Chapter 25 · Chapter 25

He did not waste a breath in the courtyard. The latch of the outer gate was barely settled before his steps sounded on the stone stairs, descending into the cool dampness of the lower cellar where I waited. I kept my palm cupped around the small clay lamp, pressing the coarse wool of my mantle against the wick so no streak of flame could rise through the street-level grate above us.

"They have turned toward the lower cistern," Saad said quietly, his voice dry and level in the subterranean shadows. "We have until the bells of the third watch before the patrol returns."

Beside me lay the open hollow beneath the flagstones. Resting inside it was the final chest of seasoned cypress, packed to the brim with my grandfather Abu Jaafar’s treatises on anatomy, the pharmacopeia of our ancestors, and the hand-copied folios of Granada that the inspectors had sworn to feed to the pyres of the Bibarrambla.