there’ll be around to aggravate me in my old age.”

I could not tell if he was joking. “When you start getting old, we’ll worry about it.”

“Guy like that will be easy, Little Girl. He won’t be looking for it. Bam! He’s gone. And nobody’ll care. Strangle his ass. Leave a rumel on him. Blame it on our old buddy Narayan. He’s in town, we need to put all kinds of shit off on him.”

“Language, old man.” One-Eye babbled on, putting a name to animal waste in a hundred tongues. I turned my back. “Sahra? You’ve been very quiet.”

“I’ve been trying to digest what I picked up today. By the way, Jaul Barundandi was distraught because you stayed home. Tried to take your kickback out of my wages. He finally found Minh Subredil’s limit. I threatened to scream. He would’ve called my bluff if his wife hadn’t been around somewhere. Are you sure it’s safe to let this librarian live? If it looked natural, no one would suspect-”

“It may not be safe but it could pay dividends. Master Santaraksita wants to make some kind of experiment out of me. To see if a low-caste dog really can be taught to roll over and play dead. What about Soulcatcher? What about the shadows? Did you learn anything?”

“She loosed everything she had. Just an impulse. No master plan except to remind the city of her power. She expected the victims to be immigrants who live in the streets. No one much cares about them. Only a handful of shadows got back before dawn. Our captives won’t be missed until tomorrow.”

“We could go catch a few more Bats,” Goblin said, inviting himself to take a seat. One-Eye appeared to have dozed off. He still had hold of his cane, though. “Bats. There’s bats out there tonight.”

Sahra offered a confirming nod.

Goblin said, “Back before we marched against the Shad-owmasters, we killed all the bats. Had bounties on them big enough for bat hunters to make a living. Because the Shad-owmasters used them to spy.”

I recalled a time when crows were murdered relentlessly because they might be acting as Soulcatcher’s far-flying eyes. “You’re saying we should stay in tonight?”

“Mind like a stone ax, this old gal.”

I asked Sahra, “What did Soulcatcher think about our attack?”

“It didn’t come up where I could hear.” She pushed some sheets from the old Annals across. “The Bhodi suicide bothered her more. She’s afraid it might start a trend.”

“A trend? There could be more than one monk goofy enough to set himself on fire?”

“She thinks so.”

Tobo asked, “Mom, are we going to call up Dad tonight?”

“I don’t know right now, dear.”

“I want to talk to him some more.”

“You will. I’m sure he’s interested in talking to you, too.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

I asked Goblin, “Would it be possible for you to keep that mist thing going all the time so we could keep Murgen connected and any time we wanted, we could just send him where we needed to know about something?”

“We’re working on it.” He took off on a technical rant. I did not understand a word but I let him roll. He deserved to feel good about something.

One-Eye began to snore. The smart would stay out of reach of his cane anyway.

I said, “Tobo could keep notes all the time...” I had had this sudden vision of the son of the Annalist taking over for the father, the way it goes in Taglian guilds, where trades and tools pass down generation after generation.

“In fact,” One-Eye said, as though no time had passed since the last remark, and as though he had not been faking sleep a moment ago, “right now’s the time you could play you a really great big ol’ hairy-assed, old-time Company dirty trick, Little Girl. Send somebody down to the silk merchants’ exchange. Have them get you some silk, different colors. Big enough to make up copies of them scarves the Stranglers use. Them rumels. Then we start picking off the guys we don’t like anyway. Once in a while we leave one of them scarves behind. Like with that librarian.”

I said, “I like that. Except the part about Master San-taraksita. That’s a closed subject, old man.”

One-Eye cackled. “Man’s got to stand by what he believes.”

“It would get a lot of fingers pointing,” Goblin said.

One-Eye cackled again. “It would point them in some other direction, too, Little Girl. And I’m thinking we don’t want much more attention coming our way right now. I’m thinking maybe we’re closer to figuring things out than any of us realizes.”

“Water sleeps. We have to be taken seriously.”

“That’s what I’m saying. We use them scarves to take out informants and guys who know too much. Librarians, for instance.”