Bahram nodded uncertainly. By now he knew that he did not want Iwang to convert to Islam. It seemed false to God and to Iwang. He knew it was selfishness to feel so, and that God would take care of it. As indeed it seemed He already had, as Iwang no longer was coming to the mosque on Fridays, or to the religious studies at the ribat. God or Iwang, or both, had taken Bahram's point. Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.

Dragon Bites World

Now when Bahram visited the caravanserai, he heard many disquieting stories from the east. Things were in turmoil, China's new Manchu dynasty was in an expansive temper; the new Manchu Emperor, usurper that he was, was not content with the old and fading empire he had conquered, but was determined to reinvigorate it by war, extending his conquests into the rich rice kingdoms to the south, Annam and Siam and Burma, as well as the parched wastelands in the middle of the world, the deserts and mountains separating China from the Dar, crossed by the threads of the Silk Road. After crossing that waste they would run into India, the Islamic khanates, and the Savafid empire. In the caravanserai it was said that Yarkand and Kashgar were already taken – perfectly believable, as they had been defended for decades by the merest remnants of the Ming garrisons, and by bandit warlords. Nothing lay between the khanate of Bokhara and these wastelands but the Tarim Basin and the Ferghana Mountains, and the Silk Road crossed those in two or three places. Where caravans went, banners could certainly follow.

And soon after that, they did. News came that Manchu banners had taken Torugart Pass, which was the high point of one of the silk routes, between Tashkent and the Takla Makan. Caravan travel from the east would be disrupted for a little while at least, which meant that Samarqand and Bokhara would go from being the centrepoint of the great world exchange, to a largely useless endpoint. It was a catastrophe for trade.

A final group of caravan people, Armenian, Zott, Jewish and Hindu, turned up with this news. They had been forced to run for their lives and leave their goods behind. Apparently the Dzungarian Gate, between Sinkiang and the Khazakh steppe, was also about to be taken. As the news raced through the caravanserai ringing Samarqand, most of the caravans resting in them changed their plans. Many decided to return to Frengistan, which though full of petty taifa conflict, was at least Muslim entire, its little khanates and emirates and sultanates trading between themselves most of the time, even when fighting.

Such decisions as these would soon cripple Samarqand. As an endpoint in itself it was nothing, the mere edge of Dar al Islam. Nadir was worried, and the Khan in a rage. Sayyed Abdul Aziz ordered the Dzungarian Gate retaken, and an expedition sent to help defend the Khyber Pass, so that trade relations with India at the least would remain secure.

Nadir, accompanied by a heavy guard, described these orders very briefly to Khalid and Iwang. He presented the problem as if it were somehow Khalid's fault. At the end of his visit, he informed them that Bahram and his wife and children were to return with Nadir to the Khanaka in Bokhara. They would be allowed to return to Samarqand only when Khalid and Iwang devised a weapon capable of defeating the Chinese.

'They will be allowed to receive guests at the palace. You are welcome to visit them, or indeed join them there, though I believe your work is best pursued here with all your men and machines. If I thought you would work faster in the palace, I would move you there too, believe me.'

Khalid glared at him, too angry to speak without endangering them all.

'Iwang will move out here with you, as I judge him most useful here. He will be given an extension on his aman in advance, in recognition of his importance to matters of state. Indeed he is forbidden to leave. Not that he could. The wakened dragon to the east has already eaten Tibet. So you are taking on a godly task, one that you can be proud to have been yoked to.'

He spared one glance for Bahram. 'We will take good care of your family, and you will take good care of things here. You can live in the palace with them, or here helping the work, whichever you please.'

Bahram nodded, speechless with dismay and fear. 'I will do both,' he managed to say, looking at Esmerine and the children.

Nothing was ever normal again.

Many lives change like that – all of a sudden, and for ever.

A Weapon from God

In deference to Bahram's feelings, Khalid and Iwang organized the whole compound as an armoury, and all their tests and demonstrations were devoted to increasing the powers of the Khan's army. Stronger cannon, more explosive gunpowder, spinning shot, killer of myriads; also firing tables, logistical protocols, mirror alphabets to talk over great distances; all this and more they produced, while Bahram lived half in the Khanaka with Esmerine and the children, and half out at the compound, until the Bokhara Road became like the courtyard path to him, traversed at all hours of the day and night, sometimes asleep on horses that knew the way blind.

The increases they made in the Khan's war making powers were prodigious; or would have been, if the commanders of Sayyed Abdul's army could have been made to submit to Khalid's instruction, and if Khalid had had the patience to teach them. But both sides were too proud for accommodation, and though it seemed to Bahram a critical failure on Nadir's part not to force the issue and command the generals to obey Khalid, also not to spend more of the Khan's treasury on hiring more soldiers with more experience, nothing was done. Even the great Nadir Devanbegi had limits to his power, which came down in the end to the sway of his advice over the Khan. Other advisers had different advice, and it was possible Nadir's power was in fact waning just at the moment it was most needed, and despite Khalid and Iwang's innovations – or, who knew, perhaps even because of them. It was not as if the Khan had distinguished himself for good judgment. And possibly his pocket was not as bottomless as it had seemed back in the days when the bazaars and caravanserai and building sites were all bustling like beehives, and paying taxes.

So Esmerine seemed to suggest, though Bahram had mostly to deduce this from ber looks and silences. She seemed to believe they were spied upon at all times, even during their sleepless hours in the dead of night, which was a rather terrible thought. The children had taken to life in the palace as if falling into some dream out of the Arabian Nights, and Esmerine did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, although she of course knew that they were prisoners, and their lives forfeit if the Khan should happen to experience a fit of bad temper at the way things were going at Khalid's, or to the cast, or anywhere else. So naturally she avoided saying anything objectionable, and mentioned only how well fed and kindly treated they were, how much the children and she were thriving. Only the look in her eye when they were alone told Bahram how afraid she was, and how much she wished to encourage him to fulfil the Khan's desires.

Khalid of course knew all this without his daughter's glances to tell him. Bahram could see him putting more and more effort into improving the military capacity of the Khan, not only by exerting himself in the armoury, but by trying to ingratiate himself with the most amenable of the generals, and by making suggestions discreet or direct on all manner of subjects, from the renovation of the walls of the city, in keeping with his demonstrations of the strength of raw earthworks, to plans for welldigging and drainage of stale water in Bokhara and Samarqand. All purely theoretical demonstrations went by the board in this effort, with no time spent grumbling about it either. But progress was uneven.