“Welcome.” One of the black-robed students resting in the tower’s shadow stood to intercept me. The others, maybe a dozen in all, scarcely looked up from their slates, busy scratching down their calculations.
“Wa-alaykum salaam,” I returned the greeting. You’d think after all the sand I’d swallowed I would have more of the desert tongue, but no.
The exchange seemed to have exhausted both his words of Empire and mine of Araby and an awkward silence stretched between us. “This is new.” I waved at the open entrance. There had been a black crystal door there, to be opened by solving some puzzle of shifting patterns, different each time. As a student it had never taken me less than two hours to open it, and on one occasion, two days. Having no door at all now made a pleasant if unexpected change, though I had rather been looking forward to poking Loki’s key at the bastard and seeing it swing open for me immediately.
The student, a narrow-featured youngster from far-Araby, his black hair slick to his skull, frowned as if remembering some calamity. “Jorg.”
“I’m sure.” I nodded, pretending to understand. “Now, I’m going up to see Qalasadi.” I pushed past and followed the short corridor beyond to the stair that winds up just inside the outer wall. The sight of equations set into the wall and spiralling up with the stairs for hundreds of feet, just reminded me what a torture my year in Hamada had been. Not quite walking-the-deadlands level of torture, but math-ematics can come pretty close on a hot day when you’re hung over. The equations followed me up as I climbed. A master mathmagician can calculate the future, seeing as much amid the scratched summations and complex integrations on their slates as the Silent Sister sees with her blind eye or the völvas extrapolate from the dropping of their runestones. Men are just variables to the mathmagicians of Liba, and just how far the mathmagicians see and what their aims might be are secrets known only to their order.
I got about halfway up to Omega level at the top of the tower before, sweating freely, I paused to catch my breath. The four grandmasters of the order preside in turn throughout the year and I was hoping that the current incumbent would remember me, along with my connections to the Red March throne. Qalasadi was my best bet since he arranged my tuition during my stay. With any luck the mathmagicians would organize my safe passage home, perhaps even calculating me a risk-free path.
“Jalan Kendeth.” Not a question.
I turned and Yusuf Malendra filled the staircase behind me, white robes swirling, a grin gleaming black against the mocha of his face. I’d seen him last in Umbertide waiting in the foyer of House Gold.
“They say there are no coincidences with mathmagicians,” I said, wiping my forehead. “Did you calculate the place and moment of our meeting? Or was it just the end of your business in Florence that brought you back here?”
“The latter, my prince.” He looked genuinely pleased to see me. “We do of course have coincidences and this is a most happy one.” Behind him a student came puffing up the stairs.
A sudden thought struck me, the image of a white body, black clad, broken and left hanging on the Gate of Peace in the desert sun. “Marco . . . that was Marco wasn’t it?”
“I—”
“Jalan? Jalan Kendeth? I don’t believe it!” A head poked around Yusuf’s shoulder, broad, dark, a grin so wide it seemed to hang between his ears.
“Omar!” As soon as I laid eyes on the grinning face of Omar Fayed, seventh son of the caliph, I knew my ordeal was over. Omar had been among the most faithful of my companions back in Vermillion, always up for hitting the town. Not a great drinker perhaps but with a love of gambling that eclipsed even my own, and pockets deeper than any young man I ever knew. “Now tell me that this was coincidence!” I challenged Yusuf.
The mathmagician spread his hands. “You didn’t know Prince Omar had returned to Hamada and his studies at the Mathema?”
“Well . . .” I had to concede that I had known.
“They said you were dead!” Omar squeezed past Yusuf and set a hand on my shoulder. Being short, he had to reach up, which made a change after all my time standing in Snorri’s shadow. “That fire . . . I never believed them. I’ve been trying to do the sums to prove it, but, well, they’re tricky.”
“I’m glad to have saved you the effort.” I found myself answering his grin. It felt good to be back with people who knew me. A friend who cared enough to try to find out what had happened to me. After . . . however long it had been, trekking in Hell, it all felt suddenly a bit overwhelming.