The Many Deaths of the Black Company

In those days the Black Company did not exist. This I know because there
were laws and decrees that told me so. But I did not feel entirely
insubstantial.
The Company standard, its Captain and Lieutenant, its Standardbearer
and all the men who had made the Company so terrible, had passed on,
having been buried alive at the heart of a vast desert of stone. “Glittering
stone,” they whispered in the streets and alleys of Taglios, and “Gone to
Khatovar,” they proclaimed from on high, the mighty making what they
had been so determined to prevent for so long over into a great triumph
once the Radisha or Protector or somebody decided that people ought to
believe that the Company had fulfilled its destiny.
Anyone old enough to remember the Company knew better. Only fifty
people had ventured out onto that plain of glittering stone. Half of those
people had not been Company. Only two of those fifty had returned to lie
about what had happened. And a third who had come back to retail the
truth had been killed in the Kiaulune wars, far away from the capital. But
the deceits of Soulcatcher and Willow Swan fooled no one, then or now.
People simply pretended to believe them because that was safer.