“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.”

“Would I be correct in my suspicion that you’ve been thinking about this for a while and by chance you just happen to have a little list all ready to go?” Very likely any such list would include all the people responsible for his several failed attempts to establish himself in the Taglian black markets.

He cackled. He took a swipe at Goblin with his cane. “And you said she’s got a mind like a flint hatchet.”

“Bring me the list. I’ll discuss it with Murgen next time I see him.”

“With a ghost? They got no sense of perspective, you know.”

“You mean maybe he’s seen everything and knows what you’re really up to? Sounds like a perspective to me. Makes me wonder how far the Company might’ve gone if our fore-brethren had had a ghost to keep an eye on you.”

One-Eye grumbled something about how unfair and unreasonable the world was. He had been singing that song the whole time I had known him. He would keep it up after he became a ghost himself.

I mused, “You think we could get Murgen to winkle out the source of the stink that keeps coming from the back, there, where Do Trang hides his crocodile skins? I know it’s not them. Croc hides have a flavor all their own.”

One-Eye scowled. He was ready to change the subject now. The odor in question came from his beer- and liquor-manufacturing project, hidden in a cellar he and Do Trang thought nobody knew about. Banh Do Trang, once our benefactor for Sahra’s sake, now was practically one of the gang because he had a powerful taste for One-Eye’s product, a huge hunger for illegal and shadowy income, and he liked having tough guys on the payroll who would work hard for very little money. He thought his vice was a secret he shared only with One-Eye and Gota. The three of them got drunk together twice a week.