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screams of an aged native.
    In the heat of the Indian summer, the captain had gone to sleep in nothing but his underwear, and now he arose from the camp bed, not quite awake, and grabbed for his sword with a hand made slippery by sweat. He stumbled on bare feet across the Chittai rug made of woven rush.
    When his feet hit the cold, damp stone of the ghuslkhanah —what passed for a bathroom in these parts, though it rarely contained more than a thunder box and a hip bath—his eyes half opened and his mind became alert enough for him to understand that the man screaming was his bhisti: his assigned water carrier. And what the man was screaming was “Snake, snake,” or as close to the English pronunciation of the word as he could get with a near-toothless mouth.
    Bringing his eyes fully open with an effort, and forcefully pushing back the remnants of his dream, William saw the offending creature: a shiny, wet-looking green-and-red serpent coiled on the stone floor and raising its head to attack. It was not a very scary sight, as it was quite common for snakes of all sorts, poisonous as well as inoffensive, to crawl into the ghuslkhanah through the hole in the wall that served to empty the bathwater. They were doubtless attracted by the damp and the coolness, more hospitable than the heat everywhere else in the merciless sun of summer.
    William did not know if this snake was poisonous or inoffensive. And it did not matter. He swept his sword in an arc. The snake turned its attention to him at the movement, but it was too late to strike. The head went flying to a corner of the room, while the body contorted on the stone.
    The water carrier—an elderly man, his dark face wrinkled like a dried plum—stepped back, looking with something that might be disgust at the remains of the reptile, and William sighed. The rules of caste in India. He knew, vaguely, that there were four castes and that many of the sepoys came from either the warrior class or the Muslim population, which, like the Christians, stood quite outside the caste system. As for domestic service, he very much doubted that anything but out-castes would work for the Englishmen. And yet, it was clear that there were distinctions among them and that one of the distinctions made it impossible for anyone but the so-called sweeper caste to have anything to do with dead animal flesh.
    On the other hand, it was quite possible that his water carrier was hoaxing him and simply didn’t want to deal with the dead snake. William neither knew nor cared. A few months in India and he was feeling as if it were a punishment that would never end. He used the tip of his sword to flick first the body and then the head out of the hole in the wall, and ignoring the obsequious bowing of the bhisti, stomped into his bedroom.
    He couldn’t even say why he was so resentful of the man, so uncomfortable with everything here.
    Except . . . except that having refused to marry Sofie Warington, whom his superiors had tried to press him to offer for on the principle that the feel of the jewel they sought was thick all about her—a cause he considered insufficient to tie himself to the lovely and resourceful girl with whom he was, unfortunately, not in love—he’d been sent to India to find the jewel himself. Some rumor had been concocted, something to explain his presence here—about resentment among the natives for the presence of the Were-Hunters. Gold Coats had been dispatched first, to major cities, to create an opportunity for the rumor.
    Blacklock didn’t for a moment doubt that the natives must indeed resent the Were-Hunters with all their hearts. They lived a life closer to the beasts of the field—as William’s clergyman father was all too fond of saying—and as such tolerated those who changed from beast to human more easily than Englishmen did. In fact, with their gods who took animal forms, and their idea of reincarnation up and down the scale of creation, their attitude was no