“Prince Jalan Kendeth to see Davario Romano Evenaline.” I waved the papers at the small and pinch-faced man behind the counter, affecting that strain of boredom that my brother Darin uses so well on officials.
“Take a seat, please.” The man nodded to a bank of chairs against the far wall and scribbled something in his ledger.
I held my ground, though tempted to lean over the counter and slam the fellow’s head into it.
A long moment passed and the man looked up again, mildly surprised to see me still there.
“Yes?”
“Prince Jalan Kendeth to see Davario Romano Evenaline,” I repeated.
“Take a seat please, your highness.”
It looked to be the best I’d get out of him without the application of a hammer and so I stalked off to view the street from one of the tall windows. Halfway across the foyer I spotted a familiar face and veered away. Some faces are hard to forget—this face, tattooed as thickly as any clerk’s ledger with heathen script, was impossible to forget. I’d seen it last in Ancrath, in a peculiarly lucid dream, urging me to have Snorri killed. I found myself facing a row of chairs along the wall beside the counter and took a place beside a dark fellow in light robes. I kept my head down, hoping Sageous hadn’t seen me, my eyes on his feet as he continued across the marble floor. I didn’t draw another breath before the dream-witch exited into the street.
“He saw you.”
I turned to look at the man beside me, a fellow of modest build in the kind of loose, flowing robe that keeps a body cool in places where the heat is even less tolerable than in Umbertide. I gave him a nod. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, I always say, and we had both suffered at the hands of the jumped-up desk clerk. Perhaps we might also share an enemy in Sageous.
“He was depositing gold,” the man said. “Maybe a fee from Kelem. He has spent time in the Crptipa Hills. It makes a body wonder what two such men might work at together.”
“Do you know Sageous?” I tensed, wondering if I were in danger.
“I know of him. We’ve not met, but I doubt there are two such men wandering the world.”
“Ah.” I slumped back in my chair. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Knowing everyone’s business was everyone’s business in Umbertide.
“I know you.” The man watched me with dark eyes. He had the mocha tones of North Afrique, hair black, tight-curled, and tamed with ivory combs that bound it close to his skull.
“Unlikely.” I raised a brow. “But possible. Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March.” Not knowing the man’s station I omitted any promise of being at his service.
“Yusuf Malendra.” He smiled, revealing jet-black teeth.
“Ah. From the Mathema!” All the mathmagicians of Liba blackened their teeth with some kind of wax. I’d always felt it a peculiarly superstitious practice for a sect otherwise so bound with logic.
“You’ve been to our tower in Hamada, Prince Jalan?”
“Uh. Yes. I spent my eighteenth year studying there. Can’t say I learned much. Numbers and I agree only to a certain point.”
“That will be where I know you from then.” He nodded. “Many things escape me, but faces tend to stay.”
“You’re a teacher there?” He didn’t look old enough to be a teacher, thirty maybe.
“I have a number of roles, my prince. Today I am an accountant, come to audit some of the caliph’s financial affairs in Umbertide. Next week perhaps I’ll find myself wearing a different hat.”
A metallic whir turned our heads from the conversation. A sound halfway between that of a hand rooting in the cutlery drawer and that of a dozen angry flies. A shadow loomed across us, and looking up I saw the towering architecture of what could only be one of the banking clans’ famous clockwork soldiers.
“Remarkable,” I said. Mostly because it was. A man built of cogs and wheels, his motion born of meshing gears and interlocking steel teeth, one thing turning the next turning the next until an arm moved and fingers flexed.
“They are impressive.” Yusuf nodded. “Not Builder-work though. Did you know that? The Mechanists made them over a century after the Day of a Thousand Suns. A marriage of clockwork that descends to scales smaller than your eye can perceive. It wouldn’t have worked before the Builders turned their Wheel of course, but one wheel turns another as they say, and many things become possible.”