‘They are an order,’ Brother Peter replied. ‘More like a Guild. They take talented youths very young, they teach them all the arts of warfare, all the arts of spying, all the dark arts of deception and weaponry. And then you can hire them: you give them a target and pay them, and they send one Assassin after another until they have fulfilled their mission and their victim is dead.’

‘Why did he not kill you then?’ Ishraq asked bluntly.

‘They did this to Saladin,’ Brother Peter explained. ‘They put a target on his heart while he slept, fully guarded in his tent, to warn him that if he went on he was a dead man.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Retreated,’ Brother Peter said shortly.

‘They are infidels; but they threatened Saladin?’ Luca asked, puzzled. ‘They threatened their own kind?’

‘They honour their order before anything,’ Milord replied. ‘They will accept any target, of any faith, of any nation. They serve themselves, not religion or race.’

‘But why would this galley slaver want to kill you?’ Isolde asked, puzzled.

He spoke to her directly for the first time. ‘He’s no galley slaver,’ he said. ‘He is one of the greatest men of the Ottoman Empire, he is commander of all the armies, he is head of the janissary soldiers, the elite fighting force. He’s the right-hand man of the Sultan Mehmet, who has just triumphed at Constantinople; they are sworn to each other for life. He stands for everything that I fight against – the victory of the Ottoman Empire over Christianity, the invasion of the Arabs across Europe, the rise of terror, the end of the world. That was the man you had here, and you let him go. Now he warns me that I will not be as lucky if I fall into his hands. He taunts me. This is a game to him. A game to the death. He will know I have commanded you to kill him. This is his way of telling me that he has ordered my death too.’

There was a horrified silence.

‘What will you do, Milord?’ Luca asked quietly.

The man shrugged, recovering himself. ‘I’ll go to Prime,’ he said. ‘Breakfast. Talk with you and Brother Peter, and go on my way. Continue my struggle. Fight for Christ.’

‘Will you defend yourself?’

‘If I can, for as long as I can. But this tells me that I will die. I won’t stop my work. I have sworn an oath to lead the Order of Darkness to guard against fear itself, and I will never give up.’

Luca hesitated. ‘Should we not come with you? Should we not defend you against this threat? You should have someone with you all the time.’