Uncle Doj said, "There is something different about you."

"Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant more to me than—" I clamped down on the rage. I turned toward the door. No good. Smoke was in a wagon headed south. They continued to stare at me.

It was like this every time I came back after going out without letting Thai Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of their sight.

That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of feeling Croaker got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao. Sarie being gone left a vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my heart. She had been the soul that made this weird bunch work.

Uncle Doj asked, "Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?"

The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises associated with his two-handed longsword style of fighting could become almost as restful and free of pain as was walking with the ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me since I became part of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into the sort of trance the Path requires.

"Not now. Not tonight. I'm tired. Every one of my muscles aches." Yet another way I was going to miss Sarie. That green-eyed angel had been an artist at massaging out the accumulated tensions of the day.

We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well.

Now Mother Gota demanded, "What you doing, you, you hide from your own?" in her abominable Taglian. She refuses to believe she does not speak the language like a native.

"Work." Even without the Old Man's paranoia I would have kept Smoke to myself. Hell, I'm taking a huge risk just mentioning him in these pages even though I'm scribbling them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let alone reads.

Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her discovering Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha and the Shadowmaster away.