Her life splits in two. There are her hours in the house of Kalaphates, a monotony of fatigue and dread: broom and pan, thread and wire, fetch water fetch charcoal fetch wine fetch another bale of linen. Seemingly every day a new story about the sultan filters into the workshop. He has trained himself not to sleep; he is leading teams of surveyors outside the city walls; his soldiers at the Throat Cutter have launched a ball that shattered a Venetian galley carrying food and armor from the Black Sea to the city.

For a second time Anna leads Maria to the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, where they buy a blessing from the stooped and withered nuns for eleven stavrata, and Maria swallows the mixture of water and mercury and feels better for a day before feeling worse. Her hands throb; she suffers from cramps; some nights she says she feels as though the claws of some devil have closed around her limbs and he is trying to tear her apart.

Then there’s Anna’s other life, when fog shrouds the city and she hurries through the echoing streets, and Himerius rows her around the breakwater to scale the wall of the priory. If asked, she would say she does it to make money to relieve her sister’s suffering—but is there not another part of her that also wants to climb that wall? To bring another sack of mildewed books to the copyists in their ink-filled shop? Twice more she fills a sack with books and twice more it turns out to contain only moldy inventories. But the Italians ask her and Himerius to keep bringing whatever they find, that soon they may unearth something as precious as the Aelian or better—a lost tragedy from Athens or a series of orations by a Greek statesman or a seismobrontologion that reveals the secrets of the weather and the wind.

The Italians are not, she learns, from Venice, which they call a mink’s den of mercenaries and greed, nor from Rome, which they say is a nest of parasites and whores. They’re from a city called Urbino, where they say the granaries are always full and the oil presses overflow and the streets gleam with virtue. Inside the walls of Urbino, they say, even the poorest child, girl or boy, studies numbers and literature, and there is no season of killing malaria as there is in Rome nor a season of chilling fog, like in this city. The smallest of them shows her a collection of eight snuffboxes, on the lids of which are painted miniatures: a great domed church; a fountain in a town square; Justice holding her scales; Courage holding a marble column; Moderation diluting wine with water.