We advanced across a sea of mud. The rain stopped abruptly; just as abruptly, the sun beat down again. The air was lustrously clear; we should have been able to distinguish every contour of the Jungfrau, about twenty-four hundred miles away, but there was nothing to see. Not a bird, not a bug, not the smoke of the fire Val’s captors had built. They had disappeared like jinn into the emptiness.

“Where are they?” I asked.

To our right appeared a hairline fracture in the earth, which shimmered even as I watched, detaching itself from the mud and climbing upward. It hung in space, seething uneasily, a restless island in the sky. It was toward that hanging island that the rat-catcher pointed.

“It’s a mirage,” I said. He shook his head. I squinted into the painful luminosity and made out a thick, hazy stand of trees. They could have been dwarfs or giants; the very purity of the air diminished reality, intensified illusion, skewered distances. This place, alternately drenched by sun and rain, was as unstable as the enchanted boglands beyond Camelot, and Yussuf’s pointed finger, like Merlin’s long ago, gave substance to a capricious terrain, and we hurried to the trees before they vanished. There were noises ahead, the frail snapping of twigs, human voices. The rat-catcher was running now, we were all running, and the General was bellowing again as he fired his howitzer and the slugs screamed and ricocheted.

And then I saw nine large men and Valerie. They fanned out and fled, eight of them swallowed up by the desert, but the ninth was impeded by Val, whose wrist was cuffed to his by a rope of vine. He jerked her across the forest floor, reaching for his knife to cut the bond between them. Her face was swollen and misshapen, frozen by a gag, a kind of primitive bridle. She dug in her heels and threw herself to the ground and in a vortex of flailing arms and legs he went down with her. I got to them but Qazwini stormed up, flinging me aside. He shot the hand that held the knife. Bone, flesh, and blood exploded all over us. He fired again at the other hand and it came off, extracting Val from the rest of the body.