“I am sorry to say I have never even heard of Gilan,” Gabriel said, wishing they would get on with it. He cast a withering look at his wife, who returned an arched eyebrow. “But I do have a timetable,” he said with a hand gesture that any company officer would have known for “hurry this up.”

“Yes,” al-Shirazi said. “I heard in Venike, and again from Dama Sukeh, that you think the gates open in . . . well, now . . . ten days.”

Gabriel nodded. Suddenly he could not breathe.

“My lord,” the Yahadut said. “I have come from Iberia, and my people, as a rule, do not meddle in the affairs of princes. And Dame Julia was a woman of extraordinary genius, the very queen of all our philosophy. But you should have asked someone to repeat her observations with modern instruments. Our ability to see into the Aeternium, the aethereal of the magisters, is incomparably better than it was two hundred years ago. For example . . .”

Gabriel was on his feet. “Just tell me,” he said.

The two magisters looked at each other. “We’re not sure,” al-Shirazi said. “But it’s more like a range of probabilities than a finite reality, which, in a way, is an allegory of the whole of—”

Gabriel slapped his open hand on the table. “Gentlemen,” he said firmly.

The Yahadut shrugged like a chef who will not be hurried. “There are aspects of this question not easily adaptable to a military schedule,” he said. “What is being? How do I make a timetable from an astronomical metaphor?”

Gabriel was too tightly wound. He went into his palace and counted to fifty. He looked at the magnificent tiled wall fountain he’d lifted, metaphorically, from Al Rashidi’s dying mind, and he caressed it with his unembodied hand. He needed to unpack it; it hung in blackness in a space behind Harmodius’s mirror, and despite the brilliant colours of the tiles, it was as if it was black and white in a universe of colour, because he had not yet accepted it.

Back in the real, Gabriel managed a sigh. “Gentlemen, I have a busy day. If my schedule is wrong, correct me. But get on with it.”

Bin Maymum shrugged again. “We do not wish to be wrong,” he said. He shuffled his feet. “Honestly, I hoped that by the time I found you, one of your own magisters would have seen it . . .”

“Unless we’re wrong,” al-Shirazi said. “But if we are wrong, we have made the same errors together, thousands of leagues apart.”

“Gentlemen!” spat Blanche. She had one of Gabriel’s hands in hers.

“Eight days,” the Yahadut said.

“The twenty-sixth of September,” the Gilan astrologer said. “At five seventeen in the morning, local time, in Arles, according to your cathedral clock, which is a little slow.” He looked at the Yahadut. “Except . . .”