A soft rain had begun to fall as Lysander left the abandoned shack with his new mentor, the plump, diminutive woman who had attacked him during his test. In the meager light from the moon, he saw that her black hair was streaked with gray and her skin was deeply tanned, like a servant who spent most of her time outdoors.

“The word ‘inji’ comes from the Deep Root for ‘restless ghost,’” she explained. “Ours is not a Path of fancy kicks and pretty hand-waving.” She demonstrated contemptuously with a few weak-wristed motions. “Our techniques aren’t for spectators. They’re the death in the sleep. The stopped heart in the street. We don’t exist, and we were never there. You’ve advanced sufficiently to hide your Ro. Now you must learn to hide yourself.”

She stooped to the ground and picked up a rock the size of her fist.

“Your first lesson,” she said, “Is that people tend to pity and believe injured parties.”

Before Lysander even saw her move, the servant woman’s hand shot out and slammed the rock into the bone above his left eye. Pain exploded through his skull. His vision faded to near blackness, and he felt himself waver on his feet. Instinctively, he retreated to the Nothingness to keep from losing consciousness.

“What was that for?” Lysander was used to being punished for failures, but this time he didn’t see what he’d done wrong.

“Lean over, hold your head. Hiss through your teeth. See if you can’t squeeze out a few tears,” she said, tossing the rock over her shoulder. It landed with a splat in the swamp mud behind them. “Not many, though. You’re nearly a man, and men who cry more than a few tears gain contempt, not sympathy.”

Lysander’s brows came together in confusion, blood pouring from the left one.

“Normal people react to pain,” the servant woman explained. “To walk among them, a ghost must look and act like they do. Now, do as I said.”

Obediently, Lysander doubled over and clutched the wound leaking blood into his eye. After a moment’s thought, he sucked air through clenched teeth. The tears proved to be asking a bit much, but he resolved to work on that.

“Not bad for a first effort.” The servant woman started walking again. “We’ll tell my family that you washed downstream and don’t remember who you are or where you’re from. Probably that nasty bump on the head. When it’s time to move on to your next mentor, you’ll miraculously regain your memory and return home.”

For a year, Lysander lived with the servant woman, a washer by trade, as well as a wife and mother. He learned to plant and harvest and feed chickens and wash robes in the river. He played with her children and perfected the accent of the delta and took on the mannerisms of the rough rural people in the home and town and the mannerisms of a servant addressing his betters when he helped his mentor deliver the washing to the local lord. He learned to be a lovable and bumbling outsider who knew nothing but meant well so sincerely that no one could begrudge him a few dead rice plants or poorly rinsed robes.

And when the clay pot his servant mentor used to water her chickens was overturned, they memorized the name written in the sandy dirt beneath it, scrubbed it out, then killed the target.

A year later, the servant woman pronounced Lysander proficient in blending in with the rural folk of the delta. The next morning, Lysander ran into a low-hanging branch during a game with the children and fell to the ground unconscious. When he regained his senses, he miraculously remembered that he was the adopted son of a wealthy merchant in Faigong Iri, the city upriver.

Being so close to the delta, the nuances of the Faigong Iri accent were easy to grasp. It took a bit longer for Lysander to learn the appropriate tones and mannerisms from his merchant mentor, when to be complimentary and solicitous, when to look down in contempt, when to treat as a friend and equal while deriding the proffered merchandise or barter. He learned the markets and the trade routes, when and where to buy and how high he could sell without losing his clientele, and how to sift the quality from the imitations. He learned to be mean and petty and draw the scorn of all while being so weak he drew the suspicion of none. He learned to lose a fight convincingly with everyone watching and take his revenge later when no one could see.

And when the clay pot the merchant used to dump his hot pipe ashes was overturned, they burned the parchment they found beneath and assassinated the target whose name had been on it.

In eight months, the merchant mentor decided Lysander had mastered walking among the people of Faigong Iri. On their next trip, bandits attacked his merchant mentor’s caravan, killing the merchant’s foreign apprentice.

For the next six months, Lysander’s bandit mentor taught him to live off the forest, to hunt and fish and forage for his food, to set traps along the road and herd travelers into ambushes, to attack and intimidate people into handing over their valuables. He learned to gain respect from those who only understood strength and to hide any indications that he was better educated than they. The bandit’s clay pot was used to catch rain for drinking water, and when it was overturned, they ambushed the specified target.

From the bandit, Lysander moved to a stable hand. From a stable hand to a calligraphy teacher. From the teacher to a homeless drunkard. From the drunkard to an apothecary to a painter to a brothel guard to a tax collector. He moved throughout the continent, picking up accents, mannerisms, occupations, and personalities. He became invisible in each new environment. He was nothing, and so it was easy to become everything.

By the time he was seventeen, he could walk into an alleyway after his target in broad daylight and come out alone covered in blood without drawing suspicion. By the time he was twenty, he could assassinate a target in a room full of witnesses without being accused.

On the night of his twenty-first birthday, his final mentor, a monk, returned with him to the abandoned shack in the swamps.

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This time, the prefect who had raised Lysander stood in the circle, corpse candle in hand.

“Tell me,” the prefect asked, “In these seven years, who did you call master?”

“No one,” Lysander answered.

“Tell me,” his servant mentor asked, “In these seven years, what was the greatest sum you ever saw paid out for an assassination?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me,” his merchant mentor asked, “In these seven years, where was your home?”

“Nowhere.”

“Tell me,” his tax collector mentor asked, “In these seven years, how much glory and honor did you gain from your art?”

“None,” Lysander said.

“A ghost is unled, unpaid, untethered,” his painter mentor said. “Glory, honor, riches mean nothing to the dead. Their only loyalty is to the unnamed path.”

It wasn’t a question, but Lysander could feel every inji in the circle sending out a wave demanding he respond.

He gave the only response that always rang true with other ghosts:

“I am nothing. I come from nowhere. I’m not even here now, and I never will be.”

The prefect stepped forward. “Open your robes.”

Lysander did as bade, baring his chest. A shimmer of distortion appeared at the prefect’s knuckles. An invisible Ro blade.

The prefect touched the point to Lysander’s chest beside his sternum, angling it so it would slide behind the bone and into his heart. “Tell me, in these seven years, what did you learn to fear?”

“Nothing.”

The prefect punched the blade into Lysander’s chest, between the ribs, piercing his heartcenter and stabbing into his heart. The agony was immediate, cold and stifling and sharp all at once. His legs gave out, and he dropped to his knees, instinctively retreating into the Nothingness.

“Rise from your grave, if you can,” the prefect said. “If you can’t, stay dead.”

Furiously, Lysander’s Ro churned and circled like blood in a whirlpool. It rushed for the hole in his heartcenter, desperate to drain away and leave him dead. His fists balled at his sides, and he closed his eyes, focusing on the agitated invisible cloud. Years ago, he’d forced it to become smoke on a breeze, malleable and acquiescent. Now, he demanded shape and form from it, resistance and strength. He filled the hole in his heartcenter and stoppered the wound gushing lifeblood from his chest.

With the immediate threats blocked off, Lysander began cycling the rest of his Ro through the pathways closest to the blade wound, speeding its healing. He had never repaired a mortal wound before. It was going to take more than a few minutes’ concentration, but once the most lethal damage was repaired, he got to his feet.

The prefect nodded, sending him a wave of approval. As one, the circle pulled back, creating a tunnel of bodies and corpse candles that led to the stairway.

“Inji, ghost, restless dead,” the prefect intoned, “You are free to walk among the living when and where you will.”

Lysander looked from face to face, flickering in the green-white light of the spectral swamp flames. Woodenly, he began to move toward the steps. Numb feet took the stairs one at a time. Weakness radiated through his body from the slow healing wound, threatening to tumble him to the ground at any moment, but he kept moving. He was nothing, he didn’t exist, and what didn’t exist couldn’t fall.

He climbed out of the hole and left the darkness of the shack. When he stepped outside, bright yellow morning sun sifted through the trees to hit him full in the face.

*

The stab wound in Lysander’s heart healed over without a scar, but the damage to his heartcenter could never be repaired. That same portion of Ro he’d used to stopper it on the night he rose from the grave remained in the hole, as solid as a coffin nail.

Given the freedom to do anything he liked between assassinations, Lysander became a wandering scholar and gained patronage from the Great Library of Ten Thousand Nations. He had lived for years under the prefect with the choicest pieces of information always held out of his reach, and that had given him a desire for knowledge unmatched by anything else he’d found one could pursue.

Until he met Kwai Un. She’d been raised among the Librarians, trained from birth to read, sort, and keep safe the scrolls, books, tablets, knotwork, and script ribbons procured and stored in the Great Library. Whenever Lysander returned from his travels with knew knowledge or a physical work to add to the ever-growing collection, he searched the stacks upon stacks until he found her haphazard pile of thick brown curls and the specially constructed spectacles worn by every Greater Librarian made up of lenses of every color and magnification perched on her head.

Over the course of his young life and many travels, he had learned how to speak to women, how to court them, and how to bed them. But Kwai Un was bored by sweet words and disgusted by jewelry.

“What good is it?” she asked, inspecting a white jade bracelet through a thick smoked lens. She overlaid this with a thinner green lens and shook her head. “I can’t learn any more than I can observe from it. Now, a book you can learn a great number of things from.”

“Then throw it away and go read,” Lysander said, sending out a wave of indifference. “I don’t care.”

He cared more than should have been possible.

Lysander tried exotic fragrances and picnics and seats to watch the local masque, but nothing moved Kwai Un more than the new additions he brought to what she considered her library. It became so that on his travels, when he wasn’t taking a life for his Path, his time was split evenly between searching out rare or lost works that would bring a smile to her face and obsessing over how to possibly coax the smallest hint of affection from her. His heartcenter hurt when he was away from her, and it ached even more when he was with her, so close and always at arm’s length.

One night, in an inn on one of his many trips throughout the continent, after too many cups of rice wine, he pulled out a few scraps of loose parchment and wrote every awful beautiful thing she made him feel. The wonderful pain of knowing her. The endless carving of the blade she’d left in his gut. He was nothing, but to him, she seemed to be everything.

He intended to toss the parchments into the fire as soon as he was done, but the same rice wine that had loosened his brush also made him pass out before he’d accomplished that last task.

When the innkeeper shook him awake to rudely shoo him out the next morning, Lysander scooped up the tablets, ink, brush, and few odd bits of parchment that had somehow found their way out of his bag in the night and dropped them back in. The night of furious writing was forgotten.

Upon his return to the Great Library, Lysander pulled out the tablets he’d purchased and the notes he’d taken while listening to an ancient fisherwoman recount stories of faraway lands where other humans might dwell. Kwai Un’s face lit up as she took them, as always, then she abandoned him to scour them.

Though he knew it was pathetic, he left holding that look of delight dearly in his mind’s eye. It was the best he thought he could ever hope for from her.

*

Weeks later, Lysander came back to the Great Library bearing a variety of new texts and recorded knowledge. This time, however, Kwai Un met him at the entrance. Her pile of curling tresses were even more chaotic than usual, and her multitude of lenses were in scattered in various placements over her eyes, forehead, and hair.

“This,” she said, holding up a handful of parchment covered with drunkenly meandering lines that looked suspiciously like his brushstrokes. “What I can learn from this… It’s endless. I’ve read it a hundred times since you left, and I find new layers to consider every time. I have so much to ask you about the text, but for now I think you’d better kiss me.”

He did. And when that was accomplished to Kwai Un’s satisfaction, they found a rarely visited section high in the stacks where Lysander willed his Ro to hide them both for a while.