‘And what is that?’ asked Fitz.
‘The Kingdom.’
Mr Ahmadi took the tall hat from his head, and set it on the cave floor between them. He put his fingers to the hat’s rim, and seemed to snap them, and the hat broke apart – sprang apart – into a long coiled band of black cloth. He took this between his fingers, turned it over, and laid it flat, then reached for the lantern, opened its glass window, and touched the corner of the cloth to the still burning wick.
The whole black and silken band burst into blue flame. All of them lurched back – Navy a good deal closer than she would have liked to the skulls on the wall behind her.
‘The Officers seized and examined everything I owned,’ said Mr Ahmadi, ‘except the clothes off my back.’ The blue fire began to subside; as it did, within the black silk silver traces began to appear, coalescing into gleaming, pen-like strokes that ran across the fabric, each channel running into the next in a cursive illumination that gleamed in the void of the cave.
‘And the hat off my head.’ He looked up and smiled at Fitz. ‘Obviously.’
Fitz stared at Mr Ahmadi with a tangled knot of emotions: caution, fear, loyalty, pride, excitement – even love. He looked down at the bright map lying on the cave floor. It had clearly been traced from some sort of sea chart; in its corner lay a finely drawn compass rose, along its lower edge ran the crenellated line of a rugged, probably rocky coast, the place names tricked out in an elegant, ancient-looking silver hand, and, in the wide emptiness of its central void, a small cluster of blobs and dots, the smallest of which – a pinprick of light in the wide draught of dark ruffled silk – was annotated with a star, and a single word.
Kingdom.
Mr Ahmadi’s finger dropped on this silver speck in the ocean like an eagle diving out of the sun.
‘The Kingdom,’ he said. ‘It has gone by many names. Navy?’
‘The Joy of the Heart’, she whispered, as if her mouth were as dry as sand. ‘The Great Hoard. The Treasure of Incoherence. The Tamarisk. It has a hundred names. But it’s been lost for a thousand years. More.’
‘Correct. Even with the aid of a full set of notes, which I confess I stole from the British Museum and do not intend to return – it took me three weeks of searching through the Keep, then the Registry, to find the manuscript containing this map. And that still wasn’t enough.’
‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ said Navy. ‘The whole purpose of the Heresy is to recover the Kingdom. How could there be a map in the Keep showing exactly where it is, and we not know it?’
‘There wasn’t,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘I found many maps, but every one of them was imperfect or incomplete. The more I searched, the further I seemed to fall from the truth I sought. I was as blind, stumbling around in the dark, as all the Masters who have come before me. But last night those fools my fellow Officers put me in a cell with Professor Sassani.’
‘The manuscript,’ said Ned.
‘Indeed,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘Sassani is another kind of fool, but he had seen your manuscript, Ned, and while he was determined not to reveal the least scrap of information to the Rack, not even in the throes of the thresher – which is impressive – he was no match for a snatcher of dreams. I waited until he had fallen asleep, and then I whispered into his ear, such things that could not but provoke him to gabble everything he knew. I had gathered much information from my research, but from Sassani I discovered that which I still lacked. And then I finished drawing my map.’
‘And the Kingdom?’ asked the Professor.
‘If the winds are favourable, half a day’s sail,’ said Mr Ahmadi.
‘But the Kingdom is in the desert,’ said Navy.
‘It was buried in sand,’ said Fitz. ‘In The Giant’s Almanac –’
‘You think a king delights in treasure?’ shouted Mr Ahmadi. The noise of it, the shock of it, startled them. No one moved. ‘You think a king buries his heart for two thousand years for the sake of gold? No,’ he said, his voice falling again, until it was little more than a spent whisper, a broken reed. ‘A king’s delight is not in jewels, not in gold, not in all the riches of his kingdom, not in the wealth of the wide world. A king’s delight lies in bestowing it. Tell them, Hožir.’
The water, now, was rising, and beyond the light cast by the fluttering lantern, and by Fitz’s little lamp, the wet darkness of the cave had begun to feel threatening, as if it might overwhelm them at any moment. The Professor, who sat cross-legged beside Ned, with his long cloak draped for warmth round his ankles, had been watching the water as it gathered in the shadows; and Fitz knew that he spoke, now, in large part to distract them. He spoke directly to Navy and Fitz.
‘I once knew a man, my children, not much older than you,’ he said, ‘who made a terrible mistake. He was young, passionate, impetuous – as perhaps the two of you are. He had a gift for telling tales, imaginative stories of all kinds. He could picture with absolute clarity anything he had ever encountered, as if it stood before his eyes whenever he but summoned the thought of it; more, he could dream and conjure forms never known in nature – great monstrous and colourful beasts of all kinds, winged, scaled, furred, the most exotic and wonderful creatures and plants, fields of grass that seeded themselves in the clouds, snakes of gleaming white stone that tunnelled in
