With yet another final effort, Jakob forced his burning, clicking, trembling legs up the last few steps and into the glare at the top of the Pharos of Troy.

The dearest wish of his hammering heart was to flop down and roll screaming like a man on fire. From the way the remains of his knees felt, it would’ve been no surprise to see them wreathed in flames. Instead, he clenched his ever-clenched jaw, allowed himself only a steadying hand on the archway, and gave vent to something between a groan and a growl. As he had ten thousand times before, he made of his pain a spur to push him on. He raised his head and squinted through one eye towards the dazzling light of Saint Natalia’s Flame.

It rose from a great bronze dish in the centre of the gallery and was sucked up through a flue above, a scriptural pillar of fire, constantly tended by a silent nun and never allowed to go out. The dome was set inside with a mosaic of shining mirror chips, held up by an arcade of stone arches, so that Saint Natalia’s blessed light was reflected back redoubled, bringing comfort to everyone on land or sea for miles around.

Those who dared the steps to this highest point in Troy were greeted, once their eyes adjusted to the glare, by the kind of views an angel might have from heaven. To the west, the sea and sky, struck red by the sinking sun. To the east, the Grand Aqueduct curving towards the darkened mountains. To the north, the ragged coast and the black slit of the Hellespont through the dark country, pinpricks of light travelling the roads towards the city.

Duke Michael, who had far fewer serious leg wounds to recover from, stood a few strides off, fists resting on a parapet chiselled with the names of centuries of visitors, gazing off towards the south. Towards the Holy Land. Where the elves had come from, and at a terrible cost been turned back.

From whence they would come again.

‘God damn them,’ whispered Jakob.

‘The elves?’ Duke Michael glanced over, Saint Natalia’s Flame casting searing brightness down one side of his face while it sank the other into darkness.

‘The steps,’ grunted Jakob, grinding a sore knuckle into his throbbing hip. ‘The elves have the good grace only to visit once a century. The steps never give me a moment’s peace.’

‘If you dislike steps …’ And Duke Michael grinned out across the darkened country. ‘I fear you came to the wrong city.’

‘I belong to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency.’ Jakob forced himself to let go of the archway, forced his crooked back to straighten, his wheezing lungs to settle, his wobbling legs to take one step more, one step more. Past the Sister of the Flame in her nun’s cowl, so still and silent on her stool she might’ve been a stuffed habit. Across that mixture of shrine, guardhouse, and eagle’s eyrie. ‘We go where we’re sent.’

Duke Michael considered him like a cautious buyer working out the proper price for a carpet. ‘But you are not the same as the rest of the congregation. You were not tried by the Celestial Court.’

‘Perhaps I should’ve been.’

‘You were not condemned to service.’

‘Perhaps I should’ve been.’

‘You joined of your own free will. You could leave right now.’

‘If I could make it back down the steps,’ muttered Jakob, and he set his hands on the parapet, on the carved names of those who had stood here before him, faded over years, decades, centuries.

‘I have no doubt you could achieve anything you set your mind to,’ said Duke Michael. ‘A warrior of your long experience deserves a place of honour. You could reclaim your destiny.’ And as he said the word he clenched his fist and ground it into the carvings, eyes shining.

‘I believed in destiny, once.’ Jakob made a fist of his own, all scar and twisted knuckles. ‘That I was bound for great things. An instrument of God’s purpose! That every obstacle must be swept aside, and any method used to do it. There were trials along the way. Tests of faith. Tests of commitment. I told myself I couldn’t waver. What kind of great purpose, after all, is easily realised? So I sacrificed everything and everyone. I covered myself in glory and steeped myself in blood. And there, at the summit of a hill of corpses, I reached my destiny, and passed through it to the other side …’ He slowly opened his aching fingers, and let his hand fall. ‘Where there was nothing. And I saw I’d never followed God’s plan, only the lies I told myself to justify my greed and my ambition.’

Duke Michael looked sideways at him. ‘So you have made of yourself an arrow shot from another’s bow. You have trusted them to aim well and washed your hands of the right or wrong of it. Some might call that cowardice.’

Jakob would’ve snorted, but it felt like too much effort, so he settled for a weary grunt. ‘Believe me, I am long past caring what some might call it.’ Saint Natalia’s Flame was hot behind him, and he was grateful for the evening breeze on his face. ‘I’ve seen it all, Your Grace, then seen it all repeated. One man’s cowardice is another’s prudence. One man’s treachery another’s courage. One man’s destiny another’s disaster.’

‘So everything is a matter of where you stand?’

‘And when you reach my age, you’ve stood everywhere. To be the arrow takes all the faith I have left. To aim the arrow … I’ll leave that to those who still believe.’

‘Talking of which …’ Duke Michael turned grinning towards the stairway as Brother Diaz came labouring from it, breathing even harder than Jakob had.

‘Saviour, what a climb,’ gasped the monk, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. His eyes went wide as he took in the view beyond the archway, then wider yet as he leaned out gingerly to peer over the parapet, a murmuration of little birds billowing and twisting in the evening far above the city, and yet far below them. ‘And, Saviour, what a fall.’ He turned to the brazier, the flames surging up through the flue above. ‘So this is Saint Natalia’s Flame?’

‘And they haven’t let it go out since Natalia lit it, centuries ago.’ Duke Michael nodded towards the nun, and the neat stacks of cedarwood beside her. ‘Or if they have, no one’s admitting it.’

‘And the chain?’ asked Brother Diaz, taking a curious step towards the one that hung beside the brazier, each link fashioned to look like a serpent eating its own tail.

‘It drops a powder into the fire and makes it burn blue. A warning to any who see it that the elves are coming.’ Duke Michael leaned close to Brother Diaz. ‘Best not to send up any false alarms. It hasn’t been used in my lifetime.’

The monk took a cautious step back, drawing the sign of the circle over his chest. ‘Let us hope it never is again.’

‘Hope is a precious resource,’ murmured Jakob. ‘We shouldn’t waste it against the inevitable.’

The Sister of the Flame grimly nodded her agreement, and silently took up more wood, and tossed it into the basin, the flames roaring brighter.

‘To business, then,’ said Jakob. The sooner he got to lie down the happier he’d be. ‘Princess Alexia should be crowned as soon as possible.’

‘I’ve dreamed of it for half my life,’ said Duke Michael, ‘and I am far from her only supporter. The people yearn for old glories restored and new hopes for the future, and she offers the promise of both. I still have friends here, was able to take back my old position as Commander of the Palace Guard. I’ve seen them reaffirm their oaths of service.’

Jakob rubbed at his jaw. ‘An oath can be a useful thing. You’re sure the remnants of Eudoxia’s coven have been scattered?’

‘To the winds. Resistance to Princess Alexia’s rightful claim will be of a more mundane type.’

‘Mundane enemies can kill you just as dead,’ said Jakob. ‘The Church of the East?’

Duke Michael sighed. ‘Always hard work. The virtues of humility and generosity are not much in evidence among the wearers of the wheel.’

‘In my experience, the wearers of the circle are no better.’

‘The priesthood fear the Pope’s influence. That they might fall under the control of Zizka and Bock and be stripped of their privileges. But the elves stir, and Patriarch Methodius is not unreasonable. I have been able to convince him that my niece’s claim is legitimate.’

‘Or at any rate can be made to serve his own purposes,’ muttered Jakob, while Brother Diaz shook his head. ‘Where do the nobles stand?’

‘As one of them, I can safely say you could not find a pettier set of backbiters anywhere in Europe.’

‘And with some ruthless competition.’

‘They will extract a high price for their support. They have already presented me with a list of what they call long-standing injustices, by which they mean petty grievances and brazen blackmail.’

‘Might I see them?’ asked Brother Diaz.

‘I beg you to free me of their considerable weight.’ Duke Michael slid out a sheaf of papers which the monk set to leafing through by the light of Saint Natalia’s Flame. ‘But it is Eudoxia’s sons that cause me the greatest concern.’

‘Marcian, Constans, and Sabbas are dead.’ Jakob winced as he touched the still-sore spot on his breastbone where the point of Constans’s sword had emerged.

‘Good news at last.’ The duke closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘You have done Troy a great service.’

‘An unfinished one. There’s still Arcadius.’

‘The cleverest of the four, and the most influential. He is Admiral of the Imperial Fleet. He kept the sailors paid during the years of Eudoxia’s neglect and they love him for it. He could mount a blockade of the city tomorrow and starve us out within weeks. If the merchants didn’t rise up within hours at the interruption to business.’

‘A rule of politics always and everywhere,’ murmured Jakob. ‘Never stop the money. Arcadius is the greatest threat, then.’

‘Doubtless. But I have a plan for him—’

‘The Athenaeum.’ Brother Diaz looked up from the nobles’ demands. ‘Lady Severa spoke of records there?’

‘Centuries of them,’ said Duke Michael. ‘For bureaucracy the Empire of the East concedes no equal.’

‘Might I consult them?’

‘I see no objection, provided you do not stray from the books. Some extremely dangerous …’ Michael seemed to grope for the right word. ‘Leftovers … from Eudoxia’s time remain sealed beneath the place.’

‘I’ve witnessed some horrors, in recent months.’ Brother Diaz cleared his throat. ‘Believe me when I say I have no wish to witness more.’

Duke Michael watched him head for the steps, still poring over his list, and leaned close to Jakob to murmur, ‘The monk always struck me as a curious choice of leader. Is there more to him than meets the eye?’

‘There’s more to everyone than meets the eye,’ said Jakob. ‘Brother Diaz is a man in search of a purpose. Without it, he is a curious choice. If he were to find it … who can say what he might do?’ His body was calming after the climb, pangs softening to familiar aches, the heat of the flame soothing his back as he turned to the view. ‘Looking at this, you can believe anything is possible.’

‘I forget how it must strike someone who has never seen it before.’

‘I have seen it before. I stood at this very spot and witnessed the army of the elves, their fires spread out like stars on the black country.’ Jakob slowly brushed the carved names beneath his fingertips. ‘I think … this one is mine.’ It was hard to tell, the lines were so worn by the long years between then and now. Almost as worn as the man who carved them.

‘I knew it.’ Duke Michael wagged a finger at him. ‘You are the same Jakob of Thorn who fought in the Second Crusade! But that was more than a century ago! How can it be?’

‘It is a long and tragic story.’ Jakob traced more names. Thought of the men who had carved them. Strange, how strong those memories still were, forged in the white-hot crucible of his youth. ‘This is King William the Red of Sicily, and this his butler, Biordo Ambra, one of the most savage fighters I ever saw. This one is Sir John Galt, who they called the Pillar of the Faith. He carved it with his fingernail, and I thought it the finest thing I ever saw.’

‘Weighty names,’ murmured Duke Michael. ‘Heroes all.’

‘Yesterday’s heroes.’ Jakob pulled his fingertips from the faded carvings. Soon enough there would be nothing left of them. ‘Tomorrow’s ghosts.’

‘Yet you are still with us.’

Jakob gave a chuckle so dry it was little more than a grunt. ‘I’m a ghost already.’

‘Oh, I suspect you have a few fights in you yet.’ Duke Michael frowned out towards the south and east. Towards the Holy Land. ‘Tell me … the elves. Are they really as bad as they say?’

‘I have come to think … that they are no worse than men.’ Jakob took a long breath. ‘So … yes.’