All Sasturi Guild Houses are haunted houses. I had never been inside of one before that evening, although some of my colleagues had. When you study the ways of the dead, it is only natural to find yourself wiling away your days in the company of mediums. There were even rumors of love affairs between scholars and Sasturi, although this seemed unlikely. The Sasturi intermarry. I’m not certain if this is a rule or merely a custom, but the end result is the same. The ability to commune with ghosts is bred into them. I thought about this as Oulute led me to their guild house, and I also thought that it was a pity that I had never investigated doomed love affairs when I had the time. Such a story of forbidden love would have commanded a good price from the songsters.

  I should have been pacing forward with grim determination. Instead I was distracting myself with glum regret. Regret is like an overbalanced shelf. Remove one to look at it and all the others come tumbling down. A bad metaphor, I know, but I felt them dropping on me in a sudden and violent way as I trudged along. I regretted the look of disappointment on Moesebai’s face, and the tears that Lianahndra shed, and Lewibindi’s death, of course. These were people of worth, and I had spent the last few years carousing with Malreesi Muelant and her ilk. What would have happened if the Azerdondea had never come to Libreigia? I would have matured, settled down, and discovered the gift for scholarship that I am certain was innate in me. The Azerdondea were like a disease. Worse, they were like an addiction. They glittered at you and made you attend their parties, and all else was forgotten.

  As we approached the house, Oulute looked back at me. His little face was very mournful, as if he were leading me to my execution. “That’s the house,” he said, gesturing up the snowy road. “Come back to the Bird and Baby with me.”

  “No, young Oulute, I cannot. I’m afraid I must stay and make a visit.”

  His features scrunched up. He was either confused or about to cry. “Why do you want to go in there?”

  “Don’t worry. I am a scholar of Haunts and Scribbles. I am used to making such visits.”

  “But you needed me to lead you here.”

  “It’s sometimes nice to have people who know where you’ve gone.”

  This alarmed him even more. “You want me to tell someone?”

  I thought about this. I had imagined a report to the city guard. But they were obviously in the clutches of Malreesi Muelant, suborned by the power of the king. The archivist and Lianahndra were plotting together, and I had already betrayed them. Why should they care about my untimely demise? “If I don’t come back out in an hour or so,” I said, “go to Haunts and Scribbles and ask for Moesebai.”

  The boy nodded. I felt some regret as I left him and crossed the wide avenue to the guild house door. It was very cold and an hour seemed like a long time for him to stand in the freezing air. But we urchins of the world are used to such tasks, and have done worse things to earn a supper and a place to sleep.

  The guild house had a bell beside the door. A rather clamorous bell, as I found when I pulled on its rope. It was still early in the evening and the house wasn’t sleeping, but it took some time for my summons to be answered. I stood and listened to the voices on the other side of the wall. Children’s voices. A matron singing rather sweetly. The clank and rattle of pots being scrubbed. The clunk of a loom. A miasma of domestic sound.

  The door opened and a short old fellow looked up at me. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “You can go and tell Bhaetamistri that he has a visitor.”

  He blinked. “Bhaetamistri? There is no one here with that name.”

  I didn’t despair. I had expected as much. “Maybe not with that singular name. But it’s one of the names he uses. He is usually in the company of an apple-cheeked matron. Don’t pretend that you don’t know him.” The man didn’t answer me. He simply stood there, looking patient. “Listen,” I said, “I know he’s here. Perhaps you are too unimportant to know about him. So if you can’t find him, ask your guild master. Tell her that a scholar from Haunts and Scribbles has some information that Bhaetamistri will want to hear.”

  The door closed. I stood there and looked at it. I turned and looked at Oulute, who had drifted into the shadows on the other side of the street. The door opened.

  The apple-cheeked matron looked out at me. “Doefrit. I thought that our business was done.”

  “I would like to speak to Bhaetamistri.”

  “If you wish. May I ask why?” She was being very pleasant, but her eyes were wary.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  She considered. Her expression was very stern. She seemed to want to chastise me. Then a mournful look came into her eyes. Her pupils shrunk, as if they were tired of looking at the world’s sorrows and had decided to withdraw. This entire dramatic scene played on her face, and then she said, “Very well. Follow me.”

  The haunted house was very domestic at that time of night. She led me through a courtyard where several young women were drawing water from the well. They looked at me and giggled, their breaths misting the frozen air. Several boys were wrestling beneath a birch tree, its white bark as stark as the snow on the ground. The windows above the courtyard were lit, and someone was laughing in an upper room. I had an odd moment. I wished that I had been born Sasturi and raised in the comfort of a guild house. I didn’t only envy the warmth and the succulent odors that were issuing from behind the rear wall. I wanted a place to belong. If I had been one of those wrestling boys, I told myself, I would have been taken care of when my parents died.

  “I thought that you Sasturi lived with ghosts,” I said to Vaetra as she led me into the left wing of the house.

  She glanced back at me. “Everybody lives with ghosts,” she said.

  There was a long corridor that ran to the left and the right, and there were open doors. The sound of looms filled the space, and tufts of cloth floated on the air. The singing voice had changed tunes, but the new one was just as sweet. I looked in the doors as we passed them. Neat little rooms with fire places, and people sitting beside them. Faces turned to me as I passed. The sound of the looms grew louder.

  There was a door at the end of the corridor, and a girl was seated outside of it. She was spinning and had a skein of roving wrapped around one arm. She looked up at Vaetra and said “The session is almost over.” Then she saw me, and her eyes widened in surprise, maybe even shock. But she said nothing.

  We waited. It was warm in the hallway, and I thought of Oulute out in the cold. Perhaps I should have brought him into the house with me. The girl’s spinning was quite mesmerizing. Her spindle went so fast that it seemed like there were two skeins of yarn whirling above the whorl. They made a pleasing symmetry in the air. As I watched some of my tension fell away. The brick in my sleeve seemed interested in the spinning as well, if bricks can be said to be interested in anything. I thought I felt it twitch. I felt very peaceful, standing there, watching the spinning and considering the nature of a twitching brick.

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  The looms went quiet. There was the sound of movement from the other side of the door. It opened, and people began coming out of the room. They each paused as they emerged to look at Vaetra, and then at me. As if they were engaged in a kind of ritual. They didn’t like Vaetra. I was interested to see the hostility on their faces. They seemed to pity me.

  After the last of them emerged, Vaetra led me into the room. Lamplight flickered over looms. There were eight of them, arranged around a well in an octagonal pattern. Cloth fell from each loom into the well. It was very plain, undyed cloth, but there was something entrancing about it. If found it hard to look away from it.

  Bhaetamistri was seated at one of the looms. He had turned to face me, and the expression on his face flickered between amusement and sorrow. “Doefrit the scholar,” he said.

  “Hello,” I answered. We looked at each other. He waited for me to regale him with the reasons for my presence. “Lewibindi Jaestis is dead.”

  He nodded. “His spirit has entered the well.”

  “That well there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It can’t be brought back up, can it? To ask it who murdered him, for instance?”

  He gave me a long look. Then he sighed. “I rather liked you,” he said. “You are a fool and a drunkard, of course, but pleasant company, and plain spoken.” The door closed behind me. I glanced back and saw Vaetra leaning against it, her arms crossed. “But," the Sasturi master continued, “it seems that you are not able to keep things secret. Have you told anyone about the elephant?”

  “No. A funny thing happened after I handed it off. I was on my way home when I tripped over Lew’s body. Then I was arrested, and handed over to Malreesi Muelant. She was in disguise, of course, but I saw through it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, ah. And I wondered if you knew that she was a spy. But then I thought that you must. That you went to her little dinner party for some reason of espionage, and I got caught in your web.”

  “Or my weaving.”

  “If you like. But I want to know what it was all about.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a scholar, although everyone seems to forget it. Scholars are curious by nature.”

  “And you want my help.”

  “Yes.”

  “She has tried to recruit you? To make you into one of her agents?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your price?”

  “Price? No price. I’m not for sale.”

  “I bought you by paying your bar bill.”

  “Well, maybe I *was* for sale, but I’m not now.”

  He chuckled. I disliked it. Moesebai used to chuckle at me like that, when I was a mere youth and trying to impress him by being precocious. “Then she has some hold over you,” Bhaetamistri said, “or thinks that she has.”

  “She said that you Sasturi were in league with her. That you could be bought, and that you would say that I killed Lewibindi.”

  The spy master went very still. I heard Vaetra draw in a sharp breath. “That is a calumny,” Bhaetamistri said after a moment. “We have a code. We do not betray it.”

  “Does the code allow the dead to spy for you?”

  He sighed. “What do you know about death, scholar of Haunts and Scribbles?”

  “I know that it causes grief. I know that Lianahndra is crying for Lewibindi.”

  “Yes. It causes grief. But if Lewibindi were to come to her now, and if she were able to communicate with him, she would find that in death he is much the same as he was in life. Perhaps narrower in his interests. Whatever obsesses us in this life, whatever we give our time to, our care to, accompanies us into death. I have often thought that people would act differently if this were more widely known.”

  “Why isn’t it? If you Sasturi know this, why not tell the world?”

  A small, sad smile. “We have, of course. People don’t want to believe it. They want to believe that their actions will fade away after they die. They want a posthumous forgiveness, or forgetting. But their actions continue to reverberate in the living world. Why shouldn’t those reverberations be felt in the world of death?”

  “Do ghosts really enter the world of death?” I asked, remembering my lonely speculations in Yundrid’s chambers. “Don’t they just stand waiting in an antechamber?”

  He was honestly surprised. A wry smile widened on his face. “You *are* a scholar, Doefrit. And that is a very good description of what happens. We entice the dead into antechambers, using the spirit stones.”

  “Well, I have been told that’s true of the shrines,” I said, with scholarly honesty. I nodded at the well. “I don’t know what that is.”

  He turned his head and looked at the fall of cloth from the eight looms. “That is what we call a spirit chimney. When the shrines were closed to ordinary people, we had to create another home for their ghosts.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, with an equal amount of scholarly dishonesty. “I believe I read about that in *The Travels of Uesandhra*.”

  Bhaetamistri was very quiet for a moment. “I certainly hope not,” he said.

  “We scholars of Haunts and Scribbles know much of Sasturi life and custom.”

  “Or at least you do, it seems.”

  “We know, for instance, that a ghost can escape. That story that Malreesi told was true, wasn’t it? The ghost of Adakhuehan the Second is tied to that elephant charm. I’ve seen it.”

  For a moment he seemed genuinely confused. Then he laughed. He glanced over my shoulder, and some communication seemed to pass between him and Vaetra. “That was just a mean little story that Malreesi made up. The Raensapali emperors were all tall, and not one of them had a hairlip.”

  I considered this. “So it really was just acne. The thing that annoyed Adakhuehan so much that he beheaded the clean faces?”

  “Not acne. Scars, from a childhood disease. But he was mad. And cruel.”

  “So if the ghost with the hairlip isn’t the emperor, who is he?”

  His eyes were very sad as he regarded me. “A spy master, of course. One of my predecessors. He was active in the Raensapali court when Malreesi was a girl, and she remembered him. When the ghost of a man with a hairlip began to appear in Libreigia, she began to suspect Sasturi interference in Azerdondea affairs.”

  “So she invited you to the dinner party and questioned you.”

  “Did you hear many questions? She warned me. With that ridiculous story. She must have been very disappointed when the ghost kept appearing.”

  “That’s why you wanted the elephant back? So that she would leave you alone?”

  A pause. “We wanted it back because the ghost of my predecessor knows many secrets.”

  “But why was his ghost here in the first place?”

  “It escaped, as you said. When he died, we brought his ghost to a guild house in a very unimportant place. But the spirit chimney exploded.” He lifted his hands and dropped them back down in his lap. “It happens sometimes.”

  “And somehow Lewibindi and Lianahndra found his ghost and got it to possess the elephant.”

  “They didn’t. But the elephant did come into their hands. I have been chasing that elephant for a very long time.”

  “And they used it to spy. Did Malreesi ever figure that out?”

  “I don’t know. If she had, would she have recruited you?”

  “Maybe not.” I looked around the room. Our conversation seemed to have come to a natural stopping point. “So I have nothing to fear,” I said. “Malreesi has nothing to threaten me with.”

  Bhaetamistri was silent for a long moment. He looked down at his hands. His fingers had been playing with the tassels of his robes. He didn’t look up at me as he said, “She has nothing to threaten you with. But I’m afraid that you have much to fear. For a few moments, at least.”