Sindhu muttered something in cant. Narayan thought a moment, glanced at me, grinned again. He nodded.

Sindhu pawed through Jah's clutter, looking for the ground. He cleared a small area, looked around some more.

While I watched him, trying to figure out what he was doing, Narayan produced an odd tool he'd carried under the dark robe he'd donned for the adventure. The tool had a head that was half hammer, half pick, that weighed at least two pounds. Maybe more if it was the silver and gold it appeared to be. Its handle was ebony inlaid with ivory and a few rubies that caught the lamplight and gleamed like fresh blood. He began pounding the earth with the pick side, but quietly, unrhythmically.

That wasn't a tool that would be used that way ordinarily. I know a cult object when I see one, even if it's unfamiliar.

Narayan broke up the earth. Sindhu used a tin pan to scoop it onto a carpet he'd turned face down, careful not to scatter any. I had no idea what they intended. They were too intent on what they were doing to explain. A litany of sorts, in cant, pa.s.sed between them. I heard something about auspices and the promise of the crows, more about the Daughter of Night and those people-or whatever they were.

All I could do was keep watch.

Time pa.s.sed. I had a tense few minutes when the guard changed outside. But those men had little to say to one another. The new men didn't check inside the tent.

I heard a meaty whack and muted crunch, turned to see what they were doing now.

They'd gotten a hole dug. It was barely three feet deep and not that far across. I couldn't guess what they meant to do with it.

They showed me.

Narayan used the hammer face of his tool to break Jah's bones. Just as Ram had been doing with a rock that morning in that draw. He whispered, "It's been a long time but I still have the touch."

It's amazing how small a bundle a big man makes once you pulverize his joints and fold him up.

They cut open Jah's belly and deposited him in the hole. Narayan's final stroke buried the pick in the corpse's skull. He cleaned the tool, then they filled the hole around the remains, tamping the earth as they went. Half an hour later you couldn't tell where they'd dug.

They put the carpets back, bundled up the excess dirt, looked at me for the first time since they'd begun.

They were surprised to find me impa.s.sive. They wanted me to be outraged or disgusted. Or something. Anything that betrayed a feminine weakness.

"I've seen men mutilated before."

Narayan nodded. Maybe he was pleased. Hard to tell. "We still have to get out."

The firelight outside betrayed the positions of the guards. They were where they were supposed to be. If my spell worked a second time we'd only need a little luck to get out unseen.

Narayan and Sindhu scattered dirt as we walked toward our camp. "Good rumel work, Mistress," Narayan said. And something more, in cant, to Sindhu, who agreed reluctantly.

I asked, "Why did you bury him? No one will know what happened to him. I wanted him to become an object lesson."

"Leaving him lie would have told everyone who was responsible. Innuendo is more frightening than fact. Better you're guilty in rumor."

Maybe. "Why did you break him up and cut him open?"

"A smaller grave is harder to find. We cut him open so he wouldn't bloat. If you don't they sometimes bloat so much they come up out of the ground. Or they explode and loose off enough gas so the grave can be found by the smell. Especially by jackals, who dig them up and scatter them all over."

Practical. Logical. Obvious, once he explained it. I'd never had occasion to conceal a body before. I'd surrounded myself with very practical-and clearly very experienced-murderers.

"We have to talk soon, Narayan."

He grinned that grin. He'd tell me some truth when he did.

We slipped back into camp and parted company.

I slept well. There were dreams but they weren't filled with gloom and doom. In one a beautiful black woman came and held me and caressed me and called me her daughter and told me I'd done well. I wakened feeling refreshed and as vigorous as if I'd had a full night's sleep. It was a beautiful morning. The world seemed painted in especially vivid colors.

My exercises with my talent went very well.

Chapter Nineteen.

The disappearance, without trace, of the high priest Jahamaraj Jah, so trivial an opponent that I recall him only as a faded caricature of a man, stunned the thousands cluttering the region around the Ghoja ford. A whisper went around saying he had schemed against the Radisha and myself and that had sealed his fate. I wasn't responsible for the rumor. Narayan denied having said anything to anybody. Two days after we buried Jah everybody was convinced I'd eliminated him. n.o.body knew how.

They were scared.

The possibility had a big impact on Blade. I got the feeling he thought I'd gone through some rite of pa.s.sage and he could now devote himself to my cause. I was pleased but had to wonder about a man so devoutly antagonistic toward priests.

I had Narayan spread word that I still needed recruits, especially skilled hors.e.m.e.n. Another two hundred Shadar enlisted. Likewise nearly five hundred survivors of the Dejagore battle, though many just wanted regular meals or the comfort of a known place in the hierarchy. Taglian caste systems encourage dependence upon hierarchy. The chaos at the ford provided none of the benefits of social rigidity, only the handicaps.

I told Narayan to think about expanding the camp. Soon we'd be overcrowded. I told Blade to look for likely leaders. We'd never have enough of those.

The Taglians continued to amaze me. They remained pacifistic in their thinking, yet admired what they thought was the direct and casual way I disposed of enemies. The bigger the violence, the more they would applaud. As long as they were not threatened personally.

The Radisha sent for me the third morning after Jah's death. It was a brief interview, of no consequence except that I left convinced that Smoke was more than a fakir. He'd penetrated the veil of time well enough to a.s.sure himself that I'd had a hand in Jah's disappearance. He was more frazzled than ever. For the first time the Radisha was rattled.

She saw her control slipping.

That night she and Smoke and a few followers slipped over the Main and headed north. She left Swan and Mather to pretend she was secluded in the fortress. That deceit was useless. Narayan told me what was happening before the Radisha hit the water.

The day was noteworthy, too, because we enlisted our first nonveterans. There were just three of them. Two were friends of Narayan's friends. But their arrival was a sign that word was spreading and there were Taglians willing to join the cause.

Drills and training continued, as intense as I could make them, always designed to strip each man of all loyalties but those to his comrades and commander.

Former slaves had become the most plentiful volunteers-and best students. They had nothing else. The Shadowmasters had destroyed their world. I thought it might be a good idea to send trusted men to roam the lands below the Main in search of more men without strong ties to Taglios.

Narayan and Sindhu told me the Radisha was doing her sneak. I listened, then said, "Sit. The time has come."

They understood. They didn't look as distressed as I'd expected. They had talked it over and had agreed to open up. "Who are you? What are you doing?"

Narayan took a deep breath. He did not look me in the eye. "Mistress, we are Deceivers. Followers of the G.o.ddess Kina, who has many names and many guises but whose only truth is death." He went into a long-winded explanation about the G.o.ddess and how she related to the G.o.ds of Taglios and its neighbors. It was an improbable mishmash like that surrounding the genesis and attributes of most dark G.o.ds. Narayan plainly had not thought much about the doctrine. His explanation didn't tell me much except that he and Sindhu were devoted to their G.o.ddess.

It took some pressure but they admitted they worshipped Kina, in part, by committing murder.

Sindhu volunteered, "Narayan, jamadar of the Changlor band, is famous among us, Mistress." Evidently he broke the silence because it wasn't good form for a man to brag about his own accomplishments. "He has given the gift of paradise to more than a hundred souls."

"One hundred fifty-three," Narayan said. That, apparently, was not considered braggery.

"Paradise? You want to explain that?"

"Those whose lives are taken for the G.o.ddess are freed from the Wheel of Life and ascend to paradise immediately."

The Wheel of Life was a Gunni concept. You kept going around and around, rebirth after rebirth, till the good you did sufficiently outweighed the evil. Then you were allowed escape. But not to paradise. Paradise was not a Gunni concept. The Gunni who escaped the Wheel became one with the generative force that had created the Lords of Light, the G.o.ds, who were its champions in the endless struggle with Shadow, which would be defeated only when the generative force had absorbed so many good souls it filled the universe. Shadow, of course, fought back by leading men to evil.

Paradise is a Vehdna notion, something originally imagined by adolescent males and dirty old men. It is stocked with all the comforts a male from a hard world could l.u.s.t after. In particular it is infested with eager virgins of both s.e.xes so the elevated will have something with which to while away eternity.

The Vehdna paradise gives no gate pa.s.ses to women. The Vehdna say women have no souls. The G.o.ds created them to bear children, serve the l.u.s.ts of men, and work themselves into early graves.

The Vehdna doctrine is the most perniciously anti-female of Taglios' cults but the most flexible as well. They have their female saints and heroines, and the Vehdna amongst my soldiers adapted to my command more easily than did the Shadar or Gunni. They just cast me in the role of their warrior saints Esmalla (three of the same name, from the same lineage, scattered over a century about eight hundred years back) and concentrated on doing their jobs.

The religions in my end of the world had not made more sense. I did not criticize Taglian beliefs. But I did ask questions. Understanding is an important tool.

Narayan insisted his beliefs were not derivative. He claimed Kina worship antedated all other religions. What I saw were echoes of its primal influence. "Mistress, it is said the Books record the histories of the Children of Kina back to the most ancient times, when men first received the gift of letters. It is said some are in tongues no man has spoken in ten thousand years."

"What books are these? Where are they?"

"The Books of the Dead, they're sometimes called.

They are lost now, I think. There was a very bad time for the Children of Kina a long time ago. A great warlord, Rhadreynak, forged a vast empire. He insulted Kina. She visited vengeance upon his house, but by chance he was spared. He launched a crusade without mercy. The keepers of the Books fled into a hidden place. All who knew where they had gone were devoured by Rhadreynak's wrath before the sainted Mahtnahan dan Jakel broke his neck with the silver rumel."

Sindhu said something in cant, softly, the way men of other paths would say "Praise G.o.d" or "Blessed be His Name."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Mahtnahan was the only silver rumel man ever to have lived. The only Deceiver ever to have sent more than a thousand souls to paradise."

Sindhu said, still softly, "Every man, when he plies his rumel for the first time and knows the ecstasy of Kina for the first time, aspires to the heights attained by Mahtnahan."

Narayan brightened, grinned his grin. "And to his luck. Mahtnahan not only freed us of our greatest persecutor, he survived the killing. He lived another forty years."

I led them on through legends and oral histories, interested in the way Croaker would have been interested, intrigued by the dark history. Over and over, Narayan insisted there were true written records somewhere and that it was the great dream of every jamadar in every generation to recover them. "This is a feeble world today, Mistress. The greatest powers afoot are these Shadowmasters and they don't really know what they're doing. The Books... Ah, the secrets said to lie within their pages. The lost arts."

We talked about those Books again. I did not swallow their story whole. I'd heard similar legends about books filled with earth-shaking secrets before.

But Narayan did startle me with a description of the place where they had been hidden.

It could have been the caverns I visited in my dreams. As they might have been recalled after a thousand years of oral history.

The history of Kina's cult might deserve some study someday. After I secured myself in today's world.

I had not spent all my time just waiting for Narayan to decide the time was ripe to let me in on a few secrets. Over the weeks I had done my listening among the men, had dropped a question here and there, to hundreds of individuals, and had put together a fair picture of the Kina cult as it was seen from outside.

Every living Taglian had heard Kina's name and believed she existed. Every Taglian had heard of the Stranglers. They thought of them more as bandits and gangsters than as religious fanatics. And not one in a hundred believed the Stranglers existed today. They were something from the past, eradicated during the last century.

I mentioned that to Narayan. He smiled.

"That is our greatest tool, Mistress. No one believes we exist. You have seen how Sindhu and I make little effort to hide from the men. We go among them and say we are the feared and famous Stranglers and they had better not displease us. And they don't believe us. But they fear us even so, because they know stories and think we might try imitating the Deceivers of old."

"There are some who believe." I suspected those included Smoke, the Radisha, and some others in high places.

"Always. Just enough."

He was a sinister little man. And probably really a vegetable peddler honored in his community as a good Gunni, good father, good grandfather. But during the dry season, when large portions of the Taglian population were on the move for reasons of trade, he would be, too. With his band, pretending to be travellers like other travellers, murdering those others when the opportunity arose. He was good at that, obviously. That was why Sindhu thought so highly of him.

Now I understood their caste system. It was based on number of successful murders.

Narayan was, likely, secretly, a wealthy man. The followers of Kina always robbed their victims.

They were more egalitarian than other cults. Narayan, of low caste and cursed with a Shadar name, had become jamadar of his band. Because he was a brilliant tactician and favored of Kina-meaning he was lucky, I a.s.sumed-according to Sindhu. He was famous among the Stranglers. A living legend.

"He doesn't need arm-holders," Sindhu said. "Only the best black cloths kill so quickly and efficiently that they don't need arm-holders."

A living legend, and my lieutenant. Interesting. "Arm-holders?" He used the word as a t.i.tle more than as a job description.

"A band consists of many specialists, Mistress. The newest members begin as grave-diggers and bone-breakers. Many never advance beyond that level, for they develop no skill with the rumel. The yellow rumel men are the lowest ranked Stranglers. Apprentices. They seldom have a chance to kill, being mostly a.s.signed as arm-holders for red rumel men and as scouts and victim-finders. Red rumel men do most of the strangling. Few win the black rumel. Those almost always become jamadars or priests. The priests do the divining and take omens, intercede with Kina, and keep the chronicles and accounts of the company. When it becomes necessary they act as judges."

"I was never a priest," Narayan said. "A priest has to be educated."

Never a priest but once a slave. He'd managed to keep his rumel throughout his captivity. I wondered if he had fought back, dealing silent death.

"Sometimes. When the moment was propitious," he admitted. "But Kina teaches us not to slay indiscriminately, nor in anger, but only for her glory. We do not slay for political reasons-except for the safety of the brotherhood."

Interesting. "How many followers do you suppose Kina claims?"

"There is no way to tell, Mistress." Narayan seemed almost relieved by this line of questioning. "We are outlawed. We come under sentence of death the moment we take our oath to Kina. A jamadar will know how many there are in his band and will have contacts with a few other jamadars but he'll have no idea how many bands there are or how strong they might be. There are ways we have to recognize one another, ways we communicate, but seldom do we dare gather in large numbers. The risks are too great."

Sindhu said, "The Festival of Lights is our great gathering, when each band sends men to the rites at the Grove of Doom."

Narayan silenced him with a gesture. "A great holy day but little different than the Shadar festival of the same name. Many of the band captains, come but bring few of their followers. The priests attend, of course. Decisions are made and cases judged but I would guess that not one in twenty believers attends. I would guess that there are between one and two thousand of us today, more than half living in Taglian territory."

Not many at all, then. And only a minority of those truly skilled murderers. But what a force to unleash in the darkness if I could make it my instrument.

"And now the true question, Narayan. The heart of the thing. Where do I fit? Why have you chosen me? And for what?"

Chapter Twenty.

Crowing and clatter wakened Croaker. He rose and went to the temple entrance. Ghostly dawn light permeated the misty wood.

Soulcatcher had returned. The black stallions were lathered. They had run long and hard. The sorceress was besieged by squawking crows. She cursed them and beat them back, beckoned him. He went out, asked, "Where have you been? Things have been happening."