Jannes and Mambres have been loaned out, and loaned out again, and while the renown is pleasant, the travel is wearying. They’ve just arrived in Ur Kasdim after weeks of eating nothing but dust and drinking nothing but leathery water, and so they’re sniping at each other: Jannes is flat upon his back with nausea after so long swaying in the saddle, and Mambres is rubbing rosewater over the abraded skin of his thighs. “Say what you will,” he says, “these outlying kingdoms are hospitable enough.”

Jannes groans, opens one dyspeptic eye. “Don’t get comfortable here, brother of my heart. The signs are inauspicious.”

Mambres blinks. “I have seen nothing of the sort in the charts. Let me see your figures.”

“It’s not a matter of figures.” Jannes waves him off, limp as a newborn lamb. “Did you not mark the gimlet eye of the vizier when first we came? The poison he plans for the king?”

“Oh, that. You know as well as I—” a grunt, as he stands up again and lets his skirts settle about his feet. “—that all is treachery, ever a treacherous king, a treacherous vizier, in all these border kingdoms. What is an execution, an assassination, to the wheel of the heavens?”

Jannes groans again, and covers his face with a cushion.