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 . . .”

“Except that there is an alternate solution,” Bin Maymum said. He shrugged again. “Perhaps the gates do not open for three years. Or one hundred and nineteen.”

Gabriel felt as if he’d taken a heavy blow to the head. His knees were weak, and there was a ringing in his ears.

“Sweet saviour,” he said. “Jesu Christe.”

Blanche looked at him.

He was biting his lip.

“What if the gates don’t open?” Michael said.

“Gavin is left to fight Ash alone,” Gabriel said.

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

The Adnacrags—Aneas Muriens

Aneas was fussing with the stump of his ear. He was vain; and it hurt more than any wound he’d ever taken, including the three broken ribs that ached like the cold grasp of death every time he took a deep breath or laughed or coughed, and the hole in his head that he couldn’t describe even to himself. He was standing in a tiny cabin in the stern that had been cleared for him; perhaps the first mate’s cabin. It was dark, lit by a scuttle to the brilliant sun outside, and he had borrowed a small mirror of Venikan silver from the captain, who seemed to be a very wealthy man.

There was a knock at the flimsy partition, and Aneas turned, ducking his head, and tapped his wounded ear hole against the overhead deck beam, and cursed.

The knock came again, more insistent.

Aneas opened the door. Gas-a-ho nodded. “May I come in?” he asked and pushed past.

Aneas frowned, at least in part because he was naked. But he wasn’t thinking well.