Emperor of Thorns

35

Five years earlier

It came as something of a relief to discover the order of mathmagicians didn’t require my death, as it seemed likely they could have arranged to take it, certainly after I’d delivered myself into their hands with such cunning. Also good to learn that they now considered there were better routes than those that led to Morrow, other ways to place the necessary voting power into Ibn Fayed’s hands and to assure the Prince of Arrow’s ascendance. It meant that I in turn did not require their death.

It is true that I had a bad record with soothsayers and the like predicting glory for Orrin of Arrow. For once, however, I felt able to step around it and move on. Maybe I was growing up. I comforted myself with Fexler’s words about the changing world and the power of desire. Perhaps for those whose burning desire was to know the future rather than live in the present, perhaps for them it was that desire more than the means they employed that gave them some blurry window onto tomorrow. Whether it be Danelore witches casting rune stones, or clever Moors with equations of fiendish complexity, maybe their raw and focused desire delivered their insights. And if my desire were the greater, maybe I would prove them wrong.

The need for vengeance, for retribution against Qalasadi after his attempt on my family, had never burned so bright as the imperative that took me to Uncle Renar’s door. In fact it felt good to let it drop. Lundist and the Nuban would have been proud of me, but in truth I liked the man and it was that rather than any newfound strength of character that allowed me to set it aside.

In some chamber above us a mechanism whirred and a great bell began to sound out the hour of the day.

‘Yusuf and I will accompany you to the caliph’s court,’ Qalasadi said, voice raised.

‘He won’t want to execute me? Or lock me in a cell?’ I asked.

‘He knows you are here, so whether you go to court with us, or are taken there later under armed guard, is unlikely to change events,’ Qalasadi said.

‘Though if his soldiers have to drag you there, projections do slide toward less desirable outcomes,’ Yusuf added.

‘But you have already calculated what will happen?’ I frowned at Yusuf.

‘Yes.’ A nod.

‘And?’

‘And telling you will make the outcome less certain.’ Qalasadi closed the book he had just opened and picked it up. Yusuf threw an arm over my shoulders and steered me toward the door.

‘And Kalal stays here?’ I asked above the tenth and loudest intonation of the bell.

Yusuf grinned. ‘The sums don’t do themselves, you know.’

To their credit neither Qalasadi or Yusuf raised an eyebrow at the tower’s lack of a front door, and I guessed it was not one that would be easy to replace. The younger men in their whites, still with the blackened teeth, alarming in their wrongness, had gathered the fragments together in a small sad heap to one side of the doorway, and others from within the mathema had joined them. Several dozen of the students sat in a circle, murmuring, passing crystal pieces amongst one another, the occasional cry going up when they found two fragments that matched. They fell silent as we passed.

‘I see you found a new solution to the door, Jorg,’ Yusuf said, his voice dry.

‘It presents a better puzzle now,’ Qalasadi said, ‘though one that is less of an obstacle.’

We crossed the plaza under the sun’s blaze. You could almost see the lake boiling away, but it put a hint of coolness in the air, a blessing worth more than gold in the Sahar. The steps up to the caliph’s gates were broad and many, larger than steps made for men, deceiving the eye so that as you climbed the true size of the palace became apparent in a slow dawning.

Supplicants queued on the steps in the shade of a grand portico. Gates, that looked to be made of gold, towered above us all, and royal guards in polished steel stood ready to receive the caliph’s visitors, bright and faintly ridiculous plumes bobbing above conical helms. Qalasadi and Yusuf bypassed the score and more of black-robed petitioners. I spared a smile for Marco, wedged in the midst of the locals and struggling to heft his trunk up another step.

‘As-salamu alaykum.’ Qalasadi wished peace upon the giant who stepped to bar our way. A sensible wish given the size of the scimitar at the man’s hip. Hachirahs, Tutor Lundist’s book had called them, their blades sufficient to hack a man in two.

‘As-salamu alaykum, murshid mathema.’ The man bowed, but not so low that one might stab him unawares.

More words exchanged in the shared tongue of Maroc and Liba. I had enough of it to judge that Qalasadi was assuring the guard of my royal status, despite appearances to the contrary. It might have been politic to spend some time and some gold cleaning off the desert and dressing the part, but it seemed wiser to meet with Ibn Fayed before Marco gained an audience.

We entered by a gate within the gate and three plumed guards led us along marble corridors, marvellously cool. The silence of the palace enveloped us, a peace rather than the sterile absence of sound in the Builders’ corridors, and broken on occasion by the tinkle of hidden fountains and the cry of peacocks.

The caliph’s palace had nothing in common with the castles of the north. For one thing, it had been built for pleasure, not defence. The palace sprawled rather than towered, its halls and galleries wide and open, running one into the next, where they should divide into bottlenecks and killing grounds. And we passed not a single statue, painting, nor any but a few tapestries depicting only patterns in many bright colours. The men of the desert lacked our obsession with raising our own images, setting down our ancestry for the ages in stone and paint.

‘We’re here.’ Qalasadi’s warning felt redundant. Double doors faced us, taller than houses, fashioned from vast slabs of ebony inlaid with gold. Wood is a rarity in the desert: the ebony spoke more loudly of the caliph’s wealth than did the gold.

Palace guards with polearms stood in alcoves to each side, the bladed ends elaborate in shape and catching the light from small circular windows in the ceiling far above.

‘Well,’ I said, then ran out of words. I have stepped into the lions’ den before, but perhaps not since I walked alone into Marclos of Renar’s personal army had I put myself so deeply into the hands of an enemy. At least with Marclos my brothers were just a few hundred yards away in a defensible position. I stood now in a well-guarded palace in an alien city amidst a vast desert in a strange land a continent away from home. I had nothing with which to bargain, and no gifts to offer, except perhaps for the trick I had played in the desert. I couldn’t say if Qalasadi’s coordinates were correct, but I did know that the Builder ghost, Michael, would not be accompanying Marco to court.

‘We will wait here. Your audience is to be a private one.’ Qalasadi set a hand to my shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you that Ibn Fayed is a good man, but he is at the least a man of honour.’

One of our escorts stepped forward to knock three times upon a boss set across the join of the doors. I turned to face the two mathmagicians.

‘A pity it wasn’t three friends your spells predicted I would make in the desert.’ I could do with friend like the caliph, even if that friendship only extended to letting me leave.

Behind me the great doors stole into motion. A breeze ran cool across my neck and I turned to face my future.

‘Good luck, Prince of Thorns.’ Yusuf spoke at my ear, voice soft. ‘We became friends at sea, you and I, so you still have a friend to make in the desert. Choose well.’

The walk from doors to throne, along a silk runner the colour of the ocean, took a lifetime. In the vast and airy marble cavern of Ibn Fayed’s throne room, walking between sunlit patches as if through the light and shade of forests, ideas, phrases, lines of attack, all bubbled up in fragments, roiling one over the next whilst all the time my gaze rested on the figure in his seat, first distant, drawing closer. Around the perimeter of the chamber great window arches stood to catch the breeze, each screened by elaborate shutters, more perforation than wood.

The whole expanse of the throne room stood empty. Only on the dais was there any sign of life. Fayed in his sic-wood throne amid the glitter of gemstones, on either side Nuban servants wafting him with fans of ostrich feathers on long poles. A circle of imperial guard on the lowest step, ten men. A wild cat of enormous size on the third step, and a heavy-muscled man to hold its chain, crouched beside it, both ready to spring.

Still I had no plan. No idea of what words might flow when my mouth opened. I prepared to surprise myself. Maybe I would tear Fexler’s gun from my hip and lay waste. I doubted that had figured in anyone’s calculations. Save perhaps those of Fexler himself.

A thin man in close black robes rose from his cushion on the step below the throne. Sun-stained but perhaps not from birth, not young, but with his years hidden. Like the very fat, the very thin play games with their wrinkles and disguise their age.

‘Ibn Fayed, Caliph of Liba, Lord of the Three Realms, Water-Giver, welcomes King Jorg of Renar to his humble abode.’ Spoken in empire tongue with no trace of accent.

‘I’m honoured,’ I said. ‘Hamada is a jewel.’ And in truth, standing there in the warmth and light of the caliph’s palace I couldn’t imagine what he would make of the castles and cities of the north. What would Ibn Fayed see in the great houses of my homeland, cold, cramped, and dirty, places where men spilled blood over narrow and muddy tracts of land, all smoke and filth.

‘The caliph has wondered what would bring the King of Renar so far from his kingdom, unattended?’ The Caliph’s Voice kept any judgment from his tone but his eye twitched across my raggedness in disapproval.

I watched Ibn Fayed, deep in the grasp of his throne, so clearly a warrior despite his silks. He met my gaze, eyes hard and black. Of an age with the Earl Hansa, the years had grizzled him, a beard cropped so close as to be little more than stubble trekked white across the darkness of his skin, reaching for his cheekbones.

‘I came to kill him for the disrespect shown to my grandfather.’

That reached him. For a moment his eyes widened. No need of a translator to whisper behind his throne — he knew my meaning.

Where my honesty won a moment of surprise from the caliph it almost set his Voice back on the cushions. For the longest moment he stood slack-jawed and staring. Not a twitch from the guards though — they heard only the gabble of a northman.

Ibn Fayed muttered something and the thin man found his tongue.

‘And is that still your intention, King Jorg?’

‘No.’

Another mutter then, ‘You no longer believe you can achieve your goal?’

‘I doubt I could escape afterward. I think the desert would defeat me,’ I said, drawing a grunt of amusement from the caliph. ‘Also, I have gained new perspective on the matter and think perhaps that there is a third way.’

‘Explain.’ The Caliph’s Voice clearly knew his master’s ways well enough not to require a prompt at every turn. His terse command convinced me that he truly was to be treated as nothing more than a conduit, speaking exactly as Ibn Fayed would if he cared to raise his voice.

‘By coming close to the source of the attacks upon my grandfather’s house I have gained distance from the Castle Morrow. Even the Horse Coast has grown small from so far away.’ I thought of Lord Nossar in his map room at Elm, inking back the faded and forgotten lines on ancient charts, laying claims that would see Martin’s son and little girl into the ground. ‘I see that actions taken at such a remove may still be those of an honourable man though when viewed from the halls of my grandfather’s castle they cry for justice and retribution. I see that the Prince of Arrow was right when he told me to travel, to meet the peoples against whom I might make war.’

‘And if assassination was the first way, what are the second and the third?’ asked the Voice.

‘The second way is war. For my grandfather to turn the wealth of his lands into more ships, a greater navy to scour the coasts of Liba.’ I didn’t speak of invasion. While the Moors might find a foothold along the Horse Coast it seemed to me that the lands of Afrique would swallow armies whole without the need for the natives to do more than wait for the sun to work its will. ‘The third way is alliance.’

Now Fayed laughed out loud. ‘My people have ruled here four thousand years.’ His voice so dry it almost creaked. He waved at the thin man who carried on without pause.

‘A chain of civilization stretching back unbroken across millennia. And you come here ragged, empty-handed? Only through the knowing of the mathema do we recognize you as king. It is true that charts render small what may hold many lives, but in our map room Renar may be found only after careful search and can be covered with the thumb.’ He made the appropriate gesture, as if squashing my kingdom like a bug. ‘Whereas a man may scarcely cover Liba with his hand.’ The thin man spread his fingers. And with the hand still raised, open and turned toward me, ‘There is a saying in the desert. Don’t reach for friendship with an empty hand.’

‘What would the Earl Hansa pay to have you back, boy?’ Fayed’s croak from the throne.

I made the least of bows. ‘My hand only looks empty, Ibn Fayed.’ I didn’t know what my grandfather might pay, but I guessed Fayed would ask for more than coin. Even if I survived the negotiations, to return dragging such a failure with me would undo any ties I had made in Morrow.

‘What then does it hold?’ the Voice asked.

‘Tell me, Excellency, did you need your magicians to tell you I was coming?’

The Voice bridled at being questioned, anger written into the sharp lines of his face. Fayed made the briefest wave and the answer came, calm and without offence. ‘Hamada is a fortress that needs no walls. Only by caravan can the dunes be crossed. And rest assured that all who travel the salt roads are known in this palace before they come in sight of the city. Known by name and feature, their cargo known, down to the last fig in their saddlebags.’

‘And if you knew of my approach you would know also of my travelling companion,’ I said.

‘Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. A Florentine banker.’

‘He is waiting at your gates, Caliph. Why is he here?’

Again the wave to quell his Voice’s objections. When a man doesn’t bother to keep secrets from you, you know that you’re in trouble.

‘He comes to claim against a contract. Our payment for an old debt sunk off the Corsair Isle. Though the Florentines had agents aboard and had taken the monies into their care they say that under the agreed terms no payment is properly transacted until docked in Port Vito.’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘And although his visit is not welcomed or encouraged, you afford him the protections and diplomatic privileges agreed for the clans under empire law.’

‘Yes.’

‘And those old agreements might allow him a secret fig or two in his saddlebag … Perhaps you should bring him in and I could show you what’s in my hand …’

The Voice had no answer. A long silence, nothing but the wafting of feathers as Ibn Fayed considered. The faintest of nods.

‘He will be summoned.’

Our audience proved less private than advertised for no further order was issued. And yet I assumed it was being acted upon.

‘An interesting cat you have there, Excellency.’ I don’t count small talk amongst my skills but we couldn’t just watch each other for the next ten minutes waiting on Marco.

‘A leopard,’ the Voice replied. ‘From the interior.’

A long pause. I’m really not good at idle chat.

‘So you’re destroying all the Builders’ works? I’m interested in hearing the reasons why.’

‘It is no secret.’ The Voice looked uncomfortable even so. ‘The caliph’s proclamations have been called out after prayers across Liba for close on a year now. This new wisdom came to him in a dream at the end of the Holy Month. On the Day of A Thousand Suns there came a dawn so bright that many of our ancestors who died that morning could not see the way to paradise. They sought the darkness of their machines to hide from that unholy light. But they became trapped there, djinns, haunting the relics of their past. It is out of mercy that we act. We break open their prisons and set them free to ascend to their reward.’

He delivered his lines with conviction. Whether he believed them, or whether he could have made a great actor, I didn’t know.

‘Let us hope those trapped souls understand the mercies that you heap upon them,’ I said. ‘And whose idea was it? Some scheme out of the mathema?’

‘Mine.’ Ibn Fayed laid the claim from his throne, his hands closing into fists.

A distant, hollow sound, repeated, and again. I glanced back along the silk runner to see the doors open. Marco Onstantos Evenaline stepped through, in his blacks as ever, but with his hat in his hand. He must have been plucked from the line shortly after we passed him and have followed in our footsteps.

We all watched his slow advance across the width of the hall. Ibn Fayed really did have a hell of a throne room. It occurred to me that a large portion of the Haunt would fit into it, and certainly the entirety of the villages of Gutting and Little Gutting.

At last Marco drew up alongside me, looking pleased for the first time since we met. The absence of his trunk had changed him, he stood taller, more proud.

‘Ibn Fayed, Caliph of Liba, Lord of the Three Realms, Water-Giver, welcomes Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South to his humble abode.’

‘As well he should,’ Marco said. ‘Though courtesies will prove no shield from the consequences of his actions.’

‘You dare?’ The Voice may have spoken an alien tongue but the volume and tone drew ten curved blades from the scabbards of the imperial guard.

‘Harsh language to use over an unpaid debt, Marco?’ I did my best to ignore the glittering steel a foot to my left, the guardsmen having included me in the insult. ‘By the look of things I would say the caliph is good for it?’ I didn’t wave my arm at the opulence of our surroundings, concerned that someone might lop it off.

‘You wallow in ignorance, Jorg of Renar, like a pig in filth. It will please me to see you burn.’

‘Marco! I thought we were friends?’ I tried not to smile but I was never the actor.

He looked away from me toward the throne. ‘Ibn Fayed, you are sentenced to die. All of Hamada is forfeit.’

Two long steel bolts appeared in Marco’s chest, jutting out at diverging angles. I took a moment to recognize them as projectiles, fired from some overlarge crossbows that must be concealed in galleries above us.

Marco staggered half a step and raised his hands. ‘Die.’ Joints crackled as he formed a fist. It put me in mind of that scorpion in the Hills as I unwound it. For a heartbeat he hypnotized all of us, stood there impaled on those bolts, his hat rolling on its brim at his feet. Fist slammed into palm.

And nothing.

Though perhaps it seemed brighter for a second, as if the sun had peeked out from behind clouds.

Marco pounded fist into palm a second time. ‘No!’ He swept us with a wild gaze, looked down at the shafts in his chest, and collapsed.

‘This is what is in your hand?’ the Voice asked. ‘A madman?’

‘Look out of your window, Ibn Fayed.’ I pointed west.

A sharp clap sent one of the guards running to haul open the shutters.

The man pulled on a concealed rope and the screens parted, the brightness of the day dazzling us. For long moments we stood blinking in the desert light, trying to see into the brilliance of the outside world. And there it rose, boiling upward over the dunes, a fierce column of orange and black, fire threaded with night, opening into a inferno, mushrooming above the sands, and above that, impossibly high, a white halo of cloud spreading, outpacing the flames.

The burned half of my face pulsed with warmth, a heat on the edge of pain, the light of it filling my eye and making something new of the flame-cloud, lending it an ethereal beauty and the aspect of a gate, or fissure in the world, opening onto something that could be heaven or could be hell.

‘It would take you two days on camel back to stand dead centre beneath that explosion,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand.’ Ibn Fayed stood from his throne.

‘Have Marco’s trunk brought here,’ I said.

The caliph nodded. His Voice called out the command.

We had no need of small talk while we waited. The explosion demanded the eye. None of us spoke. Even the servants laid down their feathered poles to watch. And after five minutes we saw the dunes rise, the sand leaping into the air, one after the next, bang, bang, bang, faster than an arrow in flight. The sound hit us, a wall of it, loud enough to take every shutter from its hinges and leave a finger’s width of sand across each inch of the marble floor. The rumble that followed drew out for an age, deep and full of terror.

Qalasadi and Yusuf came through the great doors, six guards behind them carrying Marco’s trunk. If they knocked we didn’t hear them.

They set the trunk beside Marco’s corpse.

‘You have checked this?’ The Voice pointed at it.

‘We have.’ Qalasadi nodded. ‘In any event, nothing of the Builders’ magic can pass the gates and seals set upon this palace.’

‘That’s n-’ I bit off the words and patted my chest. Gone! The view-ring wasn’t there. ‘How in hell-’

‘I cut the thong just before we left the mathema,’ Yusuf said. ‘Kalal stayed to pick it from the floor.’

‘A light touch, Brother Yusuf. I hadn’t taken you for a thief.’ It unnerved me to think he had held a blade at my neck, but I supposed they had had me in a noose since I set foot on the quay at Kutta port.

‘Theft is about timing, Jorg, and timing can be calculated.’ He seemed unashamed.

I remembered the bell sounding as we left the tower, holding my attention, drowning out other senses, over-writing the clink of view-ring striking floor.

‘Besides,’ Yusuf continued. ‘It would have been detected and taken at the palace gates, casting you in a very bad light. A friend couldn’t let that happen to a friend.’

I shrugged. There seemed little else to do. In any event, they hadn’t detected my gun. Perhaps when they spoke of the Builders’ works they meant the ones with more magic and less mechanics. The ones where lightning ran trapped in metal veins.

‘Open it.’ Ibn Fayed, returned to his throne, gaze flicking from window to trunk, trunk to window.

Qalasadi kneeled, undid the catches, worked some magic on the lock — a lock I knew to be very tricky — and threw back the lid.

‘Sand?’ The caliph leaned forward.

The desert taught me many things. Two of those things were about Marco. The desert is a quiet place. Not silent. There is always the wind, the hiss of sand, the plod of feet, and the complaint of camels. But it is a place where a man can be heard and where a man can listen. When I listened to Marco I noticed that he whirred, he creaked, and he ticked. All these sounds existed on the edge of hearing, but once noted could be found in any quiet moment, especially if he exerted himself, then I would hear it more clearly, that whirring, like the cogs in my watch.

And in discovering this strangeness I found myself watching Marco Onstantos Evenaline, the white man in his black suit, unburned by the sun, sweating but never wilting, a man curiously unsuited to what should be, excluding the harshness of ledgers, a business of warm handshakes and human bonding.

The second thing I learned at night, watching the infinite stars. I noticed that they shimmered. Only to be expected of course. Stars twinkle. But it seemed to me, in the dead of night, with the sands about us cooled and the air cold enough to set me deep into my blankets, that the stars above Marco’s camel twinkled too much. And I remembered that heat haze I had seen in the Iberico Hills, with just the eye ringed by the burn that Gog left me by way of a thank you. The haze I saw with a second sight. The haze that warned of secret fires.

A week later, in the dead of night, two days out from Hamada, I rose from my blankets. The Ha’tari were used to men leaving the caravan to water the sands. In the Margins we had a trench cut to save us wandering out amongst the fissures and the horrors that lurked there, but in the desert we could find a quiet spot among the dunes. It was far less common that a man should lead his camel out into the sand. And I wasn’t even leading mine, I was leading Marco’s. Perhaps they thought me a city boy, too long without the company of women, and tempted beyond reason by the twitching rear of the camel ahead. Probably they thought I wanted to steal from the banker. Either way, none of them liked him, and they liked my gold.

I didn’t go far. In the dip between two moon-pale dunes I hefted the trunk from the camel’s back and set to working at its tricky lock with tiny picks I keep from my years with the brothers. There’s little call for anything more sophisticated than an axe when faced with a lock on the road, but they always fascinated me and I learned a few techniques from men in our band who had found their way into disgrace through less violent paths than mine. I worked veiled, with the sand gauze across the eye-slit, using only touch.

In time I had the case unlocked. I dug a grave in the sand, more of a dent — you can’t scoop a deep hole in the dunes any more than you can dig in water. It took much of my strength to tip the trunk onto its side. The view-ring’s capabilities told me plain that only a fraction of the machinery before me was required to manufacture Michael’s image. I had to wonder at the weight of the rest and the wisps of hidden fire rising from it.

I guessed that the contents would separate from the container easy enough. No ancient’s hand had stretched the sharkskin over its frame, nor wood panelled the interior. Marco would want to be able to change the casing without effort in order to disguise his cargo when required.

I opened the lid from the side and tipped the trunk forward so it fell open-mouthed into the pit … into the dent at least. Some fiddling, the application of my knife’s point in two places, and enough shaking and grunting to alarm Marco’s camel, soon won the trunk free of its contents. I used a stolen plate to heap sand over the rectangular block of silver-steel and plasteek. The machine buzzed once during the process then fell silent.

With sand mounded smoothly over the device I turned my attention to filling the trunk. Half an hour later, sweaty and dry-mouthed, I near killed myself hauling the thing onto the camel’s back once more.

‘How did you know the Builder-ghosts would not just explode the device while you were burying it?’ Qalasadi asked.

‘How could they know what was happening? And such things are of immense value — they cannot be made again. They would not destroy it unless all hope of recovering it had gone,’ I said.

‘Why would they allow the banker to detonate it if it were not close enough to the palace to destroy Ibn Fayed?’ Yusuf asked.

‘I didn’t know for sure that they would,’ I said. ‘It seems though that the Builder-ghosts see less than we might think, especially in the desert and where their works have been targeted for destruction. They must have placed their trust in Marco to act in their interest. Even if they knew where the device lay, they could not with certainty say that the caliph had not entered the radius of destruction. Or perhaps they expected it to be more devastating.’

‘More?’ The Voice drew a deep breath.

I shrugged. ‘In any event, Marco didn’t need to bring his trunk into the throne room to do its work, or into the palace. He could have destroyed Hamada from a mile off amongst the dunes. Whether his bravado before the throne was on the Builders’ instructions or what he felt to be a fitting exit from the world, I don’t know.’

‘The Builders threw their suns from one side of the world to the other on tongues of flame, and where they burned whole countries were reduced to char,’ Qalasadi said. ‘Why have one lone banker haul the weapon here on a camel?’

‘There’s not much that still works after a thousand years.’ I closed the trunk and sat on the lid. ‘The rockets and the greatest of their weapons are spent and useless. Only the triggers are left intact … the sparks that lit the suns, if you like. They need to be moved by agents to the city that is to be destroyed.’

‘And this is their vengeance for my …’ Ibn Fayed looked old, a tremor in his hands. ‘I was too proud. For my people’s sake I will-’

‘You may have put yourself at the head of the queue, Caliph, but I think there is more to it than that. Michael, he called himself. It may not be chance that he shares his name with the archangel, warlord of God’s armies. The Builders have larger worries than one desert ruler breaking what machinery he can find above the dunes. Some among them plan to kill us all. Hamada was to be a demonstration. A model to be repeated.’

‘Lucky for us that you arrived on our shores when you did then, King Jorg.’ Qalasadi bowed his head.

‘Was it luck, magician?’ I tried to see his eyes but he kept his face down. ‘You knew the Builder-ghosts were mounting some kind of attack. You thought it involved me … and you let me into the caliph’s palace, albeit declawed. And perhaps there was another hand pointing my way, working on that timing you all seem so proud of …’ I wondered, had Fexler played me, pushed me here and there across his board with the most gentle of nudges and the occasional flash of red light glimpsed through a steel ring? Had he delayed Marco, or sped his way, so that we found Port Albus together? Had I been Fexler’s agent in some contest with Michael … with the whole of his faction?

‘Explain to me,’ Ibn Fayed said, ‘why this assassin would risk so much just to let me know his mind before we all died? If my archers had not both contrived to miss his heart, he could have died without igniting …’ His gaze returned to the windows. ‘That.’

‘I don’t think there was any danger of him failing,’ I said.

‘But he died just moments after completing his mission,’ Ibn Fayed said, sharp eyes beneath grey and bushy brows.

‘Oh, Marco’s not dead,’ I said. ‘Are you, Marco?’

The modern’s head snapped up. The speed of it shocking, like a length of flexed metal flicking straight, murder in his eyes.

‘I’m far from sure he was ever alive.’ I stepped back, not drawing my sword in case over-zealous archers threaded bolts through my chest as well.

Marco got to his feet in a quick series of jerky motions. He pulled the bolts from his body and dropped them to the floor, blood-smeared but not dripping. The imperial guard drew their swords again.

‘You just wanted to hear how you were tricked, didn’t you, Marco? Before you found a good moment to finish at least part of the job.’

He ignored me and leapt at the caliph, careless of the guardsmen blocking his way. Bright blades flickered in motion, feet scrabbled on the sandy floor, blood sprayed, gobbets of flesh flew and Marco surged to within a yard of Ibn Fayed before the weight of men took him to the ground. He fought with the same frightening speed demonstrated when he raised his head, fingers rending muscle and fat, throwing grown men away as if they were less than children. The swords that fell on him sliced his blacks to tatters but beneath the red butchery of his flesh metal gleamed, copper and silver-steel. Whirs and clicks accompanied his movements, audible through the screams, the clash of steel, and the leopard’s spitting howl. The noise of teeth-through-ratchets as fingers closed on necks with the inexorable strength of the vice.

Men died. Marco found his feet again. Ibn Fayed and his Voice moved to shelter behind the throne as Marco climbed the third step, blood running down the stone in red trickles. Injured guardsmen clung to both legs, others hewed at him as though he were a tree. Before the throne the leopard and its handler hesitated. The cat had been straining at its chain, ready to attack. Now it sat back, ears flat to its skull. Sensible beast.

More guardsmen were running in from the great doors, and more behind them, but like all things it was a matter of timing. Marco had enough of it for his purpose and they had insufficient for theirs. He would kill the caliph before they stopped him.

I mounted the three steps, careful of my footing in the gore, pulled the gun from beneath my robes. With the barrel set to the back of his pale skull I put four bullets through the metal casing and into whatever clockwork served him for a brain.

He fell twitching amongst the dead and wounded as the echoes of the last shot died away.

I held the gun up. ‘Old technology.’ I pointed it at Marco. ‘New technology. You might want to rework those seals, Qalasadi.’ I spun the gun around my finger and caught it flat in my palm, displaying it to Ibn Fayed, ‘And this, Caliph, is what I have in my hand.’