"So what is it?" Calihye asked him, and he looked at her with curiosity. "What is it that creates a perfect warrior such as Artemis Entreri?" she clarified.

His mind flashed back again to Memnon. An image of Belrigger flashed before him and he felt himself jerk.

He realized that he was holding the flute again.

Tosso-pash's one-toothed leer flickered before him, and he threw the flute down on the bed.

"Training? Discipline?" Calihye asked.

Entreri snatched his shirt up from the chair and moved past her.

"Anger," he said, and in such a tone that no further questioning would likely be forthcoming.

It stood as just another clay-stone rectangle in a sea of similar houses, an unremarkable structure a dozen feet across and half a dozen front-to-back. It had an awning, like all of its neighbors, facing the sea breeze that usually offered the only relief from Memnon's unrelenting heat. There were no walls partitioning the house. A single threadbare curtain sectioned off a sleeping area, where his mother and father, Shanali and Belrigger—or Shanali and someone who had paid Belrigger—slept. For the boy there was just the floor of the common room. Once, when too many bugs had crawled around him, the boy had climbed on the table to sleep, but Belrigger had found him there and had beaten him severely for the infraction.

Most of the beatings had blended together in the haze of passing time, but that particular one, Artemis remembered clearly. Drunker than usual, Belrigger had taken to his back and rump with a rotted old board, and the battering had left several splinters in Artemis's backside that had become infected and oozed white and greenish pus for days.

Shanali had come to him with a wet cloth to wipe those wounds. He remembered that. She had rubbed his backside gently, with motherly love, and though she had uttered a few scolding words, calling him foolish for not remembering Belrigger's rules, even those had come tinged with sympathy.