‘Prince Ilsevir has fallen grievously ill.’ Girim withdrew a letter from the breast of his robe and Acir saw the royal seal attached to it. ‘He is asking to see me. I am recalled to Bel’Esstar, Acir!’ Girim took him by the shoulders, gripping him hard. ‘This is the moment we have long dreamed of. We have taken back the Poet-Prophet’s birthplace and now we shall restore His shrine. We will make His city a fit place for His second coming.’

Acir, left in command of the desert garrison, had often imagined by the watchfires in the dead of the empty desert night, the scenes of rejoicing in Bel’Esstar that greeted the Prince’s restoration to health. Acir had built a gilded picture in his mind from Girim’s letters of a city reborn to faith, a city triumphant. Girim had described how warmly the citizens had welcomed the Guerriors; the streets had been strewn with flowers. Soldiers had begged to leave the Palace Guard to enlist as members of the Commanderie.

‘We shall defend our own,’ Girim wrote, ‘from the infidel and from the unbeliever. Bel’Esstar is a fortress of faith and there we shall build our Stronghold.’

Acir looked around him. Dust blew across the empty street. In the distance he could hear the faint, frenetic chip of metal on stone from the site of the Fortress of Faith.

The gilded city of his desert dreams did not exist, maybe had never existed, he had conjured it from Girim’s letters.

There was no sense of joy – only an all-pervading fear.

The Sanctuary for the Correction and Improvement of Unbelievers had been established in the old Debtors’ Prison on scrubby waste ground to the north of the city.

As Acir approached, he noted the high fences, the watchtowers, the locked gates. He wished he did not have the feeling that Girim had assigned him here as punishment; that he too would have to be forcibly ‘corrected’ from his deviant behaviour. And this dull feeling of dread only increased as he approached the sentries at the gate and saw the look of suspicion in their eyes as his papers were demanded.

‘Please wait in the gatehouse, Captain. I will inform the Governor you have arrived.’

Captain nel Macy, Governor of the Sanctuary, came striding briskly across the courtyard to greet him. He walked with the stiff strut of a seasoned soldier who has survived many campaigns.

‘Captain Korentan! Welcome! Glad to have you with us. Let me show you what we’ve been doing here.’

Beyond nel Macy’s broad shoulders, Acir could see a group of Sanctuarees being herded across the yard; to Acir they looked like convicts, men and women dressed alike in coarse grey tunics and loose trousers.

‘Where are they going?’ he asked.

‘To work on the Fortress. Have you seen it? Isn’t it magnificent?’

‘But I understood the purpose of the Sanctuary was essentially spiritual. Not a labour camp.’