“Bin Maymum and I are astrologers,” he said. “We watch the stars. And both of us have read our Dame Julia.” He cast his cantrip, and a screen materialized, a glowing, rich black like his robe, and on it hung the stars, like crystals strewn on cloth. “My lord, when I heard that you were in the Antica Terra, I wanted to meet you; but in Venike I understood that you had a schedule; a timetable.” The man touched his nose frequently, an odd tic, and used an eating knife to point at his image of the heavens.

“You are not from Ifriquy’a,” Gabriel said, leaning forward.

“No, my lord. I am a gentleman of Gilan; perhaps the farthest eastern kingdom held by humans. We are the border with the Wild, just as we hear you are in Ilba.”

“Alba,” Gabriel said automatically, and then he thought of Blanche. How we love to correct each other, we humans, he thought.

“My king, Rostan Dabbaj, is a great knight and a great warrior.” The easterner’s hair and his pale good looks were explained; he didn’t look like an Ifriquy’an.

The Yahadut scholar frowned. “Surely not the easternmost,” he said. “Surely the easternmost is Qu’in.”

Al-Shirazi frowned at being interrupted. “It is centuries since we have heard anything from Qu’in,” he said.

“Perhaps my people have better communications than yours,” Bin Maymum said.

“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?”