Read Water Sleeps: A Novel of the Black Company (Glittering Stone) for Free Online Page B

city, she was Minh Subredil, another being entirely.
    Minh Subredil was an outcast, the half-breed by-blow of a priest of Khusa and a Nyueng Bao whore. Minh Subredil knew more about her antecedents than did half the people on the streets of Taglios. She talked to herself about them all the time. She would tell anyone she could trap into listening.
    Minh Subredil was a woman so pathetic, so shunned by fortune, that she was an old, bent thing decades before her time. Her signature, which made her recognizable to people who never had encountered her, was the small statue of Ghanghesha she carried everywhere. Ghanghesha, who was the god in charge of good luck in Gunni and some Nyueng Bao belief. Minh Subredil talked to Ghanghesha when there was nobody else who would listen.
    Widowed, Minh Subredil supported her one child by doing scut-work day labor at the Palace. Each morning well before dawn she joined the assembly of unfortunates who gathered at the northern servants’ postern in hopes of gaining work. Sometimes she was joined by her dead husband’s retarded sister Sawa. Sometimes she brought her daughter, though seldom anymore. The girl was getting old enough to be noticed.
    Subassistant housekeeper Jaul Barundandi would come out and announce the number of positions available for the day, then would select the people to fill them. Barundandi always chose Minh Subredil because, though she was too ugly to demand sexual favors of, she could be counted upon to kick back a generous percentage of her salary. Minh Subredil was a desperate creature.
    Barundandi was amused by Subredil’s omnipresent statue. A devout Gunni of the cult of Khusa, he often included in his prayers a petition that he be spared Subredil’s sort of luck. He would never admit it to his henchmen but he did favor Subredil some because of her poor choice of a father. Like most villains, he was wicked only most of the time and mainly in small-minded ways.
    Subredil, as Ky Sahra, never prayed. Ky Sahra had no use for gods. Unaware of his tiny soft spot, she did have in mind a destiny for Jaul Barundandi. When the time came. The subassistant would have ample opportunity to regret his predations.
    There would be many, many regrets, spanning the length and breadth of the Taglian empire. When the time came.
    *   *   *
    We went out through the maze of confusion and distraction spells Goblin and One-Eye have spent so many years weaving throughout the neighborhood, a thousand layers of gossamer deception so subtle only the Protector herself might notice them. If she was looking. But Soulcatcher does not roam the streets looking for enemy hideouts. She has the Greys and her shadows and bats and crows to do that work. And those are too dim to notice that they are being guided away from or subtly ushered through the area in a manner that left it seeming no more remarkable than any other. The two little wizards spent most of their time maintaining and expanding their maze of confusion. People not trusted no longer got within two hundred yards of our headquarters. Not without being led.
    We had no trouble. We wore strands of yarn tied around our left wrists. These enchanted loops softened the confusion spells. They let us see the truth.
    Thus we often knew what the Palace intended before plans went into motion. Minh Subredil, or sometimes Sawa, listened in while the plans were being made.
    I muttered, “Isn’t it awfully early for us to be out?”
    “Yes. But there will be others already there when we take our place.” There are a lot of desperate people in Taglios. Some will camp as near the Palace as the Greys will allow.
    We did reach the Palace area hours earlier than ever before. But there were rounds of the darkness to make, brothers of the Company to visit in their hiding places. In each instance the voice of the witch came out of the wreckage that was Minh Subredil. Sawa tagged along behind and drooled out of the corner of her twisted mouth.
    Most of the