Gremt was startled. He fixed his eyes intently on Magnus, and slowly the old image came back—the Magnus of now, the handsome ghost, the ghost dreamed up by the ancient mortal who’d endured badly formed limbs, a humped back, and a narrow hooked nose and now wanted none of it. Here were the even Grecian features and the beautiful forehead and the blond hair, the picture of a male in his prime, with the confidence of the fair.

Yet he looked away from me, humiliated, shattered. He stared into the fire, while Gremt stared at him with obvious concern. I was still shaken. In fact, I was beginning to feel a kind of panic.

Then a weariness took hold of Gremt and he settled back in the chair and looked up, perhaps at the figures of the tapestry, and he closed his eyes.

Amel was laughing softly and with a malicious delight. “What a crew they are,” he said confidentially and with his low iron laughter. “Are you enjoying their company? Why don’t you burn down their house and be done with it!”

“You’re wasting your rage,” I said to him. But I could see that Teskhamen had of course heard the threat and he didn’t take it lightly. He was looking to me for some ratification that I had no such intention.

“I came here as your guest,” I said. “I don’t do what he wants.”

“And how long before he can make you do what he wants?” asked Teskhamen. He didn’t sound the least bit angry or impatient. Just smooth.

“He’ll never be able to make me do anything,” I said. I shrugged. “What makes you think otherwise?” There was no response. “Look, if he caused Akasha ever to do anything at his behest, it was because he deceived her, led her to believe that she was the author of the thoughts coming into her mind. He could never make Mekare do anything.”

“What makes you certain?” asked Teskhamen. He was studying me intently. “Perhaps he coaxed Mekare into coming to you, offering herself to you, inviting you to take him out of her.”

I shook my head.

“She came on her own,” I said. “I was there. She wanted to go on, to be with her sister.” Flash flicker of those images, of the late gracious red-haired Maharet in a place of sunshine awaiting her surviving sister.

Teskhamen nodded, but it seemed no more than a courtesy. “You will be on the watch, however,” he said gently. “You will be careful. You have inside you a powerful and evil spirit.”

“Evil?” I asked. “Are we going to start arguing about the nature of good and evil?”