A notably arbitrary tone she always had, that one, but just then I could yield to it happily enough. I was a good ten strides gone before it occurred to me that the boy was not following. When I turned he was standing with his back to me, facing the three of them, saying, “I will bring you a spade. At least let me do that, let me get the spade.” Hands on his hips, head shaking stubbornly. He was doing just that in the hayloft, in the potato patch, when he was five.

“Rosseth, we do not need you.” Lal’s voice was sharp, even harsh, almost as much so as I could have wished. “Go with your master, Rosseth.” He turned away from her and flung toward me, marching so blindly that he would have blundered right into me if I hadn’t stepped aside. I looked back at the women—they were not looking at us, but drawing together over those dead bodies like so many ravens—and then I walked behind the boy back to the inn. For the first time in a very long while, I followed him.

LAL

Good or ill, it might all have been avoided if I hadn’t already been drinking. I drink very seldom—it is one of the many pleasant habits that my life has never been able to afford—but then I drink with a purpose. You will say that I should have been rejoicing: that this day had not only set Nyateneri and me squarely back on the track of the one I called my friend and she the Man Who Laughs, but also offered us at least some part of a vision of some part of his fate. True enough, and a meaningless, useless kind of truth it seemed, that evening long ago in a little low room smelling of Karsh’s life, Nyateneri’s fox, and the dozen pigeons Karsh kept in the attic directly above. What good to know that our dear magician had lived near Corcorua in a ridiculous pastry tower, and had been betrayed by a beloved companion—himself in turn slain by demons of some sort—when there was no imagining how long ago this had all happened, or where in this world he might have fled? Lukassa could tell us no more than that terrible chamber had told her; for the rest, the trail was even colder than it had been when we set out in the morning. My friend would have to come to us now—there was truly no going to him.

For my part, I was weary from my skin inwards, angry with everything from my skin on out, and capable neither of thought nor of sleep. So I had Karsh send up what he complained were his last three bottles of Dragon’s Daughter—the southernmost wine in his cellar, so red that it is almost black—and I was decently into the second when word came that I was wanted at the bathhouse. I brought the bottle with me, for company’s sake. Lukassa followed.

When I drink too much—and I only drink too much, as I have said—I most often become sullen, brooding and resentful. Perhaps this is my true nature, and all else of me a mask, who knows? I said no word to Nyateneri—no questions, no reproaches, nothing—while the three of us were burying the two bodies in a wild tickberry patch, a tedious distance from the bathhouse. It was work we both knew, and best done mum in any case. I finished the second bottle then, without offering it round. Nyateneri said something in her own tongue over the graves, and we walked back to the inn with her looking sideways at me on my left and Lukassa sneaking glances on my right. And I said nothing at all until we were in our room with the last wine bottle open before me. I am like that, to this day. It is why I prefer to travel alone.

Then, finally, I rounded on her, on Nyateneri. I am not proud of much that I said, and there is no reason to recount every word. The main of it was that she had deceived Lukassa and me: she had endangered our lives from the moment we met, saying that no one pursued her and all the while knowing that those two killers were drawing nearer as she lied to us. When she defended herself, pointing out that she had said only that no one anywhere wanted her back, never that she was not wanted dead—oh, then I lost language completely and came around the table reaching for her. Which was certainly foolish—hurt and tired or not, she was still stronger than I—but she swiftly put the bed between us, holding up her hands for peace. In the attic the pigeons woke up and began gurgling and flapping, making chilly dust filter down between the rafters.

“What does it matter? They came to kill me, and I killed them—you never even saw them until they were dead. What danger, what smallest inconvenience for you? What night’s sleep did it all ever cost you? It was my business, mine to deal with, and I did, and it is done. It is done, finished, no harm to anyone but me. Tell me differently, Lal-after-dark.”

“Is it?” I screamed at her. “Two little deaths and all well—is it always finished so easily for you, with no—” I was still dribbling words—“no echoes? Tell Rosseth, whom they almost strangled—tell her.” Between the tower, and the encounter with Tikat, and then helping to bury Nyateneri’s victims, poor Lukassa had endured the hardest day of us all; small blame to her if she had now gone to huddle in a corner, whining wordlessly to the fox and twisting an end of her hair. I’d have done likewise, but for the wine.

Nyateneri turned to look long and thoughtfully at Lukassa, who looked back quickly, and then away. “Indeed I will,” she said. “And then perhaps she will tell me what it is like to be dead, and then to be raised into life again, and even possibly why it was never mentioned to me that I was traveling with a wizard and a walking corpse, who were in turn being followed by a mad farmboy. The matter might have been brought up, surely? At some well-chosen point?” Her voice remained as pleasantly ironic as ever, but it shook very slightly as she stared at me. Furious as I was, I would not have charged her again.

“That was our business,” I answered. “None of it put you in peril, as your secrets did us. I would have told you if it were otherwise.”

Nyateneri’s laugh was high and contemptuous. “There was only one wizard whose word I ever took for anything.” Her left hand was swelling badly: she had used it without complaint as we dug the graves, but the slightest gesture obviously hurt her now. She went on loudly:

“And even he never tried to raise the dead. He said there was no way of doing that that was not wrong in its nature, and the greatest of mages could not make it right. So there’s no need to tax yourself persuading me that you learned the art from him. I knew him better than that.”

“The devil you do!” I shouted, and it was not until I saw her blink uncomprehendingly that I realized I had fallen—and a long, long fall it was—back into my oldest childhood tongue, the secret speech of an inbarati of Khaidun. That may not tell you how angry I was, and how drunk, but it tells me. I was trembling myself, from the shock of that sound, as I repeated the words in common speech, carefully. I said, “If you knew him as well as you say, then you ought to remember how much he loved gardening, and how dreadful he was at it. His melons were like fists, his greens crackled like parchment—his corn came up withered, and his beans never came up at all. He couldn’t have grown so much as a potato without the aid of magic.”

Nyateneri was staring at me, shaking her head, looking half-drunk herself with weariness and amazement. “That?” she said. “That? You did it with that old garden rhyme of his? I don’t believe it.” But she was beginning to laugh, in a different way this time, a kind of deep, boiling giggle. “Oh, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. You raised her like a squash, like a—” but the giggle took over then, and she collapsed onto the bed beside Lukassa, pounding her thigh with her unhurt hand and hooting helplessly. The fox’s cold laughter joined hers.