“Nostril?” Chingkim murmured wonderingly.

Taking my hint, Nostril made a perfect ko-tou to the Prince and then to me, and said meekly, “Master Marco, I would beg a boon.”

“You may speak in the Prince’s presence. He is a friend. But why are you going about under an assumed name?”

“I have been seeking you everywhere, master. I used all my names, a different one to every person I asked. I thought it prudent, since I go in fear for my life.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“Nothing, master! I swear it! I have been so well behaved for so long that Hell itches with impatience. I am spotless as a new-dropped lamb. But so were Ussu and Donduk. Master, I beg that you rescue me from that sty called a barrack. Let me come and lodge in your quarters. I ask not even a pallet. I will lay me down across your threshold like a watchdog. For the sake of all the times I saved your life, Master Marco, now save mine!”

“What? I do not recall your ever saving my life.”

Chingkim looked amused and Nostril looked befuddled.

“Did I not? Some earlier master, perhaps. Well, if I have not, it was only for lack of opportunity. However, if and when some such dread opportunity occurs, it is best that I be near at hand and—”

I interrupted, “What about Ussu and Donduk?”

“That is what has terrified me, master. The frightful fate of Ussu and Donduk. They did nothing wrong, did they? Only escorted us from Kashgar to here, did they not, and performed capably in that duty?” He did not wait for a reply, but babbled on. “This morning a squad of guards came and manacled Donduk and dragged him away. Ussu and I, certain that some terrible mistake had been made, inquired around the barracks, and were told that Donduk was being questioned. After a while of worrying, we inquired again, and were told that Donduk had not satisfactorily answered the questions, so he was at that moment being buried.”

“Amoredei!” I cried. “He is dead?”

“One hopes so, master; otherwise an even more terrible mistake has been made. Then, master, after a while the guards came again and manacled Ussu and dragged him away. After another while of wringing my hands, I inquired again about the two of them, and I was rudely told to inquire no more about matters of torture. Well, Donduk had been taken and slain and buried, and Ussu had been taken, and who else was there to torture but me? So I fled the barrack to come looking for you and—”

“Hush,” I said. I turned to look a query at Chingkim.

He said, “My father is anxious to know all he can learn about his eternally restive cousin Kaidu. It was you who mentioned to him last night that your escorts were men of Kaidu’s personal guard. No doubt my father assumes them to be well informed about their master—about any possible insurrection Kaidu may be planning.” He paused and looked down into his goblet and said, “It is the Fondler who does the questioning.”

“The Fondler?” Nostril murmured wonderingly.

I pondered, which hurt my head, and after a moment said to Chingkim, “It would be obtrusive of me to interfere in Mongol affairs that involve Mongols only. But I do feel in a measure responsible … .”

Chingkim drained his cup and stood. “Let us go and see the Fondler.”

I would much rather have stayed in my new quarters all day, and nursed my head, and got acquainted with the twins Buyantu and Biliktu, but I went, and made Nostril come with us.

We went a long way, through enclosed passages and open areas and more passages, and then down some stairs that led underground, and then another long way through subterranean workshops full of busy artisans, and through storage cellars and lumber rooms and wine cellars. When Chingkim was leading us through a series of torch-lit but unpeopled chambers, their rock walls damp with slime and mottled with fungus, he paused to say in an undertone to Nostril, though surely meaning the advice for me, too:

“Do not again use the word torture, slave. The Fondler is a sensitive man. He resents and recoils from such rough terms. Even when a matter of importance necessitates his plucking out a person’s eyeballs and putting hot coals in the sockets, it is never torture. Call it questioning, call it caressing, call it tickling—call it anything but torture—lest someday it is required that you be fondled by the Fondler and he remembers your disrespect of his profession.”

Nostril only gulped loudly, but I said, “I understand. In Christian dungeons the practice is formally known as the Asking of the Question Extraordinaire.”

Chingkim finally led us into a room that, except for its torch light and beslimed rock walls, might have been a counting room in a prosperous mercantile establishment. It was full of counting desks at which stood clerks busy with ledgers and documents and abachi and the petty routine of any well-run institution. This might be a human abattoir, but it was an orderly abattoir.

“The Fondler and all his staff are Han,” Chingkim said to me aside. “They are so much better at these things than we.”

Evidently even the Crown Prince did not demand entry straightaway into the Fondler’s domain. We all waited until one of the Han clerks, the tall and austerely expressionless chief of those clerks, deigned to approach us. He and the Prince spoke for a time in the Han language, then Chingkim translated to me:

“The man called Donduk was first questioned, and with propriety, but declined to betray anything he knew of his master Kaidu. So then he was questioned extraordinarily, as you put it, to the limits of the Fondler’s ingenuity. But he remained obdurate and so—as is my father’s standing order in such cases—he was relinquished to the Death of a Thousand. Then the man Ussu was brought in. He also has resisted both the questioning and the questioning extraordinary, and will also be accorded the Death of a Thousand. They deserve it, of course, being traitors to their ultimate ruler, my father. But”—he said this with some pride—“they are loyal to their Ilkhan, and they are stubborn and they are brave. They are true Mongols.”

I said, “Pray, what is the Death of a Thousand? A thousand what?”

Chingkim said, again in an undertone, “Marco, call it the death of a thousand caresses, a thousand cruelties, a thousand endearments, what matter? Given a thousand of anything, a man will die. The name only signifies a death long drawn out.”

He was plainly urging that I not pursue the matter, but I did. I said, “I never held any affection for Donduk. Ussu, though, was a more congenial companion on the long trail. I should like to know how his long trail ends.”

Chingkim made a face, but he turned to speak again to the chief clerk. The man looked surprised and doubtful, but he went out of the room by an iron-studded door.

“Only my father or I could even contemplate doing this,” muttered Chingkim. “And even I must convey to the Fondler most fulsome compliments and abject apology for interrupting him when he is actually engaged in his work.”

I expected the chief clerk to come back bringing a monstrous, shaggy brute of a man, broad of shoulder, brawny of arm, beetling of brow, black-garbed like the Meatmaker of Venice or all in Hellfire-red like the executioner of the Baghdad Daiwan. But if the chief clerk had looked the picture of a clerk, the man who returned with him was the very essence of clerkness. He was gray-haired and pale and frail, fussy and fidgety of manner, prissily dressed in mauve silks. He tripped across the room with small, precise steps, and he looked at us, despite his diminutive Han nose, very much de haut en bas. He was a man born to be a clerk. Surely, I thought, he cannot be other than that. But he spoke in the Mongol tongue, and said:

“I am Ping, the Fondler. What wish you of me?” His voice was tight, with the barely controlled and not at all concealed indignation that is the natural speech of a clerk interrupted in his clerking.