Fifteen billion people held their breath.

"In you go then." General Ch'ao Kai made his decision sound like a command. "Don't let the food go cold."

The servitor glanced wryly at the congealing filo parcels but kept silent and just nodded to the ornately armoured General as the door opened and he stepped into the dirt and chaos that was Zaq's room.

"Here," he said. "I've brought you some--"

What he brought went unannounced because Zaq catapulted himself naked from a sunken bath, scooped his long knife off the floor and spun round to face his visitor, just catching a glimpse of General Ch'ao Kai's shocked face before the door closed itself and he was alone with the intruder.

"Wait," the servitor said, backing away.

Thunder shook the sky outside and lightning lit the windows. And as Zaq slashed with his blade, a howling wind ripped blossoms from cherry trees and toppled the spire of a distant pagoda.

"Wait!"

The voice belonged to the servitor and it was in Zaq's head, echoing around the darkness that the Chuang Tzu contained within him. This shouldn't have been possible because no one was allowed in Zaq's head except the Library, and he resented even that.

"Get out," he screamed, as fire split an oak outside, cleaving five hundred years of careful nurture. "Go now."

"Zaq," said the man.

"You mustn't call me that." Zaq's voice had risen to a howl to make itself heard over the roaring wind outside and tears blinded him, the blade in his hand feeling wrong since he'd smashed the handle six years before.

Opening his mouth to shout for General Ch'ao Kai, Zaq shut it again. He'd banned the General from entering this room. Come to that, he'd banned everyone. Here was where he was meant to be safe.

"Out," he demanded, and blinked as a rat jumped from the stranger's sleeve.

Instead of backing towards the door as Zaq expected him to do, the servitor casually tipped the tray sideways, spilling dim sum, cup and squat iron teapot onto the tiles. This done, he gripped the now-empty tray by one corner and swung the thing hard towards Zaq's wrist.

If the blow had hit flesh, both bones in Zaq's forearm would have broken because the Chuang Tzu had no codes that added strength to his simple, calcium-based skeleton; in fact, he had no physical enhancements at all.

Such things were rendered unnecessary.

As the edge of the heavy tray neared Zaq's wrist, smoke streamed up his spine, across his shoulder and down his arm, setting hard as steel and dark as jet. So unobtrusive was the Emperor's symbiont that the armour was in place before Zaq even realized he was wearing it.

Ebony split and mutton-fat jade hit the floor, the base of the tray mixing with earlier fragments from the knife handle. Without hesitation, Zaq slashed with his blade, his armour adding strength to the blow. Razor-edged steel met unprotected flesh and sliced deep, silencing the servitor's scream with the scrape of a blade across larynx.

Zaq's coat splattered red and then the servitor pitched forward, hitting the floor on his knees. It was, Zaq had to admit, all very convincing. The headless body at his feet gasped at him like a dying carp, shat itself and shuddered its way into oblivion. The blood on Zaq's cloak was suitably warm and when Zaq tasted it he got salt and a sweetness that reminded him of something just beyond the edge of memory.

"Librarian."

"Highness."

Zaq sighed. Sulking might not be quite the way to describe how the Librarian behaved after he'd been out of contact with it for more than a day but to Zaq it seemed to come close. In this he was wrong. The speed at which the Library lived was quantum, simultaneously past and present. What Zaq saw as a retreat into formality was merely a side effect of temporal distance.

On one level, the absence of a few weeks was sufficient for the Library to have had several billion thoughts, many of them relevant. On another, a few weeks was less than a single thought in the mind of a creation so old it could remember time changing direction at least twice.

"Send cleaners," said Zaq, his voice bored. "I need someone to clear up this mess."

"Tell the General."

"No."

A few years back, Zaq had worked out that the Librarian always knew what he'd decided to do before he did. And when he'd challenged the Library on this, it had admitted this was true, while insisting there was nothing sinister in the fact. Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent.

The Library had sounded almost amused while it explained this; as if Zaq was somehow missing the point.

"You summon help," Zaq said, looking round at the chaos of his room. "After all, everything's you really."

"Me?"

"All of this." Zaq gestured at the body at his feet, then at servitors sweeping away floods in the courtyard below.

"That wasn't me," the Library said. "You want to know why he was here?"

"Does it matter?" Zaq asked.

"So you don't want to know who he was?"

"He was you," Zaq said. "Like everyone else in this place. You know that as well as I do."

"No," the voice in his head said, sounding almost sad. "You're wrong. That was you, more or less..."

The house at the end of Moz's alley remained empty. No one had lived in it since the dog woman died and her companion went home to England. So now it was to be sold, but before this could happen the place needed repairing, otherwise it couldn't be sold to a nasrani and no one but a foreigner would be willing to pay the price the dog woman's family in England had decided it was worth.

"Ask Hassan," Malika insisted. Caid Hammou decided who got building work in the Mellah, and Moz needed money because his mother needed medicine. He knew this because Malika had told him so.

"Hassan won't--"

"Ask him," she insisted, and then she smiled as the jellaba-clad boy shuffled his feet in front of her. "If you don't," she said, "I'll ask him for you."

Smashing down an internal wall and carrying away the rubble was Moz's first real job. He was thirteen, ould Kasim had agreed his hand could be untied and he got the work because Hassan found it funny that Moz was asking for his help.

"You want what?"

In the background Idries smirked.

"Dar el Beida," said Moz. "I heard they need someone to help rebuild the dog woman's house."

"And you understand building?"

"I can learn."

It wasn't until later that he discovered that Hassan was taking not just ten percent in commission from what little Moz earned. The older boy had also been given a handful of dirham by his uncle, who hired the foreman who actually employed Moz. He had to give another ten per cent to the foreman for the hire of a sledgehammer.

Moz laboured for the whole of that autumn, far harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And at the end of each day his body ached and clear liquid bled from the blisters on his hands and fingers, but Moz kept working and did as he was told, pissing into a bucket to help temper concrete for the maallan and always remembering to let the urine run over his fingers first, so that their blisters would heal and he could move the rubble faster...

It made no difference in the end.

The ring was gold and had an inscription around the inside, "all my love always." It took Moz most of that winter to find someone who read Turkish and in the end it was only bloody-mindedness that made him try the cigar seller in Gueliz.

There was a second ring; this was fatter but had the same words around the inside and Moz found it inside an envelope sealed and hidden at the back of a drawer stuffed with bras his mother had long since become too thin to wear and knickers washed to a faded and ghostly greyness.