For a long and pleasantly silent moment I sat back and savoured my drink. An unpleasant memory jerked me out of my reverie. I set my whisky down, hard.
“What the hell happened in the desert then?” As much as I like talking about myself I realized that in my eagerness to escape becoming part of Yusuf’s world-saving calculations I’d forgotten to ask why, apparently for only the second time in eight centuries, a Builders’ Sun had ignited, and why close enough to Hamada to shake the sand out of their beards?
“My father has closed the Builders’ eyes in Hamada. I think perhaps they don’t like that.” Omar put his palm across the mouth of his cup and rolled it about its rim.
“What?” I hadn’t felt drunk until I tried to make sense of what he said. “The Builders are dust.”
“Master Yusuf just told you that they still echo in their machines. Copies of men, or at least they were copies long ago . . . They watch us. Father thinks they herd us, guide us like goats and sheep. So he has sought out their eyes and put them out.”
“It took a thousand years for someone to do that?” I reached for my cup, nearly knocking it over.
“It took a long time for the Mathema to discover all the Builders’ eyes.” Omar shrugged. “And longer still to decide the time was right to share that information with a caliph.”
“Why now?”
“Because our equations indicate the Builders may be done with herding and guiding . . .”
I didn’t want to know what came after that so I took a gulp of my whisky. “. . . it may be time for the slaughtering,” Omar said.
“Why for God’s sake?” What I really meant was, why me? Do it in a hundred years and I wouldn’t give a damn.
“The magic is breaking the world. The more it’s used the easier it is to use and the wider the cracks grow. Kill us and the problem might go away.” He watched me, eyes dark and solemn.
“But destroying Hamada is hardly going to . . . oh.”
Omar nodded. “Everyone. Everywhere. They can do it too.”
Footsteps on the stairs, a dark shape hurrying to Omar’s side, a hasty whispered exchange. I watched, trying to focus, tipping my cup and discovering it empty. “Who’s your friend?”
Omar got to his feet and I stood too, his steadiness making me realize quite how much I was swaying. “You’re not off?” The racing finished hours ago.
“Father has called us all to the palace. This explosion of yours has changed things—perhaps turned theory into fact. We all saw it, then felt it. I was knocked off my feet. Perhaps Father will share with us how and why we were spared. Hopefully he will have a plan to stop it happening again!” Omar followed the caliph’s messenger toward the stairs, waving. “So good to see you alive, my friend.”
I half-sat half-collapsed back into the cushions. Even though he never used it against me I always held the fact that Omar’s father was the caliph of Liba, where mine was only a cardinal, to be a black mark against his name. Even a seventh son looks like a good deal to a man who is tenth in line. Still, when the caliph calls, you come. I couldn’t hold that against Omar, though he had left me to drown my sorrows by myself. Not to mention added to those troubles with his talk of long-dead Builders lurking in ancient machines and wishing us ill. Even drunk I wasn’t about to believe that nonsense, but there was definitely something bad happening.
I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. “What time is it anyway?”
“Lacking an hour to midnight.”
I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.
“Who said that?” I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. “Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!”
A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.
Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. “Now you’re not drinking alone.”