Mahtnahan was the only silver rumel man ever to have lived. The only Deceiver ever to have sent more than a thousand souls to paradise.

Sindhu said, still softly, Every man, when he plies his rumel for the first time and knows the ecstasy of Kina for the first time, aspires to the heights attained by Mahtnahan.

Narayan brightened, grinned his grin. And to his luck. Mahtnahan not only freed us of our greatest persecutor, he survived the killing. He lived another forty years.

I led them on through legends and oral histories, interested in the way Croaker would have been interested, intrigued by the dark history. Over and over, Narayan insisted there were true written records somewhere and that it was the great dream of every jamadar in every generation to recover them. This is a feeble world today, Mistress. The greatest powers afoot are these Shadowmasters and they dont really know what theyre doing. The Books... Ah, the secrets said to lie within their pages. The lost arts.

We talked about those Books again. I did not swallow their story whole. Id heard similar legends about books filled with earth-shaking secrets before.

But Narayan did startle me with a description of the place where they had been hidden.

It could have been the caverns I visited in my dreams. As they might have been recalled after a thousand years of oral history.

The history of Kinas cult might deserve some study someday. After I secured myself in todays world.

I had not spent all my time just waiting for Narayan to decide the time was ripe to let me in on a few secrets. Over the weeks I had done my listening among the men, had dropped a question here and there, to hundreds of individuals, and had put together a fair picture of the Kina cult as it was seen from outside.

Every living Taglian had heard Kinas name and believed she existed. Every Taglian had heard of the Stranglers. They thought of them more as bandits and gangsters than as religious fanatics. And not one in a hundred believed the Stranglers existed today. They were something from the past, eradicated during the last century.

I mentioned that to Narayan. He smiled.

That is our greatest tool, Mistress. No one believes we exist. You have seen how Sindhu and I make little effort to hide from the men. We go among them and say we are the feared and famous Stranglers and they had better not displease us. And they dont believe us. But they fear us even so, because they know stories and think we might try imitating the Deceivers of old.

There are some who believe. I suspected those included Smoke, the Radisha, and some others in high places.

Always. Just enough.