The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“Come on, old friend.” He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. “Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.”

I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. “I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?”

“Do you even remember what happened to you last night?” Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.

“Something about a camel?” I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. “Jorg!” I remembered. “Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!”

I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still—“Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?”

“It was.” Omar signed for Allah’s protection. “He has met with my father and they are now friends.”

I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. “Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?” I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba—she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages—but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future . . . my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. “How far will it take him, I wonder . . .”

“What do you make of him?” Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man—a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. “Can he match his ambition?”

“What?” I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. “Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.”

FIVE

Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-onwhite of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.

“A gift, my friend!” Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.

“Oh you bastard.”

“You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!”

I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them would be trekking the dunes with just me and twelve salt merchants to keep order.

“And give the Red Queen my father’s regards,” Omar said. “And my mother’s.”

Omar’s mother I liked. The second eldest of the caliph’s six wives, a tall Nuban woman from the interior, dark as ebony and mouth-wateringly attractive. Funny too. I guessed Omar’s sense of humour came from his father. Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.

I turned to Yusuf. “So, master Yusuf, perhaps you have a prediction for me, something I can use.” Tradition has it that nobody of consequence leaves Hamada without some numerology to guide their way. Most come from failed students who ply their trade in whatever way they can, be it as accountants, bookmakers, or mystics selling predictions on the street. A prince, however, might hope for an audit of his possibilities and probabilities to be issued by the Mathema itself. And, since I knew Yusuf from my days in Umbertide, there seemed no harm in trying to coax one from a master.