‘Have these,’ he said, holding out the bag. ‘Life is not easy for a single woman without means.’

‘You make a very unconvincing merchant.’ She smiled, but took the proffered gift.

‘May your gods hold their hands over you.’

‘And yours. Even if you succeed, you know, you will not be able to return this way. The whole countryside will be raised against you.’ She looked away into the flame of the lamp. ‘I am a Persian, a loyal subject of the King of Kings.’

‘You will not betray us?’

‘The father of the one you go to rescue is a traitor. But the prisoner is just a child. I would not see the innocent punished.’ She looked back at Valens. ‘No, I will not betray you. But another might. Zabda was convinced the expedition was cursed, or that you rode with a traitor.’

‘Why?’

‘The deaths of Severus and Quintus.’

‘Quintus’s fall was an accident in the storm.’

‘There were no witnesses. Zabda said he was a fine horseman.’ Lucia shook her head. ‘First you lost your commander, then your navigator.’

‘And then no matter what we did, we could not shake the Arabs from our trail.’ That another had shared his suspicions unsettled Valens. ‘Did Zabda know who it was?’

‘If he did, he did not tell me.’

Chapter 25

CHAPTER 25

The Elburz Mountains

THEY WERE SURE NO ONE had seen them leave the road. Camped by the river, they had waited until there was a brief opportunity when there was not a soul in sight, no traveller on the road or labourer in the fields. To cover their tracks, for the first miles, they had ridden up the riverbed. By the time the story got about of a caravan that had left Zadrakarta but never reached the first of the Walls of Alexander, they should be long gone. Perhaps they would enter into local mythology. Village mothers would scare their children with stories of spectral horsemen still riding the plains on dark nights like these, when the moon was hidden.

Valens rode now with Narses and Decimus at the front of the column. Narses knew these mountains. He had hunted across them when serving with the Satrap of Hyrkania. For these final approaches, the Persian would be the eyes of the expedition. Back at Zadrakarta, Valens had formally appointed Decimus second in command. The risks they had run so far would be as nothing compared with those to be faced at the Castle of Silence. If Valens himself was killed or captured, the rest would need undisputed leadership to have any hope of getting out alive.