Calyx swallowed his pride. He opened the interface and pushed the words through, blunt and urgent.

[My lord. We may yet come too late to save your two disciples. Might I beg the use of your divinizing art? Let us have their bearing, and we shall make better haste.]

The five wraiths withdrew from the herb plantation and vanished into the bazaar's flapping tents.

They waited there, listening for the chime that meant Radeon had bothered to answer.

Oisin rolled in tight circles, agitation making his movements jagged.

"Calyx, if I may. Allow me to send a message as well. I should like an explanation, if you please. Why was the deduction so inconsiderable?"

"You're in jest, surely. We are in rather grave trouble already," Maeron sneered.

"It makes no sense," Oisin said, bristling.

"Do try to use that brain of yours on occasion," Maeron said. "First we set the failure to rights. Then we contest the charge."

"My chest feels tight. Let me send the message now," Oisin insisted.

As the argument was about to heat up again, Calyx snapped, his patience spent.

"This will not do," he said, his voice turning very flat. "We work well, and we work swiftly. No more talk of numbers."

Something flared in him. An old pressure, a remembered authority. He had forgotten most of his cultivation forms and named arts, but the power was still embedded in his bones.

The air around them tightened. The four quarrelling ghosts shivered as if cold water had been poured over their heads.

Silence returned. Focus followed. Then the message came.

[Central Pagoda. Bazaar Area.]

Sharp. Clean. No explanation, no comfort. Just a location like a blade point.

The five wraiths moved at once, minds spinning, rolling out beneath the linens and the feet of the stall keepers in the bazaar.

Calyx spoke first again, already shaping a plan as his body kept moving.

"Very good," he said. "Oisin and Elsin will play the part of children. You will dismantle the pagoda from without. I, Maeron, and Ewan shall enter from within. We have mapped the grounds. We will not waste time."

The others affirmed by clicking near Calyx. They did not argue now.

Oisin and Elsin transformed beneath an empty table, the one with the cloth nearest the pagoda.

Their forms warped and swelled from a small marble into children of about seven and eight years of age.

Their nascent weapons, both hammers, morphed and fused into a ball. Leather, soft. New, one might even say.

The vigilant guards saw two children near the pagoda, their clothes clean, white, the kind of clean that suggested wealth and care.

They looked like someone's spoiled sons turned loose for a morning. They kicked a ball back and forth, laughing softly, careless enough to be invisible.

The guards watched the crowd, not the children. A ball was harmless, and a child was harmless. So they paid them no mind.

When a patrol's eyes slid past them, Oisin's hand flicked. Three marbles struck the pagoda's entrance and vanished into the seams like insects finding a crack.

Inside, Calyx went deep. He split himself into thousands of grains, sand sized, each shard of him holding a sliver of sense.

He flowed through gaps in wood and stone, under doors, along beams, between floorboards.

Maeron and Ewan climbed the central pillar, their ghostly arrays muted and careful, undetected by any naked eye that was not looking for the dead.

Rooms passed beneath Calyx's awareness in rapid bursts. What he saw in most of them were dazed eyes. Every scan hoped it was not Fay nor Good Chip.

As he went down another floor, he saw more men sprawled on cushions, their smiles too wide.

People danced too hard and too stiff. Men sang until they were hoarse.

He made himself smaller. Almost dust. Then scanned dozens of rooms in a breath.

As Calyx neared a small crack in the floor, he felt it, his intuition calling.

Fay. Her aura flared below, radiant and strained, the bright signature of a living cultivator forced into real struggle.

Not fear alone. Fight. Calyx's thoughts sharpened to a single line.

They were here. They were late. But they still had a chance.

He drove himself into the smallest flaws, wedging his grains into cracks too thin for a nail.

He divided again, thinner still, and pushed outward. Calyx expanded, swelling each small vessel into a ball the size of a head.

The pagoda shuddered. Stone trembled. Wood groaned. Somewhere above, a bell chimed once, off rhythm, as if startled awake.

A hidden wall gave. A floor seam widened. A room opened into his awareness and then into his mouth.

Three men stood there. Dirty clothes. Twitching heads. One still had a pouch in his hand. Calyx opened wide.

A mouth three meters across opened. It engulfed the three men in a single motion.

Crunch. Gulp. Bone and flesh vanished in a single bite.

He did not let the blood spill. He slurped it back, swallowed clean, erased the mess. Only the sudden absence remained.

Calyx reformed enough to hold his shape and thrust out a hand, human in outline and not in truth.

"Come, then," he said. "Time is of the essence."

Fay stared at the Preta right in front of her. All color drained from her face. Her hands clenched the whip.

Her breath came fast and shallow, the paint on her skin cracking at the corners of her mouth.

Good Chip's fear flared into bravado, bright and useless. He stepped forward, jaw clenched, fists tight.

"Monster," he snapped. "I challenge you, here and now. Come, then. We'll fight to the death."

Calyx froze for a fraction, as if the words had slapped him.

Miscommunication. Of course. They had never been told.

They had only been dragged into a pagoda and then saved by a mouth in the wall.

Far away, Radeon watched.

He watched the scene unfold, the rescue and the mistake layered atop it.

A soft chuckle escaped him, dry with amusement. He had never told the ghosts to keep their identities hidden from his disciples.

He had simply assumed competence would handle the rest. Now he watched what that assumption bought him.

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