I held out my hand and he took it, his grip firm and dry. ‘Sometimes men must take their chances,’ I said, and leaning in I took the nearest die. ‘If I may. You never know when one of these might save your life.’

‘Go with God, Jorg of Ancrath,’ he said and returned to the study of the board.

30

Five years earlier

Marco stood beside his trunk, stiff, uncomfortable in his frock coat.

‘Is there a law says you can’t take that off?’ I grinned and took hold of his half-ton trunk.

‘Your breastplate must chafe in this heat, Sir Jorg?’

I had strapped it back on as we came into port. Not something to go overboard in, but worth suffering ashore.

‘The blacks will stop a dagger thrust?’ I asked.

‘Tradition will stop anyone from trying,’ Marco said.

The banking clan privileges hadn’t meant much to me as a road-brother but certainly in the courts of the Hundred and in the corridors of Vyene they were afforded protections above that of kings.

‘Let’s find us some transport.’ I nodded down the largest of the alleys leading from the plaza. All the streets in Kutta looked to be narrow, hemmed in by tall buildings to manufacture shade. A tight fit for wagons, but the serious cargos would be unloaded further down the coast at Tanjer, a larger and more commercial port.

Marco followed me, keeping his distance as if spurning my protection and putting me firmly into the role of porter. Perhaps he was safer than I. Men everywhere knew that to strike down a modern was to open an account with the clans, and that gold would spill from Florentine coffers until the debt had been paid, the ledgers balanced. In a broken empire though, the promise of eventual death on an assassin’s blade proved less protection than the bankers might have hoped when set against the certainty of immediate gold. Perhaps in less wild and more honourable lands the moderns’ traditions offered more surety. Certainly the Moors held merchants in high esteem and kept better order than we did in the lands closer to Vyene.

Dragging that trunk in search of stables, my decision to leave Brath safe in the care of a Port Albus farrier seemed more foolish by the yard. By the time we reached what I was looking for the curses were spitting from me, sweat dripping, arms burning. It appeared to be a stable of sorts. Camels lounged around a covered water-trough, mangy beasts with clumped collars of moulting fur and cracked skin around their knees. I’d met a camel before, long ago in Dr Taproot’s circus. A surly creature, ungainly and given to spitting. These looked no better.

‘Wait there.’ I stood Marco out of sight.

I knocked at a door of bleached and fractured planks, answered in time by an old man with one milky eye. In the shadows behind him I heard the snort and clomp of horses.

‘As-salamu alaykum.’ I wished peace upon the old thief. All horse-traders are thieves. ‘Two mounts and a pack-mule.’ I held up three fingers and in the other hand a gold florin stamped with grandfather’s face, and I finished with, ‘Insha’allah.’ Thereby exhausting all the local phrases I’d learned from Yusuf on our crossing.

He watched me with his good eye, running fingers over his chin, white stubble, skin the colour of java and milk. A shadow fell across us, a man on camelback. I glanced at him, a warrior riding high on the saddled hump, all black wrappings, just the flash of eyes in the slit of his shesh. He moved on.

‘Two horses,’ I repeated.

The old trader spouted gibberish at me and waved his hand in negation. He knew what I wanted, nobody with something to sell in Kutta lacks the rudiments of empire tongue required to conduct a sale.

‘Two!’ I added a second coin and rubbed them between finger and thumb.

It hurt him to do it but he shook his head and stamped off muttering. The door shuddered closed.

‘They really don’t want you getting to Hamada, Marco.’

I crossed over to him. He scowled each time I said his name, flinching at some breach of manners, some over-familiarity. ‘Marco,’ I said, leaning close enough to smell the sourness of him, ‘it’s a long walk. Have you no friends in Kutta?’

‘No,’ he said.

I wondered if he had any friends anywhere. Heading off across the desert to Hamada with him, horses or no horses, seemed a fool’s errand. Someone with influence, quite possibly Ibn Fayed himself, did not want Marco to get there. Moreover, at least three mathmagicians appeared to have anticipated my arrival, which meant that Ibn Fayed knew my intentions. The only sensible course of action was to turn around and sail for Port Albus. Except that such a move would be encompassed in the calculations carried out long before my arrival by Yusuf, Qalasadi and others. To behave as predicted would only draw me deeper into their net. Perhaps into an arrest at the docks, or an accident at sea – arranged for my return trip whilst I had been playing the game of twelve lines and sipping tea. Coming here in the first place had been a misjudgment – in truth an arrogance, a child’s conceit.

‘So what would you have me do, Marco?’ Abandoning him to his fate seemed the most sensible choice. But the die had told me to make a new friend, and sensible choices were predictable choices, which this far into the net would like as not get me killed.

‘I’ll need a room.’

‘That I can do.’

I went alone, collared a street urchin and let a copper coin lead us both to a guesthouse. The heavy and ancient door the boy took me to looked unpromising, sitting alone in a wide blank wall. When I knocked, a woman glared at us through the grille. A crone, older than the bleached wood and rusted nails she hauled open. Too wrinkled and bent to need a veil to keep her modest she cast a disapproving eye over me and led on in. The interior surprised me. A short corridor led to an inner courtyard where lemon trees grew in the shade of balconies rising four storeys on each side. Enamelled tiles decorated all surfaces, blue and white, geometrically patterned. An illusion of coolness, if not actual coolness.

I took two rooms, paid in coppers from half a dozen nations, and went to fetch Marco. He had waited where the crone couldn’t see him through the grille and I let her complaints, the sharp and the guttural, run off me as I hauled his trunk through, the modern following in my wake.

‘It’s too small,’ Marco said. Sweat ran off him in rivers but it didn’t seem to bother him. I’d yet to see him drink. I wondered if soon he’d start to shrivel. Something about him called to the death-magic in me, to the necromancer’s heart. It tingled at my fingertips.

‘Too small for what?’ I collapsed onto the trunk. Dragging it up two flights of stairs had half-killed me.

Marco scowled. I had expected bankers, especially travelling bankers, to be closer to diplomats, masters of their own demeanour, but this one made no effort to hide his distaste for me. Perhaps he hoarded his charm along with his gold, for I’d yet to see so much as a glint of either.

‘You owe me for the room, and the guide, banker.’

‘Guide? A child in rags led you off.’

‘A child that I paid,’ I said, still flat out on the trunk.

‘I am keeping tally, Sir Jorg. Now, if you will afford me some privacy …’

I levered myself up and went to my room where I collapsed again. I lay with closed eyes imagining the sharp winds over the icy shoulders of Halradra. In six months I had crossed half the empire. And like Goldilocks with her bears and porridge, I’d found parts too hot and parts too cold. And for the first time I wanted to be back in the Highlands, back where it felt just right. For the first time I thought of my kingdom as home.