‘And when you go to Congression, Jorg, how will you cast your vote?’ Ibn Fayed asked, affording me the courtesy that one lone vote might matter.

‘For myself of course.’ I grinned, creasing the stiffness of scar tissue. ‘And you, Caliph?’

‘Orrin of Arrow is a good man,’ he said. ‘It might be time for such a man.’

‘Wouldn’t an emperor grate on you? Don’t you prefer to rule the desert with a free hand?’

Ibn Fayed shook his head, croaking a dry laugh. ‘I live on the very edge of the Holy Empire. To the south, as far away as Vyene, is another emperor, a Cerani emperor, and his domain reaches to my borders, as vast as our broken empire ever was at its heights. Soon enough, maybe not in my lifetime but surely before my grandson takes this chair, the Cerani and their allied tribes will come out of the desert and swallow Liba whole. That is unless someone is crowned at Vyene to remake our strength.’

I passed a month in the desert city. I learned what I could of their ways. For some weeks I studied in the mathema, even pieced together a little of their door. Qalasadi returned the view-ring to my keeping, on the understanding that it must never enter the palace and must leave Liba with me.

I sat one evening in the mathema tower, closeted alone in a windowless chamber on the floor behind the door marked ‘epsilon’. A simple earthenware oil lamp lit the book before me, equations and more equations. I have the head for mathematics but no love for it. I’ve seen a formula bring tears to Kalal’s eyes with its elegance and the sheer beauty of its symmetries. I grasped the formula, or thought I did, but it didn’t move me. Whatever poetry such things hold I am deaf to it.

On the table beside the book, the view-ring, a shiny and inert lump since the explosion, or since Qalasadi’s intervention, although he said they did nothing to it. I yawned and slammed the book hard enough to make the flame jerk and shudder, and to set the ring dancing like a spun coin at the very last of its rotations. But unlike a coin the ring kept its oscillations going. I watched it, hypnotized.

‘Jorg?’ and Fexler’s image rose above the ring, painted in whites as always, not quite opaque. If the Builders had set themselves the task of recreating ghosts from the stories told to children they could have done the job no better.

‘Who’s asking?’

He focused on me as I spoke, his image growing sharper. ‘Can’t you see me?’

‘I can see you.’

‘Then you recognize me. Fexler Brews.’

I laid my hand flat across the book. ‘It says here that a prediction will diverge from the truth. The further the prediction is carried, the larger the discrepancy. Wraps it all up in statistics and bounds of course. But the message is clear enough. You’re a prediction. I doubt you’re anything like the man I saw die any more.’

‘Untrue,’ Fexler said. ‘I have the original data. I don’t need to rely on fading memories. Fexler Brews is alive in me as true and clear as ever.’

I shook my head and watched him. The shadows danced everywhere but across him. On me, on the walls, the ceiling, only Fexler constant, lit by his own light.

‘You can’t grow if you’re constantly defined by this collection of frozen moments that you keep returning to. And if you can’t grow, you’re not alive. So either you’re Fexler, and like him you’re dead. Or you’re alive, but you’re someone else. Something else.’

‘Are you sure it’s me we’re talking about?’ Fexler raised a brow – very human.

‘Ah …’ It closed on me like steel jaws. The worst traps are the ones we lay for ourselves. All these years and it took a nothing, a web of numbers, to show me to myself. I could count on one hand the brief and personal passion plays that nailed me to my past. The carriage and the thorns. The hammer and Justice burning. The bishop. Father’s knife jutting from my chest. And at my hip, in a copper box, perhaps one more. ‘I liked you better before, Fexler. Why are you here?’

‘I came to learn your plans,’ he said.

‘You don’t watch me enough to know them?’

‘I have been … busy, elsewhere.’

‘Vyene is calling me,’ I said. ‘I mean to take ship to Mazeno and travel by road to the Gilden Gates. It will probably be a quicker return journey than the one that brought me here. And besides, I have a memory from a fever dream, a memory of you asking me to go there, something about the throne, and my view-ring, only you were calling it a different name. Control ring? Is that a true memory?’

‘It is a true memory, but I won’t speak of it now. It is probable others are listening. Go to Vyene: it will be a good education.’

I sat back, ran my eye across the books ranked along shelves from floor to ceiling, all that knowledge. ‘These mathmagicians, they’re the champions of that effort to recivilize us aren’t they, Fexler? The start of a new understanding, so we can repair what the Builders built.’

‘One of several such starts.’ He nodded.

‘I’ve looked at the scraps left from your time. Almost nothing was ever written down …’

‘It was written into machines, into memory. You just lack the means to read it.’ Fexler looked around at the books too, as if he needed to use his eyes to see them. One of many deceptions, no doubt.

‘I’ve looked at those scraps and nowhere does it speak of heaven and hell, of a life beyond death, of church or mosque or any place of worship.’

Fexler looked down at me, floating as he was a foot above the desk, his head near touching the ceiling. ‘Few among us concerned ourselves with religion. We had answers that didn’t require faith.’

‘But I’ve spoken with an angel.’ I frowned. ‘At least I think I have. And for damn sure I’ve reached into the deadlands chasing after pieces of men’s souls. How can you—’

‘For a clever boy you can be very stupid, Jorg.’ Something in his voice carried a faint echo of that angel, timeless, tolerant.

‘What?’ Spoken too loud. My anger is never more than a moment away. It makes a fool of me more times than I can say.

‘Our greatest work was to change the role of the observer. We put power into the hands of men, directly into their hands. Too much power as it turned out. If the raw strength of one man’s will, the right man’s will, can bring fire from nothing, part the waters, pulverize stone, command winds. What then of the unfocused desire and expectation of millions?’

‘You—’

‘Your afterlife is what you expect it to be, what the thousands, the millions around you expect, what legend builds, told, retold, refined, evolving. In this place, amongst the sands, they fashion themselves a different paradise and different paths to it, some dark, some light. All of it is fabrication, constructed over the reality my people lived in. Whatever waited for a man after his death in those times, it was not mentioned in our calculations. Our priests, when they could find anyone to listen, described something more subtle, more profound, and more wonderful than the mishmash of medieval superstition your kind have built upon.’

‘We made it?’ It didn’t seem possible. ‘We built heaven and hell?’

‘Oh yes. If your priests ever discover what power lies at their fingertips with the will of their flock behind them … well pray that they do not, or every word of fire and brimstone, of last judgments and devils with pitchforks, will become the gospel truth, rising up on all sides. Why do you think we have worked so hard to reinforce the church’s hatred of “magic” and its practice?’