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stolen knife.
    First, I rescued a length of leather from a stack of the same—polishing rags, it would seem—and fashioned a rough wrist-scabbard for the stolen knife. I took a last look at the ring, sitting by itself on the workbench, then caught it up and dropped it into my breast pocket.
    My hand stopped. Breast pocket: I’d forgotten I had one.
    It was the size of my palm, with a flap, currently missing a button. I fished around inside, feeling its emptiness—and then a faintly non-cloth sensation brushed my fingers. I drew out a tiny scrap of paper, smashed flat by having been slept upon.
    I picked it open. The paper was near-translucent onionskin, and had been wet at some point, but I managed to get it flat with only a small tear: the corner of a larger page, a triangle three and a half inches high and two and a bit wide. There were a series of pencil squiggles on it, lines as pregnant with meaning as the grains of sand and the date pip:

    It looked like a capital A drawn by a small child or the victim of a stroke, although oddly precise. Probably it was the result of a piece of paper and a stub of pencil riding together in a pocket.
    I turned the scrap over. Then rotated it.
    At first glance, the string of interconnected curves seemed as devoid of meaning as the accidental A on the reverse. But I knew they held some intent beyond mere idiotic self-importance, and indeed, once I shifted the direction of my gaze to read from right to left, the pencil scribble became words, in crude, even childish Arabic writing: the clock of the sorcerer .
    I sighed.
    Pressing the scrap into my purloined note-book, I put it and the ring into the breast pocket, stitching the flap shut with the ever-useful hair-pin. I arranged the cushions as I had found them, pushed the purse’s metal clasp deeper into the coals, and blew out the small lamp. When I had let myself out, I padlocked the door and walked into the suq in search of a sorcerer and his clock.

    I found many things during the course of the day. My first goal was food and drink, followed by thick stockings and a heavy woollen burnoose to keep out the penetrating cold. As I walked, the chorus of muezzins woke the town, and soon the streets burst into life, shutters opening to displays of colour and enticing aromas—not the least of which was the damp soap-smell that wafted from a hammam , a place I dared not even think of entering, no matter how much the pores of my skin craved a scrub-brush.
    By mid-morning, I was warm, fed, and gaining in confidence: I had negotiated several transactions without arousing suspicions, I had passed two more pairs of patrolling armed soldiers, and my tongue was producing a reasonable facsimile of the local accent. Yes, a restoration of memory would be nice, but as the immediate needs of survival became less pressing, the suq provided an endless variety of distractions, for all the senses: I saw tailors and carpenters, carpet-makers and silk-weavers, book-binders and jewellers, purveyors of leather footwear and ceramic pots and elaborate wedding head-dresses, men embroidering the fronts of robes or trimming the beards of reclining customers. My nostrils were teased by the odours of frying onions and baking bread and the cloud of aromas from the spice merchants, in between being repelled by the miasma from butchers’ shops and malfunctioning sewers, entertained by the sharpened-pencil smell of fresh cedar and the musk of sandalwood, caught by the clean reek of fresh leather or the dark richness of roasting coffee beans, and educated by the contrasts of wet plaster with crushed mint, donkey’s droppings overlaid by fresh lavender. My ears similarly passed from one aural environment to another: a chorus of schoolboys from over the walls of a madrassa and the sound of a grain mill grinding below street level; the rhythm of soft-soled footwear against compacted dirt beside the ceaseless, many-noted ting of brass hammers from a dark den; a pure voice