A woman rode out of the house, ducking under the lower eaves of the porch. Her wings flared silver, only they were not wings but rather the flowing cloth of a gleaming cloak doubled over the paler silver-gray wings of the horse. She was a ghost, with pallid ghost skin in a round ghost’s face, and ghost hair pulled into three braids like cords of straw. Her eyes burned with the blue fire of demons. If there was any doubt that she was a ghost, she had an arrow still quivering in her left shoulder and one that had caught in the fleshy skin of her neck, and although blood pulsed from the wound, she did not falter. Her gaze swept the courtyard, and when it flickered over him, he staggered, barely caught himself on a wooden pillar.

The hells!

She was the ghost girl he had found at the edge of the desert. When he had found her, she had been naked but for that silk cloak, mute and unresponsive. Whatever stirrings of sexual desire her white skin and pale-gold hair and demon eyes might have aroused in him when he had stumbled upon her, curled up behind a rock at the side of a dirt path, were nothing compared with the greed she had enflamed when he had realized an instant later that she was a treasure of incomparable worth. He had brought her, in hiding and at great expense, all the long journey north through the empire and over the high mountain pass, just so he could exchange her for Zubaidit’s freedom.

Her gaze passed on as she dismissed him. The Silvers cried out with garbled words, like men waking into nightmare, and ran into the house, crashing into furniture in another room. Nearby, a female sobbed as in agony.

The big man stumbled into the courtyard through another door. “Priya! Where are you?”

The bold Qin soldiers were struck as into stone by the power of her demon gaze. She raised a hand, holding a mirror with brass fittings, chased in the old style. She turned the mirror to catch a reflection.

“Umar is now dead, like Eitai,” she said in her dead, flat voice. She pointed to Chaji, who cowered among the soldiers. “You are the last one, Chaji. The wolf must cut out those who are diseased, to keep the herd strong.”

Lamplight flashed in the mirror, a doubling and tripling of flame.

Chaji collapsed to the paving stones as though the strings to a dancing doll were sliced through and the wooden body clattered to the floor. None moved to attack. They were utterly terrified.

The demon gaze shifted, and halted on the big man, who cowered for all his hulking size. “You took the coin, and pushed me into the house, to let the others at me.”

Mai stepped forward, around Priya, and pressed the older woman behind her.

“What do you want, Cornflower?” she asked, her voice alive in the air like the scent of flowers. “You are dead. Why do you haunt us? How can we help you rest?”