Then the captain walked him out to the pens, a fair distance, and pulled a riding beast from the reserve pens, a creature of a quality Kais Tain rarely saw.

That, he prized, and found that he and the captain had reached an accommodation of practical cooperation. Under other circumstances they would have been aiming weapons at one another. But now the captain seemed to understand he was not there to steal away goods, but to carry out the Ila’s wishes, economically, and asking no great show about it.

In that understanding they became almost amiable, and the captain chided sergeants who hid back the better harness. They laid out the best. The captain’s name, he learned, was Memnanan. He had spent all his life in the Ila’s service as he had spent his in Tain’s.

They walked companionably through areas of the Beykaskh that Marak knew his father would spend a hundred men’s lives to see. He looked up against the night sky at the high defenses, the strong walls and observed a series of latchless gates that sighed with steam.

They had never even come close to piercing these defenses. Only their raids on caravans had gained notice, and that, likely, for its inconvenience, unless they should have threatened the flow of goods for a full year.

The storerooms they visited and those they passed were immense. All the wealth in the world was here. They passed the kitchens. The vermin of the city ignored morsels of bread cast in a drainway. It lay and rotted. He found that as much a wonder as the steam-driven doors.

“We have sent for a caravan master,” Memnanan said. “We count forty-one who will make the whole journey, including yourself. Getting them outfitted will take hours, at the quickest.”

The captain ordered a midnight supper and shared it with him under an awning near the kitchens, the two of them drinking beer that finally numbed the pain, both getting a small degree drunk, and debating seriously about the merits of the western forges and the balance of their blades. In pride of opinion, they each cast at a target, the back of a strong-room door.

They were within a finger of each other and the center of the target. Another beer and they might have sworn themselves brothers. And in that thought, Marak recoiled from the notion, and sobered, as the captain must surely do.

A sergeant reported that the caravan master had come into the outer courtyard. This arrival turned out to be a one-eyed man with his three sons, who together owned fifty beasts, six slaves, and five tents, with two freedmen as assistants. This caravan master had served the Ila’s particular needs for ten years, so he said, and took her pay and feared her as he feared the summer wind.