The man’s suspicion doesn’t fall away, but the hostility in him eases slightly. “Why do you want to know?”

“We have business with him,” Valentina says.

The man looks at all of us, perhaps trying to gauge the threat we present. “Is he really in danger?” he whispers.

“Yeah. If the people who are looking for him find him, they’ll kill him,” Paheli says, not bothering to soften the blow.

The man’s face blanches. “Wh-who is after him?”

“We can’t tell you. We’ll speak to him, though,” Paheli says. “The less you know, the safer you will be.”

The man rubs his cheeks; the gesture reveals his anxiety. He doesn’t fully trust us, and we can’t really blame him. We wait for him to decide. Finally, he does.

“He’s in the back room,” he says in a ragged whisper. “I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. My father is… somewhat eccentric.”

“Please lead us to him,” Paheli says. The man hesitates again but then bids us to wait while he checks with his father.

A minute later, he returns. “You may go in,” he says to us. Kamboja, Areum, and Ligaya stay behind as lookouts, while the rest of us go through the door. In a dim room with no windows and only a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling is a very old man hunched over a table, working on something.

The makers of human conjury are usually people with elastic wills. At least that’s what our limited and faulty experience has shown us. They’re not particularly strong or brave; they are just able to shift intention from their mind to an object and anchor it there. It’s not exactly magic. Not the magic we know. These makers also sense the middle world, but not all of them are able to see it. They just seem to know that there’s more to the world than their eyes show them.

The din in the market outside fades, and the air gains a still quality. Paheli sits in the chair opposite the old man, and we stand behind and beside her. The old man peers at us with his bloodshot eyes.

“Who are you?” he whispers. From the pulse ticking under his eye, we can tell he senses something awry about us.

“Let us ask the questions, baba,” Paheli says with a smile. She leans forward, elbows on the table, a palm of her hand cupping the side of her face.

“What do you want?” Old Mahmoud says, his fingers drifting to a folded-up notepaper on the table.

“Is that conjury?” Valentina asks, and the old man starts, his fingers retreating from the paper. The question is unnecessary. The paper has a telltale purple aura.