The letter had become a weapon. It had rescued our father from obscurity, and then it had killed him, his blood cavorting through his arteries at a fatal speed. (I couldn’t get it out of my head that he had died due to something in his research, as irrational as that might seem. It instilled in me a kind of paranoia. For a while, I even thought it possible that the letter had been poisoned in some way by the Kalif’s men, that Dad had been too close to the solving of some historical mystery the Kalif would prefer remain unsolved.)

The funeral that followed was farce and tragedy. We attended the wrong casket and were shocked to be confronted by the visage of a young man, as if death had done my father good. Meanwhile, another family with a closed casket had buried our father.

“Death suited him.” It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true—it seemed true. That he had gone into death old and come back young. And more comforting still—the idea that there had been a mistake and he was alive somewhere.

Of us all, Duncan stared the longest at that young man who was not our father, as if he sought the answer to a mystery for which there could be no solution.

Four years later, we moved from Stockton to Ambergris, there to live with our mother’s side of the family in a rheumy old mansion with a flooded basement. Set against the banks of the River Moth, remote from much of Ambergris, the place could hardly be called an improvement over the house we had grown up in, but it was less expensive, and our mother had come to realize that with her husband dead nothing much remained to keep her in Stockton. Thus, we shared space with an ever-changing mob of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and friends of the family. (Although, over the years, this cacophony of distant relations reduced itself to just our mother, which is probably how she would have preferred it from the beginning.)

We came to Ambergris across the thick sprawl of the muddy River Moth, by ferry. I remember that during the journey I noticed Duncan had a piece of paper in his shirt pocket. When I asked him what it was, he pulled it out and showed it to me. He had kept the letter from the Kalif to our father; as far as I know, he has it still, tattered and brittle. (I do have it—or the remains of it, anyhow. I don’t dare open it anymore, for fear it will turn to dust.)

“I don’t want to forget,” he said, with a look that dared me to doubt his loyalty to our father.

I said nothing, but the thought occurred to me that although we might be traveling to a new place, we were still bringing the past with us.