He was used to Babylon’s sensible grid of streets; these small western towns had their narrow, stinking lanes running every which way and sometimes abruptly petering out. He was glad he had hired a guide; anyone unfamiliar with these alleys could not have found his way through them.

Though larger than its neighbors, the satrap’s residence-palace, Mithredath discovered, was far too grand a word-looked like any other house hereabouts. It presented a plain, whitewashed front to the world. Mithredath sniffed. To his way of thinking, anyone who was someone should let the world know it.

He paid the guide-well enough to keep him from sneering but not extravagantly-and rapped on the door with his pomegranate-headed walking stick. A moment later a guard opened the little eye-level observation window to peer out at him. “Who comes?” the fellow demanded fiercely.

Mithredath stood where the man could see him clearly and answered not with the accented Aramaic in which he had been challenged but in pure, clear Persian:

“I am Mithredath, saris”-somehow, in his own tongue, “eunuch” became almost a word of pride-”and servant to Khsrish, King of Kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Marduniya the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, of Aryan seed. May Ahura Mazda smile upon him and make long his reign. I am come to the satrapy of the Yauna of the western mainland upon a mission given me from his own royal lips. I would discuss this with your master, the satrap Vahauka.”

He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

He did not wait long. He heard a thump on the other side of the door and guessed the guard had dropped his spear in surprise. Mithredath did not smile. Years at the court of the King of Kings had schooled him against revealing his thoughts to a dangerous world. His face was perfectly composed when the guard flung the door wide and shouted, “Enter, servant of the King of Kings!”