None of them wanted to, but they did it. The first layer of raw stone on the man’s body was dreadful, and Chih gained a new kind of appreciation for the tradition of covering the faces of the dead. Then it was just more work, gathering stones to cover the man’s body, a chore because if it was more than that, they might sit down to shake and never stand up again.

The shadows were very long and the sky turned to a dim orange by the time Chih, Sang, and Wei Jintai sat down by the fire. A small pot of stock had been prepared with a few balls of cooked rice mixed with dried longfish shreds dropped in.

“Ah, if I knew I would be feeding so many, I would have bought more in town,” Lao Bingyi said, shaking her head, and of course Wei Jintai and Sang assured her that it was plenty, it was delicious. Chih, as a cleric who was technically due free meals wherever they went, only thanked Lao Bingyi for her generosity, but they reflected that it was better to engage in this kind of almost scripted exchange than to sit in silence and to think about the poor man who lay in his grave not so far away.

No one was incredibly happy to sleep in the shelter where they had found the murdered man, but as Khanh pointed out, he wasn’t in there any longer.

“He’s all the way over there in that copse of ash trees,” Khanh said practically. “If he comes this way, we’ll hear him rustling through the bushes.”

“Why would you point that out?” asked Lao Bingyi, aggrieved. “What a grim thing to imagine!”

Before they lay down, Chih hung a string of blessed holy bells across the entrance to the shed, and they went to make sure that Almost Brilliant was snug in the tree that she had chosen. Cuddled against the trunk and fluffed up until she was very round, she was almost invisible in the darkness, and when Chih came to check on her, she chirped at them sleepily.

“If you are murdered in the night, I will tell the Divine that you died well and bravely.”

“Thank you for always telling the nicest lies about me.”

They set a watch for the night, though Wei Jintai said she could sit for the whole thing and be none the worse for wear in the morning.