‘That was a mistake. They were my few.’ A heat rose in me.
‘Mistakes can be made.’ He nodded, thoughtful. ‘Even with enchantment to tame the variables the sum of the world is a complex one.’
‘So you still intend to gift the realm of Morrow to Ibn Fayed? To let the Moorish tide back yet again into the Horse Coast?’ I watched Qalasadi, his eyes, his mouth, the motion of his hands, everything, just to try and read something of the man. It maddened me to have them stand there so calm, as if they knew at each moment what was on my tongue to speak, in my mind to do. And yet did they? Was it part of their show of smokes and mirrors?
‘We intend that the Prince of Arrow win the empire throne at Congression in the 104th year of Interregnum.’ Yusuf spoke for the first time, his voice edged with just a touch of strain. ‘The Congression of year 100 will be a stalemate: that cannot be changed.’
‘It may be that the caliph’s domains can more easily be expanded in other directions.’ Kalal spoke, his high voice at odds with a serious mouth. ‘Maroc may fall more easily than Morrow or Kordoba.’
The amount of relief that suggestion brought surprised me. ‘I came to kill you, Qalasadi. To lay waste to your domain and leave behind ruination.’
He had the grace or commonsense not to smirk at my apocalyptic turn of phrase. Most likely they knew of Gelleth even in Afrique. Perhaps they saw the glare of it, rising above the horizon. Lord knows it burned bright enough, and high? It scorched heaven!
‘I hope that you will not,’ said Qalasadi.
‘Hope?’ I drew my robe aside, setting hand to hilt. ‘You don’t know?’
‘All men need hope, Jorg. Even men of numbers.’ Yusuf pressed a smile onto his lips, his voice soft, the voice of a man ready to die.
‘And what do your equations say of me, poisoner?’ My sword stood between us now. I had no recollection of drawing it. The rage I needed flared and died, flared again. I saw my grandfather and grandmother laid out pale on the deathbed, Uncle Robert in a warrior’s tomb, hands folded across the blade upon his chest. I saw Qalasadi’s smile in a sunlit courtyard. Yusuf wiping the sea from his face. ‘Salty!’ he had said. ‘Let’s hope the world has better to offer than that, no?’ Words spoken at sea.
I slammed my sword hilt onto the table’s polished wood. ‘What do your calculations say?’ A roar that made them flinch.
‘Two,’ Qalasadi said.
‘Two?’ A laugh tore out of me, sharp-edged, full of hurting.
He bowed his head. ‘Two.’
Yusuf ran a finger across pages of scrawl. ‘Two.’
‘It’s what the magic gives us,’ Qalasadi said.
Something cold tingled at my cheekbones. ‘Why two?’
And the mathmagician frowned, as he had in the courtyard at Castle Morrow, as if trying once again to remember that lost sensation, to recall a forgotten taste.
‘Two friends lost in dry-lands? Two friends to be made in the desert? Two years away from your throne? Two women who will own your heart? Two decades you will live?’ The magic lies in the first number, the mathematics in the second.’
‘And what is the second number?’ Anger left me, the remaining image two sad mounds in the dirt of the Iberico, fading.
‘The second number,’ Qalasadi said, without checking his papers, ‘is 333000054500.’
‘Now that is a number! None of these twos, threes, and fourteens you plague me with. What the hell does it mean?’
‘It is, I hope, the coordinates where you abandoned Michael.’
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
