All I could do was keep watch.

Time passed. 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 impassive. 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.

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. Nobody 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 passage 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 horsemen. 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 assure 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 goddess Kina, who has many names and many guises but whose only truth is death.” He went into a long-winded explanation about the goddess and how she related to the gods of Taglios and its neighbors. It was an improbable mishmash like that surrounding the genesis and attributes of most dark gods. 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 goddess.

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 goddess 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 gods, 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.