"Not bad," Jado said grudgingly. I treasured that faint praise. "Come. I make you tea."

Sweating, my staff still held warily, I nodded. "Have you ever seen anything dismember a Necromance, Jado-sensei?"

"Not recently." He brushed his horny hands free of splinters. "Come, tea. We talk."

I racked my staff and followed him into the spotless green and beige kitchen. Early-evening light poured in through the bay window. Jado got down the iron kettle and two bowls, and his pink Hiero Kidai canister that held green tea. I hid a smile. The old dragon was gruff, but he loved little pink things.

Maybe humans are little pink things to him too. I had to swallow bile again. My left shoulder twisted with hot feverish pain.

"So." Jado put the water on to boil while I eased myself onto a wooden stool set on the other side of the counter. "You have been called out of slumber, it seems."

"I wasn't sleeping, I don't sleep," I objected immediately. "I'm just not a social person, that's all. Been running bounties."

He shrugged. He was right, throwing myself into one hunt after another was a way of numbing myself. Trying to exhaust myself so I could sleep, staving off the pain with furious activity. It was a time-honored method, one I'd used all my life; but as a coping mechanism I had to admit it was failing miserably.

His robe, rough cotton, caught the sunlight and glowed. I rilled my lungs—the lingering smell of human was only a tang over his darker scent of flame and some deep, scaled hole, darkness welling up from the ground, incense burned in a forgotten temple. I didn't know what Jado was, he didn't fit into any category of nonhuman I'd ever read or heard about. But he'd been in Saint City for at least as long as Abra, because I sometimes, rarely, took messages from one to the other; little bits of information.

I had never seen Jado leave his home, or Abra leave her shop, and I wondered where they had come from. Maybe one day I'd find out.

It was a relief to smell something inhuman. Something that didn't reek of dying cells, of pain, of eventual abandonment.

Japhrimel's gone, I thought, and the sharp spike of pain that went through me seemed somehow clean as well. "What do you know about Christabel Moorcock? Did you ever train her?"

He shook his head. "She is not of my students." The kettle popped on the stove, heating up. "You wish for a sword, then."

It was my turn to shrug, look down at the counter. I traced a random glyph on the Formica with one black-nailed fingertip. My rings sizzled. The glyph folded out, became something else—the spiked fluid lines of the scar on my shoulder. I traced it twice, looked up to meet his tranquil eyes.

"You have decided to live." Jado leaned on the counter, his own blunt fingertips seemingly arranged for maximum affect. His broad nose widened a little and he seemed to sniff. For a moment, his eyes were black from lid to lid, maybe a trick of shadow as he blinked, his eyes lidding like a lizard's. "Though you still smell of grief, Danyo-chan. Much grief."

He's not coming back. Maybe I can grieve instead of trying to avoid it. "I never thought I wouldn't live," I lied. "Look, Jado, it's about Rigger Hall. And I think I need a sword. My hand won't get any stronger if I don't exercise it."

"Christabel." His accent made it Ku-ris-ta-be-ru. "She was death-talker. Like you."

With only four of us in the city, it stood to reason he would know. I looked down at my left hand, narrow and golden and graceful. His, brown and square, powerful, tendons standing out under the skin. "I don't think that's what killed her."

A slight nod. "So, you have theory already."

"No. Not even a breath of one. I've got a dead normal, a dead sexwitch, and a dead Necromance who left a little note about Rigger Hall. That's all I've got." I think it might be ritual murder, but I'm not sure. And until I'm sure, nobody's going to hear a theory from me, dammit.

"And this means you need sword?" His eyebrow lifted. The kettle chirruped, and he poured the water into the bowls. I watched him whisk the fine green powder into frothy, bitter tea, his fingers moving with the skill of long practice. When my bowl was ready, he offered it with both hands. I took it in both hands, with a slight bow. Black raku glaze pebbled under my fingertips. The bowl still remembered the fire that made it strong; I caught the echo of flame even in the tea's strong, clear, tart taste.

We are creatures of fire. Tierce Japhrimel's voice threaded through my memory, slow and silken. I was too busy keeping Jado from bashing me with a staff during sparring, but now the thought of Japh crept back into my head. I had managed a full half-hour, forty-five minutes without pain? Call the holovids, stop the presses, rent a holoboard, it was a banner event.

No. I hadn't stopped thinking of him. I never stopped thinking of him. But he was really, truly, inevitably, finally gone.

"I miss him," I said without meaning to, looking into the teabowl's depths. Now that I knew he wasn't in Death's hall, I could admit it. Maybe. "Isn't that strange."

Jado shrugged, sipping at his own tea. His slanted charcoal eyes half-lidded, and the rumble of our strange paired contentment made the air thick and golden. "You have changed, Danyo-chan. I met you, and I saw it, so much anger. Where did anger go?"

I shrugged. "I don't know." The anger isn't gone, Jado. I'm just better at hiding it. "I've been doing research on demons. And on A'nankhimel. Between bounties, that is." My mouth twisted into a bitter smile. I stared into the tea. "He never really told me what he did to me, or the price he paid for it. I still only have a faint idea—it's so hard to separate myth from reality in all the old books, and demons seem to delight in throwing red herrings across the trail." I realized what I was talking about, looked up. Jado examined the window with much apparent fascination.

I sighed. "I used to work so hard at just staying alive, paying off my mortgage, just jumping from one rock to the next. Now I've crossed the river, and you know what? I wish I was back in the middle. At least while I was jumping I didn't have so much goddamn time to brood."

Jado made a soft noise, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, just showing he was listening. Then his dark eyes swung away from the window and came to rest on me. "Perhaps would be best if you did not pursue your past, Danyo-chan."

Remember Rigger Hall. "I'm not pursuing it. It's pursuing me. Now I have to find out what Christabel did at Rigger Hall, and what connection the three victims had."

"Why?" He took the change of subject gracefully, of course. If anyone knew me, it was Jado. Even before Rio he had never treated me differently than any of his other students.

How could an old man who wasn't human have made me feel so blessedly, thoroughly, completely human myself? "There's only three Necromances left in the city. Me, Gabe, and John Fairlane. We can't afford to lose any more." Bitter humor traced through my voice, etching acid on a pane of glass.

Jado snorted a laugh as if steam was coming through his nose. "Come, drink your tea. We will find you sword. I think I know which one."

The room at the head of the stairs was just as I remembered. Dying sunlight fell through the unshielded windows, slanting to strike at the polished wooden floor. Dust swirled in sinuous shapes with long frilled wings. The door had been taken off its hinges, a long fall of amber silk taking its place. The silk rippled and sang to itself in the silence.

On the black wooden racks against the wall the swords lay, each humming in its sheath. I glanced down to the space where my sword had hung; it was empty. There were four empty spaces—four of Jado's students, out in the world. I wondered if any of the others had broken their sword in the heart of a demon.