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under his turban.
    “He cannot stand it.”
    “It causes pain?”
    “He’s never been the same. The poisoning was years ago now, something placed in the food, a traitor we never found. His Majesty suffered for seven days. The doctors and the holy men thought he would die. His breathing was very fast, his skin darkened to the color of rubies. He could eat nothing. It was only through the will of God that he survived.”
    “You saw him?”
    “I was permitted to visit once a day, to know his wishes while he was in the throes of his great suffering. It was most miraculous, to see him alive after the seventh, and worst, night. All could see that he was heavily afflicted, his face so much thinner, but shining with God’s favor, a vision of beauty in its fragility.”
    “Beauty?”
    “A man reborn, his eyes brighter, his skin glowing with life.”
    Jacob held the Vizier’s gaze. “What kind of a poison does that?”
    The fat man frowned, his lips pursed to a pudgy bud.
    “You handle all of His Majesty’s affairs?” Jacob asked.
    “I have the honor of ensuring that his wishes are carried out.”
    “Was it his wish that I be chained in a cell, or yours?”
    The Vizier’s eyes narrowed to slits, his chest heaving under an iridescent vest and heavy strands of pearls. “You are a dangerous criminal. It was done with His Majesty’s safety in mind.”
    “Because God only knows what a dangerous criminal would do inside the Palace, if allowed to roam free.”
    “It is my duty to protect the Sultan and his property.”
    Jacob leaned closer, allowing a half smile to cross his lips. “Does that mean the cell door would have remained locked the whole night through, or just till a quarter past midnight?”
    The Grand Vizier scowled, casting his gaze quickly across the desert.
    “You truly are inexplicable.”
    Jacob nodded, supposing that was true.
    “After all,” the fat man added, his tone edged with menace. “What kind of disinherited brigand, what kind of thief, would ignore an open door in the midnight hour, in a palace full of priceless treasures?”
    Jacob watched him for a moment, aware that he’d just been threatened by a man who knew far more about Robert Letoures than he should have.
    “A careful one,” he replied.

    Nadira lifted her gaze, catching sight of the sacred cliff statues of Abu Quardan as they appeared from the rose colored twilight, gods and goddesses of the ancient world standing over sixty meters tall, their arms crossed over their chests as immortal pillars of the sky. They were the guardians of the Red Desert, a place of temples, shrines and lost religions, the last sanctuary for true paganism in Ruman.
    The pilgrims who flocked to these holy sites were the sole preservers of the old faith, their women dressed in beautiful tribal clothing, permitted to openly laugh and dance in worship, and talk freely among men. They were her people, people of the endless desert, whose lives were so harsh that they grasped at every opportunity for laughter, found meaning in every change of the breeze, and believed that the sun and moon were lovers forever separated by astral tides of fate.
    She set her gaze ahead and forced a neutral expression, resisting the urge to look back and find the thief in her retinue, the short distance between them seeming as vast as any field of stars. She had done all she could to forget, painted her lips with clay, paled them, hidden them, but the memory of his warmth refused to disappear. No one kissed a slave the way he had kissed her, with the protective caress of his hand on her cheek, his body held strong, patient…waiting.
    And now she’d turned it over in her mind for too long, no longer frightened by it, sometimes lost in the yearning for another taste of it. Was he past the experience already, thinking of his coming reward as he rode under the Sultan’s golden canopy, or was there some small thought spared for the woman he’d held and so gently let go?
    He has to