“That would be most inappropriate,” he said, and curse it, he was right. If I was to be the younger partner on the road—apprentice, servant, son, what have you—then the four-legged member of our troupe would have to be my responsibility. As well as the cooking pot. Cursing under my breath, I thrust my spare garments into the cloth bag and tied my turban once again. This time it felt more secure, which improved my temper somewhat. It was never easy, partnering a man with as much experience as Holmes had—I truly detest the sensation of incompetence.

We spent the night hours practising with the equipment Holmes had conjured out of the bazaar. A set of linking rings, larger relatives of the linked silver bracelets he had bought in Aden, appeared welded in place, awaiting only the magician’s touch before the metal miraculously gave way and allowed the rings to part. A long knife that collapsed into itself at the press of a button; a light frame with a pneumatic pump to lift me in levitation; a small laboratory of lethal chemicals whose reactions would give clouds or sparks or other useful effects. And, when we were ready for it, torches wrapped for flaming, for the ever-impressive juggling of fire.

In the hour before dawn, when only the chowkidars were awake at their posts, we shouldered our cloth bags and in silence left the spice-seller’s shop. The air was still fresh, without the dust raised by a quarter of a million tramping feet, the stars still dimly visible before fifty thousand cook-fires threw their pall over the heavens. Holmes made his way as one who was intimate with the place, ducking past godowns and crossing over deserted boulevards, until the smell of livestock rose up around us and we entered a sort of livestock market, horses in one area, large pale bullocks in the other. Magnificently oblivious of the dung heaps, Holmes strode forward to a shed with a tight-shut door. He banged the side of his fist against the shed’s side, but answer came there none. He drew back his hand to hammer again, when a voice piped up from behind us, speaking Hindi.

“If you are wanting the horse-seller Ram Bachadur, he has gone away to see his mother.”

It was a child, a small person of perhaps nine or ten in Hindu dress, perched atop the low stable wall eating peanuts. Even in the half-light of early dawn it was clear that there was something curious about him, some slightly Mongolian angle to his features, so that one expected him to be slow, his natural development retarded by nature. It took but one brief exchange to begin to question the assumption.

“Do you know where he has gone?” Holmes asked, his arm still raised.