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“Ox!” the abbot
     snarled. I kicked the door halfway across the room, and a pathetic sight met our eyes. Ma
     the Grub was lying on his back. Traces of ku poison smeared his lips, and he was as dead
     as Confucius. Pawnbroker Fang was still alive, but barely. His glazed eyes tried to focus
     on us, and his lips moved.
    “We never intended to... It was the silkworms,” he whispered. “If they died... the IOUs...
     own everything... Now my daughter...”
    He was almost gone. The abbot knelt and placed a small jade Buddha in the pawnbroker's
     hands and began to pray for his miserable soul. Fang's eyes opened one last time, and he
     looked blindly down at the jade Buddha, and he made a truly heroic effort.
    “Cheap, very cheap,” he sneered. “No more than two hundred...”
    Then he too was dead.
    Li Kao gazed down at the bodies with a rather strange expression on his face, and then he
     shrugged his shoulders.
    “So be it,” he said. “I suggest that we leave them here to rot and return to the
     monastery. We have far more important things to worry about.”
    Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub had almost certainly killed the children of my village,
     but when I looked back at the bodies I could find no anger in my heart.
    The abbot led the way. We lit candles, and our shadows loomed like twisted giants upon the
     gray stone walls as we trudged down the long winding flight of steps to the great vaulted
     cellar where the scrolls were stacked in long rows of wooden shelves. Our monastery is
     very old, and over the centuries the abbots had added to the library. The medical texts
     numbered in the hundreds, and I helped the novices bring scroll after scroll to the long
     tables where the abbot and his bonzes checked every reference to
    
    
     ku
    
    
     poison. The references were extensive, since the poison has been a favorite agent for
     assassination for nearly two thousand years, and the information was always the same: The
     victims' vital signs would drop so low that they expended almost no energy at all and
     could last for months, but nothing could restore them to consciousness, and death was
     inevitable. There was no antidote.
    The poison was said to have been imported from Tibet. Li Kao was the only scholar who was
     qualified to interpret the ancient Tibetan texts such as
    
    
     Chalog Job Jad
    
    
     , and he said that the abbot's copy of
    
    
     Zaraga Dib Jad
    
    
     was so rare that there might not be another one in existence. The rustle of the old
     parchment was punctuated by Master Li's soft curses. The Tibetan physicians had been
     magnificent at describing treatments but terrible at describing symptoms, and apparently
     it had been taboo to mention by name any agent whose sole purpose was murder - possibly,
     he pointed out, because the alchemists who invented such things belonged to the same
     monkish orders as the physicians. Another problem was the antiquity of the texts, which
     were faded and spotted to the point of illegibility. The sun had set and was rising again
     when Master Li bent close to a page in
    
    
     Jud Chi, The Eight Branches of the Four Principles of Special Therapy.
    “I can make out the ancient ideograph for 'star,' and next to it is a badly spotted
     character that could mean many things, but among them is the ideograph for 'wine vessel,'
     ” he muttered. “What would you get if you combined the ideographs of star and wine vessel?”
    “You would get the logograph 'to awake from a drunken stupor,' ” said the abbot.
    “Precisely, and 'drunken stupor,' if used figuratively, is such a maddeningly vague
     description of symptoms that it could mean almost anything. The interesting thing is that
     the preceding text suggests seizures and clawing of air,” said Master Li. “Can we say that
     the children are now lying in stupors?”
    He bent close to the text and read aloud.
    “To awake from a drunken stupor, only one treatment is