He nodded at Avisha, who wished herself dead and her bones picked clean for having spoken so stupidly. Who was she to mock Sheyshi? At least Sheyshi kept her mouth shut.

“Open your mouth and prove yourself a fool,” she muttered as the company moved off en masse, the big man’s head towering over the rest. They were talking about sheep again!

“Do they really have horns?” Chaji came to stand next to her. He indicated Keshad, who was fulminating, staring toward that same poor beggar with offering bowl held out in trembling hand as he limped through the crowd in the same general direction as the Qin company. An odd-looking man under the grime, and oddly familiar.

“Avisha,” said Keshad under his breath, “here’s a vey. Keep walking, split away from me. Then go say a pretty word to him and bend close and put it in his bowl, and afterward tell me if there is a mark in the bottom. Wait until he is out of our sight before you meet up with me.”

He had spoken to her! She did as she was told, angling away, pretending to be walking by herself, a simple village girl come to the city for the first time. Men smiled at her, in her pretty clothes and well-kept hair. Women eyed the cut and quality of her taloos.

“May the gods grant you blessings, holy one.” The beggar was old, thin, with a beaky nose and dark rodent’s eyes that had an unpleasant glimmer. Then he moaned grateful noises, a few mumbled words that could have been anything. He reeked, as if he’d been sleeping in a smokehouse after having been rolled in dung. Whew!

She remembered where she’d seen him before.

She caught up with Keshad by the gates to the inner city, where he had paused to wait for her with the four Qin soldiers assigned to guard him.

“Well?” he demanded.

“It’s a wooden bowl. There was a mark painted in the bottom, crossed knives linked under a circle.”

Keshad pressed a fist to his mouth, then lowered it.

“What means that?” asked Chaji, very serious now.

“That’s what empire folk call a blessing bowl, for the god Beltak. Now, maybe he stole it, or maybe he found it, but maybe he didn’t.”

Avisha bit her lip. “Heya.” She hesitated. When Keshad gave her a look of barely veiled disgust, she blurted out the rest. “The very first day I came to the compound, I saw a beggar in a red cap in the courtyard. I’m sure maybe it was him.”

“Maybe he is a spy,” said Chaji. “The captain warned us, maybe Red Hounds from the empire follow us over the mountains. You want, we kill him right now.” He grinned at Avisha. “You want to watch? Very fast, we kill him.”

“You can’t kill a holy beggar in the public street!” Keshad surveyed the street traffic, the gate guards staring at the Qin soldiers and factor and girl loitering in the sun, the laborers and market women pausing to whisper. A pair of raggedly dressed young men watched the Qin soldiers with what looked like admiration. “Even if this one is a spy, no one seeing the impiety would know that. They’d only see outlanders killing a holy beggar.”