“I think not,” I said miserably.

“Then it must have been a rukh, insanely tearing with its beak and talons, for the girls are not just dead—they no longer exist, not as separate girls. They are nothing but a spatter on the remaining walls. Bits of flesh and blobs of gore. Twins they were in life, and twinned they have gone into death. They will be inseparable forever, since no funeral practitioner could possibly sort out the fragments and say which were of whom.”

“Bruto barabào,” I breathed, appalled. “But it was not any rukh or jinni or dragon. Alas, it was I who did this.”

“And to think, master, you once told me that you could never kill a woman.”

“Unfeeling slave!” I cried. “I did not do it deliberately!”

“Ah, well, you are young yet. Meanwhile, let us be thankful that those two did not keep any pet dog or cat or ape, to be intermingled also with them in the afterlife.”

I swallowed sickly. Whether this was my fault or God’s doing, it was a terrible loss of two lovely young women. But I had to reflect that, in a very real sense, to me they had been lost already. One or both of them had been betraying me to the inimical Achmad, and I had entertained suspicion of Buyantu as the secret whisperer at the Echo Pavilion. Whoever that was, though, it evidently had not been she. But just then I jumped, as another voice spoke in my ear:

“Lamentable mamzar, what have you done?”

I turned. It was the Court Firemaster, who no doubt had come at a run because he had known the distinctive noise of his own product.

“I was trying an experiment in al-kimia, Master Shi,” I said, contrite. “The girls were instructed to keep the fire very low, but they must have—”

“I told you,” he said through his teeth. “The flaming powder is not a thing to play with.”

“No one can tell Marco Polo anything,” said Prince Chingkim, who, as Wang of Khanbalik, had come apparently to see what havoc had been visited upon his city. He added drily, “Marco Polo must be shown.”

“I would rather not have been shown this,” I mumbled.

“Then do not look, master,” said Nostril. “For here come the Court Funeralmaster and his assistants, to gather the mortal remains.”

The fire had been damped down, by now, to wisps of smoke and occasional little sizzles of steam. The spectators and the water-carrying servants all went away, for people naturally disliked to linger in the vicinity of the funeral preparers. I remained, out of respect for the departed, and so did Nostril, to keep me company, and so did Chingkim, in his capacity as Wang, to see that all was properly concluded, and so did the Master Shi, out of a professional desire to examine the wreckage and make notes for future reference in his work.

The purple-garbed Funeralmaster and his purple-garbed men, although they must have been accustomed to seeing death in many forms, clearly found this job distasteful. They took a look about, then went away, to return with some black leather containers and wooden spatulas and cloth mops. With those objects, and with expressions of revulsion, they went through my rooms and the garden area outside, scraping and swabbing and depositing the results in the containers. When finally they were done, we other four went in and examined the ruins, but only cursorily, for the smell was dreadful. It was a stink compounded of smoke, char, cooked meat and—though it is ungallant to say of the beautiful young departed—the stench of excrement, for I had given the girls no opportunity that morning to make their toilet.

“To have done all this damage,” said the Firemaster, as we were glumly poking about in the main room, “the huo-yao must have been tightly confined at the moment it ignited.”

“It was in a securely lidded stoneware pot, Master Shi,” I said. “I would have thought no spark could have got near it.”

“The pot itself only had to get hot enough,” he said, with a glower at me. “And a stoneware pot? More explosive potential than an Indian nut or a heavy zhu-gan cane. And if the women were huddled over it at the time …”

I moved away from him, not wanting to hear any more about the poor girls. In a corner, to my surprise, I found one undestroyed thing in that destroyed room. It was only a porcelain vase, but it was entire, unbroken, except for some chips lost from its rim. When I looked into it, I saw why it had survived. It was the vase into which I had poured the first measure of huo-yao, and then poured in water. The powder had dried to a solid cake that nearly filled the vase, and so had made it impervious to damage.

“Look at this, Master Shi,” I said, taking it to show to him. “The huo-yao can be a preservative as well as a destroyer.”

“So you first tried wetting it,” he said, looking into the vase. “I could have told you that it would dry solid and useless like that. As a matter of fact, I believe I did tell you. Ayn davàr, but the Prince is right. You cannot be told anything by anybody … .”

I had stopped listening, and went away from him again, for a dim recollection was stirring in my mind. I took the vase out into the garden, and pried up a stone from a whitewashed ring of them around a flower bed, and used it for a hammer to shatter the porcelain. When all the fragments fell away, I had a heavy, gray, vase-shaped lump of the solid-caked powder. I regarded it, and the dim memory came clearer in my mind. What I remembered was the making of that foodstuff the Mongols called grut. I remembered how the Mongol women of the plains would spread milk curd in the sun, and let that dry to a hard cake, then crumble it into pellets of grut, which would keep indefinitely without spoiling, until someone wished to make an emergency meal of it. I took up my stone again, and hammered on the lump of huo-yao until a few pellets, the size and appearance of mouse droppings, crumbled off from it. I regarded them, then went once again to the Firemaster and said diffidently:

“Master Shi, would you look at these and tell me if I am wrong—”

“Probably,” he said, with a contemptuous snort. “They are mouse turds.”

“They are pellets broken from that lump of huo-yao. It appears to me that these pellets hold in firm suspension the correct proportions of the three separate powders. And, being now dry, they should ignite just as if—”

“Yom mekhayeh!” he exclaimed huskily, in what I took to be the Ivrit language. Very, very slowly and tenderly, he picked the pellets from my palm, and held them in his, and bent to peer closely at them, and again huskily exclaimed, in what I recognized as Han, several other words like “hao-jia-huo,” which is an expression of amazement, and “jiao-hao,” which is an expression of delight, and “chan-juan,” which is a term usually employed to praise a beautiful woman.

He suddenly began dashing about the ruined room, until he found a splinter of wood still smoldering. He blew that into a glow, and ran out into the garden. Chingkim and I followed him, the Prince saying, “What now?” and “Not again!” as the Firemaster touched the ember to the pellets and they went off with a bright flare and fizz, just as if they had been in their original finely powdered form.

“Yom mekhayeh!” Master Shi breathed once more, and then turned to me and, wide-eyed, murmured, “Bar mazel!” and then turned to Prince Chingkim and said in Han, “Mu bu jian jie.”

“An old proverb,” Chingkim told me. “The eye cannot see its own lashes. I gather that you have discovered something new about the flaming powder that is new even to the experienced Firemaster.”

“It was just an idea that came to me,” I said modestly.

Master Shi stood looking at me, still saucer-eyed, and shaking his head, and muttering words like “khakhem” and “khalutz.” Then again he addressed Chingkim :

“My Prince, I do not know if you were contemplating a prosecution of this incautious Ferenghi for the damage and casualties he has caused. But the Mishna tells us that a thinking bastard, even, is more highly to be regarded than a high priest who preaches by rote. I suggest that this one has accomplished something worth more than any number of women servants and bits of palace.”